How many islands were like this one?
These people had lived through the ‚rst winter or even longer, stacking rocks for shelter, breaking the pine trees and brush beneath this tiny safe zone for ‚rewood. Now they were gone. There were six big graves, each too big for a single person. Two more bodies sprawled inside their pathetic little shack with no one left to put them in the ground.
A knife and a special rock lay in between the two women, a nearly round boulder etched all over with crosses. It had been used to crush the smaller woman’s head and then the last survivor seemed to have sawed open her own throat.
Cam thought there had been some sort of religious holocaust. Ruth believed the crosses were something else. They had begged the sky for salvation. They’d tried to direct their souls away from this misery. Disease had taken them. The men might have missed it, because birds had been at the corpses, but the tight rotted ‚lm of their skin was distended and black behind their ears. They had endured the machine plague only to be destroyed by another contagion.
“We need to bury these people,” Ruth said.
Cam nodded. “Okay. Okay. But there’s no shovel.”
“It’ll be dark in an hour,” Newcombe said.
“We can’t just leave them here!”
“I know what to do.” Cam walked to the shack. He set one hand on the rock wall, testing it. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved. The corner gave. Most of the branches holding the roof fell in. He hit the wall again and the rest of it collapsed. The rubble formed a poor cairn, but it would have to be enough.
“Please,” Ruth whispered. “Please be safe. Find somewhere safe.” Her words weren’t for these strangers, of course, and ultimately she hadn’t insisted on putting them to rest for their sake, either. It was a way to try to heal a few of her own terrible wounds.
* * * *
They picked their way down into the growing shadows on the east side of the mountain, moving north toward a small ‚eld of snow. They wanted to stay above the barrier, but they couldn’t risk catching whatever had killed these people.
“We should scrub our boots and gloves,” Newcombe said.
“Let’s hit that snow.” Cam gestured. “We can use some for water, too.”
Ruth squeezed one of the etched pebbles in her hand. She had taken it in secret. She didn’t know why, except that the impulse had been too strong to repress. “I don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “Everyone there…”
Cam stayed with her as Newcombe ranged ahead. “It won’t be like that on every island,” he said. “We’ll ‚nd somebody.”
“But that’s what I mean. If there was anything good about the machine plague, it’s that most diseases must have been wiped out at the same time. The †u. Strep. The population’s too scattered.”
“Don’t people carry a lot of that stuff inside them even when they’re not really sick?”
He had EMT training, she knew. She nodded. “Yes.”
“So some islands would just be unlucky. The people get weak, they’re always cold, a virus takes over.” Cam hesitated, then said, “It’s not your fault. You know that.”
“You mean some diseases might have adapted.” Ruth seized on that part of what he’d said because she didn’t know how to answer to the rest. “Yes. We’re going to have to be more careful. There might be other islands that… Some islands might be Typhoid Marys, where everyone’s built speci‚c immunities that we don’t have.”
“How do we test for that?”
“I don’t know.” Some islands would also be thick with rats and †eas, pests that were extinct everywhere else for lack of hosts. “If we ‚nd anyone who’s obviously sick, we might have to back off. Leave them alone.” Ruth pushed her thumb against the patterns etched into the rock, her mind reeling with quiet horror.
There was another threat they were certain to ‚nd among the pockets of survivors. Insanity and delusion could prove to be an even greater problem than disease. Aboard the ISS, Gustavo had reported religious fervor in Mexico, Afghanistan, the Alps, and Micronesia. Holy men had risen everywhere in the apocalypse.
Ruth had never had much use for God. People cited the mysteries and wisdom of faith, pointing to the great understanding of their teachings, but what they’d really done was to close their minds against the true complexity of the planet, to say nothing of the incomprehensibly vast universe. The idea was laughable. What kind of half-wit God would bother to create billions of other galaxies if Earth was the focus of His energies?
It was a very human thing to believe. People were lazy. They were egocentric. Ruth understood wanting a small, controlled world. No one liked uncertainty. It tested the boundaries of human curiosity and intelligence. The monkey was still very strong in modern man. The monkey had limited patience, so people resisted time and change. They developed rationales to show that they were the center of everything, ‚ghting to teach “intelligent design” in schools instead of biology and science. Nonsense. Tall parents tended to have tall kids. Short parents tended to have short kids. Everyone wasn’t identical. It was that easy to see — evolution in a single generation. Otherwise people would have been perfect clones of each other throughout history. To think that life was immutable was a fantasy. Bacteria grew drug-resistant. Dogs could be cultivated into ridiculously specialized breeds like her step- father’s terrier. Religions themselves had evolved with time, some growing more open, some more closed.
There were real answers if you sought the truth. The world was knowable. That was what she’d learned, but it was hard. She would have liked to feel that a larger hand was guiding her, but why her and not the people who died on this mountaintop? Because they were evil?
Ruth clenched down on the pebble again as a slow, stubborn fury worked its way through her. She wouldn’t stop. That was what the rock meant to her. She couldn’t stop even though her feet were broken and sore and her arm was throbbing in its cast.
“Hey!” Newcombe shouted. He stood on an open granite slope about ‚fty yards downhill, waving his arms.
At ‚rst Ruth thought he was warning them away. More bodies? Then she realized he was pointing east and she brie†y glanced down at the rock inside her ‚st, struck by doubt and new hope.
“Look,” she said, touching Cam in celebration.
Far across the valley, barely visible in the yellow dusk, a thread of smoke rose from another mountaintop.
* * * *
It took them two days to hike down and up. Once they saw a large, slow C-130 cargo plane in the south, dragging long cables through the air that Newcombe said were a sensor array. Once there were more snakes.
The cook‚res were repeated both days, late in the morning and again at sunset. There was de‚nitely someone up there, but who? Would soldiers give themselves away?
* * * *
Ruth jostled Cam from a dead sleep and he twisted up into the pale moonlight with his hand balled in a ‚st.
“Shh, it’s okay,” she said.
The moon was a gleaming white crescent in the valley, low enough to the horizon that it appeared nearly level with them at ninety-‚ve hundred feet. Its light cast bars of shadows from the tree trunks — and the shadows moved, creaking. There was a chill breeze in the treetops and the forest was alive. The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He relaxed. His mask rustled as he opened his mouth, but he kept quiet. He only nodded and Ruth felt a small, quixotic smile. A lot of things were wrong, obviously. The whole fucking world was wrong. Maybe he’d been about to make the same joke, but there had been new tension between them.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth continued. For what? She was still kneeling very close to him and she tipped her head back, trying to redirect his attention away from herself. “It’s supposed to be Newcombe’s shift, but I thought…I wanted to talk again. Without him.”
