Plague War p-2

by Jeff Carlson

  “How’s he doing?” Ruth whispered. Cam didn’t answer. Her job was to continue to guard behind them, but it took all of her self-discipline not to turn and watch Newcombe. That was Cam’s responsibility, studying the area between them and the air‚eld in case Newcombe †ushed any threat. The ground was deceptive. The desert blended into a single red expanse, but the †ats weren’t †at, as they’d learned too well. The land rolled with hidden pockets and gullies and rock.

  Ruth said, “Hey, are you listening?”

  “He’s ‚ne.”

  The sun †ashed across her goggles as she leaned too far from the boulder, glancing sideways, but Cam didn’t look at her. Empty static on the radio. Warm sweat down her ribs.

  You’re angry with me, she thought.

  Sleeping side by side now carried an electric charge, and more than once she’d been restless despite her exhaustion. Their situation was still the all-time worst for romance, caked in dirt, strung out on adrenaline, in danger of bugs and enemy troops. The friction between the two of them was maddening.

  They both found excuses to get away from Newcombe. Scavenging for food was a good one, or calling a short rest as Newcombe scouted ahead. There had been more kissing and careful hands. Ruth enjoyed pressing her body against Cam’s despite all their bulky gear. At night she’d considered more. They could touch each other, at least. Was it worth risking the machine plague? No. But she knew their clothes only gave them the slightest protection. She thought about it incessantly. If I push down my pants and he takes off his glove…Two nights ago, when Cam was asleep, she’d rubbed her ‚ngers in her crotch to no satisfaction, her blunt glove against her jeans.

  “Remember our signal,” Cam said, handing her the binoculars.

  “Be safe,” she answered.

  He didn’t seem to want more. He dropped his pack beside Newcombe’s and quickly loped away, circling out to the left to form a pincher with the other man.

  Ruth trapped her peppermint against the back of her teeth and set her good hand against the inside of her hip, centering herself, touching her frayed pants and the round stone in her pocket. She should have jumped him. That was what she would have done in her old life, take the opportunity, have some fun. They could both be dead in minutes.

  Cam faded into the terrain, leaving only dust. The horizon shimmered in the heat. Ruth kept her head on a swivel, trying to cover a full three hundred and sixty degrees now that she was the last one in hiding, and yet she caught herself looking after Cam more often than not. She smiled grimly.

  You’re not in love with him, she thought.

  * * * *

  The sky shook before her thirty minutes were up. Jet ‚ghters lanced out of the northeast in three arrowheads, barely off the ground. One group was different than the other two. She’d come to recognize the twin vertical tails of F-35s, but the third group consisted of a sharp-nosed model she’d never seen before, with lean, swept wings. It didn’t matter. Ruth felt her heart leap with elation — and a new concern.

  The planes weren’t slowing. They ripped past and cut into the Sierras, transmitting in bursts: “Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. George, respond. This is Flicker Six.”

  Ruth gawked at the thundering sky. She thought wildly of leaping onto a rock and screaming for Cam and Newcombe, maybe ‚ring her pistol, but there was still no guarantee that the three of them were alone out here. She couldn’t chance giving them away. The decision was hers, and the simple code matched what Newcombe had told her.

  “This is Goldman, con‚rm, con‚rm,” Ruth told the radio. She bent to take the men’s packs with her own. Then the desert shook again. The mountains behind her rattled with sound and motion, enveloped in torn cyclones of dark lines and ‚re — jets and missiles.

  Somehow the same voice acknowledged her, even though the ‚ghters were engaged. “Roger, George, your retrieval is in ‚fteen. Repeat, your retrieval is in ‚fteen.” The rebels had come in force. There was no way to hide a plane over the basins of Nevada, so they were using themselves as a battering ram, clearing space between the enemy and the Doyle runways.

  Ruth hiked with her pistol out and the radio hissing softly beneath the roar of the jets and a distant explosion — a smoke trail down into the mountainside. Somehow she turned her back on the spectacle and kept moving.

  There was a ri†eman in the desert. Oh please, no, she prayed even as she freed her gun hand.

  It was Newcombe. “What are you doing!” he shouted, glancing away from her to the mountains. Ruth did the same. The air war was fast and terrifying and had visibly separated into two con†icts now, bright specks and smoke.

  “Where is Cam?” she asked, panting. “Plane for us. Twelve minutes. We need to get to the air‚eld.”

  Newcombe took the radio from her but simply walked away from his pack and Cam’s. “We can’t mess with this stuff. You have the nanotech, right?”

  “I’m not leaving him!”

  “Do you have the nanotech?” Newcombe said. “He’ll see us down there. Come on. Goddammit, come on. There’s no point running around looking for him. We could miss each other and miss the plane!”

  Ruth nodded, but the irrational feeling stayed with her as they ran. She hadn’t understood how deeply she was attached. She had been fooling herself pretending that her relationship with Cam was just physical, just circumstance, just anything. She would have paired herself with Newcombe if it was really only about a warm body.

  Too soon another plane darted out of the heat, smaller, slower. The ‚ghters had come in very low, but this one kept within a few feet of the terrain, swerving and diving like an old barnstormer. The buzz of its engine was very different than the high scream of the jets. It was a stubby little Cessna.

  Newcombe banged against a chain-link fence and cursed, rocking the wire violently. “Damn it!” They were a hundred yards from the air‚eld with no way through. He could have climbed it with no problem, but she had her arm.

  Ruth glanced out into the rocks and bare earth again. What if Cam ran all the way back to our hiding place for me? she worried. She wanted to shout. Where are you?

  Newcombe led her forty yards to a gate. He put his ri†e barrel against the lock and ‚red. They hustled between two long aluminum hangars as the Cessna droned into the open space ahead, but suddenly the plane lifted away.

  “Wait, wait, we’re here!” Newcombe yelled into the radio. Then they got past the hangars and saw the runways were drifted over with sand. The desert had long since reclaimed this ‚eld exactly as it had buried the highways. The plane swung back again in a loop and Ruth glimpsed black skids against its belly. Of course. They knew what to expect from satellite photos. Their ‚rst pass had only been to get a closer look.

  “Stay back,” Newcombe told her, maybe thinking of ‚re and shrapnel if it crashed.

  The white Cessna kicked up sand as it touched down, bouncing. Newcombe waved and yelled as the plane trundled back around for takeoff, but he was looking past her shoulder. Ruth turned to see Cam behind them. She touched her hand to her chest as if to hold the warm feeling there.

  “I told you,” Newcombe said. “Move!”

  She resisted. She wanted to help Cam, but he waved her away so she turned and ran. The door of the plane was open. Ruth tried to climb aboard with Newcombe’s help. A man leaned out and grabbed her jacket.

  Ruth looked up. “Thanks—”

  There was something wrong with his face. A bandage. He was not wearing a containment suit or even a gas mask. She glanced at the cockpit. In the pilot’s seat was another man with the same perfect wound. No. The ‚rst man wore a square of white gauze over his right eye, while the second had a square taped over his left. Otherwise they seemed unhurt and even clean. New uniforms. Both of them held submachine guns.

  Ruth began to push back against Newcombe, but he was stronger and the other man yelled, “Let’s go, let’s go!”

  “Come on, Ruth!” Newcombe shouted.

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nbsp; She leaned inside despite her instincts. Maybe it was okay. The man in the cockpit had lowered his gun, and the ‚rst guy reached down to help Newcombe and Cam, too. No one else was aboard. The less weight, the longer their range. In fact, the thin carpet was spotted with holes where rows of seats had been torn out.

  Ruth took one of the few that remained, and Cam fell heavily beside her. Newcombe dropped into a seat behind them. Then the other man bolted the door. “Strap in,” he said as he ducked into the cockpit.

  The pilot was already accelerating. The plane slammed against the dunes and a familiar cold weight ‚lled Ruth’s chest like a ball of snakes, choking her. She’d forgotten. Her long months in the space station had left her uneasy with tight places. The rattling cabin felt like a deathtrap. Then they heaved into the air.

  “What happened to their eyes?” she asked Cam, mostly to be close to him. The pilots’ wounds were too symmetrical, which made her wonder if they were self-in†icted. Why?

  Cam only shook his head, still gathering himself. Then he turned to Newcombe and indicated his face.

  “Nukes,” the soldier said quietly. “They’re afraid of more nukes. The †ash. If they only lose one eye, they can still land the plane.”

  Lord God, Ruth thought, ‚ghting her claustrophobia. She leaned her goggles against the window as if to escape, but the air beyond the scratched Plexiglas was a tangle of far-off jets and burning mountain peaks.

  19

  Cam’s seat belt cut into his hips as the plane jerked and bumped. The pilots had shoulder restraints. The rest of them did not and the †ight was like a roller coaster, tipping and diving. Again and again his seat snapped away from him, even with the belt cinched down.

  Hills and rock whipped past the windows. A city. Once they paralleled a line of utility wires for a few seconds, dozens of poles stuttering by. It was a disappointment. They’d suffered so badly to get here and they still weren’t safe, although they were free of the plague. The Cessna 172 was not a pressurized aircraft, but the cabin windows and the cockpit glass had been sealed with silicon caulk, as had the instrument and control pass-throughs, the hatches, and one of the two doors. There was a vacuum pump bolted to the †oor, exhausting to the outside. It was a crude ‚x, but it worked. The pilot had leveled out for two minutes while the copilot applied a fast-setting caulk to the inside of the remaining door. Then they’d lowered the air density within the plane to the equivalent of eleven thousand feet.

  “We’re okay!” the copilot called back, reading from a gauge strapped to his wrist.

  Cam tore off his goggles and mask, scrubbing his bare hands against his beard, nose, and ears in a frenzy of relief. Ruth removed her gear more woodenly and he saw that her face was drained white.

  “Look at me,” Cam said, leaning close to be heard over the engine noise. Then they tumbled left and banged their heads together. “Don’t look at the windows, look at me.”

  She nodded but didn’t comply. Beneath her matted brown curls, her eyes were wide and dull, as if she was seeing something else. Cam knew the feeling. They were incredibly low. One mistake could †y them into a building or a hillside, and the back of his neck crawled with nervous strain. Would they know if missiles were closing in?

  “We’ll be ‚ne,” he said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was shaky and she clenched his hand in her own, bare skin on skin.

  “Where are we headed?” Newcombe yelled toward the front. Cam felt a pang of worry for his friend. Newcombe didn’t have anyone to comfort, and Cam would have grabbed his arm or his shoulder if Newcombe were in the same row.

  “Colorado,” the pilot shouted.

  “What? Isn’t that where the nuke hit?”

  “Leadville, yeah.” The plane veered left again and then jack-hammered up and to the right. “We’re out of Grand Lake, about a hundred miles north of there,” the pilot shouted. “The fallout didn’t reach us.”

  * * * *

  He answered their questions as best he could during the two-and-a-half-hour †ight. The plane settled down once they were out of the desert, but he obviously shared their tension and welcomed the distraction. He knew who they were. He was proud to serve. “You guys look like shit,” he said like a compliment.

  * * * *

  Grand Lake was among the largest of the U.S. rebel bases. They landed on a thin road and Cam saw a scattering of jets and choppers on either side, many of them draped in camou†age netting. Nearby stood four long barracks of wood and canvas. There were no trees. The land was trampled brown mud. There were people everywhere. These peaks were inhabited over an area of several square miles in a shape like a horseshoe. From the plane, Cam had seen tents, huts, trucks, and trailers spread across the rough terrain along with hundreds of ditches and rock berms. Latrines? Windbreaks? Or did those holes and simple walls serve as homes for people with nothing better?

  Grand Lake had been a small town set on the banks of its namesake, a fold of blue water caught in a spectacular box canyon just nine miles west of the Continental Divide. It sat at eighty-four hundred feet elevation and couldn’t have supported many more than its original population of three thousand in any case, but during the ‚rst weeks of the plague, its streets had served as a staging ground for convoys and aircraft. The roads and trails that rose into the surrounding land became lifelines to safe altitude. Soon afterward the town itself was demolished for building material and other supplies.

  From above, the movements of the ‚rst evacuation efforts were still visible, like tidemarks in the sand. Many of the vehicles didn’t look as if they’d moved since then, packed in among the refugee camps. In places the trucks and tanks also functioned as barriers, squeezing the population in some directions while protecting the people on the other side. There were also open areas where they seemed to be farming or preparing to farm, digging at the mountainsides to create level patches. Some looked better planned than others.

  Cam’s impression was one of entrenched chaos, but he felt admiration that they were here at all. They’d done so much better than anything he’d known in California. They had more room and more resources, but more survivors, too. They could have lost control. They could have been overwhelmed. Instead, they’d kept tens of thousands of people alive even as they maintained a signi‚cant military strength.

  The chaos had increased nine days ago. Cam saw that, too. Grand Lake was only ninety-six miles from Leadville. They had yet to recover from the damage. Many of the shelters were still being rebuilt and there was litter everywhere, often in long patches and streamers that ran northward in the direction of the pulse. The blast wave had swept through this area like a giant comb, tearing away fences, walls, and tents — and aircraft.

  As they taxied and braked, Cam noticed a jet ‚ghter up the slope that had overturned and caught ‚re. Nearby, another F-22 still hung in a cradle of chains attached to a bulldozer as a team of engineers struggled to excavate beneath the plane, trying to right it again without damaging its wings.

  “I’ll run interference for you if I can,” their pilot said, gesturing to the other side of the Cessna.

  “Thank you, sir.” Newcombe spoke for them all.

  At least a hundred men and women stood beside the road, grouped among the trucks and raised netting. Cam was on edge. The crowd was ‚ve times as many people as he’d seen in one place since the plague. In fact, a hundred people were nearly more than he’d seen alive at all, not counting helicopters and planes. He touched his face. He turned to Ruth. She was what mattered, and he saw a different strain in her eyes as she clutched her backpack and the data index.

  She was breathing too fast. Her chest rose and fell against her T-shirt. Her arms were scored with red marks where she’d been scratching. They’d taken off their encrusted jackets and Ruth was slim and ‚rm but absolutely ‚lthy, speckled with old bites and sores and a few spots of blister rash.

  “The man in the dark suit is Governor Shaug,” the pilot said. “Small guy. Not much hair.”
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  “I see him,” Newcombe said.

  “Let’s head straight for him, okay?” The pilot had removed his eye patch and pocketed it as he walked to the door of the plane. Newcombe and Cam stood up. The copilot joined them.

  Outside the round windows, Cam saw a team of Army medics and a gurney off to one side. That was good. They’d anticipated the most obvious need, but he resented the mob. He wanted food and sleep. But they wanted the vaccine. He had no right to blame them. The circus seemed like a bad idea, though, despite the netting that concealed most of them from satellite coverage. The Russians might be looking and listening. The best thing would be for Ruth to disappear.

  Their pilot opened the door. The air felt wonderful on Cam’s skin, but the crowd stopped them close enough to the plane to feel the hot stink of the engines. Most of the people were in uniform, yet it was a civilian who took charge, a clean-shaven man in a smudged white dress shirt. Many of the others were bearded and sunburnt. This man was pale.

  “Missus Goldman?” he said.

  “We have wounded,” the pilot said. “Let us through.”

  “Missus Goldman, I’m Jason Luce with the U.S. Secret Service. Are you okay?”

  “She’s hurt. Let us through.”

  “Of course,” Luce said. His men slipped in between Ruth and the copilot as they walked and then a man in Army green drew Newcombe away from her, too.

  “Staff Sergeant?” the man said.

  “Sir.” Newcombe saluted, but visibly hesitated as the space between himself and Ruth ‚lled with people.

  It was hard to let go. They had been bound together through eight weeks of desolation and misery and yet this was exactly what they’d fought for, the chance to pass the vaccine to someone else. Cam told himself to be glad. It was over. They’d won. Grand Lake had the men and the aircraft to spread the nanotech — and to protect Ruth.

  “Wait.” She pulled back from Luce. She’d regained some of her color, but her expression was afraid.