Plague War

16

Leadville had become a fortress. The barricade across its northern border choked the highway into what must have been the world’s only traffic jam.

Ruth and Ulinov were hustled into the ambulance after Gus, and their siren cleared a lane through the emergency and military vehicles for a mile and a half — not far beyond the spot where the Endeavour’s tires first hit ground. But at the knoll that James had dubbed the front row, other sirens interceded and blocked their way, three civilian police cars and two military police jeeps. Another ambulance came up on their tail while they waited and Ruth assumed that it held Doc Deb and Wallace.

Gus blabbered, “Do they know who we got in here? Tell ’em who we got here, go, go, let’s go.”

No one else said anything, except for the EMT working a protective brace around the sleeve of Ruth’s suit. “Lie down, you’re very pale,” the woman said, but Ruth couldn’t look away from the windshield. The ambulance driver had shut off his siren and made no move to force his way into the stream of olive drab trucks and black Suburbans bumping down onto the highway. Both of the MP jeeps had long machine guns mounted in back, gunners ready, and all of the cops had weapons in hand.

Ruth realized several things about the “front row” that James hadn’t mentioned on the radio. This knoll was distanced from the main body of the mountain by a shallow ravine filled with fencing and soldiers. Presumably the blockade went all the way around. Also, this side of the knoll paralleled the bigger slope, so that no one up there would have a good view of the people down here — or a good shot. It wasn’t so much the front row as it was elite seating, separate and protected.

They had expected trouble.

A trace of that wild panic hammered through her blood again but was muted by shock and utter exhaustion. She’d burned out. There wasn’t anything left. Ruth sat with her snapped arm in her lap, listlessly roasting inside her suit. The air was so fresh, even in the close quarters of the ambulance, that she was aware of her own moist heat rising from her round metal collar. In another time and place, the stink would have been humiliating.

Less than a minute passed before they were moving again. Another army jeep skidded up behind the cops and MPs blocking the way, and a man like a lean wire flung himself from the passenger seat. He wore army green but a cap instead of a helmet, and was unarmed except for a pistol on his hip. None of the military police saluted him, yet the debate only lasted ten or twelve words. The MPs pulled one of their jeeps off the road.

“Oh yeah, wow, I like that guy,” Gus said.

The lean man waved at their ambulance driver, then turned and hustled to his jeep. His driver weaved aggressively toward two of the vehicles still coming down from the hill, cutting them off, and the lean man popped up in the passenger seat with one hand jutting forward to deflect a military truck.

They didn’t get far. The road bent around the knoll and then dropped into a riverbed, sheer hills closing in on both sides. The dozens of vehicles slowed and backed up across what amounted to three lanes, all pointed southeast, using the shoulder and nosing out onto any level patch. Ruth wanted to laugh — it was goofy, feeling nostalgia for a jam of red taillights — but again she experienced only a tick of emotion beneath her weariness. Hard gravity had flattened her butt and compacted her innards, and drew open an aching space between the ends of the broken bones in her forearm.

“What a mess,” Gus said.

The lean man stood on his seat again. Ruth waited dully for him to go ballistic, screaming the other vehicles off the road into the reed marsh and lazy water. Instead, he looked back at their ambulance and lifted both hands in a shrug. He was Hispanic, late forties, trim and hard with a formfitting uniform to show it. He had a dark bar of a mustache but no beard.

He looked left and right, contemplating the hills overhead, then ducked over and grabbed a walkie-talkie. Ruth bent forward to look herself. She saw hundreds of people trudging down the slope on their left, a solid mass in the bright sun, and there were dozens more gathered along the bank upriver.

She felt more than a faint spark then. Not hearing the rifle shot until after the bullet hit the medic, that would stay with her as long as she lived. There would always be a small absence of sound chasing after her.

“Okay, now what?” Gus said, jarring Ruth to get a better view himself. “What a mess. Who planned—”

“Gus.” Ulinov had his eyes closed.

“Why is there shooting?” Ruth asked the driver, blurting her fear like a child, but it was the female EMT who answered.

“A lot of people lost everything.” She was Ruth’s age, and no better washed than any of them. Grease had wicked her long brown bangs into points. “They want to get even.”

The ambulance inched forward. Ruth turned this statement over in her mind just as ponderously.

She said, “What?”

“Some people just want to get even.”

“I didn’t build the locust! I’m trying to stop it.”

“Might’ve been rebels,” the driver put in, uselessly revving his engine. He was only a kid, his facial growth spotty except for a hanging tuft on his chin.

Ulinov spoke one word again. “Rebels.”

“Got us boxed in fucking good right now, waste the whole government if they wanted.” The kid revved and revved, knuckles flexing on his steering wheel.

Somewhere there were helicopters thumping.

“I’m trying to stop it,” Ruth repeated.

“I just meant—” The EMT shut up, like the gray-bearded medic had done when he took the bullet.

Thunder swept toward them from downriver, closing fast, sheets of noise that intensified into a single bass vibration. The ambulance shook. So did Ruth’s heart. Rebels. The setup had been perfect. Start a panic, pack the leaders into a kill zone— Gus shouted and Ulinov reached for the rear doors as if to jump out—

The gunships went overhead, upriver, at least two of them, then swooped around and thudded back again. They were covering the slow wedge of trucks and Suburbans.

It was a disproportionate response to a lone rifleman, even to protect the president if he’d come. The fuel cost alone would be awesome. The response was also improbably quick. They must have readied the chopper crews before Endeavour even grazed the atmosphere and Ruth wished fleetingly, honestly, that she was back in her lonely little cell aboard the ISS.

This time she did laugh, one short huff.

Betrayal, disillusionment, she had no name for her tired anger. She’d long suspected that the situation down here wasn’t as stable as she’d been told, carefully worrying over the few reports of raiders and food riots, but if James had ever hinted at civil war, she’d missed his clues. What else didn’t she know?

They jockeyed around the next bend and the reason for the jam was obvious. Ruth knew the barricade existed, from orbital photographs, but her eye had skipped over it easily. She had wondered at its size, yet accepted that Leadville’s security needs were extraordinary. The harsh fact was that there wasn’t enough food or shelter for everyone who’d reached elevation, and it was mandatory to protect the labs and the nanotech experts who were the one hope of reversing the situation.

She had rarely considered what it would be like on the outside. She didn’t have to. She was one of the chosen. She always had been. Now she stared at the wall, following the helicopters with her ears, as the ambulance nudged forward a few yards at a time.

It would be such a waste for her to be killed out here.

The up-and-down terrain slumped into a saddle between the short hill on their right and, on their left, a more gradual rise that eventually thrust up into Prospect Mountain, one of the rounded white peaks east of Leadville. In this rare low spot, their highway merged with another that had come out of the northeast along the river. It was a textbook defensive position. Cars had been stacked three deep and three high across the gully, civilian cars, many stripped of their tires and seats and possibly their engines and wiring as well.

This colorful pile of steel was beyond anything required to divert the refugee masses up the eastern slope, of course. It would withstand artillery, though it didn’t look as if an assault of any kind had ever come. No wonder. A tank had pulled forward from the one gap left in the wall, where it probably functioned as the gate, its stout barrel raised cross-river in support of the helicopters.

Twenty soldiers stood at the entrance and stopped each vehicle, if only briefly. Why? Was there a password? She supposed there must be. How else could you keep out infiltrators who looked like you and talked like you?

Impeded by the tank, traffic jostled for position. Directly ahead of Ruth, a black Suburban butted against the lean man’s jeep and he beat on its tinted driver-door window with his walkie-talkie. Horns bawled, helpless, stupid, but she still heard some of his confident voice.

The soldiers at the gate waved the lean man through without hesitation, before his driver had stopped — and when he gestured they let both ambulances pass as well.

* * * *

Leadville was the stuff of postcards and paintings, even disregarding the majesty of its mountain cradle. The pride taken by its tourist board had been deserved.

The main body of town covered slightly more than one square mile on a shallow, concave plain just west of a sweeping mess of upheavals and canyons with names like Yankee Hill and Stray Horse Gulch. Eastward, the mayhem of land rose onward until it finally broke at 14,000 feet and plunged away toward Kansas.

There had never been many trees at this elevation— absolutely none, now, all burned for fuel during the first winter — and Leadville was a gathering of red brick. The white spire of a church jabbed heavenward. Anchoring main street were two heritage museums, the courthouse, and a well-preserved opera theater built in 1870, and the low buildings and wide boulevard would always have the shape of a frontier town. It didn’t matter that these structures, and the shops and breakfast cafes, had been turned into command centers for civil, federal, and military staffs. It didn’t matter that sandbagged firing positions cluttered the sidewalks.

This place, already so laden in history, would survive to repopulate the continent and become America again. Ruth swore to herself. Her days, her nights, her life, anything. She would make it happen. These people had fought too hard.

Gus touched her leg and she leaned away, squeezing both hands into fists despite the horrible grating in her arm.

“Look,” he said. “Look at that.”

But she had already seen. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from the streetlights and storefronts, and she noticed a podium on the courthouse steps as they sped past. A victory parade. A celebration in the face of starvation and madness.

“We made it,” Gus said.

Ruth nodded but couldn’t talk, too busy, too keyed up, all senses locked on absorbing her surroundings.

She had never cried in front of them.

* * * *

The jeep led their little convoy around the back of a modern hotel, which seemed strange, but she saw another ambulance parked in the lot already. She stared at the three-story building. Some new reflex in her was desperate to get inside again. Inside meant clean, calm, alone. Inside meant safe.

“My name is Major Hernandez,” the lean man told them, as medical staff bustled around the open doors of the two ambulances. “We’re going to get you out of those suits and have the doctors look you over.”

It was a chaotic moment for an introduction but he made it work, looking for Ruth’s eyes as she sat deep inside the ambulance, then trading a curt nod with Ulinov. Ruth had the impression that he made everything work, but he wasn’t her idea of an officer. He wore no decorations or pins. His only insignia was a single nonreflective black oak cluster on one side of his collar — and she recalled how the MPs had acted, making way but not saluting. Of course. It would be stupid to identify command in a war zone with snipers in the hills.

Hernandez was also shorter than she’d realized, no bigger than Ruth, yet stood undisturbed by the rush of white uniforms. The medical staff had wheelchairs, a gurney, and two men held IV bags overhead, shouting, but they went around him exactly as the traffic jam had dodged around the tank.

The gurney and IV bags, probably blood plasma, went to the other ambulance — for Derek Mills or for the wounded medic?

Ruth opened her mouth but Major Hernandez continued, his tone practiced and reassuring. “You’ll probably see some old friends inside. We have NASA’s best physicians waiting.”

Ulinov was lifted down into a wheelchair as Gus crawled out on his own. Ruth tried to follow, with help from the EMT inside the ambulance, and she fell against the woman. Raging adrenaline had carried her up and down the Endeavour’s interdeck ladder, but at a real price. Her body had no more strength left than a bag of jelly rammed full of sticks and stones wherever it hurt.

Then the gurney rolled past again in a knot of bodies, bearing an orange pressure suit. Mills had made it!

Deborah stood at the rear of the other ambulance, resisting the nurse who was trying to ease her into a wheelchair beside Ulinov. “Let me go with him—” Deb had her smooth jaw tipped up in that haughty, aggressive way.

“Easy.” Hernandez pushed an open palm at her. “We have the best teams right inside. Let us take care of you too.”

Ruth grimaced. Her own heart was slamming, badly overtaxed by Earth’s gravity, and her system hadn’t been ruptured. The injuries Mills had suffered must be twenty times more dangerous because of that strain.

She was grateful to be set in a wheelchair herself.

“There are some people who need to see you,” Hernandez said, and Ruth looked up and was confused to find him addressing Ulinov. “I’ll hold them off awhile if you like, Commander.”

Ulinov shook his head. “You have the shuttle secure?”

Hernandez turned smoothly to Ruth, as if the question had been hers. “Yes. Your equipment is all safe, Dr. Goldman. We’ve pulled everything out.”

He made another spare gesture and they were wheeled toward the glass entrance. Ruth watched Ulinov’s face, wondering at his exchange with Hernandez. Why was it important for them to talk to him?

Too much else was happening. “Is Derek going to be all right?” she asked. She didn’t want anyone to think her only concern had been for her gear.

Hernandez paced alongside her without answering, and Ruth realized that he might not know the name. She glanced up again to clarify. His frown was genuine, affecting his dark, direct eyes. “I’m afraid your pilot is dead,” he told them.

Ruth shook her head. “But I saw—”

Deb, close behind, cut her off in a clipped tone that Ruth took to be accusing. As if she could have known. “Bill has puncture wounds over his left hip, arm and shoulder, blunt trauma to the abdomen and thigh. He’s hemorrhaging.”

And yet Bill Wallace had stayed at his console to complete the emergency power-off.

Ruth moved her head again, unsure what she was denying, if anything. She would need to rediscover that kind of courage and dedication in herself.