by Jeff Carlson
With great power comes great responsibility, and the sixteen hundred people killed in White River had been fellow Americans, or could have been again someday. Someday soon.
21
Ruth sat quietly through the short drive, head down, mouth shut. Fortunately, conversation was possible only in a yell. The big truck had no muffler and its shocks were blown. The slat benches in back rammed up or slammed down each time the wheels hit the slightest bump in the road, and she let the bass roar of the engine fill her head.
The airport was a dense and complicated scene, the short county runway surrounded by fat commercial airliners and smaller craft. Waiting on the tarmac now was a single-engine Cessna, civilian white and beige, and a much larger C-130 cargo transport painted olive drab.
They parked beneath the 130’s tail but could have driven straight in. The rear of the plane was open—it dropped down and became a loading ramp—with a jeep, a flatbed trailer, and a bulldozer lined up nose to rear within its long body.
Ruth saw no more troops or specialists waiting to join them among the USAF ground crews, so the expedition would total fewer than twenty. She was the only woman.
Hernandez, the ranking officer, dispatched five Special Forces and an Air Force pilot to the Cessna, then hustled everyone else into the massive C-130. Was he trying to keep on schedule or was he, like Ruth, afraid that a voice on the radio would cancel their mission before they were in the air?
Her fellow techs were Dhanumjaya Julakanti, better known as D.J., and Todd Brayton, both from the hunter-killer development team. Both had helped design the discrimination key.
She got the acknowledgment she needed in their eyes and a nod from D.J., but there was no way to talk. Hernandez insisted everyone sit together close behind the cockpit. The bulldozer, trailer, and jeep were chained to the deck, but if anything snapped free during takeoff, it would drop toward the tail. Smarter to be up front.
A knife of panic bit into her again when the plane lunged skyward. The interior was a long, dimly lit drum. No windows. Too much like the Endeavour. Worse, the web seats ran alongside the edges of the deck, facing the opposite wall rather than forward, so that the g-forces drew her stomach sideways.
Finally they leveled off. Always courteous, Major Hernandez unstrapped and knelt before the three techs. Ruth watched his face intently, alert for a wink, a word, a tipoff of any kind.
“I know this all seems thrown together,” he said, “but you’re in capable hands. I don’t want you to worry about anything except your job, okay?”
Hernandez and four Marines had been assigned to the expedition as their personal bodyguards, in addition to the seven men of the Special Forces team and three USAF pilots. Hernandez rattled off introductions, making a point of including the troops in the other plane—and Ruth noted that this handpicked group was all chiefs and no Indians, entirely sergeants and corporals. It also seemed top-heavy, with Hernandez and the Special Forces captain. A lieutenant colonel headed the trio of pilots.
D.J. said, “Seems to me you’re a little shorthanded.”
“No point wasting suits,” Hernandez told him, “or air, or jet fuel. And there isn’t going to be anyone else there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
No, Ruth thought. Not after they dusted White River. None of the few regions still capable of getting a plane off the ground would dare.
The small Cessna was flying ahead of the C-130, since it required a shorter, narrower space to touch down than the cargo plane. If necessary, the men aboard the Cessna could do whatever possible to improve and mark the landing area.
After a flight of two and a quarter hours, the C-130 would have the fuel capacity to circle or even to return to Leadville in a worst-case scenario, but there was a sufficient stretch of road waiting. Satellite photography, backed by discussions with the Californians, confirmed a near straightaway of 2,500 feet along the slanting plateau of the mountaintop.
“Putting down in an urban area might be tricky if this guy’s lab was in a city,” Hernandez said, “but the C-130 is one of the toughest aircraft ever built. We can squeeze into a dirt field if necessary, then drive from there.”
D.J. scowled at the bulldozer and began to open his mouth. “We’ve got everything covered,” Hernandez assured them.
“We’re in, we’re out, we’re home.” Home. Shit. There was her clue. Major Hernandez was still loyal to the council.
“It’s the Special Forces,” Ruth said. “Think about it.”
D.J. shook his head. “James and Hernandez are friends.” She shook her head right back at him. “That doesn’t mean anything. James tries to get in good with everyone.”
Privacy hadn’t been a problem. The C-130 could hold nearly a hundred troops, and the vehicles formed a low, irregular wall down the middle of the deck. Ruth had opened her laptop and started arguing schematics with D.J., who caught on and made some loud comments of his own. After a minute she’d apologized to Hernandez for the disruption, then moved away with D.J. and Todd. They were still in view of the soldiers but buried in engine noise, which was bone-shaking here alongside the wings.
“I’ll tell you what doesn’t mean anything. One word.” D.J. didn’t quite sneer, but his full lips held a condescending smile perfectly. “He could have meant home like home free.”
“He would’ve said it another way if he was on our side.”
“I don’t think he’ll say anything at all.”
Dhanumjaya Julakanti had jumpy eyebrows, a dimpled chin, and a tendency to overenunciate, especially the words I me my. Some people couldn’t see past his charisma or his IQ, a classic combination, and mistook his self-importance for leadership— but Lord knew she wasn’t Miss Humility. Ruth recognized a piggish obsession with being right when she saw it.
Todd Brayton wasn’t any help. Young, maybe twenty-five, straw blond with brown eyes, Todd was fidgety, too quiet, more nervous than Ruth and D.J. together. When they first met the week before, she’d tried to avoid staring at his blister scars. Todd made that difficult. He touched the blotch on his nose often, and constantly rustled his burned fingers together. He had been one of the last techs out of NORAD and Ruth admired his willingness to face the locusts again. Yes, they’d be wearing suits, but exposure was more than a nightmare to him.
Todd was the bravest of them.
He seemed to have already hit his limit, however, with nothing to spare for any conflict outside himself.
“Look.” Ruth strived to keep her voice friendly, which was impossible, half-shouting over the engine noise. “Hernandez would have preferred a full platoon of his own men. There’s no reason to send a mixed group except that our guy plugged in a separate unit. And he made sure to stack the deck while he was at it, seven to five.”
D.J. waggled his chin at her. “You’re just making assumptions again. Maybe they planned to send all Special Forces originally and Hernandez is the one who was switched in.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Todd said. “We can’t hint around about it, we might tip off the wrong side.”
D.J. kept shaking his head. “They wouldn’t tell us anyway.”
“You think they’ll wait to see how things play out,” Ruth said. Sure. Whether it was the Special Forces team or Hernandez and his Marines, they didn’t care about her peace of mind.
They’d want to keep their options open until the last minute, and couldn’t rely on her not to slip up.
James would be in trouble no matter what happened, she knew. Imprisoned? Banished? Ruth was only beginning to understand his sacrifice. But if this mission was a bust the soldiers could all go back to Leadville, no harm, no foul.
She and D.J. and Todd would have a harder time claiming innocence. In fact, they might be better off instigating a showdown between the two halves of their escort, stay out West.
It was a dangerous thought. Even if the right soldiers won, they might execute her for making them outcasts.
Ruth went back to the front
of the plane and chose a seat in the small crowd where she could see a wedge of sky through the open cockpit door. She managed a smile, thinking that the crash of the Endeavour had been preferable to this flight. At least it had been over quickly. Her anxiety was a restless jitter in her fingers and in her mind.
Below, outside this thin metal shell, lay an environment only marginally less lethal than the vacuum of space. The dead zone stretched without interruption from Utah to the mountains in California—and west of the Sierra range it blanketed a full third of the planet, unblemished and absolute except for the volcanic peaks of Hawaii, until the high points of New Guinea and Taiwan rose up across the Pacific.
The plane rattled and dropped left, and Ruth yelped as the nose stayed down. But it was only turbulence. They leveled out again, and nearly every man present said something nice to her or smiled and nodded. Ruth couldn’t even meet their eyes, silently cursing herself.
She was a damn poor choice to save the world.
Landing was uneventful. The plane bounced once, a shuddering impact followed by a quick, gut-fluttering arc, but Ruth managed not to embarrass herself again.
Then they taxied for fifteen minutes, which was maddening.
Where was there to go? The plane moved at a crawl and stopped three times. Hernandez made her remain in her seat. They were going to jockey back around into a takeoff position, he said. Ruth kicked her legs. At last the pilots were satisfied, and the two Special Forces troops aboard went to lower the tailgate. Again Hernandez made her stay put, but she could smell pine trees and earth as soon as the plane opened.
Hernandez had already conferred by radio with the USAF pilot and five Special Forces in the Cessna, who’d touched down forty minutes ago. They reported everything as expected, no tricks, no traps, only a handful of malnourished survivors. Still, Ruth was ordered to keep close to the Marines.
Some instinct tensed in her hindbrain when she emerged into sunlight. At first she blamed Hernandez for this paranoia, but then D.J. said, “Top of the world, eh?”
That was it. In Leadville the close horizon of giant peaks manufactured the illusion of being protected. Here there was only the pale sky. They were up on the tallest point and their view appeared infinite. To the west, beneath the late sun, the land tumbled away in a zigzag maze of ridgelines and cliffs and rounded granite slopes.
The habitable zones in California were little more than a chain of flyspecks. Yosemite offered several large patches not far from here, but this peak seemed alone above the barrier. Her eyes went again and again to the tangle of ravines and dusky green forest below as she moved with Hernandez and the Marines.
Lord only knew where Sawyer had come from. If that ragged knuckle of lava southward across the valley poked above ten thousand feet, its surface area looked no bigger than two or three football fields.
The C-130’s tires had left inky skid lines like claw marks on the asphalt road, very near the only structure in sight. Glancing back at the plane was a mistake. This mountain was barren of trees, but she saw a rock outcropping down the road that their starboard wing must have cleared by a matter of feet—and they’d have to squeeze past it again to take off.
The building, originally, had been a two-room cabin with a stubby chimney. It was old, maybe 1950s. Another room had been tacked on years ago, and a modern whisker antenna rose alongside the chimney. More recent additions consisted of two-by-four framework and blue tarps, and behind it Ruth saw three low huts skinned in clear plastic. Greenhouses.
Five adults and a boy stood together away from the cabin, out on the road with an equal number of Special Forces in camouflage and an Air Force man in gray-blue. The two groups did not mingle. The soldiers all held assault rifles, long barrels tipped casually toward the ground.
Ruth frowned. Was this really how they planned to treat these people, herding them?
“Flank,” said the Marine beside her, like a swear word, and motion drew her eyes back toward the greenhouses— Two shapes, scuttling for cover— One of them thrust out its arm, and the men around her raised their weapons—
A woman up the road screamed, “Lindsey, God no!”
Her shrill fear was immediately lost in male voices: “It’s just kids!”
“Kids—”
“Stand down,” Hernandez said. “For Christ’s sake.”
The Marines surrounding Ruth lowered their rifles as a young girl’s laughter reached their ears, clear and breathless.
“Lindsey!” the woman shrieked, but the girl danced back into the open and pointed her stick at them, making buh buh buh sounds before ducking behind the cinder-block foundation of a greenhouse.
Ruth stared, even after Todd had nudged her and they’d started walking again. The girl looked to be nine or ten, dressed in yellow rain gear that hung on her like thirty-gallon garbage bags, and she was obviously delighted by the soldiers.
Ruth shook her head and smiled. The emotion in her was too complex to articulate, but that girl was hope. That girl was a future. Given the chance, mankind would rebound from anything. Human beings were too adaptable.
The soldiers blocked her from the six Californians as Hernandez introduced himself, so Ruth edged her good shoulder in between two Special Forces. Five of the six, two women, two men and the boy, were haggard and dirty and therefore completely normal. It was the last man who froze her attention.
Piebald blister rash peppered his face and neck, distorting his black beard, old scars intermingled with larger, healing patches and hemorrhagic bruising. His dark eyes showed his suffering, and Ruth believed she could see his guilt. This was someone who had helped decimate an entire planet, accident or not. Atonement was beyond him. He had paid horribly, and strived now to do more, and he would always be lost inside his pain—and yet the feeling in Ruth was not hatred or even base revulsion. It was awe. It was respect.
“Mr. Sawyer,” she said, extending her hand.
His fingers were rough and nubby but his smile was a fragile thing. “No,” he said. “My name is Cam.”
22
“I’m Ruth,” the lady told him, holding on to his hand for another moment. Whether she was proving something to him or to herself, Cam appreciated the effort.
He knew he was a monster and his hands were the worst. His right pinky had been eaten down to the bone at the first joint, and ruffles of scar tissue prevented him from bending that finger more than a little. Nerve damage had robbed him of sensation in his ring finger as well, leaving his grip uneven.
“You came across with him,” Ruth said, softly, carefully, but her intelligent brown gaze was unwavering.
One of the other civilians got loud, a dark guy with a dimpled block chin. The man’s eyebrows rose in a display of impatience. “Where is Mr. Sawyer? Is he all right?”
“He’s sleeping,” Cam said. “At least he was.”
“Sleeping!”
The officer, Hernandez, was more tactful. He said, “We need to see him, hermano.” Brother.
Cam felt a smile cross his lips again. Those three rolling syllables evoked so much that he had lost. “Let’s wait a couple hours, okay? He’s better when he’s rested.”
Hernandez glanced at the sun and then at the cabin.
“Really,” Cam said. “He’s not having a better day.”
“All right.” Hernandez turned to one of the men in camouflage. “Captain, why don’t we make these folks a solid meal and see if there’s any medical attention we can provide.”
Hollywood’s name was Eddie Kokubo. Edward. But that was the only thing he’d lied about. This island could have sustained them all easily and the people here had been eager to help, eager for new faces, eager to rebuild any semblance of a community.
Cam had regained consciousness inside their home, in brilliant yellow lanternlight and the wretched noise of a woman’s sobbing, crushed somewhere beneath his own agony. There was space in his body only for a flicker of understanding— and the confused, recurrent terror t
hat they would cook him.
He drifted in that place for days, surfacing irregularly but all too willing to retreat from himself.
Eighty-one hours after reaching elevation, he woke as they were changing his bandages, alone in a real bed. Dr. Anderson was so much like he’d pictured from Hollywood’s descriptions that he forgot they’d never met. Mid-forties, graying, Anderson wasn’t quite overweight, but his oval cheeks and stubby fingers gave him a look of contentment, which was reinforced by his slow way of moving. His wife, Maureen, was less gentle, a redhead with creases on her forehead and alongside her pointed nose.
“Doctor A,” Cam said.
Maureen jerked back at his croaking. Anderson merely paused and then looked up from Cam’s left foot. “You’re awake,” he answered, simple encouragement.
It went like that for another two weeks, Anderson babying him with calm pronouncements and broth, fighting the onset of fever with judicious amounts of aspirin and irreplaceable one-use chemical cold packs. Nearly half a square yard of Cam’s skin had been turned into open, oozing wounds, and Anderson kept him isolated for fear of infection.
They also wanted to see if he and Sawyer told the same story. They questioned him a bit at a time. Anderson was mostly accepting but Maureen probed for inconsistencies, her green eyes like jade, and his condition proved an excellent excuse to avoid answering too quickly. He would look away or take a deep breath, not needing to fake grief and exhaustion, thinking as best he could until he was convinced he had his half-truths straight.
He and Sawyer were the only ones talking.
Hollywood had bled out within an hour—and laid beside him now were two additional graves. Jocelyn Colvard and Alex Atkins had also crawled up that night, too long after Cam and Sawyer dragged Hollywood to the barrier. A stroke killed Jocelyn instantly but Atkins hung on for almost seven days, groaning, coughing, a restless coma that gave way to rasping death.
