black. In the heat, the insects had been destroyed, which in turn condemned the reptiles and the vegetation. Lacking any balance whatsoever, the biosphere tipped. The earth baked into powder and superheated the air.
It drew moisture from every seam in their armor. Ruth was stripped down to T-shirt and undies inside the grimy shell of her jacket and pants, and still she broiled.
Drinking water had become life-and-death. Every day they needed more than they could carry. Fortunately they’d also returned to civilization, passing through the outskirts of little towns with names like Chilcoot and Hallelujah Junction. Highway 395 paralleled their hike north and was spotted with stalled cars and Army trucks. They scavenged new clothing and boots. They also found bottles and cans easily enough, although many had swelled or burst in the sun.
The highway was no protection from the dust. Red dirt and sand licked across the asphalt. It piled against cars and guardrails, forming dunes and bars. There were soft pits where culverts had been and other hazards like fences and downed wires. Once she’d cut her ankle on a ‚re hydrant concealed in the sand, so they usually went cross-country.
They had yet to see another dust cloud. Most days had been windy, which erased their trail but would also confuse the dust kicked up by anyone else. They worried constantly about planes and satellite coverage. Were the †ags of dust running up from their feet noticeable from above? There was always movement around them. Huge whirlwinds walked in the desert and vanished and then leapt up again, especially to the east. Their hope was that they only looked like another dust devil.
“Sst,” Cam whispered. Newcombe repeated the all clear and then Ruth, too. They drew together in a band of shade and Ruth blessed the wind-blasted rock for its size, glancing up along its pitted surface as she set her good hand against her pants pocket and the hard, round shape inside it. She still had the etched stone she’d taken from the ‚rst mountaintop. More and more she was treating inanimate objects with respect, making friends or enemies of everything that touched her.
Part of her knew it was stupid. But she’d grown superstitious. There was no question that some things liked to bite. She would be a long time forgetting the rigid edges of the ‚re hydrant against her pantleg, so didn’t it make sense to feel obliged to benign objects like her little stone and the much larger shape of the desert rock? The idea was as close to faith as she’d ever been, a heightened sense of connection with everything around her.
Maybe there really was a God within the earth and the sky. He would exist immaterial of whether religions were right or wrong. People tended to believe in what they wanted the world to be instead of looking to see what it was, inventing tribal power structures, skewing observable facts to make themselves important. Before the plague, in fact, the most successful religions had existed as shadow governments, transcending nations and continents. What fathers believed, they taught their sons, and they were encouraged to have as many sons as possible. Who honestly thought that the Catholic edict against birth control was based on the lessons of Christ? Or that the enforced ignorance of women in the Muslim world was holy in any way? Large families were the quickest way to expand the faithful— and yet none of these human blunders meant there wasn’t some kernel of truth to the idea of a greater being.
Hundreds of forms of worship had been born throughout history, and new religions had surely begun since the plague. Why? Despite the suspicion and greed of the monkey still inside them, people could be smart and honest and brave. Had the best of them truly perceived some link to the divine? Ruth was beginning to think
Earth was a very late planet in the life span of this galaxy, †ung deep into its spiral arms. If there was a God, maybe he’d used the farthest, most forgotten worlds of his creation for experiments, knowing that most of them would be half-perfect mistakes. What could He hope to learn? The limits of their imagination and strength?
Her little stone, etched with crosses, had become more than a reminder. It was a talisman. It had power. She could sense it.
The stone protected her.
“What do you think?” Cam asked.
Newcombe was peering north through his binoculars. Ruth turned and squinted into the desert herself. The town of Doyle was a squat collection of buildings like boxes and square signs elevated on long metal poles. Mobil. Carl’s Jr. Beyond it, brown hills and ridges rolled upward into the dazzling light.
Newcombe shrugged and traded Ruth the binoculars for a plastic bottle of mineral water. She swung her gaze away from town to the few structures of the air‚eld, feeling both wary and hopeful. She couldn’t deny that she was also pleased. The men were beginning to trust her as much as they relied on each other, and she’d earned it.
Her transformation was complete. Ruth had always been tough but now she was a warrior in every aspect, lean and hard and too sensitive all at the same time. To say that she was twitchy would not be incorrect. And yet the twitch was a cool, distant feeling, insulated by experience.
She let her eyes drift over the air‚eld’s fences and high buildings. “Looks good,” she said.
Still they waited, drinking more. Newcombe passed around some candy for quick energy and dug out the radio, too. He didn’t speak. He only clicked at his send button a few times, transmitting three short ticks of squelch. It meant
They’d established direct contact with the rebel forces twice more, once for nearly a full minute with a ‚ghter that jettisoned an automated relay. Both times Newcombe had talked nonstop, accepting the chance of being triangulated or overheard, using as much slang as possible in case the enemy was recording him. He had never been explicit, though, and the pilots had also hedged their language. No one ever came right out and said
“Okay,” Newcombe said. “You know your marks.”
Cam nodded. “Ten minutes.”
“Thirty,” Ruth said.
Newcombe touched her shoulder and then Cam’s before he moved out, intending to reconnoiter wide around the air‚eld. They were badly hamstrung by the short range of their equipment, and the relay had vanished in the dust. They just didn’t know what to expect. U.S. soldiers couldn’t wait below the barrier, unless a pilot had landed in a containment suit with a stack of air tanks. That seemed unlikely. They’d had the air‚eld in sight for a day and a half now with no sign of activity, but there were any number of ways the Russians could stop them.
Because they had the vaccine, the enemy might have left men at every airport within a hundred miles. Or they could have simply dropped motion detectors or antipersonnel mines. An effort that widespread would have used a lot of fuel and gear, of course. It was a good bet that the invaders hadn’t done it. The stakes weren’t quite so high for them.
The same couldn’t be said for the United States, because the
U.S. had yet to gain possession of the vaccine. The two ‚ghters they’d spoken with weren’t the only ones Newcombe identi‚ed as their own. Four days ago, a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets had slashed into the mountains. Yesterday, a lone bomber came limping out of the southwest before two MiGs overtook the wounded aircraft and gunned it down.
Their side was trying to cover them and misdirect the enemy. They’d been surprised to ‚nd an ongoing exchange between a weak transmission from a man who said he was Newcombe and a stronger signal urging him toward a pickup in Carson City. The weaker transmissions were still more powerful than their own, and so more easily overheard, and Carson City lay sixty miles away from Doyle in the direction they would have gone if they’d chosen to head south instead of north. It was a neat trick, and Ruth appreciated the help — but meanwhile other people were sacri‚cing their lives.
Larger con†icts were taking place in Yosemite and farther south. The Russians had been airlifting the rest of their people into California, which was good and bad. It meant the enemy was preoccupied with shielding their planes from American and Canadian interceptors, but they were also growing stronger and better established.
The U.S. was crippled in meeting the enemy. A large part of the nation’s air force had disappeared with Leadville — and for hundreds of miles, the surviving planes were only so much aluminum, plastic, and rubber. The EMP had burned out electronics even below the barrier, where U.S. forces might have scavenged new parts and computers.
Estimates on the radio said the Russians had already landed tens of thousands of troops and civilians. More were on the way. In fact, their numbers were surging. There were more and more planes every day, because the
