Plague Zone p-3

by Jeff Carlson

  “Kill them!” Jia shouted to the copilot.

  Deborah scrunched her eyes shut against the pain, then opened them again in a blur of tears and caustic ash. Her world had shrunk down to a few inches. She clawed at it with one good arm, dragging her body behind her, but the level asphalt seemed like a wall. It felt too steep.

  Get to Kendra, she thought. That’s all. Just get to her. There are too many people counting on you.

  Each breath was a struggle. She could feel her stamina oozing away with the blood from her mangled belly. Everything below that was numb. Her nerves were cut somewhere beneath her abdomen except for a single unsteady wire tricking up from her left thigh, where the muscles cramped and bunched.

  Kendra lay three feet in front of her — three feet — but it was too far for either of them. Kendra’s loose fist hung motionless, propped just above her chest. Her wide eyes stared up. She was dead. Dead, but still warm. The two of them would be enough for the nanotech’s gestation if only Deborah could swallow it.

  You must be the last one left, she thought. Cam, Medrano, they’re all dead.

  She dragged and fought and got no closer, reaching, reaching… She knew she could forget. She could escape this misery if she succeeded. The counter-vaccine would erase her mind, and she yearned for whatever peace the nanotech might bring. It was her duty and her revenge. With one motion she could honor her friends and infect the Chinese, and that was enough. It had to be enough.

  Just get to Kendra.

  Dust leapt from the earth. At first she didn’t make sense of the horizontal rain. The guns were beyond her tunnel vision. Deborah felt two or three tugs in her dead, outstretched legs, but forgot them.

  Kendra.

  Then a bullet crashed through Deborah’s forearm, knocking it aside. The pain was like a cleaver.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  Jia ceased fire and rolled over the top of the dune, preparing to run for the labs. His moment was now. There were no more Americans in front of him and he didn’t have the ammunition or the time to allow the fight to continue.

  “Go! Go!” he yelled to the copilot.

  Someone rose from the wreckage beside him, a bloody figure as dirty as the night. Jia dragged his submachine gun up. Unfortunately, the man held a firing system between them — a clamshell like a small laptop. The faint light of the fires revealed a beard and old blister rash on his dark face. He was Hispanic.

  They stared at each other. Perhaps it was like looking into a mirror. Jia had never put a face on the enemy. They had always been “the Americans.” Compassion was not what Jia expected to feel, and yet he’d always been attuned to other men. This soldier was no less human than his own troops. Maybe Jia was the only one who truly grasped how the warriors on both sides were alike, noble and courageous.

  Jia would have spoken to the other man if they shared a language. Even so, he tried to communicate. “Bié dng! Tng!” he shouted. Don’t move! Stop!

  The copilot’s feet ticked in the wreckage nearby. His presence added a second gun to Jia’s. Jia thought the American might attempt to negotiate, but the man never said a word. Maybe he grinned. A feral expression split his face, yet his hatred and his spite never touched the sadness in his eyes.

  He pressed his hand down on his device. The ruins convulsed. Explosions lifted in a broken ring all around the labs, at least ten blinding flashes in the night. Shrapnel crashed against the dunes, but the nearest detonations were behind Jia. He was inside their lines. The bombs threw most of the debris away from him.

  It was a final diversion.

  Jia shot the American even as they ducked the blasts together. Both men crouched without thinking. Only Jia stayed down. The American flailed upward as Jia’s submachine gun blazed into his chest, yet he’d bought his comrades a few more heartbeats of time.

  As the explosions lifted through the ash, the blond American lying in the parking lot squirmed once more, scrabbling toward the corpse nearby. Jia took aim again. Beside him, the copilot brought up his Type 85. Their guns raked the fallen Americans — but in that split second, Jia Yuanjun thought he saw both bodies in the parking lot reach for each other. The corpse’s arm dropped away from its side, either rocked by the bombs or Jia’s own bullets.

  The two Americans touched each other.

  Then the blond figure jerked one hand to her mouth.

  28

  Her teeth hurt. Two in front were loose. She was sure she’d crunched through an old filling, and yet she seemed unable to stop pressing her jaws together. In her sleep, the habit was even more severe. She needed some kind of nightguard if it could be fabricated. Otherwise she was going to peel those incisors right out of her head.

  The Army doctors said it was PTSD. They’d seen a lot of stress and fear. Ruth believed her neural pathways were permanently altered, because her jitters weren’t confined to her grinding. Her left hand tended to make a fist and squeeze like a heart. She glanced constantly to that side. The mind plague had changed her, and she’d noticed the same fidgeting in most of the survivors. The doctors wanted to pass it off as a normal traumatic reflex because a few calm words were all they had to offer. That wasn’t true for Ruth. She could build something to fight it.

  The worst cases were being treated with weed, alcohol, or restraints. Most people seemed okay. In fact, Ruth was impressed that less than two days had passed since she woke up. The best elements of the U.S. military were quick to regain their feet, staggering up to fight a battle that never came.

  The war was over.

  Sixteen hours ago, they’d landed her in Sylvan Mountain, ninety miles southwest of Grand Lake. Grand Lake had been abandoned for now, its complexes too damaged by the Chinese assault. Sylvan Mountain was mostly a surface base, a simple garrison lined with armor, artillery, and chopper pads, so it hadn’t merited air attacks. The mind plague had been enough to incapacitate this place.

  The fallout had also reached these mountains, but the sky was clearing, leaving only a rime of soot. Faint threads of it still curled in the wind, tightening, opening, and tightening again — like her hand.

  Ruth watched the horizon, trying to ignore herself. A small part of her basked in the heat of the late yellow sun. Soon it would be dark, and she cherished the light. She also welcomed the bustle of troops around the only helicopter on this broad concrete slab. They were loading the Black Hawk with wire cut from their own fences, shouting in the cold as they wrestled the steel with pliers and gloves. None of it was enough to distract her. She could only watch and wait, pacing, twitching.

  A captain with an M4 intercepted her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “Dr. Goldman? You shouldn’t be out here.”

  “Beymer,” she said, tugging at the white badge on her uniform. Go ask Colonel Beymer. The overwhelmed Navy colonel was acting CO, and he hadn’t known what to do with her except to give her anything she needed, medical attention, food, rest, and a quiet space for the microscopy gear they’d recovered with her. No one had time to babysit.

  The badge was supposed to give her top clearance, which suited Ruth just fine. Speaking was an effort. In addition to hurting her teeth, she’d chewed her tongue and the insides of her cheek while she was infected, possibly because she’d been tied and her body couldn’t find any other way to respond to the mind plague’s commands to move.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” the captain said. “Not without containment suits.”

  Ruth didn’t answer.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” he said, “but we don’t know what they might be carrying. What if there are other strains of nanotech?”

  Only a few of his words rang through her anxiety. You don’t know what I’m feeling, she thought. I should have been there. But the captain was right, if not the reasons he’d stated. The landing pad was a zoo whenever new birds arrived. After everything that had happened, it would be idiotic for her to be squished by a chopper or run over by their ground crews.

  “I’ll move
out of the way,” she said, enunciating slowly through her swollen mouth.

  “Thank you, ma‘am.” The captain hesitated, trying to meet her eyes, but Ruth couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. They wanted so much from her.

  She’d used that need against them. Everyone was afraid of another contagion, something else cooked up in Los Angeles, but Ruth had convinced Colonel Beymer to send a helicopter after her friends nevertheless. Kendra Freedman was the name she’d cited. We have to find her, she’d said, and that was true, but she was less interested in saving Freedman than in discovering if Cam and Deborah were alive.

  Ruth walked across the landing pad and sat down on a supply crate, picking one fingernail through the splintered edge of the box. It was good to be out of her lab. Even her mouth hurt less outside. The tent was small and dark, and Ruth was more disturbed than ever by small and dark. The waiting was worse. Ten minutes ago, Beymer had sent a man to say that his team was inbound from L.A.

  I should have been there.

  The thought would always haunt her. How much differently would things have played out if she could have helped them? Would she be dead, too?

  Ruth had come back to her senses in a residential home in the flood-ruined old town of Tabernash, twenty miles south of the V-22 hanger. Ingrid was with her in a locked bedroom, but Ingrid was infected and only one of Ruth’s hands was partially untied. Ingrid must have seen the others fall sick before running to free Ruth. She wasn’t fast enough. Ruth was still tied to the bed. Coaxing Ingrid to her had been impossible. Ruth had screamed and begged in the darkness, hungry, bleeding, and alone except for the senseless ghost of her friend. She watched Ingrid roam back and forth against the walls for hours, never finding the door, until the older woman finally stumbled close enough for her to grab her belt. Ruth was weak. Ingrid was clumsy. She fell on Ruth, then rolled away, but Ruth had already dragged the pistol from Ingrid’s hip. Her wrists were bound too close together to aim the gun at those ropes, nor did she want to shoot at her feet, but she was able to use the weapon as a tool to pry herself free. Then she found her way to their radio.

  Earlier today, Ruth had successfully modified the first vaccine for the mind plague to outpace the counter-vaccine, thus creating an antidote. Reprogramming the antidote so it wouldn’t replicate except in specific conditions was more difficult, but they wanted to keep it from spreading to the Chinese — not until the enemy was gathered into prison camps. Ruth had devised a governor that limited the antidote to replicating only in high oxygen atmospheres. This was an artificial environment within her ability to create, especially at Sylvan Mountain’s altitude, using precious medical supplies. It meant she was able to cultivate the antidote in small doses. Then she secured it in vials of blood plasma for injection into one person at a time.

  Ingrid, Emma, and General Walls were now in a private tent, recuperating. The rest of these heroes had vanished. From the data on Walls’s laptop, they knew who else had survived, but Bobbi Goodrich must have wandered away from their safe house before Ruth got free. Bobbi was missing. Nor had they been able to locate the other squad of immunized soldiers led by Lieutenant Pritchard. Wherever the USAF commando had gone into hiding, his men were infected, maybe starving or hurt, and Ruth hoped someone would find them before it was too late. As far as she was concerned, the places they’d earned in history were paramount even to her own, because it was these people, not her, who’d struggled on through the end.

  Agent Rezac was another complication. Ruth’s antidote carried some of the same risks as the mind plague itself. Within seconds of her injection, Rezac had stroked out. She was dead. The same problem had crippled or killed dozens more just here in Sylvan Mountain as they awoke from the plague. It wasn’t fair.

  The first reports out of Los Angeles were even worse. The recovery team said they’d found Deborah and Kendra dead in a parking lot outside the Chinese labs. The women’s bodies lay side by side, Kendra’s arm outstretched, Deborah’s hand pressed against her own face with a substrate in her mouth.

  They’d done it. Even as they were overrun by Chinese troops, they’d won. From their bodies, the counter-vaccine had drifted to the enemy — and Cam.

  He was alive. He was in the second stage of infection when the recovery team found him burrowing in the ruins. His body was in some indefinite form of hibernation. It had saved him. Most likely he hadn’t moved more than a few inches during the first, agitated phase of the mind plague. He was nearly dead from blood loss, but they’d done their best to increase his vital signs. They were rushing him back to Sylvan Mountain for surgery. Except for two Chinese prisoners taken on site, Cam was the sole witness to what had happened in L.A. Medrano was dead, too, as were a pair of Russian soldiers in the rubble — allies of the Chinese?

  Cam might know something about Kendra’s design work or other labs or American survivors, but, in truth, there was no reason for Ruth to stop her own crash programs to wait for his helicopter. He’d never regained consciousness. Even if he opened his eyes, he was a zombie. Cam would have a better chance of pulling through if he was responsive, if he wouldn’t fight his restraints, but his body didn’t need any more immediate shocks. The doctors wouldn’t inject him with the antidote until he’d improved.

  Ruth had only come to the landing pad because she needed to see him one more time before they took the chance of killing him like Agent Rezac.

  She hoped she was pregnant. It seemed unlikely. They’d only made love once, but she would have been ovulating, so it wasn’t impossible. She wanted his child. Some part of him would carry on.

  They both deserved that much, didn’t they?

  Ruth leapt to her feet as two F-35s soared overhead, the recovery team’s escort from the West Coast. Where was the helicopter? Long seconds passed before a black dot materialized out of the sunset, whup whup whup whup, the drumbeat of its rotors slapping at the mountainsides.

  Their mission had been delayed by the chopper’s need to refuel in Utah, California, and then in Utah again. Its flight into L.A. had been an exacting game of leapfrog, working with fighter escorts with far greater range and speed, but there were no more VTOL planes available. Ruth was grateful just to have been able to reach into California at all.

  She broke her promise to stay off the pad as the Black Hawk entered its final approach.

  “Dr. Goldman, wait!” the captain yelled. He ran to intercept her but Ruth shrugged him off with her head on a swivel, looking up, looking left, trying to anticipate where the chopper would land. She dodged a jeep loaded with wire. Then she bumped into two mechanics taking apart an engine and kicked through the parts spread on the ground.

  “Hey!” one man shouted.

  “Sorry—” The scattered metal at Ruth’s feet seemed like a bad omen and she wavered, fidgeting. She almost stooped down to help them sort through the jumble, but medical teams had emerged from the low buildings beside the field. Ruth hurried to join them even as the captain grabbed her sleeve.

  “Goldman, wait.”

  She stared at the much larger man. “Get your fucking hands off me,” she said. He hesitated. She pulled away. It wasn’t his fault — he was protecting her — but Ruth was no longer interested in being shielded from anything.

  Somehow she controlled herself enough to make room for the medics and their gurneys as a soldier jumped from the Black Hawk. At her side, her fist clenched and unclenched.

  The first man they lifted from the flight deck was unrecognizable, wrapped in blankets with his face obscured by an air mask and bandages. The blades overhead were still winding down. Ruth pressed into the crowd. “Cam!” she yelled. “Cam!” But the man’s dumbstruck eyes were Chinese. A prisoner.

  “Where is Corporal Najarro!?” she yelled.

  They were unloading someone else from the other side. Ruth shoved her way past the Black Hawk’s nose, joining the confusion as they strung IV bags above his gurney. She needed to touch him. She felt the power in her shaking hands. The tw
o of them were a circuit that must be closed again, even if it was only for this instant.

  Cam wore an air mask like the other man. One side of his beard had been scorched down to stubble, but she recognized his hair and the muscles along his neck, even though his dark skin was gray and shiny like wax.

  “Miss, you can‘t—” someone said.

  Her hand reached Cam’s shoulder as she burst into tears. Her grief was a lover’s and a friend‘s, wretched and deep. Stay with me, she thought. Be with me. We haven’t had our turn yet. Please.

  There was nothing in his eyes except the slack, uncaring look of the plague, so unlike his anger or his strength. Ruth turned away even before another medic said, “Let us get him inside.” She nodded. It didn’t matter if they saw her head move or not. She was already retreating and the gesture was as much for herself as anyone else.

  The gesture was his, tough-minded and succinct.

  She would fight on with him or without him. She owed them that much, but she honestly wasn’t sure how far to take the next generation of nanotech. Where did self-defense become something more? Was it possible to draw the line at healing people when she knew how easily new advances would spread to everyone in the world?

  As she walked away from the helicopter, the soldiers on board were met by two jeeps and more men. If anyone recognized her, they didn’t say. They were following orders, unloading carefully bagged computers, lab gear, and paperwork. Sorting through the material would be a colossal chore. Ruth wasn’t looking forward to it. The job would keep her mind off of Cam, but maybe worrying about him would have been better.

  I can’t go back to that tent right now, she thought. I should. I have to. Instead, she walked onto the rutted earth beyond the chopper pads, drinking in the sky and the cold. Her body was as restless as her head.

  I can’t.