Plague Zone p-3

by Jeff Carlson

  In ancient China there had been little or no bias against homosexual relationships. As long as a man fulfilled his duties as a husband and a father, what he did elsewhere was ignored. That attitude changed during the Cultural Revolution. The Communist Party targeted homosexuals as deviants and a threat to their ideal society. Openly gay men were jailed, even executed.

  This persecution began to relax again in the twenty-first century. Sodomy was decriminalized, homosexuality removed from a list of mental disorders — but the Party and the military continued to hold onto the conservative views of the Revolution.

  The machine plague brought the worst of that era crashing back again. There wasn’t enough room in the mountains for everyone. Many of China’s minorities were gone. The subtle racism of the Han had become a survival mechanism, blatant and merciless. The Communist Party resurrected all of the old prejudices, cutting away anyone who was suspect.

  Jia was not an activist. Even before the apocalypse, he would never have worked against his country. For one thing, it seemed futile. He wasn’t a coward. He was smart enough to see how forcefully the river flowed. All he wanted was to belong. He owed them his success. On some level, Jia also knew that the best way to save himself was to become indispensable. The Party overlooked small crimes if a man proved loyal and hard-working. Jia recognized the irony. He was willing to give everything of himself for China precisely because China did not want all of him, only his stamina and cleverness.

  He was also aware that a prominent role in coordinating the nanotech would expose him to great scrutiny. The MSS must have interviewed everyone who’d ever served with him. Many of those men were dead, but what if the MSS uncovered a former lover? What if they spoke to someone who suspected? For weeks, Jia worried at being found out. He did not want to forfeit his chance, and yet it occurred to him that perhaps they did know. They must know.

  The mind plague was a gamble. The attack was launched without the knowledge of their own people precisely because it might not work. Jia had been told the nanotech was untested except for a few limited trials, so the job required not only a senior officer but also a man whose obedience was propped up by extreme fear and ambition. He was the ideal fit. If anything went wrong, they could discard him effortlessly, casting him as an over-reaching upstart and a homosexual as well. There would be no defense. Jia would be held up as a failure, and then shot.

  General Zheng said, “The governor is not a fool. He’s correct that our forces are unready.”

  “Sir,” Jia said, “everything is exactly to plan.”

  Zheng turned to study their display screens again. “This is nanotech,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Our people taught it to hunt out the basic structure of the human brain, sir. From there, it attacks the frontal lobes of the cerebrum.”

  “So it kills.”

  “No, sir. It’s a bloodless weapon. I didn’t mean to imply that it destroys the tissue. The nanotech simply gloms onto the synaptic clefts in the areas affecting time sense and memory. Right now, the Americans are badly confused.”

  There was a high failure rate, of course. By clogging millions of the brain’s receptors, impeding the electrochemical impulses that normally jumped between the synapses, the mind plague not only left its victims witless and agitated. People varied too much. Sometimes the nanotech caused permanent injury.

  Zheng said, “What if the wind changes or if it reaches as far as mainland China?”

  “We’re immune, sir.”

  “Your machine is that sensitive to racial genetics?”

  “No, sir. We were given a vaccine in our health injections, sir.”

  There was no difference between Oriental and Occidental brains. The mind plague would have attacked them all without a cousin nanotech to ward it off.

  Three weeks ago, Jia had been among the first who received the hypodermic shots of fluid purported to be rich in nutrients. The order to launch the plague had waited only until everyone in the People’s Republic quietly received the same shots. The MSS also made certain to allow black marketeers to sell small amounts of it across their borders with the Russians, both in Asia and here in California. Those cases had been altered to have the vaccine to the mind plague removed, of course, because they knew the Russian spy agencies would sell their analysis of the serum to the Europeans as part of their own double-dealings with the enemy. The Russians believed the shots were merely another of China’s heavy-handed medical programs, a soup of B vitamins intended to help their mal nourished armies.

  “I see,” Zheng said. “The Americans would have noticed us mobilizing if we were prepared to march in behind the nanotech. Or they might have intercepted our communications if the plan was widespread.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jia was relieved. By reaching the facts himself, Zheng allowed him to say more without costing face. It was a delicate situation. Zheng must feel wildly uneasy receiving orders from a young colonel, which is why he’d sided first with Governor Shao. Jia needed to restore their normal relationship as fast as possible. “You have my loyalty, sir. My role was only to begin the attacks. You reacted more quickly than anyone expected,” Jia explained, and that was true. “I’m sure there are confirmations waiting for you even now.”

  “Who are you reporting to?” Zheng asked.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Is it General Qin?”

  “I swear I don’t know, sir.”

  “And yet your operation extends through dozens of air and ground units in addition to our nanotech labs. I want your control codes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who are your contacts? Are they MSS?”

  “Yes, sir. Sixth Department, sir. Colonels Feng and Pan have been my go-betweens.”

  Huojin interrupted. “Colonel? The first transports are in the air, sir.”

  “Stick to the plan. Take the capital,” Jia said.

  Their border troops and Elite Forces were always on standby, so Jia had been able to mobilize two companies of paratroopers without being concerned that it might alert the Americans. Soon the entire PLA would be on the move, rolling through the deserts and taking to the sky.

  “What about a nuclear response?” Zheng asked. “These bunkers aren’t hardened against their missiles.”

  “No, sir, but we’re on American soil, and the plague is spreading like the wind itself. They’ll have no time to consider their options.”

  The Americans would also be in the path of any fallout themselves. If they hit the West Coast, the normal west-to-east flow of the weather would carry the radioactivity over their own homes on the Continental Divide — and the old, implacable power of mutually assured destruction still held true.

  “They can be certain our mainland would retaliate with missile launches of our own,” Jia said. “The expectation is the Americans will hesitate. Then the plague will have them.”

  In all of history, had there ever been a war that was decided in a few hours? Jia hadn’t accepted this task for the glory. His name was meant to be kept secret, yet he thrilled at the idea that someday he might be remembered among the greatest of Asia’s warlords, Khan, Sun Tzu, and China’s own heroes like Mao and Chiang Kai-shek.

  The war in North America should have been theirs from the start. The Russians had been honed down to a cold-blooded war machine during their long fight in the Middle East, but the all-male invasion of the PLA had a deeper motivation.

  They wanted to go home.

  They wanted women.

  North America could have satisfied both needs, becoming a second China. There had been thousands of prisoners taken in California, Arizona, and Colorado. For every female of age, this was less horrible than for the men. The People’s Liberation Army had been too hard-pressed to dedicate any troops to building shelters for their POWs, nor was there water to spare in the desert.

  The labor camps killed many of the enemy combatants, but the females were spared. Most
of them had been repatriated as part of the cease-fire, except for the bù l zhì few who chose to stay with their masters. Victory would have meant a thousand times as many concubines. If the Chinese armies won, they might have been complete, graced with lizhide, low-class wives and a giant work force of slaves to run their farms and factories. Even now, after the stalemate, hundreds of American women must have given birth to Chinese babies. Eventually the People’s Republic might claim the world through breeding out the other races. That would take generations and it would create new ethnic minorities, but Jia could see how they might establish their peace one pregnancy at a time.

  The new plague was immediate. It was something in which Jia could participate wholeheartedly, and if the attacks went well he should be safer than ever, praised and accepted by the Ministry’s highest leaders.

  He was unspeakably proud of his inclusion in the Sixth Department, which had only tightened its clutches on the Communist Party. The MSS would use their victory to cement their power, adding momentum to their bid to unify the Party beneath their own generals. With new leadership, they also intended to bring a change in direction. Originally, the People’s Republic had planned to evacuate their forces as agreed in the cease-fire. The reality was that much of Asia was eroded down to its bedrock like the American Midwest. Only the coastlines and the mountains were inhabitable. Mainland China was no more able to house and feed another hundred and fifty thousand soldiers than those men were capable of fending for themselves in occupied California.

  The mind plague was the only answer for the troops who’d been left behind. They needed to take America or there they would die, because new orders were about to be unveiled along with the announcement of Jia’s attack.

  They had been told never to come home.

  7

  Eight hundred miles from Los Angeles, in the town of Jefferson, very little was as it seemed, either. Cam stood at the northern edge of their village with his head ringing, looking inward at the huts when his job was to watch the fences beyond their home. The wind crawled on his jacket hood, sinister and quiet. He tried to ignore it. He’d cinched his mask and goggles tightly across his face. His hands were thickened by old leather gloves. Duct tape sealed his wrists and the cuffs of his pants. Still, he felt exposed. The wind was like a voice at his back. It whispered against his armor, cold and persistent, defining every wrinkle in his sleeves and collar.

  The night was absolute. The only light was from the stars — but the darkness was full of technology. Most of Jefferson’s homes were wired for electricity, even if they held only a few lightbulbs, and some of the men had brought out floodlamps, too, preparing to light up the perimeter until sunrise. They were far from helpless. The town boasted an M60 machine gun and a Russian Army rocket-propelled grenade launcher in addition to dozens of rifles, carbines, handguns, and military radios.

  “This is One,” Greg said in Cam’s headset, beginning their status checks clockwise around the huts.

  “Two,” a woman said.

  “Three.”

  The sound-off continued through eleven guard posts until it reached Cam at the northernmost point. “Twelve,” he said.

  “Thirteen,” Bobbi added. Inside the first sealed hut, she continued to monitor their Harris radio as well as the local net on their headsets and walkie-talkies. For nearly an hour, they’d been confirming each other’s status every ten minutes. They were afraid they might have to turn on themselves again. Already there had been a burst of flashlights and yelling at Station Eight when David’s batteries failed and the people at Seven and Nine thought they’d have to shoot him.

  One of their guards wore a painter’s dual cartridge respirator. Three others had flak jackets, which were useless against nanotech but might save their lives in combat. It had been decided. Jefferson was under quarantine. Even if outsiders looked like they were okay, even if they needed help, the guards intended to warn off or kill anyone else who walked out of the hills, defending their own families above all else. Cam was ready to take part in a slaughter if necessary, yet he’d convinced them to black out the town instead of powering up their small grid. What if that old woman came here because she saw the fire? he’d said. Cam would be a long time forgetting Tony’s wide-eyed face. The kid had seemed to target them, reeling around to focus on their shouting voices.

  There were other ways to watch the darkness. They had two nightscopes in addition to the one they’d lost with Tony when it was contaminated like the boy, and their fences were still a decent early warning system.

  Cam believed himself to be an honorable man. Since the war he’d become a public leader much like Allison, supporting her, learning from her, taking charge of Jefferson’s economy and politics because he thought he could help. Now a lot of that person was gone. The survivor was back, his instincts and old traumas winning out over the cool, more rational mind of the statesman.

  He’d taken the twelve o‘clock point in Jefferson’s defenses for a reason. Morristown lay just eleven miles north. The nanotech had dropped Allison in seconds and paralyzed Marsha down her left side, but even if the plague crippled or killed 20 percent of its victims, that could leave nine hundred men, women, and children staggering out of the much larger town.

  Cam was obsessed with the way the old woman had been heading into the wind, walking out of the southeast where there were no settlements on their maps. Where had she come from? A group of nomads? He was more concerned about what they were going to do if the old woman’s direction was not entirely random. He thought she might have been moving into the wind in the same way Tony had responded to their voices — because it was a stimulus. If so, everyone in Morristown might have staggered northwest themselves, chasing the wind. That would lead them farther away from Jefferson. Good. But how long would it be until the first traces of nanotech swept over this village? What if the plague had originated first in Utah or Idaho?

  The night must be threaded with poison, and Cam realized he was breathing shallowly, trying to separate himself from one of his most basic instincts. If you breathe, you die, he thought, wrestling with the impossible challenge. It had been the same with the machine plague. There was no way to stop nanotech, and he cradled the weight of his M4 instead of pacing. He wanted to save his energy. Even so, it was profoundly unnerving to stand alone in the night with his vision darkened by the bronze lens of his goggles, waiting to die.

  The stars were dim points overhead. The buildings around him existed only as square shadows. Then his headset crackled again. “Where is Cam?” a woman asked.

  “Ruth?” he said, and there was a burst of chatter from the other guards.

  “How are Michael and—”

  “—did you—”

  “Stay off the radio!” Greg said. “Hey! Stay off the radio so she can talk!”

  Cam looked across the village again. He heard more voices in the darkness now. The two men at Station Ten were arguing with each other, and Cam wondered how long they would stay put. It wasn’t even midnight.

  “Ruth?” he asked, brooding over the tone of her few words. He knew her too well. Bad news, he thought. It’s bad news.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  Cam stalked through the village without needing a light. The layout was simple, with seventeen huts set in a ring around their four greenhouses, a storage shed, the dining hall, and the showers. Nor did they own enough luxuries to scatter hazards like children’s toys or spare engine parts on the ground.

  He passed through the leeside of a hut, leaving the wind. Then he moved back into the current. It rushed around his legs and through the spaces between his arms and chest, seeking any gap in his armor. Cold and hungry, it swirled against his face.

  Cam was already badly spooked. The transition from that quiet instant back into the wind made him stop at the edge of another protected space. His mind roared with old gunfire and the howl of planes — the stark image of a one-eyed man lifting a shovel like an axe — the feel and smell of an
emaciated young woman coughing blood into his face. He could also see Allison’s grin, though he tried to suppress that image. The memories inside him were hellish and raw and he didn’t want to pollute his favorite things about her.

  He turned back into the wind with his M4 swinging beside him in one hand, leaning his weight forward as if walking through deep mud or snow. The truth was that they were already buried in another plague. They lived deep within an invisible ocean, but they had all learned to ignore it as best they could. Earth’s atmosphere was permeated by the dead. Trillions of people, animals, birds, and insects had been exploded into dust by the machine plague. Replicating without end, the archos tech used every available speck of carbon and iron to build more of itself, disintegrating untold megatons of living flesh into microscopic machines — machines that, in their own fashion, still lived on.

  The archos tech would forever seek new hosts. Thousands of inert nanos covered every short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With each step Cam stirred up great puffs of it. The only reason they could survive below ten thousand feet was because they’d beaten it. Their own bodies had become tiny processing stations, destroying insignificant amounts of the machine plague every day, after Ruth and her colleagues found a way to shield them.

  Could she do it again?

  Protect her, he thought. Protect her and maybe everything will be okay again.

  Their only salvation was the vaccine nano. Originally, it had been an inefficient savior. It could be overwhelmed. In an ideal scenario it would have killed the machine plague as soon as the plague touched their skin or lungs. Realistically, its capacity to target the plague was limited and it functioned best against live, active infections. That was a problem. The plague took minutes or even hours to “wake up” after it was absorbed by a host. In that time, it could travel farther than was easily understood. Human beings were comprised of miles upon miles of veins, tissue, organs, and muscle — and once the machine plague began to replicate, the body’s own pulse became a weakness, distributing the nanotech everywhere.