Plague Zone

20

Their convoy decelerated suddenly as they came around a bend in the highway. Ruth looked up, expecting trouble. They’d arrived at the depot and their four vehicles split into pairs to cover the road from both directions.

The depot was larger than she expected. Some of the small base was fresh construction, but the squat new bunkers and fences had also absorbed two preexisting green aluminum warehouses. They were old and weather-streaked. Some sort of company sign had been removed from the face of one warehouse, leaving a less-faded square where the sign had protected the metal for years. The few open areas inside the fence were packed with trucks, an Abrams tank, and several trailers and RVs, which the soldiers would have used for offices and living space. Most of the vehicles were still parked in neat lines. Otherwise the depot was a mess.

To Ruth, it looked as though the mind plague had spared a few people inside the trailers. Then they’d been attacked by the rest. In many places, the windows were blown out by gunfire. Two of the RVs had burned. At least five corpses sprawled on the tarmac, some of them charred.

“This is Bornmann,” the radio said. “Hold your positions, but sing out if you see anybody. Over.”

Some of the infected would still be alive. Were they hiding? Or had they gotten through the wire and walked away? Ruth’s gaze traced along the fence but didn’t find any breaks. “You need to call off your general,” she said to Pritchard. “We can do better than this.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Look at it! This place is crawling with nanotech, and everything’s burned. We can do better. Even a regular house—”

“There’s a plane inside.”

“What? There’s a plane in where?”

“We never planned to stay at this location,” Pritchard said. “Just relax. We know what we’re doing.”

Ruth scowled inside her helmet. Then the radio crackled again. “This is Bornmann. We’re stepping out. Route to us through Reece’s suit if you see anything. Over.”

General Walls had put all of his suited personnel in the back of the Army truck with the blanket. It was a decision that allowed him to leave the first Humvee alone, neither removing nor adding people. The suited troops were able to jump out of the covered truckbed freely. They were his strongest force, even if one of them was Deborah, rather than another commando — but only four suited people left the truck, striding quickly to the fence.

“You know how to use that headset?” Pritchard asked, pointing at Ruth’s helmet.

“Yes.”

“Listen in, okay? Don’t say anything.”

Ruth fumbled with the control belt at her hip as Cam voiced the same problem that had been bothering her. “I don’t see a plane or anywhere to take off.”

“Black ops,” Pritchard said. “We tried to prepare for as much shit like today as possible. There are aircraft stashed all over the Rockies.”

“You mean in the warehouse? Where do you take off?”

“It’s a V-22 Osprey. Vertical takeoff and landing. What do you hear, Goldman?”

“They’re not saying anything.”

“Where are we going?” Cam said.

“Albuquerque. Last I heard, they were still okay. Rezac’s trying to confirm. Now shut up. Watch behind us if you can.”

They had a bad moment when the Chinese jets roared overhead, unseen in the haze, but the fighters kept going. Bornmann’s team cut the fence and ran into the lot. Ruth could just barely see them across the highway. The warehouse had huge rolling bay doors, which they left shut, entering through a man-sized door instead.

“We’ve got our wings,” Bornmann said on his suit radio. Deborah relayed this message to the other vehicles but Ruth had already told her group, raising a small cheer inside their Humvee.

Then the real work began. Bormann’s team had to assume the interior of the warehouse was dusted with the plague, too, even though there was no sign of chaos. Before allowing Bornmann inside to begin his preflight checklist, they decontaminated a wide swath of the fuselage. They also turned the blanket on the air itself as best they could. Meanwhile, Walls asked Ruth to take over as their radio relay. She agreed even though it meant Deborah would be sent into the depot with her friend, Emma Kincaid. They needed the extra hands.

At the same time, eighteen miles north, Sergeant Huff reported that her squad had driven as far as possible to the downed Chinese plane. They were proceeding on foot.

A nasty thought occurred to Ruth. She didn’t know what the Osprey looked like and she wondered if there was room onboard for everyone. If Huff’s team managed to rejoin the larger group, there were twenty-one of them. Who would stay if their plane was too small?

The wait was excruciating. Ruth was hungry again and her body grew stiff and uncomfortable. Pretty soon Pritchard would have to give her the last air tank in their Humvee. Before then, she was sure she’d need to pee inside her suit. Foshtomi had already crouched under the steering wheel, shucked down her pants and wet the floor. It was unavoidable.

Despite these distractions, Ruth continued to analyze her surface scan of the nano. What she really wanted was a look at the new vaccine through the magnetic resonance force microscope that the commandos had brought with them. Unfortunately, it sounded as if it would be at least an hour before Huff’s team caught up even if they didn’t have any trouble securing a few samples of the vaccine. Nor was there room for Ruth to set up the MRFM inside the Humvee in any case.

Cam operated Ruth’s laptop for her, since she was too clumsy in her gloves. His bare hands were scarred and ugly, but, to her, they were only proof of his incomparable toughness. She was ineffective. Her head was fuzzy. She could have napped, but no one else had slept, either. All of them kept going, so Ruth blinked and shook herself and cursed.

No one’s going to buy you a goddamned coffee, she thought.

In the Army truck, Walls and Rezac were also crunching data, and Rezac came on the Harris radio. “Goldman, are you sure your translation of Freedman’s message is correct?”

“I’m sure,” Ruth said.

“There is no Saint Bernadine Hospital in Los Angeles.”

“What kind of maps are you using?”

“We’ve got data files like you wouldn’t believe. Google. State. Fed. That hospital isn’t there.”

It must be, Ruth thought with new despair. If the message was wrong — if Freedman didn’t really know where she was — they would never find her. She could be anywhere. That meant Ruth was alone again.

The suited troops began to clear the tarmac in front of the warehouse, led by Captain Medrano, their engineer. Some of the traffic jam was easy to move. The trucks and jeeps in front were simply driven out onto the highway, but twice they discovered zombies. These people had been infected long enough to reach the second stage. Once it was a single man, apparently dozing. The next time they found four men and a woman hiding in a truck. The woman jumped Lang and knocked him down. Sweeney shot them all. Then another man stumbled out of a bunker into the hammering sound of Sweeney’s M4.

The damage was done. Gunshots echoed up and down the valley, so Lang killed the fifth man with his pistol — but now they could expect more zombies and maybe the Chinese, too. It was hard to gauge how far the sound carried through the fallout.

Medrano urged his team to move the vehicles at double-time, even after Emma nearly ripped her glove after catching it on a belt buckle inside a car. Meanwhile, he sent Deborah into the warehouse with the blanket again to decontaminate as much surface area as possible. More trucks rolled out of the depot. One of the burned RVs was still in the way, but Medrano didn’t think it would drive even if he could risk entering it, so they cleared a number of other vehicles just to make room to shove it aside. The half-melted tires peeled away when he nosed a truck into the RV’s side, its rims shrieking on the asphalt.

“Two, this is Rezac,” the radio said. “I think I have some good news. There’s a hospital by the same name in San Bernadino, one of the cities in the Los Angeles sprawl. Saint Bernadine. San Bernadino.”

Ruth gestured for Pritchard to give her the handset, which she clunked against her helmet. “This is Goldman, nice work,” she said, but Rezac was still talking.

“—makes sense. Most of their people are inside Los Angeles proper or in the desert, using our old military bases. They might have put their nanotech labs away from everything else in case there was an accident.”

“I think you’re right. Nice work.”

“It gets better. Saint Bernadine might have survived the nukes. I mean, it won’t be in great shape, but there are some hills and terrain that would have shaded it from the blasts.”

“Is there any way you can get a satellite on that area?”

“No. Maybe. I’m still trying to get a signal from anyone else in NORTHCOM.”

“Thank you,” Ruth said, and Pritchard muttered, “Shit. I hope Albuquerque’s okay.” Ruth turned to Cam and said, “She’s alive. Did you hear? Freedman could still be alive!”

“Yeah.” He tried to smile.

Ruth went back to her laptop, but her concentration was shot. It didn’t help that she was cramping. Finally she had to pee. Relaxing those muscles was humiliating, even though no one else could feel or smell the trickling puddle. Ruth tried to emulate Foshtomi’s tomboy attitude to herself. Just be glad you only have to pee, she thought, but she wasn’t looking forward to taking off her suit and revealing what had happened. Maybe it was childish, but she wanted to be a giant like Freedman, and legends didn’t wet their pants.

Her anger was a spark.

“I might have found a weakness,” she said, returning to an earlier idea. “The new vaccine must recognize the same marker that the mind plague uses to identify people who are already infected.”

“What does that mean?” Pritchard asked.

“Both nanos are limited by the marker. They communicate with each other. The mind plague only replicates to a certain maximum within any given individual. Otherwise it would tear them apart just like the first plague. The vaccine works almost in the same way. It only protects people in which it finds the mind plague isn’t already present. The marker makes all the difference. Without it, the Chinese would lose their advantage. The vaccine would be transmitted to our side, too, the way every other nanotech spread around the world, and Freedman’s conceptual work has always been too advanced for that.”

“Why would she even build this shit for them in the first place?” Foshtomi asked.

“I don’t know. She’s a prisoner. Her message sounded like she thought she was somewhere else — that the Chinese were fighting India, not us.”

“So you were right,” Cam said. “The vaccine won’t reverse the plague in anyone who’s already sick.”

“I don’t think so. But if we can isolate that marker, we might be able to exploit it. Theoretically, we could design a parasite that would go after the mind plague and shut it off. We…” Lord God, she thought. What if Freedman had deliberately constructed the mind plague with the marker available as a kill switch?

“What is it?” Bobbi asked. “Ruth? What?”

“The marker’s too obvious,” she said, shifting restlessly. “I think Freedman sabotaged the mind plague so people like me could stop it. But I need time. And I need to get out of this fucking car.”

“How much time?” Pritchard asked.

“I don’t know. Days. Somewhere safe.”

“I don’t think we have that long.”

“I know.” Ruth’s claustrophobia was squeezing down on her lungs again and she turned away to stare out the window.

The light never changed. There was no sun. The day seemed eternal beneath the black sky, but Ruth guessed it was early afternoon when Medrano came on the suit radio just minutes later. “We’re clear, sir,” Medrano said.

Walls spoke on their main frequency. “This is Five,” he said. “One, you’re first. Park to the side of the warehouse door. Two, you drive straight in. Bornmann says there’s room behind the plane if you stay to your left. We need space around the forward door, just make sure you don’t hit the wing. Is that understood? Take it slow. Over.”

“Roger that, sir,” Pritchard said. He turned to Foshtomi. “As slow as butter.”

“Don’t talk dirty to me,” Foshtomi said.

That didn’t really make sense, but Pritchard laughed and Ruth glanced sideways at Cam. She watched his expression until he noticed her eyes and turned, and she thought again that he was very handsome despite his scars and his beard, which she’d always hated. It was a strong face.

She made a formless sound like a question. “Mhm.”

I love you, she thought.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said.

“Yes.” Ruth leaned her shoulder against him. Then Foshtomi started their engine and rolled forward.

The first Humvee parked on the side of the warehouse doors, only one of which had been slid open. Foshtomi drove in. As she passed, three of the commandos rolled the door shut again. Foshtomi hit her headlights. One was broken, but the other cut into the gloom.

The Osprey was a sleek, black, medium-sized aircraft that hugged the ground. Its wheels seemed ridiculously small. Thick wings extended out of the top of the fuselage instead of from the bottom or the middle as Ruth had seen on other planes. The propellers were also different, with long, long blades on rectangular engines as big as cars. The plane itself looked large enough to carry everyone, although it would be crowded. An enormous pair of tail fins rose from the back. Foshtomi eased past. In back of the warehouse were a row of white-walled offices and she stopped alongside them.

“Wait for my order,” Walls said on the radio. “One, you’re out first after Reece decons your vehicle. Move for the plane through the regular door.”

“Copy that, sir,” a soldier in One answered.

Ruth marveled at their discipline. Walls was using the men in the other Humvee to see if the warehouse was safe. They must know it, and yet they did as they were told.

Five minutes later, Deborah appeared beside Ruth’s vehicle with the blanket. As she maneuvered around the Humvee, Ruth’s suit radio said, “This is Bornmann. The guys from One are inside the plane and we’ve sealed up again. Over.”

“They’re safe,” Ruth said to her friends.

“Excellent.” Pritchard gestured from side to side. “Make sure we have everything when we go, your laptop, food, water, weapons. I’ll grab the radio.”

“Move around if you can,” Foshtomi said. “Limber up. We’ve been sitting a long time.”

They rustled against each other, and Bobbi fidgeted with her jacket collar. Cam had already donned his goggles and mask. Ruth didn’t want to jinx them by saying anything that sounded like farewell — these might be their last words — but it didn’t make sense to wait. For what? She wanted to be braver than she really was, so she forced herself to take the chance.

“I love you,” she said. “I’ve always loved you.”

The second part wasn’t true, but she wanted it to be. She needed that level of connection and support, and she didn’t want to lose him without making it real.

“Me, too,” Cam said. “I love you, too.”

Ruth wept when he kissed the faceplate of her helmet. They were so close, and yet couldn’t touch. She also felt like she should say something to Bobbi and the two soldiers. She didn’t know what — but just for being alive, they were her sisters and her brother. “Thank you,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Just get us out of this shit, Ruth,” Foshtomi said.

“Okay, clear,” Deborah said on the suit radio. Ruth and Pritchard relayed this information to Walls, and Walls said, “It’s your turn. Go.”

They stepped out.

There was a man inside one of the office windows. He stood just inches from Ruth, slumping. He must have been asleep until the throaty engine of the Humvee woke him. He’d been hurt. His jaw seemed broken, and blood leaked from his teeth down his chin.

“Oh!” she shouted, flinching back toward the Humvee.

The infected man rattled the glass with both hands. His eyes were huge and disoriented. They didn’t match his face, which was aimed directly at her. Instead, he gazed upward and to his right. Almost nothing showed of his eyes except the whites, as if he was staring deep into his own skull. But he was aware of her. He shoved his hands into the window again. A crack split sideways through the glass.

Foshtomi yelled from the driver door as Ruth began to turn. “Run!” Ruth felt Cam grab her air tanks, but his glove slipped off as she bent and shoved him. She was safe in her suit. He was not. She put as much weight into her arm as possible and knocked him past the rear of the Humvee.

I love you.

“Wait—” he shouted.

Foshtomi opened fire. A three-round burst from her M4 punched through the window and the infected man. Debris exploded from the white office wall as he spun away, blood spattering from his chest.

Ruth felt a sting across her wrist, either a ricochet or a shard of glass. Before she could look down, her forearm went rigid. The muscles locked up as if they’d become steel. It nearly tore the flesh from her shoulder. Tendons jumped all the way from her elbow through the side of her chest. She would have screamed if there was time. Then the pain engulfed her heart. The floor sagged up to meet her like a big gray wall and she was only barely aware of slamming her helmet against the Humvee as she fell. She was no longer able to differentiate between the vehicle and the floor at that speed.

Her last thought was a strange sense of déjà vu, as if she was coming home. She’d been here before. Her agony and confusion were intense, but those feelings were coupled with an impression of longing. Somehow she knew where to go. She would find her way there, and her body jerked with nerve impulses as she tried to stand and walk.

Ruth Goldman had absorbed the mind plague.