Plague Zone p-3

by Jeff Carlson

  I can’t let Cam see her like this, she realized, pressing her glove to Allison’s swollen face. She turned the girl’s head and hid her partly in her jacket hood. Now her tears were hot and thick and she tried to wipe her eyes, which was stupid. It would have infected her if she got inside her helmet. Instead, she only smeared blood and dust across her faceplate.

  Her voice broke when she called back to the stabbing flashlights. “Allison’s dead. So is Tony. And the stranger. Michael’s alive.”

  “You better hurry,” Greg yelled back. “Linda’s starting to move her arms.”

  Ruth walked toward the lights again. Greg, Cam, and another man had stayed to hold three beams on her. Deeper in the village, other flashlights and lanterns swarmed. Then she knelt beside Linda Greene, who was weakly stretching her arms as if dreaming. Ruth pulled Linda’s wrists together and secured them with duct tape, binding the other woman like a criminal.

  What’s happening to you? she wondered.

  4

  Doug Tillman quit breathing before Ruth got to him, and Martha Shemitz had a broken neck. The other four were still alive. Michael had lost some teeth and Ruth tried to staunch the gash on his chin, tying Doug’s shirt around Michael’s head as a crude bandage. Andrew also seemed unlikely to recover, his scalp split in two places where he’d been beaten.

  Meanwhile, both Linda and Patrick woke up. Linda was agitated, grunting and shuffling on the ground as she fought her bonds. In contrast, Patrick nearly seemed lucid. He trembled, but he was silent, blinking his distorted eyes. Ruth also noticed a recurrent tic in his cheek. What did he see? Was he feeling nonexistent stimuli like cold or heat? Itching?

  “You need to get out of here,” she called to Cam. “Leave everything inside my place. I’ll seal the doors and windows.”

  “Ruth,” he said distantly.

  “Get out of here.”

  “Ruth, how long can you breathe in that suit?”

  That was the least of her worries. She should be able to swap out her air tanks without contaminating herself, so dehydration became the greater threat. Even though it was made for a much larger man, her suit was like wearing an individually sized sauna. Already she could smell her own sweat, and she’d forgotten to drink her fill before she suited up. In the short term, that was fine. The suit had no sanitary features, so if she had to go to the bathroom, it would run down into her boots, but ultimately the water problem meant that Ruth only had hours, when she might need days to take care of these people and to study them.

  She wanted to go to him. She knew she couldn’t.

  “Leave me a walkie-talkie and a pistol,” she said. “Make sure I have lots of tape.” I love you, she added to herself. Be careful.

  She was stunned when Cam echoed the thought exactly.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He set his weapon beside his flashlight, near her door, where the others had stacked plastic sheeting, rope, tape, batteries, a med kit, and jugs of water. Someone had lit two kerosene lanterns for Ruth, leaving one in the open, the other inside her hut. The bandages and the water were for the people she hoped to save, but already her mouth was dry. Stop crying, she thought, summoning a grim resolve from within. She was alone. That was the truth.

  Ruth dragged Linda inside first, cracking the woman’s head against the doorframe when she jerked and spasmed. “Oh shit,” Ruth said, but Linda didn’t seem to associate the pain with her. She reacted to things Ruth couldn’t see, groaning and straining.

  Ruth left her in the corner, tied to the only piece of furniture, a low, heavy table. There were only three rooms in the hut — two thin bedrooms in back and this bigger space by the door. Ruth had normally eaten breakfast here with Bobbi and Eric, sitting on the floor, and she regretted the mood of all those mornings together. She was often envious of the couple, happy to be included but edgy because of what she couldn’t share. She hated to see herself as the old maid. Now she was the lucky one. Bobbi was a widow, Eric lay dead in Greenhouse 3, and this house was already saturated with nanotech.

  She dragged Patrick in next, then Michael and Andrew. Then she returned outside and began to wrap the dead bodies in plastic sheaths, sealing them as best she could. More than once, she stuck her gloves to the tape. Every time, her heart leapt with adrenaline. But the suit held.

  She paused over Denise. The woman had died uninfected, hadn’t she? Ruth was very tired, but she had never been one to cut corners. She rolled Denise in plastic, too. Then she dragged each of the six corpses inside, turning her home into a prison and a morgue.

  The gruesome feeling in Ruth’s chest grew louder as Linda squirmed against the table, moaning. She ran back outside. She knew she had to go in again, but there was another job to do first. Maybe she was more meticulous about it than necessary. Ruth dug in the earth until she had enough dirt to cover the bloodstains. In the shallow pits, she buried the tools and the gear they’d used to subdue their friends. She even gathered as many of the rocks they’d thrown as she could find, even though she could never completely sterilize this place. Poisoned ground, she thought. A lot of the nanotech would remain on the surface, exposed to the breeze or lifting away in the morning heat when the sun rose tomorrow.

  If they survived the night, even if they sealed this place in concrete and built a heavy fortress to contain her home, Ruth knew they could never stay. The village needed to be permanently abandoned. Still, her best efforts might buy them some extra time. Ruth continued to work despite her exhaustion.

  Her mind wandered.

  She glanced at the stars, remembering better times. She knew she was trying to get away from herself, but at last she turned and walked back into her small, crowded home. Then she began to tape the door shut from the inside.

  Originally, Cam and Allison led their party east from the Rockies down into the plains beyond Boulder and Greeley, where they were sure the summers were hot enough to destroy the insects. In sufficient heat, even bloodless or cold-blooded organisms became vulnerable to the machine plague. Their guess proved to be true, but the absence of bugs also turned those areas into deserts. The insect swarms were the only pollinators available. Every species that required hives or cocoons had been destroyed by the ants. There were no bees, butterflies, or moths left of any kind. In their greenhouses, they’d manually brushed pollen from one plant to another. Outside in the world, however, it was only the clumsy, brutal movements of the swarms that continued this process, spreading the delicate powder even as they obliterated forests and meadows everywhere.

  Ruth could only guess what the Midwest had become. She’d seen the edges of it herself, and there were rumors supposedly passed on from pilots and scouts and the specialists who controlled the remaining U.S. spy satellites. Without grass, the prairies had been peeled down to the bedrock, stuffing away in the rain and ever-more frequent windstorms. Megatons of silt had displaced the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into a continent-wide swamp, filling low places like Arkansas and Louisiana with stagnant, creeping bogs of mud.

  Ruth and her friends quickly abandoned the plains. At the time, she’d still hoped to lure Cam from Allison, but there were other problems besides her wounded heart. They would always be regarded as criminals by some. They’d planned to keep their heads down, but they were recognized and betrayed in the second town where they made their home. In the third, there was an outbreak of some respiratory disease — a normal disease, not nanotech — and Cam ran a fever of 104° for two days, frightening both women badly.

  As always, it was Allison who was the boldest. She led them into the heart of the Rockies again, where they hid almost directly under the noses of Grand Lake. Jefferson lay just forty miles west of that mountain peak. Grand Lake was no longer home to the president and Congress — those people had been relocated to Missoula, Montana, far, far away from occupied California — but the Air Force maintained Grand Lake as a fortress, and Allison believed the military would never think to look for Ruth so cl
ose within reach.

  Mostly Ruth was happy. Certainly she was never bored. They’d spent seven of the past fifteen months on the move, hiking and scouting, negotiating with other survivors. Most of their energy went into the basic necessities. Food. Shelter. Ruth was even glad to forget her research, contributing instead to their day-to-day struggles. It was selfish, she knew. More critical than any other challenge was the next-generation nanotech that must be designed as quickly as possible. A second invasion wasn’t impossible. The Russians and the Chinese had dragged their feet as they prepared to leave, bickering with each other and haggling with the disunited American government, even constructing new bases to house their airmen and soldiers in the meantime, playing for every advantage as they developed their own nanotech.

  Ruth had no illusions about what had finally happened.

  Her hands shook as she double-sealed the windows of her home. She thought her tremors were only bad nerves and exhaustion, but what if it was something else? Would I know if I was infected? she worried. What if it’s possible to absorb a low-level dose of the contagion that’s breeding in me right now?

  Another thought occurred her, and it was even more awful. What if their village had been specifically targeted because of her? They knew Colorado was under intensive electronic surveillance. What if the invaders had heard something or if a facial recognition program had finally made a match? The nanotech could be meant for her, infecting Allison and the others only because they were in the way.

  Michael woke up behind her. He thrashed against his bonds and huffed for air in guttural, rhythmic grunts. “Haaah. Haaah. Haaah.”

  Ruth turned only to make sure he wasn’t pulling free of the tape. But her gaze lingered. Michael’s eyes were half closed and roamed endlessly behind his eyelids, almost as if he was in REM sleep. His mouth hung open like a cave.

  “Haaah. Haaah.”

  He was ugly, wrapped in the flopping bandage of the shirt. Ruth fought down an urge to smash his head with the lantern. The infection wasn’t his fault, but she couldn’t look at him anymore. She was embarrassed by the sounds he made.

  “Haaah. Haaah.”

  Her claustrophobia was like a tidal wave inside her, swelling and hurting. Her pulse didn’t make it any easier to be careful with the knife, slicing another big square of plastic. Every minute, she was sealing herself deeper in plastic and tape. Would she ever get out?

  “Listen,” Cam said to Bobbi, gesturing for her to join him by the radio. They crouched together in a busy hut as other people hammered plastic sheeting over the windows. “We need to find somebody,” he said, but Bobbi was distracted.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said.

  “Listen to me.” He showed Bobbi the frequency control, trying a second band and then a third. Each time, he clicked twice at his SEND button and waited to hear something in return. “We’re going to have to walk through as many channels as possible,” he said. “One at a time. Like this.”

  “Why can’t you just call?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  The hut stank of marijuana, which was their only anesthetic except for alcohol. Brett had been gutshot. They were afraid to let him drink, although Susan had used a jar of 150 proof moonshine to sterilize his torso as best she could. The alcohol was expensive. Marijuana was not. The plant was called “weed” for good reason. It had survived in the wild only to be recultivated in Morristown, where it was grown for its fibrous stalks for cloth and rope and as an easy cash crop as a drug.

  Cam breathed clean air as people continued to hurry in and out of the door, piling backpacks, canteens, and other gear in the corner. Jefferson was consuming itself. They’d torn down Greenhouse 2 as well as 4, intending to use the plastic and the last of their tape, staples, and nails to seal most of the villagers inside.

  They had to assume the worst. No one had responded to his calls on the civilian channels. Morristown, Steamboat, New Jackson, Freedom — every town within reach was off the grid, so he’d abandoned the CB for their Harris AN/PRC-117 instead. Cam wanted a helicopter for Ruth and he was prepared to face a jail sentence if necessary. Let the U.S. leadership punish him if there was ever time for it. The important thing was to get her to safety, but first they needed a bit of luck.

  Like most of their military hardware, the Harris was something that had been abandoned by American troops whose positions were overrun. Cam regarded it with a mix of old pride and pain. His time in the Rangers had been short but intense, full of the quick, meaningful friendships that were born of relying on each other, and Eric and Greg had continued his training after they went into hiding. Bobbi was still a newlywed or she might have known more herself. Eric had focused more on her weapons training during their courtship. Guns were exciting, so she’d learned to shoot instead of other basics.

  “This radio was Z‘ed out,” he said. “That means the encryption software was dumped to keep it from the Chinese, so we can’t hear or talk on the secure net. That’s why it’s so quiet. I guarantee you there are people talking right now. We just can’t hear their transmissions.”

  Bobbi pointed at the handset. “But you can still call.”

  “No. This radio is only capable of open broadcasts. We can only reach people who are monitoring or broadcasting in the open.”

  The Harris was a sixteen-pound chunk of metal intended for use in a vehicle or as a field pack. It didn’t have the strength to contact Grand Lake or Sylvan Mountain directly. It was meant to be deployed as a part of a larger net — and they were in friendly territory. There were signals corpsmen and retransmission stations scattered across the Rockies. He might even be relayed through a plane if U.S. forces had put the right equipment in the air, trying to find stragglers like himself.

  Or to kill them.

  Cam was paranoid enough to believe that the new plague might have its origins on the American side. The U.S. weapons programs wouldn’t have stopped after Ruth went AWOL, and it wasn’t impossible that the plague zone was limited to this valley. What if, through sheer bad luck, this place had been chosen as a test area? He needed to make it clear who was at risk. They would come for Ruth. He was certain of that.

  “The best we can do is stumble onto a frequency that’s being monitored or find two units talking in the unsecure and step on their transmission,” he said. “That’s why this could take awhile. There’ll be units who don’t have any better equipment than we do, but there are hundreds of frequencies. So you need to do this for me.”

  “Hey!” Owen called from across the room, hefting a staple gun and a roll of tape. “We’re done except for the door. Are you coming out?”

  “One minute.”

  “We gotta seal up!” Owen shouted. He was a tall man and among the most visible in the crowd, which included his wife. The village gossip was that she’d miscarried twice, which was why Owen doted on her like nothing else. Cam didn’t want to argue with him.

  “Close it,” he said. “I’ll come out as soon as I can.”

  The air wouldn’t last. Sealing two huts in plastic was a temporary fix. Ripping down the greenhouses had also left more of their late-year crops unprotected, increasing the likelihood of more insect swarms tomorrow. Meanwhile, the fire ants were still expanding beneath Jefferson. Even if the colony stayed in the ground tonight, Cam knew they could count on dealing with the bugs again after sunrise. The vicious goddamned ants would be excited by the blood they’d spilled.

  He switched to another frequency as hammers sounded on the outside of the door. He tried another and another, and suddenly the radio came to life:

  “—through Medicine Bow and we need extraction off a hot LZ, over,” a man said very fast before another voice answered, “Roger, Cougar Six Two.”

  Jesus, Cam thought. What if the nanotech isn’t just in this valley? Where do we go?

  There were large sections of National Forest called Medicine Bow nearby in Wyoming, and he knew those mountains were peppered with civilian and
military camps. Cam didn’t recognize the call sign — Cougar Six Two might have been anyone — but they were American and that was all that mattered.

  “Break break break,” he said. “Any station this net, this is Two Echo Two, any station this net, over.”

  The first man responded. “Two Echo Two, Two Echo Two, this is Cougar Six Two. Over.”

  “Roger, Cougar Six Two, I need you to pass along an emergency message, break. Flash code Revere. I say again, flash code Revere, over.”

  Silence. The other man obviously had his own problems. He had been calling for some sort of evacuation himself, but his discipline held. The man said, “I need you to authenticate, Two Echo Two. Over.”

  “I say again, flash code Revere. This is Corporal Najarro with the Seventy-Fifth. I need to speak with Major Thrun or the current operations officer in Grand Lake, over.”

  His flash code was ancient by military standards. Call signs, encryptions, and communications windows were changed every thirty days. Cam had been out of contact for a year and a half, but Grand Lake would have archives that contained the OPORD mission profile from his last assignment. Grand Lake should know his name, and, knowing him, they should realize who might be with him.

  “Roger that, Two Echo—” The background exploded with small arms fire and the man’s voice rose into a shout. “What is your current location, over?”

  Cougar Six Two was under attack. Who were they fighting? Could there be enemy forces inside the plague zone or was Cougar defending himself from infected people? Cam spoke with icy control, trying to make himself more significant to Cougar Six Two than the disaster surrounding the other man. “I say again, Revere. Revere. I need you to pass that message ASAP, Cougar Six Two. I’ll monitor this frequency for the next thirty minutes and will come up on this station every hour on the hour for ten minutes thereafter, over.”

  The man yelled just to be heard over the gunfire and screaming. “Understood, Two Echo Two! Godspeed. Out.”