Plague War

29

A wet shock of blood hit Cam’s faceplate as Jennings lurched back from the steering wheel. The snap of the man’s head was abrupt and vicious, and Cam jerked and shouted as gunfire rolled over the street.

Dead, helmet torn, Jennings bounced forward again from his seat and fell across the wheel. The jeep swerved left at thirty-five miles per hour, slowing as his boot slid off the gas but rammed on by the trailer’s weight and inertia.

The shift of momentum was a steepening terror in Cam as his thinking exploded.

Past the Thirty-eighth block, Olson had spotted an olive drab glider hung up in a cluster of trees, its harness open, the paratrooper gone — and Captain Young had shrugged and said to keep going. They knew they were surrounded. They knew they were outnumbered. Counts varied but they agreed that more than forty chutes had swept down from the C-130, gathered mostly in a large batch ahead of them and a smaller group behind.

Young hoped to bluff their way through, but the sniper’s kill shot had been timed with at least one other marksman.

Eyes wide, mind wide, Cam saw Trotter spin off the roof of the bulldozer’s cage ten yards ahead. Farther on, muzzle flashes erupted along the squat brick wall of an apartment complex and from behind the corners of a condominium building, more than a dozen erratic bursts on and off like a firing of synapses.

The ’dozer took the brunt of it. Sparks and yellow paint dust jumped up from the hard iron and Sergeant Olson fell with Trotter. In the driver’s seat Dansfield bucked and shook, shredded as a few rounds chanced between the slats of armor and then pinwheeled back and forth.

Riding shotgun in the jeep, Young shouldered against Jennings’s body to straighten the wheel. Too late. He kept the jeep and trailer from jackknifing — and maybe from turning over as the trailer’s mass continued forward — but bad luck had a red Toyota minivan angled across their path.

They struck the van doing twenty-five or more, their right fender punching the corner of its rear end. Both vehicles rocked and the smaller, heavier jeep butted against the minivan’s side.

No one was wearing safety belts. Jennings and Young couldn’t fit into theirs, unable to sit properly because of their air tanks, and in back Cam and the three scientists were perched together above the bench seat.

Impact threw Cam sideways into Young’s back. Todd, opposite him, began to topple out of the jeep but was hit by the side of the van at the same time that Ruth and D.J. were carried forward over Cam in a tangle of bodies. Someone’s arm mashed his headset against his skull.

Pinned beneath them, against the dashboard, Young squirmed out through the open side of the jeep.

On the radio a man wept — who else had been shot? — and they were all breathing like dogs. Cam dragged himself into the space that Young had cleared, then dropped onto the asphalt. Blunt jigsaw chunks of safety glass rolled like pebbles under his forearms and belly.

The minivan and the jeep had come to rest in a cockeyed T-shape, the trailer bent around to make something like a triangle, and to Cam’s widened perceptions the little import van felt like a huge bulk between himself and the paratroopers.

Then a knot of rifle rounds tore through the dented panel above his head and slammed into the jeep. Tink tak tak.

“Cover cover gimme anything!” That was Young. His faceplate had a stress fracture across his brow and he looked past Cam at the trailer with one eye shut, the skin on that cheekbone and temple rubbed raw. “Newcombe!”

Two minutes ago Cam had considered asking for a pistol. They had extra guns stripped from the Marines, but Young had been off the general frequency, communicating with their pilots and maybe Leadville as well, and the spare gun belts were on the trailer with Newcombe and Iantuano—

Jennings. There was a gun on Jennings’s corpse.

Even as Cam thought it, crabbing onto his knees, Young and someone on the trailer managed a small amount of return fire — the sporadic, heavy bark of Glock 9mm pistols. Young didn’t even bother to aim, his arm thrust under the minivan.

The paratroopers responded and Cam stayed flat as a shower of glass clattered over him, mixed with slower-falling shreds of paint, plastic, and upholstery. But the rifle fire didn’t sound as concentrated as before. Some of the troopers were advancing, he realized, and must have ducked at the pistol shots.

Young was slowing them down but probably not by much.

Cam rose from the asphalt against all instinct, overcoming his own fear-stiffened muscles. Any safety the ground provided was a lie. If Leadville had been negotiating with Young since their first exchange, it was only a ploy. This ambush was Leadville’s true response, and showed a willingness to pick up whatever pieces were left rather than risk recapturing nothing at all — and if Cam and the others were overrun here in the street, they could all expect a bullet in the head.

So close, the troopers would kill them out of self-defense, to prevent them from detonating the explosives Young had threatened to use.

Cam hunched into the side of the jeep and clawed at Jennings. He screamed when a bullet sang off of the jeep beside him, near enough that the vibration went into his chest. Then he ducked back to the ground, dragging Jennings by the neck.

He glimpsed Todd above him, still lying in the rear of the jeep and using his body to shield Ruth and D.J. Todd’s voice was a mantra, a mumble, his headset either damaged or knocked off somewhere inside his suit: “Down, down, stay down!”

Twice now Cam had seen him protecting others.

Beyond the jeep, Newcombe stood on the trailer where he’d been riding in a narrow slot among the computers, pistol out, and the invaluable hardware around him might have been the best protection. Maybe no one was shooting at Newcombe. Sawyer had likely also come through the crash okay, his chair wedged into the rear and facing backward, but Iantuano was missing from his perch. Either the snipers had nailed him in that opening volley or he’d been thrown onto the street.

“We gotta move! Move now, move south, let’s get behind that white building!” Young rallied them with well-trained authority, but spoke as if organizing people scattered over a vast distance instead of a few yards. “Where are the scientists? Newcombe, can you reach—” He stopped.

Cam held a Glock 9mm in one hand, even as he tugged the gun belt away from Jennings.

Young stared at him. Young was reloading, vulnerable.

“Captain? Hey, shit.” Newcombe obviously thought Young was wounded or dead, and assumed command after no more than an instant’s panic. “Shit, uh, we’re running for the white house!”

“They’re still in the jeep,” Cam said, answering Young, and Young was talking again even before Cam had finished.

“Make sure they have the nanotech,” Young told him. “Newcombe, can you reach the extra belts? Grab ’em all. We’re gonna have to hike it out.”

Abandoning the lab equipment was a good sacrifice, and should hold many of the paratroopers here. But how close were they to the freeway? Had they even reached Thirty-fifth Street?

“Science team, listen up!” Young was fiercely methodical. “I want you over the driver side of the jeep, that’s away from me. We’re gonna run south to that white building on the closest side of the street and I need you to bring all of your gear, the laptop, the samples, all of it!”

Cam tried to think through the math. Christ. They were at least seven blocks from the plane, two down and five over.

Young continued. “Iantuano, you still with me?”

“ ’Round back of the trailer, yeah. I think I busted my arm.”

“I need you to carry Sawyer. Can you slide your sixteen down to Newcombe? We go on my mark.”

Seven blocks unless they were cut off.

* * * *

Cam belly-crawled after Young between the trailer and jeep as Todd scrambled down onto the asphalt, then Ruth. Looking from side to side for D.J., Cam saw Iantuano punch Sawyer in the gut three times to stop him from fighting, swinging awkwardly with his left because his other arm was broken.

“Where’s the other one, the other scientist?” Young shouted at Ruth even as D.J. yelled, “Give up! We have to give up!”

He was still in the jeep. Cam might have left him. There was no time. But Ruth and Young both argued with D.J. even though they couldn’t see him, crouching together alongside the vehicle. “Goddammit it’s not that far,” Young said, and Ruth yelled, “We can make it!”

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t have the laser—”

“The software is the most important thing!” Ruth shouted. “The software and the samples! We can make it!”

Iantuano inched toward them, parallel to the trailer, with Sawyer over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Meanwhile the rifle fire came in short, controlled bursts, picking over the minivan. Only Newcombe was shooting back and Cam could sense the Leadville troops shifting closer—

Young turned and fired point-blank into the jeep, five quick rounds. D.J. cried, “No, no, wait!” But every shot went into the front wheel well, destroying the tire and striking the engine. Crippling the jeep would make it harder for their enemy to move the lab gear, which might keep at least some of the paratroopers from chasing them. These shots also sounded like return fire from their position, and solved the problem of

D.J. as effectively as Iantuano had controlled Sawyer. “No, wait,” D.J. pleaded. “I’m stuck! I can’t!”

“Help me grab him.” Young glanced into Cam’s eyes before he rose, and Cam couldn’t leave him up there alone.

Standing over the jeep felt like leaning into the path of a train, expecting a bullet, and Cam tore a ligament in his shoulder as they hauled D.J. out of the backseat and put him on the street with rough adrenaline strength.

“Green green, we are inbound on foot!” Young hollered, and clearly their pilots had been waiting, listening.

“I am holding position. I am holding position.” The Air Force man spoke with cool precision, then added, “Get your ass back. We’re not going anywhere without you.”

* * * *

They were lucky— It was a crazy thought— Cam realized they were lucky their radio channels hadn’t been jammed. Their headsets were basically just walkie-talkies, and Colorado was a long goddamned ways off to affect local communications, but the paratroopers surely had the same equipment as they did.

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 have 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.

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.