That should have felt like good news. They weren’t going to sneak up on anyone, not with Bacchetti wheezing, not with their bootsteps echoing from the castle shapes of granite, and they couldn’t afford to search for a different route to avoid an ambush. A crippled man with a shotgun could have held them off until they were crippled themselves.
It had to be Hollywood, which had to mean they were on the right course. Good news.
But Cam was beyond anything good.
* * * *
They climbed. They climbed over a jumble of car-sized boulders and Cam went first, testing the footing. At the top of a loose drainage, he held his burning arm down to Sawyer like a rope.
They climbed too slow.
* * * *
Sawyer knocked himself over, beating at his temple. Cleaning and armoring his wounds might have minimized the infestation, but the machines were in him just the same.
Cam leaned down and summoned a voice. “Tell me where.”
Sawyer snapped his head like a dog shaking off wasps. Cam wasn’t sure it was an answer.
“Tell me. You son of a bitch.”
Sawyer lifted one shredded glove. That was his only response. He lay there panting until Cam pulled him up.
* * * *
They climbed and Bacchetti matched their pace for three hundred yards on his hands and knees, convulsing and choking. Cam glanced back too many times. The man probably wouldn’t have made it even with assistance, but they would never know. Cam chose to stay with Sawyer.
They climbed above the sun.
At this elevation, the gradual mornings of spring were capped by sudden afternoons, and the mellowing light had eased down into the west. Soon it would be canceled altogether by a saw-toothed ridge.
They climbed and their sight dimmed as the day settled into dusk. They climbed through a field of dirt-browned snow and ice, the first they’d encountered. Cam knew this meant something. Wrapped in stars, his consciousness shot through with hard pinpoints of white, he didn’t realize that there were three of them again until he kicked into a silhouette and, when he tried to pick Sawyer up, the shape of the body seemed unfamiliar.
Hollywood had scratched open his round face before he passed out, maybe trying to stay awake. In the starlight his blood was black and glossy, and only hinted at the raw furrows he’d clawed through the rash on his cheek.
“Hey,” Cam whispered. “Hey, get up.”
They were almost there. He was sure of it. On this side of the valley, snow remained only in the highest reaches. The sun had destroyed the rest, and this gravel moonscape was the same as home. They were almost there.
Hollywood had won. Hollywood had succeeded, twice, at a punishing odyssey that they wouldn’t have even attempted without his example — and there was no question that it would have gone faster if they were better people. If they hadn’t bickered and lied and killed.
More than anyone, this young man deserved his help.
“Sawyer,” Cam said, looking around. “Hey.”
Sawyer was already beside him, clacking through the gravel on his knees. He blundered past Cam and pushed a chunk of rock into Hollywood’s teeth.
The boy’s eyes bulged open, shining glints in the dark. “Glaah! Glah!”
Cam screamed, too, putting his arms in the way. “Stop—”
“He fell.” Sawyer reeled away from them, hefting the rock again and then driving it down onto Cam’s wrist.
“Stop, stop, you don’t have to—”
“He fell. He fell and hit his head but we carried him up. We carried him all the way.”
“We could! We could have done that!”
Sawyer panted against him. “We have to. To be the good guys. In case Price makes it. His word against ours. And we’re the good guys. We carried their friend.”
“We could have. Oh Jesus, we could have.”
“Price wanted to take over. Remember that. It’s what we have to tell them. Price grabbed all those guns and planned to take over.”
* * * *
They climbed to the barrier. They climbed with Hollywood between them, dying or already dead, draining blood down the front of his jacket, and then an invisible wall slammed through them in bits and pieces.
The pain did not miraculously cease. Too much tissue had been disintegrated. Too many machines had filled them.
Cam shrieked and hit the ground, unaware of the impact. He had known that transition would be awful but he had never been so thoroughly infected.
He flailed against the ungiving rock, crabbing upward, a spasm of nerves encumbered by thick, strengthless muscle. Clots and blotches rose beneath his skin and merged, expanding, piling into reefs of blisters. He climbed, but his foot was trapped beneath Hollywood’s weight, and his leg held him like a leash. He did not know this. He did not understand that his progress had stopped. He tried to climb — would always climb — and screamed again as his own blood abraded him from scalp to toe.
Sawyer rolled close, thrashing in the same animal frenzy, though he made no sound except a strangled, nasal grunting.
The voices that answered Cam were from above.
He would never guess how long it took the footsteps and flashlights to reach him. Long enough that the overall agony settled again into specific burns and aches. Long enough to worry that it was Jim Price, that Price had reached safety hours ago and would now kill them both.
Long enough to wonder if it mattered.
Sawyer was still in the grip of a massive seizure, grinding his teeth as his head drummed against the gravel.
The strangers descended together in a halo of light, and cutting beams stabbed out at Cam and played over his trembling, stained body. The tall figures stayed back. They murmured among themselves, quick, guttural, alien. Then they broke apart and encircled him. He saw the beveled shaft of a baseball bat, the gleam of an ax…
Realization cut through his delirium.
Sawyer’s original fear had been right, as he had been right about so many things. The situation here was no less desperate than on their own peak. These people had sent Hollywood across to bring back food. His strange enthusiasm, his urging and his promises, everything made sense now. Cattle drive.
It was a fate that they deserved, but Cam rasped up at the faceless shadows. “Wait. Me.” Then the empty black of the valley swept up and claimed his mind before he could say more to convince them to spare Sawyer’s life.
14
The shuttle’s trademark sonic booms rattled over the high mountain basin like cannon fire. Moving fast enough to compress air at the front of its nose and its wing, Endeavour sent twin shock waves through the Colorado sky.
James Hollister looked up. He had been watching the crowd.
This basin formed a vast natural amphitheater in roughly the outline of an egg, its oval floor two miles across and three long. Canyons, sinks, and gullies creased the surrounding hillsides and James estimated the total surface space to be in excess of fifteen square miles.
The northern and western slopes were mostly empty — bald humps of green wild grass and rock. Along the eastern face, however, people stood shoulder to shoulder, horizon to horizon, like a great bison herd of Native American legend.
James had always possessed a flair for numbers but this mass defied him. It was unreal. It was hypnotizing. And its voice was an inconstant rumble, louder now that the Endeavour’s far-off thunder had split the clear blue afternoon.
“I don’t see them—”
“You think they’re okay?”
Some of the camera crew near James had turned south, shielding their eyes from the sun. That wasn’t the right direction. It was too soon. Endeavour would still be turning into its approach path, hidden from everyone down in this basin.