Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  “Here, over here!” Cam hadn’t intended to start yelling himself, but his breath went out of him in a rush. Blinking back tears made his eyes sting and he half choked as he whirled on Sawyer. “You said SCUBA gear might protect somebody.”

  “Right.” The long shadow of Sawyer’s face split with a grin. “There’s lots of dive shops on mountains.”

  “I just meant...” Cam turned downslope again to hide his face as one fat drop squeezed free, streaking his skin with cold before sifting into his beard. “Maybe they have bottled air like medical supplies, that could work.”

  “Right. Except for your eyes. Open wounds. Bug bites.”

  Cam involuntarily touched the still-healing burn blisters on his nose. His body itched with a hundred minor scratches, especially his hands.

  Every cut, every breath, was a doorway.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sawyer said. “Even if he was driving a limousine up here with enough air for everyone, that wouldn’t solve anything.”

  Of the few known facts, it was certain that the machine plague first got loose in northern California—San Jose, Cal Berkeley, someone’s garage—and there hadn’t been time for much warning. Otherwise their desolate peak might have been very, very crowded.

  Last they’d heard, Colorado was dealing with 14 million refugees, food riots, and a rogue element of Air Force recruits carrying automatic weapons.

  Colorado should pull through. The Rocky Mountains offered hundreds of square miles at safe altitude, a few towns, ranches, ski villages, National Park structures. Several areas still had power jury-rigged from hydroelectric plants, and just below the barrier were dozens of towns and even small cities for easy scavenging. Similar high country like the Alps and Andes would keep the human race alive.

  A future existed. Cam just hadn’t believed he would be part of it. Unless their group had incredible luck hunting throughout the summer and fall, he and Sawyer had calculated that the only way they’d survive another winter would be to dismantle the other hut for fuel and kill and freeze most of the others immediately after the first snow.

  2

  Cam heard the newcomer breathing about the same time that his crunching footsteps reached them. The man sounded like a tortured wolf. They huddled together like children. Not even Manny shouted, and Cam realized that the grasshoppers had fallen silent again.

  The newcomer almost marched through them.

  His light stabbed into Cam’s eyes, diamond hard— Then he stopped, panting, sinking to one knee. He clawed at his face, at the bandanna and ski goggles over his mouth and eyes.

  “Please water,” he gasped.

  They swarmed him, babbling, helping him to his feet, hauling him up toward the fire. Cam got the flashlight, a smooth weighty rod, the metal hot where the newcomer’s hand had been. It felt like magic, like strength. Cam noticed that the man wore a ludicrous pink parka lined with fur and a little fanny pack, like he was some rich old lady out for a stroll. Had he chosen it for its visibility or were the people across the valley short on decent winter gear?

  “Water,” he said again, but they’d brought none. Stupid.

  Spasms hit the man before they reached the fire and he fought them, moaning, trying to get at his pants. They didn’t understand and he shit himself bloody.

  Manny cried out—“Aaah!”—a sharp noise like a bird in a net. Cam met Sawyer’s glinting eyes in the dark. Until the man exhibited symptoms, it had been possible to hope that he really was bringing them doses of a new-generation nano that would serve as a vaccine, protecting their bodies from within, despite his crude armor of goggles and mask. But he was infected.

  They knew only what they’d heard from Colorado and what they’d experienced themselves. Sawyer theorized that the nanotech had been a prototype of a medical nature, so obviously made to work inside a body, while others insisted it must be a weapon.

  It didn’t matter.

  The important thing was that the nanos burned out at high altitude, because of a design error or an intentionally engineered hypobaric fuse.

  It didn’t matter.

  The microscopic machines were carbon-based and disassembled warm-blooded tissue to make more of themselves.

  Like a super virus, they spread both by bodily fluids and through the air. Like spores, they seemed capable of hibernating outside a host anywhere except in thin atmosphere. And this machine plague had multiplied exponentially until most of the planet was barren of mammals and birds.

  Inhaled by a human or animal, inert nanos passed into the bloodstream before reawakening and tended to cluster in the extremities. If they gained entry to a body through breaks in the skin, such infections usually remained localized—but only at first. Even the tiniest contamination multiplied and spread and multiplied again. Again and again. The body would heal if it didn’t sustain too much damage, which meant they’d been able to dip into the invisible sea and raid the nearby resort as well as a village of cabins and condos farther down the valley. But if you got too weak, you couldn’t make it back up.

  Almost as bad, the transition to safe altitude shocked an already-exhausted body with cramps, nausea, migraines, even hemorrhaging and diarrhea, as hundreds of thousands or millions of dead nanos clogged the bloodstream. Cam had seen one woman drop stone dead of a stroke; three cardiac arrests; an exploded retina; and he had never known anyone to stay below the barrier longer than six hours.

  The newcomer must have been beneath 10,000 feet for most of a day, running and climbing. He seemed now almost to lose consciousness, his boots dragging as they carried him.

  He had been eating well. He was soft in places that they were only hip bones or ribs.

  In the sharp white beam of the flashlight, Cam saw blisters peppered over the man’s neck and hands, oozing blood and worse. A sudden phantom of ash sloughed off into Cam’s face. Maybe he imagined it. Unfortunately their level of medical ability was pathetic. They no longer possessed even basics like disinfectant or aspirin. Cam had full EMT training, a requirement for all ski patrol, and during the slow winter he’d taught everyone interested—but none of them were up to cutting somebody open to stop internal hemorrhaging. If the newcomer was that bad off, his survival would be a roll of the dice.

  Cam hoped the man would live long enough to say why he’d come. He deserved at least to fulfill his mission.

  Near the fire the others got in the way, crowding around, Price shouting a formal greeting that he’d obviously rehearsed. “All this time we’ve been alone! All this time we’ve waited!” The noisy idiot had been a real estate developer with several rental properties in the area, and if he excelled at anything, it was making presentations.

  “Let the man rest,” Cam said, and Price immediately took the newcomer’s elbow and pulled on him.

  “Yes,” Price said. “Yes, you can have my bed!”

  It made sense, their hut was nearest, but Cam didn’t trust Price not to use the situation to his advantage. To make it political. Manny had clearly come to alert Sawyer and Cam on his own rather than being told to do so. They might still be asleep if the kid hadn’t had to move out of their hut after bickering with his bedmates all winter—and not for the first time, Cam was glad to have a spy in Price’s camp.

  He followed everyone to the low door, and Sawyer growled, “Want to crowd in with them?”

  “No. That guy’s going to sleep forever.”

  Sawyer bobbed his head once and Cam was struck again by his friend’s resemblance to a bullet. Even Manny had more of a beard now that Sawyer had grown obsessive about shaving, nicking his long cheeks with blunt old razors and a knife honed on granite, scraping his prematurely receding hair down to black sandpaper. Cam thought this was wildly fatalistic behavior for someone so intelligent about the ways that nanos got into the body.

  He tried to smile. “Let’s go warm up, okay?”

  Sawyer stared at him, maybe angry, then glanced left and right to see if anyone else had heard.

  He did
n’t try to catch up with Sawyer in the cold moonscape between the huts. Dumb way to break an ankle.

  There was nothing he could say to change things anyway.

  Sawyer paused at the door, his face turned up, and Cam spotted the pale dot of a satellite cruising across the rash of stars. He looked away.

  The walls of their hut were thick patchwork, like a boys’ fort. They’d had only hammers and two heavy-duty Forest Service chain saws to work with. Yet it had withstood the weight of the snow, the force of the wind. The raised cover they’d designed for the hole in the roof functioned well, keeping their fire dry while allowing at least some of the smoke to escape. Cam had regarded their accomplishment with fierce pride for all of one week before claustrophobia eroded that good feeling.

  Half a dozen voices protested as he and Sawyer pushed into the reeking gloom. Barely twenty feet by ten, most of the space was occupied by four wide beds: flat wood frames softened with blankets. Crammed into the remaining area were two holes in the ground used for food storage, a rock fire pit, a woodpile, a pee pot, water containers, backpacks, and half-built box traps and other gear—and eight more unwashed people.

  Erin was awake and murmured, “I’m freezing,” but Sawyer stamped over to the fire and left her to Cam.

  He reveled in the distraction.

  They feasted on their own pungent body heat, moving slow to keep the thin, filthy covers airtight, teasing each other into a well-practiced frenzy. Her first. His rough fingers. Her bottom lifted off the hard bed as she rocked her pelvis up, up. Then she drank him, wanting whatever nourishment it was worth. She let him hold her ears and thrust.

  They were smarter about pregnancy than most—hands and mouths only. Always only hands and mouths, except for eight times after Sawyer found a partly used box of condoms in a ski locker. They still whispered about those couplings, three heads together, eager, wistful, Erin stretching slick and limber between them.

  Yes, sometimes there had been six hands together. A few times. Six hands and nothing more. It was their only escape. Cam’s father wouldn’t have spoken to him for a thousand years if he found out, but his father was dead. The world was dead. Why should anyone care now?

  During the eternity that blizzard winds had forced them inside, however, some of their hut mates hadn’t kept their eyes to themselves, the same dumb assholes who’d been unable to fashion a marriage of their own. Jealousy fueled nasty rumors despite everything that Cam and Sawyer had done for them—

  “You’re hurting me,” Erin said. And smiled.

  Once upon a time Erin D. Shifflet-Coombs must have been gorgeous. Her eyes were the color of gems, Anglo sapphires, and Cam fantasized often of what her rear and long thighs had looked like in tennis shorts, expensive skirts, soft rumpled sweats. If the two of them had gone to his parents’ home for dinner, his father would have puffed up like a bullfrog and pressed Cam for details all night with hard, manly nudges.

  Arturo Najarro had named his sons Charlie—not Carlos— and Tony, Cameron, and Greg. The boys were sixth-generation American and only Mom spoke more Spanish than mas cervasa.

  Erin had been a college girl, a junior, majoring in business communications at UC Davis and up with five friends for a little weekday snowboarding. Now she refused to cut her hair, insisting that it helped keep her warm, and her face was permanently lost in a sandy blond tangle. Sleeping beside this mane had probably started Sawyer’s new shaving habit.

  There was no question that the changes in Erin’s appearance had contributed to the change in her heart. Her jawline was a ripple of old blisters and her thighs were melted, anorexic. Worse, the smile came at the wrong times.

  Over breakfast she actually laughed. “But why?”

  Cam had brought her to his favorite cliff, favorite because no one else ever came here; they couldn’t stand the view; the town nestled along the creek far below looked too much like their past, a square-cornered grid of color amidst the panorama of dusky forest, black lava formations, and dull granite. Typically the two of them ate with Sawyer but he had never come to bed last night and was gone when they woke.

  She said, “If this guy doesn’t have some kind of antidote— why would he hike over?” The corner of her mouth curled up. “Do you think they threw him out?”

  Cam shook his head. “They wouldn’t have used all that wood setting so many fires.”

  Four ravens circled less than a mile to the south, riding a thermal. He watched to see if they’d dip into the valley or come toward his peak, though they never had much meat on them. The last catch had been scabby, molting, no doubt lured below 10,000 feet on a regular basis by swarms of insects.

  What remained of the ecosystem was badly out of whack, with only lizards, snakes, frogs, and fish left to whittle down the surging insect populations. On his most recent trip below the barrier, Cam had glimpsed what looked like threads of smog farther down the valley. Bugs. So far the high altitude had kept biting species away, except fleas, and until recently their scavenging parties down the mountainside had been protected by winter cold. No more.

  There wasn’t any wind today and the morning sun felt strong enough to bare his skin. The sensation was so clean, so erotic, that goose bumps broke out over Cam’s entire chest, which Erin mistook as a reaction to cold. He had to tickle her before she’d even roll back her sleeves. Then she pulled off her shirt without looking to see if anyone else was around, which sent a thin chill through him. The huts offered zero privacy, and she had been having sex with two men for most of a year, but Erin Coombs was never an exhibitionist. In fact, she used to brave the elements she hated so desperately just to avoid peeing in the common pot. The tinkle, she said. Everyone looks.

  It upset him that suddenly she seemed uncaring. Too many of them were less than they had been, numbed by experience. Cam felt more attuned to his surroundings and to himself than ever before. He felt raw and aware.

  He had grown as pale as a Latino could get, but Erin was pure ivory, except the purplish scars. Cam snuck glances at her body and small breasts as they shared a sticky mush of bone meal, bitter lichen, and gritty specks of the rock from which the orange fungus had been scraped.

  When he jammed his bad tooth she kissed him and kissed him, skin on warm skin. It was as good a moment as they’d ever had.

  He kept one arm tight around her shoulders as he studied the opposite peak. She watched his face. Finally she gestured across the valley and said, “Take me with you.”

  3

  The newcomer told them his name was Hollywood and only Price had something to say about that: “Oh yeah, I knew people there!”

  Cam thought Hollywood frowned. Tough to say. The young man had been partially eaten alive from the inside, and wet agony drew his expression in too many different directions. Blotches and rash had sprouted over his temple. Adding to the deformation were swelling bug bites, including three disgusting, whitened clusters on his neck and cheek. Cam tried to imagine how many hundreds of insects it took to inflict such damage.

  “I’m here to bring you all across,” Hollywood said. The hut stayed silent. He frowned again, gazing up from his bed at their crowded faces. Barely nineteen years old, in good shape, he was Japanese, black-eyed, black-haired—and pure surfer-boy California, drawling his vowels, tipping his chin up to emphasize every pause in his speech.

  Cam couldn’t help but think of his brothers, dark-skinned yet no different than the Joneses next door. Here on the Coast, a great nation had truly worked as a melting pot, many cultures blended into one by unprecedented freedom and wealth.

  “I mean across the valley,” Hollywood explained. “We’ve got a doctor, some farming stuff. And like, way more space.”

  Erin said, “Why?”

  “Just lucky.” He had a brave grin.

  “I mean, why do you care so much you’d risk your life?”

  He had a deliberate shrug, too, though the motion made him wince. He must have pictured this scene over and over in his mind. �
��We couldn’t just leave you here.”

  Sawyer said, “Is there a two-way radio?”

  Cam glanced around, surprised. That was a question he’d expected from Price. What did it matter? Colorado wouldn’t send a plane even if there was somewhere to land.

  Hollywood nodded. “Yeah. Shortwave.”

  “CB or ham?”

  “Ham, I think.”

  “How many of you are there?” Sawyer continued, too quietly, and Cam decided that the radio questions had been an attempt to disguise his real intent. Cam tried to signal him but Sawyer seemed blind to everything except Hollywood’s expression.

  “Nine,” Hollywood said, “including me.”

  Less than us.

  Sawyer couldn’t leave it alone. “You have food? Houses?”

  “There’s a cabin with like an apartment in back and a big propane tank. It got us through winter. And we want to grow as much food as we can, you know, that’s why we need your help. There’s only four other grown-ups.”

  Sawyer’s hand twitched, closed shut.

  “Actually we’re totally impressed you guys made it, stuck over here on this little peak. You must have raided down below the barrier all the time, huh?”

  Too many faces turned away and Hollywood’s gaze shifted over them, worried, wondering.

  Cam said, “Yeah, we’re pretty tough.”

  Hollywood grinned again. “We couldn’t just leave you here.”

  * * * *

  After Jorgensen they murdered Loomas—Chad or Chuck or whatever Loomas, sales manager, hairy-chested like a dog with a fat platinum ring on his fat finger. Cam distracted the lazy hijo de puta with a shout as Sawyer rushed up from behind and put a hammer in his skull. Loomas whined, down on all fours. Always whining. Cam hurt his foot and both shins kicking the man until Sawyer pushed him back and finished it.

  Carving the body was much harder. Their new wealth had to be set aside, portioned out exactingly. Sweet fat and salt.