Cam shut his burning hand into a fist. “I’ll walk point with you, watch the compass while you keep an eye on the map.”
“Right.” Sawyer stood up and Cam rose beside him.
Manny also broke into motion again, frantically squeezing his foot and kneading his ankle.
Erin said, softly, “Can’t we just sit for five minutes?”
Cam bent and took her arm.
* * * *
She went inside herself. Cam wasn’t sure how much time had passed since they’d worked down from the ridge — fifteen minutes, maybe; the sun was no higher than midmorning — but already Erin had bumped into him twice when he slowed to read the compass. She was tapping some reserve of energy.
Cam needed that second wind himself. They’d tromped through a hundred yards of wilting stalks before he remembered it was spring. This field of Mule’s Ear looked as if autumn had come. The yellow flowers, usually the size of a silver dollar, were just incomplete nubs — and the long, fleshy leaves that gave the plant its name had browned. Many were dry enough to crackle beneath his boots despite the storm runoff that made this meadow an uneven carpet of muck and puddles.
He’d seen no bees or butterflies this year, and wondered if the ants and reptiles had devoured every hive and slow-moving caterpillar. He wasn’t sure that a lack of pollinating bugs would doom these plants. Maybe a fungus was also to blame, or mites, or aphids…
Cam had nearly grasped the tremendous interlocking gestalt of it when mosquitoes gathered at the bottom edge of his goggles, a sudden fog probing for entry.
He slapped the spindly black cluster and twisted his mask. “Christ—”
Sawyer jumped and almost fell, turning to look back at him. Thirty small shadows clung to Sawyer’s face, his fabric mask stained with a wet comma over his mouth.
“What?” Sawyer said, and Cam reached out. Sawyer blocked his arm, the map flagging out from his hand in stiff paper zags, but none of these movements dislodged the bugs.
The bloodsuckers themselves were a minor threat, no more than an irritation. It was the bites that could kill. Each puncture might also drive nanos into their skin.
Cam mashed his gloves against his chin and forehead and turned to Erin. Her hood bristled with thin bodies like hair. Behind her, Bacchetti was already rubbing busily at himself. Manny lifted both hands before his eyes in disbelief.
“Oh shit,” Sawyer said.
“Run.” It was all Cam could think of. But they stood there for another instant, water chuckling somewhere among the dying plants. He bent to wipe his thighs and saw that inky living hair attached to his boots as well.
He stared, as Manny had.
The mosquitoes’ egg cycle must have been broken long ago. They lived no more than a few weeks, and the females needed blood to become fertile. Could they have adapted in such a short time to feed on soft-skinned frogs and salamanders? That seemed impossible. This entire species should have been wiped out except for some remainder of the breeds whose eggs lay dormant in mud until wetted by flooding.
Spring runoff. Christ. And Hollywood had probably suffered enough bites to fertilize five hundred females, each capable of birthing a thousand more—
Cam killed twenty with his hand and it meant nothing. He straightened up into a haze of bodies, squinting against their high, brittle whine. “Run.” He pushed Erin and she stumbled, crunching through two yards of Mule’s Ear. “Run!”
Manny bounded away, milling his arms, and they all broke after him. The mosquitoes were black snow.
Cam screamed when the blue jacket ahead of him disappeared, but then he saw another figure and changed course. He fell. He jumped up and Manny staggered into him, coming sideways across the slope. Cam began to shove at him, but Manny resisted. They went in different directions and Cam ran another forty yards before he realized that Bacchetti, to his left, was also moving laterally across the floodplain. West, into the wind.
Maybe it would be enough to push off the bugs.
He saw flashes of green and red disappear over a low rise, Sawyer and Erin. They might have yelled for him. He scrabbled after Manny to the top of the embankment.
They thrashed into the brush and lowest branches, shielding their goggles and masks with their forearms. These pines were different than any Cam had seen for twelve months, with thin needles and fragile orange soft cones that showered pollen over him. Each impact squashed mosquitoes by the dozens and chased away hundreds more.
He saw Bacchetti’s blue jacket and then spotted Erin ahead, a red figure working toward the sparsely wooded face of a hill. The wind would be stronger there.
Adrenaline was a poor substitute for real stamina. Cam made it to the slope, but the incline knocked his feet out from under him. He began to crawl. Then Manny helped him stand again and they struggled up.
At the crest, Erin lay on her side, heaving for air. Sawyer was still standing. There was nothing beyond them except more forest and rock bumps. Cam saw himself as a distorted blob in Sawyer’s mirrored lens when Sawyer stepped toward him, patting at his face and chest, killing the few bugs that still clung to him. Bacchetti was more clumsy, his efforts like punches.
“We have to keep moving,” Sawyer told them.
“The ridges,” Manny said, panting. “Stay on the ridges.”
“Right. If we can. Definitely keep away from water.”
“You think we’re near the road?”
Sawyer shook his head, untangling the torn map. He crouched and pinned the folds to the ground with his arms.
“We must be close,” Manny insisted.
But all the distance they’d hiked eastward again had been lost. They might even have run farther west than they’d been before. At least they had also fought a good ways downhill, north. The lodgepole pines and abundance of undergrowth were proof that they’d reached a lower altitude, more vivid to Cam than numbers on a map—6,600 feet. That was the benchmark nearest to the point where Sawyer’s tracing finger stopped.
“Maybe here,” Sawyer said.
The new sound on the wind didn’t register with Cam at first. They would need to head northwest to avoid the floodplain and the worst of the mosquitoes, but Highway 14 wasn’t more than a mile off. They could find a car.
A car. Cam turned his head. “Is that—”
The horn cried and cried again, a mockery of the coyotes who had once sung here. Then the howling became bleats.
“That’s Morse,” Manny said. “Ess oh ess.”
Three short, three long, three short. The pattern was obvious once the kid had pointed it out.
“Right.” Sawyer laughed and rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what the hell Price thinks we’re going to do for him. Look.” He slid his finger two and a half miles west, upwind. “Somehow they got onto this logging road.”
Cam said, “But it goes through.”
“Unless it’s blocked. Or they crashed.” Sawyer teetered noticeably when he rose to his feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We can’t help them.”
11
There were surprisingly few bones in the forest, mostly just birds like elaborate little carvings. Their best theory was that every creature had tried to hide away. Squirrels and rabbits and fox had gone underground, while deer and coyotes disappeared into thickets. Birds had tucked themselves into brush and treetops only to be blown free later by the wind.
Humans had experienced that same burrowing impulse.
Each of the first six cars they came upon was a mass coffin, the stick shapes in their matted, stained clothing invariably bunched together against the doors or in the floorwells. The smell would have been worse except that during the first spring, bugs had slipped in through vents and doorjambs, stripping the rotted flesh and often the upholstery as well.