Jeff Carlson: Plague War

But it worked. Newcombe dragged on the steering wheel and the truck hooked even further to the side, its engine spluttering. The Champion slid away and drifted a few yards. All around the boat, the surface clunked with charred, waterlogged bits of lumber.

Newcombe killed the engine. He got out of the truck and slogged over cautiously, dirty and wet while they were dry. Cam helped him into the rocking boat and said, “Nice work, man. You do nice work.”

“Got a little sketchy there for a minute,” Newcombe said. That was all. Still, Cam sensed a chance to rebuild everything between them, rather than allowing Ruth’s mistrust to continue to push them apart. He could make a new beginning. But he wasn’t here for Newcombe. He turned from the other man and glanced at Ruth and then past her at the cluttered sea, wanting more than anything to talk to her alone.

He didn’t want to ‚ght. Every minute in this place was enough of a struggle without losing her.

* * * *

The motor echoed strangely. The sound yammered back at them from every housefront but raced away into every gap, bouncing in and out of broken windows and open doors as they eased through residential streets.

Newcombe drove with the 260-horsepower Mercury throttled down. The Champion wouldn’t go any slower than ‚ve miles per hour and coasted effortlessly. Too often they bumped and bounced into tight spots, the propeller grinding once on a submerged car and then blasting through a door window in a slosh of bubbles and glass. Several times they scratched against drifts of dead brush and lumber and garbage. The ruins formed an incredible maze. Cam used it as best he could, always looking east for a way out. Sometimes that was easy. The †ood had come from that direction and knocked down fences and cleared yards, often leaving bars of debris and mud on the lee side of the buildings — the west side. Streets that ran east tended to have been swept clear.

They had to know if they could boat up the river, even if it meant another argument. Newcombe must have realized what Cam was doing, but none of them had any interest in going west and the two men worked well together. Once they struggled to lift aside a snaking mess of utility lines. Once they took turns leaning out of the boat to kick away a long sheet of aluminum. There were still odd little things †oating in the most stagnant corridors, a toy farmhouse, shoes, a perfectly sealed Tupperware container blotched on the inside with mold.

The sun †ickered everywhere, clean acres of light on the dirty sea. It shimmered in patches of chemicals. It sparked on glass and metal and lit up every scratch in the lens of Cam’s goggles, turning his head, making shapes that weren’t there.

Again and again they were caught in delicate threads. Hundreds of strands †agged out from thousands of spiders. Newcombe accelerated suddenly after they idled through the collapsed shell of a home and found themselves within arm’s reach of a wall full of silk and white nests, all of it packed with tiny brown bodies. The water not only protected the spiders from the ants. It also kept this region cool enough that they were probably never affected by the plague, even in summer, and Cam wondered again at the niche evolution they kept seeing. It seemed to him that the remnants of the ecosystem were pulling further apart rather than working toward any new cohesion, but he was too tired to think how it might end.

Moving east was a waste of time. After forty minutes Cam and Newcombe were ‚nally able to study that shore through binoculars. What they could see of it was an impassable mud slope, raked through with dozens of narrow trickles of water. It made the decision for them. North.

An hour later Newcombe chose a spot to run the Champion aground. They sped into the cramped swamp beneath a massive highway interchange where the boat would be hidden. Newcombe unlatched the motor’s cover and Cam helped him dump more than thirty canteens of water onto the engine, dousing its heat. There was no sense leaving a bright heat signature at the shoreline, pointing the way they’d gone. Cam ‚gured they’d covered a little less than twice the distance they would have hiked on foot, but that was partly the point — to give Ruth every opportunity to rest. She had even lain down for a while against the coil of rope at the nose of the deck, totally withdrawn.

They needed to talk about what she wanted him to do.

* * * *

They could have had the chance. As soon as the three of them cleared a fence and made their way onto the Interstate again, Newcombe called a halt and knelt, checking his watch. He quickly reorganized his pack. On the outside were mesh pockets where he kept one of their little radios, his binoculars, and a squeeze bottle of gasoline. Now he tucked away the radio and binoculars and put jars of maple syrup into those pockets instead, preparing to range off by himself and set more food traps.

Cam stopped him. “Wait.”

“I’ll catch up.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Cam said, aware of Ruth’s gaze switching back and forth between them. Her posture had changed as soon as it became obvious what Newcombe was doing. She’d stood a little straighter, but now that bent, worried tension returned to her shoulders again.

Cam felt badly. He wanted to reassure her, but this was more important. “We can’t set any decoys on this side of the water,” he said. “Not right away. Think about it. When you put them all over downtown, the swarms couldn’t have formed much of a pattern. But if Leadville notices the worst swarms are moving north, they’ll realize we’re causing it.”

Newcombe stared at him. “Okay.”

“C’mon,” Cam said to Ruth, gently touching her good arm. She looked at his hand and then raised her face to his, her busy eyes trying to read him. He nodded once. It was the best signal that he could give her, hidden in his goggles and mask.

They walked. They walked and every minute it got harder. Stress and fatigue poisons left them sluggish and the sameness of the hike was wearing in its own way, the endless cars, the endless dead. Newcombe was the ‚rst to see the few spots of clouds in the west. Cam hoped it would thicken up. A good overcast would be some protection against satellites and planes. Any drop in temperature would slow the bugs, too. More important, their jackets and hoods were individual sweat shells. They were always dehydrated.

It was close to noon before they went to ground, much later than they wanted it to be. At last they found a wide, dry canal that ran beneath the highway. Five minutes later there was an explosion in the distance like a sonic boom.

“Oh, please, God, no,” Ruth said, lifting her head from where she’d curled up to nap.

“You think they tagged us?” Cam asked Newcombe. The soldier only shrugged. They gazed out from their hole in silence. Cam made Ruth drink as much water as she could hold. They all had salty chips and tuna ‚sh and Newcombe quickly updated his journal, looking at his watch twice again. The man took real comfort in the time and date, Cam had noticed. He supposed it made sense. Those numbers were reliable in a way that nothing else could be.

Finally, Ruth and Newcombe settled down to rest again. A pack of helicopters swept through the valley, unseen — a distant rolling thunder. But there was nothing more. The hunters never came closer.

* * * *

“Don’t leave me,” Ruth whispered, her small hand on Cam’s shoulder. He turned and opened his eyes to darkness, unsure if he’d been asleep or only in and out of waking. He wasn’t surprised to ‚nd her leaning over him.

He felt the hair rise on his arms and neck. It was as if he’d expected her and he realized he’d been having his nightmare again, the same nightmare of Erin bleeding out as ten thousand grasshoppers covered the sun. The sky beyond the canal was black, like in his dream, and the two of them were positioned exactly as he and Erin had been, one on the ground, the other kneeling, except their positions were reversed. In his dream he’d been in Ruth’s place, staring down at his lover as she drowned in her own eroded lungs.