Plague Zone

16

Eight hundred miles west of Grand Lake, Colonel Jia Yuanjun walked alone through an empty hallway. The silence was bewitching. Solitude was so unlike his daily life. Part of him welcomed it even as he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle with anticipation.

You shouldn’t be here, Jia thought, but this sublevel was a familiar place. He knew every corner. He went sixty paces into the damp, echoing shadows and moved left out of the corridor. This basement was always quiet. The architect who’d designed these bunkers had overdrawn his plans, no doubt hoping to impress his superiors, and their construction efforts had stopped long before completing the lowest floor. In many areas, the walls showed naked rebar. In others, there were no walls at all. Farther down the corridor, Jia knew there was a great room in which nothing stood except load-bearing pillars and scrawls of white paint to indicate where plumbing and electrical lines were never laid. The lighting consisted of only a few bulbs clipped to the ceiling. Nor was there heating or fresh air.

They’d built this base on the outskirts of Los Angeles, northeast of Pasadena, where the badlands had long since reclaimed the suburban sprawl, raking the streets and abandoned yards with sand. Beneath the sun-baked desert, however, the earth was cold, and the hundreds of people inside the compound were forever exuding moisture. Most of their breath, sweat, and cooking smells evaporated through the exits or dried up in the insufficient circulation of their fans, but Jia believed it was the living vapor of his fellow soldiers that made this sublevel so chilly. It smelled of people and earth, yet not in an evil way, mixed with the tang of concrete and iron. Jia was in the belly of their Army. He supposed that was exactly where he wanted to be. It was peaceful. He felt as if he belonged — and yet he’d risked everything by coming here.

A boot step ticked in the darkness.

What if you were followed? Jia thought. He sidled back against the wall, leaving the dim light entirely as the boot steps moved closer, gritting on the floor. One man? Two?

I was ashamed, he thought, rehearsing the same lies he’d planned for months. Why else would anyone hide themselves down here except to mourn their failures or their lost families? Access to this level was forbidden, but one of its entrances sat directly beside Jia’s quarters. The rooms below were used as storage space, giving him a plausible excuse to walk down here, and the crowded barracks were no place to show emotion.

If necessary, Jia would confess one weakness to conceal another. He had often done that to bind another man to him. He’d learned that if he volunteered one candid thought to a colleague or a rival, they felt empowered. Sometimes they would trust him enough to share their own truths. Less often, they reported him. Either way, he gained new relationships, either with the men who opened themselves to him or with the superiors who interrogated him and then saw his drive, his intelligence, and his humanity.

Neither the Communist Party nor the MSS wanted robots if they could have dedicated minds working for them instead. Automatons were easy to find. Men with initiative were not. This was how Jia had survived, but he’d always recognized that it was a double-edged sword.

One day, he would die on the wrong side of the blade. Today?

You shouldn’t have come here! he thought. Then he realized the boot steps were in front of him. The walking man had emerged from deeper within the basement. Jia allowed himself a small measure of relief. He had been pressing his shoulder blades against the hard concrete but now he leaned forward into the light, masking his nerves with an alert expression.

“N ho,” he said. Hello.

The other man jerked in surprise, then glanced left and right before saluting. With anyone else, his poor form would have earned a reprimand, but Jia was touched by the fear in Bu Xiaowen’s eyes.

“Colonel,” Bu said. “Are you… I didn’t think…”

“I needed a moment to compose myself,” Jia said. Then he added, “None of my team have slept since yesterday. General Zheng excused us.”

They both listened to the silence. Somewhere, a far-off noise resonated through the concrete. Pang. But there was no one else in the basement and Jia stepped forward and grabbed the front of Bu’s uniform. He pulled Bu’s open mouth against his own for a fierce, exciting kiss.

Jia had not chosen to be the way he was. He certainly did not celebrate his sexuality, but the attraction between himself and men like Bu Xiaowen was undeniable. They never needed words. They just knew. Jia supposed it was the same way in which heterosexual men and women felt a mutual spark. Their bodies were simply calibrated that way, and Jia and Bu had watched each other for weeks before they first discovered a chance to exchange a few words, unheard and unseen, in one of the stairwells.

He lowered his hands to Bu’s hips. He could not feel them beneath Bu’s gun belt, and yet he enjoyed the frustration of it because undressing each other was usually their only fore-play. Their sexual encounters were always rushed.

He pressed Bu against himself, yearning for more — but his self-control was stronger. He broke their kiss. “I can’t stay,” he said.

“No,” Bu agreed, holding him.

Jia didn’t go. In fact, his only movement was to return Bu’s embrace, bringing the other man’s cheek against his own. His heart continued to beat rapidly and his erection was stiff and eager, but everything else about him softened.

We can never be together, Jia thought. That only makes you more special to me. Your eyes. Your caring. “I didn’t think I’d see you,” he said.

“You almost didn‘t,” Bu said. “My unit’s on standby and then back on duty in another hour.”

“I can’t stay,” Jia said again.

“You shouldn’t have come at all,” Bu said, fishing for more.

Jia wanted to smile and say exactly what Bu wanted to hear, but after a lifetime of deception, he was too good at shielding himself. He didn’t know how to reveal something so honest. I love you. The words just wouldn’t leave his throat.

“Zheng is watching you,” Bu said.

“I know.”

Jia had been relieved of his duties as superior officers hurried to involve themselves in the assaults, and Jia hadn’t argued. Indeed, he had been most subservient. Their victories would be his success, too, so Jia detached himself from Sergeant Bu and ran his hands over his own shirt, straightening his uniform.

There was regret in Bu’s gaze. “I’m glad you came, zhng gun,” he said. It was Bu’s pet name for him. Sir.

This time Jia did smile. “Me, too,” he said, reaching for Bu’s hand. Could he actually say what he needed to? Revealing his heart would be insignificant compared to the crimes they’d committed together, and Jia decided he was going to do it.

Tell him, he thought.

Then they were thrown against the ceiling in an upheaval so loud that Jia went blind, too, his senses wiped out by the deafening roar. Slammed up and back, he fractured his left arm. He felt the bones crack within the endless black sound. His chest struck something hard, too. Then his face. He might have been screaming. The sound was too loud to know and he tumbled and crashed inside it.

When it stopped, there was more light than Jia understood. Daylight. Somehow the base had been torn open, leaving him in a pit filled with gray slabs of concrete and smaller debris. The air was choked with dust. It smelled like charred flesh, and Jia groped to place himself. The sky overhead was dim and gray. The predawn was much brighter than a few lightbulbs, but it would still be an hour before morning in California — if morning ever came.

Voices echoed from the rock. Paperwork spilled everywhere in thin white rectangles. Some of the pages took flight as the dust lifted and surged in the same hot wind. As he staggered to his feet, Jia identified the unexpected shapes of crushed beds and electronics and, incredibly, an entire truck that must have rolled into the base. The jumble was also full of bodies. Only some were moving. Not all of them were whole. Jia saw a dead man pinned beneath a mass of concrete and another who was missing his jaw and one arm.

He felt as if he was waking from a nightmare. Deep down, perhaps, he was still screaming, but it was as if he was too small to absorb what had happened. His surroundings only came to him in bits and pieces. He saw a shattered door and an exploded water tank and a desk drawer without a desk. There was also a blue plastic comb in the rubble and Jia stared at it without comprehension.

Then he stepped toward the mutilated soldier. The face wasn’t Bu’s and the awful, blank feeling in Jia’s head lifted for an instant. Where had they been standing? Was this the corridor?

The base shuddered again and hundreds of voices reacted above him, shouting in the wind. A pile of debris crumbled nearby, burying some of the dead and a wounded man who thrashed once before he disappeared. No! Jia thought. But the man was gone. A few people were picking themselves up inside the pit, yet most of the other survivors seemed to be on the shattered floor above. He couldn’t immediately count on them for help.

“Bu?” he yelled. “Bu, can you hear me!?”

Everywhere the collapsed walls formed barriers and unstable pockets, any of which could be hiding the other man. The voices were an obstacle of another kind, making it difficult to hear.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!” His voice rose. “Answer me!”

Later, Jia would learn that a pair of Minuteman ICBMs had detonated on either side of the Los Angeles sprawl, bracketing the city on its northeast and southeast borders. The yield of these warheads was only one megaton each — the Americans had tried to limit the danger of fallout to themselves — yet that was several times the strength of the first atomic bomb used in Hiroshima. Worse, the two blasts slammed together with gale-force winds.

At the same time, other missiles hit Oahu and Hawaii, which the Russians and the Chinese both used as staging grounds. These strikes might also have been a signal, walking the devastation out into the Pacific, like a feint toward China. Much closer, more warheads detonated in Santa Barbara, Oceanside, and San Diego. The Americans also destroyed the three large military bases far inland among the Mojave Desert, where the Chinese kept most of their aircraft — but there were no strikes on mainland China itself. The American launch was precise. Possibly they no longer had enough operational silos for a larger response.

For now, Jia knew only his private horror. He clawed at a snarl of wreckage with both hands, ignoring the bolt of agony through his forearm. There was blood in the gray dust. So much blood.

“Sergeant!” he yelled.

He found a naked foot. It was crushed and bent, and yet Jia felt relief. His thoughts were still divorced from him, but he couldn’t imagine how Bu would have lost his boot, much less his sock. This was someone else, a man who’d been sleeping in their barracks overhead.

Jia kept moving. The ground was a strange up-and-down ruin. Most of the dunes gave way beneath his feet. His instinct was to shy away from the larger slabs, but he ducked his head beneath them nonetheless, calling for the other man.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!”

He found a live wire sparking in the rubble. He walked across a slew of ghosts made of empty clothes. Then he jumped when another survivor limped out of the dust abruptly like one of the ghosts come to life.

“You!” Jia shouted. “Help me. We’re looking for a Second Department noncom in—”

The man didn’t respond, shambling away. Was he deaf? There was blood in his hair, so Jia let him go. He’d heard someone else groan and he followed the sound, pushing his way past a massive hunk of concrete.

Bu Xiaowen lay beyond it. Each breath was a strained rasp. He was bent and gray with dust, but Jia recognized the other man’s voice even in this extreme. He ran to him, stumbling once and jamming his fractured arm. “Bu,” he said, marveling that they could have been so widely separated by the quake. They were together now. Jia felt himself awaken at last. The emotions in him were terrible — and honest — as he laid his hand on Bu’s cheek, assessing his lover’s airways. Bu’s mouth looked clear of gravel or loose teeth. That was good, but Jia could see that he was seriously injured.

“I can‘t,” Bu groaned. “I can’t feel…”

“Hold still. I’m here. Just hold still. We’ll get you out as soon as we can,” Jia said, promising something that he had no right to guarantee. Bu’s throat was mashed and swollen. His left arm twisted away from his body like a dead thing. Jia thought he must have been rolled beneath the nearest debris, a tangle of concrete and rebar. One of the steel rods had punctured Bu’s leg, spurting blood through the dust.

Jia clamped his good hand down on the calf wound. Mastering the pain in his other arm, he took off his gun belt and wrapped it twice below Bu’s knee before cinching the buckle tight. Then he turned and began to open his lover’s shirt.

“The roof,” Bu groaned. “What…”

“Quiet now. Breathe. Listen to me. Just breathe. The base was hit, but we’re going to be okay.”

Bu’s collarbone had come through his skin. His lung was surely punctured, perhaps in several places. That was why he couldn’t get enough air, and Jia was unsure if mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would help. What can I do? he thought, when really there was a different question he needed to ask himself.

What have I done?

All of his certainty from last night gave way to blame and guilt. He had been so aggressive in lobbying to attack the Americans. Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened without him. There were other men with ambition, but his circumstances were unique. Perhaps another officer wouldn’t have rushed to prove himself. What if they’d waited until the mind plague was even more virulent? The Americans might never had survived long enough to fight back, and the war would truly have been one-sided.

Jia grimaced through a mask of tears. Then he leaned down to Bu’s dazed, pale face. He didn’t want this kiss to be farewell, but, more than anything, he didn’t want Bu to die without feeling their love again.

Bu was still very confused, but his lips opened to Jia’s. They shared this tiny warmth. There was a rattle of someone’s boots in the debris and Jia jerked his head up from the other man.

Dongmei stood on the other side of the gray dunes. Her uniform was cleaner than either Jia’s or Bu‘s, and she held a canteen and a small pouch of medical supplies. She was lovely, like an angel. Her readiness was only what Jia would have expected — but while her broad hips were poised to continue forward, the rest of her body seemed unsure. She leaned slightly to one side as if to turn and run.

She gaped at them, open-mouthed.

Jia stared back at her, not believing his bad luck. The women’s barracks were set away from the basement. Dongmei had escaped the bombing. Then she’d either climbed into the pit or even jumped down to help. She was a good soldier. She might have run into danger entirely by herself without an officer to direct her.

Jia saw his own choice as other people shouted behind Dongmei. There was no way to silence her without the risk of being discovered, not even if he used his hands instead of his pistol. First he would need to chase her, and Dongmei was thirty meters away. It also sounded as if more troops were entering the pit to look for survivors.

They would need leadership. His role would be even more essential now than ever, especially if the command center was gone. That responsibility was greater to him than anything else and Jia scrubbed at his damp eyes, smearing one cheek with his grime-ridden hand.

“He can’t breathe,” Jia said, pretending he had been trying to give Bu mouth-to-mouth. “His neck. His ribs.”

“I, I,” Dongmei stammered.

“Is there a bag and mask in your kit? His leg is cut, too. Are there medics?”

The fear in her round face was disarming, even juvenile. It was the look of a young woman confronted with monsters she’d never believed were real. Could she genuinely be that innocent? Or was she so scared because she admired him and didn’t know how to process his homosexuality?

“Lieutenant Cheng!” he barked. “Are there medics?”

Dongmei seemed to grasp at the familiar tone, recovering herself at last. “No, sir,” she said. “Not down here. Captain Ge told some of us to help—”

They probably sent only the weakest ones, Jia thought, the women and the walking wounded. Let the injured take care of the injured. It was cruel, but he approved. If there were still operational crews overhead, they would be impossibly busy as they tried to meet the American offensive.

Who was in charge? General Zheng? How many officers had been killed when the base collapsed?

“Sir,” Bu groaned. “Sir, I can’t…”

“Come here,” Jia called to Dongmei, drowning out his lover’s voice. What if Bu Xiaowen said the wrong thing? “Take over,” Jia said. “Keep him stabilized. I need to get upstairs, but we never leave one of the People’s Heroes behind. This man deserves all the help we can give.”

Dongmei nodded, and Jia thought he saw a new uncertainty in her expression. She was beginning to doubt what she’d seen. That was good. But it wasn’t enough.

He couldn’t leave her alone with Bu.

As she picked her way through the rubble, Jia bent down to the other man again. He’d made his decision. There had always been two of him, the soldier and the man, and it was the soldier who must win over his secret, more gentle self.

“I love you,” he murmured.

Bu misunderstood, groggy with pain and shock. “Sir?” he rasped. Then he smiled. “Sir, we shouldn’t…”

Jia clamped his good hand over Bu’s nose and mouth, hiding this action as best he could from Dongmei with his own face. Bu stiffened beneath him. He was too weak to fight. His hips moved but the injuries throughout his chest must have been an agony even worse than smothering. He tried to bite, too. Jia clamped Bu’s jaw shut, smashing his lips. Bent close to Bu’s face, Jia shut his eyes to block out the sight of his lover’s bulging eyes.

Dongmei hesitated again a few paces from them. Jia had forgotten to pretend to be lifting his head for air and exhaling into Bu’s mouth. Maybe she’d also seen Bu’s face, blotched red from popping capillaries.

Then it was done. Jia didn’t look at the body as he stood up. He was afraid he might start crying again if he did.

“He’s dead,” Jia said, putting too much emphasis on his first word. It might have sounded like an innocent thing to say, except that she’d just seen him commit murder.

“I… Yes, sir,” Dongmei said. Her eyes were solemn and clear, but was there a quaver in her voice?

Jia could not wait or give her a later opportunity. He needed to trust Dongmei, so he said everything he knew to prove himself to her. “The most important thing is to bring everyone together again and take command. We need to be sure we’re protected against more attacks, and our team will be critical in following the nanotech. Show me how you got down here. Is there a ladder?”

“Yes, sir. We used ropes, sir. I think I got down over there,” Dongmei said, pointing back to her right. She wouldn’t confront him now.

But would she eventually betray him?

Jia strangled her, too, throwing himself on top of the young woman in a grotesque masquerade of intercourse, driving his legs between hers and shoving his arms up through Dongmei’s flailing hands to her neck, using his weight to hold her down against the rubble. She was his friend and an excellent soldier, but China needed him. It was the best he could do for his country. It was his duty.

When she was dead, Jia surveyed the wreckage. He dragged Dongmei away from Bu and pulled judiciously at a length of rebar, bringing an avalanche across her face and torso. If there was an autopsy, her neck wounds would be obvious, but Jia knew the survivors were too busy to make time for a criminal investigation.

He stalked away. And when he found his way through the dust and carnage to the rescue teams, no one questioned the bloody slash she’d left on his forehead or the cold, seething fury in his eyes. They helped him up a rope ladder to the second floor. Two medics tried to assess his wounds, abandoning more badly wounded soldiers in favor of him, but Jia brushed them off. “Tend to our Heroes,” he said.

“Colonel!” a man called. “Colonel!” It was an Air Force lieutenant whom Jia recognized, although he couldn’t remember the man’s name.

“Report,” Jia said.

“Casualties are overwhelming, sir! Most of the base is gone, sir! I can’t raise anyone else on the radio and Captain Ge said it looks like the whole city is gone!”

The young man was hysterical, but his reaction only seemed to increase Jia’s self-possession. “Where are Generals Zheng and Shui?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir! You are the most senior officer I’ve found, sir! We’ve been trying to organize our rescue efforts—”

“You’ve done well, but we need to reestablish communications both here and with the mainland. I need to know how badly we were attacked and what assets we have available. Especially our Air Force, lieutenant.” Jia clapped him on the arm paternally and saw his own steadiness register in the lieutenant’s expression — steadiness and gratitude — and he was glad somewhere beneath his rage.

Jia Yuanjun would hit the Americans with everything left at his command.