We could cut straight across or even go upriver.”
“Mm.” Newcombe turned and Cam followed his gaze to the submerged homes and wreckage.
“We have to try,” Cam said, rising to his feet. His back hurt and he had ant bites down his neck and shoulders, a pinched nerve in his hand, but he bent to help Ruth anyway.
* * * *
They fell into a familiar rhythm, Cam in front, single ‚le with Ruth between him and Newcombe. They went south, drifting back the way they’d come but off the highway.
The new shore was ‚ckle. In places the water stretched inland, ‚lling the streets — and everywhere the houses and fences were a problem. They wanted to look into yards and garages, but each neighborhood was its own trap, either dead-ending in the water or choked with debris from the larger †ood or both. Several times Cam dodged around ‚elds of spiderwebs. Once he saw ants. Everything took time. They needed food and cautiously entered a house that looked normal except for the dry band of muck wrapped around its foundation. They wanted to siphon gas into a few extra canteens and Ruth immediately sat down as Newcombe stopped beside a small Honda, shrugging out of his pack.
“You okay?” he asked.
Ruth bobbed her head, but Cam wondered what she looked like behind her goggles and mask. Her twisted posture wasn’t right.
“I haven’t seen any reptiles,” she said. Typical Ruth. Sometimes it was hard to know what she was thinking, only that she’d de‚nitely latched on to something.
“Me either,” Cam said.
“But you did in the mountains,” Ruth said.
“Yes. Not at the top, but we saw way too many snakes and whole ‚elds full of lizards at eight thousand feet. Seven. Six.” That was as far down as he’d gone. “They were de‚nitely below the barrier.”
“Maybe the ants are attacking their eggs,” she said. “Or their hatchlings. The bugs might be getting to their young before they’re big enough to ‚ght.”
“I can’t ‚gure out why there’s anything alive down here at all,” Newcombe said.
“They don’t get as hot as people,” Cam said.
“But they do,” Ruth said. “Sometimes hotter. Cold-blooded things aren’t actually cold. They just don’t generate their own body heat, except from running or †ying. Basking in the sun. They can be very precise. I think most reptiles keep themselves between seventy and eighty degrees, but insects are usually about the same temperature as the environment.”
Cam nodded slowly. The machine plague operated on a heat engine. When it hit ninety degrees, it activated. And yet in his experience, the plague took as long as two or three hours to power up after it was absorbed into a host. At midday, in summer, the nanotech might begin to decimate the bugs — but as the day cooled, so would these creatures. Obviously enough of them had survived, and they would breed uncontested in autumn, winter, and spring.
Fish and amphibians were safe in rivers and lakes. He’d seen it himself. They remained below the critical threshold, and at altitude it was the same. Lower temperatures protected the reptiles and insects in the foothills and mountains. They must have continually repopulated the world below in haphazard migrations.
“My guess is they’re always on the edge of disaster down here,” Ruth said, “but it makes me wonder if the whales might have survived. Dolphins and seals.” She shook her head. “We looked sometimes. Up in the space station, I mean. They’re insulated in a lot of fat, but if they stayed cold enough… maybe way up in the Artic or down at the South Pole…”
It was a nice thought. “I hope so,” Cam said, trying to encourage her.
Then he leaned back to stare past the houses. Cam had grown accustomed to the feeling of being watched, surrounded by empty dark windows and ghosts, but this was different. A noise. The dead had mostly settled long ago, but rot and imbalance were always itching away at things. Buildings shifted. Garbage moved. And yet his subconscious had pulled this one sound out of the soft whispering all around them, a low, distant sound like the breeze, even though the late morning sky was clear and still.
“Hey,” he said.
Newcombe looked up from the Honda. “What?”
The noise reminded Cam of the storm winds in the mountains, but there was no wind here and the rising
“Oh God,” Ruth said, just as Cam ‚nally recognized the echoing drone way out across the water.
Fighter jets.
* * * *
They holed up inside a sewer drain, musty but dry, crowding in one after another. Newcombe thought the concrete box and the dirt-pack above it would conceal them from airborne sensors — and as the jets swept back again, crisscrossing the sky, he said they might as well settle in. Their allies in Colorado had transmitted bad commands to all of the U.S. spy satellites under Leadville’s control, causing those eyes to tumble and burn down through the atmosphere, but Leadville still had a thermal imaging sat which would pass overhead twice during the next two hours… unless they’d moved it.
Hiding from the sky was complicated. Leadville might have used some of the satellite’s fuel reserves to alter its orbit and its timing, and spy planes could pass so far overhead as to be invisible. The space station was still up there, too. Even uninhabited, the ISS made a ‚ne satellite with its cameras operated remotely from Colorado. Newcombe didn’t have good intelligence on what its last orbital path had been.
They could only work with what they knew. That was one reason they got moving so early every day, to gain a few miles before ‚nding cover again. In his systematic way, Newcombe had even taken ‚ve watches from a store, still ticking perfectly. He kept three for extras in his pack and wore the other two— two for safety — having set both alarms to give them at least thirty minutes to look for a place to hide before the thermal satellite passed overhead. The bugs also seemed worse in the afternoon, mindlessly responding to the same heat that made them vulnerable to the plague, so it wasn’t a bad time to go to ground. They always needed to eat, reorganize, and nap.
First they emptied a pint of gasoline over the street above them, trying to cover their smell. Then they shared ‚ve cans of greasy uncooked soup and it was good beyond words, rich in fat and sodium. Cam’s stomach cramped. He ate too much too fast, dragging his mask down to gulp straight from the can, but slowly that knot relaxed as his body sang with new energy. Unfortunately all they’d found to drink were stale, odd-tasting boxes of juice, and they were leery of the water, certain it was teeming with bacteria and common household toxins like weed spray, detergents, and motor oil. Boiling it would at least kill any parasites, but they couldn’t risk a ‚re.
“Insects don’t have hemoglobin, either,” Ruth said, resuming their conversation from before. She was tenacious if nothing else, and Cam smiled to himself.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“They don’t have iron in their blood like we do, and the plague uses both carbon and iron to build more of itself. That could give them a little more protection. It might confuse the nanotech.” Her good hand shrunk into a ‚st. “Places that get hotter than this must have been absolutely wiped out, though, Arizona and New Mexico and Texas. Large parts of the South.”
“Yeah.” Cam thought of Asia and Africa, too, and everywhere along the equator. In jungles, the air would be hot and thick, which might increase the odds that bugs and reptiles would be susceptible to the plague.
There was nothing they could do about it. Ruth was still taking on more than she could handle, he thought. Or maybe she was only using the problem to distract herself.
The two jets crossed back again, trailing great wakes of sound. Newcombe identi‚ed the aircraft as F-22 Raptors and wrote brie†y in his journal, one of several little notepads he’d picked up. He expected to have to account for himself, providing a report of everything they’d seen and done, and Cam appreciated the man’s con ‚dence more than he could say.
Ruth was already drowsing. “I’ll keep watch,” Cam said, and Newcombe lay down to sleep.
Cam felt surprisingly good. He was hurt, worn down, tense, and ‚lthy, but also full of purpose and self-worth. Companionship. Yes, they squabbled constantly, but it was for the best, everyone contributing. The redemption he
