7th Sigma (19 page)

“How am I supposed to get home from Isleta Pueblo?”

“Have Patrice come get you by road—without the glass. Go back for the glass after.”

Julio was inclined to argue. “Ruth will kill me if I let you go back there. She thought this trip was dangerous enough with just the bugs.”

The raft grounded in the shallows, out of the current, and Kimble grabbed his bedroll, backpack, and the food bag. “Patrice has more supplies, so I'm taking this.”

“You can't go,” Julio said sternly.

“It's okay, really.”

“I mean it!” said Julio and reached out to take Kimble's arm.

Kimble put him down on the deck relatively gently, Julio's wrist locked painfully at ninety degrees to his arm. Julio tried to get up and quickly found the futility of that. “Sorry,” Kimble said. Still holding the
nikkyo
grip, he stepped off the raft into the shallows, pushed Julio away to flop onto his back and, before Julio could get back up, shoved the raft out into the current.

Before Julio was standing, Kimble had vanished into the bosque.

12

Rapid Responses

Kimble's first thought was to head for higher ground, but the South Valley was named that for a reason, broad and flat. The old earthen levee was the highest ground and it had eroded badly over the years. He settled for a large cottonwood tree growing in one of the old irrigation ditches and used a strap from his backpack to shinny up the trunk to its lowest branch, fifteen feet off the ground.

He couldn't see them, but there was smoke from a fire drifting up near the river in or beyond a clump of Russian olive trees. Examining the ground between his tree and the fire, he saw lots of bugs. From the debris scattered around he realized this area had been junkyards, old auto salvage yards and light industrial.

He could always wade upriver, but he thought Pritts and his friend would be watching, looking for more river traffic. He headed due east, instead, threading up a dirt alley. After a while, he hit an old high-tension electrical right-of-way. The wires and their metal towers had been the first things to go, back when the bugs first showed up. Just as the shorted battery had called them up in Corrales, the high voltage EMF had drawn them from all corners.

Scraps of insulation wound through the weeds and coiled across the ground like shed snakeskins, but the metal had long ago walked or flown away in the bodies of robot bugs.

Kimble followed the path carefully, slowly. Watching out for bugs and for Pritts required two different observation behaviors. Failing at either would have disastrous consequences.

Sensei is going to kill me
, he thought.
Or Captain Bentham will.
For some reason this cheered him up a little.
They can't
both
kill me, after all.

He came to a spot where flooding had strewn debris from a sheet metal shop across the electrical right-of-way. The bugs weren't solid across the ground but they covered most of it. He rested in the shade for fifteen minutes then picked his way carefully through the stretch of feeding bugs. He was halfway across when he smelled ozone and something moved in the adjacent auto salvage yard.

Something big.

He froze and crouched.
Did I walk right up on them?
By his estimate, he was till several hundred yards away from the campfire smoke. He took two quick, stretching steps over patches of bugs until he came to a stand of head-high cedar brush that shielded him from whoever was moving in the next field. The base of the bushes was clear of bugs. He leaned forward and parted the cedar branches slowly, trying to see through, but it was too thick. All he succeeded in revealing was a hollow three feet off the ground formed by several branches. Loose feathers and broken eggshells showed that a chicken had nested there in the past. He stepped up into the hollow, sat on his rucksack, and leaned forward again, moving a branch down on the far side.

The thing moving in the yard was not human. It looked like a longhorn steer, including long horns and a swinging tail, but it was not a steer. It was oily black and the ears were perfectly circular. Below the horns there were no eyes, just patches of darker black. And the horns … well, the horns looked like lightly oxidized aluminum.

It was walking in a circle, head down, swinging its horns from side to side. If Kimble had seen an actual longhorn walking like that, he would've suspected a serious illness or perhaps jimsonweed (of which the Dineh say, “Eat a little, and go to sleep. Eat some more, and have a dream. Eat some more, and don't wake up.”).

This not-steer's movement, though odd, seemed filled with purpose. The circle was getting smaller and smaller as the not-steer spiraled in. Finally it began slight movements forward and backward, little half steps. It stopped. In fact it froze, motionless for a few moments, then it took four precise steps forward and its tail lifted.

You're shittin' me!

The cow pie looked like many others, except for its color—black. The mixture of solid and liquid was just right, and in the twilight Kimble would've passed right by it without a second thought.

Well, he would have if it had stayed
still
.

At first Kimble thought it was shrinking, but after a moment he realized it was burrowing, instead, sinking into the earth. There was a haze around it as if vapors were being given off but it soon dropped completely below the surface. The steer—the not-steer, that is—turned in place until its head was back over the hole, for now it was definitely a hole. From his perch in the cedar, Kimble thought the opening was at least ten inches across. He could see eight inches down the opposite wall before the near edge cut it off and there were still steamlike vapors rising out of the opening.

The not-steer lowered its nose until it was a foot above the hole and froze. The silvery horns, at first nearly touching the ground, rotated upward until they pointed straight at the sky.

Kimble rolled out of the tree without thinking, landing back in the clear space at the cedar's base. Then he heard the buzzing that followed the near ultrasonic sound of swarming bugs. Bugs had lifted into the air all around him, not unlike a swarm. Their passage through the air was not as urgent, but they were all headed his way.

He sunk down, hugging the ground as the bugs buzzed overhead, several bouncing through the cedar brush.

The old electrical right-of-way was temporarily empty and Kimble crawled sideways until he could see past the cedar. Like a miniature tornado, the bugs formed a descending funnel hanging down from the drifting cloud above, drawing tighter and tighter as they streamed down into the hole created by the not-steer.

That must be some deep hole.

A low-flying bug cut through a cedar branch, which dropped to the ground in front of him. Kimble scrambled north up the right-of-way. When he looked back over his shoulder, the not-steer had turned and was watching him.

*   *   *

HIS
light shorts and shirt had dried by the time he passed the not-steer, but when Kimble came up on their campsite, he could tell that Pritts and his buddy were still cold, if not also wet. The fire Kimble had been using to spot their camp was a bonfire now, as they'd gotten some of the drift logs alight. Both men stood close to the flames, rotating slowly.

It was getting late and Kimble didn't want to step on a bug in the night. He found a hollow under some brush cedar overlooking the camp, and he edged in, inspecting carefully for bugs. He was shielded from view on all sides, though he could move a branch if he wanted to see them. He was close enough that an occasional word or phrase drifted over the distance, but most of what the men said was being drowned out by the snap and roar of the fire.

While there was still light, he dressed in warmer clothes, laid his bedroll out, and put his other things where he could reach them easily.

As the bonfire died down he could hear more of what the men said.

“If I have to go into the water one more time to avoid bugs, I'm just gonna let them eat me.” It was the other deputy, the one who wasn't Pritts.

“We don't find some food, soon,” said Pritts, “
I'll
eat you.”

“Bet those two on the raft had some food.”

“Yeah, well, we won't know now you scared 'em off, Ortiz.”

“
I
scared them off? They didn't jump into the river until you showed your rifle.”

“They were already leery. The older guy started asking questions before that. You were too eager.”

“Sure I was.”

The give and take sounded routine, almost like an old married couple. Pritts got up and threw a long branch of green cedar on the fire that went up with a bunch of crackling and popping, drowning out the next phase of their argument. Kimble just caught fragments.

The month before, they'd ridden in from the west, crossing over the lava of the Three Sisters, threading down through the Petroglyph National Monument. They'd lost Pritts' horse on the edge of Paseo de Volcan, when it had punched a leg down into the earth, probably where an old pipeline had been eaten down its length, leaving the earth above unsupported. Ortiz's horse they'd killed in the city, to eat.

They'd tried smoking most of the meat but at that time they'd still had some crystal meth. Pritts had done the last of the meth and, hopped up, put too much firewood under the smoking rack. The meat had burned instead of drying and there was a big fight about it when Ortiz returned from hunting. They had last eaten two days before, the remains of a doe Ortiz had shot the week before. They'd tried to hunt that morning but a surge in bugs had driven them back to the river's edge and, more than once, up to their necks in the water.

“Wish we had some rock,” Ortiz said. “At least it would kill the hunger pains. But
someone
smoked it.” The round of recriminations that followed proceeded like an ancient ritual, every part known by heart.

The plane came out of the north about the time the sun crested the Sandias, a four-engine turboprop aircraft traveling over the city at a bug-safe fifteen thousand feet. It was clear to Kimble that it wasn't just an overflight. The plane turned and made five passes, north to south, south to north, dropping in altitude and shifting eastward each time.

Looks like Julio got the word out.

After the last pass, six blue blossoms appeared high above the northeastern quadrant of the city and drifted with the wind, west, toward the river.

Whoa
, Kimble thought. He thought it had just been a spotter flight. He hadn't expected them to send a unit of the Rapid Response Force.

Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one to see the parachutes open. Both Pritts and Ortiz were swearing, scrambling to get their bedrolls and gear together.

“You don't know they've come for
us
,” Pritts was saying.

“Face it. Those guys on the raft reported us. I knew you shouldn't have shot at them. They probably showed them your wanted poster down in Isleta.”

The chutes were below the trees now. Kimble thought the RRF team was aiming to come down in the river, bug-safe, bug-free.

Pritts and Ortiz had planned ahead, apparently. There were no arguments over where to go. They had a small raft in the scrub near the river. It wasn't big enough to hold them, but it supported their saddlebags and bedrolls, a disturbingly large bundle of disposable rifle barrels, their rifles, and their hastily stripped clothing. They waded out into the river, swearing at the frigid water. They only had to swim ten feet, mid river, and then they were wading again. When they got over to the far shallows, they snatched up their belongings and shoved the raft away, then continued upriver, keeping to the water.

Kimble nodded. It was a smart move. The water hid their tracks and kept them away from bugs. It was also an unlikely direction for the fugitives to go, toward the city center, where the bugs would be worst. The Rangers would certainly have the camp's location. Julio would've pointed it out on a map and the information would've gone out by heliograph. Apparently all the way out of the territory. It was possible that even in the night the heat from their bonfire had been pinpointed by satellite.

Kimble waited until they two men had splashed around the next bend in the river before following. He had an unused plastic trash bag in his pack, reserved as rainwear for a rare spring storm. It protected and floated his things across the river.

The water was
very
cold. He shuddered to think what it must be like for the two men, who hadn't eaten recently. Kimble's teeth were chattering as he dressed on the other side.

He went ashore, stepping past patches of bugs, and risked running along the top of the overgrown western levee. Twice the ground collapsed under him and he threw himself forward, remembering with vivid imagination the fate of the fugitives' first horse.

Maybe they'll eat me if I break my leg.

Once, the bugs became so thick he had to go back to the shallows, but he returned to the levee almost immediately. He could travel faster and more quietly than the men splashing through the shallows but he had only just caught sight of them when they turned up into the bosque a half a mile south of the wreckage of the Central Avenue Bridge.

It had been a mixed residential and industrial area, and it was thick with bugs. Pritts and Ortiz topped the levee and then dropped to the ground behind the crest, peering through the brush back at the river.

Kimble saw the Rangers, then, rounding the bend. They were in three inflatable kayaks, strung well apart. The man in the stern of each boat handled the double-bladed paddles. The men in the bows scanned the shorelines with binoculars, their gyro rifles in their laps.

The deep water was on the west side at this bend. They would pass very close to Pritts and Ortiz.