Plague War p-2

by Jeff Carlson

  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 ‚rst. 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 terri‚ed 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 †ashlight. 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 †ashlight 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 sacri‚ce.

  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 ‚nal 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 horri‚c 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 †ashlights 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 signi‚cant 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 ‚rst 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 †oor. Ruth glimpsed the open space of a dining room. Newcombe was at the stairs to the second †oor and waved for them, his ‚ngers spasming. “Here,” he said, leading the way. His †ashlight 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 †ashlights 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 †oor. 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 ‚re, consuming the bone, cramping every muscle. Her ‚ngers 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 ‚ngers 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 †oor for themselves, but Ruth did not sleep any more that night.

  * * * *

  The room looked bigger in the yellow-gray dawn and still had some semblance of neatness above the †oor. The posters. The toy robots and books on the shelves. Ruth tried not to let it affect her, but she was very tired. She hurt. She mourned this anonymous boy and everything he represented — and wrapped up in her misery was a cold, stubborn anger.

  She was ready to keep moving.

  She knew it was worth it.

  Even as hard as life had become in the mountains, there was no excuse for the decisions made by the Leadville government. If they won, if they left most of the world’s survivors to die above the barrier, in many ways it would be a crime worse than the plague itself. What this place and every graveyard like it deserved was new life. A cleansing. The ruins should be bulldozed where they couldn’t be repaired, repopulated where the damage hadn’t been so bad, and there were desolate cities across the globe, far more than could be reclaimed for generations. They’d forgotten. The leadership was too insulated, trapped on their island fortress.

  Ruth made herself eat with grim focus, even though her stomach still felt like a knot and breakfast was a few cans of cold, gluey potatoes and beef. Cam ate like it hurt him, and Ruth wanted to say something, she wasn’t sure what. Her taste buds stung at the fresh reek of gasoline. The stench made her head ache, but at least she could barely smell the corner of the closet they’d had to use as a toilet.

  “Show me your map again,” she said.

  Newcombe set down his can and unbuttoned his jacket pocket. He invariably folded his map and tucked it away, in case they had to run — but his neatness was also about control, Ruth thought, watching his long, hawk-nosed face. Sandy blond eyebrows and beard stubble. Newcombe looked so young, even beneath the ant bites and dirt and the †aking raw pink spots that were being worn into his skin by his goggles and mask.

  She didn’t like his silence. Newcombe was impatient, jerking at the map when a corner of it hung up in his pocket. Yes, they were all sore and irritable, and they’d already talked through their options after the planes had gone, but they couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.

  Their plan was to sprint back to the truck and drive out of the hot spot as fast as possible. The boat trailer was already attached and Newcombe had ripped open the truck’s ignition, so that starting it was a matter of pressing two wires together. Even after fourteen months of disuse, the battery had kept enough power to crank the engine once. Then they’d run it for more than an hour to generate a charge. We built good, Newcombe had said with surprising softness, leaning his hand on the truck’s tall, broad hood. He might have only been talking to himself, but Ruth believed he’d felt the same melancholy pride that haunted her now, sitting in the wreckage of this child’s room. She was glad. Even the relentless Special Forces soldier wasn’t untouchable.

  Newcombe was con‚dent the truck would start again, and the boat’s enormous motor had also ‚red right up. The question was where were they going.

  The chair is against the wall. That strange sentence had changed everything, shifting the balance between them. It was almost as if there were suddenly other people among the three of them, just when she’d ‚nally begun to adapt to being so utterly on their own. Ruth had become accustomed to outnumbering Newcombe. Cam always backed her, but now Newcombe had new power, and Ruth thought Cam was wavering.

  The radio code was a rendezvous point. Despite the chaos of the plague year, it was still the twenty-‚rst century. The Canadians had their own eyes in the sky. The rebels controlled three American satellites themselves. The surge of radio traf‚c in Leadville could not be hidden, especially in this now-empty world. Nor could the sudden †ux of aircraft. Even if the Canadians hadn’t been involved in the conspiracy, promising aid and shelter, they would have known something big was going on.

  Newcombe’s squad had gone into Sacramento with no less than eight contingency plans, ‚ve of which led to open stretches of road where a plane could touch down, and Ruth did not doubt that those men could have reached one of their rendezvous points long before now if they’d been moving on their own, even wearing containment suits, even hauling extra air tanks.

  The Canadians planned to intercept them, lancing down out of British Columbia. The two North American nations had coexisted as friends and allies for nearly three hundred years, but now Canada would raid across the border in force, committing four full strike wings as a curtain against any Leadville ‚ghters. Newcombe wanted to head for Highway 65 just north of Roseville, and Ruth was tempted. She yearned for it. Safety. Warm food. Oh God, and a shower. But it would mean pushing farther north once they were across the sea, staying in the lowlands rather than hiking east into the mountains — and there was a deeper fear in her.

  “Look.” Newcombe laid out the map with his naked hands, his knuckles bruised and scabbing. Then he edged his ‚nger slightly from Citrus Heights to Roseville. “Look how close. We could get there in a day or two.”

  “I just don’t know,” Ruth said, touching the rough patches on her face where her own goggles had pressed in. She was thinking of the paratrooper ambush that had destroyed Newcombe’s squad. “They’d come in one of those big cargo planes, right?” she asked.

  “Not
necessarily. I’d send something small and fast.”

  The thought of cramming herself into a plane made Ruth claustrophobic again and she glanced uneasily at the walls of the room. Not all of the ISS crew had survived the crash of the space shuttle Endeavour. “All it takes is one missile to bring us down,” she said, “and Leadville will do anything to keep anybody else from getting the vaccine. They’ve already shown that.”

  “There are ways to defend against air-to-air missiles, especially if our escort doesn’t let anyone close,” Newcombe said. “And if we don’t do this, we’ll have to keep playing hide-andseek with the helicopters. We’ve been lucky so far.”

  “But we’re so close to the mountains here!” Ruth met his blue eyes, pleading with him. “The whole idea is to spread the vaccine to as many people as possible, so no one can ever control or keep it.” She worried that the Canadian government would prove just as sel‚sh. Overall, their losses had been even worse than those in the United States, and they might view the nanotech as the same opportunity for conquest and rebirth.

  “We’re not that close,” Newcombe said. “Look. Look where we are. It’s still a hundred miles to the Sierras and it’s going to keep getting more and more uphill. You have to realize we’re still weeks away from elevation. You don’t even know if anyone’s alive up there. We could wander around for another month just trying to ‚nd a mountain where someone’s survived this long.”