Plague Zone

11

The soldier at the bunker door stiffened, then relaxed and fell. Beside him, a second Marine began to twitch against the concrete wall. He dropped the medical tape he’d been using to seal the door. Then he collapsed on his friend, bucking all over with short, rigid, stuttering movements. Both men were volunteers, but that didn’t make the decision any easier for Major Reece, who stood across the room with her pistol in her small hands.

Dry-eyed, Deborah Reece fired. She had always taken pride in the clarity of her self-discipline, no matter what she was feeling. But she couldn’t breathe and her balance was off. She missed her first shot. The round sparked from the concrete floor and banged into the wall.

“Please,” she said, like a prayer.

The first soldier was already trying to wrestle free of his buddy, pinned by the other man’s weight. Impossibly, he looked straight at her despite his struggle. His pupils were the same enormous holes she’d seen in every other casualty.

She didn’t know his name. He was simply one of the J2 specialists who’d been inside the complex when the nanotech swept over the Continental Divide. He looked to be about thirty-five, the same age as Deborah, and very much in his prime. A captain. Lean and sunburnt, he was exactly the sort of man she preferred for her discreet, almost professional affairs, and in that instant Deborah felt a startling intimacy with this stranger.

Kill him, she warned herself.

Grand Lake was buried in the new plague. Even at eleven thousand feet, sealed within the mountain, their superstructures were vulnerable. Everyone up top was infected. Some of them seemed to remember what lay beneath, clawing at the tunnels and blast doors. The nanotech was more insidious than fallout or chemical agents. Complex 4 had gone silent within the first minutes of the attack, and 1 and 2 were both compromised.

These warrens had been built by engineers who were limited in equipment and supplies. Most of the subterranean complexes had been designed only to withstand the brutal winters at this elevation. Air strikes had been a secondary concern, and, possibly, the chance of surviving a nuclear near-miss.

Over time, many sections had settled badly, shifting out of plumb. Snowmelt seeped through the mountain and pushed against the bulkheads, eroding the rock alongside or beneath them, creating new pressures and holes. Today, the steel doors would stop people, even fire, but not microscopic machines. Attempts to retrofit the base after the war had been brief. Far more energy had gone into expanding these warrens than into improving the existing, upper levels. Complex 1 had grown to include three entrances to the outside — and from the last reports, the nanotech was cascading inward from all three directions.

It wasn’t just the doors. The air systems were also a weak point, as were the thousands of conduits for electrical and communication lines. Once inside, the nanotech was unstoppable. The warrens were too small. Built like honeycombs, even the largest complex barely covered one full acre with its offices, storerooms, and other areas stacked in a tight, vertical puzzle. Deborah had asked for volunteers and the Marine captain turned to his buddy and said, “It’s us.” Then they gave their lives trying to secure a door with nothing more than medical tape.

He did his best, she thought. Now do yours. There was a terrible symmetry in the idea. Deborah respected their bravery too much not to emulate it, and her next bullet went through the captain’s head.

The other Marine’s spasms had slowed to a pace that was erratic and weak. He was dying. Her way was quicker. Deborah shot him, too.

She turned and ran past an overturned desk at the back of the room. Her long legs danced easily through the mess as she clapped one hand against the white Navy shirt she’d cinched over her nose and mouth, snarling the knot in her blond hair even though she’d taken to wearing it short.

The mask was still there. So was the team at the rear entrance of the room, which shouldn’t have surprised Deborah, but they were less a squad than a hastily picked group without an obvious chain of command. Most of the eleven men and woman were Army, and therefore her subordinates, yet she’d also ended up with an Air Force major and three Navy officers, and their orders were more important than any individual’s life.

Seal your exits at any cost.

That duty might have been easier because many of them didn’t know each other. Instead, Deborah was saved by the same thing she’d learned to value most in herself — their loyalty to the uniform. They could have slammed the door shut with her locked on the other side, but first they made a hole, lifting their rifles and sidearms so she could pass.

Focused on their weapons, Deborah wasn’t light-footed enough to clear their legs. She tripped and sprawled on the hard floor.

“Major!” one of her soldiers cried, Emma Kincaid, a medical corps officer like Deborah.

“I told you to abandon that door!” Mendelson yelled. He was the USAF major, a square-headed man of fifty. His words were directed at the other troops instead of Deborah, challenging her for command.

This short concrete hall was lined with office doors. Several of the men and women held armloads of paperwork and more files lay on the floor. Like most of the complex, these offices served intelligence personnel from all five branches of the military, and yet the low cubicles hadn’t only been ransacked for priority files but also for simple, precious desk supplies like Scotch tape. They had no other way to seal the doors. Deborah, Emma, and two nurses had snatched as many medical kits as they could find, breaking out adhesive bandages and tape, but those were almost gone.

Behind her, one soldier had closed the steel door. Three more slapped sheets of paper over the lock and hinges. Half a dozen hands held the sheets in place as others jabbed at the paper with tape or an incongruous tube of toothpaste, anything to create a seal.

“We should give up this door, too!” Mendelson yelled. “We need to get ahead of the nanotech! Don’t you see? It’s getting deeper into the complex because of us! It needs people!”

Two men had died because of her. That much was true. Still, Deborah said, “No.”

She should have volunteered herself, but a CO couldn’t afford that luxury. If she’d taken the Marines’ place, she would be dead now, too, leaving Mendelson in charge, and either he didn’t have the guts or he didn’t understand. The air systems had been shut down, so an empty room might serve as a buffer — it might have been best to lock several doors and hope that some dead space between them and the infected soldiers would be enough — but they didn’t have any more space to give up. From this hallway, there were barely fifty yards left before they hit the command center. It was critical to protect the operations room. Otherwise they would be deaf and blind to the outside world even if they found their way into a few safe corners inside the complex — and then what?

Without this base, the war was lost. Communications had ceased with nearly every other major installation across North America. Spokane. Calgary. Salt Lake. Flagstaff. Two hours ago, the president was reported safe in Missoula, and there were survivors in Yellowstone and in Albuquerque, but more than 80 percent of U.S. and Canadian forces seemed to have been wiped out. The rest were isolated and in chaos.

“I’m staying!” Deborah said.

“We’re with you,” an Army man said, as another yelled, “This isn’t working! We need to try something else!” His fingers were smeared with blue gel toothpaste, which he’d used like caulk in the doorjamb.

“They were laying insulation in Sector Four,” one of the Navy officers said. “What if we—”

“Four is cut off,” the Army man said.

“The rest of you get going!” Deborah shouted. “Move!” She turned to the troops at the door and said, “We’ll wedge paper into the cracks where you haven’t sealed it already. Maybe we can get it wet, too, make some sort of paste.”

“We can chew it if we have to,” the Navy officer said.

Behind them, there was a rustle of boot steps. Mendelson went with those soldiers, yelling back at Deborah. “Goddammit, leave the door!”

But her orders were straight from General Caruso. Maybe she couldn’t walk away from the men she’d shot in the other room, either. She could still see the captain’s face and feel her pistol jump in her hands.

What was the plague doing to them? Anything that increased pressure in the skull would push the brain downwards through the foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord exited. The cranial nerves that controlled pupil response were in the brain stem and quit working if they were squashed. Were the infected people hemorrhaging? Maybe the nanotech hit them like a concussion. Deborah wondered if anti-inflammatory drugs could possibly slow or stop the effect.

Then her friend Emma grabbed her arm. Emma’s eyes were alive and clean, and Deborah spoke urgently to her. “We need someone to cover us,” Deborah said.

“I — No,” Emma said.

“I can’t do it again!”

“I won’t.”

“That’s a direct order, Lieutenant,” Deborah insisted, cradling her friend’s waist with her arm when she should have pushed her away.

Emma was a slight, pretty woman much like Deborah herself, although Deborah was taller. A classic blond, Deborah knew she was very pretty, but Emma more than held her own against her. Emma was a carrottop — orange hair, orange freckles — with a shy but ready smile. They complimented each other well, neither outshining the other, and Deborah had been pleased when they became confidants.

“I know I can trust you,” Deborah said.

Emma nodded and shook her head in the same uncertain movement. Even her body moved left and right in denial like a fox in a trap.

“Draw your weapon,” Deborah said as coolly as if she was working through any checklist. “Get as far back as possible. If you see us fall down or start to twitch, stop it before it gets to you. Shoot us.”

“Deborah, please—”

There were shouts at the other end of the hallway. A deep clang reverberated from the walls. Deborah pulled Emma aside and raised her gun, protecting her friend.

The far door looked as if it had been thrown open before Mendelson reached it. He’d yelled as the other men and women jumped aside. One of them stumbled to his knees, grasping at the laptop and paper files in his arms.

For an instant, Deborah thought the nanotech had spilled all the way through the complex from the other side. Then a new squad barged through her people. These men were identical in their green containment suits, their heads misshapen by hoods and masks with heavy eyepieces like insects’ eyes. Air tanks thickened the lines of their shoulders. The two in front also bristled with carbines and a flashlight, which winked and glared, even though the overhead lights were on. Grand Lake’s primary power source was the hydroelectric station in the river much farther down the mountain, but it could be destroyed. There were also diesel generators inside the complex, although their fuel reserves were dismal and would be dedicated entirely to the command center.

My God, Deborah thought. What are we going to do if the lights go out?

“Clear a hole! Clear a hole!” someone screamed.

There was nowhere to go. Deborah tried to flatten herself against the wall, only to bump against Emma. By then, the first man had reached them. The hard edge of his M4 caught Deborah in the shoulder — accidentally, she thought — and his weight drove her sideways with exploding force.

“Oh!”

Somehow Emma and another soldier caught her, rucking her uniform up against her neck. Deborah glanced after the suited man, weeping in pain.

Then her eyes stung again from a new emotion. The suited men were combat engineers, sent to burn the door at last. One of them clutched several rods of dark welding metal in his gloves. Behind him, two others wrestled with the pipe-stem nozzle of an acetylene welder and two fuel tanks. One man also carried an oversized helmet with a black-glassed visor.

Deborah’s efforts might have delayed the plague just long enough to preserve this hallway and most of her command. But as she regained her feet, she turned her back on Emma’s shaken eyes and stared at the blank surface of the door instead. They were safe.

They were safe, and it hurt.

“Deborah?” her friend asked.

Why wasn’t there anything on the intercom? she wondered. Then, angrily, What if I’d listened to Mendelson?

Her team had lost contact with the command center when they ran for the hallway. Would things have been different if she’d waited five minutes? Her team could have abandoned the other room instead of trying to hold that door, and then the engineers would have arrived before anyone else died.

Deborah’s breath returned at last. Her chest loosened and she gasped inside her face mask, hurrying away from the engineers. Their welder hissed to life. Everyone else winced at the incandescent blue light. Deborah did not, striding purposefully through the hallway to turn herself in to General Caruso.

“Let’s go! Move!” she said.

A few of her people had gone through the far door, but the others either seemed to be in shock or were collecting papers from the floor. A Navy officer said, “These are the Russian SITREPs from—”

“Move!” Deborah barked, shoving past him.

She hated to cry, but each inhalation was cathartic and sweet even as she shuddered with tears, trying to hide her face with her arm. As a member of the last crew aboard the International Space Station, as a physician and an infantry officer, Deborah Reece had seen more death than she could truly understand, but she had never killed before.

Deborah had spent the plague year in low Earth orbit, watching from the ISS as the world’s cities went dark and stayed dark. The ISS circled the planet every ninety minutes, and, on the nightside of the globe, prehistoric blackness covered every part of the world except for a very few strong-holds that burned like weak, fading stars. Leadville. Fuji. Kathmandu.

Her job had been to monitor and maintain the health of the crew. That she became rivals with Ruth Goldman was incidental. For one thing, they were the only two women aboard, and Deborah was the first to find comfort in the arms of their pilot, Derek Mills, whereas Ruth never did resolve her quiet attraction with Commander Ulinov.

The larger challenge was that while Deborah was intelligent, like all of NASA’s people, Ruth’s genius could make her difficult to reach. Ruth probably had forty IQ points on any of them, and, in her mania to reverse the plague, she exhausted herself and let her moods carry her for days on end. Her jokes were as deft as a scalpel. She cut everyone without trying.

Deborah was unlike Ruth in another way. She lacked Ruth’s imagination, which seemed to her to be a good thing. She thought if people were too smart, they lost sight of how to be normal or never understood the basics of social behavior in the first place. As long as she’d known her, Ruth had been a polarizing figure, either drawing people to her or repelling them. Like Deborah, some people had both reactions at once, binding themselves to Ruth but unable to personally identify with her intensity.

Deborah wanted to be friends. They took some steps in that direction. Then Ruth cut her even more deeply. When the ISS crew returned to Earth, it was on a highway too narrow for the shuttle. The Endeavour went off the road, killing Derek and injuring most of the rest. Ruth was needed in the nanotech labs — but eight days later she disappeared, joining the conspiracy to hijack the mission into Sacramento, California, where they’d hoped to recover the original designs of the machine plague.

Deborah never expected to see her again. When she did, she was thankful just to find a familiar face. It had taken no less than two miracles to bring them back together. Deborah was not surprised that Ruth had the tenacity to walk all the way from Sacramento to the edges of the Nevada desert, yet somehow she’d also evaded the enemy landings in California. More unlikely, Deborah herself drove out of Leadville only days before the bombing. Ruth’s would-be lover, Nikola Ulinov, was also a top Russian diplomat and a friend of Deborah’s. Playing upon the authority he’d long held aboard the ISS, he urged Deborah to make something of herself again.

U.S. Command was only too happy to add a physician to their ranks when Deborah volunteered. Even without military training, she had been handed the rank of captain, able to give orders yet equally bound by directives from above. It was a neat trick. Deborah didn’t mind. She thought Ulinov was right, and she knew she could handle herself even in a combat zone.

That was exactly where they sent her, even if she was a celebrity. Maybe they did it because of the small glamour of being associated with the space station, and if her status was some help to morale, all the better. Deborah was attached to an artillery company on the thin line of Leadville’s northern border. She felt some guilt for leaving the other survivors of the ISS crew, but Bill Wallace had been recovering nicely, and Gustavo and Ulinov were both deeply involved with the highest levels of the American government.

Now they were all dead.

Ulinov had saved her even before himself. It was a debt she couldn’t reconcile. She hated him for his part in the bombing, and yet she respected his loyalty and his self-sacrifice. He was a good man. He was just on the other side. Ultimately, the bombing had even caused some good. At the edge of the blast zone, beneath a stifling, radioactive haze, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the nearest rebel command. Later, people said there had been thousands of acts of unity everywhere as U.S. and Canadian forces turned to face the invasion together. The truth was that Deborah’s company only wanted to run from the fallout without needing to fight through rebel lines. In fact, her people hiked ninety miles north before they learned what was happening in California.

Once more, Deborah’s training as a physician brought her straight into the middle echelons of their leadership in Grand Lake. It wasn’t what she wanted. She had only been with the men and women of her unit for most of a week, but when the sky ripped open, those soldiers became the only people she knew in the world. Yet she was under orders. Deborah had to believe that Grand Lake knew where she could do the most good — and they were right.

Ruth was rescued from an airfield in Nevada and brought back to the Rockies. Deborah, with Emma, found herself working alongside Ruth again. For the first time, Deborah was glad. Ruth had changed. She was more open. They needed each other.

One of Deborah’s tasks had been to organize blood samples from thousands of soldiers and civilian refugees after Ruth discovered a new kind of nanotech inside them, a nanotech that shouldn’t exist. Leadville had been testing several prototypes on its own troops, and Deborah chose to serve again when Ruth left Grand Lake, joining an elite military escort meant to aide and protect her. Ruth thought their best chance was to recover every fragment of Leadville’s work that the survivors of the bombing must be carrying in their blood.

Unfortunately, many of those refugees were starving and sick and terrified. Chinese aircraft ruled the skies. Soon enough, Chinese armored units rolled into the foothills of the Rockies — and Ruth betrayed her own people again, threatening both sides with the parasite. Deborah still didn’t know how to feel about what she’d done. Yes, Ruth’s plan had worked, bringing the war to a standstill, but only at the cost of exiling herself. Worse, she’d given the West Coast to the enemy when she might have decimated them instead.

Ruth had even briefly convinced Deborah to help, her crazy goddamned genius shining in her eyes like holy fire, although Deborah’s feelings had changed as soon as Ruth left her alone. Holding a vial of the parasite in her bare hand, waiting for Ruth’s signal to open the plastic tube, Deborah’s heart had soured at the idea of murdering thousands of Americans even if it meant saving millions more. Instead, she’d turned herself in along with the nanotech.

Deborah wasn’t proud of being tempted. She had just been very, very tired and hurt and afraid. Nor had she lied to the National Security teams who debriefed her afterward. She was considered a loyalist because of it, which was embarrassing and wrong. That was why she was still in Grand Lake. Deborah was one of the “lucky” people who were hardy enough to survive at this elevation, even if she had sinus trouble, so she’d accepted one of the key personnel slots in Complex 1.

She’d cut her blond hair for the same reason — to make herself a better fit. Deborah was no longer a civilian serving in the Army. She was Army.

They carried on a vital peacekeeping mission. Even with the many flaws, the superstructures beneath these mountaintops were a feat of engineering and difficult to replicate. U.S. Command not only needed as many existing bases as possible, they’d always kept one eye toward surviving another plague. The landing strips on the surface were small and congested, but the fuel depot was well protected, and this place had all the advantages of high altitude and geographical isolation.

Grand Lake Air Force Base was a powerful component of the deterrents arrayed against the Chinese and the Russians, not only because of its aircraft but because it served as an Alternate NORTHCOM. Complex 1 housed one of the early warning hubs for NORAD, the organization dedicated to monitoring the world for nuclear launches or initiating a U.S. first strike. They had the eyes, ears, and authority to coordinate with the missile silos in Wyoming and Montana — but even if they achieved 100 percent containment, sealing themselves off from the nanotech, Deborah knew their clean air would only last forty-eight hours.

There was still one final choice to make.