needed was here with these two. He believed in what they were doing.
Still, it was damned odd. They were so dependent on each other. Day-to-day their survival was an intimate experience, demanding cooperation and trust, and yet the three of them were hardly more than strangers. There had never been time for more than a few words here and there, always on the run. Cam hadn’t even seen their faces for days. He only knew them by their actions.
Newcombe. The man was smart and powerful, with stamina to spare, but his pack was the heaviest and he’d already hiked twice as far as Ruth and Cam, ranging outward to set their bug traps. He had also suffered the most yesterday. He was peppered with bites, and Cam wanted him to nap because Cam needed him to stay sharp. It troubled him that their dynamic was uneasy. Newcombe was an elite and a combat vet. A sergeant. He naturally expected to take charge of two civilians, and yet Cam and Ruth each had their own authority.
Ruth. Cam turned to look and found her curled up against her pack like a little girl. His gaze lingered.
She was completely out of her element. Her power was in her intellect but she was changing, he knew, becoming more physical and more aggressive. Becoming ever more attractive. What he remembered most were her dark eyes and curly hair. Ruth was not what anyone would consider gorgeous, but she was trim and healthy and genuine.
He didn’t understand her guilt. Nothing that had happened was her fault, and the work she’d done was miraculous, and yet she clearly felt she was lacking. That was something else they shared — something else that set them apart from Newcombe. Newcombe had never failed. Yes, their takeover at the lab had ended in a bloodbath with ‚ve of his squadmates killed, but Newcombe had reacted as well as possible to every obstacle. None of the mistakes were his. He simply wasn’t hurt as deeply as the two of them. It was an awkward bond, but it was there.
Cam looked away from her and a brown spider †ed from his movement, scurrying across the concrete. He crushed it. He watched the ruins and the gossamer webs, ‚ghting inside himself for quiet.
He had learned to contain feelings like hunger and fear, but Ruth was something else. Ruth was warm and bright, and Cam was too starved for anything positive. He was too aware of what they could achieve together. The potential for improving the nanotech, the potential for new uses, was both stunning and dark. There was far more at stake than their own lives.
The world they knew was dying. Today was May 19th, and yet they’d seen very little new spring growth and not a single †ower, not even resilient weeds like poppies or dandelions. The grasshoppers, ants, and beetles were devastating, but a lot of plants appeared to be wilting or extinct simply because they’d gone unpollinated. There didn’t seem to be any bees left, or butter†ies or moths, and it was the same in the mountains.
If they were successful, if humankind ever reclaimed the world below ten thousand feet, it would be a long struggle to survive as the environment continued to fall apart. Generations from now, their grandchildren would still be waging war against the bugs and sterile deserts and †oods, unless they developed new nano tools — machines to ‚ght and machines to build. Ruth had said that wasn’t at all impossible, and Cam realized he was watching her again when he should be looking outward.
“Shit,” he said.
The man-woman thing had already played some part in their relationship. If nothing else, she peed away from them, whereas Cam and Newcombe were as casual about it as boys could be. But there were other nuances — her hand in his, climbing over the bent wire of a fence, or her nod of appreciation when he opened a can of pears and gave it to her ‚rst. Had he ever done the same for Newcombe? He supposed so. More than once he’d grabbed the other man’s arm to help him past a car wreck. Last night he’d even offered Newcombe ‚rst chance at a jar of chocolate syrup because Ruth was still eating from a tin of ham, but with Newcombe these gestures were straightforward and thoughtless.
With Ruth, he read more into everything. He felt hope, and it was good and it upset him at the same time. Cam had no expectations that she regarded him the same way, not with his rough, blistered face. Not with his ragged hands.
He could have been angry, but he had seen what that kind of bitterness did to so many others. Sawyer. Erin. Manny. Jim. All of them dead. Cam had come far enough from those memories to see those people in a different light, and to see himself differently. Either you discovered how to live with yourself or you self-destructed, in hundreds of little ways or all at once, and Cam was thankful to be a part of something so much larger than himself. To be someone new.
Explosions pounded the earth. The vibrations hit in three or four rolling impacts and Cam jolted onto his knees and peered up out of the drain, looking for ‚re or smoke.
Newcombe wrestled past him. “Let me see.”
“It was that way.”
A steadier noise washed over them, a collection of howling engines that cut out of the southwest. The ‚ghters. Cam realized that what he’d thought were missile strikes had been sonic booms as the jets accelerated close above the city, ahead of their own sound, but then he saw two specks brie†y, darting east at an angle that did not correspond with the direction of the turbulence overhead.
There were other planes in the sky, maneuvering for position. They were already miles away and Cam held still as he tried to picture the chase in his head, seeking any advantage. Should they use this chance to run? Where?
“Fuck, I’m an idiot,” Newcombe said as he turned to grab his pack. His radio.
“What’s happening?” Ruth asked, blocked in behind them.
“The ‚rst planes are from the rebels, maybe Canada,” Newcombe said. “That’s good. They’ll help us. I just never thought they’d risk it.”
Cam frowned as he glanced at the other man, sharing his disgust. They had all made the wrong assumption, always afraid of the sky, but it had only made sense to act as if they were alone. Except for Leadville’s new forward base, there were no organized forces here along the coast, either rebel or loyalist. The mountains in California and Oregon offered little more than a few scattered islands above the barrier, with few survivors. Their nearest allies were in Arizona and northern Colorado and Idaho, where the refugee populations had declared their independence from Leadville. But with the lion’s share of the United States Air Force, Leadville had claimed military superiority even before developing weaponized nanotech. Cam and Newcombe had never expected anyone to interfere.
Their radio was a small, broken thing — a headset and a control box. It was designed to be worn with a containment suit, the earpiece and microphone inside, the controls on the suit’s waist. They had cut it free of Newcombe’s gear on the ‚rst day, splicing the wires back together again. They’d also packed up Ruth and Cam’s radios as extras.
Newcombe held up the headset and then there was a woman whispering inside their little concrete box. The same woman as always. Every day, every night, Newcombe worked to ‚nd a signal other than the loop broadcast cajoling them to surrender, but the suit radio was more of a walkie-talkie than a real ‚eld unit. It had limited range and only operated on ten military bands, and Leadville was jamming all frequencies except this one.
Her words were calm and practiced. “. come for you anywhere, save you, just answer me…”
In the city and on the highway, they had also found police, ‚re‚ghter, and army radios for the taking. Ri†es, too, although Cam couldn’t use a larger weapon with the knife wound on his hand.
During the ‚rst days of the plague, local and federal forces had tried everything to meet the threat, often with opposing intents. There were roadblocks. There were eastbound convoys and escorts. Once they’d come across an old battle‚eld where an armored Guard company had turned back CHP and sheriff units, uselessly. It was all just part of the mess.
Good batteries were a problem, though. Many of the civilian and military radios had been left on as their operators †ed or died, maybe hoping, impossibly, that help could still come. Even when Newcombe got something working, the civilian frequencies were deserted, and the Sierras made it easier for Leadville’s forward base to override the military bands. Sitting on top of the immense wall of the mountains, Leadville could block out every other voice.
The woman taunted them. “If you’re hurt, if you’re tired, we have medical personnel standing by and we. ”
