The newcomer almost marched through them.
His light stabbed into Cam’s eyes, diamond hard— Then he stopped, panting, sinking to one knee. He clawed at his face, at the bandanna and ski goggles over his mouth and eyes.
“Please water,” he gasped.
They swarmed him, babbling, helping him to his feet, hauling him up toward the fire. Cam got the flashlight, a smooth weighty rod, the metal hot where the newcomer’s hand had been. It felt like magic, like strength. Cam noticed that the man wore a ludicrous pink parka lined with fur and a little fanny pack, like he was some rich old lady out for a stroll. Had he chosen it for its visibility or were the people across the valley short on decent winter gear?
“Water,” he said again, but they’d brought none. Stupid.
Spasms hit the man before they reached the fire and he fought them, moaning, trying to get at his pants. They didn’t understand and he shit himself bloody.
Manny cried out—“Aaah!”—a sharp noise like a bird in a net. Cam met Sawyer’s glinting eyes in the dark. Until the man exhibited symptoms, it had been possible to hope that he really was bringing them doses of a new-generation nano that would serve as a vaccine, protecting their bodies from within, despite his crude armor of goggles and mask. But he was infected.
They knew only what they’d heard from Colorado and what they’d experienced themselves. Sawyer theorized that the nanotech had been a prototype of a medical nature, so obviously made to work inside a body, while others insisted it must be a weapon.
It didn’t matter.
The important thing was that the nanos burned out at high altitude, because of a design error or an intentionally engineered hypobaric fuse.
It didn’t matter.
The microscopic machines were carbon-based and disassembled warm-blooded tissue to make more of themselves.
Like a super virus, they spread both by bodily fluids and through the air. Like spores, they seemed capable of hibernating outside a host anywhere except in thin atmosphere. And this machine plague had multiplied exponentially until most of the planet was barren of mammals and birds.
Inhaled by a human or animal, inert nanos passed into the bloodstream before reawakening and tended to cluster in the extremities. If they gained entry to a body through breaks in the skin, such infections usually remained localized — but only at first. Even the tiniest contamination multiplied and spread and multiplied again. Again and again. The body would heal if it didn’t sustain too much damage, which meant they’d been able to dip into the invisible sea and raid the nearby resort as well as a village of cabins and condos farther down the valley. But if you got too weak, you couldn’t make it back up.
Almost as bad, the transition to safe altitude shocked an already-exhausted body with cramps, nausea, migraines, even hemorrhaging and diarrhea, as hundreds of thousands or millions of dead nanos clogged the bloodstream. Cam had seen one woman drop stone dead of a stroke; three cardiac arrests; an exploded retina; and he had never known anyone to stay below the barrier longer than six hours.
The newcomer must have been beneath 10,000 feet for most of a day, running and climbing. He seemed now almost to lose consciousness, his boots dragging as they carried him.
He had been eating well. He was soft in places that they were only hip bones or ribs.
In the sharp white beam of the flashlight, Cam saw blisters peppered over the man’s neck and hands, oozing blood and worse. A sudden phantom of ash sloughed off into Cam’s face. Maybe he imagined it. Unfortunately their level of medical ability was pathetic. They no longer possessed even basics like disinfectant or aspirin. Cam had full EMT training, a requirement for all ski patrol, and during the slow winter he’d taught everyone interested — but none of them were up to cutting somebody open to stop internal hemorrhaging. If the newcomer was that bad off, his survival would be a roll of the dice.
Cam hoped the man would live long enough to say why he’d come. He deserved at least to fulfill his mission.
Near the fire the others got in the way, crowding around, Price shouting a formal greeting that he’d obviously rehearsed. “All this time we’ve been alone! All this time we’ve waited!” The noisy idiot had been a real estate developer with several rental properties in the area, and if he excelled at anything, it was making presentations.
“Let the man rest,” Cam said, and Price immediately took the newcomer’s elbow and pulled on him.
“Yes,” Price said. “Yes, you can have my bed!”
It made sense, their hut was nearest, but Cam didn’t trust Price not to use the situation to his advantage. To make it political. Manny had clearly come to alert Sawyer and Cam on his own rather than being told to do so. They might still be asleep if the kid hadn’t had to move out of their hut after bickering with his bedmates all winter — and not for the first time, Cam was glad to have a spy in Price’s camp.
He followed everyone to the low door, and Sawyer growled, “Want to crowd in with them?”
“No. That guy’s going to sleep forever.”
Sawyer bobbed his head once and Cam was struck again by his friend’s resemblance to a bullet. Even Manny had more of a beard now that Sawyer had grown obsessive about shaving, nicking his long cheeks with blunt old razors and a knife honed on granite, scraping his prematurely receding hair down to black sandpaper. Cam thought this was wildly fatalistic behavior for someone so intelligent about the ways that nanos got into the body.
He tried to smile. “Let’s go warm up, okay?”
Sawyer stared at him, maybe angry, then glanced left and right to see if anyone else had heard.
* * * *
He didn’t try to catch up with Sawyer in the cold moonscape between the huts. Dumb way to break an ankle.
There was nothing he could say to change things anyway.
* * * *
Sawyer paused at the door, his face turned up, and Cam spotted the pale dot of a satellite cruising across the rash of stars. He looked away.
The walls of their hut were thick patchwork, like a boys’ fort. They’d had only hammers and two heavy-duty Forest Service chain saws to work with. Yet it had withstood the weight of the snow, the force of the wind. The raised cover they’d designed for the hole in the roof functioned well, keeping their fire dry while allowing at least some of the smoke to escape. Cam had regarded their accomplishment with fierce pride for all of one week before claustrophobia eroded that good feeling.
Half a dozen voices protested as he and Sawyer pushed into the reeking gloom. Barely twenty feet by ten, most of the space was occupied by four wide beds: flat wood frames softened with blankets. Crammed into the remaining area were two holes in the ground used for food storage, a rock fire pit, a woodpile, a pee pot, water containers, backpacks, and half-built box traps and other gear — and eight more unwashed people.
Erin was awake and murmured, “I’m freezing,” but Sawyer stamped over to the fire and left her to Cam.
He reveled in the distraction.
They feasted on their own pungent body heat, moving slow to keep the thin, filthy covers airtight, teasing each other into a well-practiced frenzy. Her first. His rough fingers. Her bottom lifted off the hard bed as she rocked her pelvis up, up. Then she drank him, wanting whatever nourishment it was worth. She let him hold her ears and thrust.
They were smarter about pregnancy than most — hands and mouths only. Always only hands and mouths, except for eight times after Sawyer found a partly used box of condoms in a ski locker. They still whispered about those couplings, three heads together, eager, wistful, Erin stretching slick and limber between them.
Yes, sometimes there had been six hands together. A few times. Six hands and nothing more. It was their only escape. Cam’s father wouldn’t have spoken to him for a thousand years if he found out, but his father was dead. The world was dead. Why should anyone care now?