Plague Year Read online

  There was one big problem with all three concepts.

  In creating more of themselves, locusts pulled both carbon and some iron from the tissue of their hosts; and as a substance, each locust was hardly distinguishable from any other life-form.

  One very big problem. ANN designed to target locusts in mass would also attack human and animal cells.

  “Show them your figures again,” Ruth said. “If LaSalle’s bug lumps together every speck of organic carbon in the world, everything else that’s happened so far is going to seem like a roller disco in comparison.”

  “Roller—?”

  “We’ll all be dead, everywhere.”

  Her earpiece thumped once more and she wondered if James was smiling, pacing, shaking his head. She wished she could see his face. His voice, like always, conveyed only quiet strength. “The council has a way to protect us from any ANN,” he said, “in case something goes wrong. Incorporating the hypobaric fuse into every design is mandatory now, even if that sets everyone back.”

  “A fuse won’t stop LaSalle’s bug from affecting plants or insects or whatever else is left below 10,000 feet. Any environmental balance the planet still has will be shot! We need an ANN that can discriminate.”

  “Actually the other good news is somewhat related.”

  “What? Then what are you getting me worked up for?” Ruth’s grin was real but she forced a laugh for his benefit. “Zap me the file, this is perfect!”

  They had the beginnings of a brain. Another member of their group had proposed targeting the hypobaric fuse itself rather than locusts in general, using this unique structure as a marker. Unfortunately, so far their best-developed program was less than 30 percent effective in a pressurized capsule where decoys and debris outnumbered hibernating locusts only two to one.

  “It’s better than that,” James said. “The FBI got a team into Denver. They think they have a new lead.”

  Ruth flexed her arms and legs, an involuntary surge of excitement. She struck the wall with one knee and set herself rotating, and jammed her palm against her headset to keep it from pulling off. “When? How?”

  “They just cleared enough highway to start flying again—”

  She nearly interrupted. How much highway? The shuttle required more than twice the landing strip of most airplanes.

  “—took a group into town and pulled more computers from the field office there, the public library. They think they have full records on manufacturers’ sales now.”

  Before the plague there had been forty-six university nanotech labs nationwide, seven private groups, and five more working for the government. That number had not included Ruth, or at least two other covert federal operations she was aware of—nor had it included perhaps a dozen independently funded labs who were also keeping their heads down, mining the public data but not sharing their own advances.

  Only thirteen companies had manufactured microscopy and nano-fabrication equipment, however, and such big-ticket items hardly sold like the stock shares of those companies.

  Even before the locust burst through the quarantine lines around northern California, FBI data crunchers had unearthed two private groups in the region. Agents swept through those labs and the six more operating publicly in the area, confiscating everything, even the few lab techs who could still be found.

  Too bad only some of those people reached safe altitude.

  Evidence everywhere had been lost or destroyed. No one was even certain that the locust had been built in the Bay Area. It could have gotten loose in transit or during a buy. No one ever came forward to explain. That wasn’t a surprise—anyone claiming responsibility would have been lynched—but not a single alarm had been raised even in the first forty-eight hours, when the problem might have been contained.

  The general belief was that the locust’s design team had died as soon as it got loose...and by the reckoning of most survivors, they probably hadn’t died slow enough.

  There was no punishment hard enough for this crime. No human language even had a word to describe what had happened.

  But the goal of the search for the locust’s designers, at least in Ruth’s mind, had never been revenge. They wanted insight, answers, a key to stopping it.

  She said, “Tell me you found the lab.” But even James would have been shouting.

  “It’s just a lead,” he said. “Hardware.”

  “Are they sending someone after it? Where?”

  “They’re still costing out fuel and bottled air.”

  “But this could be everything we need! Original schematics, customized gear, even clues to what happened to the design team!”

  James didn’t reply for several moments, maybe letting her calm down. Maybe wishing, like her, that it could be true. He said, “No one’s convinced it’s solid information yet.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Three years ago Select Atomics delivered a fabrication laser to a Stockton location that can’t be accounted for.”

  Ruth had never been to the West Coast but had grown familiar with the area, at first from watching news coverage, then from interviews with the FBI and NSA. Every survivor associated even vaguely with nanotech, even security guards and janitors, had undergone extensive debriefing as the intelligence agencies combed for potential leads, names, rumors.

  Based on the pattern of infections, the authorities’ best guess was that the locust’s designers had worked in Berkeley or Oakland in the congested urban heart of the region.

  “Stockton,” Ruth said. “That’s east of the Bay Area near Sacramento, right? Near the foothills of the Sierras?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. But you have to realize—”

  “Get a plane out there! As soon as we can.”

  “Ruth, you have to realize that the laser could have been taken anywhere. Even if they were in Stockton, things got crazy in a hurry. The freeways were traffic jams. Half the city burned. And it was snowing something like two inches an hour everywhere above 6,000 feet.”

  She shook her head, the earpiece hurting her ear. “The original team might have made it.”

  “Ruth—”

  “Some of them might have made it.”

  6

  Sawyer prowled back and forth across the shallow drainage that led up to their peak, moving laterally, as if the small markers of rock they’d built at 10,000 feet were an impassable fence. He wasn’t interested in good-byes.

  Cam gathered with the others on the ridge where they’d lit their signal fire for Hollywood. Faulk, who was staying, had agreed to burn two armloads later in the day. Much later. Sunrise remained a great yellow promise beyond the ranges to the east, and in the frost-hard twilight even whispers sounded sharp and loud. It was April 14th, Year One. Plague Year. The broadcasts out of Colorado had served as a reliable calendar for Hollywood’s group, and he said the radio had just begun to talk about the future that way—and the idea caught on here immediately, for obvious reasons, Cam thought. A new start.

  “Throw a bed frame over the pile,” said Doug Silverstein. “That should keep it dry long enough to really get it roaring.”

  Faulk nodded. “They’ll know you’re coming.”

  To the west, gray clouds emerged from the lingering night and absorbed the familiar shapes of the nearest mountains, earth and sky bound together by charcoal sheets of rain. The damp, erratic wind was fragrant with oxygen.

  Sawyer’s voice whipped over them—“M’on!”—and most of their heads turned. He pumped his balled fist up and down and Cam remembered, strangely, making the same gesture to truckers from the backseat of his dad’s car when he was a kid, baseball on the radio, horsing around with his brothers in the tightly packed space. He smiled. They had shrieked like idiot hyenas whenever a trucker hit his horn for them.

  Erin was smiling, too, the only other face not tight and brooding. Cam shook himself. He knew her weird cat’s smirk only meant she was thinking, but he didn’t want anyone to see the two of them stand
ing there grinning. Jesus. He waved back at Sawyer in a slow arc meant to convey patience.

  Wait. This is important.

  The center of their gathering was a knot of handshakes and embraces, private words. It was the greatest display of emotion Cam had ever seen on this high, barren island, and he wished he was more a part of it. He wished so many things.

  It didn’t matter that they’d already enacted this same ritual two days ago, when the skies clouded up and spit hard for half an hour, or that everything had been decided for more than two weeks now. They all wanted to touch the few who were staying—Faulk, Sue, Al, and Amy Wong. Amy’s three-monthold boy, Summer, was passed among a dozen people who cooed and murmured to him and scratched at the puffy down jacket that served as his swaddling clothes.

  Cam hadn’t gotten a chance to hold him and hadn’t fought for it, either. Summer gave him the willies. Babies should cry. Summer only stared, oblivious even to this morning’s commotion. Cam suspected brain damage. Their diet had been dangerously short on protein, and Amy had gone beneath the barrier twice before she knew she was pregnant. The nanos might have affected that part of her body or attacked the baby directly, or both.

  Below, Sawyer moved past the line of rock markers and Cam’s thoughts vanished in a jolt. It shouldn’t have been frightening, that dark silhouette against the rough slope of grays and browns, but they had survived long enough to develop a new set of instincts. Nothing belonged down there. Nothing human.

  Watching him, Cam hesitated, then turned suddenly and shouldered in toward the heart of the crowd. He needed to say something. Anything. He was pleased when Erin grabbed his hand and came along.

  It felt as much as ten degrees warmer inside the gathering, shielded from the wind. Their jackets whistled against the others’ GORE-TEX skins, a sound that Cam associated with busy weekends at the resort. His past had never seemed closer.

  Amy and Lorraine were crying softly, heads together, holding Summer between them; but Sue studied Cam’s approach with dry, steady eyes, both hands on her pregnant belly. He couldn’t read her expression. No one else had noticed him yet. Price was clapping people on the shoulder like a football coach, out of words for once, and both Hollywood and Doug Silverstein fidgeted with bundles of yellow twine that they’d cut into lengths of roughly two feet.

  “We really appreciate this,” Faulk said, for the hundredth time, and Hollywood nodded and shrugged.

  Their plan was to tie markers on trees near berry patches and snake pits and anything else of use down to 7,000 feet or more, to decrease the time that Faulk and Al Pendergraff would spend below the barrier on future scavenging trips.

  “Really,” Faulk repeated, and Cam cleared his throat. They all turned. Hollywood looked relieved but the others just stared at him with the same careful intensity as Sue.

  Beside Cam, Erin ducked her head.

  He put his hand out and Faulk took it immediately. And that was all. He and Pendergraff repeated the handshake and Amy smiled through her tears, and Sue even kissed his cheek as he bent to hug her around her big belly. After everything they’d been through, it came down to a civilized exchange of gestures.

  * * * *

  He never saw any of them alive again.

  Seventeen days hadn’t been enough for Hollywood. The boy still hunched slightly over his right side and couldn’t seem to move his left leg forward all the way, resulting in a swaying waddle even worse than Manny’s lopsided gait. Manny had long since grown accustomed to his missing toes and walked or ran with an easy skipping motion.

  Leading everyone down from the peak, the two of them looked like a drunk penguin alongside a windup toy with a bad spring. They were the youngest members of the group, at nineteen and fifteen, and had a certain eagerness in common.

  Cam wanted to believe that was a good thing.

  Hollywood admitted he still felt some pain. If it wasn’t already mid-April, they might have let this rainstorm pass and given him more time...except California’s short wet season was ending. They couldn’t risk it. They’d all thought this winter was worse than normal, though Sawyer just laughed at Cam’s idea that the planet was cooling because all the cities and factories and everything were shut down. In fact, now that they knew it was still early in the year, the truth was this winter had been comparatively mild. This might be the last rain.

  Cam had encouraged Hollywood to exercise while he was still bedridden, leg lifts, simple arm motions. It helped flush the system of dead nanos. That Hollywood hadn’t known this, that he’d made the trek in good weather, was evidence that the people across the valley had rarely if ever scavenged below the barrier. They hadn’t needed to. They were rich. So Sawyer’s suspicion of a “cattle drive” must be groundless.

  It must be.

  The tension in Price’s hut had been as thick as the smoke stench and body odor, and surely didn’t help Hollywood’s recovery, yet Cam never suggested moving him upslope. Price’s group needed goading. He’d figured that if his regular visits made them uncomfortable, so much the better. He came by every day to talk about landmarks in the valley and the easier, bigger life on the other side.

  After just six days Hollywood insisted on walking again, gingerly, bent over like an old man and holding his arm close the way that a bird would tuck in a broken wing. The boy had clearly been rushing himself; rest was their only treatment for internal wounds; Cam should have said something but didn’t have the heart to keep him tied down. More than that, he wanted everyone to witness Hollywood’s tenacity.

  They fed him weeds and lichen and greasy, stringy scrub-jay, sweet crunchy grasshoppers. They made a great present of the last can of fruit cocktail.

  If he suspected, he said nothing.

  Sawyer had climbed back to the piles of rock at 10,000 feet and stood gazing up at them, his face lost behind his hood and mirrored ski goggles and a black racing mask.

  “We should stay together,” Hollywood said. “It’s safer,” and Cam felt someone bull past him to the front of the group.

  Price shouted, “Everyone sticks together!”

  Sawyer gave no indication that he’d heard, no sound, no movement. They couldn’t even tell where he was looking. Price flapped his arms and opened his mouth again, but Cam spoke quickly over Price’s navy blue shoulder. “So what do you think, what’s the air pressure?”

  “The barrier’s down at least five hundred feet, maybe six or seven.” The racing mask muffled Sawyer’s voice but he made no extra effort to be heard. “There’ll be pockets of high pressure, though, fluctuations. Suit up now.”

  One thing the resort lodge and cabins had had in abundance were goggles and other ski gear, gloves that pulled way up over jacket sleeves, fabric masks. Equipment designed to repel snow could not be proof against a sea of nanos, of course, but today it was especially crucial to delay and minimize infections.

  They had never gone more than three hours before feeling the machines inside them, at which point they’d always started back for safe altitude if they weren’t already climbing.

  Today, by that time, they would still be descending.

  According to their topography map, the other peak was seven and a half miles due north, down and across and up— and it would be impossible to zip straight over. The roads in the great valley ran mostly west and east, and Cam had estimated that a man on foot would total twelve miles or more as he switchbacked up and down the steepest slopes, avoiding cliffs and hard terrain.

  He tightened his gogs and glanced toward the low, oncoming clouds. He wondered again why storms hadn’t washed the world clean, at least the mountain areas. Common sense suggested that rain and snow would press the nanos to the ground, then carry them downhill. Sawyer said he didn’t understand the rule of scale. Nanos weren’t little people. Airborne particles of that size barely noticed the finest drizzle or the thickest blizzard, and gusts of wind and the impact of a storm’s first raindrops would stir up pockets of grounded nanos. Bad weather probably swept
away a good percentage of the invisible machines, yet brought just as many or even more up from the lowlands.

  “Wait.” Erin laid her hand on Cam’s hip. She’d set her goggles on her forehead and her eyes were a rich violet in the gloom. Several loose strands of her hair, flagging on the breeze, reached out from her hood to Cam’s face as she stepped close. Her smile felt funny when she kissed him.

  She was warmth and softness. He moved his hand up under her jacket but was frustrated by its tight fit, and ran his palm down to her crotch instead. She rocked her hips forward to increase the pressure.

  All around them, fifteen other human beings were engaged in similar embraces or slugging water from canteens or urinating there on the dirt. Keene had squatted down in a last attempt to move his bowels. After crossing the barrier, they’d keep their armor shut regardless of the body’s needs. No one wanted the nanos inside their clothing, exposing any cuts or bug bites.

  In a way, this was farewell. There wouldn’t be another chance to feel bare skin until they reached the other side.

  Cam wanted to say I love you, but it wasn’t true. Need was a more honest word. There had been times when taking care of Erin had been the only thing that kept him going.

  He said the words anyway, like a prayer. “Love you.”

  “Yes.” Her smile broadened so much that the corners of her eyes crinkled. A real smile. “I love you too.”

  Then she went to Sawyer, glancing back over one shoulder. But her smile had become that crooked little smirk again and Cam pretended to look elsewhere. He watched her gesture silently, watched Sawyer push his face open, goggles up, mask down. His friend had quit shaving the day after Hollywood came and seemed like someone else now with a patchy beard rounding his long face.

  Cam wished he’d gotten the last kiss. Didn’t everyone save their favorite for last?

  He turned uphill, thinking that the stay-behinds would have come to the top of the drainage to watch them go. Yet he saw nothing, no movement anywhere except a fleeting dust devil and one quick arrow of a bird.