Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  The paratroopers barely glanced in, a ripple of silhouettes across the window and then nothing more.

  “The vaccine,” Young said. He looked at Cam but turned to Ruth as he continued. “Is that even possible? I thought you needed a lot more time.”

  All of them sat on the firm carpet, scattered unevenly behind two freestanding counters and a desk. Overhead the walls held posters of beaming young white people, close-ups that might have been more appropriate in a hairstylist’s except for the inhuman sapphire blue of their contact lenses.

  A genuine strangeness walked inside Cam, measured and intent. He was too calm, and the mood had grown as they waited. He felt the shape of it on his numb face and he saw it in Ruth as well—in her steady, solemn gaze.

  She was uncharacteristically mute.

  Todd said, “It’s just a first-gen. We’d be better off running for the goddamn hospitals while they’re out there hunting us down.”

  “No, you were right about that,” Young said. “The nearest hospital is five blocks and they gotta be everywhere now. But it’s good odds we won’t see another sweep through here. They’ve got too much ground to cover.”

  Outside, the F-15s grumbled southward.

  “We’re probably safe to hole up in this place,” Young added, and Ruth stirred at last.

  “It might work,” she said. “If it doesn’t it’s harmless.”

  “If it doesn’t he’ll be infected!” Todd’s glove bumped at the lower half of his faceplate restlessly, obsessively. “How do you even expect to deliver it into his system—is he going to eat the wafer?”

  “It can be breathed in.”

  “He’ll get a lungful of plague at the same time.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said.

  “Then what?” Young asked, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, what about the rest of us?”

  “If it works, he’ll incubate.”

  Young said, “But what does that mean?”

  “We—” She dropped her eyes. “It could be passed from one person to another via body fluids. Blood.”

  “Let me try.” Cam pulled the sample case from his chest pocket and held it out, meaning for her to identify which vacuum wafer contained the prototype.

  “We should draw straws,” she said.

  He pulled it back from her. “No.”

  “No way, Doc,” Young agreed.

  Cam pressed the case against his chest. “It has to be me.”

  “That’s wrong,” Ruth told him. “We’re all in this, we should all—”

  “I’m your best bet. I know better than anybody what an infection feels like.” It would collect first in his oldest and worst wounds, his ear, his hands. “I’ll know if the vaccine is working or not before you’re out of air.”

  She shook her head. “Yes. Okay. I’m sorry.”

  He was glad she said the last. He shrugged for her benefit and said, “I’ve got the least to lose.”

  He had the most to gain. Ultimately, his decision was the same choice he’d made after Hollywood had struggled up to their barren rock peak.

  It was what he wanted to be remembered for. Succeed or fail, this was who he wanted to be.

  His collar locks were loud and the air sighed out of his suit up over his face as he lifted his helmet, suddenly and unbelievably rank in comparison to the atmosphere inside the shop. Musty and stale, the shop was still far sweeter than the baking stink of himself. Ruth had instructed him not to breathe but Cam tasted the change even with his mouth shut, the brush of wind at his nostrils like a promise.

  “Ready?” she asked, and Todd brought the vacuum wafer up to Cam’s lips. Ruth hadn’t wanted to chance the operation herself, having just one hand, and Cam had needed both of his to remove his helmet. “One, two, now,” she said.

  Todd pushed his finger and thumb between Cam’s open teeth and broke the wafer, pinching it, as Cam inhaled sharply. They’d agreed that he might as well swish it around his tongue and actually swallow it too.

  “Okay, hold your breath as long as you can.” Ruth offered him a strip of sturdy white fabric, cut from a jacket exactly like medical doctors wore on TV. Newcombe had found it hanging in back after Ruth suggested that they’d better try anything to minimize Cam’s initial exposure.

  He wrapped the dusty fabric over his nose and mouth with practiced movements, then slipped free from his air pack, feeling soreness and bruises all through his shoulders and back, and along his hips and stomach where the waist belt had sawed against him. He would have liked to lose the suit completely. His body itched and hurt in a hundred places, and the smell was like wearing a toilet. Unfortunately he was dressed only in a T-shirt, to reduce chafing from his pack, along with the damp adult diaper and socks and boots, and there didn’t seem to be any more clothing available in the shop.

  They were long past modesty but he couldn’t afford to reveal his many abrasions to the machine plague, though it was likely that some of the archos nano had already wafted inside his suit.

  They arranged another bundle of fabric around his collar, a bunchy scarf. Young took Cam’s pack, triple-checked that the spigots were off and then studied its gauge. He inspected Todd and Ruth before trading exams with Newcombe.

  Then there was nothing else to do.

  “Forty-six minutes,” Young said. After that, Todd would be out of air and Ruth would be well into the red.

  Cam pushed his broken teeth out of his gums, mashing his glove-thick finger against his mask. The eyetooth peeled free easily but he winced at the pain that the molar caused as one of its roots clung to him. His stomach reacted wildly to the warm new trickles of blood he swallowed, and he burped and burped again. Absurd.

  Young turned on his radio and switched repetitively through the few channels, trying to intercept enemy communications, but there was only an open broadcast meant for them: surrender. He clicked off but was soon listening again, his map spread beside him, obviously planning the quickest route back to the planes and the Leadville troops.

  Newcombe prowled the shop, searching through drawers and cabinets for anything useful. The receptionist’s desk held a can of Pepsi and two cheese-and-cracker packets. In back he found a tray of snorkeling goggles with plastic insets that could be replaced with prescription lenses, and brought one to Cam.

  Ruth and Todd sat on either side of him protectively, resting, trying to make their air last. There was so much to say but at the same time nothing at all.

  None of them wanted to act like last words were necessary.

  Inside Cam’s bloodstream and throughout his body now, either archos was beginning to multiply uninhibited, devouring his tissues to form more and ever more of itself—or the vaccine nano was disassembling the invaders and remaking this material into more defenders, a war of tides.

  At first archos would replicate freely even if the vaccine prototype worked, just by sheer force of numbers, yet without this machine cancer the vaccine would have nothing upon which to grow itself.

  He thought of Sawyer and the long year behind them. He thought too much.

  For the vaccine to fail totally would not be the worst scenario, Cam knew. If it was somewhat effective, slowing the spread of the plague but eventually, inevitably allowing lethal damage, they might wait and hope and understand too late that he’d committed himself to a lost battle...

  “Okay,” Ruth said.

  “What?” Cam had forgotten them, absorbed with the pace of his own heart and the rhythm of his breathing. Could it really have been most of an hour?

  She stood up. “Okay, let’s get ready. We’re going to have to do this in the next five or ten minutes.”

  “What do you need?” Young asked.

  “Your knife. Some kind of container.”

  “It hasn’t been long enough,” Todd said, his hand at his faceplate again. “You can’t—”

  “I won’t just sit here.”

  Cam intervened. “I think it’s working.”

  Todd’s voice became a shout. �
�It hasn’t been long enough, there’s no way you could know!”

  “He’s right,” Ruth admitted, but she smiled at Cam, a tired little slant. As a gesture it was identical to the shrug that he had given her earlier, a show of resolve. “We’re doing it anyway,” she said, accepting a blade from Newcombe.

  “Leadville says they have decon tents,” Young said, “to take care of casualties. And we can move pretty fast if we have to once we’re out of these suits.”

  Todd was very quiet now. “Do you know what archos does when it burns out inside you? The nanos don’t just shut off.”

  “I’ll go first,” Ruth said.

  “The more there are in your tissues, the longer we stay here—” Todd couldn’t seem to bring himself to be explicit. “It’s not too late. We should go now. We can be partway there before our tanks run out!”

  Ruth knelt in front of Cam as Newcombe stepped to her shoulder, holding a dirty old paper Burger King cup taken from the trash.

  Cam extended his left arm. She carved through his sleeve and removed his glove. The air was cool on his palm. He flexed involuntarily. She looked up into his eyes and he nodded. Her mouth was set again with that tight, brave smile, and he wondered what she saw in his face.

  She sliced deep into the pad of his index finger, then slit his middle and ring fingers as well. The pain wasn’t bad. He had long since sustained too much nerve damage.

  Ruth popped her collar locks and removed her helmet, her curly hair tangled and limp with sweat. She closed her eyes briefly and lifted her face, either reveling in the feel of fresh air or praying or both.

  Cam’s blood pattered into the paper cup, teeming with the archos plague and also—maybe—a host of vaccine nanos.

  They drank from him.

  30

  The stillness was incomplete. The hush that embraced the city was disturbed by a spring breeze and the banging, here and there, of untrimmed tree branches against buildings; the low creak of structures still losing the night’s cold; the mindless buzz and clack of flies and ants and beetles.

  The early sun drew shadows on the street, the great square shapes of high-rises and odd little talons cast by finger bones and ribs.

  A plastic grocery bag strayed eastward, given flight by an updraft yet quickly sagging down again.

  Ruth Goldman stood level with the crinkled white bag on a second-story office balcony, impulsively cheering its surge into the morning sky. “Hey—” But the bag descended and snared on a rooftop air-conditioning unit. She looked away, trying to hold on to the elation that its random, dancing movements had evoked in her. Irrational, yes, to have such a strong reaction to a piece of garbage, but merely by disturbing this wasteland it had become a cousin to her.

  Her hope was fragile and yet savage at the same time.

  “We’re ready,” Cam said behind her, through the door she’d left open. Ruth nodded, hesitating as she tried to settle her emotions, and Cam stepped outside. She thought he would say something more but instead he only joined her at the railing, gazing out over the wide street.

  She wished she could see his face. She would’ve liked to share a smile. They were a matching set, both with their left arms in a sling—but they were also identically hooded and masked and goggled and gloved.

  The five of them had been exposed to the plague for thirty-three hours now and it was an advantage that Leadville could not match, the ability to wait.

  Captain Young thought Leadville was still a long way from maxing out on containment suits and oxygen and jet fuel, but the price of the hunt had grown too steep and the last planes had flown out yesterday evening.

  They had won. The vaccine nano worked. Ruth had no doubt that it could be improved upon, yet their prototype functioned at a level that exceeded the minimum requirement. Freedman and Sawyer’s fabrication gear might have been more finely calibrated than she’d guessed, or maybe it was only that for once the cards had fallen in their favor, allowing them to build the nano correctly the first time.

  Occasionally they did feel some pain, especially after eating. Every bite of canned peaches or soup concentrate carried archos into their systems. So far, however, no one had suffered worse than brief internal discomforts or a faint itching beneath the skin. If they chanced upon a particularly thick drift of the plague, Ruth suspected they would experience real damage before their antibodies responded, but the fact remained that they were able to move freely through an environment in which their enemy was limited.

  They had won. They could wait.

  Leadville was going to be a constant problem, Young warned. He expected surveillance planes, and Leadville still controlled a thermal-imaging satellite that would pass above this area twice each afternoon—and out in the open they would be comparatively easy to spot, given the total lack of any other animals or industrial heat sources.

  But they could wait. They could hide. And their odds would improve as each day passed, as they hiked farther from Sacramento and the search area expanded.

  Across the street, the bag blew free of the air unit and tumbled over the roof of the auto parts store. Childishly pleased, Ruth hummed to herself. “Mm.” At the building’s edge the bag dropped, however, sinking toward a delivery entrance where three skeletons huddled against a chain-link fence.

  Weird veins of black bristled along the concrete there, roping an anklebone, sweeping up the wall and disappearing into the edges of the delivery door. Ants. The bugs were crazy for something inside the store, some chemical or rubber.

  Late yesterday, scavenging for food and clothing, they’d repeatedly avoided ant swarms and Newcombe had opened the door of an apartment to a brown mass of termites. Flies harassed them until the day began to cool, and as night fell Cam had suggested that this second-story office would be a safe place to camp. The building was brick and there were stairwells on either end if it became necessary to run.

  Insects would be another constant threat, as would the hazards of the wreckage-strewn roads, mudslides, weather.

  They had won but they still had so far to go.

  The distance between Ruth and her companions also seemed much greater than was right. She glanced sideways, conscious again of that desire to share. Strange, to be strangers. They were blood kin, and she would be a long time forgetting the warm, coppery taste of him—and yet they had been too busy foraging and catnapping and keeping on the move to talk about anything more than their immediate plans.

  That would change. There would be time to know each other better as they traveled, but it felt awkward and wrong that they could be at all shy with each other now.

  “I,” she said, and when Cam turned she ducked her head and gestured away from herself. “Young really wants to split up?”

  Inside the office space, the other men were on their feet, both Young and Newcombe wearing day packs. Fortunately there wasn’t much to carry, the nanotech samples, weapons, two radios, batteries, small items like matches and can openers. They would find food as they went and sleep among the dead.

  Cam said, “No one else likes it either.” He shrugged. “It just makes too much sense.”

  “Yeah.”

  If some of them were spotted, the others could carry on, assuming that Leadville sent troops to capture them instead of dusting the entire valley floor with the snowflake nano. Their vaccine was protection against only the archos plague. But Leadville wouldn’t indiscriminately dust a wide area for the same reason that their enemy hadn’t hit Sacramento after evacuating all forces—it would be stupid to kill Ruth and the others without knowing exactly where to find their bodies, to recover the phenomenal machines inside them.

  I’m glad I don’t have to say good-bye to you, she thought.

  The three–two division had been obvious. Ruth and Todd needed to separate, to improve the chances that a nanotech expert would escape. Young and Newcombe would also split up, each of them acting as a bodyguard, and because both Cam and Ruth were handicapped—his hand, her arm—it
made sense to put them together in the larger half so they could help each other.

  The soldiers’ training and Cam’s long experience with this world gave them an edge, a good edge, and Ruth didn’t think she was crazy to feel optimistic.

  It would literally be an uphill battle, trudging on foot from here to elevation and then onwards from peak to peak, carrying immunity to the scattered survivors. Lord knew some of those people would also be a danger, too hungry or too full of hurt to understand why or how they had come. Others would help them, though, perhaps a majority, dispersing in all directions, reclaiming the low ground between the coast and the Continental Divide and someday beyond...

  And if they succeeded, if they discovered peace again, who could say what might come of the archos technology and everything else they’d learned?

  Before too long she might make Cam whole again, and heal the burns and internal injuries of all survivors. She might find the immortality that Freedman had chased. Ruth turned again and smiled, even though he couldn’t see the lower part of her face. She knew the expression would affect her eyes and her voice. “I guess this is the easy part.”

  “Walk in the park,” Cam said. “Absolutely.”

  They spread north along the Sierras first.

  Acknowledgments

  Most of all I want to thank my best friend, Diana. (She was also kind enough to marry me a few years ago.) Without her patience and support, this book would not exist.

  I’d also like to thank my father, Gus Carlson, Ph.D., engineer, former department head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and all-around smart guy. He’s been an excellent sounding board in my research and brainstorming, not just with the nanotech featured in Plague Year but for a good deal of the concepts in my other stories as well.

  Kudos also to my bright and tireless editor, Anne Sowards, and to Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Allison, and everyone else who’s been so great at Penguin USA. Also a tip of the hat to my agent, Donald Maass, and to Cameron and Stephen in the office there.