“You’re still sure it went off in Leadville?” Ruth asked. She’d ‚nally started to pat at her own clothing and Cam used the excuse to lean away from her. He was trembling badly now and he didn’t want her to see what must be in his eyes.
We’re going to live, he thought. He almost wept. He was that deeply affected. He’d thought he had so little left to lose, but he was still a long way from being used up.
* * * *
They stayed put for thirty minutes. Cam moved them a few yards from the snake holes onto a slab of rock, where they settled down to clean themselves, drink, and wash their goggles. Newcombe tried the radio again. He scrawled in his journal. Except for another passing quake, the forest was silent. The bugs seemed to have gone to ground after the blast wave and that at least was a mercy.
“You saw what happened to the sky,” Newcombe said.
Ruth nodded but Cam’s mind was still elsewhere. He looked up through the trees as they talked, absorbing the strange beauty of the dust. A brown fog continued to unfurl on the wind, affecting the sunlight, but they were three miles down into the valley. They’d lost their vantage point and could no longer see the torn horizon in the east.
“The quake hit ‚rst because vibrations go through solid things pretty fast,” Newcombe said. “Air is different.”
“The wind,” Ruth said.
“That wouldn’t make any difference up close.”
“No. But the fallout,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“The wind will push the fallout away from us, especially the stuff way up in the atmosphere,” she said.
They needed it to be true, but Cam kept his mouth shut. He was also worried about the plague. If the blast wave had truly swept across seven hundred miles, it would have also brought a massive storm of nanotech. A lot of the subatomic machines might have billowed up above ten thousand feet and self-destructed. Cam supposed the blast could have cleaned away as many as it deposited, but the Sierras rose up like a wall after the great basins of Utah and Nevada. The blast wave might have spent the last of its strength here even as these mountains acted like a comb, collecting thick ‚lms of nanotech out of the air.
He was in no hurry to start hiking again. If they’d ingested too much of the plague along with the dust, in another hour or two they’d be screaming with it. They could run back west up to the barrier.
* * * *
It didn’t happen. For once they had some luck. Cam supposed they were still close enough to elevation. Almost certainly there had been wild †uctuations of pressure inside the blast. Maybe the bomb had even sterilized a wide swath of the plague as a side effect.
They got up and hiked. They hiked, and after another mile Ruth began to limp, favoring her right foot. Gradually there were signs that the blast wave hadn’t been so powerful down in the valley. The mountains across from them seemed to have de†ected the wind, protecting this low area. There was less dust slammed into the sides of the trees. The normal litter on the forest †oor had only been swept into curling ‚ngers and dunes rather than completely lifted away.
In a stand of mountain hemlock, ants dropped out of the pine needles overhead like cinders, still alive. In another place Cam saw a yellow page from a phone book, just a single page, carried up from God knew where. Then they walked into a hundred yards of garbage strewn through the trees, mostly plastic bags and cellophane. It was new. The breeze was already pushing a lot of it free and one bag †oated down alongside him as they walked.
The blast must have dispersed weird pockets of debris across North America. Cam wondered †eetingly about the ants in the trees. He’d ‚gured it was a local colony that got swept up but maybe they were something else, like a desert species. The fragmented niche ecologies he’d seen everywhere might be facing yet another upheaval as new insects were dropped into the mix over hundreds of miles.
It would be worse on the other side of the bomb. The eastward †ow of the weather would bend most of the dust, garbage, and bugs back over and around the explosion. Where the fallout didn’t kill everything, the insects would begin a new and evermore savage ‚ght for dominance.
There was no reason to care in the short run. Cam had learned very well to distract himself, but he couldn’t escape the aching in his feet, knee, hip, hand, or neck for more than a few minutes at a time — or his concern for Ruth. They hiked. They hiked and found a sunlit meadow where the taller weed grass had been †attened in arcs like crop circles. Cam panicked again when his left hand began to throb suddenly, but after a few minutes the vaccine seemed to beat down the plague, and Ruth and Newcombe seemed unaffected. It was just a †uke infection.
* * * *
They slept like the dead a good mile up the rising slope of the next mountain. They were all so tired that Newcombe nodded off on guard duty, something that had never happened so far as Cam knew. He opened his eyes to a black sky shot full of stars. The aspirin had worn off and he was dehydrated and cold, and possibly his subconscious had rebelled at the sound of two people breathing deeply when there should have been only one.
They were tucked into a crevice in a hill of granite, afraid of more nuclear strikes. Cam knocked over an empty food can and a full canteen when he sat up. Damn it, he thought.
They were dangerously low on water. They’d seen one pond but it had been hazy with bugs — and they were running out of food, too. Those basic needs wouldn’t go away and Cam frowned to himself in the dark, counting through the miles left to return to the barrier. At daybreak he’d look for a creek while Ruth and Newcombe ate and packed and took care of her feet, changing her socks and applying the last of the ointment if she’d blistered again. He ‚gured that even with a short nap at lunch, they should be able to reach the mountaintop before the sun went down again.
But there were planes at twilight. Drowsing in his sleeping bag, Cam mistook the sound for a memory. So much of what he recalled and expected were nightmares.
The menacing drone grew louder.
“Wake up,” he said to himself. Then he shifted his sore body away from the rock and spoke again, setting his glove on the other man’s legs. “Newcombe. Wake up.”
Both of his companions moved. Ruth sighed, a soft, melancholy sound. Newcombe rolled over and touched his hand to his mask and coughed. Then the soldier jerked and turned his face toward the gray sky. The valley was still dark, the dawn hidden behind the mountain above them. Cam noticed that Newcombe’s gaze also went to the western horizon. He’d thought it must be a trick of the mountain peaks, re†ecting the noise somehow, but the aircraft were de‚nitely coming out of the west.
“What do we do?”
“Stay put,” Newcombe said.
Their hole in the rock wasn’t perfect but it would have to be enough. The planes were just seconds away. Newcombe found the radio and turned it on, then dug out his binoculars. Cam regretted giving his own to Mike. They watched the rim of the horizon as Ruth struggled into a sitting position between them, her naked cheek imprinted with red lines where she’d lain unconscious against her pack.
“You okay?” Cam asked quietly. She nodded and leaned against him. Her warmth was sisterly and good and for once he was able to let it be just that.
The engine noise spilled into the valley, a deep monotone thrumming. An instant later, brilliant new stars appeared over the peaks to the southwest. Metal stars. The planes lit up like ‚re as they †ew eastward into the sunrise, gliding smoothly out of the night. Cam counted ‚ve before another batch came into view. Then the night sparkled with a third group much farther south, all of them coming out of the dark western sky.