The ski patrol had not been much of an elite, with never more at stake than a broken leg or some kid separated from his parents. These men were of an entirely different class. Highly trained, highly motivated, with everything in the world on the line — it was a privilege to be associated with them and a disgrace to have wasted their time.
Hernandez started toward the plane and Cam took one step after him, leaving Sawyer. Hernandez turned back.
Cam said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Hernandez studied his face again, quickly, then gave a nod. “Shout out anytime, hermano. We need to keep him happy.”
“Lo que usted diga,” Cam said. Whatever you say.
He wanted so much to be one of them.
26
Ruth realized she had been right not to trust Cam with the secret of the conspiracy. He was too close to Hernandez. Too bad. She liked him. He tried so hard. But the strength of his commitment was its own liability.
Crammed into the back of the jeep with D.J., writing new code and arguing over every line of it, Ruth managed to ignore her anxiety until the bulldozer began crashing around. Lord knew she had always been able to hide in her work — and using the keyboard and ball mouse with one glove-thickened hand was a real chore, enough to keep her occupied.
“I can’t see when you do that,” D.J. said, reaching across her to steady the laptop. Ruth bumped his arm, grabbing at her belt and changing frequencies.
She needed to hear what Hernandez was saying.
It was unfair to doubt Cam for a choice he hadn’t made, of course. He didn’t know that two sides existed, and it was only natural for him to respond to the resources and the sense of control Hernandez had brought into his life.
He was a good man but profoundly wounded — and so he might disbelieve everything she’d say about the atrocities of the Leadville government. The quickest way for him to be done with this mess was to fly back to Colorado. He would be a champion. He could in some way consider himself whole again. Ruth wasn’t sure he would be able to choose a path that led anywhere else, a path that meant more running, more effort, as they diverted north into Canada and reorganized a working lab and tried to gather enough allies to hold off the inevitable assaults as Leadville pursued them. It was too much to expect.
Nevertheless, tension and guilt had kept her awake most of the night. Her brain ached from the blunt rubber stink of the suit and her body felt heavy with exhaustion even as it twitched with nervous energy, ill and uneasy.
D.J. pulled on the laptop and complained again, a muted buzz outside her suit. She’d caught Hernandez midsentence: “—ooner we get you on the trailer.” He made a sweeping motion in her direction and Cam rolled Sawyer after him toward the jeep.
The bulldozer punched into another vehicle. Ka-rang! One of the car’s tires popped as the ’dozer shoved it sideways, the metal rim digging into the asphalt with a hair-raising wail. It didn’t stop until the car tottered over the embankment at the top of the exit ramp, tumbling down with three distinct impacts.
“Lowrey, Watts.” Hernandez raised his voice only slightly. “We’re lifting this chair up onto the trailer.”
“Yes, sir, I was gonna put him up front against that crate.”
“Fine. Let’s move it. The ramp will be clear in a minute.”
Cam noticed Ruth’s attention and lifted one glove. She thought he might have smiled but the low sun was on his faceplate, obscuring the middle of his expression. She turned away.
In her uncertainty, some part of her actually wanted to find the labs stripped clean. Once they had Sawyer’s schematics, the Special Forces would instigate their takeover — and Hernandez would fight. Ruth was sure of that much.
No matter the odds, Hernandez would fight them.
* * * *
Overall the city appeared only lightly damaged. Commercial buildings loomed above them, impassive weight, a thousand white glints of sunshine on unbroken glass. If they failed, if Sawyer’s files and prototypes were truly lost and the machine plague held sway over the planet forever, this place was a monument that would exist in some form until ultimately the continental shelf rolled into the Pacific Ocean. Concrete and iron would withstand quakes, fires, and weather for eons.
Ruth gazed all around, gripped by dark wonder.
The frozen traffic here surged only one way — west, toward the freeway, every car nosing into the next. They came up onto sidewalks. They diverted through parking lots and hedges and fences. They were full of stick shapes, and the crowded street itself had become the grave of hundreds, color-fast rags on yellowing bone, screaming jaws and eroded fingers, the skeletons of dogs and birds scattered among the human remains like strange half-grown monsters.
The carnage looked even worse in contrast to the commonplace icons of America, most of which survived untouched. Rising on poles, bolted to storefronts, were the garish plastic signs of Chevron and Wendy’s and 24 Hour Donuts.
Their progress eastward was a crawl at first, the jeep hanging back with the big white pickup truck the soldiers had gotten started. The man in the bulldozer had a lonely job. He thrust into the packed cars, always a half block or more ahead of the group, and he was even more isolated by the metal slats that Leadville mechanics had welded to the operator’s cage to protect him from the shrapnel that sometimes crashed up.
With each roar of the bulldozer’s engine, each shriek of metal, echoes rattled against the high faces of the buildings and fled into the silence, sometimes returning to them from odd directions. Sometimes the sounds that came back did not match those that had gone away, lower in pitch or delayed too long.
Ruth wasn’t the only one who kept looking over her shoulder.
Dangerous hooks and teeth lined their path, torn hoods, bent fenders, windshields mashed into opaque spiderwebs.
Debris gritted beneath the jeep’s tires as it advanced, scattered dunes of safety glass and chunks of bone. They rolled over puddles of antifreeze and gasoline — and Ruth instinctively drew a long breath through her nose, though of course she could only smell the thickening odor of her own sweat.
It would be appalling for them to have made it this far only to lose their lives to one spark, fifty cars igniting around them like explosive dominos. The image shocked her, veins of fire throughout the city…but good engineering prevented most of the vehicles from leaking fuel as they were smashed or overturned, and the man in the bulldozer exercised some care when pushing his blade into a vehicle’s underside.
Ruth saw patterns in the devastation. The people who’d left their cars to continue on foot had collected in drifts on the far sides of the standstill traffic. Obviously they’d kept fighting toward the freeway, every skull and arm leaning forward as if to meet her, but why had so many died in groups?
She understood suddenly and was nauseous. Those stained bones, settled now, would have been a real barrier with flesh and muscle on them, stacked waist high in places, slick with fluids, perhaps still moving. Hemorrhaging or blind, thousands of men and women had staggered through the maze of cars until they reached obstacles they couldn’t pass…and it had been bodies that filled the spaces between the never-ending vehicles…
Ruth was glad for her containment suit. At first, in the plane, wearing it had been like wrapping herself inside a small prison, prickles of goose bumps lifting against the rubber skin, but now it helped her feel removed from her surroundings.
Now she knew better than ever that her solitary, stubborn focus on her work had been correct. There was no doubt that she had been right to come here. The hard question was if she would be good enough, smart enough, quick enough.