A joke? Cam glanced up, but she’d turned to D.J. now, directing her sarcasm at him. Then Ruth and D.J. both looked over their shoulders, hearing footsteps that Cam’s bad ear perceived a moment later.
Maureen moved softly across the road behind them at a funny, sidestepping angle, avoiding the two soldiers nearby.
“He’s awake,” Maureen said.
23
Ruth was uncomfortable with her sense of fate and its grip on her increased as they walked toward the cabin. Mostly this odd mood was rising anticipation, a conflict of relief and worry that at last it was time. But there was something more. She identified with Cam — so cursed, so lucky — in ways she was still only beginning to realize.
Maybe she would have felt this same quiet empathy for anyone in his place, but it was an extensive chain of events that had brought them together. Her step-father would have called it providence. Too much circumstance, too many choices and accidents outside their individual lives.
“You’re going to have to take this slow,” Cam told D.J., and Ruth immediately said, “That’s not a problem, whatever you want.”
“Just follow my lead.”
And yet, she thought, the prime factor in her being here now, this evening, was really only the dumb force of nature. Until the plague year humankind had forgotten, in their cities, in their comfort, the godlike hand of the seasons.
It was winter that had dictated this encounter.
Only spring thaw had allowed Cam and Sawyer to cross the valley, and only spring thaw had allowed the shuttle to touch down. Thaw had allowed the Russo-Muslim and Chinese-Indian wars to resume on the other side of the planet.
Cam limped, favoring his right leg. At the cabin’s front steps he stopped and turned, blocking their way, not even looking at D.J. yet sticking an arm out to corral him as D.J. tried to go around. “Wait,” Cam said. He was watching Hernandez and the two medics hurry over from the cargo plane, followed by Dr. Anderson and all four children and several more soldiers.
D.J. took offense. “We don’t have to—”
“I said wait.” Cam’s burned face lacked expression, and his tone was level, but his shoulders canted forward and D.J. shut up and moved back.
Both of their Marine guards closed in, the nearest bumping Todd in his hurry. She saw Cam’s gaze flick between the soldiers once, twice. Then he dropped his arm from D.J.’s path.
The grasshoppers filled the quiet, ree ree ree ree ree, as busy and insistent as her thoughts.
Lord knew he was a mystery, his inconsistencies. He had been firm with Hernandez, overriding the major’s initial request to see Sawyer, and he had been equally tough with D.J., and clearly he was dangerous. Yet he was gentle with her. Because she had been so polite or merely because she was female?
It would be impossible, she supposed, for him not to have become horrendously self-conscious.
D.J. acted like he couldn’t see past the scarring but Cam was smart enough, aware enough, to concern Ruth. He had guessed after just thirty minutes that something was off between them and Leadville. How? Could he be that sensitive to tensions?
He was young, Todd’s age, but he had kept himself alive where so many others had died, and she imagined that was an education of a kind that few could match.
Plague Year. In this place, the name was fitting, and Ruth felt that cold sense of distance in herself again. She had been lucky. It was a strange thought after so much hardship and death, but she had been very lucky all this time.
“Major,” Cam said, as Hernandez arrived with his small crowd. “We can’t take all these people inside.”
Hernandez was affable. “The kids aren’t going, hermano.”
He’d used that word before. What did it mean, sir or some equivalent of gentleman? Ruth knew amigo, that was friend, but she believed it would be more like Hernandez to treat Cam formally even as he tried to manipulate him.
Hernandez had done the same with her.
Cam shook his head once, an efficient no. “Two or three people besides me, that’s it. That has to be it. And the camera and stuff stay out here.”
One soldier had brought recording equipment, a handheld family minicam, a larger video camera, a tripod, a batch of wireless clip microphones and extra tapes and batteries.
Hernandez studied Cam briefly. Then he shook his head, too. “I’m afraid I’m on orders,” he said.
They compromised. Hernandez was adamant that the three scientists go in, but reduced the support staff to himself and the audio/video gear to one camera.
Ruth followed Cam into the shadows of the front room, the living room, and crossed through with only an impression of neatness. Then he held out his hand again and ducked into an adjacent bedroom alone.
Beneath the not-unpleasant reek of woodsmoke, she smelled old sweat and grime. Hernandez raised his minicam and thumbed the record button with a small chime, apparently as a test. He lowered it five seconds later. D.J. glanced around with one eyebrow up and Todd rocked on his heels, sort of pacing without really moving.
Much like Ruth’s quarters at Timberline, this cabin seemed empty of furniture. No couch, no chairs, all used for firewood. A pair of sleeping bags lay folded on the hardwood floor near the fireplace, no doubt for two of the children, and on some shelving built into the wall was the ham radio.
The sight of it filled her with that quiet, uneven sorrow again. Gustavo might have heard these people directly if he had only monitored amateur frequencies in the first week and a half of Cam’s attempts to make contact. Evidently Gustavo’s voice had filled this room more than once. But in mid-April, Gus had been occupied with military transmissions and preparing for their landing — and then the ISS had been empty.
What if they had spoken? She wouldn’t be here, maybe none of them, not even the Special Forces unit substituted into their escort. The council would already have Sawyer and his equipment.
It could still happen. James would cover for them, telling Kendricks that she was busy if the senator asked, dampening any rumors in Timberline; but the listening devices throughout the labs would inevitably catch word of who was missing, and Ruth had to assume the tapes were scanned daily.
New orders could come at any moment, alerting Hernandez to the traitors around him.
Or there might be another plane flying out right now.
“Okay,” Cam said, turning Ruth’s head. He gestured with one scabby claw. “He’s doing okay.”
* * * *
Albert Sawyer was a slumping wax candle of a man, shrunken and malformed. He had sat up, or had asked to be propped up, against the wall alongside his bed.
He must have wanted to appear as robust as possible, but repeated cerebral events had robbed Sawyer of muscle control down most of his right side — drooping eye, slack cheek, head tipped over his fallen shoulder. He had also lost too much weight, so that what flesh he’d kept was taut and hollow against his frame, and whereas Cam’s brown face looked abraded or burned, Sawyer’s whiter skin had turned into a blood purple hide, clotted and pebbled. His long bullet head grew hair only in wisps.
Cam and Maureen had warned them, but Ruth caught her breath and Todd froze in the door, bumping Hernandez with his elbow as he involuntarily reached for his nose.
She saw their reaction mirrored in the living half of Sawyer’s face. His left eye widened, bright with emotion.
“Look at these pretty fucks,” Cam said, too loud, in a brash voice she hadn’t heard before. Sawyer’s gaze rolled furiously and Cam spoke again, drawing that one baleful eye to himself.