Plague Zone

10

The Reverend Timothy Morris had established his settlement directly after the war. As an unexpected reward, he received a full quarter-ton of seeds from Missoula. A few of the United States’ seed banks survived the plague year, the seeds held back for their potential rather than being eaten outright. Since then, the government had been paying people to grow specific crops in exchange for a percentage of future harvests and the right to dictate where new seeds and saplings would be sent.

Their wealth steadily attracted more people to the Reverend’s influence. The folks in Morristown weren’t crazy. They were enthusiastic. The Reverend preached New Evangelism, which taught that man’s purpose was to regrow and repopu late. Sometimes it also meant plural marriages, wife swapping, or marriage at a young age. That was one reason why Tony had been so fascinated with Jefferson’s neighbors and why his mother despised them.

The crowd on the perimeter was silent. A few of them groaned, but it was their faces that truly spoke for them. Their eyes were huge and afraid. One sandy-haired woman blinked spasmodically, but most of them walked with their eyes wide open as if lost or confused.

“What do we do?” Ingrid asked.

“We can’t just kill them!” Cam said.

“Do it! We gotta do it!” another man screamed. The high pitch of his voice made it clear that he was trying to convince himself, too — but what choice did they have? The closest people were about to clear the fences.

Cam wrenched his gaze away from the oncoming shadows as Greg and Neil jogged up behind him. “Where is the hazmat suit!?” Cam yelled, cursing himself. Did we leave it at Ruth’s hut?

“What if we start a fire?” Ingrid said. “Is there any gasoline?”

“The flamethrowers are back at the greenhouse!”

“Then we’ll shoot into the ground at their feet.”

Cam glanced at the older woman with respect as her hand clacked against her M16, flicking the fire selector to full auto. Ingrid had volunteered for guard duty when others insisted on taking cover inside the sealed huts, and Cam remembered the handsome, blunt nose and chin behind her face mask. Ingrid Wood was unusual not only for her age — few people in their sixties had survived the plague year — but because of her accent. Ingrid had emigrated from Germany two decades ago after a divorce, and she was friendly, tough, and unfailingly polite.

“We may have to wound them,” she said.

“Do it!” Neil screamed.

The first of the infected people staggered out of the fences, a young man in a MICHIGAN T-shirt and a skinny girl with filthy white socks beneath her blue gown. Cam recognized one of them. The young man’s thick hair and the plague scarring on his nose were unmistakable. He was a farmer’s son and loud in his religion, taking every chance to explain about the Resurrection any time a crew from Jefferson came to trade equipment or food. Jake. The young man’s name was Jake and he was a good kid, rightly proud of his family’s apple trees.

Cam raised his M4.

The floodlights switched on before anyone fired. David had finally gotten his tripod ready and hit the power, draining electricity away from Ruth’s lab. Its dual lights burned into the people in the fences, illuminating the night like stark white glaring suns. Two shadows leapt from each person in a fan of silhouettes. Glass and chrome winked among the car parts on the ground.

Their eyes looked incredibly strange. It was as if none of them had irises. Their pupils were huge, like black pennies, and did not shrink in the light. It was a permanent condition. They shared some uniform injury to their brains.

The floodlights hurt them. The young man reeled away as the skinny girl ducked her head and scuttled sideways. Others raised their arms or moaned. The light stopped them. The Bull Dog was too strong. At first, Cam thought it might work. Then he noticed the second wave of human shapes. The field of light held at least a hundred figures, and there were hundreds more beyond them in the darkness.

Cam felt his blood run cold. The nearest people were repelled by the glare, yet the larger crowd seemed to be attracted to it. It was an eerie sight. Most of the infected people had been headed toward Jefferson, but without purpose. Some had stopped or strayed in other directions. Others were looking at the sky or their feet.

As the Bull Dog lit up the fences, the entire crowd turned as one, their white and brown faces reflecting the light like dishes. Blood gleamed on hands or bare legs where they’d fallen and hurt themselves. Then the crowd began to separate into two halves, circling in toward the brilliant corona from either side.

“Oh my God,” Ingrid said.

“Shut ‘em off! Shut ’em off!” Cam yelled. Too late. The infected people had a clear goal and began to pick up speed, shambling through the obstacles and barbed wire. Metal clanked, but they were silent, only grunting or heaving for air. Even the young apple farmer seemed to regain his bearings, stalking toward them even though he bent sideways from the light as if it was a physical force.

“Open fire!” Greg shouted, blasting the young man in the head. The boy toppled.

Cam’s eyes stung inside his goggles but he repressed the emotion, screaming against his face mask. He welcomed the noise of his M4, too, because it overrode everything else.

The carbine rattled in his arms as he dropped the skinny girl with a three-round burst. Her blood looked purple in the high-intensity lights. Cam took down the man behind her. Then a woman. Then another man. The range was too close. The M4 and the older model M16 were designed to penetrate Soviet helmets at a hundred yards, not unarmored targets at forty feet. Cam’s shots passed through the fourth man’s shoulder without knocking him down.

At the same time, Owen and Ingrid blazed at the crowd with their M16s. Two more carbines and a shotgun ripped into action from Cam’s left, farther down the perimeter.

The guns were withering. Twenty people twisted and fell. One man lay screeching on a chrome bumper, making noises that sounded almost like words before their Russian grenade launcher coughed somewhere to Cam’s right. A small rocket jumped into the field of light, splashing fire and smoke. The men and women of Jefferson had moved to reinforce Cam and the others like a well-schooled platoon, but they were downwind of the infected mob.

The carbines on Cam’s left went silent first. He was reloading his own weapon when he noticed the change, yet it wasn’t until he set his M4 against his shoulder again that he realized the delay from the other position had lasted too long. Those men weren’t reloading. They were infected.

Cam peered at the nearest hut, looking for flashlights or muzzle flashes. There was nothing. Then someone stumbled past the corner of the building. The man was not empty-handed or half clothed like the people in the crowd. In fact, he seemed to be pawing at his jacket hood as he struggled to shake his hand loose from the trigger guard of his shotgun, treating the weapon like a burden rather than a tool.

“Oh shit we gotta move!” Cam yelled at Greg. “Fall back! Fall back!” He slapped at Ingrid’s shoulder, but the older woman was too focused on controlling her M16. She fired into the west side of the crowd.

The infected people continued to advance. The guns did not frighten them, nor did the dead and wounded on the ground. They stumbled through their bleeding friends with no more attention than they gave to the fences and car parts. If anything, the muzzle blasts seemed to draw them. It was as if they were so deeply submerged in their trance that they seized on any external sensation. They walked right into the guns, which were much fewer now.

“Hold your position!” Greg shouted, but Cam pointed and yelled, “We lost everyone on our left! Every time you shoot someone—”

The floodlight teetered over and crashed as Neil fell beside them, his body hammering stiffly at the ground. The nanotech was among them.

“Run!” Cam shouted. He dragged Ingrid away from the man. Greg moved with them and suddenly Owen and another villager were there, too, retreating from the floodlight.

Owen and Greg yelled into their headsets for their wives. If the town was overrun, hiding in the sealed huts was pointless. Their air would run out. “Tricia!” Greg yelled. “Tricia!”

“—out of the buildings and run east before—”

Two infected men walked into their path, the village guards who had been on Cam’s flank. Even in the half-light, it was obvious they weren’t normal. One man had pushed his goggles sideways across his head and was struggling with his hood and mask. The other kept his right arm lifted away from his body, twitching, as his head rocked in the same palsied movements.

It was Matthew. Cam recognized his green jacket. Matthew seemed absorbed with the tremors in his arm and neck, but his face turned at the sound of their voices.

“Watch out!” Ingrid said.

Somehow they needed to get past. Cam dodged left and the others came with him, only to find themselves pinned against a truck and the front of Greenhouse 1. The fifth man, David, raised his rifle, but Cam yelled, “No, you’ll make it worse!”

Cam reversed his M4 and took the short barrel in his hands. The muzzle was hot despite his gloves. He clubbed Matthew and then whipped the carbine at the other guy. Someone else threw a pistol, knocking him down. They ducked upwind of the two men and Cam saw it was Owen who’d helped him, emptying his holster. Cam would have said something if there was time. Thank you. They were on the same side, no matter if they’d argued.

But their chance was already gone. Forty yards away, the sealed huts were opening up. In the yellow light streaming from both cabins, the other villagers staggered and twitched. Some of them collapsed. Tricia screamed with Hope in her arms before suddenly she jerked, too. The baby’s cries shut off at the same time. Tricia fell to one knee and dropped her infant daughter, who rolled halfway out of plastic sheeting her mother had fashioned into a bag around her.

They’d run straight into a drift of the plague.

The baby, Cam thought before his eyes cut left and right through the convulsing shapes. He was looking for Ruth.

“No!” Owen screamed. “No!”

Not all of them had fallen. Several people either tried to break free of the rest or turned to help the infected ones. In many cases it was hard to tell who was sick and who wasn’t. Sometimes it was the infected ones who lurched away, bouncing off their neighbors. The healthy people ran from each other or bent and dragged at a lover or a friend only to succumb themselves.

Cam grabbed Owen before the man could run to his wife.

“No! No!” Owen screamed.

His voice turned several heads among the infected. Their faces were horrible. They were identical. Dark, white, man, woman — there was only one expression in the group, a numb look that left their mouths sagging. Many of their faces rippled with spasms and tics, but those movements were like whitecaps on an empty, quiet sea, affecting only the surface. That slack expression appeared again and again. It affected their bodies, too, dulling every part of them except their eyes. Their eyes bulged with need.

“We can still make the cars,” Cam said. “Go. Run through the greenhouses.”

“No,” Owen said, no longer shouting. “No.”

“Hope,” Greg whispered. “Christ, she‘s—Hope.”

They couldn’t reach her. There were twenty villagers scattered around the baby. All of them were contagious — and they ignored the little girl. Even her mother was indifferent. Lying against a man who’d dropped dead, Hope pawed weakly at the earth with her tiny hands. The three-month-old girl was too young to crawl on her own. She lacked the motor skills and strength, but, regardless, she was exhibiting the same insistent drive they’d seen in everybody who was infected.

“There’s someone behind us,” Ingrid said.

The floodlights still shone on the north side of town, a white corona in the dark. Silhouettes walked between the square shapes of the huts.

From the other direction, some of their friends also began to pace toward them — three villagers, then four and five. Tricia joined the disorganized march. She tripped on one of the dead and staggered sideways.

Cam’s group backpedaled without a word, even Owen, even Greg. Especially in the dim light, the infected people no longer looked like family. They looked alien and deadly and Cam yanked his 9mm Beretta from his gun belt.

“Run for the cars,” he said.

Greg tore his eyes away from his wife. His face was hidden in his goggles and mask, but everything about his posture shrieked of conflict and suffering.

“Greg,” Cam said. “Run.”

He didn’t know what else to do. Without Ruth, they were only a handful of ordinary people, but he would lie to Grand Lake if they reestablished contact. Get a helicopter, he thought. Save who you can. Maybe we can come back for her in hazmat suits—

A jeep horn startled him. It blared from the other side of the greenhouses. Cam’s nerves betrayed him. His hand clenched on his pistol and he put a bullet into the villagers. One of the oncoming shapes fell.

“No!” Owen screamed. He smashed Cam’s shoulder with his rifle, knocking Cam into Greg. Then he swung his M16 around and leveled it at Cam’s midsection.

The pistol shot must have sounded like an answering signal to whoever was in the jeep. The horn blared again and again. Maybe someone was shouting, too. Cam wasn’t sure. The pounding of his heart was too loud and Owen kept screaming.

“No, no, no, no!” Owen yelled.

“Put it down,” Ingrid said calmly, although she’d raised her M16 and moved to Owen’s left so his rifle couldn’t cover her, too. “Owen! Put it down.”

“I didn‘t—” Cam shouted.

“You son of a bitch, no!”

There wasn’t time. More and more silhouettes were bobbing through the lights on the north side of town. From the south, the infected villagers were also closing rapidly. In seconds, they would be overwhelmed.

Cam shoved Greg to one side and jumped the other way, trying to escape Owen’s weapon. He didn’t make it. The M16 blazed in his face, deafening and bright. A bullet smashed into the right side of his chest like an icy ball. Another might have nipped the inside of his arm. Impact threw Cam onto his back, but somehow he dragged his arm forward against that momentum. He shot Owen in the leg — partly because he didn’t want to kill the man. Mostly it was because it was the quickest shot from the ground.

The wound was devastating. At close range, the 9mm bullet ripped a melon-sized hole through the back of Owen’s thigh. It shattered his femur in a gush of dark arterial blood, but Ingrid killed him before he dropped. She emptied her clip into his chest, a burst of five or six shots. Sparks flew from Owen’s M16 as her rounds struck the weapon. Maybe it had been her real target.

Cam’s vision was fading, yet he heard David gasp as the man turned and fled. David ran into the corridor between the stripped frameworks of Greenhouses 2 and 3. The jeep horn was still bleating. Cam tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t work. The best he could do was to squeeze his arm against his side where his jacket was wet.

Then everything went dark.

He woke between Ingrid and Greg as they hauled him forward. His feet dragged on the ground, adding to the strain on his side. It felt like his ribs were being pulled apart and he tried to run with Greg, who had most of his weight. He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. They were still five steps from the skeletal wood structure of Greenhouse 3, moving without flashlights.

The jeep horn had gone quiet, too. Whoever was at the cars had either been infected or decided to stop making himself a target.

“Wait,” Ingrid said, bumping against Cam.

Greg pulled on his other side and they went two more steps before Greg froze, too. “Oh, God,” he said.

David sprawled in the corridor between the greenhouses. Their friend lay on his back, trembling, as if he’d struck a nonexistent wall. But there was nowhere else to go. Behind them, the villagers had walked over Owen’s corpse and the flashlights they’d left nearby, filling the few white beams with legs and feet. At the same time, a larger, different group of silhouettes walked into the flashlights from the north.

Jefferson belonged to the infected.

“Run through the greenhouse,” Cam said, gesturing with his entire body against Ingrid. Greenhouse 2 was upwind of David, if that mattered. Every breath was a gamble. The air must be streaked with nanotech.

“Go!” Greg said. “Ingrid, go. I got him.”

She stepped over the foundation wall, ducking one of the crossbeams that had supported the plastic. Instead of running ahead, though, she turned with her M16. There were more silhouettes to their left, bumbling through the space between Greenhouses 1 and 2. In a moment, they would be cut off.

Cam heaved his legs over the foundation wall as Ingrid took aim. Chik kik. She was empty. “Idiot,” she said, fumbling a new magazine from her jacket as she backpedaled through the low, broad planters, still soft and green with seedlings.

Greg and Cam outpaced her before she opened fire. Muzzle flashes danced over the posts and crossbeams, throwing shadows like crucifixes on the surface of Greenhouse 1. Someone howled. Most of the others tumbled in silence. Then another gun fired from the jeeps, supporting Ingrid. Cam recognized the chatter of an M4. A pistol barked, too, punctuating the lighter, popping noise of the carbine. At least two other villagers had survived, and Cam lunged forward with Greg, buoyed by a new surge of hope.

“This way!” a woman hollered.

They fell out of the back of the greenhouse. Greg staggered to his feet but Cam’s right arm wouldn’t work. He could only push himself onto his hurt side. His thoughts were short and confused.

Get up. Get up.

“Cam!” Ruth yelled. She stood over him with her hand thrust out, squeezing off three rapid shots from her 9mm Beretta. He thought he was dreaming.

Somewhere the M4 blazed again on full auto, running through an entire clip in seconds. Spent cartridges rang against the bumper of a jeep. Cam felt himself dragged against the vehicle’s fender, which was alive in a way that the ground was not. The jeep rocked violently as someone climbed in. The engine was idling, too, a low, bass grumble.

“Help me!” Greg shouted, heaving Cam upright. Ruth lowered her pistol and shoved her free hand against Cam’s stomach. Together they levered him into the back of the jeep, where Bobbi knelt with the M4, reloading.

“You crazy—” Cam said in admiration before he ran out of breath. Crazy goddamn females, he thought. Ruth and Bobbi had disobeyed him, running for the jeeps instead of entering the sealed huts like he’d told them.

It had saved their lives.

“Is there anyone else!?” Ruth yelled.

“No, they’re gone,” Ingrid said.

“But I saw—”

“They’re gone!”

Something was wrong with Bobbi’s carbine. Probably it had jammed. The M4 was prone to seizing on full auto, and Bobbi threw it down and lurched into the driver’s seat as Ingrid heaved herself in beside Cam. They had almost nothing else besides another carbine and a backpack. Cam didn’t see the Harris AN/PRC-117.

“The radio,” he gasped.

Bobbi said, “Susan fought us for it—”

“The AFM!” Ruth shouted, firing twice more into the corridor between the greenhouses. “I have my laptop but I think the AFM is still next to my cabin! If we—”

“Leave it!” Greg yelled. “Get in!” Then he stepped away from the vehicle himself.

“What are you doing!?” Bobbi screamed.

“I’ll burn the town. The fire should keep them back.” His voice was loaded with fear and Cam understood that, more than anything, Greg Estey intended to join his wife and daughter.

“You can‘t!” Ruth shouted. But their friend had run into the darkness. He was headed for the toolshed, Cam realized — where the last of their fuel cans were kept — and Ingrid leaned out of the jeep with her rifle and blasted the truck beside them. Bullets slapped and whined from the side of the truck, shredding the rear fender and gas tank. Gasoline spattered on the earth. Ingrid was starting the job Greg intended to fulfill, but then Bobbi accelerated. She nearly threw Ingrid from the jeep. She must have thought the truck would explode and they roared out of the motor pool, speeding between two huts on the east side of town.

Cam might have caught a glimpse of Greg. Would his friend hesitate at the toolshed? Instead of creating a barricade for the infected people, a fire might kill Tricia and Hope and everyone else in Jefferson, asphyxiating them with smoke. Maybe that was Greg’s intent even if he couldn’t be honest with himself. If he’d been able to get close enough, maybe he would have shot his baby instead of leaving her to suffer in the night and then in the heat of the day, neglected and helpless — or maybe Greg had convinced himself that his love for Hope would survive the mind plague in some form. He might believe he would retain enough of a spark to care for his daughter.

Hurry, Cam thought. He didn’t want to say good-bye, so he tried to imagine Greg’s success instead. It was the only way he could stay with his friend.

The jeep slammed over a bump in the ground. Bobbi braked hard and swerved through the fences, turning on her headlights at last. Something like a hubcap careened up from the front tire. Then a heavier object smashed against the undercarriage.

“People on your left!” Ingrid shouted.

There were more figures approaching Jefferson in their bare feet and pajamas. The cold made their skin like marble: blue lips, white eyes. One woman had cut her face and her chest was slick with blood.

After that, Bobbi seemed to clear the silent migration. She slowed down and leaned over the wheel to stare into her headlights, weaving constantly. The ground was rough and spotted with rocks. Cam buckled his elbow down against his side, trying to staunch the wound. “Help me,” he said to Ingrid, but Ruth turned to him first. “My ribs,” he said.

“Oh no,” Ruth pleaded, touching his shoulder.

Cam grimaced and sat up. He needed to give her room to inspect his wound and, at the very least, pack something against the side of his chest.

He couldn’t let Greg’s suicide go for nothing.

Their losses were unimaginable. Allison, Hope, Tricia, Tony, Owen, and the rest… the hundreds of people from Morristown… How many other survivors must be feeling the same despair? What if the new plague really was everywhere across America? That was how Allison would have looked at things, including herself in the larger whole instead of standing apart, and Cam grasped at the sense of being with her. He nursed the bright embers of his grief, encouraging it. Rage was a defense mechanism he’d learned years ago, burying his pain and taking energy from his hate. At times, it had been the only thing that kept him going.

It gave him direction.

If there was any chance of reversing the mind plague, they had to get Ruth to safety and the equipment in Grand Lake.