to be. The planes would drive any survivors into the same plummeting maze of ridgelines and gullies, and everyone was a threat of one kind or another. But they all deserved to live. Cam had been angry with Gaskell, and yet now that those people were behind him, he was glad.
He’d come full circle. Saving them was a way to save himself. Ruth would always come ‚rst, but the two goals were dif‚cult to separate.
It was criminal to abandon anyone above the barrier. What could that possibly feel like, watching the invasion and then the activity in the valleys below with no way to move or save yourself? The idea left Cam shaking. They’d been so close. Another week, another month, and the vaccine could have reached survivors over an area of a hundred miles and thousands of lives. The invasion had stunted everything. Ultimately it might kill more Americans than had died in Leadville. Ruth was right. As soon as the new enemy immunized enough of their own men, they could put them on planes back to China or Russia to reactivate their missile bases.
How long would it be? Hours to cross the oceans, hours to power up their silos and retarget their ICBMs. The planes might have left California yesterday — but it wasn’t impossible that the rebel forces in the U.S. controlled their own missiles, some fraction of the American arsenal. Maybe there had been nuclear strikes across Asia or Europe, destroying the enemy’s capacity to hit North America again. Maybe the U.S. had already blasted the Himalayas or the mountains in Afghanistan. The invasion †eet might be the last remnant of the enemy, only powerful for the moment.
It was a cold thought, and it comforted him, because Cam was in agony. His ear smoldered with nanotech and a second infection had begun to spread through his ‚ngers. They’d walked into a hot spot.
Ruth had it, too. She lurched like a crab, trying to stay off her left foot even as she bent to that side and thumped her cast against her ribs, beating at her own pain. Cam was to blame. He’d wanted to protect her. He’d stayed in a †atter area of the valley because the going was easy, ignoring the confetti of sunbleached plastic garbage in the trees. The blast wave must have eddied here, depositing trash and a higher concentration of the plague, and at sixty-‚ve hundred feet they were far below the barrier. The trees had become ponderosa and sugar pine. The underbrush was often snarled and thick.
“ ’M sorry,” Cam said, glancing through the long shadows. He was looking for garbage in the branches as an indicator, but his mask was damp and smothering and his goggles fogged as he tried to maintain a quicker pace, stupid with exhaustion.
He led them straight into an ant colony.
* * * *
There were dozens of powdery brown cones on the ground, low circles of clean dirt as large as bread plates. Red mound ants. They had denuded the area of most of its brush and attacked many of the pines, too. Cam instinctively jogged into the clear space as he ran with his eyes up.
The colony boiled over their feet and shins before any of them noticed. Then Newcombe yelled as the ants rushed inside his pantleg, biting and stinging. “Yaaaa!”
Newcombe turned to swat his leg. Ruth fell. Cam clawed at her jacket but couldn’t keep her off of the spastic earth. The bugs were a living carpet, shiny, red, wriggling. They surged over her on every side.
“God oh God oh—” she screamed.
They were in Cam’s sleeves, too, in his collar and in his waist. He dragged Ruth up from the seething ants and †ailed at her clothes with one hand. No good. They were both crawling with tiny bodies and the twitching mass surrounded them in every direction — the ground, the trees.
Newcombe seized Ruth from behind and Cam shoved the two of them away. “Move!” he shouted. He used his pack like a club, banging it against Ruth to clear as many ants as possible.
It was the gasoline in the outer pocket that he wanted. He splashed the †uid ahead of them, very close. He was clumsy with the pack hanging on one arm and the bites like nails in his cheeks, neck, and wrists. They were near the edge of the colony. Cam saw open ground, and yet there were still ‚ve yards of writhing bugs between them and safety.
He ‚red his pistol against the mouth of the empty canteen. The ‚re seared his cheek and hair as the fumes ignited. The small explosion kicked his hands apart and he spun over backward, knocking all three of them down into the spotty blaze.
“Up!” Newcombe yelled, but Cam chopped his arm at Ruth’s legs when she staggered away. She was on ‚re — and the heat and the concussion had accomplished exactly what he’d hoped, shriveling the mass of ants beneath them. So he tripped her. He pushed her up and shoved her down again. They thrashed across the ground together, banging elbows and knees, both to put out the burning spots on their clothes and to crush the ants inside.
The colony wasn’t done. Another red mass skittered toward them from the left and Ruth wailed, bashing her forearm against Cam’s ear as she scrambled to her feet.
Newcombe leaned over them and shot into the dirt with his assault ri†e. The weapon was deafening. He squeezed off a full magazine in seconds, using the bullets like a shovel to rip up the wave of ants. It only bought them an instant. The ants swarmed right through the broken earth, but it was enough. They ran. They were alive. And yet above them, the smoke was like a rising †ag.
* * * *
“We can’t stop,” Newcombe said, gasping. He tugged at Ruth and Cam, leading them downhill, and then Cam grabbed him, too, when he put his shoulder into a †exing pine branch and rocked sideways. “The smoke cloud,” Newcombe said.
Then she collapsed.
* * * *
The valley ‚lled with shadows as the sun went below the close horizon of mountain peaks — and a sheet of grasshoppers lifted up into the last rays of daylight, swirling out from a gray, ravaged stretch of forest a few miles across from them. There were enemy troops passing through the area, or maybe only more refugees.
“Go as far as you can,” Newcombe said. “I’ll ‚nd you.”
Cam’s attention was elsewhere. Ruth was conscious but still dazed. When he pulled back her hood and jacket to drop her body temperature, she moaned and said, “The senator. Two o’clock.”
He could only hope they were out of the concentrated drift of the plague. Hyperthermia and dehydration would kill her just as well, and her delirium frightened him. He didn’t think she was capable of more than a few hundred yards. He knew he couldn’t carry her.
Newcombe planned to buy Cam and Ruth as much time as possible. They knew it was possible to use the bugs in their favor, so Newcombe would set out the last of their lard and sugar across the mountainside. A new frenzy of ants and other insects might divert whoever was coming. If not, he would try to lead them away, sniping at them with his ri†e. Both men had one of their little radio headsets, and they’d divided the spare equipment and batteries evenly.
“Here.” Newcombe weighed the two thin packets of Kool-Aid mix in his palm before passing one to Cam. “Eat this. Give most of it to her, but you eat some, too. It’ll help.” Then he stood and slung his ri†e. “I’ll catch up tonight,” he said.
Cam roused himself in time to stop the Special Forces sergeant before he’d gone too far. “Hey,” he called, thinking of all the things that should have been clear between them — the things he’d seen and meant but hadn’t spoken of. “Be careful,” Cam said.
Newcombe nodded. “Just keep going.”
* * * *
The two of them came to a road suddenly and Cam hesitated, looking up and down the smooth blacktop. The road made a small two-lane corridor through the forest and the temptation drew him sideways despite Ruth’s weight. She nearly fell, sagging against him. Cam looked at the road again. They could walk far more easily on the †at, open surface, but it was also a good place to be seen. They had to stay in the brush and the trees.
“Fast as you can,” Cam said, dragging her forward. Their boots clocked on the asphalt. They were across in seconds and then he glanced back at the sky. Twilight was giving way to full night. His guess was they’d gone no
