Jeff Carlson - Plague War

In a stand of mountain hemlock, ants dropped out of the pine needles overhead like cinders, still alive. In another place Cam saw a yellow page from a phone book, just a single page, carried up from God knew where. Then they walked into a hundred yards of garbage strewn through the trees, mostly plastic bags and cellophane. It was new. The breeze was already pushing a lot of it free and one bag †oated down alongside him as they walked.

The blast must have dispersed weird pockets of debris across North America. Cam wondered †eetingly about the ants in the trees. He’d ‚gured it was a local colony that got swept up but maybe they were something else, like a desert species. The fragmented niche ecologies he’d seen everywhere might be facing yet another upheaval as new insects were dropped into the mix over hundreds of miles.

It would be worse on the other side of the bomb. The eastward †ow of the weather would bend most of the dust, garbage, and bugs back over and around the explosion. Where the fallout didn’t kill everything, the insects would begin a new and evermore savage ‚ght for dominance.

There was no reason to care in the short run. Cam had learned very well to distract himself, but he couldn’t escape the aching in his feet, knee, hip, hand, or neck for more than a few minutes at a time — or his concern for Ruth. They hiked. They hiked and found a sunlit meadow where the taller weed grass had been †attened in arcs like crop circles. Cam panicked again when his left hand began to throb suddenly, but after a few minutes the vaccine seemed to beat down the plague, and Ruth and Newcombe seemed unaffected. It was just a †uke infection.

* * * *

They slept like the dead a good mile up the rising slope of the next mountain. They were all so tired that Newcombe nodded off on guard duty, something that had never happened so far as Cam knew. He opened his eyes to a black sky shot full of stars. The aspirin had worn off and he was dehydrated and cold, and possibly his subconscious had rebelled at the sound of two people breathing deeply when there should have been only one.

They were tucked into a crevice in a hill of granite, afraid of more nuclear strikes. Cam knocked over an empty food can and a full canteen when he sat up. Damn it, he thought.

They were dangerously low on water. They’d seen one pond but it had been hazy with bugs — and they were running out of food, too. Those basic needs wouldn’t go away and Cam frowned to himself in the dark, counting through the miles left to return to the barrier. At daybreak he’d look for a creek while Ruth and Newcombe ate and packed and took care of her feet, changing her socks and applying the last of the ointment if she’d blistered again. He ‚gured that even with a short nap at lunch, they should be able to reach the mountaintop before the sun went down again.

But there were planes at twilight. Drowsing in his sleeping bag, Cam mistook the sound for a memory. So much of what he recalled and expected were nightmares.

The menacing drone grew louder.

“Wake up,” he said to himself. Then he shifted his sore body away from the rock and spoke again, setting his glove on the other man’s legs. “Newcombe. Wake up.”

Both of his companions moved. Ruth sighed, a soft, melancholy sound. Newcombe rolled over and touched his hand to his mask and coughed. Then the soldier jerked and turned his face toward the gray sky. The valley was still dark, the dawn hidden behind the mountain above them. Cam noticed that Newcombe’s gaze also went to the western horizon. He’d thought it must be a trick of the mountain peaks, re†ecting the noise somehow, but the aircraft were de‚nitely coming out of the west.

“What do we do?”

“Stay put,” Newcombe said.

Their hole in the rock wasn’t perfect but it would have to be enough. The planes were just seconds away. Newcombe found the radio and turned it on, then dug out his binoculars. Cam regretted giving his own to Mike. They watched the rim of the horizon as Ruth struggled into a sitting position between them, her naked cheek imprinted with red lines where she’d lain unconscious against her pack.

“You okay?” Cam asked quietly. She nodded and leaned against him. Her warmth was sisterly and good and for once he was able to let it be just that.

The engine noise spilled into the valley, a deep monotone thrumming. An instant later, brilliant new stars appeared over the peaks to the southwest. Metal stars. The planes lit up like ‚re as they †ew eastward into the sunrise, gliding smoothly out of the night. Cam counted ‚ve before another batch came into view. Then the night sparkled with a third group much farther south, all of them coming out of the dark western sky.

This has nothing to do with us, he realized with a dull sense of shock. For so long, everything they’d seen in the sky had been hunting them. This was something else. He didn’t know what, but it was an event like the quakes and the blast wave, too large to easily understand.

Newcombe also scanned up north, then turned back the other way. “Write for me, will you?” He didn’t lower his binoculars as he fumbled at his chest pocket with one hand.

“Yeah.” Cam took the notepad and pen.

“They have American markings,” Newcombe said. “C-17 transports. Eight, nine, ten. They have an AC-130 gunship with them. Repairs on the fuselage. I also see a commercial 737. United Airlines. But there are six MiGs, too.”

He said it as one word, migs , and Cam said, “What’s that?”

“Fighters. Russian ‚ghters. Christ. It looks like American planes with Russian escorts, but there’s also a DC-10 that has Arabic writing on it, I think.”

“Let me see,” Ruth said.

“No.” Newcombe turned north again and continued to gaze up the valley as he ‚ddled with the radio. There was just static. Cam didn’t know if that was still because of atmospheric disturbance or because their transceiver only worked on Army bands that the planes wouldn’t use — or because the planes were running silent.

“I know a little Arabic,” Ruth said. She reached for Newcombe’s shoulder but he shrugged her off. Cam was the only one to see two of the three groups change direction, the sun winking on their undersides as they banked away to the south.

“Now there are some north of us, too,” Newcombe reported. “An old Soviet tanker. Three transports. Two ‚ghters I don’t recognize.”

“A refugee †eet,” Ruth said. “They took whatever they could ‚nd. But what’s on the other side of the Paci‚c? Japan? Korea, too. There were U.S. military bases there. That could be where our planes came from.”

“I think they’re landing,” Cam said. He pointed south, where the two farthest groups had already dwindled to pinpoints. Some of the glinting dots circled up into a holding pattern as others disappeared, merging with the ground. How? There were hardly any roads above ten thousand feet. Days ago, Newcombe had explained that C-17s were designed to land in very short spaces if necessary, but the 737 and the ‚ghters would need runways of some kind.

Much closer, the third group had also leaned into a long easy curve, sweeping northward up through the valley. They would soon pass overhead and the vibrations of the engines ran ahead of the planes like another quake, trembling through rock and forest. Cam stared up at the machines. Then he had another thought. Maybe they were landing below the barrier wherever there were roads, as close to safety as possible. If they touched down with their cabins held at low pressure, the crews and passengers could line up at the doors, then crack the seals and run for elevation.

“I don’t like this at all,” Newcombe said. He gave Ruth the binoculars and immediately began to worm out of his sleeping bag. He grabbed the top and rolled it up, getting ready to go.