by Jeff Carlson
And they might be dangerous if they did, Ruth thought, unable to stop herself from glancing at Cam. It was a real concern. Lord knew some of those survivors would be too desperate to care why or how they’d come, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to give Newcombe anything else to use against her. Ruth genuinely believed that most people would help them, and once they’d reached four or ‚ve groups they would be unstoppable, dispersing in every direction, ‚lling the dead zones of the plague like a new human tide.
“This is our best chance to get somewhere,” Newcombe said.
I’m stronger than you are, Ruth realized, but she needed to be careful. She couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. “I just don’t like it,” she said.
Cam ‚nally interjected, and Ruth was grateful. “I know what I’d do,” he said. “This isn’t usable ground for them, not if we get away. If I was Leadville, if I thought the Canadians were going to take off with us, I’d just nuke the whole area. Here. Oregon. Wherever they could drop a bomb in front of us. There’s no way a plane can defend against that, right?”
“That’s crazy,” Newcombe said. “This is their own ground— it’s American soil.”
“No. Not anymore.”
“They’ll stick to conventional weapons,” Newcombe insisted. “Look, it’s a gamble either way, so we take our best bet. We get the rebels and the Canadians behind us.”
Ruth clenched her arm in its cast, wondering how deeply his training had affected his thinking. The need for structure. Newcombe was an incredible asset, a great soldier and obviously comfortable improvising in any situation, but he was still a soldier, with the expectation of ‚tting into a larger command.
He was going to be a problem.
“Do you want to get left down here?” he asked, gesturing at her broken arm. Had he seen the ‚st she’d made?
The infections last night scared him, she thought. Me, too. But at least she knew how rare it should be to hit a concentration that bad, especially once they got out of the delta.
“They’re willing to put a lot of lives on the line,” Newcombe said. “Fuel. Planes. Taking you north was always the plan, get you into a lab, make the vaccine better and then spread it everywhere.”
“We can still do that,” Ruth said, slowly. “We can do that after we’ve given the vaccine to a few people out here.”
Cam surprised her. “We could split up,” he said.
She was right that he had been uncertain but wrong about the biggest question on his mind. She’d thought he was halfway to agreeing with Newcombe to jump on a plane. Instead, he had found another way out of the box. He was willing to leave her— and it upset her more than she would have guessed. It made her angry.
“Why don’t we split up,” Cam said. “I can try for the mountains while you guys go to the rendezvous.”
It felt like betrayal.
4
They were on the water before the sun lifted clear of the mountains. They were well-practiced by now and stripped the house in ‚ve minutes, ‚nding a case of bottled water in the kitchen and a good haul of disinfectant, gauze, tape, and perfume in the bathrooms. Then they ran to the truck. Newcombe started it easily as Cam and Ruth climbed into the boat behind him. Everything looked good. But they were more silent than usual, Cam noticed, and he knew he’d frightened Ruth. Fine. She had to understand. He wasn’t her dog and he wouldn’t always say yes. Still, he caught himself looking for her eyes as Newcombe drove away from the house.
She ignored him. Armored in her goggles and mask, Ruth held tight to her seat, turned almost sideways because she could only use one arm.
The boat was a twenty-two-foot Champion, lean like an arrow and nearly as thin. With a hull less than three feet deep from top to bottom, it was more of a bass ‚shing platform than a riding craft. It had only two seats set in its smooth deck. The Champion was designed to speed ‚shermen from one good hole to the next, and that was perfect. Cam guessed that even the motor shaft wouldn’t stick more than a couple feet below the surface, which would be crucial out there in the ruins.
Newcombe drove to the shore slower than Cam expected. They must have reentered the hot spot as soon as they left the house, but the street barely had any downward slope and the waterline had crawled up and back many times, leaving thirty yards of muck and garbage in lines and dunes.
“Hang on!” Newcombe shouted. They crunched through styrofoam and plastic, a lamp shade, empty soda cans, and stinking damp clothing and paper. Endless skins of paper. Ahead of them, the shallow edge of the sea was thick with bobbing junk, clogged in between the homes on either side. Newcombe intended to drive straight in. The truck was a big monster. Newcombe thought it would keep churning until the water was deep enough to †oat the Champion off its trailer. He didn’t want to risk getting caught on something if they backed in like you were supposed to do.
Then the truck hit the water, clattering through the debris. They shuddered over something big. The trailer rocked up on one side and the boat slid the other way, almost bumping loose. They’d already removed the rope ties that secured the Champion to the trailer, not wanting to miss any surge that would carry it free. Now that seemed tremendously stupid.
But it worked. Newcombe dragged on the steering wheel and the truck hooked even further to the side, its engine spluttering. The Champion slid away and drifted a few yards. All around the boat, the surface clunked with charred, waterlogged bits of lumber.
Newcombe killed the engine. He got out of the truck and slogged over cautiously, dirty and wet while they were dry. Cam helped him into the rocking boat and said, “Nice work, man. You do nice work.”
“Got a little sketchy there for a minute,” Newcombe said. That was all. Still, Cam sensed a chance to rebuild everything between them, rather than allowing Ruth’s mistrust to continue to push them apart. He could make a new beginning. But he wasn’t here for Newcombe. He turned from the other man and glanced at Ruth and then past her at the cluttered sea, wanting more than anything to talk to her alone.
He didn’t want to ‚ght. Every minute in this place was enough of a struggle without losing her.
* * * *
The motor echoed strangely. The sound yammered back at them from every housefront but raced away into every gap, bouncing in and out of broken windows and open doors as they eased through residential streets.
Newcombe drove with the 260-horsepower Mercury throttled down. The Champion wouldn’t go any slower than ‚ve miles per hour and coasted effortlessly. Too often they bumped and bounced into tight spots, the propeller grinding once on a submerged car and then blasting through a door window in a slosh of bubbles and glass. Several times they scratched against drifts of dead brush and lumber and garbage. The ruins formed an incredible maze. Cam used it as best he could, always looking east for a way out. Sometimes that was easy. The †ood had come from that direction and knocked down fences and cleared yards, often leaving bars of debris and mud on the lee side of the buildings — the west side. Streets that ran east tended to have been swept clear.
They had to know if they could boat up the river, even if it meant another argument. Newcombe must have realized what Cam was doing, but none of them had any interest in going west and the two men worked well together. Once they struggled to lift aside a snaking mess of utility lines. Once they took turns leaning out of the boat to kick away a long sheet of aluminum. There were still odd little things †oating in the most stagnant corridors, a toy farmhouse, shoes, a perfectly sealed Tupperware container blotched on the inside with mold.
The sun †ickered everywhere, clean acres of light on the dirty sea. It shimmered in patches of chemicals. It sparked on glass and metal and lit up every scratch in the lens of Cam’s goggles, turning his head, making shapes that weren’t there.
Again and again they were caught in delicate threads. Hundreds of strands †agged out from thousands of spiders. Newcombe accelerated suddenly after they idled through the collapsed shell of a home and found
themselves within arm’s reach of a wall full of silk and white nests, all of it packed with tiny brown bodies. The water not only protected the spiders from the ants. It also kept this region cool enough that they were probably never affected by the plague, even in summer, and Cam wondered again at the niche evolution they kept seeing. It seemed to him that the remnants of the ecosystem were pulling further apart rather than working toward any new cohesion, but he was too tired to think how it might end.
Moving east was a waste of time. After forty minutes Cam and Newcombe were ‚nally able to study that shore through binoculars. What they could see of it was an impassable mud slope, raked through with dozens of narrow trickles of water. It made the decision for them. North.
An hour later Newcombe chose a spot to run the Champion aground. They sped into the cramped swamp beneath a massive highway interchange where the boat would be hidden. Newcombe unlatched the motor’s cover and Cam helped him dump more than thirty canteens of water onto the engine, dousing its heat. There was no sense leaving a bright heat signature at the shoreline, pointing the way they’d gone. Cam ‚gured they’d covered a little less than twice the distance they would have hiked on foot, but that was partly the point — to give Ruth every opportunity to rest. She had even lain down for a while against the coil of rope at the nose of the deck, totally withdrawn.
They needed to talk about what she wanted him to do.
* * * *
They could have had the chance. As soon as the three of them cleared a fence and made their way onto the Interstate again, Newcombe called a halt and knelt, checking his watch. He quickly reorganized his pack. On the outside were mesh pockets where he kept one of their little radios, his binoculars, and a squeeze bottle of gasoline. Now he tucked away the radio and binoculars and put jars of maple syrup into those pockets instead, preparing to range off by himself and set more food traps.
Cam stopped him. “Wait.”
“I’ll catch up.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Cam said, aware of Ruth’s gaze switching back and forth between them. Her posture had changed as soon as it became obvious what Newcombe was doing. She’d stood a little straighter, but now that bent, worried tension returned to her shoulders again.
Cam felt badly. He wanted to reassure her, but this was more important. “We can’t set any decoys on this side of the water,” he said. “Not right away. Think about it. When you put them all over downtown, the swarms couldn’t have formed much of a pattern. But if Leadville notices the worst swarms are moving north, they’ll realize we’re causing it.”
Newcombe stared at him. “Okay.”
“C’mon,” Cam said to Ruth, gently touching her good arm. She looked at his hand and then raised her face to his, her busy eyes trying to read him. He nodded once. It was the best signal that he could give her, hidden in his goggles and mask.
They walked. They walked and every minute it got harder. Stress and fatigue poisons left them sluggish and the sameness of the hike was wearing in its own way, the endless cars, the endless dead. Newcombe was the ‚rst to see the few spots of clouds in the west. Cam hoped it would thicken up. A good overcast would be some protection against satellites and planes. Any drop in temperature would slow the bugs, too. More important, their jackets and hoods were individual sweat shells. They were always dehydrated.
It was close to noon before they went to ground, much later than they wanted it to be. At last they found a wide, dry canal that ran beneath the highway. Five minutes later there was an explosion in the distance like a sonic boom.
“Oh, please, God, no,” Ruth said, lifting her head from where she’d curled up to nap.
“You think they tagged us?” Cam asked Newcombe. The soldier only shrugged. They gazed out from their hole in silence. Cam made Ruth drink as much water as she could hold. They all had salty chips and tuna ‚sh and Newcombe quickly updated his journal, looking at his watch twice again. The man took real comfort in the time and date, Cam had noticed. He supposed it made sense. Those numbers were reliable in a way that nothing else could be.
Finally, Ruth and Newcombe settled down to rest again. A pack of helicopters swept through the valley, unseen — a distant rolling thunder. But there was nothing more. The hunters never came closer.
* * * *
“Don’t leave me,” Ruth whispered, her small hand on Cam’s shoulder. He turned and opened his eyes to darkness, unsure if he’d been asleep or only in and out of waking. He wasn’t surprised to ‚nd her leaning over him.
He felt the hair rise on his arms and neck. It was as if he’d expected her and he realized he’d been having his nightmare again, the same nightmare of Erin bleeding out as ten thousand grasshoppers covered the sun. The sky beyond the canal was black, like in his dream, and the two of them were positioned exactly as he and Erin had been, one on the ground, the other kneeling, except their positions were reversed. In his dream he’d been in Ruth’s place, staring down at his lover as she drowned in her own eroded lungs.
Cam sat up, frightened. It was early in the night and the sky really was a solid dark mass, except where the quarter moon radiated light way down on the horizon. The clouds must have come in. Good. He glanced over at the other man, listening. Newcombe was only four feet away, but in the darkness it seemed farther. His breathing was soft and regular.
Ruth had volunteered to take the ‚rst watch, explaining that she’d napped in the boat and again when they ‚rst reached the canal. That was the only reason Cam and Newcombe had agreed, when normally the two of them let her sleep the whole night.
She’d wanted this. She’d wanted him.
“Please,” she said, laying her ‚ngers on his shoulder again. It was about as meaningless as contact could be, her glove on his jacket. She was barely more than a shadow herself, misshapen by her goggles and mask, but Cam remembered the shape of her mouth and her quick, intelligent gaze.
She doesn’t know, he thought. She can’t. No one would ever guess I could still feel that way about anyone, because no one could ever feel that way about me.
And if she did…If she was aware of his attraction, he would hate her for using it against him.
“Newcombe wants out of here,” Ruth whispered. “I can’t blame him for that, but he hasn’t been through what you and I have. He doesn’t realize.”
Cam nodded, brooding. He wanted more reasons to be closer to her, even bad ones, and not for the ‚rst time he wondered how she must have felt watching the planet go dark from the space station. Watching it stay dark, the cities on every continent abandoned and lost. She had suffered in different ways, more like a prisoner than a refugee.
“Don’t leave me,” she repeated.
“I won’t.” It was a promise. But at the same time, he knew it was very possible that Newcombe would force the issue. What else could the soldier do? Let them walk away? Newcombe had almost as much on the line as the two of them. He would never jump on a plane without Ruth or her data index.
Cam turned to regard the other man again as an old, animal feeling stole over him — an empty sort of clarity that he hadn’t known since he murdered Chad Loomas, the man who was the ‚rst to steal and hide food on the small mountain peak where Cam had survived the plague year.
If it came to a ‚ght, Cam thought Newcombe had every edge. Newcombe was stronger. He had the assault ri†e. Rather than confronting him face-to-face, Cam knew he would be smarter to shoot the other man in the back.
* * * *
Before dawn they continued north. It was necessary no matter what they decided. They had to assume there was a forward base, either on the mountaintop where Ruth and Newcombe had ‚rst met Cam or somewhere in Tahoe or Yosemite — or all three. They needed to be that paranoid. The helicopters yesterday might have only been on a random search grid, but Newcombe didn’t think so. Fuel was too precious.
The morning sun was still burning off the clouds when they discovered the reason for the helicopter patrol. There was only one bo
dy, a whole body, crushed and burned but whole, so immediately different than the thousands of bare skeletons strewn across the road.
“Stop,” Cam said. They were at least sixty yards away and he climbed onto the bumper of a station wagon, digging his binoculars out of his jacket.
“What is that?” Ruth asked, craning her neck.
It was a young man in uniform, wrapped in gear and still tied to a paraglider. A ripped glider. His clothes and skin were scorched and there appeared to be wounds caused by shrapnel. It was dif‚cult to tell because there were already bugs in him, an undulating haze like a ghost. Worse, he’d fallen to his death. Fallen a long way. Some of him had splashed and the rest was only held together by his uniform, belts, and pack.
“Christ,” Newcombe muttered.
Cam was already looking out across the horizon for the rest of the crew and the plane itself. That was the explosion we heard before the helicopters came to clean up, he thought. But he saw nothing. He supposed the aircraft could have gone down miles from here, depending on its altitude and direction when the missile struck.
“Is that a pilot?” Ruth asked.
She must think he ejected, Cam realized as he stepped off of the car. He gave Newcombe the binoculars, occupying the other man’s hands. “It’s a paratrooper,” he said. “What do you think, Newcombe? Is he Canadian?”
“But he’s not wearing a containment suit,” Ruth said.
“He’s American.” Newcombe appeared to recognize some articles of the man’s clothing, although there were no unit patches or insignia that Cam had seen. “A rebel, probably.”
“But he couldn’t last more than a couple hours down here,” Ruth said. “He would know that.”
“He probably expected to meet us,” Cam said.
