Plague War p-2

by Jeff Carlson

  “She needs medical attention,” Newcombe called.

  The pilot said, “They all do. Give ’em some room.”

  “We have doctors and food and you can rest,” Luce said, “but you have to come with me.”

  Cam didn’t argue. His role had changed as soon as they boarded the Cessna. The power he’d wielded for so long was meaningless here, and he didn’t know enough about this place to decide if he still belonged in her life. But she wanted him. That was enough. He held on to Ruth’s narrow waist and supported her as they moved into the shade beneath the netting, where Governor Shaug advanced with both hands out.

  The governor was in his sixties, short and balding. He was also the oldest person Cam had seen in sixteen months. In California, unending stress had swiftly killed off the children and the middle-aged. Shaug was one more indicator of how different things had been here.

  There was real strength in his smile. “Thank God for everything you’ve done,” Shaug said. “Please. Sit down.” He gestured to where steel benches and tables lined one corner of the shaded area. The nearest had bottled water, Cokes, and four cans of sliced peaches. A small feast.

  Cam nodded. “Thanks.”

  “We’d like blood samples immediately,” Luce said, waving for the Army medics. “Please.”

  Please. From him, the word was loaded with tension. Cam tightened his arm on Ruth and her dirty backpack, glancing at Shaug to see if the governor would intervene. He’d thought the medics were assembled to care for Ruth. It felt like a lie. But Ruth only nodded and said, “Yes.”

  * * * *

  Richard Shaug had been the governor of Wisconsin, displaced like so many survivors. He was nominally the top man in Grand Lake, and yet Cam wondered if Shaug and Luce were working against each other. There would be factions among the leadership. That went without saying. Every day was a test, and they would have different goals. Was it something he could exploit? Which man had the real power? Cam imagined that it lay with the Secret Service agent. He thought Luce was more likely to have allied with the military, and he’d seen how the armored vehicles and barricades divided this makeshift city.

  He was wrong. The medics drew four slim vials of blood each from Ruth, Newcombe, and himself. The twelve plastic tubes were set in four racks and Luce said, “Take three of those to the planes.”

  Shaug held up his hand. “No.”

  “Governor,” Luce said.

  “No. No yet.”

  “We have to get it to as many people as possible. We could †y it to Salmon River, at least,” Luce said.

  “What’s going on?” Ruth asked. Her face was paler than ever. She hadn’t been able to afford even 30 ccs of blood and looked nauseous, although her eyes were angry and alert.

  Two of the medics hustled off with the blood samples, leaving their cart and equipment behind. A full squad of troops moved with them through the crowd. They were headed for the labyrinth of shelters, not the runway. Cam’s gaze shifted to the needles and tubing, and then to Luce. Did the man realize how little blood was necessary?

  “Let’s get you inside,” Shaug said, offering Ruth one of the cans of peaches. “Do you want to eat a little ‚rst? Please. I can see you’re very tired.”

  “I don’t understand,” she protested, but she was hardly a fool or a helpless girl. She was trying to draw him out.

  Shaug didn’t bother to answer. “Clean that up,” he said to the remaining medics, pointing at their trays and equipment. Then he looked back at Ruth like an afterthought. “Let’s get you inside,” he repeated, glancing at another man.

  It was the of‚cer who’d stopped Newcombe by the plane. A colonel. “Let’s go,” the colonel said, and Cam watched the crowd separate as men and women in uniform stepped forward and Luce’s civilian agents held back. Had Luce really expected to outmaneuver the governor?

  Ruth was being used for barter or political gain, he thought. Shaug wanted to hold on to her and the vaccine in exchange for guarantees from the other Americans and the Canadians, and it was true that Grand Lake had rescued her when no one else could. But it was divisive. That was why Luce had rushed their plane. Luce hoped to spread the vaccine before some catastrophe destroyed it altogether, another bomb, or a Russian assault.

  Cam wanted him to succeed, and maybe that was all Luce had intended to accomplish — to make a friend. Shaug probably couldn’t control the vaccine no matter what he did. The three of them were exhaling traces of it just sitting here. As soon as they showered or went to the bathroom, the vaccine would be in the water and in the latrines. In fact, their jackets must be crawling with it, rubbed inside and out with blood, skin, and sweat. If they only knew, Luce and his people could slice the jackets into pieces and package the material aboard any number of jets. They could even ingest a pinch of the dirty fabric themselves and then set out below the barrier on foot.

  Cam didn’t say it out loud. There was another way. He coughed and brought his hand to his mouth, spitting lightly into his palm.

  “Have you heard from Captain Young, sir?” Newcombe asked. The colonel only frowned. “My squad leader in Sacramento,” Newcombe explained. “He and another man went south.”

  “I don’t know, son.”

  “We saw ‚ghting on May twenty-third, west of the Sierras. We thought it was them.”

  Cam paced through the soldiers and made eye contact with Luce, extending his hand. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Sure,” Luce said doubtfully, yet he reached out and Cam completed the gesture, pressing his wet palm against the other man’s dry skin. The uncertainty in Luce’s expression deepened, but then he nodded. It was done. The vaccine was loose in Grand Lake.

  * * * *

  A blue-eyed soldier with sunburn on his ears and cheeks took Ruth’s pack. Cam would always remember his face.

  “We have a small lab,” Shaug said. “There are some people who’ll start looking things over tonight. Tomorrow you can help them.”

  “Yes.” Ruth nodded, but her mouth was set in a grimace and Cam felt no better, watching the soldier turn and go. They’d carried that battered green pack for hundreds of miles and now it wasn’t theirs anymore.

  Newcombe disappeared with the colonel. A persistent nurse also tried to separate Cam and Ruth in the small, overcrowded medical tent, where row after row of people lay groaning on blankets and cots and the bare earth, mostly soldiers. Even with the tent sides rolled up, the air was putrid. Stomach †u. But this was where Grand Lake had an X-ray machine.

  The nurse said, “We really don’t want anyone in here who doesn’t need to be here.”

  “No. I’m staying with him,” Ruth said.

  “We just want to take a quick look at—”

  “I’m staying with him.”

  The nurse checked with three doctors before turning on the X-ray, which was isolated in its own tiny space by hanging blankets. This tent was hooked into Grand Lake’s power grid, fed by turbines far below in the river, but the amperage on their line was weak and couldn’t support more than a few pieces of equipment at once.

  While the ‚lm was developed, Cam and Ruth were led to a second tent where they were given antibiotics. Ruth grabbed something from her pants before a man took their ‚lthy clothes away. A rock. She tried to hide it, but Cam recognized the lines scored into the granite.

  “Jesus, Ruth, how long have you been…”

  “Please. Please, Cam.” She wouldn’t look at him. “Please don’t be mean about it.”

  He nodded slowly. The rock was obviously safe. Otherwise they would have gotten sick weeks ago. But why would you want to take anything from that place with you? he wondered. Maybe she wasn’t sure, either. “It’s okay,” he said.

  They were given stinging sponge baths with soap and water and rubbing alcohol. Then their multitude of wounds were treated, stitched, and bandaged. Ruth wasn’t shy about her body, although there were half a dozen people in between them and Cam turned his back, trying not to stare.

 
; The medical staff wore cloth masks and a hodgepodge of gloves, some latex, some rubber. They were almost certainly exposed to the nanotech. Cam coughed and coughed to purposely infect them. The vaccine wouldn’t replicate inside them because there was no plague here for it attack, but he wanted to spread the technology to as many people as possible.

  A man with glasses came in and said, “Goldman? Your arm’s healed fairly well, but I’m going to recommend a brace for at least three weeks. Don’t overuse it.”

  They cut off her battered ‚berglass cast and Ruth gasped at the sight of her arm. The skin was wrinkled and albino pale, the muscles wasted. Trapped sweat had puckered her skin and in places the doughy tissue was infected. She wept. She wept and Cam knew her tears weren’t for her arm, not entirely. She was ‚nally able to let go of all the horror she’d repressed.

  Cam hurried through the strangers and held her. Neither of them wore anything except a †imsy hospital smock. Ruth’s clean-smelling hair had †uffed up in waves and curls and Cam kept his nose against the top of her head, marveling in the small pleasure of it.

  Things got worse. The two of them had already received a fortune in pharmaceuticals and the medical staff refused to give her painkillers before they cleaned her arm. “It’s super‚cial,” the surgeon said. He scraped at her mushy skin and swabbed the wounds with iodine as Ruth screamed and screamed, clinging to her little rock.

  * * * *

  “We need to rest,” Cam said. “Food and rest. Please.”

  “Of course. We can follow up tomorrow.” The surgeon was testing Cam’s left hand now, pricking the scar tissue, but he turned and gestured at a nurse, who left the narrow room.

  Ruth had lain down, shaking. Her forearm was wrapped in a black fabric sleeve reinforced with metal struts, although the surgeon had said to take it off as much as possible to let her wounds breathe.

  The nurse returned with four soldiers. Cam recognized one of them from the landing strip and fought to hide his reaction, bristling with distrust and aggression. It was misplaced. It came too easily. “Can you help her?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the squad leader said. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we’re going to carry you, okay?”

  Cam and Ruth were dressed in Army green themselves, old shirts and pants — old but clean. The nurse hadn’t been long ‚nding things in their exact sizes. Cam tried not to dwell on the fact that the spare clothes must have come from dead men. It wouldn’t have bothered him except that he didn’t want to offend the soldiers for any reason.

  Cam leaned on one of the young men as they left the tent. Ruth was half-conscious in their arms. Outside, a blond woman stood waiting in the last light of the sun, her chin tipped up almost combatively. From her rich hair and complexion, Cam thought she was in the prime of her early thirties, a lot like Ruth. She was beautiful, but she wore the same Army green as all of them beneath a white lab coat and it was the coat that unsettled Cam. Was she from Shaug’s nanotech team?

  Just go away, he thought.

  The woman’s legs scissored as she moved into their path. There were nonre†ective black bars on her shirt collar and the squad leader said, “Excuse me, Captain.”

  She didn’t even look at him. “Ruth?” she asked. “Ruth, my God.” Her smooth hand went to Ruth’s shoulder, as deft as a bird.

  Cam said, “Leave us alone.”

  “I know her,” the woman insisted.

  He would have shoved past, but Ruth wriggled free of the soldiers and took one step, unsteady, smiling, before she buried her face in the woman’s long hair and embraced her. “Deborah,” she said.

  * * * *

  The wind picked up as the light changed, fading to orange, but Ruth clung stubbornly to her friend in the same way she’d refused to lose sight of Cam.

  “Please, ma’am,” the squad leader said.

  “Can’t you just bring our dinner here?” Ruth asked. She sat between Cam and Deborah on the tracked bare earth near the corner of the surgical tent, where they were mostly out of the breeze but could still look across the mountains in the west.

  “Ma’am,” the man repeated, but Deborah said, “Just do it, Sergeant. Send one of your guys. The rest of you can keep her plenty safe for a few minutes.”

  “My orders are to get her inside, Captain.”

  “I like the air,” Ruth said distantly.

  Cam worried that she might be confused, but Deborah only repeated herself in that haughty way. “A few minutes,” Deborah said. “Go on.”

  The squad leader jerked his thumb at one of his men, who moved off. There were other people passing by, two doctors, two mechanics, a teenager in civilian clothes.

  “What can I do?” Deborah asked softly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m cold,” Ruth said, still gazing at the horizon.

  Deborah glanced past her at Cam with a worried look and he felt for the ‚rst time that they might be friends, too, although it was strange. If he remembered right, the two women had been adversaries before today.

  Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., had been the physician and a support systems specialist aboard the International Space Station. All of the astronauts had worked two or more jobs to maintain the station, and she was a formidable woman. Most impressive of all was that Ruth had last seen her in Leadville. Somehow Deborah had walked away from the nuclear strike, and yet Cam held his tongue, watching the people come and go until Ruth shook herself, coming into focus at last.

  “Deb, what are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought Grand Lake was a rebel base.”

  “It’s not important. Did you get what you went for?”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.” Ruth set her good hand on Cam’s knee and squeezed, although she didn’t look at him.

  Deborah noticed the contact. She glanced past Ruth again, and Cam tried to smile. “We need to know everything about this place,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what I can.” But mostly Deborah talked about Leadville. She had yet to make peace with it, Cam realized, and that was no surprise.

  “Bill Wallace is dead,” she told Ruth, counting friends. “Gustavo. Ulinov. Everyone in the labs.”

  Nikola Ulinov had sacri‚ced four hundred thousand people for the Russians, saving only one. Playing on the authority he’d once had aboard the ISS, Ulinov quietly suggested that Deborah volunteer for a combat unit. Her medical training could be of real use, he said, helping the men and women on Leadville’s front lines rather than babying the politicians in town.

  “It was a warning,” Deborah said. “It was the best he could do. If he ran…If our entire crew disappeared, Leadville would’ve known. They would have shot down the plane that brought in the warhead.”

  Cam let her talk, watching the ‚ne wrinkles that appeared at the corners of her eyes and mouth as she struggled with herself.

  “When I think of him waiting,” Deborah said. “When I think of him being sure, but still waiting…” She leaned against Ruth and sighed, blinking back tears even as her eyes sparked with rage.

  “It’s okay,” Ruth said. “Shh, it’s okay.”

  Cam frowned and turned to gaze out across the mountains again, wondering at the man’s determination in bringing such force down on himself. He had seen all kinds of bravery and evil. Sometimes they were one and same. The only difference was in where you stood, and that made Cam uneasy. He believed in what he was doing, but maybe it was a mistake.

  He coughed hard into his palm. Then he touched the back of Deborah’s hand as if to comfort her, infecting her with the vaccine. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  * * * *

  Grand Lake had gone underground. Many of the trailers and huts concealed tunnel entrances. On their way from the medical tent, Cam saw a wide shape of camou†age netting that covered new excavations. Work had stopped for the day, but it looked as if they’d dug a ‚fty-foot pit by hand and were still hacking at one edge while other teams built wooden frameworks into which they’d pour concrete. He supposed that after the boxy shapes of the wa
lls had set, they’d add ceilings, then pile the dirt back in to hide and insulate the bunker. A wasted effort.

  You can all go back down again, he thought. You should all be able to walk off this mountain.

  That was probably why Shaug sought to control it. If too many people ran, he’d lose his ‚ghting force. A mass exodus down from the Continental Divide could be its own disaster, because without an organized military, they would be helpless against the Russians.

  Maybe the governor was right.

  Cam felt new adrenaline as the squad leader led them to a sun-faded mobile home with a tarp for an awning, hiding its door. Deborah had already left, promising to visit Ruth again before breakfast, and Cam was glad that someone else knew where to ‚nd them. What if Shaug meant to lock them in?

  He was unarmed and outnumbered. He went through the door when the squad leader gestured. Inside, the prefab home was little more than a shell, no furniture, no carpet. Most of the wall panels had been torn apart for ‚rewood and to get at the wiring and plumbing. Only two light ‚xtures remained. The kitchen was gutted of its cabinets, sink, and counters, and in this bizarre scene stood a short-haired Asian woman with a cigarette. The home was only here to cover the stairwell and the ventilation holes in the †oor.

  Cam hesitated at the top of the dark stairs. “I need to talk to Shaug,” he said. It was all he could think of.

  “We’ll walk you over in the morning, sir,” the squad leader said.

  Ruth glanced into Cam’s eyes, ready to play along, but the noise from below did not sound like a prison and the woman with the cigarette was disinterested and relaxed. Cam heard laughter as a man shouted, “Five bucks! That’s ‚ve bucks!”

  They went down nearly twenty feet. The walls were un‚nished concrete lined with a single black wire. Two lamps had been bolted to the ceiling. Eight doorways ‚lled a short hall, hung with blankets, and Cam worried at the damp cold.

  “This is you, sir,” the squad leader said, pointing at the ‚rst door. “We’ll be right across, okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Cam led Ruth into their room. It was cramped but private, and equipped with an electric coil space heater. He turned it on. There was also one narrow Army cot and four blankets, although he was too keyed up to sleep.