Plague War

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.