by Jeff Carlson
The evening sky hummed with far-off jets. There had been a second wave of transports three hours after the lead groups, and then a few stragglers, and the invaders had kept a good number of ‚ghters in the air. Mostly the noise was a distant soaring whisper. The jets stayed high, but if the wind faltered or if a jet crossed nearby, the sound could be intense. Twice more they’d seen mountains torn clear by gun‚re. Just standing here was like stepping in front of a train, waiting to get hit. Ruth understood their paranoia, but looking at the one-eyed man’s cold poise, she also had no doubt that the plague year had long ago turned some of these people into animals.
“We can protect you from the plague,” Cam said. “There’s a new kind of nanotech.”
“We came to help,” Newcombe said.
The black man shook his head slowly as if rejecting them. It was a signal. The girl lowered the ‚st she’d made around her rock and the one-eyed man paused in his closing arc toward Ruth. Nearby, another man and two women also relaxed, although they didn’t drop their knives or clubs. One was hugely pregnant. The other had a fair complexion that had burned and peeled and burned again.
There were about twenty survivors here, Ruth guessed. Cam and Newcombe had made only a brief effort to survey this island before all three of them lurched into camp, still afraid that there could be Leadville troops lying in wait. Despite everything else, that threat was still very real.
Newcombe tipped his ri†e down. Ruth let her pistol fall to her side, but Cam kept his weapon up. “We need to see everybody out in the open,” Cam said. “Is it just you guys here?”
“What?” The man frowned, then glanced out into the great open space of the valley. “Nobody’s landed, if that’s what you mean. Not yet.” He was delaying, Ruth thought, reluctant to put his tribe in a line in front of their guns. He gestured at the roaring sky and said, “What the fuck is going on?”
* * * *
Cam refused to spend the night on the mountain. “We’re leaving in ‚ve minutes,” he said, kneeling as he unwrapped the dirty, stained gauze from his hand. One of the men had fetched a plastic bowl that Cam set on the ground beside his knife.
Eighteen survivors gathered before him in a half-circle. Ruth saw uncertainty and distrust in their eyes — and the ‚rst incredulous glimmers of hope.
“I know it’s getting dark, but grab your stuff and get below the barrier,” Cam said. “The vaccine works in a few minutes. Faster than the plague. The longer you stay, the better the odds that a plane’s gonna come overhead and kill everybody. You’ve seen what’s happening.” He tipped his head north toward the blasted mountaintops, but only a few people glanced away.
He was trying to distract himself as much as convince them, Ruth thought. The cut hadn’t had any chance to heal and the skin was angry and red, well on its way to infection. Cam sunk the tip of his knife directly into it. Ruth caught her breath and heard several of them react as blood ran down Cam’s gnarled ‚ngers into the bowl.
“We sure could use some help ‚rst,” said the scrawny black man, Steve Gaskell.
Ruth looked up, furious that he was so indifferent to Cam’s effort, but Gaskell’s expression was wide-eyed and yearning. He stared at the neat, clear vinyl components of Newcombe’s med kit, which she’d unfolded on the ground. Tape and gauze. Antibiotics. Salve. Ruth †ushed with new stress. She was intensely aware of the bulk of strangers above her. Even with their packs nearly empty, the three of them must seem unbelievably wealthy — and Cam wouldn’t stop pushing.
“There’s no time,” he said.
“We’ve got two pregnant women and three people sick,” Gaskell said.
“We’ll give you what we can spare, but get off the mountain if you want to live,” Cam said. “Tonight.”
Ruth wondered at Cam’s disgust. Dealing with these people must be like staring into a mirror for him and he’d shown the same impatience toward the Boy Scouts for clinging to their islands. It was profoundly self-destructive. His behavior put them all at risk and she felt her own hot anger and fear.
The crowd shifted restlessly in the dusk.
Ruth looked for the ri†eman.
“They can’t leave,” the girl said to Gaskell, and another man grimaced at Cam and said, “Wait. You can wait.”
“We can’t stay,” Newcombe said.
“You don’t have to, either,” Cam said. “You can leave. You should.”
“We’ll come with you,” Gaskell said.
“It’s better if we split up.”
“Just let us pack. Ten minutes.”
“Try to reach as many other survivors as you can,” Cam said. “Pay us back.”
“Tony, Joe, Andrea, start getting our food together,” Gaskell said, not looking away from Cam. Three of his people left the group and hurried to their shelters.
“There are others like us,” Newcombe said. “We’re all spreading out.”
A woman said, “But who’s in the planes?”
“We don’t know.”
“Tomorrow, send out a couple of your strongest guys,” Cam said. “That’s the best thing you can do. Find another group. Pay us back.”
“We’re coming with you,” Gaskell said.
“That’s okay tonight,” Ruth told him quickly, before Cam could answer, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, ‚ne, but then we spread out.”
“We have to make sure somebody gets out,” Cam said. “Drink.” He’d squeezed his hand into a ‚st to stop the bleeding but kept his dripping knuckles over the bowl as he stood up, holding the scuffed green plastic picnicware with his good hand. He held the dark soup out to Gaskell.
“It’s ‚ne, you won’t feel anything,” Ruth said, trying to soften the moment, but these people weren’t as healthy as the Scouts, and she thought again of the ‚rst mountaintop they’d found, wiped out by disease. As the vaccine spread, so might bacteria and viral infections. Anyone with a seriously compromised immune system was likely to have died long ago, but there were any number of slow-acting pathogens. Hepatitis. HIV. Too many survivors would be weak and susceptible. Some islands would carry their own kinds of death, but it couldn’t be helped, not until they reached a place with a minimum of technology.
Gaskell drank ‚rst, then the girl and another man and another. Ruth saw no hint of horror in their faces. They’d seen and done worse to survive, and she turned away to stare into the last fading red coals of the sun.
Newcombe had offered to bleed himself, too. He’d taken Cam aside and said, Fair is fair. The two men had come a very long way, from allies to enemies to real brotherhood, and Cam just shook his head. You still have two good hands, he’d said. It would be stupid to change that. There was so much good in him. Ruth had to forgive his rage and his self-hate.
The woman with the belly hesitated when the bowl came to her. “What will it do to my baby?” she asked, looking at her husband and Gaskell and Cam.
“We don’t know,” Ruth said. “It will protect you both, I think. There shouldn’t be a problem.”
She was doubly glad she hadn’t slept with Cam or anyone else. How much harder would their struggle have been if she was pregnant? Her ‚rst two periods back on Earth had been bad enough. After twelve months in zero gravity, both times she’d bled and bled through cramps and nausea — but each time it had only been four or ‚ve really bad days. What if she’d had morning sickness for weeks instead or developed complications like gestational diabetes or high blood pressure?
This late in her term, the pregnant woman would be having back problems and sore feet. A mother’s bones began to soften noticeably in the third trimester to help the baby’s passage through the pelvic bone. Trudging down the mountainside would be brutal for her, and yet a new generation was beyond price. This woman was exactly who they were ‚ghting for, so Ruth forced a smile and said the words again like a promise.
“It will protect the baby, too,” she said.
* * * *
She lied again that night, huddled together with t
he others near eighty-‚ve hundred feet in a clump of backpacks, tools, and weapons. Fighter jets crisscrossed the night, mumbling and echoing. The grasshoppers sang and sang. She told Gaskell they’d been given the vaccine by a squad of paratroopers, which was close enough to what had really happened to confuse things if the rumor ever caught up to the wrong people. She told him they’d survived the plague year on a mountaintop above one of Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts, south of here, and Cam was more than convincing in discussing a few local landmarks.
The worst deceit was how Ruth explained their goggles. Gaskell’s group had jackets and hoods and they’d torn up a few rags for face masks, mimicking their rescuers, and Ruth told Gaskell that her goggles and other gear were because of the bugs. There was nothing more these people could do to minimize their absorption of the plague. She didn’t want to give up her own equipment and she didn’t want to ‚ght.
* * * *
In the morning they left each other. Gaskell promised to send a few guys to another peak to the southeast. Ruth wasn’t sure he’d do it but she was glad just to get away from them, not only because they scared her but because a crowd would be more easily noticed. A pilot might spot them or a satellite. It was good to hurry into the woods again with Cam and Newcombe. Still, in the ‚rst few hundred yards she glanced back a dozen times, a little afraid of herself. Maybe it would have been better if they’d all stuck together, but Gaskell’s people seemed equally relieved to split up now that they had some answers.
We’re all so much smaller than we used to be, she thought.
* * * *
They worked their way north even though it brought them closer to the nearest launch-point for the ‚ghter patrols. The jets seemed especially close on landing, groaning overhead, but the aircraft were thousands of feet up and miles away. That distance increased with every step down the mountain. Their plan was to curve eastward tomorrow. Ahead, the map showed a pair of valleys that fell all the way down into Nevada.
Ruth went into herself. In fact, her concentration wasn’t wholly unlike sleeping. She moved in a trance, keeping just enough of her mind on the surface to be aware of Cam’s jacket and the rough ground between them. Everything outside this tunnel she tried to ignore. Her thirst. Her feet. The sun was high in the forest and †ies buzzed all around.
“Sst!” Cam turned and hooked his arm, catching her. Ruth immediately knelt with him beneath the scraping branches of a juniper, trusting his decision to hide.
Newcombe had ducked down across from them and continued to inch away on his knees and one hand, but he’d kept his ri†e over his shoulder. He was still holding his binoculars, so Ruth nudged Cam, a silent question. Cam pointed out through the trees. There was smoke on another slope not far away to the north, nearly level with them. A ‚re? Ruth was too tired for fear. She only waited. Finally, Newcombe stood up and walked back to them, and she felt Cam relax when the other man rose from his position.
“It’s a plane,” Newcombe said. “A ‚ghter. It’s messed up pretty good, but from what I can see it’s an old Soviet MiG. I mean really old, twenty, thirty years, like something they would have mothballed back in the eighties. My guess is it shorted out when he prepped to land or ran out of fuel before he got to a tanker. I don’t know. We haven’t seen any ‚ghting, right?”
“Not close by,” Cam said.
“He could have limped away from the Leadville base,” Newcombe agreed. “But why come this far when they’re on mountaintops all over the place? I think he just went down.”
Ruth managed to talk. “Is he dead?”
“He probably chuted out. Hiked up hours ago.” Newcombe knelt with them and shrugged out his pack. He found water and gave it to her. “You sound awful.”
“I’m okay,” she rasped.
“You didn’t see me waving right in your face,” Cam said. “Let’s stop and eat. Thirty minutes.”
“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 †avor. 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 ‚ghter.
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 ri†e 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 ‚lthy 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 †ies!”
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 ri†es 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 ‚ts with the MiGs. I think it’s
one of them.”
Meanwhile the echoes came and went, pop, pop, the lighter ri†es 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 ‚ghting was above the barrier. They’d changed the world again. The plague zones were reawakening. For the ‚rst time in sixteen months, men and women ‚lled 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 †y someplace where they wouldn’t have to ‚ght 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 ri†es? 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 traf‚c 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.
