Free Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

easy skipping motion.
    Leading everyone down from the peak, the two of them looked like a drunk penguin alongside a windup toy with a bad spring. They were the youngest members of the group, at nineteen and fifteen, and had a certain eagerness in common.
    Cam wanted to believe that was a good thing.
    Hollywood admitted he still felt some pain. If it wasn’t already mid-April, they might have let this rainstorm pass and given him more time...except California’s short wet season was ending. They couldn’t risk it. They’d all thought this winter was worse than normal, though Sawyer just laughed at Cam’s idea that the planet was cooling because all the cities and factories and everything were shut down. In fact, now that they knew it was still early in the year, the truth was this winter had been comparatively mild. This might be the last rain.
    Cam had encouraged Hollywood to exercise while he was still bedridden, leg lifts, simple arm motions. It helped flush the system of dead nanos. That Hollywood hadn’t known this, that he’d made the trek in good weather, was evidence that the people across the valley had rarely if ever scavenged below the barrier. They hadn’t needed to. They were rich. So Sawyer’s suspicion of a “cattle drive” must be groundless.
    It must be.
    The tension in Price’s hut had been as thick as the smoke stench and body odor, and surely didn’t help Hollywood’s recovery, yet Cam never suggested moving him upslope. Price’s group needed goading. He’d figured that if his regular visits made them uncomfortable, so much the better. He came by every day to talk about landmarks in the valley and the easier, bigger life on the other side.
    After just six days Hollywood insisted on walking again, gingerly, bent over like an old man and holding his arm close the way that a bird would tuck in a broken wing. The boy had clearly been rushing himself; rest was their only treatment for internal wounds; Cam should have said something but didn’t have the heart to keep him tied down. More than that, he wanted everyone to witness Hollywood’s tenacity.
    * * * *
    They fed him weeds and lichen and greasy, stringy scrub-jay, sweet crunchy grasshoppers. They made a great present of the last can of fruit cocktail.
    If he suspected, he said nothing.
    * * * *
    Sawyer had climbed back to the piles of rock at 10,000 feet and stood gazing up at them, his face lost behind his hood and mirrored ski goggles and a black racing mask.
    “We should stay together,” Hollywood said. “It’s safer,” and Cam felt someone bull past him to the front of the group.
    Price shouted, “Everyone sticks together!”
    Sawyer gave no indication that he’d heard, no sound, no movement. They couldn’t even tell where he was looking. Price flapped his arms and opened his mouth again, but Cam spoke quickly over Price’s navy blue shoulder. “So what do you think, what’s the air pressure?”
    “The barrier’s down at least five hundred feet, maybe six or seven.” The racing mask muffled Sawyer’s voice but he made no extra effort to be heard. “There’ll be pockets of high pressure, though, fluctuations. Suit up now.”
    One thing the resort lodge and cabins had had in abundance were goggles and other ski gear, gloves that pulled way up over jacket sleeves, fabric masks. Equipment designed to repel snow could not be proof against a sea of nanos, of course, but today it was especially crucial to delay and minimize infections.
    They had never gone more than three hours before feeling the machines inside them, at which point they’d always started back for safe altitude if they weren’t already climbing.
    Today, by that time, they would still be descending.
    According to their topography map, the other peak was seven and a half miles due north, down and across and up— and it would be impossible to zip straight over. The roads in the great valley ran mostly west and east, and Cam had estimated that a man on foot