Carving the body was much harder. Their new wealth had to be set aside, portioned out exactingly. Sweet fat and salt.
Jim Price was next on Sawyer’s list, but Cam hoped to avoid a war. No one liked Loomas, whereas Price was undisputed leader of the largest faction on the mountain, even loved by a few. So they were trying to invent a fair, random lottery that they could secretly control when the last of the batteries died and Nancy McSomething cut herself from wrists to elbows.
Then Mrs. Lewelling jumped off of Cam’s cliff. Maybe she thought they wouldn’t be able to reach her.
Something inside Pete Czujko burst on the way back up from a scavenging trip, fighting knee-deep drifts of powder. He bled out over eight long days, watching them, the knowing fear in his eyes gradually dulling.
Timmerman died of pneumonia.
And after a worthless expedition through cabins they’d already picked clean, Ellen Gentry keeled over within seconds of hitting safe altitude. A stroke, they thought. A stroke of luck, Sawyer said, laughing and laughing.
Seven bodies were enough meat to get them through.
* * * *
“What if it’s a trap?” Sawyer walked up behind Cam, glancing at the ragged skyline to the north.
“So you are talking to me.” Cam’s first instinct was to disguise his relief, curious, and he regretted the joke immediately. Lately Sawyer had been hearing double entendres in everything and it was stupid to antagonize him. Stupid to have to apologize. Stupid waste of energy.
Cam turned back to his work, breaking the frozen crust of a snowbank with a telemark ski — a surprisingly functional tool.
Sawyer took another step as if he intended to keep walking. But he was trying to catch Cam’s eye. “This guy could be lying,” he said. “What if the people over there are having themselves a cattle drive?”
Cam regarded the virgin snow beneath the deep, broken skin of dirty ice. It was like a metaphor for something that he was too tired to realize. Yet the snow was not as pure as it appeared, compressed by melt and gravity, and he jabbed the ski down again.
“Think about it.” Sawyer knelt beside him and they shoved loose hunks onto the blanket that Cam was using in place of a wheelbarrow. “We get there too weak to stand. Even if there are only four adults, they bash us all in the head.”
“No.”
“Maybe keep a couple women.”
Cam looked left and right. Broken rocks against the pale sky. Price had delegated six people to help him but they were hauling small blanketloads to the reservoir, a natural pocket in a bed of lava that they’d built up on one side. Much closer, Erin basked on a stretch of sun-warmed granite, having complained of light-headedness.
Cam kept his eyes on her, kept his voice down. “No. No way they’re planning something like that. Too risky. Too much work. Hollywood barely even made it across.”
“But he did.”
“Some of us won’t.”
“Right. Better for you and me if they don’t.” Sawyer was casual, picking up two corners of the blanket and motioning for Cam to do the same. “We’re going whether it’s a trap or not. I just need you to be ready for it.”
“The only reason to send him over is if they really do need help trying to rebuild.”
Sawyer shook his head once.
“If,” Cam said, but the thought was too ugly to articulate.
If they did make it, what sort of future would they create? Murderers and cannibals. Were they worth Hollywood’s sacrifice or better left to die here?
Albert Wilson Sawyer could be as selfish as a rat, violent if he perceived a threat — all of which made him the perfect survivor. Sawyer’s will and intelligence had kept them alive through the harshest conditions. The chance to partner with him had proved extremely fortunate. The loyalty Cam felt for his friend had become reflex, and yet Sawyer’s strength would be a crucial weakness if he was unable to stop striving, stop fighting, creating threats that hadn’t existed until he imagined them.
Cam glanced toward Erin again and beyond her, across the valley. A profound and dangerous sadness had settled over him and he almost told Sawyer how much he regretted what they’d become.
* * * *
The end of the world was buried on page four of the Sacramento Bee. Cam wouldn’t have noticed except that his buddy Matt Hutchinson was a politics junkie. Two years of college had done something to the dude’s brain. Hutch watched shows like Crossfire and 60 Minutes and always had a new outrage to talk about, a web site he’d discovered, a magazine article he’d folded into his pocket and insisted on sharing. Peculiar behavior for a ski bum. There were many reasons people moved to the Bear Summit area, but a strong connection with the machinations of the twenty-first century wasn’t one of them.
The place was nowhere. In winter the permanent population barely topped four hundred, another thousand or more vacationers fluctuating through each week, mostly Saturday — Sunday. Come summer that resident population dropped to four dozen. The nightlife consisted of a pizza place with no liquor license, one bar with one pool table, and a corner room of the only gas station with six arcade games from 1997. The cable went out regularly, sometimes the electricity and phones, too, and at least once each winter the roads closed.
Cam humored Hutch because watching his friend get worked up was always a good time. The guy actually talked back at the yammerheads on his shows. Cam preferred sports. Every day, everywhere, everybody seemed to be bombing and raping each other and poisoning the water and ripping up forests in city-sized hunks. It was depressing.
He figured he was in for more of the same when Hutch whacked him with a rolled copy of the Bee in the cluttered ski patrol HQ and said, “Have you heard about this shit?”
“Oh yeah, Hutch, the mind boggles.”
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
So he skimmed most of the first few paragraphs while he buckled his boots, the paper spread on the bench beside him. Four fatalities in Emeryville and Berkeley, four others sick, possibly more; whatever was killing them had first been misdiagnosed as a voracious bacterial infection— But then Bobby Jaeger planted his butt right smack on top of the paper to futz with his own boots, and Cam punched him and they both laughed. Then Bobby took off before Hutch could corner him too.
Cam also stood up. He didn’t like to be late for First Walk, as they called it at this resort. Once all of the poles and markers in his section had checked out, he was free to sneak in a run or two before the chairlifts opened to the public. The mountain was an intriguing combination of wide-open views and secret thickets and gullies, and sometimes the new sun was so bright, the quiet so crisp, that he felt like a kid again.
Cameron Najarro wasn’t carrying any crosses to speak of. Money was a minor issue and he hadn’t been laid in eight months and Mom always made him feel crappy for living so far away when they talked on the phone, but like all true athletes, he found it good to lose himself. No experience surpassed that of the animal mind, of being muscle and only muscle. Snaking through trees in fresh powder, charging down a mogul field— he cherished speed and balance and mental clarity.
He was twenty-three years old.
“Hutch, dude, sometimes you’re such a buzz-kill,” he said as they clumped down a narrow hallway to the ski racks.
“So what do you think?”
“I think you’re totally morbid, man. It’s a beautiful morning, let’s enjoy it before the storm hits and we’re stuck digging out the kiddie slopes.” The snow had been superb all through March, and the forecast was two more feet starting that afternoon.