Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Mammals and birds could dip into the invisible sea for a time, sometimes hours. Without host bodies, the nanotech was inert. Then it got into the lungs or the eyes or any microscopic break in the skin. It multiplied and spread and multiplied again, disintegrating soft tissue, muscle, and bone to build more of itself.

  Scientists everywhere had made huge strides during the past year, especially in the consolidated labs in Leadville, using the plague itself to learn and experiment. The archos tech was a versatile prototype, meant to target and destroy cancerous cells. It could have been a godsend. Instead it had killed all of its design team except one when it broke loose in the San Francisco Bay Area—a small tragedy inside the global extinction. No one knew where to find their lab. When they died, their computers and their secrets vanished with them. The one man who escaped had been caught on a high island of rock in the California Sierra until just twenty-nine days ago, when he dared to run for another peak with a ski patrolman named Cam Najarro.

  He was dead now, but first he’d devised a cure.

  Using his ideas, Ruth and other top researchers became sure they could put together a nano capable of protecting the body from within, like a vaccine—and the slow American war turned hot. The Leadville government thought the situation was too far gone to simply share this new technology and trust in any peace. Overseas, starving armies ate each other’s dead and kept prisoners like cattle, and there had been atrocities here as well.

  Leadville saw an opportunity to control the only way down from the mountains. It was a chance to own the entire planet, ensuring loyalty, establishing new states, leaving every enemy and undesirable to gradually succumb to famine and war unless perhaps they agreed to come down as slaves. The prize was too great, after too much hardship.

  But not everyone felt this greed. The strike team that flew out of Colorado to ransack the archos lab was full of moles. A few men and women in key positions disagreed with Leadville’s plan, sacrificing their own safety and well-being to get the right people on the plane. All three nanotech experts, all three pilots and seven of the twelve soldiers who landed in Sacramento had gone there hoping to grab the new technology and take it north to Canada, spread it freely and end the fighting. Things went badly. The good guys came out on top only to find themselves trapped in the city, more than half their number killed or captured.

  In the end they chose to strip off their containment suits and gamble on the vaccine nano, a hurriedly built, first-generation construct. It proved not to be absolute protection against the plague. At times the vaccine was overwhelmed, which left them vulnerable to some pain—but they could stay. They could hide.

  Three days ago, Ruth and Cam and Staff Sergeant Newcombe had set out on foot through the never-ending destruction to carry the nanotech to survivors everywhere. They thought they’d won. But they were still ninety miles from elevation.

  * * * *

  The pounding scream of the helicopters increased again, tilting closer, and Ruth gaped up at the clear May sky for an instant before she turned and shut her eyes, dizzy with new fear and adrenaline. The choppers would come overhead, she realized. They would cover the squads on the ground. The idea took all the strength out of her and she leaned against the Mercedes—the heavy Mercedes, which Cam must have picked because its solid design might stop rifle fire.

  Please, God, she thought.

  Newcombe came dodging through the wreckage and bones. He was covered in ants. Unfortunately he couldn’t slap at them, clutching his pack against his chest with both arms. He twisted and bucked, banging off of a big gray SUV.

  Cam tackled him. The two men hit the ground and then they seemed to be fighting. They flailed at each other, frantic to crush as many ants as possible. Bugs weren’t only dangerous because of bites or stings. After all this time, the ants would be enshrouded in nanotech. Every tiny puncture wound might also inject the plague directly into Newcombe’s blood, but there wasn’t time to hunt out every ant hidden in his gear. Newcombe was already scrambling for his rifle, which he’d dropped, and Cam got one hand on Newcombe’s pack and dragged it behind the Mercedes.

  “Here, over here!” Cam yelled.

  The choppers had definitely lifted off now, cutting the air with their thick, pulsing thunder. Any moment they would rise beyond the truck. Ruth looked at the Mercedes, wondering if she and Cam would fit beneath. Not with their packs.

  Then her gaze shot back to Newcombe’s gear and froze there in sudden understanding. The top flap was unbuckled and Ruth saw their radio inside, a med kit, socks. No food.

  The decoys had been Cam’s idea, exploiting this strange environment. Struggling to feed themselves, they’d found stores and homes scoured clean, everything in boxes or paper bags demolished, so Cam and Newcombe had included as many cans of lard and syrup in their packs as they could carry. It was a clever plan. There were no other living heat sources down here, which could have made them comparatively easy to spot. Six times now, Newcombe had run north or gone back west to leave food traps, drawing in huge frenzies of roaches, ants, beetles, and flies. Frenzies of heat and noise. Two days ago he’d rejoined them as a hazy black storm swelled on the horizon, a violent fog of competing species and colonies, and that had been at least a mile away. How many cans had Newcombe just hacked open?

  Cam regularly dosed them with a foul mix of bug spray and perfume, yes, perfume, to hide the mammal smell of their sweat and pheromones, but they weren’t more than twenty yards from the truck. If there was a swarm, they would be in the middle of it.

  Ruth clenched her left fist, a new habit to fight for control— to punish herself. Several days ago, both bones had been snapped at the wrist, and the grind in the break was always a distraction. She wanted to be more like her friends. She wanted to be as relentless. Her own pack was the lightest and she clawed at it now, too clumsy with her arm in its cast. Somehow her filthy mask had pulled down and she gulped clean-tasting air without regret. Dust and hot sun.

  Ruth carried the data index from the archos lab, a few computer discs and a sample case of nano-structures. She also had a grenade. She believed it was better to destroy the index than to let it be captured. A brutal choice. The design work might be used to truly defeat the machine plague, but it could also lead to advanced new weaponized nanotech and Leadville had already used a crude nano “snowflake” to liquefy sixteen hundred men and women on the White River Plateau, rebels who dared to try to race them to the archos lab. If the soldiers overran her, if the bugs tore her apart—

  She closed her fingers on the hard, wire pin of the grenade as the choppers ripped into the sky, sunlight flashing from metal and Plexiglas.

  There was no way to keep the vaccine itself from them. Even if she and Cam and Newcombe set a hundred cars on fire, consuming themselves, the microscopic nanotech could still be harvested from their remains, and the human race had been pushed too close to the brink to destroy the vaccine outright. It was better to let Leadville have it than no one, but that was a dangerous idea. It felt like failure.

  Ruth stared at the roaring aircraft and let her hatred and bitterness fill her. In that instant, she knew she could do it. She tensed her hand on the arming pin.

  “Down!” Cam hit her bad shoulder and Ruth fell, gasping. She was vaguely aware of Newcombe behind him. The other man had hidden against a red commuter car and then Cam blinded her, throwing his body over her head and chest.

  She fought him, trying to get to her pack again. He didn’t understand and kept shouting, “Down, stay dow—”

  Above them, the deafening thunder veered away. The change was abrupt and distinct. At the same time, a blast wave of twitchy black muck spattered across her bare face and goggles. Ants. Shredded ants.

  Ruth bent back from it and screamed, trapped between the road and Cam’s weight. Then he swiped at the black rain with his entire upper body and she was free.

  A huge spout of insects jetted into the sky. They were carpenter ants, well out of th
eir normal reproductive cycle. Maybe they were always breeding now. The nests and passageways of their colony extended fifty yards in every direction beyond the berm of the highway and the ground there had exploded with thousands of winged males and immature queens, although Ruth saw only the aftereffect of the swarm’s collision with the helicopters. The billowing hole immediately filled in again, a cloud of small bodies ready for war.

  They were protecting the food that Newcombe had left out. The truck formed a crumpled wall near the center of the storm, fortunately. It deflected most of the flying ants as well as the warriors and worker drones that boiled across the earth. Backwash from the helicopters had dragged the upper layers away, too—and on the far side, the bugs also found competition.

  Fourteen months ago, in the space of a few weeks, the ants’ food supply had skyrocketed and then dropped off again and the tiny scavengers had evolved to meet the change, ravaging every opportunity, surviving by aggression alone. The Leadville troops would have only a residue of human scent on their containment suits, but they were new. They were moving. And they were nearly on top of the colony.

  Dark threads swirled together in the air and lashed down out of Ruth’s sight, twisting up and back in the cyclone winds. Both helicopters had swung away but one went low as the other climbed, its engines straining, clogged with ants. In some brief gap in the noise Ruth heard the rattle of submachine guns on full auto, the soldiers fighting back any way they could.

  Then she recoiled, her cheek and neck burning with half a dozen bites. “Aaaaa—”

  The wet blast of ants that painted her were not all dead. Not by far. Many had been chewed apart by the rotors and many more were stunned, some of them stuck in the moisture of their own pulverized companions, but some were still free, and confused and enraged.

  Ruth fell to the ground, clubbing at her face and neck. One thought stayed with her. My pack. She looked for it as she tottered back onto her knees and Cam was there, stumbling through the junk of his own upturned pack. He had a handful of little glass bottles. He fumbled off the caps and made a pitching motion at her. Perfume. Sweet. It scalded her nostrils and Ruth clutched at her face mask, roughly dragging the fabric up to dislodge any ants still on her cheeks.

  “Where—” she said, but he caught her arm, shaking the rest of the bottles out over their heads.

  Newcombe joined them, bumping hard. He had a squeeze bottle of insect repellant and punched it against her, crushing ants, spraying juice. It was like breathing turpentine.

  “I don’t think they’ve seen us!” Newcombe yelled.

  But the drumbeat of the choppers changed again, coming back.

  “Run for the culvert!” Cam shouted at her.

  “Where’s my pack?”

  “No, stay down!” Newcombe yelled. “If they see—”

  “I have more trap food! There!” Cam yanked at Ruth even as he knelt, propelling her toward the Mercedes and her backpack. “If we stay here we’ll die!” he shouted.

  He was right. The sun was fading as the bugs thickened. In the shifting new pitch of sound, Ruth understood that one of the chopper pilots must be using his aircraft like a powerful fan, blowing the swarm off of the ground troops.

  Off of them and onto us.

  “Go! Run!” Cam hollered, jamming a knife into a can of milk. But she hesitated.

  He threw the dripping can as hard as he could and bent to stab at another, ignoring the haze of ants on his gloves and knees. He was like that, quick to make the best decision. Cam Najarro was neither a soldier nor a scientist, but he had lived through the entire plague year on a barren, isolated peak where eighty people were ultimately reduced to six by starvation and cold and bugs and madness, and that was an education of a kind that few could match.

  He was a good man, though profoundly wounded—and maybe not entirely sane, Ruth sometimes worried. He was so single-minded. He had committed himself to her even before she suggested that advances in nanotech might someday rebuild his damaged body, taking on every role available to him. Scout. Bodyguard. Friend. It was wrong that he should stay while she escaped. Wrong to waste his effort.

  Go, she told herself, hefting her pack. The two men were puncturing every last jar and can and they’d finish in seconds. They’d be right behind her.

  Ruth jogged into the maze of cars and skeletons, trying to keep her head down. The choppers hadn’t moved and she angled away from the noise as much as possible, staggering once when her boot caught in a drift of bones. Then she ricocheted off a brown minivan and hunkered down, coughing, sick with exhaustion. Her face and mouth throbbed but she was mostly free of ants. She rose just enough to peer through the dusty windows of a sedan, trying to spot the enemy.

  Some of the soldiers had fallen in the low, living fog. They staggered up, but somehow one man’s suit had ripped. Maybe he’d caught it on the fence. Ruth thought his rubberized sleeve was flapping at the elbow, although it was impossible to tell in the leaping black mass of ants.

  His ragged arm swung up like a flag, trailing a dark mist of blood and insects. The bugs were inside him. His shape barely looked human anymore, knotting and jerking as he was eaten alive. Two of the other soldiers tried to lift him away but a third soldier rammed himself into the bleeding man and knocked him down, pointing his submachine gun at the man’s chest.

  No, Ruth thought. The realization left her stunned. No, he’s aiming at his friend’s arm.

  The weapon blazed, amputating the furious buldge of ants but leaving the man’s body wide open to more. Ruth couldn’t watch. She jerked her eyes away, looking for Cam and Newcombe. But there was another horror behind her. New eruptions had come up out of the earth and covered the road like smoke. There was also a reddish streak pushing in from the northeast, beetles or something else. At the same time, another phenomenon stirred through the haze of ants. The machine plague. Even the bugs were not immune, as Ruth had long suspected. In their frenzy, the ants were generating too much heat despite the cool May afternoon—and within the cloud, holes burst open like fireworks as the ants disintegrated.

  Ruth stared in mute awe. Then her heart leapt as a human form sprinted between two cars nearby. Cam. He ran with an odd limping motion, swatting at his collar and hood. Newcombe appeared close behind. Ruth waved frantically even as she cut her eyes back to the enemy, trying to see the wounded soldier again.

  One glimpse convinced her. Newcombe was right. Leadville had almost certainly detected some trace of her group, but as the helicopters flew in, the larger heat signature of the ant colony had deceived them. Now they were done. It was a spectacular mess. Dense spirals of ants whipped through downdrafts and currents as the last men on the ground fled, hauling the bloodied soldier aboard a crowded flight deck. He was limp now, dead or unconscious, but the writhing shadow of ants remained attached to him even after his friends kicked and slapped at his body.

  The other chopper was already lifting away and Ruth allowed herself a small, savage smile.

  It looked like her luck was holding.

  2

  The water gleamed in the sunrise, white and treacherous. “Stop,” Cam said, even as he took several more steps himself— but now he moved sideways instead of forward, feeling wary and restless.

  There was no wind this morning and the valley below them held a flat inland sea, dazzling in the light. The highway disappeared into it, although he saw the road hump up again briefly about two miles off. The water wasn’t deep. It was rotting and stagnant, cluttered with buildings and power lines and cars. Spiderwebs. Small patches of silk clung to the ruins by the thousands.

  “Where are we?” Ruth asked behind him, and Cam said, “Stop. Stay there.” Then he realized his voice was too harsh and he shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “You’ve been here before,” she said, her eyes searching for his through their dirty goggles.

  “Yeah.”

  He knew she’d lived in Ohio and Florida, and Newcombe said he grew up in Delaware, but the
re was little question that Cam’s parents and brothers lay dead somewhere on these same roads. Maybe they’d even made it this far. Northern California had once rivaled Los Angeles for bad traffic, however, because the greater Bay Area sat in a massive delta crammed with rivers and gullies, which meant bridges, levees, and bottlenecks.

  He was not as sad as she probably thought. The land down here was too strange and dangerous to be home. More than anything, Cam felt frustrated, trying to grasp the scale of what they were facing.

  Their goal looked close enough. They wanted to spread the vaccine to other survivors, and the Sierras made an imposing band across the horizon—brown foothills, dark mountains—like a wall of pyramids with the highest peaks still capped in snow. In another life he’d driven there in three hours. But those memories were deceptive. As the land rose, it buckled, and walking all the way there would have been an up-and-down nightmare even without the traffic and other wreckage.

  The city in front of them was Citrus Heights, one of the nicer suburbs that made up the dense urban sprawl all around Sacramento. It had burned before it drowned. Despite the name, most of the Heights sat on the same low plain as its neighbors. This quiet marsh must have seen a torrent of water when it first went under, judging from the debris wedged against the slumping homes and telephone poles as high as three feet up. There were mud banks among the overturned cars and snarls of brush and charred lumber, all of it softened by the glimmering white silk of webs and egg sacs. The water kept the spiders safe from the ants.

  “Let’s check your map again,” Cam said, but Newcombe had the same idea. Newcombe was unbuttoning a pouch on his jacket as he strode closer.

  Cam looked back at the glinting sea. They had been lucky not to run into other new basins and swamps before now. Hundreds of miles of earthworks spread across northern California, channeling the flow down from the mountains. Two winters with no one at the gates had been too much. Everywhere they’d seen plant life sick or destroyed entirely—and without grass and reeds, the levees were vulnerable.