Plague Year (2 page)

Sawyer plunged into the busy line, leading with his stubble-dark head. Talking louder than Price, he grabbed at people’s sleeves and blocked their way as Cam strode out to where they were making three piles. Big piles.

Manny followed, pointing with his entire arm. The kid’s voice was unmistakably eager. “Down there.”

Cam stared out across the valley instead. The people on the next peak had built three bonfires, just flickering orange sparks from here, but an obvious signal.

“See him?” Manny asked, then yelled, “Heyyyyy!”

Some of the human shadows around them also cheered. There was little chance this sound would penetrate the vast, black valley, but a sense of hope and wonder welled up in Cam again.

About a mile below them, a wand of light strobed wildly over the rough terrain—electric light like a star.

Cam said, “He must have started across this morning.”

“You think someone could make it that far in a day?”

“Longer than that would kill him.”

Price bustled over with a tin soup bowl of embers, hugging it against his chest with one hand and waving his other arm grandly at each of the few stragglers he passed.

Jim Price had a compact, barrel-shaped torso that in daylight sometimes gave him the illusion of plumpness. In the dim shine of the embers, his face was all hollows and cheekbone. Across his chin, a prominent hourglass pattern disrupted his beard, scarring from the last time he’d gone below 10,000 feet with a scavenging party. His grin was unbelievable, even frightening, but Cam must not have looked any better because Price lowered his eyes when Cam stepped in front of him.

Cameron Luis Najarro had been below the barrier four times as often and his brown skin was mottled with burn blisters. His eyebrow and left nostril. Both hands. Both feet. He kept his coarse black hair at shoulder length to cover a badly disfigured ear.

“One fire,” Cam said. “One fire’s plenty, and make it smaller. Where the hell are we going to get more wood?”

“He must have a way to protect us!” Price glanced at his hut mates, chopping his hand through the air again, and some of them nodded and mumbled. Some of them had been listening to his pompous crap all winter.

“Don’t be stupid. If he did, he’d camp for the night instead of risking a broken leg. Remember what Colorado said.”

“That was five months ago!”

Sawyer moved closer, both arms tight by his sides, his chin tucked down into his chest. “We can’t afford the wood,” he said.

Price didn’t even look at him. He had never understood Sawyer’s body language, so much more subtle than his own. Facing Cam, Price made a wagging, dismissive gesture and said, “You tell your little bed buddy—”

Sawyer decked him, one jab sideways across that big mouth. Price fell in a heap and fumbled his soup bowl, throwing orange meteors over his head. He scrabbled and kicked in the dirt as Sawyer paced forward, stiff, deliberate. Then Lorraine lurched between them, keening deep in her throat, spreading her arms wide in a very Price-like gesture.

“One fire,” Cam said. “Please.”

A few of them went back into their cabin. Everyone else pressed tight around the bonfire, roasting themselves, blocking the light. Sawyer was obvious about staring at Price over the yellow flames, and Cam almost said something but didn’t want to embarrass his friend. He and Sawyer hardly talked to each other anymore outside their hut unless Erin was with them—and he was sick of playing peacemaker.

Across the valley, the other fires were put out.

“They don’t have forests to burn either,” Sawyer announced with mean satisfaction, but Cam felt a spike of disappointment, misplaced fear. It was as if the dark of the valley lunged up like a wave and smothered those people.

After the last of their batteries had died, after they’d lost the calm, redundant, twenty-four-hour military broadcasts out of Colorado and the underground shelters near Los Angeles, there had been two suicides. Almost 10 percent of their population. Both women, of which there were only six left.

Cam had no idea how many people survived across the valley or how bad winter had hit them—nothing except that they were there. Cam’s group had never possessed binoculars or a real radio, just a glossy red CD boom box. He’d tried faking Morse code with a pocket mirror and reflected sunlight, thinking they could teach each other, but even if communication had been possible there was nothing the other survivors could do for them except say hello. Nothing except keep them sane.

Isolation cinched tighter around their hearts every hour, and they had become as much of a threat to themselves as their environment was, contorted by despair, strain, and mistrust. Ferocious hunger and guilt.

Maybe they were all poisoned by the same thought. Sawyer said, “I wonder what they’ve been eating.”

* * * *

Jorgensen was easy. That gimp leg made him totally useless. He’d crashed down a stairwell while they were scavenging insulation and more nails from the ski resort lodge, clumsy with exhaustion. They’d been rushing nonstop for days because the first snow came early. They could have just left him there but chose to be heroes, dropping most of what they’d collected and hauling him back instead. Cam didn’t remember even discussing it, which was strange and awful and hilarious, considering what they did to him six weeks later.

But they needed to be heroes.

Every person on this mountain had left family and friends behind in the first mad scramble to get above the invisible sea of nanotech.

* * * *

The flashlight vanished into thatches of whitebark pine, too small to be considered forest, then soon reemerged. Plant life thinned dramatically well below their peak, reduced in clearly visible bands from trees to brush to hardy little flowering weeds. Not enough air, water, or soil. The few pines and firs scattered above the timberline were nearly indistinguishable, all of them bent, pretzeled, abused by wind and snow.

The jouncing beam of light disappeared again behind a rise in the land. A minute passed. Five. Cam had hiked through there repeatedly and tried to picture it in his head. No sheer drainages, no slides, nothing to delay the man.

Sawyer said, “He’s slowing down.”

“Come on.” Cam moved into the night with his friend, and Jim Price muttered something. A few people laughed. Sawyer stopped, looked back. But Cam slapped at Sawyer’s shoulder and Manny had left the fire to tag along, and that seemed enough to get Sawyer walking again.

The three of them ventured down a wide, shallow ravine that formed a natural funnel to their peak and was the easiest access through a series of granite ledges and crumbling ridge-lines of old basaltic lava. Picking confidently through the rocks and packed earth, Cam felt as if he’d physically
evolved
. Sweeping his eyes left and right to make the most of his peripheral vision, he smashed his toes only once.

A chipmunk piped and they all froze, listening. The rare sound wasn’t repeated.

The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang.

They found seats at the base of a ragged pinnacle of lava they thought they’d identified on their best topo map, marked at 10,200 feet. Normal fluctuations in atmospheric pressure meant the barrier shifted daily, hourly, and it was only smart to minimize their exposure.

Cam said, “Maybe he does have some way to stop it.”

“You don’t make nano-keys out of dirt.” Sawyer rarely spoke of who he had been, who and what he’d lost, but he’d argued like an engineer when they were building their huts, pointing out drainage and foundation problems. “Even if there was someone over there who knew what they were doing, I seriously doubt they have any real equipment.”

“Maybe they brought it up in the beginning.”

“If he had a defensive nano that worked like antibodies in individual people, he would’ve stopped for the night like you said. And the only other option is to go on offense, build a hunter-killer that’d go out in the world and eat all of the little fuckers that have been eating us.”

Cam turned from the dark slope downhill to look at him.

Sawyer was staring at the ground instead of searching below. He said, “This crazy son of a bitch wouldn’t have to carry a weapon like that over here, he’d just release it.”

Manny stood up. “There he is.”

A ray of light burst over round boulders and skeletal brush no more than two hundred yards away.

“Heyyy!” Manny screamed. “Heyyyyyy!”

The grasshoppers quit for one instant, then started up again in full chorus.
Ree ree ree ree.
The mindless noise seemed to synchronize with Cam’s heartbeat and interrupted his thoughts. The bugs were like a sea of their own, rising higher every day, triumphant, unstoppable.

Manny danced, all his weight on his good foot. “Hey! Hey!” The kid windmilled his arms as if to break apart the darkness.

“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.