“They don’t have forests to burn either,” Sawyer announced with mean satisfaction, but Cam felt a spike of disappointment, misplaced fear. It was as if the dark of the valley lunged up like a wave and smothered those people.
After the last of their batteries had died, after they’d lost the calm, redundant, twenty-four-hour military broadcasts out of Colorado and the underground shelters near Los Angeles, there had been two suicides. Almost 10 percent of their population. Both women, of which there were only six left.
Cam had no idea how many people survived across the valley or how bad winter had hit them — nothing except that they were there. Cam’s group had never possessed binoculars or a real radio, just a glossy red CD boom box. He’d tried faking Morse code with a pocket mirror and reflected sunlight, thinking they could teach each other, but even if communication had been possible there was nothing the other survivors could do for them except say hello. Nothing except keep them sane.
Isolation cinched tighter around their hearts every hour, and they had become as much of a threat to themselves as their environment was, contorted by despair, strain, and mistrust. Ferocious hunger and guilt.
Maybe they were all poisoned by the same thought. Sawyer said, “I wonder what they’ve been eating.”
* * * *
Jorgensen was easy. That gimp leg made him totally useless. He’d crashed down a stairwell while they were scavenging insulation and more nails from the ski resort lodge, clumsy with exhaustion. They’d been rushing nonstop for days because the first snow came early. They could have just left him there but chose to be heroes, dropping most of what they’d collected and hauling him back instead. Cam didn’t remember even discussing it, which was strange and awful and hilarious, considering what they did to him six weeks later.
But they needed to be heroes.
Every person on this mountain had left family and friends behind in the first mad scramble to get above the invisible sea of nanotech.
* * * *
The flashlight vanished into thatches of whitebark pine, too small to be considered forest, then soon reemerged. Plant life thinned dramatically well below their peak, reduced in clearly visible bands from trees to brush to hardy little flowering weeds. Not enough air, water, or soil. The few pines and firs scattered above the timberline were nearly indistinguishable, all of them bent, pretzeled, abused by wind and snow.
The jouncing beam of light disappeared again behind a rise in the land. A minute passed. Five. Cam had hiked through there repeatedly and tried to picture it in his head. No sheer drainages, no slides, nothing to delay the man.
Sawyer said, “He’s slowing down.”
“Come on.” Cam moved into the night with his friend, and Jim Price muttered something. A few people laughed. Sawyer stopped, looked back. But Cam slapped at Sawyer’s shoulder and Manny had left the fire to tag along, and that seemed enough to get Sawyer walking again.
The three of them ventured down a wide, shallow ravine that formed a natural funnel to their peak and was the easiest access through a series of granite ledges and crumbling ridge-lines of old basaltic lava. Picking confidently through the rocks and packed earth, Cam felt as if he’d physically evolved. Sweeping his eyes left and right to make the most of his peripheral vision, he smashed his toes only once.
A chipmunk piped and they all froze, listening. The rare sound wasn’t repeated.
The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang.
They found seats at the base of a ragged pinnacle of lava they thought they’d identified on their best topo map, marked at 10,200 feet. Normal fluctuations in atmospheric pressure meant the barrier shifted daily, hourly, and it was only smart to minimize their exposure.
Cam said, “Maybe he does have some way to stop it.”
“You don’t make nano-keys out of dirt.” Sawyer rarely spoke of who he had been, who and what he’d lost, but he’d argued like an engineer when they were building their huts, pointing out drainage and foundation problems. “Even if there was someone over there who knew what they were doing, I seriously doubt they have any real equipment.”
“Maybe they brought it up in the beginning.”
“If he had a defensive nano that worked like antibodies in individual people, he would’ve stopped for the night like you said. And the only other option is to go on offense, build a hunter-killer that’d go out in the world and eat all of the little fuckers that have been eating us.”
Cam turned from the dark slope downhill to look at him.
Sawyer was staring at the ground instead of searching below. He said, “This crazy son of a bitch wouldn’t have to carry a weapon like that over here, he’d just release it.”
Manny stood up. “There he is.”
A ray of light burst over round boulders and skeletal brush no more than two hundred yards away.
“Heyyy!” Manny screamed. “Heyyyyyy!”
The grasshoppers quit for one instant, then started up again in full chorus. Ree ree ree ree. The mindless noise seemed to synchronize with Cam’s heartbeat and interrupted his thoughts. The bugs were like a sea of their own, rising higher every day, triumphant, unstoppable.
Manny danced, all his weight on his good foot. “Hey! Hey!” The kid windmilled his arms as if to break apart the darkness.
“Here, over here!” Cam hadn’t intended to start yelling himself, but his breath went out of him in a rush. Blinking back tears made his eyes sting and he half choked as he whirled on Sawyer. “You said SCUBA gear might protect somebody.”
“Right.” The long shadow of Sawyer’s face split with a grin. “There’s lots of dive shops on mountains.”
“I just meant…” Cam turned downslope again to hide his face as one fat drop squeezed free, streaking his skin with cold before sifting into his beard. “Maybe they have bottled air like medical supplies, that could work.”
“Right. Except for your eyes. Open wounds. Bug bites.”
Cam involuntarily touched the still-healing burn blisters on his nose. His body itched with a hundred minor scratches, especially his hands.
Every cut, every breath, was a doorway.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sawyer said. “Even if he was driving a limousine up here with enough air for everyone, that wouldn’t solve anything.”
* * * *
Of the few known facts, it was certain that the machine plague first got loose in northern California — San Jose, Cal Berkeley, someone’s garage — and there hadn’t been time for much warning. Otherwise their desolate peak might have been very, very crowded.
Last they’d heard, Colorado was dealing with 14 million refugees, food riots, and a rogue element of Air Force recruits carrying automatic weapons.
Colorado should pull through. The Rocky Mountains offered hundreds of square miles at safe altitude, a few towns, ranches, ski villages, National Park structures. Several areas still had power jury-rigged from hydroelectric plants, and just below the barrier were dozens of towns and even small cities for easy scavenging. Similar high country like the Alps and Andes would keep the human race alive.
A future existed. Cam just hadn’t believed he would be part of it. Unless their group had incredible luck hunting throughout the summer and fall, he and Sawyer had calculated that the only way they’d survive another winter would be to dismantle the other hut for fuel and kill and freeze most of the others immediately after the first snow.
2
Cam heard the newcomer breathing about the same time that his crunching footsteps reached them. The man sounded like a tortured wolf. They huddled together like children. Not even Manny shouted, and Cam realized that the grasshoppers had fallen silent again.