Plague Year by Jeff Carlson Page B

have been useful. More than the new alpine environment, more than the senseless joy of hurling himself into gravity’s pull, he loved the individual nature of the sport, no opponents, no audiences, no scores kept. It was his alone.
    First year out of high school, already a strong intermediate skier if not particularly smooth, Cam worked seven brain-numbing months in a phone center and was up for a minor raise when he quit in December. That season he skied sixty-one days at nine different resorts. Each night he had to ice his shins, bruised so deeply by his cheap boots that he walked like a cowboy. The nail on his left big toe fell off in March. But it was too late. He’d met powder hounds who thought it was the height of cool to brag about such bodily damage.
    Cam found a job as a lift operator and later earned a spot on the maintenance crew just by showing up every day, which was a little too much to expect of most B.S. employees. The kids partied hard and it didn’t help that management had hacked wages and benefits to a minimum.
    Next year B.S. gave the shaft to the ski patrol as well, and there were plenty of openings. He jumped at the chance.
    * * * *
    They reached Chair 12 as the clouds pushed overhead and the air got still. The ringing screech of the chairs quieted. It was almost like the lift had been waiting for them.
    An omen. But what did the silence mean?
    Cam experienced the opposite phenomenon, as if all that noise went straight into his head. As they passed downhill of the attendant’s booth and the heap of earth that had served as the off-load ramp when buried in snow, both he and Erin glanced up at the string of chairs. If only. But they kept walking.
    The diesel for the backup engines hadn’t lasted a month.
    * * * *
    Most people drove east down into Nevada to escape the plague, including his friend Hutch, which of course proved to be the worst decision possible. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred souls left in Bear Summit when the newscasts said it might be safe at high altitudes—but by that point, the Sierra range was in its third day of blizzard conditions.
    Cam stayed in his duplex at 7,500 feet with his TV and his phone, until after midnight on the fourth day when he woke to stinging pinpricks inside his left hand.
    He called home one more time. All circuits busy.
    The blizzard had stopped but the road was nine inches deep, deeper on either side of the single lane that some hero had plowed the day before. Navigating this narrow trail might have been too much for Cam if he hadn’t half memorized the highway’s constant turns, few dips, and blind corners. He drove the same stretch to work six days a week and, as the joke went, the mark of a true local was the ability to get up to the resort in any conditions, by Braille if necessary, scraping a fender against the iron reflector poles set every forty yards for the plows.
    White road, white embankments. Trying to maintain his depth perception, he snapped his lights from low beam to high to low again, a crude sort of radar.
    Odd silhouettes cavorted into his path, three bucking shapes with too many legs. Cam braked. His truck skidded and he rode down on the monsters. Deer, the things were just deer. They fled before him, giant eyes rolling in his headlights, until the embankment fell away on one side and they ran off. Downhill.
    He passed two abandoned stalls, nearly getting stuck himself as he edged past the first.
    The streetlamps of the condominium village threw a surreal pink glow across the low clouds, visible long before he inched into the valley. Then he saw lights on the ridge too among the luxury cabins. Were people staying put up there? The ridge was only a few hundred feet above the road...
    He kept driving. He was not surprised to find only a few vehicles in front of the resort’s main buildings, transformed into white dunes by the snow, but it confused him to see just fifty cars parked farther up beside the mid-mountain