He was twenty-six years old. He could still be impulsive even though he was physically worn as if twice his age. Like the ants, Cam hated the cold. In the Colorado nights, his hands ached with arthritis. A badly healed knife wound rippled across his left palm, and his fingers were thick with burned tissue. His face was equally blistered, although he could hide most of this scarring with his beard. He wore his coarse black hair at shoulder-length to cover a disfigured ear.
But the bugs were here, too.
“Jesus!” Cam staggered back from the lump on the floor. The irregular shape seemed to leap up, startled by his approach. Winged ants pattered against the plastic overhead. Then they flew toward him.
Before the cloud obscured the body, Cam saw that Eric was gone. Hundreds of red worker drones crawled from the wet cavities of Eric’s face, exhuming his insides through his mouth and eyes. They filled his clothes, too, writhing and bustling.
There were other cracks in the floor where columns of ants marched through eroded gray concrete and dirt. Somehow the insects had torn through. The colony was still expanding. They were insulated from the night by the greenhouse itself, glorying in their find despite the oncoming cold.
Cam destroyed them, screaming, “Yaaaaaah!”
The gun roared. Burning streams of fuel splashed between the low ceiling and the floor. The heat turned the plastic into melting runners. The carpet of ants shriveled and disappeared, blown away by the fire. Even the bugs at the edges of the inferno curled into dry cinders, whirling up through the air like a blizzard. The smoke was intense. Coughing, Cam reared back from the fire. Eric’s body reacted, too, its muscles contracting. The corpse twisted within the blaze, arching its hips and neck as the empty gap of its mouth pulled impossibly wide.
Cam tried to shut off his weapon but the flamethrower was a clumsy thing they’d built themselves. It shot gasoline in fat, deafening blasts that weren’t easily contained. He was forced to expend another two seconds of fuel, clearing the gun, and he kept the blaze on Eric’s corpse rather than turning the fire away. Cremating his friend was better than hurting anyone outside.
A section of the roof fell in. As the plastic burned, it separated. A wide heap of plastic slammed into the concrete. The fiery tongues covered Eric. Another hunk of it lashed down on Cam’s right, splashing his arm with drizzles of hot liquid.
The smoke was more dangerous. It was toxic. Cam was lucky that when the roof collapsed, the haze was taken away by the wind. Suddenly his breath came easier. He barely noticed, sick with adrenaline and grief.
He’d lost his flashlight in the confusion. Now it was dark except for the bubbling fire and several lights beyond the greenhouse. Cam stalked through the mess, punching his weapon against a slick hill of plastic when he couldn’t get past. The night overhead had a gorgeous blue quality he’d never seen anywhere except in the Rockies, but he winced and turned his eyes down.
Then there were arms reaching for him. Four people pulled him out. Bobbi and Allison were among them, a contrast in colors. Cam’s wife was blond, her long ponytail bleached almost white by the sun, whereas Bobbi Goodrich was black, with a tight, dark cap of hair.
“Are you okay?” Bobbi asked, her face gleaming with tears. Both women held knives. Their jacket sleeves were coated with strange dust from cutting at the plastic, and Cam could see that Bobbi had transferred her emotions to saving him. She knew Eric was dead.
He couldn’t meet the urgent heartache in her eyes.
“Poison,” he said roughly. “We’re going to poison the whole fucking colony tonight.”
Allison leaned into his chest and pulled Bobbi after her. Cam embraced both women. Behind them, the greenhouse smoldered. Then another man spoke up. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we have enough insecticide to—”
“We’ll do it with gasoline,” Cam said. “I don’t care. We’ll pour ten gallons into every hole we can find and light ‘em up.”
“Let’s put a team together,” Allison said, moving away from him. She tugged at Bobbi and the other woman nodded, even though she was still crying. Long ago, they had all learned there was never any time to waste, and yet Cam saw the doubt in Allison’s gaze.
We might not have twenty gallons in the entire village, Cam realized, walking into the night with her, but Allison didn’t say it and neither did he.
They were losing the battle for the environment.
Most of the survivors called it Plague Year, restarting the calendar and forgetting everything else in human history. The machine plague killed more than five billion people and left thousands of animal species extinct. Now it was Year Three. In many ways, Earth had become a different planet. The microscopic nanotech disintegrated all warm-blooded life below ten thousand feet, where it self-destructed. What remained of the ecosystem was beyond repair. There were only reptiles, amphibians, and fish left to whittle down the exploding insect populations. Entire forests had been devoured by beetles and ants. Lakes and riverways were forever changed by erosion.
The wars that followed caused another level of damage. The plague left few habitable zones anywhere on Earth, and mammals and birds could only dip into the invisible sea for hours at a time. Without a host, the nanotech was inert. But as soon as anyone crossed below the barrier, the plague got into their lungs or their eyes or the slightest breaks in their skin, where it began to multiply.
The nearest cities and towns beneath the barrier were immediately picked clean by the survivors. After that, there was nowhere to turn except on each other. North America was lucky in that it had the massive Rockies and the smaller range of the Sierras to hold just three nations. Nevertheless, civil war divided the U.S., with Canada and Mexico ultimately siding with the rebels.
On every other continent, the fighting was far more savage and mixed. India, Pakistan, and China battled for the Himalayas. Everyone in Europe fought for the Alps. Russia took Afghanistan — but during the second winter, they lost their struggle against the Arab world. The Russians looked for any escape, offering their veteran armies to both India and China. They planned to reinforce either side in exchange for a sliver of real estate to call their own, but there was one problem. They no longer had enough aircraft or fuel to move their population.
At the same time, the American civil war began to heat up. Scientists everywhere had made great strides in nanotechnology, especially in the consolidated labs in Leadville, Colorado, where they used the plague itself to learn and experiment. Originally designed to attack malignant tissue, the
First their science teams created a new bioweapon. Next they developed a vaccine that would protect people from the plague, but the Leadville government intended to keep this discovery for themselves. They saw an opportunity to control the only way down from the mountains, ensuring loyalty, establishing new states, leaving every enemy and undesirable to succumb to famine and war unless perhaps they agreed to come down as slaves. The prize was too great, after too much hardship.
Three of their top researchers betrayed them, stealing the only samples of the vaccine. These heroes wanted to spread the new technology freely and end the fighting. That proved to be a mistake in several ways. The vaccine became a flashpoint in the American civil war. Worse, as the vaccine spread among the pockets of survivors in California, the inoculated people became a target for a new enemy.
On the other side of the world, the Indians and the Russians had reached an agreement that also benefited the Leadville government. Leadville would help ferry the Russian Army into the Himalayas in exchange for India’s research teams and equipment. Leadville was eager to stay ahead of the Chinese in the sprint for nanotech supremacy. As part of the deal, Leadville agreed to bring the wives and children of Russia’s highest leaders safely into Colorado along with the Russian treasury, deepening the bond between the two nations. But there was a double cross. The Russians smuggled a doomsday bomb among their gold and museum pieces. They murdered their own families for the chance to destroy the world’s only superpower, erasing Leadville from the mountains with a fifty-megaton nuclear strike. U.S. and Canadian forces across North America were blinded by the electromagnetic pulse. Hours later, the Russians flew into California, supplementing their few aircraft with the rest of the planes sent by Leadville, which they’d commandeered.
They captured most of the scattered Americans who carried the vaccine in their blood. Then they spread the immunity among their own pilots and ground troops, not only in California but on the far side of the world. The Russians became the first organized military to own the vaccine. It gave them an insurmountable advantage. They raided below the barrier everywhere, not only restocking from their motherland but also using Arab and U.S. planes,
