Plague Year Read online

  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.

  “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 skiin
g 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.

  Body language had become the best indicator of what someone was thinking—body language, and position. Price’s supporters had gathered tightly around and behind him, making what could have been a circle into a teardrop shape.

  It was interesting that they stood opposite Hollywood.

  Price flapped his arms. “A cure could come anytime now! Colorado has universities, military, and the astronauts are—”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” Hollywood spoke no louder than the breeze, tired, maybe bored. His uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm made it clear to Cam that he’d been repeating this argument all afternoon. “The broadcasts out of Colorado are saying the same thing you heard five months ago. Like they need a little more time. Like they need more samples.”

  “We’re still better off waiting!”

  “Could be forever.”

  Along with two couples and severa
l loners, Cam, Erin, and Sawyer made up the fringe of the gathering, Manny hovering nearby. Most or all of these people would go, Cam thought. In comparison to the rigid, defensive stance of Price’s group, their postures seemed more natural.

  That this was a minority shouldn’t have surprised him.

  McCraney had busted his glasses nine weeks ago and would need a hand-holder, because the best replacement they’d found barely let him see ten feet. George Waxman had lost an eye to the nanos last fall and refused to venture below the barrier since. Sue Spangler was six months pregnant, big now, too big to make it even if she’d wanted to take the risk—and her lover, Bill Faulk, had good reason to stay. Same for Amy Wong and Al Pendergraff and their infant son, Summer.

  Standing beside Price, Lorraine directed a burst of words toward her own faction rather than the group at large. “We’ll never make it across the valley. Look at him, he barely got here and he’s not half-starved!”

  Cam said, slowly, “There’s nothing on this peak for us. Not a group this size. Not more than a few people.”

  “Let ’em stay,” Sawyer muttered.

  “Hollywood needs at least a couple weeks’ rest before we go. We can strengthen up, eat most of our supplies.”

  “No,” McCraney said.

  “We need those rations!” Price took one melodramatic step forward and Faulk and Doug Silverstein moved to back him.

  Emotion wrenched through all the impassive faces, ugly, urgent. Waxman and one of the loners backed off quick, but Cam strode into the center of the gathering, strong with adrenaline.

  He was never more aware of the difference between his skin color and all of theirs than in moments like this—it actually seemed to have weight, especially on his face, his broad cheekbones—and he wondered fleetingly what showed in his expression. If they would misinterpret his fear.

  “Listen to me,” he said.

  I found it in that luxury cabin with the deck overlooking the river, Sawyer had told him. Remember that? The place was a goddamn paradise, twenty feet of sofa cocked around a stone fireplace, double-pane glass, a giant oven, and two water heaters fed by propane tanks. They’d stumbled through jamming ski gear and canned goods into already-heavy backpacks, blotting the polished oak cabinets with flecks of skin and red fingerprints. Things were getting tight, Sawyer said. That fuck Loomas had started hoarding food, Price was talking about elections again. I figured a .38 and two boxes of shells might be more help than a few extra packets of Saltines.