Cam listened to Ruth’s breathing change as she fell into a restless doze beside him. Despite her exhaustion, he didn’t think she really slept. Her hand closed on his leg, flexing and pulling. Her brain never seemed to stop. He remembered the same habit from their weeks together during the war. Ruth’s insomnia had become its own threat, never allowing her to recuperate even when she was staggering from her wounds.
In the darkness, Cam touched her cheek. “Shh, Ruth,” he said, listening for Bobbi or Ingrid. The crickets might be his only warning if one of them was infected. A person’s footsteps would quiet the bugs, so Cam closed his eyes and absorbed the familiar song.
Ree ree ree ree ree.
He was simultaneously elated and suicidal. He felt half insane. Having sex with her had been very good. His body was content where it didn’t hurt or where his muscles weren’t knotted from stress and grief, but his mind was twisted in the same way. What the hell had they been thinking?
In some ways, the worst part was that he supposed Allison would have understood — even approved. His wife was nothing if not pragmatic. Fine, she’d said, like a dare. The offhand remark was the last word she ever spoke to him, and Cam tried to hear it again now. She would forgive him. Wouldn’t she?
He could still feel Allison against himself, shorter than Ruth and even stronger, heavier in her breasts, wider in her hips. She liked to be kissed just under her ear.
Christ, he thought. You betrayed her. Allison died in front of you and hours later you’re fucking Ruth. But he couldn’t avoid how right it felt. Touching her was something he’d anticipated for years.
Cam opened his eyes to the stars and darkness. He tried to fight his way toward some kind of peace. Watching the sky made him feel small and lost and yet deeply connected with the earth around him. The grass rustled in the breeze. He smelled spruce or some other pines.
Are you out there? he wondered, but he didn’t believe in ghosts or any kind of god, not after so much killing. He knew it was different for Ruth. She’d had an epiphany during the war. They’d never talked about it much. Cam had grown up Spanish Catholic and Ruth as a secular Jew, and he thought she was embarrassed by her new faith because it couldn’t be quantified or explained like her research. Before they came to Jefferson, though, there had been times when Ruth said some interesting things. She seemed to need to share, and maybe she still thought she could pry him away from Allison.
On the first occasion, their group had been camped on a hot, dusty plain east of the Rockies with no wood for a cook-fire and only a few stale Army rations in their packs. Cam recalled everything about that evening clearly. Ruth had asked if they thought all of this — their lives, the world — might be some kind of test. “I don’t mean between good and evil,” she added with a wary look. “I mean like a materials test.”
Materials test was an engineering term for methods of determining the limits of any given machine or substance. If there was a Creator, she imagined He was a distant, uninvolved God who was only interested in them in ways they could never comprehend. The notion was typical Ruth. Her ideas were huge and convoluted and, ultimately, also very simple.
“What sort of half-wit God would bother to create quintillions of other star systems if we’re the most important thing to him?” she said. “And that’s just in this galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies around ours. Why not just one sun and one planet? He doesn’t have the whole world in his hands. That’s ridiculous.”
Earth was a very young planet in the life span of the Milky Way, lost deep in its spiral arms. Their home was just one extremely average ball of rock among an endless sea of others.
“It’s laughable to think any of our mythologies have much to do with reality,” Ruth said, and yet she obviously tried to conduct herself with goodwill, purpose, and self-restraint. Those were the traits professed by most religions, weren’t they? She believed it was what they were made for — to help each other, to cooperate, to show endurance and insight.
Ruth felt like she had something to prove — that her abilities weren’t just a randomly generated mistake. She believed there was a divine spark in everyone, something to be found and nurtured.
How did their relationship fit into her sense of destiny? Because he was meant to help her?
Shit, Cam thought. They didn’t need to sleep together to be a team, and he knew he was only using rationalizations to justify what they’d done. He wondered what Ruth would say if he asked.
Cam agreed with some parts of her philosophy. He believed everyone was responsible for his or her own life, either trying their best or failing to make the effort. It was so easy to blind yourself with selfishness, fear, or greed. But he still wasn’t sure. Had the two of them made a mistake or done something right?
What if the answer was both?
He touched Ruth’s cheek again. Stupid. She reacted, shifting her weight and her hand on his thigh. This time he didn’t say anything to reassure her subconscious. I love her, he thought. I do. Yet he was afraid to wake her up. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to look her in the face again.
The cloudless sky slowly lightened and Cam left Ruth to check on Bobbi and Ingrid, moving through the predawn in full armor — goggles, mask, jacket, gloves. The wind had died. The crickets were silent. The valley below him to the northwest seemed empty and peaceful. Morristown had burned out, and there was only a long, ancient row of electrical lines to indicate that people had ever lived down there.
Bobbi was asleep in a small fighting hole. Cam heard her snoring before his eyes were able to separate her shape from the pile of rocks she’d built. He stopped. Was there any way to be sure she wasn’t infected? Sleep was nearly as essential as eating. If the mind plague stopped people from fulfilling those basic needs, none of the infected would last more than a few days. The autumn nights were sharp in the Rockies, and Cam remembered how the crowd out of Morristown had been dressed only in their bed clothes, often barefoot or in socks at best.
They came for us, he thought. They walked eleven miles to find us even though it was midnight and barely thirty degrees out, so maybe they don’t sleep.
He crept away from Bobbi just the same. If he threw a pebble at her and she stood up and turned on him with that drunken, searching walk… He didn’t want to kill another friend. Either way, she needed her rest. Leave her alone, he thought, searching across the hill for Ingrid. He expected she would be south of Bobbi’s position, bracketing either side of the gully they’d driven up. There was a knoll where Ingrid would have a clear field of vision and Cam made for it, circling through the brush and rock in the half-light.
The older woman sat in a hollow in the grass, leaning forward on her M16. It was an uncomfortable position that forced her to stay awake. She’d fall over if she didn‘t, and Cam smiled to himself. Good girl, he thought, pitching his voice at a whisper. “Ingrid.”
She turned and nodded.
Cam approached and held out his good arm. “How about breakfast?”
Ingrid took his hand but didn’t rise beyond a few inches, trying to work some life back into her legs. The cold had hurt her. “Where is Ruth?” she asked. Maybe she was only trying to cover her infirmity, but Cam owed her an honest answer.
“I let her sleep,” he said.
“Good.”
Something else went unspoken as she studied him through the yellow lens of her goggles. Ingrid knew they’d made love. She seemed pleased by it. Ingrid lived alone, and Cam supposed she wasn’t so old that she hadn’t found some enjoyment in the lives and romances of the other women in the village.
They walked down the hill together, Cam sidling in close to support her arthritic frame.
“I’ll talk to Bobbi if I can,” Ingrid said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, and Cam was glad he didn’t have to hide anything from her.
But who’s going to talk to Ruth? he worried.
As they neared the jeep, they saw that she was awake. Ruth leaned across the fender with her M4, an unkempt silhouette. Was there some kind of power source behind her like a flashlight? Her jacket was open and her goggles, uselessly, were pushed back into her curly hair.
“It’s us, we’re okay,” Ingrid called.
Ruth lowered her carbine. Cam was glad for his own goggles and mask as her brown eyes shifted from him to Ingrid and back. “Where’s Bobbi?” Ruth said, hesitating beside the jeep. Then she laid her hand on Cam’s elbow with newfound intimacy. The light he’d seen was her laptop. She’d placed it on the ground. The screen was divided into three windows, a big white one that was full of text and two smaller graphics. Nanotech schematics.
“Bobbi’s in a fighting hole, asleep,” Cam said. “I think she’s okay.”
“I can wake her up,” Ingrid said.
“I’ll get her,” Cam said. He was angry with himself for feeling so much like a schoolboy, but a lot of his self-consciousness was brought on by the age of the two women. They weren’t old enough to be his grandmother and his mother — Ruth would have been a very young teenager when he was born — but Ingrid especially could have been his mom.
He told himself he wanted to conserve her strength. They were still fifteen or twenty miles from Grand Lake with a lot of rough country in between. Cam estimated the hike at two days if they were lucky, and they’d already done a poor job of protecting Ingrid, keeping her up all night.
“Stay here,” he said. “Drink what you can.”
Mostly he just wanted to get away from Ruth. Maybe Ingrid could say the right things for him. The anguish he felt was unbearable. He was torn between his memories of Allison and the living woman in front of him, but if Ruth was hurt, his terse attitude didn’t mean as much to her as something else she’d learned.
“Cam,” she said. “Wait. I have preliminary numbers. This nanotech is much bigger than it needs to be. My guess is that at least 50 percent of its bulk is unused — maybe more.”
Her words went through him like another bullet.
“What does that mean?” Ingrid said.
Ruth didn’t answer. She was waiting. Cam turned at last and they exchanged a long glance of nervous, wondering horror. “The machine plague had that same handicap,” Cam said to Ingrid. “I mean the original archos tech.”
“It was a prototype,” Ruth explained. “Freedman and Sawyer built it with the extra capacity to hold advanced secondary programs. They wanted to be prepared for making it better, and I think the Chinese designed this contagion in the same way. It doesn’t look like it’s done. It’s not ready.”
“Maybe they planned to upload new programs after we’re all sick. The way this thing affects people right now might only be the first stage of the attack.”
“But it’s empty coding,” Ruth said. “As far as I can tell, it’s just bulk.”
“You don’t know how far they’ve progressed,” Cam said like a challenge. It was heartless, but there was a part of him that believed every implication in his words. They’re smarter than you. Faster. More aggressive.
Her voice rose to match his. “The new plague would replicate even more rapidly if it was smaller,” she said. “It would function more cleanly and be less likely to…” Ruth faltered, but then her eyes flashed, responding to his cruelty. “It would be less likely to kill,” she said.
“Both of you,” Ingrid said. “Stop.”
Cam’s stomach was clenched like a fist.
“This isn’t accomplishing anything.” Ingrid stepped between them with her hands on their shoulders, connecting them, but Cam swung away to conceal his rage.
“I’ll get Bobbi,” he said.
“I’m sorry!” Ruth said. “Wait. I didn’t mean—”
They were caught by the sun. Shadows appeared beneath them and Cam’s gaze flickered toward the horizon. Across a sprawling, open valley to the north stood the thirteen-thousand-foot wall of the Never Summer Range. Those white peaks glared in the rosy-yellow light. Dawn was spectacular. There were no clouds, but the ever-present haze in the atmosphere acted like a dark prism, refracting and holding the light. Sunsets could be equally gorgeous. Cam and Allison had watched hundreds of these displays together, taking as much solace as they could find in their lives.
Earth was experiencing the first small effects of nuclear winter. It seemed more than possible that global warming had been checked or even reversed. Three years had passed since there were tens of thousands of power plants and factories burning around the world, nor was the total daily traffic any greater than perhaps the equivalent of pre-plague Miami.
At the same time, the atmosphere was dense with smoke and pulverized debris. Some estimates put the bomb in Leadville at sixty megatons. There had also been at least ten detonations on the other side of the planet. The Chinese had been brought to a stalemate in their other war in the Himalayas when India nuked the front lines of their own territory. India had been cautious to announce what they were doing. Nor did they harm the Chinese armies. Their bombings were a defensive maneuver, separating themselves from China with wide swaths of lethal, useless land — and so the Chinese turned their attention elsewhere.
It wasn’t unlikely that India’s victory in stopping the enemy had led China to accelerate their efforts in North America. If the Chinese had fared better in the East, maybe they wouldn’t have felt it necessary to compete directly with the U.S. in the race for weaponized nanotech.
Staring into the light, Cam shook off these thoughts before they paralyzed him. He was exhausted and irritable and he said, “Let me get Bobbi and we’ll eat. We need to get moving.”
“Cam, I—” Ruth said.
“Sweetheart, he knows,” Ingrid said. “Please. Both of you. Don’t fight. You both know you’d never say anything against Allison.”
The sunrise fluttered. There were two gigantic strobes beyond the horizon, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. The light was supernatural. It ate the sky, beating against the mountains like a silent wall that jumped up and vanished and jumped up again. Cam had seen it before. He bent and jammed his arm across his eyes — but even then, he was aware of more flashes. Those are nuclear, he thought.
“Get down!” Ingrid yelled as Ruth said, “Oh. God. Oh no. Oh no, oh God.”
There were planes in the darkness to the southwest. Jets. Cam opened his eyes. The sky sparkled with reflected sunlight and then a phalanx of bright shapes slashed overhead. Only then did the engines’ noise hit, dragging over them like a wave. Cam threw himself into the ground, no matter if the fighters had been moving too quickly to spot a few bodies on a hillside.
The shock wave will hit us soon, he thought.
Ruth joined him against the jeep, fidgeting with her M4. “Were those our planes?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where were the nukes? Grand Lake?”
“No. We would have burned.”
The sunrise crept over the highest points of the land like yellow paint, touching the earth and the grass with heat. Cam felt the air change as he lifted his head to track a distant howl. The sound reverberated from the mountains in the east. At least one jet was curling back. Or were there more?
Somewhere, Bobbi was yelling, and Ruth shouted, “We’re here! We’re here!”
Now the sky in the west trembled with new engines — the lower, deeper growl of prop-driven aircraft. Cam waited as Bobbi ran and joined them, shoving her hands against her face to reseat her goggles and mask. “What’s happening?” she cried.
Attack at dawn, Cam thought, peering past Bobbi’s shoulder. In the east, the sunrise changed again. It began to dim behind the immense, indistinct swelling of mushroom clouds. Then he glanced the other way. To the west, he recognized the stubby fuselage of the first plane to emerge from the night. Another followed close behind. They were Chinese Y-8 cargo planes, very similar to the American C-130 and used for the same purposes — to ferry equipment or troops into tight landing spaces. The fighters were an escort.
Wherever the nukes had landed, it was a long way off. The Chinese aircraft must have a different target. Cam could only think of one place that made sense.
“Those planes are headed for Grand Lake,” he said.