The bull snakes could very well be evolving to eat bugs, too, adapting their diet to the only available food source. Maybe they’d kept the ant colonies from expanding into this area, which was why the yellow jackets had survived up here, too, developing a crude symbiosis with the reptiles.
He had more important questions.
“Would the mind plague affect animals?” he asked into the silence. “Ruth? Hey. Would the new plague affect snakes and yellow jackets?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Cam bristled at her tone, but Ingrid spoke first. “We got out of there,” Ingrid said. “That’s all that matters.”
“It’s not. We need to know if we’re going to have problems with them, too. I mean if they’re contagious.”
Ruth shrugged. She wouldn’t look at him or the other woman. At last, she said, “Animals don’t have the same neurological makeup as humans do. Not even close. My guess is the nanotech would misfire or only partially activate, but how would you know if a snake was acting funny?”
“They could be paralyzed,” Cam said. “Or go blind or have seizures.”
She met his eyes now. “Yes.”
“I didn’t see any snakes that weren’t moving,” Bobbi said, and Ingrid said, “Ruth, do you want to finish whatever you were doing with your laptop? Then we’ll get moving.”
“Yes.”
Cam wouldn’t let it go. “If they’re warm enough, the plague could be breeding in them even if it doesn’t affect the way they act,” he said. “That means we’d better avoid everything. Kill everything.”
None of them spoke. Ingrid worked at her foot. Ruth opened her laptop and Cam glanced over the meadow, watching for yellow jackets.
“Jesus, I’m thirsty,” Bobbi said.
He might have had a hand in saving the insects and snakes. Maybe it was perverse, but the idea made him glad. This world needed every life-form it could find.
Long ago, in Grand Lake, Cam and Allison had participated in a widespread trap-and-release program to share the vaccine with as many animal species as possible. Mostly, they’d succeeded with rats. The elk, marmots, grouse, and birds that were native to this elevation had been hunted to extinction, but the rats thrived in the crowded refugee camps, and, once immunized, the rats did the rest of their work for them.
There were mountaintops where no people had gone. There were others where no one had survived for long. Some animals must have persisted in those lonely peaks. In time, they were attacked by the vaccinated rats. The rats bred uncontrolled beneath ten thousand feet, warring with the insects and invading the new outposts built by men. In the summer, the rats also returned to the mountains, where they took the young of the few remaining marmots and swarmed the old or injured elk. They stole the eggs of the grouse and other birds. But they also passed the vaccine to the animals they attacked but didn’t succeed in killing.
Were the yellow jackets now immune after an encounter with the rats? Cam hoped so. We should come back here if we get the chance, he thought. We should come back and do everything we can to protect them, breed them.
The emotions in him were both lonely and good, because he knew the idea would have made Allison happy. It would have made her feel rich.
Just think what we could do with pollinators again, he thought.
They lost sight of the horizon as they edged into Willow Creek, a high mountain canyon within ten miles of Grand Lake. Cam would have stayed out of this valley altogether if he wasn’t sure the artillery unit was stationed inside it. Even so, he kept his group as far up the box canyon’s north side as possible, traversing east without losing any more elevation than necessary. He didn’t want to have to climb back out if it looked like the gun crews had fled or were infected.
The creek meandered through the canyon floor, running southwest toward the only low point, where eventually it jogged south and fell downslope alongside a small state highway. That road hit Highway 40, which wasn’t so far from Interstate 70, Loveland Pass, and roads leading into the Leadville crater. Cam knew the area well. During the war, his Ranger unit had picked their way cross-country from 40 to 70, skirting the fallout zone. Any number of civilian camps and small military garrisons had filled the region since then.
The first body was below them to the south. The man lay on his back, his face and naked chest much lighter than the rock and brush. Only the white skin drew Cam’s gaze. Then he realized the ground down there was burned and torn, concealing what had been a rutted dirt road.
“Look,” he said.
Ruth and Ingrid both knelt, merely using the opportunity to rest. Bobbi squinted in the direction he’d pointed. Her eyes must have been better than his. “Jesus,” she said. “How many people do you think are down there? Thirty?”
Once he understood what he was looking for, his eyes registered at least twenty bodies littered in an area as big as a football field. The mind plague must have driven some of the infected to follow the survivors into these mountains… The artillery crews had walked their guns back and forth across the mouth of Willow Creek, dropping everyone who’d chased them. Cam was doubly glad he’d kept them out of the canyon. The battlefield was at least a mile away, but it was surely contagious.
“Bobbi,” he said suddenly. “Fire two shots.”
“What? Why? I’m almost empty.”
He was down to a few rounds himself, but touched his holster. “They’ll have spotters looking for anyone like us who comes over the mountains,” he said. “Then they’ll shell us if they don’t think we’re okay.”
Ruth was already struggling back to her feet. She unslung her carbine while Bobbi stared into the canyon as if looking for FOs, forward observers. Even ragged and dirty and hurt, Ruth processed situations faster than anyone else.
She was a fighter. She was what he needed.
Blam! Blam! Ruth squeezed off two rounds into the air, startling someone above them. There was a clatter of gravel a hundred yards up the slope and Cam whirled, grabbing for his pistol again. That close? he thought. Then he caught a glimpse of a slinking little shape. A chipmunk? Rats? Maybe these mountains really were coming back to life. Maybe there would be more snakes or lizards or even wolves or bees in rare places, helping each other in unexpected pairings. Allison was right, he thought, feeling that lonely goodness again.
Ruth’s shots were still echoing in the canyon when two more answered them. Crack-ack!
“One more,” Cam said. Ruth obeyed. Within a few seconds, the signal was repeated again exactly, and Cam said, “Okay. They’re expecting us.”
The survivors were situated on a flat area like a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by a bend in the creek, which they’d used to maximize their defenses. It separated them from Cam’s group, even if the water didn’t look more than shin-deep, and there were two catwalks built across it.
They had tried to erect barricades on the canyon floor. Cam saw four pickups and a jeep set nose-to-tail across the dirt road. There were no trees available. Everything had been clear-cut for fuel during the long winters, so they’d dug a few pits with shovels and possibly high explosives, too, reducing the canyon to distinct fields of fire. As far as he could tell without binoculars, less than half a dozen infected people had made it anywhere near their encampment. The closest body sprawled two hundred yards away. Their artillery had caught most of the infected at the other end of Willow Creek. Then snipers dropped the rest.