Plague Zone p-3

by Jeff Carlson

  They walked down the hill together, Cam sidling in close to support her arthritic frame.

  “I’ll talk to Bobbi if I can,” Ingrid said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, and Cam was glad he didn’t have to hide anything from her.

  But who’s going to talk to Ruth? he worried.

  As they neared the jeep, they saw that she was awake. Ruth leaned across the fender with her M4, an unkempt silhouette. Was there some kind of power source behind her like a flashlight? Her jacket was open and her goggles, uselessly, were pushed back into her curly hair.

  “It’s us, we’re okay,” Ingrid called.

  Ruth lowered her carbine. Cam was glad for his own goggles and mask as her brown eyes shifted from him to Ingrid and back. “Where’s Bobbi?” Ruth said, hesitating beside the jeep. Then she laid her hand on Cam’s elbow with newfound intimacy. The light he’d seen was her laptop. She’d placed it on the ground. The screen was divided into three windows, a big white one that was full of text and two smaller graphics. Nanotech schematics.

  “Bobbi’s in a fighting hole, asleep,” Cam said. “I think she’s okay.”

  “I can wake her up,” Ingrid said.

  “I’ll get her,” Cam said. He was angry with himself for feeling so much like a schoolboy, but a lot of his self-consciousness was brought on by the age of the two women. They weren’t old enough to be his grandmother and his mother — Ruth would have been a very young teenager when he was born — but Ingrid especially could have been his mom.

  He told himself he wanted to conserve her strength. They were still fifteen or twenty miles from Grand Lake with a lot of rough country in between. Cam estimated the hike at two days if they were lucky, and they’d already done a poor job of protecting Ingrid, keeping her up all night.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Drink what you can.”

  Mostly he just wanted to get away from Ruth. Maybe Ingrid could say the right things for him. The anguish he felt was unbearable. He was torn between his memories of Allison and the living woman in front of him, but if Ruth was hurt, his terse attitude didn’t mean as much to her as something else she’d learned.

  “Cam,” she said. “Wait. I have preliminary numbers. This nanotech is much bigger than it needs to be. My guess is that at least 50 percent of its bulk is unused — maybe more.”

  Her words went through him like another bullet.

  “What does that mean?” Ingrid said.

  Ruth didn’t answer. She was waiting. Cam turned at last and they exchanged a long glance of nervous, wondering horror. “The machine plague had that same handicap,” Cam said to Ingrid. “I mean the original archos tech.”

  “It was a prototype,” Ruth explained. “Freedman and Sawyer built it with the extra capacity to hold advanced secondary programs. They wanted to be prepared for making it better, and I think the Chinese designed this contagion in the same way. It doesn’t look like it’s done. It’s not ready.”

  “Maybe they planned to upload new programs after we’re all sick. The way this thing affects people right now might only be the first stage of the attack.”

  “But it’s empty coding,” Ruth said. “As far as I can tell, it’s just bulk.”

  “You don’t know how far they’ve progressed,” Cam said like a challenge. It was heartless, but there was a part of him that believed every implication in his words. They’re smarter than you. Faster. More aggressive.

  Her voice rose to match his. “The new plague would replicate even more rapidly if it was smaller,” she said. “It would function more cleanly and be less likely to…” Ruth faltered, but then her eyes flashed, responding to his cruelty. “It would be less likely to kill,” she said.

  “Both of you,” Ingrid said. “Stop.”

  Cam’s stomach was clenched like a fist.

  “This isn’t accomplishing anything.” Ingrid stepped between them with her hands on their shoulders, connecting them, but Cam swung away to conceal his rage.

  “I’ll get Bobbi,” he said.

  “I’m sorry!” Ruth said. “Wait. I didn’t mean—”

  They were caught by the sun. Shadows appeared beneath them and Cam’s gaze flickered toward the horizon. Across a sprawling, open valley to the north stood the thirteen-thousand-foot wall of the Never Summer Range. Those white peaks glared in the rosy-yellow light. Dawn was spectacular. There were no clouds, but the ever-present haze in the atmosphere acted like a dark prism, refracting and holding the light. Sunsets could be equally gorgeous. Cam and Allison had watched hundreds of these displays together, taking as much solace as they could find in their lives.

  Earth was experiencing the first small effects of nuclear winter. It seemed more than possible that global warming had been checked or even reversed. Three years had passed since there were tens of thousands of power plants and factories burning around the world, nor was the total daily traffic any greater than perhaps the equivalent of pre-plague Miami.

  At the same time, the atmosphere was dense with smoke and pulverized debris. Some estimates put the bomb in Leadville at sixty megatons. There had also been at least ten detonations on the other side of the planet. The Chinese had been brought to a stalemate in their other war in the Himalayas when India nuked the front lines of their own territory. India had been cautious to announce what they were doing. Nor did they harm the Chinese armies. Their bombings were a defensive maneuver, separating themselves from China with wide swaths of lethal, useless land — and so the Chinese turned their attention elsewhere.

  It wasn’t unlikely that India’s victory in stopping the enemy had led China to accelerate their efforts in North America. If the Chinese had fared better in the East, maybe they wouldn’t have felt it necessary to compete directly with the U.S. in the race for weaponized nanotech.

  Staring into the light, Cam shook off these thoughts before they paralyzed him. He was exhausted and irritable and he said, “Let me get Bobbi and we’ll eat. We need to get moving.”

  “Cam, I—” Ruth said.

  “Sweetheart, he knows,” Ingrid said. “Please. Both of you. Don’t fight. You both know you’d never say anything against Allison.”

  The sunrise fluttered. There were two gigantic strobes beyond the horizon, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. The light was supernatural. It ate the sky, beating against the mountains like a silent wall that jumped up and vanished and jumped up again. Cam had seen it before. He bent and jammed his arm across his eyes — but even then, he was aware of more flashes. Those are nuclear, he thought.

  “Get down!” Ingrid yelled as Ruth said, “Oh. God. Oh no. Oh no, oh God.”

  There were planes in the darkness to the southwest. Jets. Cam opened his eyes. The sky sparkled with reflected sunlight and then a phalanx of bright shapes slashed overhead. Only then did the engines’ noise hit, dragging over them like a wave. Cam threw himself into the ground, no matter if the fighters had been moving too quickly to spot a few bodies on a hillside.

  The shock wave will hit us soon, he thought.

  Ruth joined him against the jeep, fidgeting with her M4. “Were those our planes?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where were the nukes? Grand Lake?”

  “No. We would have burned.”

  The sunrise crept over the highest points of the land like yellow paint, touching the earth and the grass with heat. Cam felt the air change as he lifted his head to track a distant howl. The sound reverberated from the mountains in the east. At least one jet was curling back. Or were there more?

  Somewhere, Bobbi was yelling, and Ruth shouted, “We’re here! We’re here!”

  Now the sky in the west trembled with new engines — the lower, deeper growl of prop-driven aircraft. Cam waited as Bobbi ran and joined them, shoving her hands against her face to reseat her goggles and mask. “What’s happening?” she cried.

  Attack at dawn, Cam thought, peering past Bobbi’s shoulder. In the east, the sunrise changed again. It began to dim behind the immense,
indistinct swelling of mushroom clouds. Then he glanced the other way. To the west, he recognized the stubby fuselage of the first plane to emerge from the night. Another followed close behind. They were Chinese Y-8 cargo planes, very similar to the American C-130 and used for the same purposes — to ferry equipment or troops into tight landing spaces. The fighters were an escort.

  Wherever the nukes had landed, it was a long way off. The Chinese aircraft must have a different target. Cam could only think of one place that made sense.

  “Those planes are headed for Grand Lake,” he said.

  15

  Deborah Reece looked up from her atomic force microscope when the room trembled with a sharp, hammerlike boom. “What—” she said, studying the concrete ceiling. Then her chair rattled as the sound was repeated again and again. Boom boom boom. Boom. The desk shivered, too, and the faceplate of her containment suit vibrated from the same onslaught of explosions.

  “Air strikes,” Bornmann said nearby, muffled in his suit. “Son of a bitch.”

  Boom.

  “Where the fuck are our planes!?” someone yelled as another man said, “Rezac, what’ve you got?”

  In her fear, Deborah thought Dirk Walls had called for her. He was a two-star Marine general and as out of his element in this tiny squad as Deborah herself. She leaned away from her equipment, turning her entire torso inside her suit, but Walls was talking to the communications specialist attached to their unit, NSA Special Agent Michelle Rezac, a dark-haired woman with a soft voice and hard gray eyes.

  Suddenly the floor went sideways. It shoved Deborah’s feet out from under her. The mountain groaned. Bornmann fell against her and she screamed — but even in the confusion, it was the sideways jolt of this quake that caught her attention. The other explosions were clearly downwards. The larger quake felt as if it had come from another direction entirely and it was followed by aftershocks, none of which matched the detonations overhead.

  “What was that!?” a man yelled.

  Boom boom.

  Dust sifted down from a corner of the room where the concrete was under strain. Deborah clambered back to her feet. Somehow her microscope was still on the desk and she grabbed it in case there was another quake.

  She wouldn’t have believed the pressure on her could increase. Now there were Chinese aircraft in the sky, plastering the surface of Grand Lake with fire. Why? Would they land?

  Boom.

  She wondered how many people General Caruso could send against enemy soldiers, and if that number included herself. Of course it did. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen effective troops outside the command center and she bunched her hand inside her glove, remembering the jolt of her pistol all the way up her arm.

  Deborah and four others had left the command center an hour ago, hurrying to a makeshift lab in the upper levels of Complex 1, where they found the hardware retrieved from 3 by a squad of USAF commandos. Those men stayed with her as bodyguards. The other members of the group, like Walls and Rezac, were only here because Caruso had four more suits he hadn’t committed elsewhere. Caruso wanted to safeguard Deborah, but he also must have felt like there was no longer any point in holding onto his reserves. They were living on borrowed time.

  They were late, so late. Deborah never would have imagined the U.S. arsenal would still be in the ground, and yet she’d been thrilled by Caruso’s decision to keep their missiles in check. She had been wrong about him.

  Boom boom. Boom.

  Across the room, desks and gear clattered against the floor. Deborah looked at the ceiling again. The fluorescent lights gleamed in every scratch in her faceplate. This suit had seen plenty of action and it smelled of other people despite the nauseating rubber stink. Pulling on the heavy pantlegs, sleeves, and chest piece had been like wrapping herself in a men’s locker room.

  Boom.

  “Rezac!” Walls shouted, but Agent Rezac ignored him. She stood at the intercom with her hand collapsing her bright yellow rubberized helmet against her ear to secure her headset. At her waist, like all of them, she wore a control box, but she’d disconnected the short wire that connected her to their radios and jacked herself into the intercom instead.

  The nine of them were a hodgepodge of colors. One man wore a yellow civilian suit like Rezac, one was Army green, and the remainder were black as night. Deborah wore black, too, and she was glad. If they needed to ambush Chinese storm troopers, she didn’t want to do it in an emergency yellow hazmat suit.

  Rezac’s voice was an unintelligible mumble. Deborah stared at the other woman, needing information. In fact, everyone was watching Rezac except Emma.

  “I think I have a picture,” Emma said.

  “Really? Good work.” Deborah shuffled to a neighboring desk, where she’d paired Emma with a magnetic resonance force microscope and a small plastic tray littered with thin, square, colorless tabs called substrates. The MRFM was bigger than Deborah’s AFM. It had a larger base and internal arrays. Otherwise it looked much the same — a stout, glossy white tower with digital controls and a black eyepiece on top.

  “This is what we’re supposed to be looking at, right?” Emma said without using the radio, raising her voice to be heard outside her helmet.

  Deborah bent beneath the weight of her air tanks, taking care not to bang her faceplate against the eyepiece. She saw a black-and-white topography like the bottom of an egg carton, a symmetrical row of bumps joined by perfectly identical ribs and struts — but was she looking at the nano or just the material of the substrate itself?

  A speck of dust wouldn’t be so uniformly structured. She was sure of that. But the only way she’d known how to capture samples of the mind plague was to wave the substrates in the air, then insert the slides one by one into their microscopes and look for proof of the invisible machines. Unfortunately, holding the tiny squares in her gloves was an exercise in frustration. The substrates were made of sapphire, she remembered, but were just one centimeter across and only one millimeter thick, which made them as substantial as cellophane.

  If Emma had zeroed in on a nano at last, this would be only part of it. Was the magnification set too high? They were actually making some progress. It wasn’t enough, but at least they’d taken a few steps forward.

  Deborah was the most proud of saving Emma. I need her, she’d told Caruso. She worked with me with Goldman, she said, urging him to bring Emma through their decon tents into the command center, and Caruso agreed. It was the first time she’d deceived a superior in her life. Placing her friend above everyone else was selfish. Something in her had broken, but for Caruso to drop the entire nanotech program on her shoulders was beyond unfair. He expected too much.

  Deborah was finally questioning herself and what was most important to her — her country or her life. It was only an incredible bonus that Emma was so smart. Emma had clever hands and a good memory, and Deborah allowed herself to feel a bit of rivalry. There’s no way I’m going to let her show me up, she thought. “Okay, I see it,” she said.

  “Now what?”

  I don’t know, Deborah thought, but Bornmann was watching and she couldn’t bring herself to admit her ignorance.

  Captain Bornmann was a lion of a man, not because he was especially large but because he had a slow, lazy way of moving that radiated danger and stamina. Bornmann had led the commando team into Complex 3, risking the lives of his men to secure this equipment. Deborah understood why he was hovering. He wanted miracles, but she couldn’t give him any.

  “Listen up!” Rezac said on the intersuit radio. “They’re reporting nuclear strikes across Wyoming and Montana.”

  “Christ,” someone said.

  “The Chinese just hit most of our silos. Now they’re decapitating our command centers. It sounds like most of our gear topside is gone.”

  Deborah nearly had to sit down, swooning, as her blood leapt in her veins like a drum. The wildness she felt was unlike her. She wanted to run, but where?

  “We just had a coded me
ssage out of Salt Lake,” Rezac said. “They’re getting it, too — fighters, followed by troop carriers.”

  The attacks were insanely bold and well choreographed. The Chinese had sent their planes toward their own missile strikes, and yet the invasion worked because so many of the U.S.-Canadian radar stations were out of commission. There had also been jamming. During the past two hours, Grand Lake’s satellite links had filled with interference or failed completely. The survivors at Peterson AFB and in Missoula reported the same complications. The Chinese had total air superiority. They’d probably set a dozen AWACS planes above the Rockies, creating an electronic umbrella. That was why the missile launches from China went undetected — and now those aircraft must have been sacrificed by their own generals, either burned outright or short-circuited by the electromagnetic pulse.

  As for the fighters and troop carriers, no doubt those planes had come in extremely low to the ground, using the Continental Divide as a shield against the nuclear blasts. They must have timed their arrival at their targets just minutes after the ICBMs hit.

  This isn’t over yet, Deborah thought. It didn’t matter that the war was lost. The enemy had beaten them at every turn, but she knew the men and women around her would never give up. Neither would Deborah, not with the guilt she felt for lying to Caruso. That deception had been a small thing, saving Emma, but Deborah had always placed her integrity above her personal feelings.

  Now the two of them would pay the price. They were on the front line. If the Chinese wanted this base and high-level prisoners, they would probably succeed, but first a lot of people would die. Room by room, Deborah thought like a mantra. We’ll fight them for every goddamn room.

  “General Caruso has ordered us out,” Rezac said.

  “Out?” Bornmann asked.

  Deborah felt the same uncertainty, even dismay. She had made her decision to fight.

  “Pack it up,” Rezac said. “We can’t hold this base against ground troops. That’s impossible. All they need to do is bring the roof down on top of us. We’re getting out.”