Ruth shook her head and smiled. The emotion in her was too complex to articulate, but that girl was hope. That girl was a future. Given the chance, mankind would rebound from anything. Human beings were too adaptable.
The soldiers blocked her from the six Californians as Hernandez introduced himself, so Ruth edged her good shoulder in between two Special Forces. Five of the six, two women, two men and the boy, were haggard and dirty and therefore completely normal. It was the last man who froze her attention.
Piebald blister rash peppered his face and neck, distorting his black beard, old scars intermingled with larger, healing patches and hemorrhagic bruising. His dark eyes showed his suffering, and Ruth believed she could see his guilt. This was someone who had helped decimate an entire planet, accident or not. Atonement was beyond him. He had paid horribly, and strived now to do more, and he would always be lost inside his pain — and yet the feeling in Ruth was not hatred or even base revulsion. It was awe. It was respect.
“Mr. Sawyer,” she said, extending her hand.
His fingers were rough and nubby but his smile was a fragile thing. “No,” he said. “My name is Cam.”
22
“I’m Ruth,” the lady told him, holding on to his hand for another moment. Whether she was proving something to him or to herself, Cam appreciated the effort.
He knew he was a monster and his hands were the worst. His right pinky had been eaten down to the bone at the first joint, and ruffles of scar tissue prevented him from bending that finger more than a little. Nerve damage had robbed him of sensation in his ring finger as well, leaving his grip uneven.
“You came across with him,” Ruth said, softly, carefully, but her intelligent brown gaze was unwavering.
One of the other civilians got loud, a dark guy with a dimpled block chin. The man’s eyebrows rose in a display of impatience. “Where is Mr. Sawyer? Is he all right?”
“He’s sleeping,” Cam said. “At least he was.”
“Sleeping!”
The officer, Hernandez, was more tactful. He said, “We need to see him, hermano.” Brother.
Cam felt a smile cross his lips again. Those three rolling syllables evoked so much that he had lost. “Let’s wait a couple hours, okay? He’s better when he’s rested.”
Hernandez glanced at the sun and then at the cabin.
“Really,” Cam said. “He’s not having a better day.”
“All right.” Hernandez turned to one of the men in camouflage. “Captain, why don’t we make these folks a solid meal and see if there’s any medical attention we can provide.”
* * * *
Hollywood’s name was Eddie Kokubo. Edward. But that was the only thing he’d lied about. This island could have sustained them all easily and the people here had been eager to help, eager for new faces, eager to rebuild any semblance of a community.
Cam had regained consciousness inside their home, in brilliant yellow lanternlight and the wretched noise of a woman’s sobbing, crushed somewhere beneath his own agony. There was space in his body only for a flicker of understanding— and the confused, recurrent terror that they would cook him.
He drifted in that place for days, surfacing irregularly but all too willing to retreat from himself.
Eighty-one hours after reaching elevation, he woke as they were changing his bandages, alone in a real bed. Dr. Anderson was so much like he’d pictured from Hollywood’s descriptions that he forgot they’d never met. Mid-forties, graying, Anderson wasn’t quite overweight, but his oval cheeks and stubby fingers gave him a look of contentment, which was reinforced by his slow way of moving. His wife, Maureen, was less gentle, a redhead with creases on her forehead and alongside her pointed nose.
“Doctor A,” Cam said.
Maureen jerked back at his croaking. Anderson merely paused and then looked up from Cam’s left foot. “You’re awake,” he answered, simple encouragement.
It went like that for another two weeks, Anderson babying him with calm pronouncements and broth, fighting the onset of fever with judicious amounts of aspirin and irreplaceable one-use chemical cold packs. Nearly half a square yard of Cam’s skin had been turned into open, oozing wounds, and Anderson kept him isolated for fear of infection.
They also wanted to see if he and Sawyer told the same story. They questioned him a bit at a time. Anderson was mostly accepting but Maureen probed for inconsistencies, her green eyes like jade, and his condition proved an excellent excuse to avoid answering too quickly. He would look away or take a deep breath, not needing to fake grief and exhaustion, thinking as best he could until he was convinced he had his half-truths straight.
He and Sawyer were the only ones talking.
Hollywood had bled out within an hour — and laid beside him now were two additional graves. Jocelyn Colvard and Alex Atkins had also crawled up that night, too long after Cam and Sawyer dragged Hollywood to the barrier. A stroke killed Jocelyn instantly but Atkins hung on for almost seven days, groaning, coughing, a restless coma that gave way to rasping death.
Cam would never know how Jim Price had fallen. Life wasn’t like TV, where hero and villain were inevitably, neatly brought together for a stylish mano-a-mano duel. It wasn’t even possible in this situation to determine which of them was the hero.
Price must have gotten stuck too far east up the valley. Driving out of Woodcreek had been the wrong choice after all, and Price and the rest had died for that decision.
Sawyer, as always, had been right even in the final extreme. The few people on this mountain had listened to the shoot-out in the valley and assumed there were good guys and bad — and by carrying Hollywood with them, Cam and Sawyer had cloaked themselves in the illusion of his friendship and his trust.
They’d fought, they said, because Price planned on making himself king. Price and his supporters had raided a gun shop in Woodcreek, and they stood up to him despite being outnumbered, and their friends died for it. Erin. Manny. Bacchetti.
Maureen softened as he described Hollywood’s days with them. “So Eddie finally got someone to call him that,” she said, lowering her eyes to the floor, and she traded stories of her own to help Cam through his healing.
In the next room Sawyer wept and Sawyer screamed, waking Cam, a constant disturbance, but Cam’s sympathy was for himself and for the dead and for these good, generous people.
Sawyer deserved to suffer.
Eddie Kokubo had invented greater reasons for fighting across the invisible sea, but Maureen believed that his first and most powerful motivation had been heartbreak. Eddie just hadn’t fit in here. The four adults were married couples, the youngest of them thirty-three, and the oldest of the children was only eleven. There had been another man but during the first spring he had finally succumbed to liver damage, and none of the other people who’d staggered up onto this mountain at the outset of the plague had lasted more than a week, devastated by internal injuries.
From the beginning, eighteen-year-old Eddie was never purposely excluded — except when the kids were caught up in games that were too silly for him; except when the adults did their real planning; except each night when everyone went to bed.
They were not completely alone. They saw smoke from cookfires on a bump to the northeast, and watched Cam’s group to the south through binoculars.
Cam had fretted at that, but didn’t ask. Did you see us butchering each other? When he got outside he peered southward himself. His favorite cliff was visible, along with several crests and ridgelines, yet the majority of that small peak canted west and south away from this mountain. He detected no hint of the stay-behinds, no smoke, no motion, but they would be saving fuel for the winter and in any case he spared few glances for his old home after being sure that even more of his lies were safe. The valley between hurt him too deeply.