by Jeff Carlson
“Make it an hour,” Newcombe said. “I want to run over there and see if I can pull the radio. There might even be a survival kit if the pilot didn’t get out.”
First he stayed with them to eat. He shared the last dry fragments of beef jerky in his pack, spreading his map to show Cam and Ruth where he wanted to rejoin them. Chewing on the leathery meat made her jaws ache even as it softened and burst with flavor. Cam opened one can of soup. They also pulled several handfuls of grass and ate the sweet roots.
The radio spluttered beside Newcombe, catching erratic bursts of voices. American voices. All of it was thick with static, but they caught the phrase saying Colorado and then to this channel and Newcombe forgot about the wrecked fighter.
They needed to reestablish contact with either the rebel
U.S. forces or the Canadians. A rendezvous seemed like their only option now. For twenty minutes Newcombe tried again and again to raise someone even though he didn’t have the transmitting power, captivated by the possibility of real information.
All forces stand. Repeating this. Of civil.
Waiting was a mistake. They weren’t the only ones who’d seen the smoke across the valley. “Turn it off,” Cam said, shoving his bandaged left hand against Newcombe like a club.
Ruth jumped. There were other human sounds in the forest now. The voices called to each other, coming fast. She’d regained some energy with the food and water, and with it her senses had expanded again. The group was above them, angling across the slope. Was it Gaskell?
The three of them pressed in tight beneath the junipers. Newcombe’s rifle clacked once as he braced it against his pack, but the group passed without noticing them. Ruth had a clear look at one man and glimpses of others, a white man in a filthy blue jacket with a rag over his mouth. No glasses or goggles. He did not appear to be armed and Ruth thought they were probably natives, not invaders. They spoke English.
“I said just stop for a minute—”
“—from the flies!”
They were loud to keep themselves brave, exactly like the Scouts had done. They probably couldn’t believe anyone else was down here. They were still in shock at this change in their lives, and Ruth surprised herself. She smiled. She knew that if she popped up and yelled like a jack-in-the-box, they would absolutely shit themselves. That was kind of funny.
Newcombe stirred from under the tree and stood listening. Then he knelt and spread his map. “The Scouts must have reached this island here,” he said. “We don’t know those people.”
“Do we talk to them?” Ruth asked.
“I say no. We don’t want to get tied up with anybody.”
Cam shook his head, too. “They already have the vaccine.”
But the other group was obviously in fair shape. Ruth was sure that Gaskell’s tribe couldn’t hike at that pace. The lesson learned was that anyone who was weak, hungry, and hurt was fundamentally less trustworthy—including themselves.
She wished their little trio could have kept some of the Scouts with them. She needed help. The boys could have carried her gear and supported her.
“What about the plane?” she said.
“They’re headed right for it and we can’t wait,” Newcombe said. “They might be there all day. It might attract others, too. This was a bad place to rest.”
They slipped off carefully, keeping to the trees rather than moving into any open space. Ruth glanced back with the same regret she’d felt when they split from Gaskell’s people, until she pulled together a more important idea despite her exhaustion. It was the real reason for her doubt.
If the vaccine’s already spread to that many islands, the invaders might have it, too, she realized.
* * * *
Gunshots rattled through the valley, two or three hunting rifles and then the heavier stutter of machine guns. Cam and Ruth immediately went to ground again and Newcombe joined them against a thatch of brush. They’d gone less than a mile since encountering the other group.
“Those are AK-47s,” Newcombe said. “Russian or Chinese. Arab. That fits with the MiGs. I think it’s one of them.”
Meanwhile the echoes came and went, pop, pop, the lighter rifles mixed with the deeper kng kng kng kng of the other guns, a small, personal battle for territory inside the larger war. Ruth thought it was happening on a peak to the north behind them, but she wasn’t certain that the fighting was above the barrier. They’d changed the world again. The plague zones were reawakening. For the first time in sixteen months, men and women filled the silence—murdering each other. The truth made Ruth sick in her heart.
“You said a lot of the planes are Russian, too,” Cam said.
“Yeah, but they’ve been selling weapons tech in Asia and the Middle East for sixty years. Could be China.”
They knew, Ruth thought, but she didn’t want to believe it, so she spoke the words as a question. “What if they knew?”
“What?” Cam looked up from his boot, where he was tightening down his laces again.
“Why come to California if they didn’t know about the vaccine?” It made too much sense. “Why not fly someplace where they wouldn’t have to fight so hard?”
“Actually, this might be pretty easy,” Newcombe said with a strange gleam in his eye. Pride. “Who’s in their way here?” he asked. “A few red-blooded guys with deer rifles? Every other place above the barrier is covered with armies.”
“But they’re right up against the American military,” Ruth said. “We’re just a couple hours away for planes, right?”
“You mean from Leadville? They’re gone. And don’t expect much out of the rebels or the Canadians. The whole continent is still blind after the EMP and might be for days. It’s perfect. They hit us hard, came in fast, and now they’re digging in.”
Ruth shook her head. “There was so much radio traffic before we went into Sacramento and probably ten times as much after we disappeared. They could have intercepted something or heard about it from sympathizers or spies. Maybe they even saw what happened with their own satellites.”
They want me, too, she realized. They’re looking for me.
That was why they’d preemptively killed everyone on so many mountaintops, not only to spare themselves a few casualties as they charged the barrier but also to keep the nanotech from getting away. They didn’t know exactly where she was or how far the vaccine might have spread, and sorting through dozens of bodies would be far easier than chasing every American survivor into the valleys and forests.
The vaccine could be extracted easily from a corpse. In fact, with a little luck, the new enemy almost certainly hoped to find Ruth and her data index lying among the people they’d gunned down.
“She’s right,” Cam said. “You know she’s right. We gotta figure they’ll be under the barrier any time now if they’re not already. They only need to find one person with it in his blood.”
The emotions in Ruth were ugly and thick. She saw the same contempt in their eyes, too. All of their choices up until this point, all of their suffering—it was wasted. They had just given the West to the new enemy, not only the scattered high points along the coast but everything from California across to the Rockies. More. They’d given up the world.
Whoever the invaders were, they were about to become the first well-equipped population to own the vaccine. They could keep it for themselves, inoculating their pilots and soldiers. They could simply retreat to their homeland, taking the vaccine with them even as they pressed their war here.
It was an incomparable advantage. They would be able to land anywhere, scavenge fuel and weapons anywhere, move troops and build defenses anywhere, whereas the U.S. and Canadian forces were still limited by the plague.
My God, she thought, dizzy with understanding.
The invasion would already be a success if the enemy thought the vaccine alone was enough. If the enemy gave up on recovering her data index, the decision had probably already been made. They could nuke everything
above ten thousand feet and scrape the planet clean of anyone else. They could do it now.
Ruth pushed herself up, staggering. “We need to get out of here,” she said.
17
They should have stopped long before sunset, but Cam shared her urgency and they were so goddamned slow on foot. Every step counted. He wanted to get out in front again, ahead of everyone else. They had to assume that most people were also heading east, not just other Californians but the invaders, too.
They still didn’t know who it was. Life wasn’t like the movies, where heroes and villains came with stupid dialogue to make sure everyone understood what was happening. Maybe it didn’t matter, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that if they knew what they were up against it might improve their chances.
Behind them, the small arms fire had continued for nearly an hour, popping and cracking. More than once they’d stopped to look back, trying to place the fight. Cam also wondered how many other eyes were watching. Two groups besides Gaskell’s? Could the Scouts have been that successful? He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. The planes would drive any survivors into the same plummeting maze of ridgelines and gullies, and everyone was a threat of one kind or another. But they all deserved to live. Cam had been angry with Gaskell, and yet now that those people were behind him, he was glad.
He’d come full circle. Saving them was a way to save himself. Ruth would always come first, but the two goals were difficult to separate.
It was criminal to abandon anyone above the barrier. What could that possibly feel like, watching the invasion and then the activity in the valleys below with no way to move or save yourself? The idea left Cam shaking. They’d been so close. Another week, another month, and the vaccine could have reached survivors over an area of a hundred miles and thousands of lives. The invasion had stunted everything. Ultimately it might kill more Americans than had died in Leadville. Ruth was right. As soon as the new enemy immunized enough of their own men, they could put them on planes back to China or Russia to reactivate their missile bases.
How long would it be? Hours to cross the oceans, hours to power up their silos and retarget their ICBMs. The planes might have left California yesterday—but it wasn’t impossible that the rebel forces in the U.S. controlled their own missiles, some fraction of the American arsenal. Maybe there had been nuclear strikes across Asia or Europe, destroying the enemy’s capacity to hit North America again. Maybe the U.S. had already blasted the Himalayas or the mountains in Afghanistan. The invasion fleet might be the last remnant of the enemy, only powerful for the moment.
It was a cold thought, and it comforted him, because Cam was in agony. His ear smoldered with nanotech and a second infection had begun to spread through his fingers. They’d walked into a hot spot.
Ruth had it, too. She lurched like a crab, trying to stay off her left foot even as she bent to that side and thumped her cast against her ribs, beating at her own pain. Cam was to blame. He’d wanted to protect her. He’d stayed in a flatter area of the valley because the going was easy, ignoring the confetti of sunbleached plastic garbage in the trees. The blast wave must have eddied here, depositing trash and a higher concentration of the plague, and at sixty-five hundred feet they were far below the barrier. The trees had become ponderosa and sugar pine. The underbrush was often snarled and thick.
“ ’M sorry,” Cam said, glancing through the long shadows. He was looking for garbage in the branches as an indicator, but his mask was damp and smothering and his goggles fogged as he tried to maintain a quicker pace, stupid with exhaustion.
He led them straight into an ant colony.
* * * *
There were dozens of powdery brown cones on the ground, low circles of clean dirt as large as bread plates. Red mound ants. They had denuded the area of most of its brush and attacked many of the pines, too. Cam instinctively jogged into the clear space as he ran with his eyes up.
The colony boiled over their feet and shins before any of them noticed. Then Newcombe yelled as the ants rushed inside his pantleg, biting and stinging. “Yaaaa!”
Newcombe turned to swat his leg. Ruth fell. Cam clawed at her jacket but couldn’t keep her off of the spastic earth. The bugs were a living carpet, shiny, red, wriggling. They surged over her on every side.
“God oh God oh—” she screamed.
They were in Cam’s sleeves, too, in his collar and in his waist. He dragged Ruth up from the seething ants and flailed at her clothes with one hand. No good. They were both crawling with tiny bodies and the twitching mass surrounded them in every direction—the ground, the trees.
Newcombe seized Ruth from behind and Cam shoved the two of them away. “Move!” he shouted. He used his pack like a club, banging it against Ruth to clear as many ants as possible.
It was the gasoline in the outer pocket that he wanted. He splashed the fluid ahead of them, very close. He was clumsy with the pack hanging on one arm and the bites like nails in his cheeks, neck, and wrists. They were near the edge of the colony. Cam saw open ground, and yet there were still five yards of writhing bugs between them and safety.
He fired his pistol against the mouth of the empty canteen. The fire seared his cheek and hair as the fumes ignited. The small explosion kicked his hands apart and he spun over backward, knocking all three of them down into the spotty blaze.
“Up!” Newcombe yelled, but Cam chopped his arm at Ruth’s legs when she staggered away. She was on fire—and the heat and the concussion had accomplished exactly what he’d hoped, shriveling the mass of ants beneath them. So he tripped her. He pushed her up and shoved her down again. They thrashed across the ground together, banging elbows and knees, both to put out the burning spots on their clothes and to crush the ants inside.
The colony wasn’t done. Another red mass skittered toward them from the left and Ruth wailed, bashing her forearm against Cam’s ear as she scrambled to her feet.
Newcombe leaned over them and shot into the dirt with his assault rifle. The weapon was deafening. He squeezed off a full magazine in seconds, using the bullets like a shovel to rip up the wave of ants. It only bought them an instant. The ants swarmed right through the broken earth, but it was enough. They ran. They were alive. And yet above them, the smoke was like a rising flag.
* * * *
“We can’t stop,” Newcombe said, gasping. He tugged at Ruth and Cam, leading them downhill, and then Cam grabbed him, too, when he put his shoulder into a flexing pine branch and rocked sideways. “The smoke cloud,” Newcombe said.
And our guns, Cam thought, but his head was a blur and he didn’t even try to speak. The nano infections in him had quickly spiked. The ant bites had filled his skin with flecks like scalding water. It was gone now, after a short eternity, but the pain had cost each of them badly. They moved like drunks. Their feet dragged on the earth and Ruth bumped against Cam and then Newcombe, swooning. Her jacket had charred open on her upper left sleeve. Dirt and fire-black clung to them all.
Then she collapsed.
* * * *
The valley filled with shadows as the sun went below the close horizon of mountain peaks—and a sheet of grasshoppers lifted up into the last rays of daylight, swirling out from a gray, ravaged stretch of forest a few miles across from them. There were enemy troops passing through the area, or maybe only more refugees.
“Go as far as you can,” Newcombe said. “I’ll find you.”
Cam’s attention was elsewhere. Ruth was conscious but still dazed. When he pulled back her hood and jacket to drop her body temperature, she moaned and said, “The senator. Two o’clock.”
He could only hope they were out of the concentrated drift of the plague. Hyperthermia and dehydration would kill her just as well, and her delirium frightened him. He didn’t think she was capable of more than a few hundred yards. He knew he couldn’t carry her.
Newcombe planned to buy Cam and Ruth as much time as possible. They knew it was possible to use the bugs in t
heir favor, so Newcombe would set out the last of their lard and sugar across the mountainside. A new frenzy of ants and other insects might divert whoever was coming. If not, he would try to lead them away, sniping at them with his rifle. Both men had one of their little radio headsets, and they’d divided the spare equipment and batteries evenly.
“Here.” Newcombe weighed the two thin packets of Kool-Aid mix in his palm before passing one to Cam. “Eat this. Give most of it to her, but you eat some, too. It’ll help.” Then he stood and slung his rifle. “I’ll catch up tonight,” he said.
Cam roused himself in time to stop the Special Forces sergeant before he’d gone too far. “Hey,” he called, thinking of all the things that should have been clear between them—the things he’d seen and meant but hadn’t spoken of. “Be careful,” Cam said.
Newcombe nodded. “Just keep going.”
* * * *
The two of them came to a road suddenly and Cam hesitated, looking up and down the smooth blacktop. The road made a small two-lane corridor through the forest and the temptation drew him sideways despite Ruth’s weight. She nearly fell, sagging against him. Cam looked at the road again. They could walk far more easily on the flat, open surface, but it was also a good place to be seen. They had to stay in the brush and the trees.
“Fast as you can,” Cam said, dragging her forward. Their boots clocked on the asphalt. They were across in seconds and then he glanced back at the sky. Twilight was giving way to full night. His guess was they’d gone no more than half a mile, which was more than he’d expected. The slope helped. Ruth moved like a broken doll. He didn’t even think she could see where they were going. She just leaned against him and wheeled her legs as best she could, kicking at him.
They blundered on until Cam smashed them into a tree. It was like waking up. Enough, he thought. That has to be enough.
He angled uphill again into a clump of saplings that might hide them from anyone else heading down the mountain. Maybe he would hear them on the road, too.
