Plague Year (11 page)

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.