Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

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