7th Sigma (18 page)

“Exactly. Sometimes things aren't black and white and sometimes strictly following orders is the wrong thing to do.” He pulled an envelope out of an inside pocket and handed it to Kimble.

“Not another court order?”

“No. It's your GED results. You averaged 765.”

Kimble blinked. “Uh, is that good?”

“Out of 800. You needed to average 450 to pass. You're in the top five percent.”

“Congratulations,” said Lieutenant Durant, and she kissed him on the cheek.

For the second time that morning Kimble turned bright red.

11

Broken Glass

Ruth wanted a small greenhouse so that she could grow vegetables in the winter like Mr. Covas, so, one sunny day in late March, Kimble floated down the Rio Grande on a plywood deck over bundles of netted plastic soda bottles. Mr. Covas' cousin, Julio, accompanied him.

They'd entered the river between the rubble of Algodones and Bernalillo, moving across a bug-free stretch of the Santa Ana Pueblo. Julio's unmarried sister, Patrice, drove them and the disassembled raft by wagon.

“In a week, then, right?”

“
Seguro
,” said Julio, “where the Puerco joins the Grande.”

The river widened to a lake where the old 550 bridge had collapsed. Flood detritus, helped by beavers, had plugged gaps, but the bugs still mined the metal from the dry side, following the embedded metal reinforcing rods and wire mesh like the veins of ore they were. Occasionally they'd succeed too well and a part of the dam would collapse, but then the beavers would drop trees into the water and guide them across the gap.

The dry parts of the dam were covered by an iridescent mass of aluminum, steel, copper, and crystalline blue.

“I've never seen so many bugs,” said Kimble.

Julio laughed. “Wait until you see downtown.”

They slid the raft over the dam at its lowest point and ran down the tumble of rapids to the river below.

They spent their first night on a sandbar near Corales, cooking with driftwood. The sandbar was less than a foot above water level and before the sun had dropped over the horizon, they'd made sure it was clear of any bugs.

“This bar wasn't here when we came five years ago,” Julio said. “The river's always changing.”

In the morning, they waded across to the west bosque and cautiously moved up the banks toward old Corrales, but the bugs were too thick.

“It's the old steel erosion bars.”

Kimble raised his eyebrows.

“They were girders welded into crosses, no, that's not right, more like axis, like in math? X, Y, and Z? They put these through the brush, near the old embankments, to catch stuff during the floods. It looked like those obstructions they put on the Normandy beaches to keep troops off. There was steel cable strung between them. I think that's why the bugs are still here.”

“Perhaps metal debris, too?” suggested Kimble. “Washed into the river during heavy rains and piled up here.”

“Could be.”

They retreated to the raft and headed farther downstream. The dam and lake formed by the collapsed Alameda Bridge got them past the bugs. The lake had flooded the bosque, submerging the erosion control beams there. Julio and Kimble floated the raft up to the old recreation area, a green area where the most metal had been vinyl-covered steel park benches. They beached the raft and threaded their way past an old strip mall into the old residential areas.

Bugs make a mess of frame houses. They go for metal window frames and metal roofs first, but there's so much metal used: nails, anchors, galvanized wall plate and joist hangers, and even the chicken wire fastened to the siding to anchor the stucco. Sometimes the houses remain standing, a fragile honeycombed froth of a building, but more often they come down, collapsing onto their slabs or into their crawlspaces. The bugs take longer to mine out the reinforcing rods in the slabs and foundations.

But sometimes the collapse is slow and surprisingly gentle.

That's where they looked for the glass panes they needed.

It was sweaty work. They needed the best light to make sure they didn't accidentally step on a bug, so they tended to work in the hottest part of the day, while the sun was high. They moved the debris cautiously, lest they uncover chunks of copper plumbing or conduit still being consumed by the bugs. They averaged a few panes of glass a house, doing better with vinyl-framed windows. If it was an old metal casement window, the edges of the glass tended to be uneven—not broken, but eaten where the bugs went right through the glass to get at the metal. Provided the pane had a large enough expanse of glass, they took these anyway.

They managed to pull several chunks of heavy glass from a bank, useless for window glazing because of its thickness, but almost as good as Jemez obsidian for flaking into cutting edges.

The second day, pushing aside some cinder block, Kimble uncovered a home security system. There was metal. But worse, an old sealed lead-acid battery shorted as he shifted the material above. The sudden surge in EMF was almost as bad as stomping a bug. He threw himself sideways, rolling across shards of glass and stucco and scrambled away as the sudden buzzing of descending bugs rose to a shriek.

He got down the bank without any bug burns but he was bleeding from several cuts.

Julio, walking back from taking a load of glass down to the bank, saw the incident from a safe distance. “Wow. You moved before I saw anything.”

“Heard 'em,” said Kimble.

Julio looked puzzled.

“That high-pitched sound they make. Like, oh, super high crickets.”

“Huh. I don't hear that. I hear the buzzing when they fly.”

Kimble shrugged.

Julio helped him clean out the cuts. “Young ears, I guess. You never used an MP3 player, I bet.”

They had to abandon a small pile of their salvaged glass panes near
that
house.

Water flowed over the top of the Alameda dam and fell six feet straight down so they spent most of the next morning portaging glass around the dam. It would've taken half an hour if they could've stuck to the shoreline, but the bugs were there in droves and they had to go inland a bit to find a safe path.

This time of year, the water's source was snowmelt and it felt like it, but after hauling the raft and glass around, Kimble let himself fall full length into the shallows.

“We had good luck near Montaño, last time,” said Julio.

The bridge at Montaño had not become a dam. The main span had fallen one section at a time and the first section had sunk deep into a sandy area of the riverbed, leaving most of it above water. This had allowed the bugs to eat it to rubble and floods had pushed the chunks downriver. The water rushed through the gap and down a set of rapids. They had no choice but to run it. Bugs heavily infested both banks along the old thoroughfare, so portaging the glass around was more dangerous than the river.

Though the run down the rapids took less than ten minutes, they spent half the day packing the glass between layers of dried reeds and lashing them securely to the middle of the raft. They caromed off rocks twice and Kimble stopped worrying about the glass and instead worried about the raft itself, but despite the shaking, they reached the still water below the rapids with both glass and craft intact.

The houses closest to the river in this part of the city had been large, with correspondingly large lots. The yards, once xeriscaped or green with grass, were now brush and weeds and young woods, fortunately threaded with game trails.

“The deer came back with a vengeance, and the coyotes, and the rabbits,” said Julio. He set some snares in the rabbit runs. “But you really have to watch out for the dogs.” Which is why they both carried spears.

They hit the jackpot working a street farther from the river than Julio had reached on his previous trip.

“Looks like it was a solarium.”

On the south side of a large adobe house—almost a mansion—an exterior wall had been filled, ceiling to floor, with double-glazed windows, admitting light. The panes, two feet by three, had been set directly in the adobe. When the metal roof had been eaten, the rains had turned the exposed wall to mud, sloughing and sagging gently over the years. The glass had settled with the wall and was embedded now in loose dirt and rotting straw, overgrown with bindweed and goat-heads.

It took them less than half a day to pull more intact panes than they could carry on the raft and, though they once had to drive off a pack of feral dogs by throwing rocks, the worst thing they had to contend with was the quarter-inch barbs of the puncture vine.

“I hate goat-heads!” Kimble repeated for the twentieth time.

Julio nodded in agreement.

They abandoned some of their previously salvaged glass in favor of the consistently sized panes from the solarium. When the cargo had been padded and packed, the water, previously a good six inches below the deck now lapped at the wood.

That night they ate rabbit on a sandbar near the old Rio Grande Nature Center. The weather had warmed and the mosquitoes were bad but they burned half-dried cattails and the smoke kept the gnats and mosquitoes away.

The next day they spent two hours getting the raft over the dam formed by the old Interstate Bridge. The water flowed over a large section and the problem wasn't rapids but water that was too shallow. They pulled and lifted and dragged until they made it down.

“And that should be that,” said Julio. “The bridge at Cesar Chavez washed out completely, there's a nice gap at Rio Bravo and the highway bridge where 25 crossed back over. We might have to drag the raft over some shallows but there'll be no more rapids before the Puerco.”

They were in the old South Valley when they heard the hail from the east shore. A shirtless man with sunburned face and shoulders stood in the tall grass. His pants were khaki with a small stripe down the side in brown.

Uniform?
He thought he'd seen pants like that before.

“Can you give me a ride? Bugs cut us off.”

On these lazy stretches they let the river do the work, using a pole to push the raft this way or that. Julio was slipping it into the water when Kimble said, “Wait. What does he mean, ‘us'?”

Julio raised his eyebrows but he didn't push the raft any closer to shore. “How many of you are there?” he called out. “We're pretty low in the water.”

The man crouched. “It's just two of us,” he said. He let one hand reach down to something in the grass.

“We couldn't take two.” He gestured at the driftwood caught among the salt cedars. “You could lash together a raft pretty quick, though. Couple of hours.”

Another man stepped out from behind those very same salt cedars, a multi-barrel rifle dangling from one hand.

Kimble slammed his shoulder into Julio and they both tumbled off the raft into the icy water. It was mid-channel and the water was over their heads. Julio came up sputtering. “What the hell!” He grabbed the edge of the raft and started to pull himself out but Kimble grabbed his shoulders from behind.

“No! That's Pritts! He murdered two deputies back in Parsons breaking jail. He'll shoot you as soon as look at you.” As if on cue, a ceramic slug slammed into the edge of the deck and shattered, sending fragments and splinters flying. The raft, jostled by their abrupt departure, was spinning in the current and they had rotated around to where it no longer shielded them.

Kimble saw the bare-chested man, now standing, another multi-barrel rifle in his hand. Pritts was pointing his rifle at the raft. If they'd all been loaded, he had three more barrels to fire. “Put into shore or the next one goes into your head!” he yelled across the water.

Kimble kicked sideways, turning the raft. Another shot hit the deck and they heard glass break. Julio, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, got the idea and they quickly positioned the raft and cargo between them and the men.

They were a good hundred feet out from Pritts and now directly abreast of their position. Kimble started kicking the raft farther away but Julio said, “Kick downstream. We go any farther toward the other bank and we'll be in the shallows again, where the current slows.”

The current was moving as fast as a man could run and Kimble, peeking, saw Pritts and his companion doing just that, trying to keep up with them, but then they stopped, swearing, as a large cloud of bugs rose up around them. Kimble hadn't heard them step on one, but the two fugitives dropped their guns and dove sideways into the shallows.

The river curved away and the bend soon blocked their view of the shrinking figures. Chilled, Kimble pulled himself aboard and then helped Julio up over the edge.

“You've got a splinter in your forehead,” Kimble said. They had an extra pole but the one Julio had dropped when Kimble pushed him into the water had floated down with them. They recovered it and then Kimble pulled the splinter out of Julio's scalp and staunched the bleeding. “Looks intact,” he said, examining the splinter.

“How did you know about them? That guy?” Julio asked as Kimble bandaged his head.

“Pritts? Saw him once when I was working with a peddler over in Parsons. He was chief deputy. He ran a meth ring with the other deputies. Surely you heard about it?” There, all true, without saying anything about the Rangers or Captain Bentham.

“Oh. Yeah. Heard about that. Not sure I heard the name. Hadn't heard about the jailbreak.”

“You should look at the posters at Martha's store more often.” Another truth. Kimble grabbed the pole and started pushing the raft over toward the eastern shore.

“What are you doing?” Julio looked back upstream, as if expecting the two fugitives to show up any second.

“You all right? I mean, your head and all?”

“Yeah. So?”

“I'm going to keep tabs on them. You go on and meet Patrice, unload the glass, but then float on down to the Ranger Station near Isleta Pueblo. That'd be the quickest. Okay?”