Plague War p-2

by Jeff Carlson

  Cam took off his goggles and clapped them against his leg, straining through the dust. “You okay?” he croaked, kneeling at Ruth’s side. She nodded distantly.

  Her goggles had failed, too, and were coated with grit on the inside. Cam eased the strap off the back of her hood. Then he pulled off his gloves and used his ugly, clean hands to brush at her cheek. He savored the small intimacy. Ruth was obviously stunned, but he could see that his attention helped her focus again. Her brown eyes went to his face. She might have tried to smile.

  She glanced at Newcombe. “What happened?”

  “Blast wave,” Newcombe said, wheezing. He slapped at his hood. “Christ. I didn’t think it would come this far.”

  “You mean from the bomb in Colorado? I—”

  “What kind of radiation did we just get?” Cam asked with sudden urgency. Newcombe was too calm. The soldier didn’t think they’d been hit again, and his demeanor set off the torrent of emotion that Cam had suppressed. He brought his hands back against his own body to hide his shaking. He was only beginning to dare to think he wouldn’t have to shoot her and then himself before the vomiting and pain got too bad.

  There wasn’t a second bomb, he thought. There wasn’t.

  “This isn’t fallout from another strike,” Newcombe said, showing them one brown glove. “It was just hot air, mostly. From the ‚rst bomb. It took this long to get here. The radiation might be about the same dose we’ve been getting in ultraviolet every day. Not enough to kill us, if that’s what you mean. Not at this distance.” He looked at his watch. “Fifty-eight minutes. Christ. That nuke must have been gigantic.”

  “You’re still sure it went off in Leadville?” Ruth asked. She’d ‚nally started to pat at her own clothing and Cam used the excuse to lean away from her. He was trembling badly now and he didn’t want her to see what must be in his eyes.

  We’re going to live, he thought. He almost wept. He was that deeply affected. He’d thought he had so little left to lose, but he was still a long way from being used up.

  * * * *

  They stayed put for thirty minutes. Cam moved them a few yards from the snake holes onto a slab of rock, where they settled down to clean themselves, drink, and wash their goggles. Newcombe tried the radio again. He scrawled in his journal. Except for another passing quake, the forest was silent. The bugs seemed to have gone to ground after the blast wave and that at least was a mercy.

  “You saw what happened to the sky,” Newcombe said.

  Ruth nodded but Cam’s mind was still elsewhere. He looked up through the trees as they talked, absorbing the strange beauty of the dust. A brown fog continued to unfurl on the wind, affecting the sunlight, but they were three miles down into the valley. They’d lost their vantage point and could no longer see the torn horizon in the east.

  “The quake hit ‚rst because vibrations go through solid things pretty fast,” Newcombe said. “Air is different.”

  “The wind,” Ruth said.

  “That wouldn’t make any difference up close.”

  “No. But the fallout,” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “The wind will push the fallout away from us, especially the stuff way up in the atmosphere,” she said.

  They needed it to be true, but Cam kept his mouth shut. He was also worried about the plague. If the blast wave had truly swept across seven hundred miles, it would have also brought a massive storm of nanotech. A lot of the subatomic machines might have billowed up above ten thousand feet and self-destructed. Cam supposed the blast could have cleaned away as many as it deposited, but the Sierras rose up like a wall after the great basins of Utah and Nevada. The blast wave might have spent the last of its strength here even as these mountains acted like a comb, collecting thick ‚lms of nanotech out of the air.

  He was in no hurry to start hiking again. If they’d ingested too much of the plague along with the dust, in another hour or two they’d be screaming with it. They could run back west up to the barrier.

  * * * *

  It didn’t happen. For once they had some luck. Cam supposed they were still close enough to elevation. Almost certainly there had been wild †uctuations of pressure inside the blast. Maybe the bomb had even sterilized a wide swath of the plague as a side effect.

  They got up and hiked. They hiked, and after another mile Ruth began to limp, favoring her right foot. Gradually there were signs that the blast wave hadn’t been so powerful down in the valley. The mountains across from them seemed to have de†ected the wind, protecting this low area. There was less dust slammed into the sides of the trees. The normal litter on the forest †oor had only been swept into curling ‚ngers and dunes rather than completely lifted away.

  In a stand of mountain hemlock, ants dropped out of the pine needles overhead like cinders, still alive. In another place Cam saw a yellow page from a phone book, just a single page, carried up from God knew where. Then they walked into a hundred yards of garbage strewn through the trees, mostly plastic bags and cellophane. It was new. The breeze was already pushing a lot of it free and one bag †oated down alongside him as they walked.

  The blast must have dispersed weird pockets of debris across North America. Cam wondered †eetingly about the ants in the trees. He’d ‚gured it was a local colony that got swept up but maybe they were something else, like a desert species. The fragmented niche ecologies he’d seen everywhere might be facing yet another upheaval as new insects were dropped into the mix over hundreds of miles.

  It would be worse on the other side of the bomb. The eastward †ow of the weather would bend most of the dust, garbage, and bugs back over and around the explosion. Where the fallout didn’t kill everything, the insects would begin a new and evermore savage ‚ght for dominance.

  There was no reason to care in the short run. Cam had learned very well to distract himself, but he couldn’t escape the aching in his feet, knee, hip, hand, or neck for more than a few minutes at a time — or his concern for Ruth. They hiked. They hiked and found a sunlit meadow where the taller weed grass had been †attened in arcs like crop circles. Cam panicked again when his left hand began to throb suddenly, but after a few minutes the vaccine seemed to beat down the plague, and Ruth and Newcombe seemed unaffected. It was just a †uke infection.

  * * * *

  They slept like the dead a good mile up the rising slope of the next mountain. They were all so tired that Newcombe nodded off on guard duty, something that had never happened so far as Cam knew. He opened his eyes to a black sky shot full of stars. The aspirin had worn off and he was dehydrated and cold, and possibly his subconscious had rebelled at the sound of two people breathing deeply when there should have been only one.

  They were tucked into a crevice in a hill of granite, afraid of more nuclear strikes. Cam knocked over an empty food can and a full canteen when he sat up. Damn it, he thought.

  They were dangerously low on water. They’d seen one pond but it had been hazy with bugs — and they were running out of food, too. Those basic needs wouldn’t go away and Cam frowned to himself in the dark, counting through the miles left to return to the barrier. At daybreak he’d look for a creek while Ruth and Newcombe ate and packed and took care of her feet, changing her socks and applying the last of the ointment if she’d blistered again. He ‚gured that even with a short nap at lunch, they should be able to reach the mountaintop before the sun went down again.

  But there were planes at twilight. Drowsing in his sleeping bag, Cam mistook the sound for a memory. So much of what he recalled and expected were nightmares.

  The menacing drone grew louder.

  “Wake up,” he said to himself. Then he shifted his sore body away from the rock and spoke again, setting his glove on the other man’s legs. “Newcombe. Wake up.”

  Both of his companions moved. Ruth sighed, a soft, melancholy sound. Newcombe rolled over and touched his hand to his mask and coughed. Then the soldier jerked and turned his face toward the gray sky. The valle
y was still dark, the dawn hidden behind the mountain above them. Cam noticed that Newcombe’s gaze also went to the western horizon. He’d thought it must be a trick of the mountain peaks, re†ecting the noise somehow, but the aircraft were de‚nitely coming out of the west.

  “What do we do?”

  “Stay put,” Newcombe said.

  Their hole in the rock wasn’t perfect but it would have to be enough. The planes were just seconds away. Newcombe found the radio and turned it on, then dug out his binoculars. Cam regretted giving his own to Mike. They watched the rim of the horizon as Ruth struggled into a sitting position between them, her naked cheek imprinted with red lines where she’d lain unconscious against her pack.

  “You okay?” Cam asked quietly. She nodded and leaned against him. Her warmth was sisterly and good and for once he was able to let it be just that.

  The engine noise spilled into the valley, a deep monotone thrumming. An instant later, brilliant new stars appeared over the peaks to the southwest. Metal stars. The planes lit up like ‚re as they †ew eastward into the sunrise, gliding smoothly out of the night. Cam counted ‚ve before another batch came into view. Then the night sparkled with a third group much farther south, all of them coming out of the dark western sky.

  This has nothing to do with us, he realized with a dull sense of shock. For so long, everything they’d seen in the sky had been hunting them. This was something else. He didn’t know what, but it was an event like the quakes and the blast wave, too large to easily understand.

  Newcombe also scanned up north, then turned back the other way. “Write for me, will you?” He didn’t lower his binoculars as he fumbled at his chest pocket with one hand.

  “Yeah.” Cam took the notepad and pen.

  “They have American markings,” Newcombe said. “C-17 transports. Eight, nine, ten. They have an AC-130 gunship with them. Repairs on the fuselage. I also see a commercial 737. United Airlines. But there are six MiGs, too.”

  He said it as one word, migs, and Cam said, “What’s that?”

  “Fighters. Russian ‚ghters. Christ. It looks like American planes with Russian escorts, but there’s also a DC-10 that has Arabic writing on it, I think.”

  “Let me see,” Ruth said.

  “No.” Newcombe turned north again and continued to gaze up the valley as he ‚ddled with the radio. There was just static. Cam didn’t know if that was still because of atmospheric disturbance or because their transceiver only worked on Army bands that the planes wouldn’t use — or because the planes were running silent.

  “I know a little Arabic,” Ruth said. She reached for Newcombe’s shoulder but he shrugged her off. Cam was the only one to see two of the three groups change direction, the sun winking on their undersides as they banked away to the south.

  “Now there are some north of us, too,” Newcombe reported. “An old Soviet tanker. Three transports. Two ‚ghters I don’t recognize.”

  “A refugee †eet,” Ruth said. “They took whatever they could ‚nd. But what’s on the other side of the Paci‚c? Japan? Korea, too. There were U.S. military bases there. That could be where our planes came from.”

  “I think they’re landing,” Cam said. He pointed south, where the two farthest groups had already dwindled to pinpoints. Some of the glinting dots circled up into a holding pattern as others disappeared, merging with the ground. How? There were hardly any roads above ten thousand feet. Days ago, Newcombe had explained that C-17s were designed to land in very short spaces if necessary, but the 737 and the ‚ghters would need runways of some kind.

  Much closer, the third group had also leaned into a long easy curve, sweeping northward up through the valley. They would soon pass overhead and the vibrations of the engines ran ahead of the planes like another quake, trembling through rock and forest. Cam stared up at the machines. Then he had another thought. Maybe they were landing below the barrier wherever there were roads, as close to safety as possible. If they touched down with their cabins held at low pressure, the crews and passengers could line up at the doors, then crack the seals and run for elevation.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Newcombe said. He gave Ruth the binoculars and immediately began to worm out of his sleeping bag. He grabbed the top and rolled it up, getting ready to go.

  “They could be American,” Ruth said. “Overseas military.”

  “No. We pulled everybody back. No way.” Newcombe cinched his sleeping bag into a tight bundle and laid it next to his pack, strapping the two together. “This was choreographed with the bomb. Don’t you get it? The electromagnetic pulse must have blinded our radar and communications across the entire hemisphere, which gave them a big fat chance to sneak in without anyone seeing them. First they stayed back far enough to make sure the EMP didn’t hurt them. Now they’re here. Shit.”

  “Aren’t the Japanese on our side?” Cam asked. He didn’t think Japan had nuclear weapons, or the Koreans, but China did and there was no way to know who had stolen what.

  Newcombe grunted, huh. “Maybe it’s somebody all the way out of Europe. We had a lot of bases there, too, and I know the plague hit before we cleaned everything out.” He began to load Ruth’s pack for her, picking up a can opener, a dirty fork, and a half-empty canteen.

  A miniscule orange blossom licked up from a peak in the south. “They crashed,” Ruth said.

  Then there was another puff of ‚re and a third. To Cam’s eyes, it appeared that the second explosion was in the sky. A missile? Someone was shooting at the new enemy.

  “Leadville’s forward base,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Newcombe quickly returned to packing but Cam stared at the distant battle, wondering if there was any reason to cheer. An odd feeling. They’d been trying to avoid the jets and choppers out of Leadville’s forward base for weeks, but now he was glad there was an American power in the Sierras.

  The gun‚re that hammered them was from behind. Cam whirled to see one of the new ‚ghters stra‚ng a mountaintop about four miles to the north. One of the larger planes also made a leisurely pass, its right side erupting with incredible force. Smoke and light burst from its guns. Each hail of bullets was as large and straight-edged as a city block, two huge rectangular patches.

  The wind took the shredded brown earth away in sheets and Cam felt that paralyzing fear again. The new enemy was decimating any survivors who might resist after they landed, and there was nothing he could do against such strength.

  He tried to shake his numbness. “We’ll be okay,” he said as much to himself as to Ruth. “They don’t care about us. This mountain’s too small.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Someone was invading California.

  16

  The three of them strode onto the mountaintop with their guns drawn. They made a triangle with Newcombe’s assault ri†e in front and Ruth and Cam on either side. She knew they must have looked faceless and alien in their masks and tattered gear as they staggered into sight. Ruth felt her pulse slamming through her limbs, but her good arm was anchored by the weight of her pistol.

  “Stop!” a man shouted. Thin, black, he had blots of pink rash on his nose and chin. He’d turned his shoulder as if to hide the stub of a knife in his hand — or to put his full weight into swinging it.

  Behind him, a white girl crouched and grabbed up a rock, and the rest of the loose crowd seemed to duck at the same time. The sound was very human. Voices. Boots. They created a small rustle of bodies against the endless drone of the planes and suddenly Ruth was aware again of how exposed they must be on this light-washed peak. The day was coming to an end. They stood far above the sunset. Ruth’s shadow stretched away in front of her, joined with the outlines of Newcombe and Cam, whereas the others’ eyes and teeth glinted in the orange dusk.

  Some of the strangers hid in their low stone-and-earth burrows. Most of them spread out. Ruth focused on a limping man who quickly reappeared from behind the nearest shelter. He paced sideways to †ank her, holding a shove
l like a spear. His face was lopsided by old blister rash and a badly cauterized wound. He had only one eye.

  “Gun,” Cam breathed. Ruth’s gaze †ickered left to his side of the rock ‚eld. There was a shaggy-haired man with a hunting ri†e and her heart beat so hard that it felt like it had stopped, one painful throb and then nothing else.

  “What do you want!” the ‚rst man shouted.

  “We’re American,” Newcombe said, but the words came out like a bark. He was panting. Ruth and Cam, too. The rush up through the ‚nal hundred yards onto this island had taken everything from her. It was an effort just to stay on her feet. Each of them stood bent by their individual pains. Ruth hunched over her bad arm and Newcombe had set his ri†e against his hip like a crutch. “American,” he said.

  The other man kept circling closer. Fifteen feet away. The round blade of his shovel was blunted but shiny, worn bright by the hard ground. Ruth twitched violently and straightened up through the pain in her side. She made sure he could see her pistol, but there was no change in his dead face.

  “There might be more of them,” the girl said, and the black man shouted, “Just get out of here!”

  Cam found his breath ‚rst. “U.S. Army Special Forces,” he said, tipping his head down at Newcombe’s shoulder patch. His pistol never wavered. “We’re here to help, so tell him to back off!”

  “U.S. Army,” the black man repeated.

  “We can stop the plague.” Newcombe took one hand from his ri†e to push his goggles up, showing his face. “Look at us. How do you think we got here?”

  “They’re dropping people all over the place,” the girl said to the black man. “They could be anybody.”