Plague War

22

“I’m Ruth,” the lady told him, holding on to his hand for another moment. Whether she was proving something to him or to herself, Cam appreciated the effort.

He knew he was a monster and his hands were the worst. His right pinky had been eaten down to the bone at the first joint, and ruffles of scar tissue prevented him from bending that finger more than a little. Nerve damage had robbed him of sensation in his ring finger as well, leaving his grip uneven.

“You came across with him,” Ruth said, softly, carefully, but her intelligent brown gaze was unwavering.

One of the other civilians got loud, a dark guy with a dimpled block chin. The man’s eyebrows rose in a display of impatience. “Where is Mr. Sawyer? Is he all right?”

“He’s sleeping,” Cam said. “At least he was.”

“Sleeping!”

The officer, Hernandez, was more tactful. He said, “We need to see him, hermano.” Brother.

Cam felt a smile cross his lips again. Those three rolling syllables evoked so much that he had lost. “Let’s wait a couple hours, okay? He’s better when he’s rested.”

Hernandez glanced at the sun and then at the cabin.

“Really,” Cam said. “He’s not having a better day.”

“All right.” Hernandez turned to one of the men in camouflage. “Captain, why don’t we make these folks a solid meal and see if there’s any medical attention we can provide.”

* * * *

Hollywood’s name was Eddie Kokubo. Edward. But that was the only thing he’d lied about. This island could have sustained them all easily and the people here had been eager to help, eager for new faces, eager to rebuild any semblance of a community.

Cam had regained consciousness inside their home, in brilliant yellow lanternlight and the wretched noise of a woman’s sobbing, crushed somewhere beneath his own agony. There was space in his body only for a flicker of understanding— and the confused, recurrent terror that they would cook him.

He drifted in that place for days, surfacing irregularly but all too willing to retreat from himself.

Eighty-one hours after reaching elevation, he woke as they were changing his bandages, alone in a real bed. Dr. Anderson was so much like he’d pictured from Hollywood’s descriptions that he forgot they’d never met. Mid-forties, graying, Anderson wasn’t quite overweight, but his oval cheeks and stubby fingers gave him a look of contentment, which was reinforced by his slow way of moving. His wife, Maureen, was less gentle, a redhead with creases on her forehead and alongside her pointed nose.

“Doctor A,” Cam said.

Maureen jerked back at his croaking. Anderson merely paused and then looked up from Cam’s left foot. “You’re awake,” he answered, simple encouragement.

It went like that for another two weeks, Anderson babying him with calm pronouncements and broth, fighting the onset of fever with judicious amounts of aspirin and irreplaceable one-use chemical cold packs. Nearly half a square yard of Cam’s skin had been turned into open, oozing wounds, and Anderson kept him isolated for fear of infection.

They also wanted to see if he and Sawyer told the same story. They questioned him a bit at a time. Anderson was mostly accepting but Maureen probed for inconsistencies, her green eyes like jade, and his condition proved an excellent excuse to avoid answering too quickly. He would look away or take a deep breath, not needing to fake grief and exhaustion, thinking as best he could until he was convinced he had his half-truths straight.

He and Sawyer were the only ones talking.

Hollywood had bled out within an hour — and laid beside him now were two additional graves. Jocelyn Colvard and Alex Atkins had also crawled up that night, too long after Cam and Sawyer dragged Hollywood to the barrier. A stroke killed Jocelyn instantly but Atkins hung on for almost seven days, groaning, coughing, a restless coma that gave way to rasping death.

Cam would never know how Jim Price had fallen. Life wasn’t like TV, where hero and villain were inevitably, neatly brought together for a stylish mano-a-mano duel. It wasn’t even possible in this situation to determine which of them was the hero.

Price must have gotten stuck too far east up the valley. Driving out of Woodcreek had been the wrong choice after all, and Price and the rest had died for that decision.

Sawyer, as always, had been right even in the final extreme. The few people on this mountain had listened to the shoot-out in the valley and assumed there were good guys and bad — and by carrying Hollywood with them, Cam and Sawyer had cloaked themselves in the illusion of his friendship and his trust.

They’d fought, they said, because Price planned on making himself king. Price and his supporters had raided a gun shop in Woodcreek, and they stood up to him despite being outnumbered, and their friends died for it. Erin. Manny. Bacchetti.

Maureen softened as he described Hollywood’s days with them. “So Eddie finally got someone to call him that,” she said, lowering her eyes to the floor, and she traded stories of her own to help Cam through his healing.

In the next room Sawyer wept and Sawyer screamed, waking Cam, a constant disturbance, but Cam’s sympathy was for himself and for the dead and for these good, generous people.

Sawyer deserved to suffer.

Eddie Kokubo had invented greater reasons for fighting across the invisible sea, but Maureen believed that his first and most powerful motivation had been heartbreak. Eddie just hadn’t fit in here. The four adults were married couples, the youngest of them thirty-three, and the oldest of the children was only eleven. There had been another man but during the first spring he had finally succumbed to liver damage, and none of the other people who’d staggered up onto this mountain at the outset of the plague had lasted more than a week, devastated by internal injuries.

From the beginning, eighteen-year-old Eddie was never purposely excluded — except when the kids were caught up in games that were too silly for him; except when the adults did their real planning; except each night when everyone went to bed.

They were not completely alone. They saw smoke from cookfires on a bump to the northeast, and watched Cam’s group to the south through binoculars.

Cam had fretted at that, but didn’t ask. Did you see us butchering each other? When he got outside he peered southward himself. His favorite cliff was visible, along with several crests and ridgelines, yet the majority of that small peak canted west and south away from this mountain. He detected no hint of the stay-behinds, no smoke, no motion, but they would be saving fuel for the winter and in any case he spared few glances for his old home after being sure that even more of his lies were safe. The valley between hurt him too deeply.

Month after month Eddie had wasted batteries trying to raise them on the ham radio, wasted wood and grass making smoke signals. He built flag towers and laid out giant words in rock — and then one morning he was gone, leaving only a note signed with his bold, chosen name. Hollywood.

That night they lit a row of bonfires to alert the people across the valley or to help poor Eddie find his way home. His journey was both foolish and grand, of course — it was entirely adolescent — and yet he’d been vindicated beyond even his wildest imaginings.

Without Eddie, Sawyer might never have reached a radio.

* * * *

The two Special Forces medics examined Cam first in the semi-privacy of the cargo plane, while the other soldiers let the kids get in the way as they set up tents and dug a fire pit. If these corpsmen were less educated than Dr. Anderson, their supplies made up for it. They re-dressed the stubborn, swollen divot of rash under Cam’s right arm and gave him wide-spectrum antibiotics that they warned could cause diarrhea, Anderson agreeing that the risk of dehydration was better than relying on his wasted immune system to overcome the infection.

The medics didn’t even attempt to deal with his dental problems. Across the valley they had eaten all of the toothpaste they’d found on scavenging trips, and Cam had been chewing lightly on a cavity for months now. The bits of floss he’d shared with Erin and Sawyer, the few brushes they’d worn down to nothing, had probably kept him from developing worse trouble — but toward the end of his climb, nano infestations had destroyed his gums along the upper left of his mouth. His eyetooth and the molar behind it were loose, dying. Both would need to come out soon, and the gap would further deform the contours of his face.

When he emerged from the plane, Ruth and the other two scientists were questioning Maureen. They turned, however, and the loud one, D.J., immediately hammered at him: “Where is Sawyer’s lab? Do you know the street address?”

Cam had expected impatience, but this guy was nervous. All of them. Why? Not for a lack of guns.

And that wasn’t a question they should have asked.

Ruth quickly intervened, glaring at D.J. “I need to sit down,” she said. “I’m tired. Can we all just sit down and talk?”

Cam nodded, and they walked with D.J. and Todd to the downhill side of the road, not far from the planes or the cabin — or the two Marines who followed the scientists over. This berm of hardpack and crumbling granite had become Cam’s favorite spot; favorite because the kids came here often, noisily rooting for quartz; favorite because the views were west, away from Bear Summit.

Neither D.J. nor Todd was much for conversation, though.

D.J. didn’t know how to listen and Todd didn’t open his mouth, scratching and scratching at the blot of old scarring on his nose, looking anywhere except at Cam’s ruined profile.

“We’re going to beat the plague,” Ruth said, “I swear,” but Cam barely glanced up from the rock he’d picked up, a shard of milky quartz shot through with orange-black veins of iron.

Sunset would be unspectacular today, no clouds, the yellow sun falling to the edge of the world without changing in hue or strength. The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang.

“We were already close,” Ruth insisted. “Close enough to test out in lab conditions.”

He nodded. It was everything he wanted to hear. But his reaction to their arrival was not what he’d hoped, and he turned the gleaming white rock over again in his gnarled hands.

He had thought he was beyond self-pity, yet found himself avoiding Ruth’s eyes. She stared at him with the same open wonder as the children, and spoke with compassion and an astonishing deference, which affected him in ways that D.J.’s disgust did not. Because it was undeserved. Because disgust was all that he felt for himself, for his appearance, for his past.

This bright, daring woman would never have been so respectful if she knew the truth.

Few men would have considered Ruth pretty, but she was healthy and trim and dedicated. Cam wanted to like her, which was exactly why he couldn’t trust her. Not yet.

“You’re with the rebels,” he said matter-of-factly, just to get a reaction. It didn’t matter. Sawyer was theirs, unless somebody flew in and shot all of these soldiers. Jesus. No wonder they were in such a rush.

Ruth seemed startled, but didn’t shy away when he lifted his gaze. “What? No, we’re from Leadville.”

“Then you should know.”

D.J. interrupted. “This is bullshit. Just tell us.”

“You should know.” Cam didn’t have any idea where to find Sawyer’s lab, and he had been definite about that fact with his radio contacts. Sawyer refused to share the location until they came for him, until they treated him, until they took him wherever he would be well fed and protected and clean.

Cam had begged Dr. Anderson to call Colorado before he even told them his own name, identifying Sawyer first. Unfortunately, ham radio wasn’t like picking up the phone. The family who’d lived here kept a transceiver for recreation and for emergencies, and it had more-than-sufficient wattage to bridge the distance — but unless there was someone waiting at the right time on the right frequency, a broadcast was no more effective than a prayer. And these days, nearly all radio traffic was on military and federal bands. No one was monitoring amateur channels.

The International Space Station would have been an ideal relay, and the survivors here had spoken to the astronauts several times during the past year, so they began transmitting on a diligent, revolving schedule, certain that they’d intercept one of the rapid orbits overhead. But the ISS never responded.

They had also developed several contacts on the ground, both near and remote. Within ten days they’d raised some again. None could help. Most were just as helpless, stuck on scattered high points along the coast, while those in the Rockies had strived all this time to remain uninvolved with Leadville or its enemies.

Cam was aware of the slow-developing civil war along the Continental Divide. Hollywood had shared his limited knowledge of it, a distant curiosity, but those hostilities confused their attempts to reach across seven hundred miles.

The silence became an invisible sea in his mind, wide and desolate, into which they ventured each night when reception was best — but nights passed while atmospheric activity prevented them from sending a clear signal. Nights passed in which they chased down intermittent contacts only to be dismissed as a hoax or simply too far away.

Finally, three weeks after their arrival on this mountain, Cam and Sawyer spoke with a nanotech expert in Leadville named James Hollister. Open broadcasts could be intercepted by anybody on the same wavelength, however, and Cam had been prepared to see someone other than Leadville fly in— someone who might have heard only parts of their conversations.

“Seems like Hollister would’ve told you what we told him,” Cam said, and D.J.’s eyebrows rippled in anger.

“You’ll get your price,” D.J. said. “Whatever you want.”

“I want to know where you’re from.”

“Hey, come on.” Ruth tried to elbow D.J. with her cast and shrug at Cam at the same time. Busy lady. “We’re all on the same side here,” she said.

He remembered when he had played the peacemaker.

“James told us only Sawyer knew what city,” she explained. “We just hoped you were holding out. We weren’t exactly Miss Manners about it, though.”

A joke? Cam glanced up, but she’d turned to D.J. now, directing her sarcasm at him. Then Ruth and D.J. both looked over their shoulders, hearing footsteps that Cam’s bad ear perceived a moment later.

Maureen moved softly across the road behind them at a funny, sidestepping angle, avoiding the two soldiers nearby.

“He’s awake,” Maureen said.