Helicopters thudded in the darkness and Ruth crawled into the †at tire of an Army truck before she was awake, scraping her cheek and forehead against the lug nuts.
“Here,” Cam said. “Over here.”
She moved to his voice, shuf†ing in the dirt. They’d left the highway to make camp, settling down against an old troop carrier that had gone no more than four hundred yards before bogging down. The vehicle’s nose canted into the earth, which had been mud at the time. Now the con†icting angles of the hillside and the truck added to Ruth’s disorientation. She bumped into Cam. He held Newcombe’s ri†e in both hands but leaned toward her for an instant, like the beginnings of a hug. She pushed against him, needing more physical contact.
The helicopters were far away and seemed to going farther. Ruth glanced wildly into the night, not believing it. Then a man’s silhouette blocked out the stars and she †inched. The scattered light was mirrored in the lens of Newcombe’s goggles. “They’re headed south,” he said.
The noise echoed and slapped against the foothills, fading. But there was a new sound, the hammer of guns. It was barely audible, a
“Oh shit,” Ruth said with sudden clarity. She and Cam jumped to their feet beside Newcombe, staring into the dark. There was nothing to see. The ‚ghting was too distant. They probably wouldn’t have heard the clash at all in a living world. The sound carried for unknown miles.
“They got Young and Brayton,” Newcombe said.
Cam shook his head. “You can’t be sure.”
“There’s no one else down here.”
It changed everything. In her mind, Ruth had already quit, and she didn’t know how anyone could blame her. She’d done her best. She’d decided to tell Newcombe in the morning.
One world. One people.
What would humanity look like if they succeeded? Most of the survivors in the United States were white. The immigrant and minority populations across North America had lived on the coasts and in the inner cities. Los Angeles. New York. Toronto. Detroit. It was the heartlands that had survived — and to a certain mind-set, this purity would increase the appeal of claiming the entire Earth. Leadville would share the vaccine only if they needed to expand their labor force, permitting foreign populations to come down from the mountains as farmers and slaves.
What if one of her friends had gotten away? Captain Young might have covered Todd as he ran from the choppers…No. Ruth was through fooling herself. The responsibility was hers. It had always been hers. She glanced at the stars again, ‚ghting tears. Then she clenched her ‚st and held on to the grinding ache inside her cast.
She walked to her sleeping bag and began to pack up.
* * * *
It took them seven days to cover eighty-‚ve miles, the last twenty-‚ve away from any roads. Newcombe was afraid that Leadville had dropped motion detectors or even a few soldiers on every peak in the area, equipping small squads with radios and rations and then ordering them to wait. Cam pointed out how many islands there were throughout the nearest ‚fty square miles, and Leadville had no way of knowing they’d gone north out of Sacramento, not south. There would be countless acres of safe ground on the plateaus of Yosemite. Much closer to their real position, around Lake Tahoe, were dozens of high mountains and ridgelines. Even if Leadville only targeted the major highways that branched up toward elevation, they would need to commit hundreds of troops. Still, the chance existed, so Ruth, Cam, and Newcombe had bypassed the largest islands within reach and hiked toward a smaller line of bumps instead.
Eight more times they’d felt the burn of nano infections. There was now a dark, thready patch of subcutaneous hemorrhaging on the back of Ruth’s left hand — her broken arm, the nanotech always going after any preexisting weakness. The bruise was healing but she suspected it would scar. Another mark on her. Worse, her feet were rubbed raw in her boots because she didn’t want to complain. Her pack had chafed her left shoulder badly because it rode funny, the strap catching on the sling for her cast.
There were helicopters again. There were jets. They stumbled into another stretch of land that was thick with lizards and snakes, and then a dead forest littered with dead beetles, and then the hike abruptly got easier.
The Sierra range had been in its third day of blizzard conditions when the plague spread. The snow stopped a lot of vehicles. They began to see the traf‚c breaking apart around sixty-‚ve hundred feet, the cars falling off the road or lined up in strange ways. Cam attributed the new patterns to bad visibility and traction. At one point Newcombe got a Ford Expedition started and they made fourteen miles in a hurry. Another time they went three miles in a van, and nearly twenty in a pickup truck. Unfortunately there were still plenty of stalls and crashes, especially wherever the road curved. In the snow, the turns had become traps. They had to leave all three of their vehicles. Thousands of four-wheel drives and military trucks and tanks had fought up through the blizzard, as had little snowmobiles and more unexpected things like farm tractors and ‚re engines, whatever was heavy enough to bull through the snow. But even these vehicles had gathered in clumps and fence-like formations. Wherever one stopped, others hit or steered wide and got stuck. The drivers had been hysterical and bleeding and blind.
Newcombe rummaged through most of the military trucks, not only looking for food and batteries but for clothing. They had all been in civilian gear they’d scavenged in Sacramento, but Newcombe took a stained Army jacket for himself. He had always found comfort in his training and experience. This was different. Ruth thought he wanted to have conducted himself well if they were captured or killed. He wanted to belong to his squad in the end, and she admired him for it.
She wasn’t sleeping well. She dreamed too much and constantly woke despite her exhaustion, as if her mind was in overdrive trying to process it all.
That the air kept getting thinner didn’t help. Any decrease in oxygen made the body anxious. The heart beat harder, and the brain reacted. Cam gave her melatonin and he gave her Tylenol PM, ‚rst a minor overdose, then as many as ‚ve pills at once. He even tried antihistamines because a side effect was drowsiness, and still Ruth muttered and twitched.
The nightmare was real.
* * * *
“Don’t touch anything,” Newcombe said, stepping backward into the rushing wind. The sky was clear and perfect but the few, thin clouds were moving very fast. The cold ripped across the desolate earth, whistling through the gaps in the small rock structure in front of them.
Cam stared into the low hut with one hand on his gun belt, although Ruth didn’t think he was aware of his defensive pose. “It looks like some kind of…like murder-suicide,” he said.
This mountaintop was a dead place. Walking across the barrier had been a dizzying experience. There were thousands of crosses scraped into the rock. The shape was everywhere. Hundreds of the marked stones had also been arranged into larger crosses themselves, laid across the ground. Some stretched as long as twenty feet. Others, made of pebbles, covered only a few inches. It was the work of countless days.
“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said.
“We need to bury them.” Ruth couldn’t bear to look at shriveled corpses anymore. She let her eyes follow the wind instead. Farther east and south, toward Tahoe, the Sierras created a high, ragged skyline as far as she could see. They’d reached ten thousand feet, but only barely. This peak stood alone above the barrier, separated by miles of open space from the nearest other peaks.
In the late afternoon, the distance looked much greater, crowded with shadows. Her grief was equally vast. Ruth’s face twisted suddenly and she slumped down, catching herself on one knee and her good hand. The marked pebbles lay all around.
Cam knelt beside her. “Ruth? Ruth, whatever happened here was a long time ago,” he said, but that didn’t change her exhaustion or her lonely despair.
