“No, really,” Hutch said. “Remember that meningitis scare a few years back? All our tax money spent screening for anthrax?”
Cam shrugged. Tabitha Doyle was crouched at the base of the racks, thumbing the edges of her new Dynastars, and he wanted to have a smile ready when she looked up. He knew his chances were marginal. Among the locals, guys outnumbered women more than three to one and there were plenty of better-looking faces than his own. And Tabby had just gotten out of a relationship. And of course Cam was the token colored boy on the crew, which wasn’t saying much, but skiing was a white man’s sport and even in his third year at Bear Summit, he still got funny looks. Some women just didn’t want to deal with that. Tabby wasn’t even pretty, really, her small face dominated by constantly chapped, puffy lips. But it was good to stay in practice.
Hutch kept raving. “Why doesn’t the state have a networked medical database, that’s what I want to know.”
“You guys talking about that epidemic?” Tabby asked.
Cam shrugged again. “Hutch is pretty worked up.”
“Hey, me too,” she said. “See the news this morning?”
“Just the paper.” Hutch had brought it along, like he was going to read his horoscope on the chairlift. “Four dead.”
“Thirty-eight,” Tabby said.
That afternoon, Army and National Guard units began to enforce biological-warfare protocols across the Bay Area, grounding all flights and closing the freeways, instructing people to stay put, stay inside, windows shut and air-conditioning off. Cam’s mother and three brothers and year-old niece Violeta and everyone were inside the vast quarantine area.
He got an open line on his seventh try, lucky seven, and talked with his mom for forty minutes until she made him hang up. She felt perfect, she said. She wanted him to pray for his brothers. She’d been trying to reach them with no success and could see smoke on the horizon and sometimes there were sirens — and the TV had shown maps of the East Bay marked red over Greg’s neighborhood in Concord.
Jewish mothers were supposedly the worst, but Cam’s mom was an old Spanish Catholic lady and used guilt like a pocketknife. She had a blade for every occasion.
The last time she spoke to her third son, she was gentle.
Jesus had obviously had good reason, she said, for making Cam mi pajarito vagabundo—her wandering little bird — and she was glad he’d moved so far away. He had to stay there, because above all it was important to carry on the Najarro family line.
Hutch wanted to drive east down into Nevada, and most people did, but Cam couldn’t bring himself to leave his phone. He heard nonexistent rings and even picked it up a few times. And two days later, as containment efforts broke down, rumors spread that the machine plague itself died at high altitudes. Some of the hundreds of sick people who’d dodged the roadblocks had headed for the mountains, and an army pilot had depressurized his plane to knock out an infected trooper who started acting dangerously. Reports conflicted as to what elevation was safe, but nothing could stop the savage exodus that began — nothing except the crowds themselves, hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers fighting through each other, through abandoned vehicles and wrecks and shrieking cripples.
Nothing except thirty-plus inches of snow across the Sierra range, by then in its third day of blizzard conditions.
* * * *
Sawyer began to move, the blanketload of ice and snow between them, but Cam was still staring across the valley and whacked his shin on a rock and stumbled. They looked at each other. Then Sawyer nodded once, as if Cam had spoken. “I want to show you something,” Sawyer told him.
“Let’s dump this in the reservoir first.”
“Now, while no one’s here.” Sawyer abruptly lowered his end of the blanket to the ground. Cam bent to keep the snow from spilling. Sawyer frowned at him and said, “Why are you even knocking yourself out like this?”
“A few of us will stay.”
“Then let them worry about it.” Sawyer headed downslope.
Cam followed, glancing at Erin again. She hadn’t moved from her warm slab of granite and probably wouldn’t for hours if left undisturbed. “We might have to come back to this peak,” Cam said. “We might need them later. It’s the smart thing to do.”
Sawyer just grunted.
Half a minute later Sawyer paused, then moved behind a boulder. Cam turned to see Doug Silverstein trudging along two hundred feet below them. Silverstein was six-four and had been skinny when they first met. Now he was a weird scarecrow, and looked utterly bizarre embracing a stiff, curly cloud of netting ripped from screen doors. Grasshopper hunting. Sawyer let the man hike out of sight before he started off again.
The western end of their high island narrowed into a long, slanting ridge like a diving board. Beyond it, a maze of peaks and valleys tumbled oceanward, falling in elevation until a dinosaur spine of foothills bumped up and formed the horizon. Only the straight lines and switchbacks of the few visible roads gave any sign of the civilization that had once existed in the lowlands, a string of power lines, a far-off radio tower.
The dirt on the ridge had been holed by marmots, large cousins of the ground squirrel, mostly stiff red-brown fur and tail and tough leg muscle, as quick as a wish. All of the burrows that Cam could see appeared abandoned but they’d placed three of their clumsy box-traps in the area anyway. He hadn’t been out here for several weeks because Manny took genuine pleasure in being in charge and because they didn’t want to scare the marmots off with too much foot traffic. He hoped Sawyer wanted to show him fresh spoor or new digging or signs of young — or, more likely, some proof of total extinction, given Sawyer’s mood.
Cam smelled sage and pine pollen. He turned his face into the wind, then noticed the discoloration across the valley to the south. “Jesus Christ. Is that what you wanted me to see?”
Sawyer looked back, confusion evident on his face. Cam gestured and Sawyer cast one short glance.
Random patches of brittle dead brown and gray marked the evergreen forest below, huge patches, each more than a mile wide. Cam tried to make sense of the scale, his thoughts confused by a cold surge of fear. All this struggle for nothing— “Are the nanos doing that?”
“Beetles. Maybe termites.” Sawyer shook his head. “If the nanos were self-improving to the point that they’d learned to disassemble wood, they’d have come up over this mountain by now. Let’s move.”
Cam took two steps, slow and careful, unable to look away.
Eventually erosion and landslides would wipe out any trees the bugs had missed. Eventually that valley would become a sterile mud pit. Eventually…
He marched after Sawyer. In twenty yards they’d reach the limit of their world. Seemingly at random, Sawyer stopped. Then Cam saw that he’d laid his hand over a milky vein of quartz. Sawyer measured out three paces, then glanced back upslope before kneeling at a rock. An ordinary stone. From beneath it he pulled a package wrapped tightly in black plastic.
Cam’s first thought was food. His second was to be glad, grateful. Guilt arrived late and he also looked back upslope, thinking of Erin, of possible witnesses, of salted Spam or rich and gooey beef stew. He closed his eyes to the Christmas promise of rustling, opening—
Sawyer had a revolver.
* * * *
Jim Price was loud like always. “Colorado said they almost had a cure! Them and the space station! They were very close!”
Cam surveyed the crowd of faces, twenty-two in all. Their entire population had gathered here in the dusty flat outside Price’s hut, even Hollywood, who rested against the wall in a cocoon of blankets. But everyone looked identical. Long months of deprivation had imprinted each face with a death mask.