was willing to leave her— and it upset her more than she would have guessed. It made her angry.
“Why don’t we split up,” Cam said. “I can try for the mountains while you guys go to the rendezvous.”
It felt like betrayal.
4
They were on the water before the sun lifted clear of the mountains. They were well-practiced by now and stripped the house in ‚ve minutes, ‚nding a case of bottled water in the kitchen and a good haul of disinfectant, gauze, tape, and perfume in the bathrooms. Then they ran to the truck. Newcombe started it easily as Cam and Ruth climbed into the boat behind him. Everything looked good. But they were more silent than usual, Cam noticed, and he knew he’d frightened Ruth. Fine. She had to understand. He wasn’t her dog and he wouldn’t always say
She ignored him. Armored in her goggles and mask, Ruth held tight to her seat, turned almost sideways because she could only use one arm.
The boat was a twenty-two-foot Champion, lean like an arrow and nearly as thin. With a hull less than three feet deep from top to bottom, it was more of a bass ‚shing platform than a riding craft. It had only two seats set in its smooth deck. The Champion was designed to speed ‚shermen from one good hole to the next, and that was perfect. Cam guessed that even the motor shaft wouldn’t stick more than a couple feet below the surface, which would be crucial out there in the ruins.
Newcombe drove to the shore slower than Cam expected. They must have reentered the hot spot as soon as they left the house, but the street barely had any downward slope and the waterline had crawled up and back many times, leaving thirty yards of muck and garbage in lines and dunes.
“Hang on!” Newcombe shouted. They crunched through styrofoam and plastic, a lamp shade, empty soda cans, and stinking damp clothing and paper. Endless skins of paper. Ahead of them, the shallow edge of the sea was thick with bobbing junk, clogged in between the homes on either side. Newcombe intended to drive straight in. The truck was a big monster. Newcombe thought it would keep churning until the water was deep enough to †oat the Champion off its trailer. He didn’t want to risk getting caught on something if they backed in like you were supposed to do.
Then the truck hit the water, clattering through the debris. They shuddered over something big. The trailer rocked up on one side and the boat slid the other way, almost bumping loose. They’d already removed the rope ties that secured the Champion to the trailer, not wanting to miss any surge that would carry it free. Now that seemed tremendously stupid.
But it worked. Newcombe dragged on the steering wheel and the truck hooked even further to the side, its engine spluttering. The Champion slid away and drifted a few yards. All around the boat, the surface clunked with charred, waterlogged bits of lumber.
Newcombe killed the engine. He got out of the truck and slogged over cautiously, dirty and wet while they were dry. Cam helped him into the rocking boat and said, “Nice work, man. You do nice work.”
“Got a little sketchy there for a minute,” Newcombe said. That was all. Still, Cam sensed a chance to rebuild everything between them, rather than allowing Ruth’s mistrust to continue to push them apart. He could make a new beginning. But he wasn’t here for Newcombe. He turned from the other man and glanced at Ruth and then past her at the cluttered sea, wanting more than anything to talk to her alone.
He didn’t want to ‚ght. Every minute in this place was enough of a struggle without losing her.
* * * *
The motor echoed strangely. The sound yammered back at them from every housefront but raced away into every gap, bouncing in and out of broken windows and open doors as they eased through residential streets.
Newcombe drove with the 260-horsepower Mercury throttled down. The Champion wouldn’t go any slower than ‚ve miles per hour and coasted effortlessly. Too often they bumped and bounced into tight spots, the propeller grinding once on a submerged car and then blasting through a door window in a slosh of bubbles and glass. Several times they scratched against drifts of dead brush and lumber and garbage. The ruins formed an incredible maze. Cam used it as best he could, always looking east for a way out. Sometimes that was easy. The †ood had come from that direction and knocked down fences and cleared yards, often leaving bars of debris and mud on the lee side of the buildings — the west side. Streets that ran east tended to have been swept clear.
They had to know if they could boat up the river, even if it meant another argument. Newcombe must have realized what Cam was doing, but none of them had any interest in going west and the two men worked well together. Once they struggled to lift aside a snaking mess of utility lines. Once they took turns leaning out of the boat to kick away a long sheet of aluminum. There were still odd little things †oating in the most stagnant corridors, a toy farmhouse, shoes, a perfectly sealed Tupperware container blotched on the inside with mold.
The sun †ickered everywhere, clean acres of light on the dirty sea. It shimmered in patches of chemicals. It sparked on glass and metal and lit up every scratch in the lens of Cam’s goggles, turning his head, making shapes that weren’t there.
Again and again they were caught in delicate threads. Hundreds of strands †agged out from thousands of spiders. Newcombe accelerated suddenly after they idled through the collapsed shell of a home and found themselves within arm’s reach of a wall full of silk and white nests, all of it packed with tiny brown bodies. The water not only protected the spiders from the ants. It also kept this region cool enough that they were probably never affected by the plague, even in summer, and Cam wondered again at the niche evolution they kept seeing. It seemed to him that the remnants of the ecosystem were pulling further apart rather than working toward any new cohesion, but he was too tired to think how it might end.
Moving east was a waste of time. After forty minutes Cam and Newcombe were ‚nally able to study that shore through binoculars. What they could see of it was an impassable mud slope, raked through with dozens of narrow trickles of water. It made the decision for them. North.
An hour later Newcombe chose a spot to run the Champion aground. They sped into the cramped swamp beneath a massive highway interchange where the boat would be hidden. Newcombe unlatched the motor’s cover and Cam helped him dump more than thirty canteens of water onto the engine, dousing its heat. There was no sense leaving a bright heat signature at the shoreline, pointing the way they’d gone. Cam ‚gured they’d covered a little less than twice the distance they would have hiked on foot, but that was partly the point — to give Ruth every opportunity to rest. She had even lain down for a while against the coil of rope at the nose of the deck, totally withdrawn.
They needed to talk about what she wanted him to do.
* * * *
They could have had the chance. As soon as the three of them cleared a fence and made their way onto the Interstate again, Newcombe called a halt and knelt, checking his watch. He quickly reorganized his pack. On the outside were mesh pockets where he kept one of their little radios, his binoculars, and a squeeze bottle of gasoline. Now he tucked away the radio and binoculars and put jars of maple syrup into those pockets instead, preparing to range off by himself and set more food traps.
Cam stopped him. “Wait.”
“I’ll catch up.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Cam said, aware of Ruth’s gaze switching back and forth between them. Her posture had changed as soon as it became obvious what Newcombe was doing. She’d stood a little straighter, but now that bent, worried tension returned to her shoulders again.
Cam felt badly. He wanted to reassure her, but this was more important. “We can’t set any decoys on this side of the water,” he said. “Not right away. Think about it. When you put them all over downtown, the swarms couldn’t have formed much of a pattern. But if Leadville notices the worst swarms are moving north, they’ll realize we’re causing it.”
Newcombe stared at him. “Okay.”
“C’mon,” Cam said to Ruth, gently touching her good arm. She looked at his hand and then raised her face to
