Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Their radio was a small, broken thing—a headset and a control box. It was designed to be worn with a containment suit, the earpiece and microphone inside, the controls on the suit’s waist. They had cut it free of Newcombe’s gear on the first day, splicing the wires back together again. They’d also packed up Ruth and Cam’s radios as extras.

  Newcombe held up the headset and then there was a woman whispering inside their little concrete box. The same woman as always. Every day, every night, Newcombe worked to find a signal other than the loop broadcast cajoling them to surrender, but the suit radio was more of a walkie-talkie than a real field unit. It had limited range and only operated on ten military bands, and Leadville was jamming all frequencies except this one.

  Her words were calm and practiced. “. . . come for you anywhere, save you, just answer me...”

  In the city and on the highway, they had also found police, firefighter, and army radios for the taking. Rifles, too, although Cam couldn’t use a larger weapon with the knife wound on his hand.

  During the first days of the plague, local and federal forces had tried everything to meet the threat, often with opposing intents. There were roadblocks. There were eastbound convoys and escorts. Once they’d come across an old battlefield where an armored Guard company had turned back CHP and sheriff units, uselessly. It was all just part of the mess.

  Good batteries were a problem, though. Many of the civilian and military radios had been left on as their operators fled or died, maybe hoping, impossibly, that help could still come. Even when Newcombe got something working, the civilian frequencies were deserted, and the Sierras made it easier for Leadville’s forward base to override the military bands. Sitting on top of the immense wall of the mountains, Leadville could block out every other voice.

  The woman taunted them. “If you’re hurt, if you’re tired, we have medical personnel standing by and we . . .”

  Newcombe switched through his channels rapidly. Static. Static. “Those jets have been trying to reach us this whole fucking time,” he said. “That’s why they’re down so low, to get under the jamming. To stay off Leadville’s radar net.”

  “But what can they do?” Ruth asked. “Would they land?”

  “No. Not fighters. Not here. But they can give us information and they can keep Leadville off our backs. We had contingencies. We—”

  A lot of things happened fast. Two of the planes roared back again almost directly overhead, an invisible pair of shock lines that hammered through the ruins. It was as if a giant hand dragged two fingers across the houses and the water, lifting waves and debris—and inside this hurricane, a flurry of white-hot sparks tumbled down toward the sea, so bright that a conflict of shadows rippled over the drowned city, stark and black even in full daylight. It was chaff, a defensive tool intended to blind and distract heat-seeking missiles. But if there were missiles, Cam didn’t notice. A smaller line of destruction chased after the jets, stitching its way through mud banks, buildings, and cars. Gunfire. Cam saw the large-caliber explosive rounds kick apart an entire home, tearing through wood and brick like it was paper, before he winced and ducked away and three more jets screamed past.

  At the same time Newcombe grunted, ha, triumphant. Beneath the noise, the radio was chanting in a man’s voice loud with popping static:

  “. . . air is against the wall, the chair is against . . .”

  It faded out. The jets were gone. Cam didn’t understand the weird phrase, but Newcombe was nodding. Newcombe clicked twice at his SEND button, a quick and untraceable signal of squelch, acknowledging the message even as he looked back and forth at Cam and Ruth. “Good news,” he said.

  3

  Ruth woke up hurting. Her fingers. Her wrist. The feeling was a hard, grinding itch and Ruth thrashed out of her sleeping bag, frantic to move away from the pain. It was a reflex as basic as lifting your hand off of a fire, but these embers were inside her. The machine plague. She knew that but she moved anyway, screaming in the dark.

  “Get up! Get up!”

  The stars were intense, close and sharp, like a billion fragments of light. Even through the bronze lens of her goggles, Ruth could see the neat, open canyon of the residential street around her—but as she tried to stand, she cracked her knee on something. Then the ground rocked and clanged beneath her. She nearly fell. She grabbed with both arms and struck Newcombe as he sat up.

  The two of them were in the truck bed of a big Dodge pickup, she remembered. They’d found a boat at last, well before sunset, but spent forty minutes looking for a vehicle capable of towing it. Negotiating the truck through the ruins cost them another hour. By then they were losing daylight and Cam suggested using the truck itself for camp, two of them sleeping as the third stood guard. The tires were as good as stilts and they’d soaked the road beneath with gasoline in case ants or spiders came hunting.

  “What—” Newcombe said, but he stopped and stared at his gloved hands. “Christ.”

  He felt it, too.

  “We’re in a hot spot!” Ruth cried, wrenching her bad arm as she staggered up again. “Cam? Cam, where are you!? We have to get out of here!”

  A white beam slashed across the darkness from inside the long, thin fishing boat, parked on its trailer. Then the flashlight jogged higher, reflecting on the beige paint as Cam stepped onto the bow. “Wait,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  “We can’t—”

  “We’ll go. Just wait. Get your stuff. Newcombe? We’d better splash ourselves with more gasoline. Who knows what the hell else is awake right now.”

  His methodical voice should have helped Ruth control herself. He was right. There were too many other dangers to run blindly into the night, but the pain was bad and growing worse and every breath carried more nanotech into their lungs.

  Their ski gear was only designed to repel snow and cold. Jackets, goggles, and fabric masks could never be proof against the plague. In fact, the masks were nearly useless. They wore their makeshift armor only to reduce their exposure, but it was an impossible battle. Thousands of the microscopic particles covered each short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With every step they stirred up great puffs of it, yet even holding still would be no help. They were deep within an invisible ocean. Airborne nanos blanketed the entire planet, forming vast wells and currents as the weather dictated, and this fog would be its worst down here at sea level. The wind might sweep it up and away, but rain and runoff and gravity were a constant drag on the subatomic machines. Newcombe hadn’t wanted to drink the water because he was afraid of bacteria, but even if he’d had purifier tablets, Ruth would have stopped him because this shoreline must be dense with the machine plague.

  Their only true protection was the vaccine nano. But it could be overwhelmed. In an ideal scenario, it would kill the plague as soon as the invader touched their skin or lungs. In reality, its capacity to target the plague was limited, and it functioned best against live, active infections. That was a problem. Inhaled or otherwise absorbed into a host body, the plague took minutes or even hours to reactivate, and in that time it could travel farther than was easily understood. A human being was comprised of miles upon miles of veins, tissue, organs, and muscle—and once the plague began to replicate, the body’s own pulse became a weakness, distributing the nanotech everywhere.

  The vaccine was not so aggressive. It couldn’t be. It was able to build more of itself only by tearing apart its rival. Otherwise it would have been another machine plague. Ruth had taught it to recognize the unique structure of the plague’s heat engine, which it shared, and she had given it the ability to sense the fraction of a calorie of waste heat that plague nanos generated repeatedly as they constructed more of themselves, but the vaccine was always behind its brother. It was always reacting. It was smaller and faster, able to eradicate its prey, but only after the chase.

  Fortunately, in one sense, the plague had a tendency to bunch up in the extremities
and in scar tissue, attacking the body’s weakest points first. The vaccine gathered in the same way, but more than once they had all suffered some discomfort as the endless war continued inside them.

  With Ruth, it was her broken arm. The swollen, clotted tissue there seemed to act as a screen, trapping the nanos in her wrist and keeping them down in that hand, eating her away a bit at a time. She was terrified of being crippled. She worried about it almost compulsively because anything more was unthinkable. Hemorrhaging. Stroke. Heart attack. Death.

  For an instant she stared at Cam, shaking all over. But behind the white light in his hand, he was only a shadow, faceless and distant. Ruth bent and grabbed her pack, pushing off of Newcombe as he switched on his own flashlight. There was no chance she’d bother to pack up her sleeping bag. She immediately began to climb down from the truck, swinging her foot over the side.

  “Ruth—”

  “You’re sixty pounds heavier than me!” she screamed, wild with fear and envy. “Goddammit! I’ll always have it worst! I’ll always be closer to maxing out!”

  “Just let me get in front,” Cam said, jumping down from the boat. He landed hard. The beam of the flashlight splashed over his chest, but he quickly gathered himself and took one step away from the truck.

  Ruth gritted out words. “We need to get inside. Somewhere clean.”

  “Okay.” Cam played his light over the street and changed direction, glancing back once at Newcombe. “Move,” he called. “We can douse ourselves on the move.”

  Newcombe hustled after them, a second wand of light. He caught up as they reached the sidewalk and gestured with his free hand. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check this house. You two stay here.”

  Ruth made a sound like laughter, like sobbing. It felt insane to wait out at the edge of the patchy dry lawn beside the mailbox. In the dark, this small space looked so normal and perfect, even as she burned, but Newcombe’s decision was inarguable. His sacrifice.

  If there were skeletons inside, the home would be packed with nanotech. The plague was bad along the highway, where so many people had been disintegrated, but it had also been swept by wind and rain. There were safer pockets here and there, and they tended to settle down on the upwind side, using their own nerves to gauge how thick the plague might be. They’d had mixed luck trying to camp inside. A sealed room was priceless, but a single body could be exploded into millions of the damned things and they needed to avoid concentrated spikes in exposure. Worse, it might not be obvious that anyone was dead inside a building. In the final extreme, most people had hidden themselves away, crawling into corners and closets.

  Opening every door was a good way to overload the vaccine, but that kind of inspection was necessary. Houses with bodies were also houses with bugs. Either the ants had come through, often leaving a colony behind, or the rot eventually made the place more attractive to termites and beetles.

  Hunched over her arm, Ruth watched Newcombe approach the two-story home. He skimmed his light along the front of the building, making sure there were no broken windows.

  Cam said, “What else can we do? Ruth? What else?”

  “Nothing. Wait.” Oh God, she thought. Maybe she said it out loud, too.

  “Here’s another mask. Put it on over your other one. You need help? Here.” He dropped his backpack and carefully snugged the band of fabric down over her hood and goggles. “I’m going to check next door in case we—”

  “Bones!” Newcombe shouted, and Cam pulled at her.

  “Go,” he said. “Go.”

  They were all speaking as if surrounded by a loud noise, repeating words for clarity. They were each alone, Ruth understood. She hurried alongside Cam as Newcombe’s bootsteps ran up behind them and it was eerie and horrific to feel caged when there was nothing around her except the open street— caged on the inside.

  Then she was in darkness. Both men had aimed their flashlights at the next house. Its front door hung open and Newcombe said, “Skip it, keep moving.”

  Ruth dropped one foot off the edge of the sidewalk. She fell, ramming her shin, but she scrambled up again with the dogged focus that had served her so well in her career. Her thoughts narrowed down to one rigid point. Keep moving.

  Cam seized her jacket. “Slow down,” he said. “We need to be careful.”

  She ran after Newcombe’s light. She knew too much. Few teenagers and no children survived any significant infection. Their smaller bodies were a liability, and Ruth would always be closer to major trauma than the two men.

  The hate she felt was senseless and crazy and yet it was there, crashing against her pain. She tried to hide it. “Come on!” she yelled. She had nothing to gain by accusing him, but why hadn’t Cam warned them? He had been awake. He was supposed to be awake, whispered the new hate. Then she fell again. Her boot stubbed on something and she rolled over a brittle hedge and collapsed. It was like being slapped.

  Ruth didn’t move, trembling, quiet, listening to the agony in her arm. Even the seesaw of emotions had left her.

  “I said slow down!” Cam’s light strobed up and down her body. The beam was full of swirling dust and Ruth saw a little black yard lantern tangled around her shin, its power cord uprooted. “You could break your fucking leg,” Cam said roughly, kneeling. He yanked at the cord and for the first time she realized he was twitching. He snapped his head again and again, trying to rub his ear on his shoulder.

  Ruth looked up at a nearby whump. Newcombe was at the front door, putting his shoulder into it. Suddenly the frame splintered and he stumbled in.

  “We’re going to be all right,” Cam said, but the words were just useless sounds. Helpful sounds.

  Ruth nodded. None of this was his fault. The truck might simply have more nanotech adhered to it than the boat, and Cam had his size advantage. Long ago, he’d also suffered considerable damage to his feet and hands and one gruesome ear. He was unlikely to notice an infection before her. It was just that she’d come to expect everything of him, fair or unfair.

  “Can you get up?” he asked, reaching for her.

  “Clear! I think it’s clear!” Newcombe yelled inside the house, and Ruth and Cam hurried to the neat front walk with its welcome mat still in place.

  The entry hall had a dark wood floor. Ruth glimpsed the open space of a dining room. Newcombe was at the stairs to the second floor and waved for them, his fingers spasming. “Here,” he said, leading the way. His flashlight sparked on a collection of small glass pictures. Family. Faces. Ruth forced her legs to carry her. She banged against the wall and knocked down two pictures and Cam kicked into one, shattering the glass.

  Newcombe went left at the top into a boy’s bedroom. It was blue with two silver-and-black posters—football players. Their flashlights cut back and forth. Cam shut the door. Newcombe leaned over the twin bed and pulled up the blankets, then knelt at the door and wedged the loose mass into the crack at the bottom.

  “The window,” Ruth said.

  Cam tore open the dresser drawers, throwing them onto the floor. He took great handfuls of clothes and jammed the shirts and underwear into the windowsill as best he could. They were all breathing hard. “Good?” he asked.

  Ruth shook her head and nodded in a confusion of pain. “Best we can do,” she said. “It’ll get worse.”

  In this safe room, their vaccine only had to deal with the plague already in their blood and the particles they’d carried with them on their clothes and in the gust of motion. Still, running and sweating had accelerated their absorption rate.

  Ruth wept. There was a new thread of plague scratching through her left foot and the blades within her arm had turned to molten fire, consuming the bone, cramping every muscle. Her fingers made a palsied claw. In the half-light, the destroyed room matched her thinking exactly, a tight, haphazard mess packed with restless bodies. Her claustrophobia became a living thing like cancer, numbing her intelligence and leaving only childish terror and remorse.

  Cam
endured in silence, but Newcombe beat his hand on the wall.

  “Don’t,” Ruth whispered. “Don’t.”

  At last the burning faded into more normal pain. It was done. They tugged off their masks and goggles and luxuriated in the stale air, but Ruth avoided their eyes, feeling too vulnerable, even ashamed. She felt grateful, and yet at the same time she was repelled.

  Cam was a monster. Old wounds. His dark Latino skin had erupted dozens of times, often in the same places, leaving dull ridges on his cheek and patchy spots in his beard. His hands were worse. His hands were covered in scars and blister rash, and on his right he only had two strong fingers and his thumb. The pinky there was only a weak, snarled hook of dead tissue, nearly eaten to the bone.

  Ruth Goldman was not particularly religious. For most of her adult life, she’d let her work take up too much time to bother with Hanukkah or Passover unless she was visiting her mom, but the emotions in her now bordered on the mystic, too fervent and complex to understand at once. She would rather die than suffer as he had, but she wanted to be like him—his calm, his strength.

  Cam dug out the last of his water and some peppered jerky and crackers. Ruth’s belly was an acid ball, yet he urged her to eat and it helped a little. He also had a bottle of Motrin and shook out four apiece, a minor overdose. Then they all tried to settle down again, beyond exhaustion. The men let her use the narrow bed, clearing a little space on the floor for themselves, but Ruth did not sleep any more that night.