Plague Zone

19

“We need twenty minutes,” the woman on the radio said. “Then we can clear your vehicles, too. Buy us some time.”

“Roger that, Viper,” Sergeant Huff said.

“I want One and Three to sweep the road,” Foshtomi said as she dug for a pair of binoculars. “No guns. Just run ‘em down. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma‘am,” Huff said without meeting her eyes, and Ruth felt the same squeamish sense of alarm. It was one thing to shoot innocent people from a distance. Intentionally using the Humvees as battering rams was hideous, but Huff began to relay Foshtomi’s orders. “This is Two,” she said. “Listen up.”

Foshtomi turned to Ruth. “How is Viper going to decontaminate?”

“I don’t know.”

An engine rumbled behind them as one of the Humvees rolled past. The other Humvee appeared from the corner of the bank and followed. Ruth was very, very glad she wasn’t in those vehicles, but it had always been that way, hadn’t it? Other people did the dirty work while she was safe.

“I think I see them,” Foshtomi said. She lowered her binoculars and got up on her seat, twisting in the confines of the Humvee to find a better angle through the windshield. “Shit. They’ve got a drape or something like a tent.”

“You mean an airtight tent?” Bobbi asked.

“That wouldn’t work,” Ruth said. “This plague doesn’t have the hypobaric fuse.”

“It’s just some kind of blanket.” Foshtomi slid back into her driver’s seat and handed the binoculars to Ruth. “Tell me what you see.”

Suddenly the radio squawked, full of the sound of a growling motor. “Watch out!” a man yelled. Then the noise shut off. He was gone.

“One and Three,” Huff said. “One and Three, are you okay?”

Please be okay, Ruth thought, but the radio answered in the same man’s voice. “This is One,” he said. “I think Three’s infected. They nearly hit us.”

Foshtomi punched the ceiling. “Fuck!”

“We’re coming back around,” the man said. “He’s off the road. We — Yeah, I can see Coughlin. He’s sick. They’re all sick.”

Ruth was trembling too hard to see through the binoculars when she finally brought them to her eyes. Then she realized she was crying again. We just let five soldiers be infected to save a few others, she thought. We just lost five people, plus everyone they killed in the street… Maybe that kind of math was necessary, but it felt evil, and she struggled with her helpless guilt and self-reproach.

The hillside beyond the remnants of the town was brown and green. Ruth spotted a yellow figure, someone in a hazmat suit. Other soldiers gathered around him. She was disappointed by the size of the group. Is that it? she wondered. Were there more in hiding? Maybe a larger group wouldn’t have been able to sneak away, so eight or nine commandos and scientists were all that had escaped Grand Lake.

They wrapped one of their own in a peculiar blanket, an olive green Army-issue blanket that looked like it was pierced with wire. Dimples filled the sheet. Ruth thought they’d attached a great many small things to the other side of the blanket, but what? At eighty yards, from a poor angle, it was difficult to see what they were doing, but they walked the blanket from one person to another, positioning it against their knees, chests, air tanks, and helmets. However the blanket functioned, Ruth supposed it was also how they’d replenished their air tanks, by sterilizing the connections first.

A rain of ash flittered from the sky, then cleared again. Ruth caught several glimpses of the blanket’s other side. It was lined with irregular hunks of circuit boards — some barely an inch across, others as much as three — which they’d sewn to the blanket with an odd collection of wire and string. Here and there, a few of the circuit boards were still whole. They were round and set in shallow white plastic caps.

“So what is it?” Foshtomi asked. “Is this gonna work?”

For once, Ruth was a total loss. “They must have rigged some kind of radioactive material,” she said. Those caps look familiar, too, she thought. Where have I seen them before?

Faintly, she heard the screech of tires as the other Humvee continued to cover the road behind her. The commandos hiked down in a group. Two of them were lugging microscopes, which was good, but Ruth was more interested in their blanket, which they immediately spread in front of Foshtomi’s vehicle. After thirty seconds, they laid it over the hood.

“Smoke detectors,” Foshtomi said. “That thing’s got five hundred fucking smoke detectors on it.”

They lifted the blanket and brought it to the driver-side fender, then to the door. Ruth shook her head in confusion. The dismantled fragments of plastic and circuitry were mostly unrecognizable, but the few that remained intact were the back halves of ordinary household smoke detectors. Even then, the front casing and some of the innards had been cut away.

“Ruth?” Cam asked.

“Don’t open your doors until they take off their suits and prove it’s all right,” she said, watching the men outside, yet she remembered one of the many calls for material that had gone out since the war. The government paid in ammunition and seeds for items like gasoline, drugs, batteries, and copper. There had also been a bounty for smoke detectors. Morristown had even hosted a collection center for several weeks, where government agents filled three trucks with scavenged goods. At the time, Ruth supposed they were installing fire alarms in a lot of new construction, but there was another reason for this stockpile, something else they wanted.

It took another half an hour before the commandos finished with all four vehicles. “They said twenty minutes,” Foshtomi groused even as she made an effort to calm her troops on the radio. “Just hold tight,” she told them. “Hold tight.” Then she glanced at Huff and said, “Jesus, I gotta pee.”

The commandos took turns wrapping themselves in the blanket again. Meanwhile, Foshtomi also spoke with their leader, shouting through the glass as he leaned his helmet close. General Walls was in his fifties, Ruth thought, brown-haired and good-looking without a beard. It was unusual to see a clean-shaven man.

“Sir? What’s the plan?” Foshtomi asked.

“There’s an Army depot downriver near the hydroelectric plant,” he said. “We need to—”

“We just drove through there, sir. It’s full of zombies.”

“We need to get our science assets out of sight, lieutenant. Every minute we spend in the open is pushing our luck. We need to regroup.”

“Goldman thinks we can steal a new vaccine from the Chinese, sir,” Foshtomi said. “That’s what we’d planned to do — set up a raid.”

“How many troops do you have, lieutenant?”

“Eight including me, sir, plus the four civilians.”

“She must have balls the size of that Humvee,” another man said.

Walls nodded with a grim smile inside his faceplate. “The Chinese put at least two troop carriers on the mountain,” he said. “Even if all of us went back, we’d be outnumbered ten to one.”

“But then we’d be immune, sir.”

“We’d also be dead.”

“Wait, that’s it!” a woman said behind Walls. “Does he need to be alive? The enemy soldier, I mean. He doesn’t need to be alive, does he?”

“What are you thinking?” Walls asked.

Ruth pressed against the plastic on the window with her fingertips and her cheek, trying to follow their conversation. The woman wore one of the two civilian suits, bright yellow among the others’ black.

“The Chinese sacrificed at least a dozen planes when the bombs went off,” the woman said. “We tracked an IL-76 Mainstay that crashed not too far from here. That’s the only reason we saw it. It cut right in front of our radar.”

Walls turned to the Humvee. “Would their pilots have the vaccine, too?”

“Yes!” Ruth shouted.

“What kind of coordinates can you give us?” Walls asked the woman in the yellow suit. She held their radio, but set it by her feet to take one of the laptops Walls carried in a sling with a briefcase.

“Let me see what I can bring up,” she said.

“We’ll divide into two groups,” Walls said. “I need volunteers to go for the plane.”

“I know the area,” Cam said to Foshtomi.

“No,” Ruth said.

“I can scout for them.”

“Cam, no!” He just wants to keep running, she thought. From what? Allison’s death? “Let the soldiers handle it. We’re already doing our part. We—”

“He wouldn’t want you anyway,” Foshtomi said. “I don’t mean because of what you did. I mean because he can draw on his commandos.”

But she was wrong. “Lieutenant,” Walls said with impatience, “let’s have some volunteers. I need everyone on my team.” It was another example of that brutal math. “These men are translators and engineers,” he said, indicating his people, whereas Foshtomi’s troops were truck drivers, farmers, and artillery crew. Walls could afford to lose them.

“I’ll go,” Cam said.

“How many suits do I get?” Foshtomi asked through the window. Her tone bordered on insubordination, but Ruth liked her for sticking up for her soldiers.

Walls stared at her. “Two,” he said. “Will that be sufficient, lieutenant? I’m going to put my suit on Goldman. The others stay on my nanotech people, my pilot, and my translator.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Let us change out first,” Walls said. “Goldman can dress and then we’ll mount up.”

“Yes, sir.” Foshtomi turned to Huff and said, “Get me four volunteers. I need two guys with masks. The other two can have the suits.”

“I’ll head up this mission, lieutenant,” Huff said.

“I didn’t ask — Thank you, Tanya.”

Another of the commandos sidled up to the Humvee with his head bent to peer inside. But it wasn’t a man. The face inside the helmet was female, aristocratic and lean. Ruth gawked at her. “Deborah! Hey! Deborah!” she yelled.

A wan smile was the first reaction from Deborah Reece. Then she set her glove on the outside of the window and Ruth mimicked her old rival exactly, trying to meet Deborah’s hand through the glass.

Was there forgiveness in this gesture?

Ruth didn’t try to hide her tears. She beamed at Deborah, ecstatic yet also bewildered. Their paths had crossed so many times before. Why? Too many other friends had died or separated themselves from her. Frank Hernandez. James Hollister. Ulinov. Newcombe. Ruth couldn’t say if it was fate that had brought her back together with Foshtomi and Deborah, but more and more she believed in providence. Statistics alone couldn’t explain this reoccurring destiny. Yes, they’d all made their homes within fifty miles of each other, and she and Deborah were both carefully guarded for their education — but Kendra Freedman was a part of the equation, too, wasn’t she?

Four women. They represented darkness and light. Freedman was the most powerful component by far, but Ruth couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the brash Ranger lieutenant who would bring them to safety. Sarah Foshtomi was here for a reason, too. Ruth believed it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not even knowing why she was apologizing. “I’m so sorry.” Maybe the words were a mistake. She didn’t want Deborah to assume what Foshtomi had thought — that she was responsible for the new plague.

“It’s okay,” Deborah said. “I’m glad we found you.”

There wasn’t time for more. The first commando opened his suit as two others kept the blanket against his face and hands. Deborah stepped away from the Humvee to assist.

Nothing happened. The man was okay.

“What the hell is in those things?” Foshtomi asked, meaning the smoke detectors. Her tone was sarcastic. She wanted to break the tension. Ruth tried to laugh for her, but it was a weak, distracted sound. Everything she did felt forced, a mixture of losing control and keeping herself tightly under wraps.

They decontaminated General Walls next, then the woman in the civilian suit. Moving the commandos into the vehicles was more complicated. Foshtomi’s group had to open every Humvee and truck either to let volunteers out or bring the commandos in. They managed it in stages, risking only one vehicle at a time. Ruth hoped Deborah would end up in Two with her, but Walls sent Deborah to Five.

Then it was Ruth’s turn to get out. She was helpless to stop the process, but she felt ashamed again as she donned her suit. Walls had decided to risk the plague to save her. What could she possibly say to him?

I won’t fail you again, she thought. I’ll find a way. I swear it.

After she dressed, she told them about Kendra Freedman and the message in the nanotech, but Walls just shook his head. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about that right now,” he said.

“Freedman could stop the plague!”

“We’ll talk about it. But let’s get moving.”

Sergeant Huff and three men were left behind with the Ford Expedition to drive north, where Agent Rezac had placed the fallen plane. Ruth wondered at their chances. Walls should have sent a larger force, but Huff expected to go most of the way on foot, hiking into the ravines where the IL-76 had gone down, and Walls couldn’t afford to give up more of his few remaining air tanks.

Lieutenant Pritchard was the commando assigned to Huff’s empty seat inside Foshtomi’s Humvee, probably because Walls wanted to make certain he controlled the vehicle. Foshtomi had challenged him once, if slightly — and Walls must remember how Ruth had betrayed them before. Pritchard was his enforcer.

Like Walls, Pritchard had given up his suit. Ruth was the only one in the vehicle who sat awkwardly, trying to make room for her air tanks, sealed off from everyone else.

Ash swirled up from the road as they drove. Ruth was allowed to call Deborah to quiz her about her equipment, which was good, and the progress she’d made, which was zero. The other woman, Emma, was only another medical officer like Deborah. Neither of them had any nanotech skills. The brief exchange left Ruth disheartened. They were done in two minutes and weren’t given the opportunity for more personal words. Walls demanded radio silence.

Ruth turned to Pritchard. “How did you decontaminate these suits?” she asked — anything to divert herself. She was wasting too much energy on recrimination and guilt. She needed to hear that they could keep her friends safe. “How much radiation were you taking?”

“Nothing,” Pritchard said. “Millirems.”

“So the blanket’s no good at a distance.”

“Two or three inches. Maybe four.”

“I thought we’d made more progress with OECs,” Ruth said, but Pritchard only grunted.

“What are you talking about?” Cam said.

“Open environmental countermeasures. During the plague year, we tried everything we could think of to stop nanotech, including beta emitters like Cobalt-60.” She saw his confusion and said, “Radioactive material. The idea was that you could carry an OEC with you like a beacon. Anyone within range of it would be safe.”

“Except for the radiation,” Cam said.

“Right.” Ruth hesitated. Radiation sickness had become less of a problem after Leadville’s science teams developed the booster nanotech, which provided a low, steady level of protection. The booster would help them against the fallout, and Ruth wondered if it made sense to try a larger radioactive source. “Even a medium dose would be better than dying right away or losing your mind,” she said.

Cam nodded. “How does that blanket work?”

“Smoke detectors have a bit of Americium-241 inside,” Pritchard said, staring outside as they passed another camp of infected people. “It emits alpha particles into an ionization chamber. If you obstruct it with smoke, the alpha flux drops and the alarm goes off. Complex 3 was full of ‘em. Cut away the shielding and you have a very small radiation flashlight.”

“Why didn’t they tell us? Ruth? Why didn’t you tell us? We could have had a bunch of these things.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Cam, I consulted on large-scale OECs, but I never knew how smoke detectors work until Pritchard told us.” And now it’s too late, she thought. How many stockpiles were never utilized because we’ve been too busy growing food or arguing politics with ourselves?

“What do you mean by large-scale?” Foshtomi asked. “Like more bombs?”

“Yes. But what’s the point? We talked about laying down huge sterilized areas with nuclear waste, too, but no one could stay there. They tested it in parts of Denver and Phoenix just to give scavenging efforts more time, but then we were losing people and supplies in a different way.”

“So the fallout is a good thing as far as we’re concerned,” Foshtomi said. “It might hurt the plague.”

“Yes. That’s one reason why we used to be safe in the mountains. The atmosphere’s thinner, so we got more UV. A lot of ultraviolet is hard on nanotech.”

“The machine plague self-destructed at altitude,” Cam said.

He was still angry, so Ruth’s tone was cautious. “That’s what happened above the barrier,” she said, “but sometimes we gained some extra room because nanobots are delicate little fuckers. They burn easily.”

People forgot that nanotech was man-made, whereas living things were the result of two billion years of evolution and had learned ways to heal that nanobots couldn’t mimic. Not yet. They wouldn’t need a great leap from existing replication keys to self-repair mechanisms. It was only one more program to develop — but it would slow both plagues and vaccines.

Self-repairing nanotech would be more durable but less volatile. That was why it hadn’t happened yet, which was fortunate. Otherwise an OEC might not work at all.

“Viruses can be killed by a few hundred radioactive impacts,” Ruth said. “Nanobots are probably disabled by no more than five or ten. Imagine a well-made watch being shot by a dozen BB guns. Something inside it’ll break.”

“So we should be driving up again,” Cam said. “Not down.”

“It’s like nighttime with the smoke,” Foshtomi said. “We’re not getting any UV today.”

“But it’ll clear. We could—”

“Hey,” Pritchard said. “This isn’t open for discussion. General Walls knows where he’s going.”

“Ruth?”

“Let’s see what they’ve planned,” she said. “Okay? If we can get the new vaccine, that’s a thousand times better than hoping there’ll be enough sun tomorrow to make a difference.”

Cam nodded, but she was afraid of his silence. So was Pritchard. The USAF lieutenant turned in his seat and said, “You with me on this, Najarro? We follow orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Cam said.

Ruth would have touched his leg if she wasn’t in the suit, because it wasn’t fair that she was safe and he wasn’t. She wanted to take it off because she wanted to share his fate, but she knew that would be stupid and disrespectful. Everyone had sacrificed too much for her to reject the thin, temporary luck of her suit.

Then her frustration became something darker. A chill drew up her spine like one slow finger and Ruth tried to ward off the premonition, bowing her head inside her helmet to pray. Oh please, God, don‘t, she thought.

She’d remembered her dream of losing Cam. Was it an omen? Ruth did not believe a higher power was on her side. No one was handpicked for glory or salvation. That was obvious. Their losses were horrific. So were their mistakes. There certainly wasn’t a big white Zeus in the sky who favored them over anyone else. To think otherwise was simplistic, even stupid. They made themselves what they were — hero, villain, bystander, linchpin — even as they were influenced by everything around them. The world was always in flux. That was destiny. Ruth had utter faith in the laws of probability, and each step she took was like a promise, leading her in one direction or another. She knew her subconscious often grasped things ahead of her waking mind. Was there a pattern she should have seen? Or was it simply that in a bad situation, she knew Cam would give his life to save hers?

She needed to be ready to stop him.