Plague Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

with that. Tabby wasn’t even pretty, really, her small face dominated by constantly chapped, puffy lips. But it was good to stay in practice.
    Hutch kept raving. “Why doesn’t the state have a networked medical database, that’s what I want to know.”
    “You guys talking about that epidemic?” Tabby asked.
    Cam shrugged again. “Hutch is pretty worked up.”
    “Hey, me too,” she said. “See the news this morning?”
    “Just the paper.” Hutch had brought it along, like he was going to read his horoscope on the chairlift. “Four dead.”
    “Thirty-eight,” Tabby said.
    That afternoon, Army and National Guard units began to enforce biological-warfare protocols across the Bay Area, grounding all flights and closing the freeways, instructing people to stay put, stay inside, windows shut and air-conditioning off. Cam’s mother and three brothers and year-old niece Violeta and everyone were inside the vast quarantine area.
    He got an open line on his seventh try, lucky seven, and talked with his mom for forty minutes until she made him hang up. She felt perfect, she said. She wanted him to pray for his brothers. She’d been trying to reach them with no success and could see smoke on the horizon and sometimes there were sirens—and the TV had shown maps of the East Bay marked red over Greg’s neighborhood in Concord.
    Jewish mothers were supposedly the worst, but Cam’s mom was an old Spanish Catholic lady and used guilt like a pocketknife. She had a blade for every occasion.
    The last time she spoke to her third son, she was gentle.
    Jesus had obviously had good reason, she said, for making Cam mi pajarito vagabundo —her wandering little bird—and she was glad he’d moved so far away. He had to stay there, because above all it was important to carry on the Najarro family line.
    Hutch wanted to drive east down into Nevada, and most people did, but Cam couldn’t bring himself to leave his phone. He heard nonexistent rings and even picked it up a few times. And two days later, as containment efforts broke down, rumors spread that the machine plague itself died at high altitudes. Some of the hundreds of sick people who’d dodged the roadblocks had headed for the mountains, and an army pilot had depressurized his plane to knock out an infected trooper who started acting dangerously. Reports conflicted as to what elevation was safe, but nothing could stop the savage exodus that began—nothing except the crowds themselves, hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers fighting through each other, through abandoned vehicles and wrecks and shrieking cripples.
    Nothing except thirty-plus inches of snow across the Sierra range, by then in its third day of blizzard conditions.
    * * * *
    Sawyer began to move, the blanketload of ice and snow between them, but Cam was still staring across the valley and whacked his shin on a rock and stumbled. They looked at each other. Then Sawyer nodded once, as if Cam had spoken. “I want to show you something,” Sawyer told him.
    “Let’s dump this in the reservoir first.”
    “Now, while no one’s here.” Sawyer abruptly lowered his end of the blanket to the ground. Cam bent to keep the snow from spilling. Sawyer frowned at him and said, “Why are you even knocking yourself out like this?”
    “A few of us will stay.”
    “Then let them worry about it.” Sawyer headed downslope.
    Cam followed, glancing at Erin again. She hadn’t moved from her warm slab of granite and probably wouldn’t for hours if left undisturbed. “We might have to come back to this peak,” Cam said. “We might need them later. It’s the smart thing to do.”
    Sawyer just grunted.
    Half a minute later Sawyer paused, then moved behind a boulder. Cam turned to see Doug Silverstein trudging along two hundred feet below them. Silverstein was six-four and had been skinny when they first met. Now he was a weird scarecrow, and looked utterly bizarre embracing a stiff, curly cloud of netting