Cam gathered with the others on the ridge where they’d lit their signal fire for Hollywood. Faulk, who was staying, had agreed to burn two armloads later in the day. Much later. Sunrise remained a great yellow promise beyond the ranges to the east, and in the frost-hard twilight even whispers sounded sharp and loud. It was April 14th, Year One. Plague Year. The broadcasts out of Colorado had served as a reliable calendar for Hollywood’s group, and he said the radio had just begun to talk about the future that way — and the idea caught on here immediately, for obvious reasons, Cam thought. A new start.
“Throw a bed frame over the pile,” said Doug Silverstein. “That should keep it dry long enough to really get it roaring.”
Faulk nodded. “They’ll know you’re coming.”
To the west, gray clouds emerged from the lingering night and absorbed the familiar shapes of the nearest mountains, earth and sky bound together by charcoal sheets of rain. The damp, erratic wind was fragrant with oxygen.
Sawyer’s voice whipped over them—“M’on!”—and most of their heads turned. He pumped his balled fist up and down and Cam remembered, strangely, making the same gesture to truckers from the backseat of his dad’s car when he was a kid, baseball on the radio, horsing around with his brothers in the tightly packed space. He smiled. They had shrieked like idiot hyenas whenever a trucker hit his horn for them.
Erin was smiling, too, the only other face not tight and brooding. Cam shook himself. He knew her weird cat’s smirk only meant she was thinking, but he didn’t want anyone to see the two of them standing there grinning. Jesus. He waved back at Sawyer in a slow arc meant to convey patience.
Wait. This is important.
The center of their gathering was a knot of handshakes and embraces, private words. It was the greatest display of emotion Cam had ever seen on this high, barren island, and he wished he was more a part of it. He wished so many things.
It didn’t matter that they’d already enacted this same ritual two days ago, when the skies clouded up and spit hard for half an hour, or that everything had been decided for more than two weeks now. They all wanted to touch the few who were staying — Faulk, Sue, Al, and Amy Wong. Amy’s three-monthold boy, Summer, was passed among a dozen people who cooed and murmured to him and scratched at the puffy down jacket that served as his swaddling clothes.
Cam hadn’t gotten a chance to hold him and hadn’t fought for it, either. Summer gave him the willies. Babies should cry. Summer only stared, oblivious even to this morning’s commotion. Cam suspected brain damage. Their diet had been dangerously short on protein, and Amy had gone beneath the barrier twice before she knew she was pregnant. The nanos might have affected that part of her body or attacked the baby directly, or both.
Below, Sawyer moved past the line of rock markers and Cam’s thoughts vanished in a jolt. It shouldn’t have been frightening, that dark silhouette against the rough slope of grays and browns, but they had survived long enough to develop a new set of instincts. Nothing belonged down there. Nothing human.
Watching him, Cam hesitated, then turned suddenly and shouldered in toward the heart of the crowd. He needed to say something. Anything. He was pleased when Erin grabbed his hand and came along.
It felt as much as ten degrees warmer inside the gathering, shielded from the wind. Their jackets whistled against the others’ GORE-TEX skins, a sound that Cam associated with busy weekends at the resort. His past had never seemed closer.
Amy and Lorraine were crying softly, heads together, holding Summer between them; but Sue studied Cam’s approach with dry, steady eyes, both hands on her pregnant belly. He couldn’t read her expression. No one else had noticed him yet. Price was clapping people on the shoulder like a football coach, out of words for once, and both Hollywood and Doug Silverstein fidgeted with bundles of yellow twine that they’d cut into lengths of roughly two feet.
“We really appreciate this,” Faulk said, for the hundredth time, and Hollywood nodded and shrugged.
Their plan was to tie markers on trees near berry patches and snake pits and anything else of use down to 7,000 feet or more, to decrease the time that Faulk and Al Pendergraff would spend below the barrier on future scavenging trips.
“Really,” Faulk repeated, and Cam cleared his throat. They all turned. Hollywood looked relieved but the others just stared at him with the same careful intensity as Sue.
Beside Cam, Erin ducked her head.
He put his hand out and Faulk took it immediately. And that was all. He and Pendergraff repeated the handshake and Amy smiled through her tears, and Sue even kissed his cheek as he bent to hug her around her big belly. After everything they’d been through, it came down to a civilized exchange of gestures.
* * * *
He never saw any of them alive again.
* * * *
Seventeen days hadn’t been enough for Hollywood. The boy still hunched slightly over his right side and couldn’t seem to move his left leg forward all the way, resulting in a swaying waddle even worse than Manny’s lopsided gait. Manny had long since grown accustomed to his missing toes and walked or ran with an easy skipping motion.
Leading everyone down from the peak, the two of them looked like a drunk penguin alongside a windup toy with a bad spring. They were the youngest members of the group, at nineteen and fifteen, and had a certain eagerness in common.
Cam wanted to believe that was a good thing.
Hollywood admitted he still felt some pain. If it wasn’t already mid-April, they might have let this rainstorm pass and given him more time…except California’s short wet season was ending. They couldn’t risk it. They’d all thought this winter was worse than normal, though Sawyer just laughed at Cam’s idea that the planet was cooling because all the cities and factories and everything were shut down. In fact, now that they knew it was still early in the year, the truth was this winter had been comparatively mild. This might be the last rain.
Cam had encouraged Hollywood to exercise while he was still bedridden, leg lifts, simple arm motions. It helped flush the system of dead nanos. That Hollywood hadn’t known this, that he’d made the trek in good weather, was evidence that the people across the valley had rarely if ever scavenged below the barrier. They hadn’t needed to. They were rich. So Sawyer’s suspicion of a “cattle drive” must be groundless.
It must be.
The tension in Price’s hut had been as thick as the smoke stench and body odor, and surely didn’t help Hollywood’s recovery, yet Cam never suggested moving him upslope. Price’s group needed goading. He’d figured that if his regular visits made them uncomfortable, so much the better. He came by every day to talk about landmarks in the valley and the easier, bigger life on the other side.
After just six days Hollywood insisted on walking again, gingerly, bent over like an old man and holding his arm close the way that a bird would tuck in a broken wing. The boy had clearly been rushing himself; rest was their only treatment for internal wounds; Cam should have said something but didn’t have the heart to keep him tied down. More than that, he wanted everyone to witness Hollywood’s tenacity.
* * * *
They fed him weeds and lichen and greasy, stringy scrub-jay, sweet crunchy grasshoppers. They made a great present of the last can of fruit cocktail.
If he suspected, he said nothing.
* * * *
Sawyer had climbed back to the piles of rock at 10,000 feet and stood gazing up at them, his face lost behind his hood and mirrored ski goggles and a black racing mask.
“We should stay together,” Hollywood said. “It’s safer,” and Cam felt someone bull past him to the front of the group.