Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  A transmitter on the enemy C-130 could have flooded their headsets with music or white noise.

  But maybe the paratroopers were listening too.

  “Now.” Young led them into the open, his Glock popping. At the same time, Newcombe ducked around the minivan and swept the road with their only M16.

  Ruth and Todd went next, together, like two kids on a dare—but first they wasted a precious moment jittering, hesitating, glancing back and forth from Young to each other’s pale faces. They still seemed to be looking at each other when they took their first steps.

  Iantuano lunged after them, hampered by Sawyer’s weight. Cam moved with the Special Forces man, his pistol shots too high as recoil pushed his arm up. Newcombe followed with the rifle.

  D.J. was the last to emerge, although he’d been told to stick with Todd and Ruth, and possibly he would have stayed behind if they hadn’t left him alone with his fear. Something propelled him after everyone else.

  “Wait! Wait!” he shouted.

  It was ten feet from the minivan to the sidewalk, twenty more to get behind the boxy white fourplex. The bulldozer and several stalls provided obstacles between them and the Leadville troops, and a sagging fence would also partially conceal them once they hit the yard—but a squad of five paratroopers had advanced much, much closer than anyone had guessed.

  Rifle fire pounded over them in a deafening tide.

  Just as quickly, the noise turned away. Sprawled behind the ’dozer, Olson was still conscious, his ruptured suit bloodied at the abdomen and one foot. Olson had grabbed Trotter’s M16 and squeezed off the full magazine in a wild, chattering upswing.

  He wounded three of the nearest troopers. Then the others shot him dead, point-blank.

  The paratroopers wore olive green containment suits with combat helmets of the same color, on top of hoods with long insectoid eyes rather than faceplates. They were thick-bodied, encumbered by flak jackets and a third air cylinder.

  Cam wouldn’t have hit those dark, scrambling shapes at thirty-five feet even if he had been standing still. Charging sideways, twisted over to make himself small, he kept shooting anyway and nearly killed Newcombe when the man dodged in front of him. Cam yanked his pistol back and lost his balance.

  Young, Ruth, and Todd had already run past the corner of the building and Newcombe made it as Cam stumbled, his knee folding. Six feet, three— Cam flopped onto the weeds and soft dirt and squirmed to get his gun around—

  The majority of the paratroopers, whether maintaining their positions up the street or also advancing, were restricted in their field of fire by the squad that Olson had surprised. A few shots ripped across the front of the building overhead but for the most part the rifles had quit.

  A sniper found Iantuano, the largest, slowest target. On his shoulder Sawyer convulsed, drilled through the chest, and Iantuano buckled three-quarters of the way across the yard. The man was near enough for Cam to see the dismay in his eyes and he expected Iantuano to fall dead, hit in the neck or torso by the same bullet. But the round must have bounced inside Sawyer’s ribs and exited at an odd angle, because Iantuano was wounded low on his side and only lightly. He pushed himself up on his arms—both arms, even the broken one— then clutched at Sawyer.

  D.J. was unable to make the decision to go left or right around them and paused there, high-stepping over Iantuano’s legs.

  The sniper winged him. D.J.’s forearm flapped out from his body and he twisted after it, staggering. He kept his feet just long enough to collapse beyond Cam.

  Iantuano could have rolled the last yard and saved himself. Instead he tried to improve his grip on Sawyer, worming forward with both legs, his face distorted by effort. But his bloody gloves slipped loose and a shadow of a new emotion altered his expression as he glanced down at Sawyer. That shadow was miserable doubt, almost wistful.

  The sniper put his next round through Iantuano’s helmet.

  Sawyer’s wounds were mortal. Where the bullet had exited through his abdomen, the tough rubber suit was peeled open in a fist-sized flap. His stronger arm beat irregularly on the ground but weakened to a twitching as Cam gawked.

  He faced in the direction they’d fled, upside down, bent over his air tanks. Whether he saw them and the safety that he could never reach was impossible to know. His one glaring eye shifted toward Cam and passed on, still lively in his misshapen face.

  They left him out there like an animal. And it was wrong and it was right. A bad death was nothing more than Albert Sawyer deserved for all of his selfishness and his savagery— and yet those traits had also been Sawyer’s best, his force of will, his adaptability. There was no final equation.

  Cam left him out there to die alone and turned and ran.

  * * * *

  Todd helped Cam with D.J., who was clumsy with shock and wanted to sit down. “I can’t, I can’t,” D.J. said, but that he was talking was a positive sign.

  Captain Young ranged ahead, not bothering to sneak a glance around the rear of the fourplex before crossing an alleyway. Nor did he make any attempt to find cover as he jogged through a nearly empty parking lot. If there were paratroopers in front of them, it was over. Their only hope was speed.

  Ruth moved like a drunk, swaying as if her air tanks were solid steel weights. But whether she’d sprained an ankle or simply exhausted her legs, she never complained.

  “I can’t—” It was a hideous wound. The impact through D.J.’s forearm had broken his elbow as well, and bone chips from his shattered ulna had acted like shrapnel inside the muscle. Blood dribbled from his sleeve over his hip and his leg, and also painted Todd. Cam thought he could fashion a tourniquet from one of the spare gun belts Newcombe wore like bandoleers, but they’d need to stop running and that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Squeeze your arm with your other hand,” Cam said. “Squeeze on it or you’ll keep bleeding!”

  “I can’t, I can’t.”

  “Almost there,” Todd said, muffled. “Almost there.” His headset was loose in his helmet, poking his neck, broadcasting every bump and scrape like footsteps.

  Newcombe brought up the rear in an awkward skipping stride, turned halfway around with the M16 at his hip. “Nothing,” he reported, “nothing, still nothing, where are they—” He banged against Cam’s pack and stopped.

  Beyond this block of apartment housing lay the outskirts of the business district from which they’d detoured on the drive in, and the street before them was endless with traffic. Many cars had come up onto the sidewalk and wave patterns showed which vehicles had stopped first, other drivers swinging around them into the lots of a dry cleaner’s and a used-book store.

  “Move move move,” Newcombe said, pushing his hand into D.J.’s lower back. Young and Ruth were already ten yards into the standstill traffic, angling left and then left again through the smooth, colorful shapes. Windshields caught the noon sun, obscuring the ghosts slumped inside.

  “Let me go!” D.J. wrestled away from Cam.

  “What? We’re just—”

  The maze of vehicles was more difficult for them, too tight nearly everywhere to stay in a row together, and D.J. wouldn’t cooperate. “I’m not dying for it! Let me go!”

  Halfway across the street, Young turned to look and Ruth sagged onto the blue hood of a commuter car, her breathing loud in their radios. “Calm down,” Young said. “It’s always an hour or two before the plague actually wakes up and we’ll be there in ten minutes if you just keep moving.”

  “They’ll shoot you! They’ll shoot your plane down!”

  “Maybe not.”

  A skeleton in moldering rags folded around Todd’s boot as he kicked into its pelvic bone, watching D.J.’s face instead of looking where he was going—and his hands, carefully placed on D.J.’s shoulder, jarred that shattered arm.

  “Haahhh!” Twisting, D.J. drove his air tanks into Cam’s chest and threw him against a silver four-door. D.J. kept turning, ready to run, but Newcombe
blocked his path.

  Cam knew too well how pain affected the mind, and in one sense this injury was bigger than D.J. He couldn’t see past it.

  D.J. swung his good arm at Newcombe, who took the punch and held his M16 up in an entirely defensive position, making a fence of himself.

  D.J. sobbed, crazed, hateful. “They’ll kill you!”

  “Fuck. Let him run.” That was Young.

  Todd said, “We’re almost there! D.J.!”

  But Newcombe stepped aside and D.J. surged past him.

  “Don’t, no!” Ruth yelled. “He has the samples!”

  They tackled him after just two yards as the F-15s raged overhead. Within the trembling roar, Cam snagged at D.J.’s pack and Newcombe swatted his mangled arm. D.J. collapsed, his piercing wail lasting as the jet engines faded.

  “Get it, get it!” Newcombe shouted, his rifle leveled away from them back toward the apartment buildings.

  D.J. fought as Cam rummaged through his chest pockets, not to keep the sample case but to regain his feet. He rolled upright again as soon as Cam released him, shambling, clutching his arm with his other hand.

  He was still tottering away when Cam glanced back from the far side of the street.

  Why hadn’t the troopers enveloped them? The lab equipment was a prize but Leadville had men to spare, and any pursuit should have closed in by now—

  “Green, do you copy?” Their pilot. “Green, green!”

  “Here,” Young said. “We’re here.”

  “Shit news. I got a bunch of guys taking up position out on the freeway.”

  Young stopped and raised one fist, as if they could possibly miss him. He had outpaced the group and was the only animate shape within the canyon of buildings.

  As they surrounded him, Ruth knelt, heaving for air. Cam turned to watch the way they’d come and Newcombe did the same, though it seemed more and more like a bad guess to expect troopers behind them.

  “How many you got?” Young asked.

  “Nine or ten.” The pilot sounded apologetic. “Some of them are rushing the plane.”

  “Can you—”

  “We are not resisting,” the pilot continued, formal again. He must have been simultaneously transmitting these words to the men outside his door. “We are not resisting.”

  They’d counted at least forty troopers chuting down, likely fifty, and riding in the jeep Young had supposed that the last ten were kept as a reserve aboard the enemy C-130, unless Leadville had misrepresented the size of their force, a common trick. Of those fifty, a few would have been hurt in the drop. Young had comforted his team with the fact that impact traumas routinely hobbled 2 percent of gear-heavy troops landing in an open field, and the confines of the city must have upped that number drastically, no matter that these soldiers were an elite and outfitted with gliders instead of regular chutes. A sky crossed with power lines, the streets treacherous with cars—if they were lucky as many as a dozen men had been immobilized.

  Let’s be pessimistic, Young had said. Assume forty-five effectives. That put maybe fifteen troops about three miles east of them, dropped at the archos lab to prevent a retreat, to secure any files or gear they’d missed, to help Major Hernandez and in effect become reinforced by his Marines—and Cam had assumed the other thirty or more all took part in the ambush.

  Leadville, however, correctly figured that twenty riflemen in a box could decimate their small, lightly armed party. And as they drove into the waiting guns, the remaining ten troops had already been hustling toward their plane.

  The three men wounded by Sergeant Olson were likely the difference between a squad pursuing them now and Leadville deciding instead to regroup. The wounded needed care. The trailer needed to be guarded and moved. And why bother risking more casualties in a building-by-building mouse hunt? Leadville knew they’d run out of air. Leadville also knew exactly where they were. The spy satellites must have tracked them since they’d left the lab.

  It was over, all of it, and the feeling was like carrying Erin as she bled out with four thousand feet of elevation still between them and the barrier.

  Cam saw the same weary dread in Ruth’s flushed, sweating face as she blinked up at Young. Todd had also frozen, his expression locked in a grimace, one glove at his helmet as if to fidget with the minor scarring on his nose.

  But Young was shaking his head. “Update me on high ground.”

  “Why don’t you give it up?” the pilot said, gently now. “There’s no way—”

  “Update me on high ground!”

  A code name. Did they have more planes heading in from the breakaways or maybe Canada? The entire fucking world was going to be here on top of them soon, until the fighting became a small war and cost a hundred lives, a thousand.

  Cam was willing to take it that far to win.

  “Last call was affirmative but I cannot confirm,” the pilot said. “They jammed my downlink as soon as the F-15s showed on radar. Either way it’s no good, man, they got us, we’re opening our doors—”

  “Radios off!” Young shouted. “Everyone shut your radio off, they’ll track our broadcasts.”

  Cam was willing but Todd was more rational.

  “Sir,” Todd said carefully, “they’ve got us.” He did not obey the order, holding both hands wide now in a shrugging motion. “What difference—”

  Ruth turned on her friend. “If there’s any chance—”

  “Radios off,” Young repeated and Newcombe echoed it, checking their belts. “Radios off. Radios off.”

  Todd was patient, as if speaking to madmen. He was, Cam realized, still trying to protect them. “Even if you bring in another plane there’s no way we’re going to sneak off somewhere to meet it. They can see everything. They can—”

  “The satellites are down,” Young said, and the spike of exaltation that Cam felt was new energy and strength.

  High Ground.

  Six hundred miles away in the heart of the fortress that was Leadville, a man—or maybe two, maybe a woman—had taken action that was almost certain to be traced back to its source. The number of technicians monitoring the spy sats was too small.

  Maybe their co-conspirator was already on the run. Maybe he had already been identified and shot.

  Sometime in the past hour, corrective sequences had been sent to the five KH-11 Keyhole satellites still under Leadville’s control, deliberately misfiring their jets, pushing the sats down into Earth’s atmosphere where they tumbled and burned.

  * * * *

  “Leadville is blind,” Young said, leading them farther south. A clump of skyscrapers rose from that horizon.

  Ruth also seemed to have discovered some reserve of stamina. She kept up the pace but Todd needed prodding. Newcombe, still at the rear, repeatedly pressed the stock of his M16 against Todd’s air tanks with a mute chiming.

  “But they’re not,” Todd argued. “They still have radar. Even if your plane comes in below this side of the mountains all the way from Canada, they have fighters—”

  Young said, “Nobody’s flying in for us.”

  “What?” Ruth slowed abruptly. “Then what are we—”

  Young waved them close to a panel truck before he paused and swung around. His cheek had swollen, and the fine crack through his faceplate seemed to split his right eye into unmatching halves. “There are three hospitals and a med center right in this area of town,” he said. “We can find air, enough to get us to the mountains.”

  “Christ.” The word was out before Cam knew it, an honest reaction but one he wished he’d suppressed.

  “I know it’s a long shot,” Young said.

  “Long shot!” Todd glanced at Cam for support. “Even if our tank fittings match up, even if you figure out how to make the switch without contamination—”

  “We can rig something.”

  “Even if you filled a car with a hundred extra tanks—”

  Young did not use physical intimidation, although it would ha
ve been easy for him to gesture with his pistol or merely to lean too close. He did not even raise his voice. “You want to talk yourselves into giving up? Five of my guys are dead.”

  “It’s just not feasible,” Ruth said, reluctantly, and she also turned to Cam. “How long do you think it would take us to reach elevation from here with the highways jammed?”

  Cam didn’t answer—there was an idea in him—and Todd said, “It’s too far. It would take us days. I don’t know if we could even drive out of the city.”

  “We have an hour,” Young told them. “Two or three hours before we really have to give up.”

  Todd’s hand went to his faceplate again, his nose.

  “Maybe we can take over the plane,” Newcombe said.

  “We gotta try something.” Young studied each of them in turn. “We gotta see what we can do.”

  “I, no—” Todd visibly shuddered. “They’ll know the hospitals are our only option! They’ll be there anyway just to raid for oxygen while they’re down here, medicine, all of—”

  “Bullshit. They’re gonna have their hands full collecting their people and getting the lab equipment on board.”

  “What if they leave us here?”

  “It’s better if we give up,” Ruth said, slowly. “Better than if we get caught. And you were smart about Major Hernandez. They won’t hurt us.”

  “They won’t hurt you,” Young corrected her.

  “The vaccine,” Cam said. “Let me at least try to—”

  Behind them, a high screech of metal echoed up the street like a living thing in flight.

  The paratroopers loped by in two pairs, the second trailing the first at an interval of nearly sixty seconds. What the noise had been Cam could only guess, the shriek of a damaged car door pushed out of the way, some other wreckage. It saved them.

  So did Young, again, motioning for everyone to keep quiet after the first men had gone. The next two were well positioned to catch anyone emerging from hiding, thinking it was safe. Young seemed to expect them and he was right.

  The optometrist’s office was a lousy place to disappear, down on the ground floor with a big window—a broad waiting area that doubled as display space, lined with mirrors and revolving stands of glasses. But the entrance was locked and the film of dust over the front room was undisturbed. They’d found their way inside through an open side door after taking cover behind a Dumpster.