Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  First year out of high school, already a strong intermediate skier if not particularly smooth, Cam worked seven brain-numbing months in a phone center and was up for a minor raise when he quit in December. That season he skied sixty-one days at nine different resorts. Each night he had to ice his shins, bruised so deeply by his cheap boots that he walked like a cowboy. The nail on his left big toe fell off in March. But it was too late. He’d met powder hounds who thought it was the height of cool to brag about such bodily damage.

  Cam found a job as a lift operator and later earned a spot on the maintenance crew just by showing up every day, which was a little too much to expect of most B.S. employees. The kids partied hard and it didn’t help that management had hacked wages and benefits to a minimum.

  Next year B.S. gave the shaft to the ski patrol as well, and there were plenty of openings. He jumped at the chance.

  * * * *

  They reached Chair 12 as the clouds pushed overhead and the air got still. The ringing screech of the chairs quieted. It was almost like the lift had been waiting for them.

  An omen. But what did the silence mean?

  Cam experienced the opposite phenomenon, as if all that noise went straight into his head. As they passed downhill of the attendant’s booth and the heap of earth that had served as the off-load ramp when buried in snow, both he and Erin glanced up at the string of chairs. If only. But they kept walking.

  The diesel for the backup engines hadn’t lasted a month.

  Most people drove east down into Nevada to escape the plague, including his friend Hutch, which of course proved to be the worst decision possible. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred souls left in Bear Summit when the newscasts said it might be safe at high altitudes—but by that point, the Sierra range was in its third day of blizzard conditions.

  Cam stayed in his duplex at 7,500 feet with his TV and his phone, until after midnight on the fourth day when he woke to stinging pinpricks inside his left hand.

  He called home one more time. All circuits busy.

  The blizzard had stopped but the road was nine inches deep, deeper on either side of the single lane that some hero had plowed the day before. Navigating this narrow trail might have been too much for Cam if he hadn’t half memorized the highway’s constant turns, few dips, and blind corners. He drove the same stretch to work six days a week and, as the joke went, the mark of a true local was the ability to get up to the resort in any conditions, by Braille if necessary, scraping a fender against the iron reflector poles set every forty yards for the plows.

  White road, white embankments. Trying to maintain his depth perception, he snapped his lights from low beam to high to low again, a crude sort of radar.

  Odd silhouettes cavorted into his path, three bucking shapes with too many legs. Cam braked. His truck skidded and he rode down on the monsters. Deer, the things were just deer. They fled before him, giant eyes rolling in his headlights, until the embankment fell away on one side and they ran off. Downhill.

  He passed two abandoned stalls, nearly getting stuck himself as he edged past the first.

  The streetlamps of the condominium village threw a surreal pink glow across the low clouds, visible long before he inched into the valley. Then he saw lights on the ridge too among the luxury cabins. Were people staying put up there? The ridge was only a few hundred feet above the road...

  He kept driving. He was not surprised to find only a few vehicles in front of the resort’s main buildings, transformed into white dunes by the snow, but it confused him to see just fifty cars parked farther up beside the mid-mountain lodge.

  It was dark here, totally black when he shut off his headlights. Somewhere between the condominiums and the resort, a power line had gone down. He didn’t think to worry about it. The mid-mountain lodge sat at 7,920 feet and the hideous itch in his hand would not stop, new tendrils worming through his wrist.

  He stumbled inside and found seventy-one people. Of them, he recognized only Pete Czujko and two guys who’d worked in the cafeteria. The rest were tourists, vacationers. Outsiders. They were all infected, wild with panic and the freakish pain and desperate to figure out how to get higher.

  Bear Summit’s small fleet of snowmobiles and Sno-Cats were gone. Diesel generators, rescue gear, the CB radio and patrol walkie-talkies, everything. Even the gift shop had been gutted. The chairlifts could operate at two-thirds speed on auxiliary diesel engines, yet whoever rode off with the Sno-Cats had also made a mess of draining the fuel from Chairs 11 and 12, punching holes into the bottoms of the tanks, wasting what they couldn’t carry. While Cam had hidden in his cabin with his fear and his grief, others had worked to ensure their survival.

  The missing locals. They must have seen that a majority of the vacationers and other refugees would end up here, and decided they’d be better off in the cabins along the ridge above the condominium village. Some of those homes would be empty, the fat cat owners trapped below the snowline. With propane tanks and well-stocked cupboards, those cabins were ideal for long-term survival—except that the ridge topped out at 8,100 feet. If the plague rose any higher, the locals had nowhere left to go.

  Cam might have been over there himself if he’d been more popular. But there wasn’t anything to do but start hiking.

  The new snow was hip deep and the temperature, with wind chill, hovered just under twenty degrees, though it was warming as a high-pressure front moved in. Uphill lay only darkness. Three people refused to leave the lodge. Several girls, Erin and her friends, wore only slacks and stylish little cowboy hats. There were nine children, a couple in their seventies, an enormous woman named Barbara Price who simply would not put down her show-quality beagle, three Korean tourists able to communicate only in pantomime.

  But there wasn’t anything to do but start hiking.

  Hollywood still had his map out yet didn’t say anything more, which Cam appreciated, and somehow he’d gotten Price and the rest to hurry up. No one was too far back when Cam and Erin quit following the ridge westward.

  Scoured by the wind, the crest of the ski run was soft barren dirt and gravel. They walked through parallel tracks of deep, sliding prints left by Sawyer, Manny, and Bacchetti.

  Hollywood had come a different route, powering straight up to their peak, and probably would have done so even if he’d known the area. That was just his nature. But they had learned that it was equally fast—and safer—to hike out to the resort and use the wide-open runs and the jeep trails that in winter served as Sno-Cat tracks. When there was enough snow they’d skied down, of course, on telemark equipment since the boots were soft enough to walk in, the skis light enough to carry back up.

  Delicate flowers clung to the hillside, vibrant red pride-ofthe-mountain, white phlox. Cam went out of his way to avoid stepping on them and felt encouraged.

  He could see the mid-mountain lodge now, a pine shake shoe box far below. Much closer, Bacchetti had caught up with Sawyer and Manny as they cut a steady diagonal across the slope. Then the rain finally hit, reducing the three figures ahead to phantoms of green, blue, and blue. Were they waiting? No, he saw Manny leap over a dry jag that would soon fill with water. Against Cam’s hood, the patter of drops sounded like words.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised to stumble over Tabitha Doyle. A bulge in the hill tended to funnel hikers into the easiest route, and he’d passed directly through this low spot twenty times or more.

  Sawyer must have kicked Tabs because she’d moved, the familiar fetal position uncurled into a spread-eagle pose, her distended jaw gaping now through the stained orange hood of her ski patrol jacket. Cam’s eyes were drawn as always to the clawing hands. Dissolved in a way that bacteria and the elements alone could never have done, Tabitha’s finger bones seemed to have melted in several places.

  Of the sixty-eight people who hiked up from the lodge into darkness, sixty-five escaped the machine plague even though it rose with them as the storm cleared. They experienced bu
rn out, reinfection and burn out again as the air pressure fluctuated.

  One man just sat down. Another blundered off despite their yelling, the rocking beam of his flashlight visible below them for an eternity. Barbara Price lost a paint can of blood when the whimpering beagle chewed open her face and hands.

  Halfway up, a sliver of moon cut through the clouds. They were carrying the children by then and Barbara Price had collapsed four times, and the Koreans were singing a repetitive curse that Cam began to think he could understand.

  Huddling out of the wind with two nameless shadows at the base of Chair 11’s ninth pole, slumping against the frosted metal, he had not immediately recognized the angry, high-pitched buzzing that reverberated up the hill. Snowmobiles. Headlights appeared in the east, nearly level with him, a swarm of false stars occulted by trees and bursts of snow. The missing locals. They had abandoned the luxury cabins and made their way around the valley’s ridges, wallowing in the powder, defeated by the mountain’s steepness until they reached the flat, open trails of the Sno-Cat tracks within the ski area.

  He was too full of hurt and cold to feel anything more when an avalanche snuffed out the roaring convoy.

  Tabby’s bent skeleton was like a gatekeeper. She’d survived the collapse of a snow cornice known as High Wall and died alone here, two hundred yards above the other locals, almost certainly the last person to fall short of elevation. So close. In the safety of his hut, warm with Erin, Cam often regretted never burying Tabs—but below the barrier it would be idiotic to waste the time.

  He helped Erin over the creek bed and glanced back for the others. One shape had fallen to his knees. McCraney. Cam recognized the striped jacket. He watched to make sure he stood up, and Erin touched his hip.

  Her eyes seemed colorless behind the bronze visor of her goggles, yet her anxiety was obvious. Not even Sawyer pretended to be unaffected by this part of the mountain.

  They held hands again as they descended.

  The thirty-one snowmobiles hadn’t rusted or lost their sheen at all, except where unearthed trees had caused dents or the machines had bashed against each other inside the rumbling fist of snow. The glossy metal shapes looked like the parts of a shattered merry-go-round, red and purple and blue, thrown among the cracked trunks and groping root fingers of dead pines.

  Cam and Pete Czujko had rifled through the frozen corpses long before spring thaw, digging into pockets and backpacks and saddlebags. Later they’d returned to drain the oil/gas mix that these two-stroke engines used for fuel. The bodies were still intact then, although Cam had seen a snapped elbow, a badly dislocated neck, and assumed the rest had breaks beneath their clothing as well. He’d guessed right. Fragments of bone and unmatched limbs now lay scattered everywhere.

  What disturbed him most was the final frenzy of the nanos. Until a host body lost some minimum of temperature, the damned things continued to multiply.

  Tabby’s melted hands were not the worst, nor was the fused rib cage of another skeleton. One little skull, likely a child’s, had a lopsided jack-o’-lantern stare. Its teeth were impossible, leaning out like barbed fangs, and the left eye socket had been eaten away to nearly twice normal size.

  The sixty-five people who reached safe altitude were joined in the icy dawn by two survivors from the snowmobile convoy—Manfred Wright, budding star on the regional junior ski team, and a sheriff ’s deputy bleeding from her lungs.

  But sixty-seven was quickly reduced to fifty-two as those with the worst internal injuries died, including all except one of the children. The nanos had destroyed their smaller bodies. Barbara Price would likely have survived her bite wounds, barring infection, but nano infestations in her cheek had spread to her sinuses. She could scream no louder than a moan, and lasted six days. Her husband Jim was dangerously silent for weeks.

  At first they tried living at the top of Chair 12, cramming into the patrol shack, but waves of nanos repeatedly forced them to climb again no matter the time of day or the weather.

  Exposure shrank their number to forty-seven, many weakened by altitude sickness and despair. Dehydration was a threat to them all and wasted a diabetic woman.

  Cam and Pete found themselves in leadership roles by default. They were wearing uniforms. A man named Albert Sawyer also pointed out that they must be more familiar with the area and its resources than anyone else. Sawyer was a real pragmatic. It was his idea to wait for the next storm to raid the lodge, no matter that they were mad with hunger. It was his idea to use the nanos’ only flaw to their advantage.

  Chair 12 made every difference in their fight to live. They patched the fuel system, then dared to ski down to the main lodge and fired up Chair 4, relaying cans of diesel across the mountain—and food and gear and lumber.

  By spring they were fairly well established. Accidents, pneumonia, and a suicide had compacted their population to forty, which made things easier. With rare exceptions, the survivors were young and determined. They understood this world now. Cam even had a girlfriend. Erin Coombs might never have attached herself to him if she hadn’t mistaken his name and the hue of his skin as Italian, but she must have felt committed to her decision. By then, the camp was already dividing.

  Jim Price rallied support for himself, like a politician, with a series of proposals. His first was work assignments, popular because most people felt they were doing more than anyone else. He organized a sing-along and a “remembrance meeting.” He interceded in arguments, in discussions, in everything.

  Two of the Koreans had been among the first casualties, and the third was their first suicide. The only black man lasted through their efforts to build the huts, but laid open his calf with a grazing touch of a chain saw and died of blood poisoning. After that, Cam and Amy Wong were the sole non-Caucasians.

  It shouldn’t have been important. Too much of the human race had been decimated to worry about cosmetics...yet Cam suspected his skin color was another reason why so many people turned away from him to Price.

  How many cultures had been lost forever? If they did reclaim the planet, what would humanity look like?

  There wasn’t time to brood. The canned goods faded fast and they spent their days scavenging, and found plenty to eat if they would only work for it; confused, crippled rodents; one deer; lush new spring greens sprouting from the earth. No one even whispered of the bodies down in the avalanche field, which rotted away with the melting snow—and they’d buried all of their other dead. By summer, however, they’d picked the mountain so clean that nothing ever grew there again. And as winter returned, their only option was to raid below the barrier on a regular schedule.

  They ate Jorgensen first.

  9

  The red Chevy long bed pickup, perched on the falling hillside, always made Cam think of television. It embodied that image of rugged power that a lifetime of commercials had hoped to project. They’d pretty much beaten the crap out of it, scraping off the paint, grinding the undercarriage over rocks and bumps, exceeding the load recommendation by a thousand pounds—and the truck had never failed them.

  Somehow that made Cam proud. He kept glancing at the distant vehicle as he led the others through the mud and loose boulders above the worst of the avalanche. Manny leaned over the hood, furiously scrubbing grit from the windshield, and Bacchetti held his arms and body up to shield the gas tank from the rain as Sawyer wrestled with a plastic five-gallon drum. Water in the fuel lines would kill them.

  This slope was constantly decaying, sometimes in house-sized chunks, or they might have tried to fashion a road through. But they had to take what the mountain gave them.

  The downpour increased, beating into a fine mist on Cam’s shoulders. Sloppy brown puddles rippled with impacts.

  Behind him someone made an outraged noise. “Huh!”—it had to be Price—and Cam glanced up again to see the truck moving. On the way back from scavenging trips they were always crazy to reach altitude and left the vehicle pointed upslope. Sawyer was c
arefully jockeying back and forth on the narrow flat, getting the nose around, as Manny stood at the downhill edge with both hands up, signaling how much space was left.

  “Wait! Wait!” Price pushed to the front as soon as they hit solid ground, Nielsen and Silverstein moving with him.

  Cam left Erin and jogged after them, but his heel skated in the muck and his knee twinged. His bad knee. He slowed and made himself concentrate on placing his feet.

  Bacchetti was already in the truck bed and Manny hopped up as the group closed in, Price still hollering, “Wait! No!”

  Nielsen got to the vehicle first, thumping against the driver’s side as he stumbled around to the hood. The white corona of the headlight exploded across his filthy yellow jacket, glinting in a bead of moisture tucked inside his nostril. Nielsen’s mask had pulled down and Cam said, “Hey—”

  “I’m driving!” Price shouted. The handle on the door rattled as he tried it twice. Locked. “Get out!”

  “Your mask,” Cam said, and Nielsen wasn’t the only one who cupped his face with his palms and pushed up.

  Price slapped at the window. “I’m driving!”

  “No.” The fogging glass had reduced Sawyer’s hood and goggles to a strange silhouette.

  “It’s my truck!”

  It was, actually. This full-size long bed was one of the few worthwhile vehicles in the lodge parking lots that they’d been able to get started. An incredible number of refugees had bothered to lock up and take their keys, and either died with these crucial bits of metal or lost them altogether.

  Price threw his arms wide. “Just because you rushed down here! Just because you got here first!”

  “You wasted too much time leaving those goddamn markers,” Cam said, harshly enough to divert their attention. Hollywood stood by the rear bumper, his head cocked uncertainly, and Cam lowered his voice. “Someone had to get it turned around.”