Newcombe remained silent. Maybe he was thinking of the ‚rst mountain and the mad, grinding obsession that must have driven those people to carve thousands of crosses. The sight had shaken Cam to his core, because he never would have believed that anyone had things worse than on his own mountaintop. His group had only lasted eight months before they began to kill and feed on each other.
* * * *
Voices echoed through the ravine and Cam ducked against a car-sized boulder, leaving sunlight for the cool shadows beneath the rock. Newcombe squeezed in beside him with a wild look, then checked his ri†e’s safety again. Cam had misjudged the other group’s position. He’d led Newcombe too far up this gully to run back down again and there was no other route from here to the long cliff face above, where they might have scrambled into a crevice and waited and watched. The mountain had fooled him, bouncing the noise away until the other group abruptly moved past a ridgeline and their voices were redirected downhill.
They sounded very close.
He clenched his teeth, trying to hold down his adrenaline and the stark memories of gun‚re and screaming. Then the other group passed into view. They wore uniforms. Cam raised his pistol but Newcombe jammed one hand against his forearm exactly where Ruth had touched him.
“No,” Newcombe whispered.
The uniforms were ragged, once green, now a sun-bleached, filthy color very much like army olive drab. The shoulder patches and other insignia were paramilitary, but they were undisciplined. One had his shirt open and another wore a frayed San Francisco Giants baseball cap. They were teenagers. They were Boy Scouts. All four carried handmade backpacks, stout bare frames of branches lashed with rope, made for stacking and hauling wood.
The boys were skinny and hard and sunburned, and in good spirits. They were laughing.
Cam barely recognized the sound, his body still tight with fear. But it was only his own nerves and the distortions of the rock that had deepened their voices. In fact, he already knew the loudest boy. After listening below them for most of a day, he identi‚ed the con‚dent tone immediately as the kid said, “I’m gonna beat your ass today, Brandon.”
“No way.”
“Lose like always.”
“Bite me.”
They were using their chatter like a shield as they crossed into the machine plague, keeping each other brave. That was why they’d grown noisier and noisier as they approached.
Newcombe seemed as stunned as Cam at their fun, stupid banter. Both men hesitated.
It was the loud boy who saw them ‚rst, his eyes suddenly huge in his smooth face.
Cam had hoped to meet someone else ‚rst. He’d planned to call out from a distance and give them time to react — but the loud boy was a leader. He probably took part in every scavenging mission, and his simple heroism threw his friends apart like a grenade. He shoved them away from Cam and Newcombe even though it delayed him from running himself.
Newcombe said, “Wait!”
The teens continued to stagger back. One kid had fallen over another’s feet and the loud boy yelled again, dragging at his buddy on the ground. A second later there were answering shouts from above, lost and thin in the blue sky.
Cam stayed back as Newcombe slung his ri†e and pushed off his goggles and hood, exposing his freckles and sandy blond hair. “Wait,” Newcombe said. “It’s all right.”
“Holy fuck, man—”
“—did you come from!”
Their skin was not without old blisters and bruising. Some of these scars were lost beneath sunburn, windburn, sweat, and dirt, but they’d been caught below the barrier more than once. Maybe these low islands were even submerged in the invisible sea on hot summer days. Cam could only imagine how bad that must have been, attacked by the plague with nowhere left to climb.
“They’re soldiers,” said the kid on the ground, taking in Newcombe’s jacket and gun belt. Then he looked up abruptly, as if to check for planes.
The loud boy ‚nished the thought for him. “You’re American. You guys get shot down?”
“U.S. Army Special Forces, I’m Sergeant Newcombe and this is Najarro,” Newcombe said, letting them misunderstand about Cam for the moment — and now the teenagers’ movements were slower, wondering.
The loud boy began to grin at them. “Holy fuck,” he said again, savoring the curse.
* * * *
His name was Alex Dorrington. He was nineteen years old, with thick brown hair and a habit of squinting, an adaptation to the unrelenting sun on their islands. He also seemed short for his age. Cam remembered how Manny’s growth had stunted. All of these boys would have been a year and a half younger when the plague broke loose, still in the middle stages of adolescence, and their diet had been limited and poor.
The Scouts were like Manny in another way. They were elated. They pummeled Cam and Newcombe with a hundred questions and constantly touched them, especially Newcombe, picking at his jacket as if to con‚rm he was real.
“Who’s in all the planes?”
“—if we help you—”
“But how can you walk around below the line?”
They gave Cam a little more distance once he took off his goggles and mask, unable to hide their shock. Cam exploited it. “How many more people do you have up there?” he asked, and Alex said, “There’s four, sir. Four more. You, uh, you better talk to Brandon’s dad, I guess.”
“Good. Thanks.”
They cautiously followed the Scouts up through the ridge, saying nothing of Ruth. Alex had sent a kid named Mike ahead of them, but there were still people yelling down from the top— a man, a girl.
The two groups met in a crack in the rough black lava and Cam let Newcombe take the lead, not because of his ruined face but because he was trembling. It scared him. The boys had been desperately friendly and yet Cam felt himself continuing to measure the situation and not liking it, pinned in the gully. His tension reminded him of Sawyer again. There had been times when his friend was as sel‚sh and violent as a rat, all of which made him the perfect survivor, but Sawyer’s strength became a crucial weakness when he was unable to stop striving, stop ‚ghting, creating threats that hadn’t existed until he imagined them. Ultimately it had killed him. Cam didn’t want to be that person, and yet he wasn’t fully in control of himself.
“U.S. Army Special Forces,” Newcombe said, taking charge. He stepped forward to shake hands.
“I’m Ed,” the man said. “Ed Sevcik.” He was in his forties and dark-haired like Brandon, but with gray in his beard like salt.
Newcombe said, “Can we sit down someplace, Ed?”
“Oh my God, yes. I’m sorry. This way. I’m not…I can’t believe you’re here,” the man said, glancing back and forth between them. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Cam forced a smile, although he wasn’t surprised by their enthusiasm. The arrival of new faces must be profound.
They continued back up the ravine. The girl stayed close to Ed. She had the same dark hair and snub nose, Cam noticed, and a long pair of legs she’d chosen to show off, wearing shorts when all of the boys wore pants to protect themselves from the rock.
“Are there more of you coming?” Ed asked, and Newcombe said, “No. Just us.”
“They’re not off a plane, Mr. S,” Alex said, squinting, always squinting. Maybe it wasn’t the sun but that he’d begun to need glasses.
