Plague War

8

Chair 12 had an alien look against the broken mountainside. All of the lifts at Bear Summit were painted dark green, to blend with the environment, but nothing could soften the giant straight lines of these structures. Cam always felt an ambiguous thrill when he emerged from the gorge between the base of their peak and the highest point of the ski area. In another life this had been among his favorite places. Now it was strange and deadly.

The big metal box that housed the gears perched fifteen feet in the air, looming over a glass-faced attendant’s booth. Two hundred identical, evenly spaced chairs dangled from a cable that ran along both sides of a series of massive poles, plunging out of view beyond a ridge and the first pine trees of any height.

The chairs rocked against the gray sky, heralding the storm, creaking, weeping. Sometimes when the wind was right this sound had carried over their peak for hours.

Cam looked away and turned to Erin, close beside him. She was also staring. “Watch your feet,” he said. Nosing up from the hardpack were low veins of granite, mostly smooth but peppered with toe-catching nubs and hollows.

He tried not to think about the nanos that must be puffing upward with every step, unseen dust. Grasshoppers sprang out of their path constantly, the same tans and grays as the dirt and rock. There were more of them now than ever and their irregular bursts of motion made the ground seem unstable— constant flickers at the corner of the eye.

Sixty yards ahead, almost racing each other, Sawyer, Manny, and Hollywood marched three abreast. Erin had protested when Sawyer pulled away from her, but Cam was glad. They needed pacesetters. The bulk of the group seemed to be hanging back, and this ridge they were traversing was the easy part. They’d come just three-quarters of a mile, heading west into the damp wind.

Cam glanced over his shoulder. Bacchetti wasn’t far behind but everyone else actually seemed to be moving slower, faces tipped up, all eyes on the chairlift.

Lorraine caught her foot and flailed into the ground. Cam lost sight of her as most of them bunched around, yet he could see that she didn’t get up again. He started back to help and Erin said, “Cam, no.”

The storm clouds had muted both the sudden dawn and the few colors of this world. His polarized goggles, designed to highlight white-on-white features in the snow, made the forest below seem almost black. Then he pushed into the blues and reds of everyone’s jackets and saw that Price had pulled Lorraine’s ski mask down from her cheeks.

“Christ, what are you doing!”

“She has to breathe,” Price said, and Cam dropped to one knee and grabbed at her, tugging the mask up again.

Her eyes were wide behind her goggles and he thought she was hyperventilating. She knew how serious her mistake had been. A flap of jacket sleeve hung from her left elbow and on the rock between them was one thin looping spatter of blood like a signature, dark as oil.

“We’re still safe here!” Price said, and McCraney added, “There’s no way we’ve hit the barrier yet.”

“How do you feel?” Cam asked. “You think it’s broken?”

“Let her breathe!”

Lorraine shook her head and Cam took her wrist, feeling for any deformity beneath her sleeve, working all the way up to her shoulder. Then he shook his head too. “Do you hurt anywhere else? No? Good. Somebody bring us a hunk of ice.”

Price didn’t move but Doug Silverstein turned away.

“Hold on,” Cam said. “I need a few pieces of that rope.”

Silverstein handed him the entire bundle, then hustled uphill toward a field of snow.

Cam had two canteens in his backpack and removed one, dumping it over her arm, trying to flush out any nanos she’d embedded there. Price was probably right that they were above the ever-shifting barrier, but Cam had learned to be pessimistic.

“Who’s got a spare hood or something?” he asked.

He tied her sleeve shut, covering the rip with an extra pair of gloves, as Silverstein returned with too much ice.

“I thought this was to keep the swelling down,” Silverstein said. “She won’t even feel it through her jacket.”

“She will.” Cam met her eyes. “Hold it there as long as you can, okay?” Lorraine nodded and her mask worked, like the words thank you were percolating up. Cam stood and turned his back. “You’ll be all right,” he said.

* * * *

Sawyer hadn’t waited and Manny had gone with him, but Hollywood was standing right where Cam had last seen him, head bent over a crummy gas station map he’d folded down into one square. Erin hadn’t moved either, except to sit and rest.

Cam jogged through another burst of grasshoppers. He nearly ran. The urge to escape Price and the others was that strong. It might have been better if he’d stayed in the midst of the pack, herding them, but there was a limit to how much responsibility he would accept.

They would catch up. They had to.

Erin rose to her feet and Cam saw her glance past him at the others. She had always been very attuned to his moods. His and Sawyer’s. “Thanks for waiting,” he said, and gave her butt a swat, and she took his hand for a moment until their pace made it clumsy. His breath felt hot in the thick hair of his beard, matted against his cheeks and neck by his mask.

“I guess I’m still not convinced,” Hollywood said as the two of them approached. “It really seems like we’re gonna lose time heading out this way.”

Cam shrugged and kept walking. Hollywood turned to follow, lowering his map, and Cam was glad he left it at that.

There was no point in arguing anymore.

Ahead, trudging after Sawyer and Manny, Bacchetti reached a swath of loose, shattered boulders that spilled for a thousand feet from a hump of stone above Chair 12. Cam and his buddies had called this rock the Fortress of Solitude, after Superman’s secret hideaway. They’d had names for every gully and cliff on the mountain. Smoker’s Hole. The Cock Knocker. Paradise.

Cam entered the rock field with Erin and Hollywood exactly where Bacchetti had started across, but the markers here were hastily assembled piles rather than the neat stacks they’d erected at 10,000 feet. Twice he lost the trail. The uneven jumble was all granite, split into square-cornered blocks as small as a fist and larger than a car.

He paused to orient himself, unsettled, even frightened, and saw that Sawyer and Manny were already at the lift.

Chair 12 topped out at 9,652 feet, which meant Bear Summit had been able to advertise itself as the highest ski area in California. This was almost true. “B.S.,” as the locals called it, sat unquestionably lower than Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, which claimed a wedge of terrain up to 10,067, but that section of Heavenly lay a stone’s throw across the Nevada state border.

Cam had also skied bigger and better mountains. Extreme terrain at B.S. was limited to a half dozen ravines, but that was okay. He knew each run intimately, the best jumps, every powder stash. Working at a small-time resort also meant crowds were a rarity — and Bear Summit hired people that the ritzy, brand-name places in Tahoe wouldn’t touch. People like Cam.

“Watch it,” Erin said, over a sudden clack of rocks, and he glanced back to see her gripping Hollywood’s arm as the boy regained his balance.

Cam looked forward again and almost fell himself when the slab underfoot shifted. Then a ghost turned his head.

He expected to see grasshoppers but there was nothing there.

* * * *

Before the winter he turned thirteen, Cam Najarro had seen snow only in movies and TV shows. Until then, it was almost possible he’d never been farther above sea level than the tops of various roller coasters and Ferris wheels.

Money wasn’t the issue. Cam and his brothers were sixth-generation Californian, an eternity by white standards, and their grandpa had been the last to slave in the orange groves and garlic fields for lousy cash wages. Their father was a college graduate who had been promoted to district manager of an office supply chain before succumbing to early heart disease. He made a point of taking his family on weeklong vacations each year. He usually packed them into their Ford station wagon on holiday weekends as well. It was important to him that his sons understand there was more to the world than their own urban neighborhood. He did not want them limited in any way.

For much the same reason, he never allowed them to wear their older siblings’ hand-me-downs, though that would have meant less overtime for him. And if his decision made for birthdays and Christmas mornings of more underwear and socks than new toys, at least the Najarros looked good.

Their father treasured pride and appearance above all else.

For him, the highlight of each day had been to sip one beer in the living room of their three-bedroom home, which he invariably described to his own brothers as “right on the ocean.” In English. Always in English. Maybe Cam was never offended by Bear Summit’s half-truths because his father indulged in the same habit of exaggeration. The city of Vallejo, where they lived, actually sat deep inside the San Francisco Bay — and in any case, three blocks of commercial properties lay between them and the flat, listless green murk of the delta.

Their father loved the ocean like he loved them, almost formally, and from a distance. He did not fish or swim. He would have drowned since he never took off his shoes, much less unbuttoned his shirt. He just liked to look and listen and maybe walk in the sand. That alone was victory to him, having grown up landlocked in a cow town near Bakersfield.

He couldn’t have realized he was restricting his sons’ perspective in exactly the way he’d worked so hard to avoid. Their vacations ranged north or south for hundreds of miles, but always along the coast that he found so exotic — the Santa Cruz boardwalk, Disneyland, the Pismo Beach pier. He raised a generation of lowlanders who would keep their eyes and their own dreams facing west toward the Pacific.

Cam was the only one to break free.

* * * *

Hollywood quit moving as soon as they emerged from the rock field and waited for Price and the others, raising one arm, calling, “This way! You got it!” Erin hesitated, but picked up the pace again before Cam could grab at her. Good girl.

Almost nothing remained of the ski patrol shack that had sat alongside Chair 12—a concrete pad, steel struts they hadn’t been able to tear free. Every other scrap of material had been lugged up the mountain to build their huts, and looking at the raw foundation aroused an odd, melancholy satisfaction in Cam.

He’d done the best he could.

* * * *

His father only took them to the mountains to show up a coworker. A white coworker. The boys went berserk, sledding and hucking snowballs for ten hours a day while he took pictures of them having fun. Later in the week he insisted on splurging for ski rentals and lift tickets.

Cam was soon lost in the confusion of the bunny hill, although in retrospect getting separated had been at least 50 percent intentional. For someone with three brothers, even biking down to the store for milk was a competition — and Cam was always the odd man out. His two older brothers tended to gang up and his kid brother Greg was three and a half years younger, not much help and often a hindrance.

The other boys spent their morning bickering and showing off and started racing, which wasn’t so bright since they lacked the ability to turn. Or stop. Rocketing downhill in straight lines, they eventually smashed into a blond six-yearold and spent their afternoon on a bench in the patrol office.

Cam returned to the car late, shivering with excitement and cold — they were all wearing jeans — and happily infuriated his brothers with his tales of success. The next day they shunned him. That only gave him more time to get hooked.

He didn’t ski again until he was fifteen, after one of his friends got a driver’s license — after his father was in the hospital. The Najarro boys were expected to find part-time jobs upon reaching high school and Cam burned through his savings before February, buying better gear than he needed and fewer lessons than might have been useful. More than the new alpine environment, more than the senseless joy of hurling himself into gravity’s pull, he loved the individual nature of the sport, no opponents, no audiences, no scores kept. It was his alone.

First year out of high school, already a strong intermediate skier if not particularly smooth, Cam worked seven brain-numbing months in a phone center and was up for a minor raise when he quit in December. That season he skied sixty-one days at nine different resorts. Each night he had to ice his shins, bruised so deeply by his cheap boots that he walked like a cowboy. The nail on his left big toe fell off in March. But it was too late. He’d met powder hounds who thought it was the height of cool to brag about such bodily damage.

Cam found a job as a lift operator and later earned a spot on the maintenance crew just by showing up every day, which was a little too much to expect of most B.S. employees. The kids partied hard and it didn’t help that management had hacked wages and benefits to a minimum.

Next year B.S. gave the shaft to the ski patrol as well, and there were plenty of openings. He jumped at the chance.

* * * *

They reached Chair 12 as the clouds pushed overhead and the air got still. The ringing screech of the chairs quieted. It was almost like the lift had been waiting for them.

An omen. But what did the silence mean?

Cam experienced the opposite phenomenon, as if all that noise went straight into his head. As they passed downhill of the attendant’s booth and the heap of earth that had served as the off-load ramp when buried in snow, both he and Erin glanced up at the string of chairs. If only. But they kept walking.

The diesel for the backup engines hadn’t lasted a month.

* * * *

Most people drove east down into Nevada to escape the plague, including his friend Hutch, which of course proved to be the worst decision possible. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred souls left in Bear Summit when the newscasts said it might be safe at high altitudes — but by that point, the Sierra range was in its third day of blizzard conditions.

Cam stayed in his duplex at 7,500 feet with his TV and his phone, until after midnight on the fourth day when he woke to stinging pinpricks inside his left hand.

He called home one more time. All circuits busy.

The blizzard had stopped but the road was nine inches deep, deeper on either side of the single lane that some hero had plowed the day before. Navigating this narrow trail might have been too much for Cam if he hadn’t half memorized the highway’s constant turns, few dips, and blind corners. He drove the same stretch to work six days a week and, as the joke went, the mark of a true local was the ability to get up to the resort in any conditions, by Braille if necessary, scraping a fender against the iron reflector poles set every forty yards for the plows.

White road, white embankments. Trying to maintain his depth perception, he snapped his lights from low beam to high to low again, a crude sort of radar.

Odd silhouettes cavorted into his path, three bucking shapes with too many legs. Cam braked. His truck skidded and he rode down on the monsters. Deer, the things were just deer. They fled before him, giant eyes rolling in his headlights, until the embankment fell away on one side and they ran off. Downhill.

He passed two abandoned stalls, nearly getting stuck himself as he edged past the first.

The streetlamps of the condominium village threw a surreal pink glow across the low clouds, visible long before he inched into the valley. Then he saw lights on the ridge too among the luxury cabins. Were people staying put up there? The ridge was only a few hundred feet above the road…

He kept driving. He was not surprised to find only a few vehicles in front of the resort’s main buildings, transformed into white dunes by the snow, but it confused him to see just fifty cars parked farther up beside the mid-mountain lodge.

It was dark here, totally black when he shut off his headlights. Somewhere between the condominiums and the resort, a power line had gone down. He didn’t think to worry about it. The mid-mountain lodge sat at 7,920 feet and the hideous itch in his hand would not stop, new tendrils worming through his wrist.

He stumbled inside and found seventy-one people. Of them, he recognized only Pete Czujko and two guys who’d worked in the cafeteria. The rest were tourists, vacationers. Outsiders. They were all infected, wild with panic and the freakish pain and desperate to figure out how to get higher.

Bear Summit’s small fleet of snowmobiles and Sno-Cats were gone. Diesel generators, rescue gear, the CB radio and patrol walkie-talkies, everything. Even the gift shop had been gutted. The chairlifts could operate at two-thirds speed on auxiliary diesel engines, yet whoever rode off with the Sno-Cats had also made a mess of draining the fuel from Chairs 11 and 12, punching holes into the bottoms of the tanks, wasting what they couldn’t carry. While Cam had hidden in his cabin with his fear and his grief, others had worked to ensure their survival.

The missing locals. They must have seen that a majority of the vacationers and other refugees would end up here, and decided they’d be better off in the cabins along the ridge above the condominium village. Some of those homes would be empty, the fat cat owners trapped below the snowline. With propane tanks and well-stocked cupboards, those cabins were ideal for long-term survival — except that the ridge topped out at 8,100 feet. If the plague rose any higher, the locals had nowhere left to go.

Cam might have been over there himself if he’d been more popular. But there wasn’t anything to do but start hiking.

The new snow was hip deep and the temperature, with wind chill, hovered just under twenty degrees, though it was warming as a high-pressure front moved in. Uphill lay only darkness. Three people refused to leave the lodge. Several girls, Erin and her friends, wore only slacks and stylish little cowboy hats. There were nine children, a couple in their seventies, an enormous woman named Barbara Price who simply would not put down her show-quality beagle, three Korean tourists able to communicate only in pantomime.

But there wasn’t anything to do but start hiking.

* * * *

Hollywood still had his map out yet didn’t say anything more, which Cam appreciated, and somehow he’d gotten Price and the rest to hurry up. No one was too far back when Cam and Erin quit following the ridge westward.

Scoured by the wind, the crest of the ski run was soft barren dirt and gravel. They walked through parallel tracks of deep, sliding prints left by Sawyer, Manny, and Bacchetti.

Hollywood had come a different route, powering straight up to their peak, and probably would have done so even if he’d known the area. That was just his nature. But they had learned that it was equally fast — and safer — to hike out to the resort and use the wide-open runs and the jeep trails that in winter served as Sno-Cat tracks. When there was enough snow they’d skied down, of course, on telemark equipment since the boots were soft enough to walk in, the skis light enough to carry back up.

Delicate flowers clung to the hillside, vibrant red pride-ofthe-mountain, white phlox. Cam went out of his way to avoid stepping on them and felt encouraged.

He could see the mid-mountain lodge now, a pine shake shoe box far below. Much closer, Bacchetti had caught up with Sawyer and Manny as they cut a steady diagonal across the slope. Then the rain finally hit, reducing the three figures ahead to phantoms of green, blue, and blue. Were they waiting? No, he saw Manny leap over a dry jag that would soon fill with water. Against Cam’s hood, the patter of drops sounded like words.

He shouldn’t have been surprised to stumble over Tabitha Doyle. A bulge in the hill tended to funnel hikers into the easiest route, and he’d passed directly through this low spot twenty times or more.

Sawyer must have kicked Tabs because she’d moved, the familiar fetal position uncurled into a spread-eagle pose, her distended jaw gaping now through the stained orange hood of her ski patrol jacket. Cam’s eyes were drawn as always to the clawing hands. Dissolved in a way that bacteria and the elements alone could never have done, Tabitha’s finger bones seemed to have melted in several places.

* * * *

Of the sixty-eight people who hiked up from the lodge into darkness, sixty-five escaped the machine plague even though it rose with them as the storm cleared. They experienced burn out, reinfection and burn out again as the air pressure fluctuated.

One man just sat down. Another blundered off despite their yelling, the rocking beam of his flashlight visible below them for an eternity. Barbara Price lost a paint can of blood when the whimpering beagle chewed open her face and hands.

Halfway up, a sliver of moon cut through the clouds. They were carrying the children by then and Barbara Price had collapsed four times, and the Koreans were singing a repetitive curse that Cam began to think he could understand.

Huddling out of the wind with two nameless shadows at the base of Chair 11’s ninth pole, slumping against the frosted metal, he had not immediately recognized the angry, high-pitched buzzing that reverberated up the hill. Snowmobiles. Headlights appeared in the east, nearly level with him, a swarm of false stars occulted by trees and bursts of snow. The missing locals. They had abandoned the luxury cabins and made their way around the valley’s ridges, wallowing in the powder, defeated by the mountain’s steepness until they reached the flat, open trails of the Sno-Cat tracks within the ski area.

He was too full of hurt and cold to feel anything more when an avalanche snuffed out the roaring convoy.

* * * *

Tabby’s bent skeleton was like a gatekeeper. She’d survived the collapse of a snow cornice known as High Wall and died alone here, two hundred yards above the other locals, almost certainly the last person to fall short of elevation. So close. In the safety of his hut, warm with Erin, Cam often regretted never burying Tabs — but below the barrier it would be idiotic to waste the time.

He helped Erin over the creek bed and glanced back for the others. One shape had fallen to his knees. McCraney. Cam recognized the striped jacket. He watched to make sure he stood up, and Erin touched his hip.

Her eyes seemed colorless behind the bronze visor of her goggles, yet her anxiety was obvious. Not even Sawyer pretended to be unaffected by this part of the mountain.

They held hands again as they descended.

The thirty-one snowmobiles hadn’t rusted or lost their sheen at all, except where unearthed trees had caused dents or the machines had bashed against each other inside the rumbling fist of snow. The glossy metal shapes looked like the parts of a shattered merry-go-round, red and purple and blue, thrown among the cracked trunks and groping root fingers of dead pines.

Cam and Pete Czujko had rifled through the frozen corpses long before spring thaw, digging into pockets and backpacks and saddlebags. Later they’d returned to drain the oil/gas mix that these two-stroke engines used for fuel. The bodies were still intact then, although Cam had seen a snapped elbow, a badly dislocated neck, and assumed the rest had breaks beneath their clothing as well. He’d guessed right. Fragments of bone and unmatched limbs now lay scattered everywhere.

What disturbed him most was the final frenzy of the nanos. Until a host body lost some minimum of temperature, the damned things continued to multiply.

Tabby’s melted hands were not the worst, nor was the fused rib cage of another skeleton. One little skull, likely a child’s, had a lopsided jack-o’-lantern stare. Its teeth were impossible, leaning out like barbed fangs, and the left eye socket had been eaten away to nearly twice normal size.

* * * *

The sixty-five people who reached safe altitude were joined in the icy dawn by two survivors from the snowmobile convoy — Manfred Wright, budding star on the regional junior ski team, and a sheriff’s deputy bleeding from her lungs.

But sixty-seven was quickly reduced to fifty-two as those with the worst internal injuries died, including all except one of the children. The nanos had destroyed their smaller bodies. Barbara Price would likely have survived her bite wounds, barring infection, but nano infestations in her cheek had spread to her sinuses. She could scream no louder than a moan, and lasted six days. Her husband Jim was dangerously silent for weeks.

At first they tried living at the top of Chair 12, cramming into the patrol shack, but waves of nanos repeatedly forced them to climb again no matter the time of day or the weather.

Exposure shrank their number to forty-seven, many weakened by altitude sickness and despair. Dehydration was a threat to them all and wasted a diabetic woman.

Cam and Pete found themselves in leadership roles by default. They were wearing uniforms. A man named Albert Sawyer also pointed out that they must be more familiar with the area and its resources than anyone else. Sawyer was a real pragmatic. It was his idea to wait for the next storm to raid the lodge, no matter that they were mad with hunger. It was his idea to use the nanos’ only flaw to their advantage.

Chair 12 made every difference in their fight to live. They patched the fuel system, then dared to ski down to the main lodge and fired up Chair 4, relaying cans of diesel across the mountain — and food and gear and lumber.

By spring they were fairly well established. Accidents, pneumonia, and a suicide had compacted their population to forty, which made things easier. With rare exceptions, the survivors were young and determined. They understood this world now. Cam even had a girlfriend. Erin Coombs might never have attached herself to him if she hadn’t mistaken his name and the hue of his skin as Italian, but she must have felt committed to her decision. By then, the camp was already dividing.

Jim Price rallied support for himself, like a politician, with a series of proposals. His first was work assignments, popular because most people felt they were doing more than anyone else. He organized a sing-along and a “remembrance meeting.” He interceded in arguments, in discussions, in everything.

Two of the Koreans had been among the first casualties, and the third was their first suicide. The only black man lasted through their efforts to build the huts, but laid open his calf with a grazing touch of a chain saw and died of blood poisoning. After that, Cam and Amy Wong were the sole non-Caucasians.

It shouldn’t have been important. Too much of the human race had been decimated to worry about cosmetics…yet Cam suspected his skin color was another reason why so many people turned away from him to Price.

How many cultures had been lost forever? If they did reclaim the planet, what would humanity look like?

There wasn’t time to brood. The canned goods faded fast and they spent their days scavenging, and found plenty to eat if they would only work for it; confused, crippled rodents; one deer; lush new spring greens sprouting from the earth. No one even whispered of the bodies down in the avalanche field, which rotted away with the melting snow — and they’d buried all of their other dead. By summer, however, they’d picked the mountain so clean that nothing ever grew there again. And as winter returned, their only option was to raid below the barrier on a regular schedule.

They ate Jorgensen first.