Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  “I guess.”

  She wanted to add that it was unlikely that more than a handful of soldiers would precheck the Denver runways. Leadville just didn’t have the suits or the canned air for a larger effort, but she wasn’t going to be the first to say Denver. She didn’t dare distract him.

  “I guess if we force their hand,” Mills said, “they’ll use all the resources they have anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could use a fucking beer.”

  The unsteady laugh escaped this time, but she knew it was okay. Mills would think she liked his joke. He flashed a grin and Ruth realized what she had to say next, I’m buying. Could she build him up enough that Ulinov and Wallace wouldn’t sway him back to their side?

  Ulinov scuffed through the interdeck hatch directly behind them and banged one hand against the ceiling to catch himself as Ruth turned, blinking, confused to find her fears manifested.

  How long had he been listening?

  “You,” Ulinov said. His broad face was a deep bloody brick color, so much uglier than his frown that at first she didn’t even see his expression. Then she noticed his stance. He had not secured himself with one easy grip. He’d wedged himself to the floor by pushing back from his handhold, ready to launch himself with both feet.

  It was a combat pose.

  Ruth managed to force a sound past the earthquake of her heart. “Look—”

  Ulinov dismissed her with one shrug of those beautiful shoulders. He addressed Mills, his English as bad as she’d ever heard. “You, I think better. Professional knows better.”

  There was a noise beside her as Mills shifted in his seat and Ruth wanted to look, maybe encourage him with a gesture. But there was no way to pull her gaze from Ulinov.

  “Your photographs,” Ulinov said. “Now. Pushing them over.”

  She said, “It was me—”

  “No.” His shoulders twitched again. He didn’t even want to hear a confession.

  How long had he been listening? Fuck. The only way to salvage anything would be to take the offensive, act like a nano. Fuck fuck fuck. She had to be relentless. “Commander—”

  “Enough. Do your orders.” Ulinov sounded more tired than angry now, and might have relaxed a fraction.

  “The war you’re trying to fight. Ushba. Shkhata.” She named the peaks where the Russians had failed to hold a line against their Muslim enemies. “You can help them more by putting me on the ground before we lose our best chance to beat the plague. Otherwise they’ll fight forever.”

  “What is it wrong with you? Do your orders.”

  “They’ll fight until they’re all gone, Uli.”

  “No. There is no mutiny.”

  Strange that the word hadn’t even occurred to her. But it was accurate. Mutiny. “That’s not, I was just . . .”

  Ulinov watched her wind down before he turned to Mills. “Push me the photographs,” he said. Then he looked at Ruth again and said, “You do not come back to the shuttle.”

  Her pulse refused to calm and chased so rapidly through her thoughts that she felt disassociated from herself. She’d retreated to her lab after Ulinov escorted her from the Endeavour, both to placate him and because she didn’t want to show herself to the others. Because she hoped to find some safety and comfort.

  It might have been better to face them. Here there was only the rattle of her own fear.

  Ruth knew how she could force an evacuation of the ISS.

  There wasn’t any other way. The Russian Soyuz docked to the station as an emergency lifeboat wasn’t something she could pilot herself. The whole crew had to leave together or not at all.

  She intended to dig under the insulation somewhere away from her lab, create a pinprick pressure bleed. The damage would be attributed to a micrometeorite strike. Wallace had already gone on EVA twice to repair their solar panels. The concept of total vacuum was an illusion. There were constant hazards, dust and debris, human garbage left in orbit.

  All the more reason to get out of here, before a random strike killed them all.

  Ruth had decided the curse of guilt was an acceptable price—and it would not be a small burden. No matter what the crew thought, she respected the knowledge and effort that had gone into establishing a permanent human presence in space more than most of her own work. Partly that was a casual respect for any challenge successfully met. Mostly it was in recognition of the Cold War notion that Earth was much too fragile a basket in which to place all of humankind’s eggs.

  The locust was more proof than anyone needed that they’d better spread throughout the solar system and farther if possible as soon as they got the chance, before a disaster even worse than the plague left humankind extinct.

  But first they needed that chance.

  Ruth tore through her personal effects in search of a tool and laughed at a box of tampons. Four pencils. Nothing. She tried to jaunt across the lab without clearing her foot from the open locker door, and momentum flung her down against a bank of computers. She whacked her thigh, then her forearm, and hurt her neck straining to keep her face from the console.

  Somehow she bounced in the direction she’d intended to go, toward the hatch. She caught herself there. She didn’t think she’d suffered worse than bruises, but the shock of it had cleared her head. She rubbed her leg.

  She had to wait, of course. The timing would be suspicious if it happened right away—

  The thump of hands and feet ignited her heart again. Someone was coming. Ulinov? He’d already shown an uncanny ability to predict her actions.

  Ruth backed away. Her eyes went briefly to the viewport. But it was Gustavo who filled her tiny space. “The radio, your friend James,” he yammered. “They said yes!”

  “Yes...”

  “It worked! Everything you’ve been telling them, the ANN, getting you on the ground, they said yes!”

  He stuck out one hand in congratulations and Ruth grabbed him instead, shouting right in his face. “Aaaaaaaah!” There were no words to express the depth and complexity of her triumph.

  She was going back to Earth.

  8

  Chair 12 had an alien look against the broken mountainside. All of the lifts at Bear Summit were painted dark green, to blend with the environment, but nothing could soften the giant straight lines of these structures. Cam always felt an ambiguous thrill when he emerged from the gorge between the base of their peak and the highest point of the ski area. In another life this had been among his favorite places. Now it was strange and deadly.

  The big metal box that housed the gears perched fifteen feet in the air, looming over a glass-faced attendant’s booth. Two hundred identical, evenly spaced chairs dangled from a cable that ran along both sides of a series of massive poles, plunging out of view beyond a ridge and the first pine trees of any height.

  The chairs rocked against the gray sky, heralding the storm, creaking, weeping. Sometimes when the wind was right this sound had carried over their peak for hours.

  Cam looked away and turned to Erin, close beside him. She was also staring. “Watch your feet,” he said. Nosing up from the hardpack were low veins of granite, mostly smooth but peppered with toe-catching nubs and hollows.

  He tried not to think about the nanos that must be puffing upward with every step, unseen dust. Grasshoppers sprang out of their path constantly, the same tans and grays as the dirt and rock. There were more of them now than ever and their irregular bursts of motion made the ground seem unstable— constant flickers at the corner of the eye.

  Sixty yards ahead, almost racing each other, Sawyer, Manny, and Hollywood marched three abreast. Erin had protested when Sawyer pulled away from her, but Cam was glad. They needed pacesetters. The bulk of the group seemed to be hanging back, and this ridge they were traversing was the easy part. They’d come just three-quarters of a mile, heading west into the damp wind.

  Cam glanced over his shoulder. Bacchetti wasn’t far behind but everyone else actually seemed t
o be moving slower, faces tipped up, all eyes on the chairlift.

  Lorraine caught her foot and flailed into the ground. Cam lost sight of her as most of them bunched around, yet he could see that she didn’t get up again. He started back to help and Erin said, “Cam, no.”

  The storm clouds had muted both the sudden dawn and the few colors of this world. His polarized goggles, designed to highlight white-on-white features in the snow, made the forest below seem almost black. Then he pushed into the blues and reds of everyone’s jackets and saw that Price had pulled Lorraine’s ski mask down from her cheeks.

  “Christ, what are you doing!”

  “She has to breathe,” Price said, and Cam dropped to one knee and grabbed at her, tugging the mask up again.

  Her eyes were wide behind her goggles and he thought she was hyperventilating. She knew how serious her mistake had been. A flap of jacket sleeve hung from her left elbow and on the rock between them was one thin looping spatter of blood like a signature, dark as oil.

  “We’re still safe here!” Price said, and McCraney added, “There’s no way we’ve hit the barrier yet.”

  “How do you feel?” Cam asked. “You think it’s broken?”

  “Let her breathe!”

  Lorraine shook her head and Cam took her wrist, feeling for any deformity beneath her sleeve, working all the way up to her shoulder. Then he shook his head too. “Do you hurt anywhere else? No? Good. Somebody bring us a hunk of ice.”

  Price didn’t move but Doug Silverstein turned away.

  “Hold on,” Cam said. “I need a few pieces of that rope.”

  Silverstein handed him the entire bundle, then hustled uphill toward a field of snow.

  Cam had two canteens in his backpack and removed one, dumping it over her arm, trying to flush out any nanos she’d embedded there. Price was probably right that they were above the ever-shifting barrier, but Cam had learned to be pessimistic.

  “Who’s got a spare hood or something?” he asked.

  He tied her sleeve shut, covering the rip with an extra pair of gloves, as Silverstein returned with too much ice.

  “I thought this was to keep the swelling down,” Silverstein said. “She won’t even feel it through her jacket.”

  “She will.” Cam met her eyes. “Hold it there as long as you can, okay?” Lorraine nodded and her mask worked, like the words thank you were percolating up. Cam stood and turned his back. “You’ll be all right,” he said.

  Sawyer hadn’t waited and Manny had gone with him, but Hollywood was standing right where Cam had last seen him, head bent over a crummy gas station map he’d folded down into one square. Erin hadn’t moved either, except to sit and rest.

  Cam jogged through another burst of grasshoppers. He nearly ran. The urge to escape Price and the others was that strong. It might have been better if he’d stayed in the midst of the pack, herding them, but there was a limit to how much responsibility he would accept.

  They would catch up. They had to.

  Erin rose to her feet and Cam saw her glance past him at the others. She had always been very attuned to his moods. His and Sawyer’s. “Thanks for waiting,” he said, and gave her butt a swat, and she took his hand for a moment until their pace made it clumsy. His breath felt hot in the thick hair of his beard, matted against his cheeks and neck by his mask.

  “I guess I’m still not convinced,” Hollywood said as the two of them approached. “It really seems like we’re gonna lose time heading out this way.”

  Cam shrugged and kept walking. Hollywood turned to follow, lowering his map, and Cam was glad he left it at that.

  There was no point in arguing anymore.

  Ahead, trudging after Sawyer and Manny, Bacchetti reached a swath of loose, shattered boulders that spilled for a thousand feet from a hump of stone above Chair 12. Cam and his buddies had called this rock the Fortress of Solitude, after Superman’s secret hideaway. They’d had names for every gully and cliff on the mountain. Smoker’s Hole. The Cock Knocker. Paradise.

  Cam entered the rock field with Erin and Hollywood exactly where Bacchetti had started across, but the markers here were hastily assembled piles rather than the neat stacks they’d erected at 10,000 feet. Twice he lost the trail. The uneven jumble was all granite, split into square-cornered blocks as small as a fist and larger than a car.

  He paused to orient himself, unsettled, even frightened, and saw that Sawyer and Manny were already at the lift.

  Chair 12 topped out at 9,652 feet, which meant Bear Summit had been able to advertise itself as the highest ski area in California. This was almost true. “B.S.,” as the locals called it, sat unquestionably lower than Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, which claimed a wedge of terrain up to 10,067, but that section of Heavenly lay a stone’s throw across the Nevada state border.

  Cam had also skied bigger and better mountains. Extreme terrain at B.S. was limited to a half dozen ravines, but that was okay. He knew each run intimately, the best jumps, every powder stash. Working at a small-time resort also meant crowds were a rarity—and Bear Summit hired people that the ritzy, brand-name places in Tahoe wouldn’t touch. People like Cam.

  “Watch it,” Erin said, over a sudden clack of rocks, and he glanced back to see her gripping Hollywood’s arm as the boy regained his balance.

  Cam looked forward again and almost fell himself when the slab underfoot shifted. Then a ghost turned his head.

  He expected to see grasshoppers but there was nothing there.

  Before the winter he turned thirteen, Cam Najarro had seen snow only in movies and TV shows. Until then, it was almost possible he’d never been farther above sea level than the tops of various roller coasters and Ferris wheels.

  Money wasn’t the issue. Cam and his brothers were sixth-generation Californian, an eternity by white standards, and their grandpa had been the last to slave in the orange groves and garlic fields for lousy cash wages. Their father was a college graduate who had been promoted to district manager of an office supply chain before succumbing to early heart disease. He made a point of taking his family on weeklong vacations each year. He usually packed them into their Ford station wagon on holiday weekends as well. It was important to him that his sons understand there was more to the world than their own urban neighborhood. He did not want them limited in any way.

  For much the same reason, he never allowed them to wear their older siblings’ hand-me-downs, though that would have meant less overtime for him. And if his decision made for birthdays and Christmas mornings of more underwear and socks than new toys, at least the Najarros looked good.

  Their father treasured pride and appearance above all else.

  For him, the highlight of each day had been to sip one beer in the living room of their three-bedroom home, which he invariably described to his own brothers as “right on the ocean.” In English. Always in English. Maybe Cam was never offended by Bear Summit’s half-truths because his father indulged in the same habit of exaggeration. The city of Vallejo, where they lived, actually sat deep inside the San Francisco Bay—and in any case, three blocks of commercial properties lay between them and the flat, listless green murk of the delta.

  Their father loved the ocean like he loved them, almost formally, and from a distance. He did not fish or swim. He would have drowned since he never took off his shoes, much less unbuttoned his shirt. He just liked to look and listen and maybe walk in the sand. That alone was victory to him, having grown up landlocked in a cow town near Bakersfield.

  He couldn’t have realized he was restricting his sons’ perspective in exactly the way he’d worked so hard to avoid. Their vacations ranged north or south for hundreds of miles, but always along the coast that he found so exotic—the Santa Cruz boardwalk, Disneyland, the Pismo Beach pier. He raised a generation of lowlanders who would keep their eyes and their own dreams facing west toward the Pacific.

  Cam was the only one to break free.

  Hollywood quit moving as soon as they emerged fro
m the rock field and waited for Price and the others, raising one arm, calling, “This way! You got it!” Erin hesitated, but picked up the pace again before Cam could grab at her. Good girl.

  Almost nothing remained of the ski patrol shack that had sat alongside Chair 12—a concrete pad, steel struts they hadn’t been able to tear free. Every other scrap of material had been lugged up the mountain to build their huts, and looking at the raw foundation aroused an odd, melancholy satisfaction in Cam.

  He’d done the best he could.

  His father only took them to the mountains to show up a coworker. A white coworker. The boys went berserk, sledding and hucking snowballs for ten hours a day while he took pictures of them having fun. Later in the week he insisted on splurging for ski rentals and lift tickets.

  Cam was soon lost in the confusion of the bunny hill, although in retrospect getting separated had been at least 50 percent intentional. For someone with three brothers, even biking down to the store for milk was a competition—and Cam was always the odd man out. His two older brothers tended to gang up and his kid brother Greg was three and a half years younger, not much help and often a hindrance.

  The other boys spent their morning bickering and showing off and started racing, which wasn’t so bright since they lacked the ability to turn. Or stop. Rocketing downhill in straight lines, they eventually smashed into a blond six-yearold and spent their afternoon on a bench in the patrol office.

  Cam returned to the car late, shivering with excitement and cold—they were all wearing jeans—and happily infuriated his brothers with his tales of success. The next day they shunned him. That only gave him more time to get hooked.

  He didn’t ski again until he was fifteen, after one of his friends got a driver’s license—after his father was in the hospital. The Najarro boys were expected to find part-time jobs upon reaching high school and Cam burned through his savings before February, buying better gear than he needed and fewer lessons than might have been useful. More than the new alpine environment, more than the senseless joy of hurling himself into gravity’s pull, he loved the individual nature of the sport, no opponents, no audiences, no scores kept. It was his alone.