Avoiding that base meant a detour either farther north or back south again, and Cam didn’t think Ruth had the extra miles in her. Maybe not him, either. Newcombe didn’t see that. Newcombe was too strong, whereas Cam knew very well how an injury could change and limit everything about a person. Mood. Imagination.
He admired her. She was tougher than anyone would have guessed, but the truth was that the two of them were a ragtag disaster, Cam with body-wide damage from old nano infections and his left hand thickly bandaged after a knife wound sustained during the ‚ght in Sacramento, Ruth with her busted arm — and until just sixteen days ago, she had been the centerpiece of a crash nanotech program aboard the International Space Station for over a year, losing bone and muscle mass despite a special diet, vitamins, and exercise.
She tired easily, which had been holding them back. They were still barely twelve miles from where they’d started, although they must have covered twenty or more. Their path had been a back-and-forth zigzag through the jammed streets and bugs and other hazards. Cam estimated their total hike to be a matter of weeks, not days.
It should get better. In theory, Leadville’s search grids would grow too big and they could spend less time hiding. Ruth pushed herself mercilessly. She knew she was the weak link. And yet if she dropped from exhaustion or developed a fever or something, Cam honestly didn’t think they could carry her. He shared her impatience, but it was important for her to get the rest she needed, no matter if that increased other dangers. Newcombe only encouraged her, though, with all the best reasons in mind, and Ruth was too driven to say no. It had to be Cam who protected her.
“What if we ‚nd a boat,” he said. “A motorboat. Every other guy around here was a ‚sherman or something. We could cut straight across or even go upriver.”
“Mm.” Newcombe turned and Cam followed his gaze to the submerged homes and wreckage.
“We have to try,” Cam said, rising to his feet. His back hurt and he had ant bites down his neck and shoulders, a pinched nerve in his hand, but he bent to help Ruth anyway.
* * * *
They fell into a familiar rhythm, Cam in front, single ‚le with Ruth between him and Newcombe. They went south, drifting back the way they’d come but off the highway.
The new shore was ‚ckle. In places the water stretched inland, ‚lling the streets — and everywhere the houses and fences were a problem. They wanted to look into yards and garages, but each neighborhood was its own trap, either dead-ending in the water or choked with debris from the larger †ood or both. Several times Cam dodged around ‚elds of spiderwebs. Once he saw ants. Everything took time. They needed food and cautiously entered a house that looked normal except for the dry band of muck wrapped around its foundation. They wanted to siphon gas into a few extra canteens and Ruth immediately sat down as Newcombe stopped beside a small Honda, shrugging out of his pack.
“You okay?” he asked.
Ruth bobbed her head, but Cam wondered what she looked like behind her goggles and mask. Her twisted posture wasn’t right.
“I haven’t seen any reptiles,” she said. Typical Ruth. Sometimes it was hard to know what she was thinking, only that she’d de‚nitely latched on to something.
“Me either,” Cam said.
“But you did in the mountains,” Ruth said.
“Yes. Not at the top, but we saw way too many snakes and whole ‚elds full of lizards at eight thousand feet. Seven. Six.” That was as far down as he’d gone. “They were de‚nitely below the barrier.”
“Maybe the ants are attacking their eggs,” she said. “Or their hatchlings. The bugs might be getting to their young before they’re big enough to ‚ght.”
“I can’t ‚gure out why there’s anything alive down here at all,” Newcombe said.
“They don’t get as hot as people,” Cam said.
“But they do,” Ruth said. “Sometimes hotter. Cold-blooded things aren’t actually cold. They just don’t generate their own body heat, except from running or †ying. Basking in the sun. They can be very precise. I think most reptiles keep themselves between seventy and eighty degrees, but insects are usually about the same temperature as the environment.”
Cam nodded slowly. The machine plague operated on a heat engine. When it hit ninety degrees, it activated. And yet in his experience, the plague took as long as two or three hours to power up after it was absorbed into a host. At midday, in summer, the nanotech might begin to decimate the bugs — but as the day cooled, so would these creatures. Obviously enough of them had survived, and they would breed uncontested in autumn, winter, and spring.
Fish and amphibians were safe in rivers and lakes. He’d seen it himself. They remained below the critical threshold, and at altitude it was the same. Lower temperatures protected the reptiles and insects in the foothills and mountains. They must have continually repopulated the world below in haphazard migrations.
“My guess is they’re always on the edge of disaster down here,” Ruth said, “but it makes me wonder if the whales might have survived. Dolphins and seals.” She shook her head. “We looked sometimes. Up in the space station, I mean. They’re insulated in a lot of fat, but if they stayed cold enough… maybe way up in the Artic or down at the South Pole…”
It was a nice thought. “I hope so,” Cam said, trying to encourage her.
Then he leaned back to stare past the houses. Cam had grown accustomed to the feeling of being watched, surrounded by empty dark windows and ghosts, but this was different. A noise. The dead had mostly settled long ago, but rot and imbalance were always itching away at things. Buildings shifted. Garbage moved. And yet his subconscious had pulled this one sound out of the soft whispering all around them, a low, distant sound like the breeze, even though the late morning sky was clear and still.
“Hey,” he said.
Newcombe looked up from the Honda. “What?”
The noise reminded Cam of the storm winds in the mountains, but there was no wind here and the rising shhhhhhhhhh seemed localized. He turned to follow it, afraid now. It was very big, he realized, somewhere north of them. The environment had changed so drastically, the land stripped and baking, was it possible that some temperature differential between this muddy sea and the dead earth was causing tornados?
“Oh God,” Ruth said, just as Cam ‚nally recognized the echoing drone way out across the water.
Fighter jets.
* * * *
They holed up inside a sewer drain, musty but dry, crowding in one after another. Newcombe thought the concrete box and the dirt-pack above it would conceal them from airborne sensors — and as the jets swept back again, crisscrossing the sky, he said they might as well settle in. Their allies in Colorado had transmitted bad commands to all of the U.S. spy satellites under Leadville’s control, causing those eyes to tumble and burn down through the atmosphere, but Leadville still had a thermal imaging sat which would pass overhead twice during the next two hours… unless they’d moved it.
Hiding from the sky was complicated. Leadville might have used some of the satellite’s fuel reserves to alter its orbit and its timing, and spy planes could pass so far overhead as to be invisible. The space station was still up there, too. Even uninhabited, the ISS made a ‚ne satellite with its cameras operated remotely from Colorado. Newcombe didn’t have good intelligence on what its last orbital path had been.