Plague Zone

13

The jeep took them thirty miles into the night before the gas tank ran dry. That’s enough, Ruth thought as Bobbi pumped her boot on the accelerator and tried the ignition again. That has to be enough.

“Goddammit!” Bobbi said.

Ruth merely rose into a crouch with her M4 held high, ready to jump down on either side of the vehicle. Ingrid stood taller with her M16. The wind was cold and felt like death. Ruth heard crickets, which surprised her.

Ree. Ree ree.

At first the sound was irregular, but the night quickly filled with it again. The crickets had only stopped because of the intrusion of the jeep. Ruth turned her head to try to get a feel for the size of the hillside beyond the white beams of the headlights and, beside her, she saw Cam with his right arm pressed against his ribs, holding a pistol in his good hand.

She wanted to protect him so much she turned away before he could see it in her eyes. She’d long since removed her goggles to help Bobbi navigate through the dark. Off-road, those thirty miles had taken hours. Several times they’d stopped completely while Ruth or Ingrid paced ahead to inspect a creek or a hillside or groves of dead trees.

“Turn off the lights,” Cam said. Bobbi did. Otherwise there were only the stars. The night hinted at a long, slumping ridgeline above them to the southeast.

Far below, looking north, the black valley was marred by a patch of smoldering orange coals. It wasn’t Jefferson. Their home was out of sight beyond the foothills. This fire was farther north and much bigger than twenty structures.

Morristown had burned, too.

“We need some recon,” Ruth said. Their plan was to stay with the vehicle for a while. Dawn was only a few hours away. No one wanted to break their leg hiking in the dark, and Cam needed stitching. They all needed food and rest. The hot engine would also help them show up on infrared if a chopper flew overhead or if satellites photographed the area. They could use the headlights as a signal, too, at least until the sun came up.

Ruth also wanted to check her laptop. Before the fight in Jefferson, she’d initiated programs to crunch through her surface scan of the mind plague. She didn’t expect to have results yet, but she was anxious to confirm that the computer was still functioning. Its battery should be good for another six hours, but she had two extras and she would need to freeze and save her program before switching out.

Once there had been planes in the night. They’d also heard gunshots rolling through the hills up north. There were probably survivors out of Morristown, but even if those people remained free of the plague, the shots would attract more of the infected. Ruth’s group faced the same problem with their engine and their lights. They needed to make sure they were alone.

Ingrid slung her rifle. “I’ll go.”

“Wait. Help me with Cam.”

“I’m all right,” he said.

“You’re still bleeding!” Ruth swung to face him, catching his good arm. He’d leaned forward to climb down from the jeep, which frightened her. “Let me help you,” she said.

“All right.”

“Let us help,” she repeated, correcting herself. Me. Us. The words were a small distinction when everyone else they knew was gone, but Ruth was vividly aware of trying to quiet her emotions. The loyalty she felt for him was savage and blind. Ruth wouldn’t hesitate to kill for Bobbi or Ingrid, because they were all that was left of her home, but she would die for Cam.

“Here,” she said, gesturing toward the downwind side of the jeep. The vehicle offered some protection from the cold. It would do no good if the breeze was threaded with nanotech, but the alternative was to be completely exposed and she couldn’t accept that.

The three of them got Cam out of the jeep without jarring the rags she’d cinched under his arm. Then they sat him against the front tire, where Ruth smelled oil and hot metal and the cool scent of the crushed short grass.

She grabbed her backpack. They had almost nothing else except for her laptop — no tent, no blankets, and only the few canteens she’d stuffed into her pack with some cornmeal, potato powder, and dried tomatoes. She was hungry. She ignored it. She flipped open her computer and nodded once in the blue glow of its screen. Her analysis of the nanotech’s surface scan was still running. The progress bar stood at 46 percent. She would have liked to use the laptop’s screen for a light source, but it was smarter to conserve power.

The screen went dark when she shut its clamshell. Ruth took off her face mask and tried to remove her bloodstained gloves, too, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. It took her a moment to rip away the duct tape sealing her jacket cuffs. Then she knelt in front of Cam. He’d also pushed off his goggles and mask while Bobbi put hers back on. The lack of armor made Ruth and Cam different from the other two.

“Okay, I’ll take care of him,” Ruth said to them. “You should…” She stopped and tried to soften her tone. “Can you set up an LP?”

Ingrid shook her head. “What?”

“Listening post,” Ruth said. She’d spent so much time with Cam and Eric, she’d forgotten that not everyone in Jefferson was part of their militia. Ingrid had been an unofficial grandmother to their babies, a seamstress, a barber, and their dentist, often working in Morristown and sometimes as far away as New Jackson. The older woman had been an oral hygienist before she retired, years ago, and they’d been lucky to have her as part of their community.

“Maybe we should stick together,” Bobbi said unhappily.

“No, she’s right,” Ingrid said. “If we split up… if something happens…

If any of them were hit by the nanotech, the others would have a better chance of stopping the infected one if they weren’t too close together. If there was any warning at all in the dark.

Ruth took Ingrid’s glove with her bare fingers before the older woman could leave. “Don’t go too far,” she said. “We just want to make some kind of perimeter. I think on the west side. Downhill. Okay? Find a place where you’re out of the wind, but close enough that we can hear you if you shout.”

“I don’t like it,” Bobbi said.

“I’ll trade places with you in an hour. Please.” Ruth must have let her possessiveness show in her voice or the way she knelt with Cam. Behind her goggles, Bobbi’s face was impossible to read, but the small, birdlike movement of her head was full of knowing.

“I can take a shift, too,” Cam said.

“You were shot! You need to rest.”

Ingrid left them to their quarrel, walking into the darkness. “Let her take care of you,” Ingrid said gently. Perhaps her tone was as much for Ruth as it was for Cam.

Bobbi hesitated. She was still in shock and afraid and jealous, too, Ruth thought, but Ruth fixed her attention on Cam, closing her world down to him. She did this without meeting his eyes, studying his torso instead.

“Can you lift your arm?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We need to get your jacket off without moving the bandage, but I don’t want to cut it. You need it to stay warm.”

Bobbi turned and left with a grunt like impatience.

Everywhere, the crickets sang. The wind curled around either side of the jeep and underneath it. Cam winced as Ruth helped him strip his gloves. She pulled his good arm free of its sleeve, then stood over him to unwrap the jacket from his body. Everything they did felt like a slow dance, moving together. At last, she drew the sleeve from his other arm.

His shirt was damp with blood down to his belt.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“I don’t think my ribs are broken.”

“Shush. Let me clean the wound.”

Ruth used her knife to remove his shirt because she needed to save the cleanest parts for a sponge and fresh bandaging. But he was right. The wound wasn’t too bad. The bullet had grazed his pectoral muscle just below his armpit, leaving a gash about two inches long, wider in back, like a sideways V. In some places he was already clotting, so Ruth was careful not to scrub, pressing delicately at the wound instead.

Cam’s body was dark and lean with muscle. His scars were disturbing, though. Most of his chest was peppered with old blister rash, and yet the smooth areas prickled with goose bumps from the cold where his skin was ordinary and perfect.

“Ruth,” he said.

She looked up, hoping. But he wasn’t watching her. He was gazing at the sky. You can say anything to me, she thought.

There was only the crickets. The wind.

He said, “Why is this happening?”

Ruth could barely admit to herself that she’d wanted to hear something else. What was wrong with her? They’d seen so much death. She was crazy to expect him to kiss her.

Kiss me, she thought, even as she rebuked herself. “I don’t know,” she said. But she knew. Some ideas were too powerful to ignore, forever changing the course of history. The wheel. Agriculture. Industry. The bomb. Today, Earth’s population was barely more than five hundred million people. Many of them had dispersed from the mountains, but, for the most part, they were still gathered into a handful of safe zones.

There had never been a better time to attack. One nation or creed could take possession of the entire planet, remaking humankind in its own image. Maybe there would always be one warlord or another returning to the same scheme in different ways, from Senator Kendricks to the Russian generals who’d initiated the war to the men in the Chinese government who must have overseen the development of the new plague.

It’s always men, she thought. Too aggressive. Too afraid. Women would find another way.

Ruth put all of her concentration into stitching his wound. It was ugly work. The needle was blunt and the heavy thread in her kit was meant for sewing. Nor did they have any anesthetic, not even weed or moonshine. Cam’s tolerance for pain was well learned, however, and he said nothing as she fumbled and squinted in the dark.

“Fuck,” she said when she lost the needle in the gore. She had to dig for it. “Sorry. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

He was bleeding again. She tried to hurry.

She believed the only reason they’d escaped Jefferson was because the plague was its most dangerous in newly infected people. The crowd out of Morristown hadn’t been exuding the nanotech as strongly as their own villagers. Somehow it knew not to replicate without end inside any particular host. Otherwise it would flay people alive much like the original machine plague. The amount of soft tissue used from each person was infinitesimal — the merest pinch was enough to create millions of nanobots — but maybe that was why some victims dropped dead. Maybe the problem wasn’t that the mind plague experienced glitches when it crossed into the brain. The nanotech multiplied wherever it happened to activate. Being in the blood, sometimes it opened an artery or the muscles inside the heart…

Still, Ruth marveled at its capacity to record and verify who was already infected. There must be a universal marker of some kind, she thought. The nanotech communicates with itself. How? Can I use those signals to shut it off or make us immune?

“I’m done,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans because she wanted to save the last not-so-dirty parts of his shirt to wrap his wound again.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Let me get a pressure bandage on there,” she said as she washed her hands with the last of one canteen. She was all business. She wanted to maintain her distance in her head, but her fingers shook when she reached for him again.

What must he be feeling? Pain. Heartache.

Ruth cut the waist-strap from her pack in order to tie the new bandage in place, and she took a small measure of satisfaction in destroying the pack. She didn’t know why, except that she felt angry and helpless. She knew her movements were too rough.

“Ruth,” he said.

Don’t look at him, she thought, even as another, more persistent voice inside her said, You could both be dead in seconds.

“Ruth.”

She met his eyes. They were much darker and richer than her own, she knew, sad and frightened and strong. He was the strongest person she’d ever known. Somehow he always knew what to do.

He kissed her. He tipped forward and kissed her with his beard against her cold face and for an instant she was too surprised to react. Then she felt her mouth split open with a smile and a short, happy sound like laughter.

“Oh. Please. Cam, please.”

Ruth raised onto her knees without letting herself leave their kiss. She straddled him, spreading her legs to the lean shape of his hips. His hand was inside her jacket. He touched her waist, squeezing as if to make sure she was real. Ruth pulled her shirt out of her pants so he could feel her bare skin.

They broke for air. That was dangerous. When she looked into his face, she thought his expression was even more tortured. The confusion in his eyes made her heart lurch and she almost kissed him again — but she stopped herself, breathing in. She laid her palms on his naked chest and used them like a buttress, keeping her body several inches from his even though they were connected where her open thighs met his hips and groin.

Allison, she thought.

If he wanted to stop, she would stop. She respected Cam too much to mislead him or plead or beg. Then she rocked against him. She didn’t intend to. Her body reacted on its own, drawn to the friction and heat against her jeans.

He responded. His hand traced up her neck into her hair, cupping his fingers over the back of her skull. They kissed again and she stopped thinking, caught up in the taste of him and the sweet, maddening pressure of his erection. She pushed down slowly, insistently.

He made her feel young.

They wrestled her out of her jacket. He went to her shirt next, but he had only one hand, so Ruth began to open her shirt buttons for him and she felt her body flush, nervous and eager. Her face especially radiated heat into the night. She kept the shirt on to cover her back. The fabric rubbed at her breasts and on either side of her stomach, teasing her, teasing him. His hand parted her shirt like a curtain.

Ruth was as lean as Cam after years of hardship and strict rations. She let his fingers wander over her body for a moment. Then she lowered her hands to her jeans and unbuckled her belt.

Everywhere the crickets chirped on the hillside. The short grass rustled in the breeze. Ruth was aware of the stars all around them like a carousel of lights broken by the sliver of moon down in the west, but she refused to let it draw her eyes back toward Jefferson.

She had to move away from Cam to take off her pants. She kicked off one boot. Then she rode her jeans and undies down over her hips, pulling that leg free. She couldn’t believe it was happening at last. She crouched beside him with her knees apart, wishing he would touch her. “Let me help you,” she said, laying her hand on his jeans. She meant to tug at the button and his zipper, but first she stroked the bulge there.

His good hand lifted underneath her. She was smooth and wet. His fingertip stroked and circled and her pelvis rocked involuntarily, losing that exquisite touch.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, please.”

Cam touched her again. Ruth squeezed her hand down on his erection. The feelings coursing through her were bright and delicious even as she closed her eyes against the sting of tears. This is wrong, she thought. Is this wrong? Her emotions were as bewildered as his own must be, awash in good animal sensations, worry, guilt, and self-hate.

The attraction between them had always been more than a stupid crush. If physical pleasure was all she needed, she would have picked someone who wasn’t so badly ruined by the machine plague. That was why they’d managed to be friends all this time. They trusted each other. The affinity she felt for him ran deep enough to overcome any selfishness or even the lonely, painful love she’d tried to forget.

Nevertheless, she’d always wanted to cement their relationship like a woman and man, so she desperately reminded herself again. The nanotech could infect us both in seconds.

Cam and Ruth nuzzled together. They rubbed each other. Her orgasm was a quiet thing exactly like her climaxes had been when she was alone in the cabin she’d shared with Eric and Bobbi, sometimes as she listened to them at night or sometimes early in the mornings when she woke from a dream and needed someone, only to find herself with nothing but her memories of Ari and Cam and other fantasies.

Tugging down his pants was another joint effort. She wanted him to make love to her on her back. She wanted him to fuck her on her knees. But his wound left him handicapped, and she knew it would be very, very good just to lower herself onto his lap. “Let me…” she said.

Cam nodded. He even helped her, placing his good hand against her side to hold her weight as she straddled him again.

He was damaged here, too. She felt rough old blisters in his hip socket. Was that another reason he’d kept himself apart from her? Because he was embarrassed? He must have known she would keep his secret.

The only thing that mattered was her body working against his in the night.

There was no talk of birth control or protection. No one had seen any pills or condoms for years, except as overpriced commodities on the black market. Most women she knew were either trying to have a baby, using the rhythm method, or having sex in ways that didn’t involve intercourse. Ruth was glad she’d had her period eleven days ago, so she didn’t have to turn him away. As she got older — the time she’d spent in zero gee might also be to blame — her cycle had shortened until her periods began every twenty-six days, which was annoying as hell, even if she wasn’t sleeping with anyone — but the timing also meant that she was ovulating. She could get pregnant. Was that something to worry about?

She was being too cerebral and she knew it. She was recording every moment of their lovemaking. She let it change her. Having him was magnificent. She came again, and she’d nearly worked herself to a third before he reached his own orgasm. Afterwards, she stayed on top of him in a silent embrace, reveling in the sweat trapped between them until her butt was just too cold and she decided she’d better get dressed.

“Cam,” she said.

“No. I love you. You know I love you. But let’s not talk right now. I…”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “It’s okay.”

Tomorrow, she thought. We can rest, and tomorrow maybe things will make more sense.

“I need to find Ingrid,” she said.

“No. Don’t.”

“What?” Ruth would have argued or played dumb for hours just to stay in his lap. In the warm space against his chest, her nipples were still full, and the muscles up and down her belly and spine were tired and relaxed.

“Sleep if you can,” he said. “You need to be sharp if you’re going to make sense of the nanotech.”

“I don‘t—” I don’t have any gear except my laptop, she thought, but maybe he was right. Maybe they’d flag down a helicopter or meet up with a convoy, making their way to Grand Lake or any of the other labs scattered throughout the U.S.

Ruth got up at last. Her legs trembled and she smiled at that, flashing her teeth at Cam in the dark before she hid her feelings again. She’d been concealing things from him more and more, which felt especially wrong now that they’d been intimate, but it was the same night he’d lost his wife. She had to be careful.

She got dressed. She helped him back into his pants and his jacket. Then she walked several steps away to pee. She wished she could wash herself but there was no water to spare, and she was girlishly pleased by the evidence of their sex.

When she came back, he shared a little more of a canteen with her. They double-checked that their weapons were at hand. “Rest,” he said, staying upright against the jeep.

A large part of her wanted to stay awake. What if they were infected? Maybe it would better if she didn’t see the nanotech coming. Close your eyes, she thought. Then their time together would be the last thing she experienced.

Ruth curled up on the ground beside him. He set his hand on her side, and she was glad. She shouldn’t feel glad — she knew she shouldn‘t, because she crying, too — but a part of her that had been locked away was now content. She was in love, and, remarkably, she slept. But she dreamed that she lost him.