Plague War

18

Six days later they were within two miles of the air‚eld and Ruth split away from Cam as he went to ground in a cluster of red desert rocks. Neither of them spoke. They simply acted. He picked his way into the small maze of boulders and Ruth hunkered down a few yards to his †ank, watching their back-trail as Newcombe trudged past and then took his own position on Cam’s other side.

The triangle was their default and their strength. It was as close to a circle as the three of them could manage, turning eyes in every direction.

The path behind them was hazy with orange dust and the breeze had been erratic today, calming early in the morning. It might be hours before the ‚ne, dry grit settled down again, but they couldn’t afford to wait for the weather to change. Instead, they watched for other dust trails.

No one, Ruth thought. There may never be anyone out here again.

To the west, the Sierras were a staggered wall of blue shadows and dusky forest. That color lightened and broke apart as it spilled down into the arid foothills. Their guess was that most survivors would move north or south along the edges of that uneven line, and if Russian troops had come in pursuit, they’d obeyed the same border.

Ruth, Cam, and Newcombe were miles beyond any hint of green. The plague had been catastrophic in this place. Even the weeds and hardy sagebrush were dead. All that stood were a few dry stubs of windswept roots. Several times they’d seen the desiccated remains of grass and wild†owers laid on the ground like stains, brittle and black. In the heat, the insects had been destroyed, which in turn condemned the reptiles and the vegetation. Lacking any balance whatsoever, the biosphere tipped. The earth baked into powder and superheated the air.

It drew moisture from every seam in their armor. Ruth was stripped down to T-shirt and undies inside the grimy shell of her jacket and pants, and still she broiled.

Drinking water had become life-and-death. Every day they needed more than they could carry. Fortunately they’d also returned to civilization, passing through the outskirts of little towns with names like Chilcoot and Hallelujah Junction. Highway 395 paralleled their hike north and was spotted with stalled cars and Army trucks. They scavenged new clothing and boots. They also found bottles and cans easily enough, although many had swelled or burst in the sun.

The highway was no protection from the dust. Red dirt and sand licked across the asphalt. It piled against cars and guardrails, forming dunes and bars. There were soft pits where culverts had been and other hazards like fences and downed wires. Once she’d cut her ankle on a ‚re hydrant concealed in the sand, so they usually went cross-country.

They had yet to see another dust cloud. Most days had been windy, which erased their trail but would also confuse the dust kicked up by anyone else. They worried constantly about planes and satellite coverage. Were the †ags of dust running up from their feet noticeable from above? There was always movement around them. Huge whirlwinds walked in the desert and vanished and then leapt up again, especially to the east. Their hope was that they only looked like another dust devil.

“Sst,” Cam whispered. Newcombe repeated the all clear and then Ruth, too. They drew together in a band of shade and Ruth blessed the wind-blasted rock for its size, glancing up along its pitted surface as she set her good hand against her pants pocket and the hard, round shape inside it. She still had the etched stone she’d taken from the ‚rst mountaintop. More and more she was treating inanimate objects with respect, making friends or enemies of everything that touched her.

Part of her knew it was stupid. But she’d grown superstitious. There was no question that some things liked to bite. She would be a long time forgetting the rigid edges of the ‚re hydrant against her pantleg, so didn’t it make sense to feel obliged to benign objects like her little stone and the much larger shape of the desert rock? The idea was as close to faith as she’d ever been, a heightened sense of connection with everything around her.

Maybe there really was a God within the earth and the sky. He would exist immaterial of whether religions were right or wrong. People tended to believe in what they wanted the world to be instead of looking to see what it was, inventing tribal power structures, skewing observable facts to make themselves important. Before the plague, in fact, the most successful religions had existed as shadow governments, transcending nations and continents. What fathers believed, they taught their sons, and they were encouraged to have as many sons as possible. Who honestly thought that the Catholic edict against birth control was based on the lessons of Christ? Or that the enforced ignorance of women in the Muslim world was holy in any way? Large families were the quickest way to expand the faithful— and yet none of these human blunders meant there wasn’t some kernel of truth to the idea of a greater being.

Hundreds of forms of worship had been born throughout history, and new religions had surely begun since the plague. Why? Despite the suspicion and greed of the monkey still inside them, people could be smart and honest and brave. Had the best of them truly perceived some link to the divine? Ruth was beginning to think yes, although her sense of it was doubtful and faint.

Earth was a very late planet in the life span of this galaxy, †ung deep into its spiral arms. If there was a God, maybe he’d used the farthest, most forgotten worlds of his creation for experiments, knowing that most of them would be half-perfect mistakes. What could He hope to learn? The limits of their imagination and strength?

Her little stone, etched with crosses, had become more than a reminder. It was a talisman. It had power. She could sense it.

The stone protected her.

“What do you think?” Cam asked.

Newcombe was peering north through his binoculars. Ruth turned and squinted into the desert herself. The town of Doyle was a squat collection of buildings like boxes and square signs elevated on long metal poles. Mobil. Carl’s Jr. Beyond it, brown hills and ridges rolled upward into the dazzling light.

Newcombe shrugged and traded Ruth the binoculars for a plastic bottle of mineral water. She swung her gaze away from town to the few structures of the air‚eld, feeling both wary and hopeful. She couldn’t deny that she was also pleased. The men were beginning to trust her as much as they relied on each other, and she’d earned it.

Her transformation was complete. Ruth had always been tough but now she was a warrior in every aspect, lean and hard and too sensitive all at the same time. To say that she was twitchy would not be incorrect. And yet the twitch was a cool, distant feeling, insulated by experience.

She let her eyes drift over the air‚eld’s fences and high buildings. “Looks good,” she said.

Still they waited, drinking more. Newcombe passed around some candy for quick energy and dug out the radio, too. He didn’t speak. He only clicked at his send button a few times, transmitting three short ticks of squelch. It meant I’m here but there was no reply, only empty white noise.

They’d established direct contact with the rebel forces twice more, once for nearly a full minute with a ‚ghter that jettisoned an automated relay. Both times Newcombe had talked nonstop, accepting the chance of being triangulated or overheard, using as much slang as possible in case the enemy was recording him. He had never been explicit, though, and the pilots had also hedged their language. No one ever came right out and said the Doyle air‚eld or June 11 ^th, before noon.

“Okay,” Newcombe said. “You know your marks.”

Cam nodded. “Ten minutes.”

“Thirty,” Ruth said.

Newcombe touched her shoulder and then Cam’s before he moved out, intending to reconnoiter wide around the air‚eld. They were badly hamstrung by the short range of their equipment, and the relay had vanished in the dust. They just didn’t know what to expect. U.S. soldiers couldn’t wait below the barrier, unless a pilot had landed in a containment suit with a stack of air tanks. That seemed unlikely. They’d had the air‚eld in sight for a day and a half now with no sign of activity, but there were any number of ways the Russians could stop them.

Because they had the vaccine, the enemy might have left men at every airport within a hundred miles. Or they could have simply dropped motion detectors or antipersonnel mines. An effort that widespread would have used a lot of fuel and gear, of course. It was a good bet that the invaders hadn’t done it. The stakes weren’t quite so high for them.

The same couldn’t be said for the United States, because the

U.S. had yet to gain possession of the vaccine. The two ‚ghters they’d spoken with weren’t the only ones Newcombe identi‚ed as their own. Four days ago, a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets had slashed into the mountains. Yesterday, a lone bomber came limping out of the southwest before two MiGs overtook the wounded aircraft and gunned it down.

Their side was trying to cover them and misdirect the enemy. They’d been surprised to ‚nd an ongoing exchange between a weak transmission from a man who said he was Newcombe and a stronger signal urging him toward a pickup in Carson City. The weaker transmissions were still more powerful than their own, and so more easily overheard, and Carson City lay sixty miles away from Doyle in the direction they would have gone if they’d chosen to head south instead of north. It was a neat trick, and Ruth appreciated the help — but meanwhile other people were sacri‚cing their lives.

Larger con†icts were taking place in Yosemite and farther south. The Russians had been airlifting the rest of their people into California, which was good and bad. It meant the enemy was preoccupied with shielding their planes from American and Canadian interceptors, but they were also growing stronger and better established.

The U.S. was crippled in meeting the enemy. A large part of the nation’s air force had disappeared with Leadville — and for hundreds of miles, the surviving planes were only so much aluminum, plastic, and rubber. The EMP had burned out electronics even below the barrier, where U.S. forces might have scavenged new parts and computers.

Estimates on the radio said the Russians had already landed tens of thousands of troops and civilians. More were on the way. In fact, their numbers were surging. There were more and more planes every day, because the Russians had carried the vaccine overseas. The Russians had freed every available pilot and engineer to scavenge below the barrier, lifting aircraft out of the Middle East and their homeland.

Ruth was certain her tiny group couldn’t stay ahead of the invaders much longer. The Russians would spread out if only to improve their defenses and food stocks. They would ‚nd her.

She still kept her grenade with the data index and slept with both under her head.

She also worried about her arm and whether it was healing correctly. How would they know when to cut off the worn, stinking cast? The men could fashion a splint easily enough, but their opinions differed on when she would be ready to lose the ‚berglass sheath. She was honest. She explained that the doctors in Leadville had been concerned about her bone density and said the break might be a long time knitting together. It still hurt, which couldn’t be a good sign.

“How’s he doing?” Ruth whispered. Cam didn’t answer. Her job was to continue to guard behind them, but it took all of her self-discipline not to turn and watch Newcombe. That was Cam’s responsibility, studying the area between them and the air‚eld in case Newcombe †ushed any threat. The ground was deceptive. The desert blended into a single red expanse, but the †ats weren’t †at, as they’d learned too well. The land rolled with hidden pockets and gullies and rock.

Ruth said, “Hey, are you listening?”

“He’s ‚ne.”

The sun †ashed across her goggles as she leaned too far from the boulder, glancing sideways, but Cam didn’t look at her. Empty static on the radio. Warm sweat down her ribs.

You’re angry with me, she thought.

Sleeping side by side now carried an electric charge, and more than once she’d been restless despite her exhaustion. Their situation was still the all-time worst for romance, caked in dirt, strung out on adrenaline, in danger of bugs and enemy troops. The friction between the two of them was maddening.

They both found excuses to get away from Newcombe. Scavenging for food was a good one, or calling a short rest as Newcombe scouted ahead. There had been more kissing and careful hands. Ruth enjoyed pressing her body against Cam’s despite all their bulky gear. At night she’d considered more. They could touch each other, at least. Was it worth risking the machine plague? No. But she knew their clothes only gave them the slightest protection. She thought about it incessantly. If I push down my pants and he takes off his glove…Two nights ago, when Cam was asleep, she’d rubbed her ‚ngers in her crotch to no satisfaction, her blunt glove against her jeans.

“Remember our signal,” Cam said, handing her the binoculars.

“Be safe,” she answered.

He didn’t seem to want more. He dropped his pack beside Newcombe’s and quickly loped away, circling out to the left to form a pincher with the other man.

Ruth trapped her peppermint against the back of her teeth and set her good hand against the inside of her hip, centering herself, touching her frayed pants and the round stone in her pocket. She should have jumped him. That was what she would have done in her old life, take the opportunity, have some fun. They could both be dead in minutes.

Cam faded into the terrain, leaving only dust. The horizon shimmered in the heat. Ruth kept her head on a swivel, trying to cover a full three hundred and sixty degrees now that she was the last one in hiding, and yet she caught herself looking after Cam more often than not. She smiled grimly.

You’re not in love with him, she thought.

* * * *

The sky shook before her thirty minutes were up. Jet ‚ghters lanced out of the northeast in three arrowheads, barely off the ground. One group was different than the other two. She’d come to recognize the twin vertical tails of F-35s, but the third group consisted of a sharp-nosed model she’d never seen before, with lean, swept wings. It didn’t matter. Ruth felt her heart leap with elation — and a new concern.

The planes weren’t slowing. They ripped past and cut into the Sierras, transmitting in bursts: “Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. George, respond. This is Flicker Six.”

Ruth gawked at the thundering sky. She thought wildly of leaping onto a rock and screaming for Cam and Newcombe, maybe ‚ring her pistol, but there was still no guarantee that the three of them were alone out here. She couldn’t chance giving them away. The decision was hers, and the simple code matched what Newcombe had told her.

“This is Goldman, con‚rm, con‚rm,” Ruth told the radio. She bent to take the men’s packs with her own. Then the desert shook again. The mountains behind her rattled with sound and motion, enveloped in torn cyclones of dark lines and ‚re — jets and missiles.

Somehow the same voice acknowledged her, even though the ‚ghters were engaged. “Roger, George, your retrieval is in ‚fteen. Repeat, your retrieval is in ‚fteen.” The rebels had come in force. There was no way to hide a plane over the basins of Nevada, so they were using themselves as a battering ram, clearing space between the enemy and the Doyle runways.

Ruth hiked with her pistol out and the radio hissing softly beneath the roar of the jets and a distant explosion — a smoke trail down into the mountainside. Somehow she turned her back on the spectacle and kept moving.

There was a ri†eman in the desert. Oh please, no, she prayed even as she freed her gun hand.

It was Newcombe. “What are you doing!” he shouted, glancing away from her to the mountains. Ruth did the same. The air war was fast and terrifying and had visibly separated into two con†icts now, bright specks and smoke.

“Where is Cam?” she asked, panting. “Plane for us. Twelve minutes. We need to get to the air‚eld.”

Newcombe took the radio from her but simply walked away from his pack and Cam’s. “We can’t mess with this stuff. You have the nanotech, right?”

“I’m not leaving him!”

“Do you have the nanotech?” Newcombe said. “He’ll see us down there. Come on. Goddammit, come on. There’s no point running around looking for him. We could miss each other and miss the plane!”

Ruth nodded, but the irrational feeling stayed with her as they ran. She hadn’t understood how deeply she was attached. She had been fooling herself pretending that her relationship with Cam was just physical, just circumstance, just anything. She would have paired herself with Newcombe if it was really only about a warm body.

Too soon another plane darted out of the heat, smaller, slower. The ‚ghters had come in very low, but this one kept within a few feet of the terrain, swerving and diving like an old barnstormer. The buzz of its engine was very different than the high scream of the jets. It was a stubby little Cessna.

Newcombe banged against a chain-link fence and cursed, rocking the wire violently. “Damn it!” They were a hundred yards from the air‚eld with no way through. He could have climbed it with no problem, but she had her arm.

Ruth glanced out into the rocks and bare earth again. What if Cam ran all the way back to our hiding place for me? she worried. She wanted to shout. Where are you?

Newcombe led her forty yards to a gate. He put his ri†e barrel against the lock and ‚red. They hustled between two long aluminum hangars as the Cessna droned into the open space ahead, but suddenly the plane lifted away.

“Wait, wait, we’re here!” Newcombe yelled into the radio. Then they got past the hangars and saw the runways were drifted over with sand. The desert had long since reclaimed this ‚eld exactly as it had buried the highways. The plane swung back again in a loop and Ruth glimpsed black skids against its belly. Of course. They knew what to expect from satellite photos. Their ‚rst pass had only been to get a closer look.

“Stay back,” Newcombe told her, maybe thinking of ‚re and shrapnel if it crashed.

The white Cessna kicked up sand as it touched down, bouncing. Newcombe waved and yelled as the plane trundled back around for takeoff, but he was looking past her shoulder. Ruth turned to see Cam behind them. She touched her hand to her chest as if to hold the warm feeling there.

“I told you,” Newcombe said. “Move!”

She resisted. She wanted to help Cam, but he waved her away so she turned and ran. The door of the plane was open. Ruth tried to climb aboard with Newcombe’s help. A man leaned out and grabbed her jacket.

Ruth looked up. “Thanks—”

There was something wrong with his face. A bandage. He was not wearing a containment suit or even a gas mask. She glanced at the cockpit. In the pilot’s seat was another man with the same perfect wound. No. The ‚rst man wore a square of white gauze over his right eye, while the second had a square taped over his left. Otherwise they seemed unhurt and even clean. New uniforms. Both of them held submachine guns.

Ruth began to push back against Newcombe, but he was stronger and the other man yelled, “Let’s go, let’s go!”

“Come on, Ruth!” Newcombe shouted.

She leaned inside despite her instincts. Maybe it was okay. The man in the cockpit had lowered his gun, and the ‚rst guy reached down to help Newcombe and Cam, too. No one else was aboard. The less weight, the longer their range. In fact, the thin carpet was spotted with holes where rows of seats had been torn out.

Ruth took one of the few that remained, and Cam fell heavily beside her. Newcombe dropped into a seat behind them. Then the other man bolted the door. “Strap in,” he said as he ducked into the cockpit.

The pilot was already accelerating. The plane slammed against the dunes and a familiar cold weight ‚lled Ruth’s chest like a ball of snakes, choking her. She’d forgotten. Her long months in the space station had left her uneasy with tight places. The rattling cabin felt like a deathtrap. Then they heaved into the air.

“What happened to their eyes?” she asked Cam, mostly to be close to him. The pilots’ wounds were too symmetrical, which made her wonder if they were self-in†icted. Why?

Cam only shook his head, still gathering himself. Then he turned to Newcombe and indicated his face.

“Nukes,” the soldier said quietly. “They’re afraid of more nukes. The †ash. If they only lose one eye, they can still land the plane.”

Lord God, Ruth thought, ‚ghting her claustrophobia. She leaned her goggles against the window as if to escape, but the air beyond the scratched Plexiglas was a tangle of far-off jets and burning mountain peaks.