Plague Zone

23

In the cyclone of bodies and metal, Deborah felt a snapping pain through her left shoulder. She breathed hot dust and smoke. Then it was done. The tornado stopped, but the pain stayed with her, crippling that arm.

She was outside the plane. The ground beneath her was tough and dry, and she felt a breeze and daylight. Despite the curtains of dust, she saw most of the fuselage nearby. Then the hazy sun disappeared. When she lifted her head, she’d moved into the shadows beneath the high, broken line of one wing.

There must be other survivors.

“Bornmann!” she shouted, rasping for air. “Cam? Hey!”

Why didn’t they answer?

Somehow she staggered up, twisted nearly in half by the dislocated shoulder. Her ribs on that side were hurt, too, and she was covered with grit and blood. Most of it wasn’t her own. Foshtomi, she thought, trying to calculate how badly the other woman was hurt by how much of her uniform was soaked. Is there any way she’s still alive?

Gnarled oak trees and scrub brush covered the hillside. The brown plants were peppered with gray and white debris. Fire licked at the brush in several places. The Osprey had flung jagged chunks of aluminum and steel into the hillside along with wiring, glass, and plastic. The wind stank of jet fuel.

Deborah didn’t think to run away, not even faced with the rising flames. She was nothing without her squadmates. She barely remembered the self-doubt she’d felt before Walls led them out of Complex 3. Deborah had come a very long way just to find herself back where she’d begun, as a reliable cog in the machine, but she was pleased to be that woman again. It was all she’d ever wanted. Her suffering had reinforced everything that was best in her — her willingness to give of herself. The team needed her, not only as another gun but as a doctor, especially now.

She turned into the wreckage. There was a man crumpled beneath a flat chunk of a propeller blade. She hurried toward him but Sweeney was dead, his neck wrenched backward. His legs were broken, too, and maybe his spine. Looking away, Deborah noticed one of the engines behind her. In one sense, she was still inside the plane. The main bulk of the aircraft surrounded her, forming an uneven barricade.

The sky reverberated with the distant roar of jets. That seemed unimportant. Within two steps, she spotted two more human shapes. Deborah heard someone groan and lurched closer. “Bornmann?” she said. “Hey—”

The first man was Lang. A small area on the left side of his face was unharmed. Otherwise she might not have recognized him. Impact had rubbed most of the skin and muscles from the side of his skull.

Translator, copilot, commando — Lang might have been the most versatile element of their team and Deborah paused over his corpse, feeling demoralized and lost. Then she banished her grief with a bit of gallows humor she’d learned from Derek Mills, the pilot of the shuttle Endeavour. “Pilots are always the first to the scene of a crash,” he’d said when they were planning their descent from the ISS. She had to honor Lang. Her sense was that their pilots had pulled the Osprey out of a death spiral, bringing the aircraft up at the last minute. If they hadn‘t, she would have been killed, too, so she moved past him with a firm sense of gratitude.

The next man was Captain Medrano. He groaned again. “It’s me,” Deborah said meaninglessly. He was barely conscious. His arm was broken and his face was cut. His pulse was steady, though, and her cursory examination detected no other bleeding or major injuries.

In the short time they’d known each other, Medrano seemed like a badger to her. He was short and roundish and skeptical. Deborah wasn’t sure if she liked him, but he was her brother nevertheless. There weren’t enough of them left to pick and choose.

As she applied pressure to his face wound, she glanced through the wreckage again. She felt as if she’d failed Ruth for being unable to find Cam. Had Cam and Ruth become a couple at last? What if he was dead like Sweeney and Lang?

Deborah had never approved of Cam. He was dangerous, untrained, and seemed to bring out all the worst in Ruth. He made her so emotional. He was also fiercely loyal. Deborah couldn’t help but respect that level of commitment, and, like Medrano, she was also bound to Cam.

“Get up,” Medrano said as if to himself.

“Easy,” Deborah warned him, but he spoke again, clearly, trying to focus his dazed eyes on her.

“Get up. Run. The fighters—”

The Chinese fighters were coming back.

Deborah had been listening to the distant engines change in volume and pitch without realizing what it meant. The sound galvanized her. “You’re coming with me,” she said, flush with new strength.

“Can’t walk,” Medrano said. “My ankle—”

“My shoulder—” she retorted.

A long section of the fuselage rocked toward them. The metal shrieked against smaller chunks of debris. Deborah dragged at Medrano’s uniform with her good hand, gaining a few inches as the wreckage teetered overhead.

Someone walked out of the plane like a miracle.

He was filthy, maybe burned. He was also bent much like Deborah, protecting his ribs, and she recognized the shoulder-length black hair. Cam. His luck seemed like something learned — a trait she envied for herself.

“Help me!” she yelled, but Cam stopped and looked up.

The noise in the sky was increasing. It echoed from the hills. Deborah pulled Medrano upright as Cam raced closer. He grabbed Medrano’s other side and the three of them ran downhill into the widely spaced trees. Medrano screamed as his wrist banged against Deborah’s back. Her shoulder was agony. Their ragged forward motion carried them past the wreckage and an orange, snarling clump of poison oak.

Cam leaned in front of Medrano, his lips drawn back from his teeth. Two of his incisors were gone. The rest looked like misplaced fangs. “This way!” he yelled, hauling everyone to his side like a human chain.

We’re not going to make it, Deborah thought, glancing back as the Chinese fighters screamed overhead. She wanted to face her own death.

Their turbulence washed through the oak trees and her short, dirty hair. In the same heartbeat, one missile slammed into the Osprey’s remains. Ordnance was precious. If those pilots knew there were survivors, they must have believed a single missile was enough. The explosion threw the Osprey’s belly and starboard wing into the air. There were secondary blasts from the fuel tanks in the wing. Ribbons of fire sprayed over the hillside.

Concussion shoved Deborah into the trees, separating her from Medrano and Cam. Maybe she bounced. The pain in her shoulder was incandescent and she blacked out.

She was brought back by someone pounding on her chest. Cam gasped as he hit her, and she realized this new pain was too sharp to attribute to his fist. She stank of charred skin and cloth. He’d doused a spot of burning fuel on her uniform, scalding his bare hand in the process. They were enveloped in smoke. The forest had ignited.

“Deborah,” he said. “Deborah?” He was obviously woozy himself, but she knew he’d had EMT training — nothing like her own schooling, but she was glad just the same.

“My shoulder. Can you reset it?”

“I’ll try.” He turned and said, “Medrano. Help me.”

He bent her arm at the elbow, rotating it outwards as Deborah tried not to twist away from the pain. Then he lifted her elbow even further, wrenching the ball of her humerus back into its socket through the torn ring of cartilage. Deborah grayed out again. But afterwards, the pain was reduced, and she’d even regained some motion.

There wasn’t time to make a sling. The smoke was suffocating, and they could see the flames crackling up through the hooked branches of two trees.

“Go,” Cam said.

Deborah outranked him — they both outranked him — but she let him take over. She remembered how he’d convinced Walls to send them west. The same characteristics that made him dangerous were exactly what the three of them needed now — decisive, unrelenting nerve. She had to trust his aggression. It was the real basis of Cam’s luck. Sometimes the chances he took were the best and only path.

The three of them jogged downhill, groaning, limping. They had nothing but each other. No radio. No water. Where did he think they were going?

The smoke thinned but Cam changed direction suddenly, moving them sideways across the slope when they might have escaped the fire by continuing downhill. Deborah almost spoke up. What are you doing? There was a clear area like a meadow below them, empty of brush. Why not run through it? Then she realized those trees were leafless and dead. Worse, something slithered on the rotting gray oaks. Ants coated the naked wood.

“Wait,” Cam said. “No.” He turned with his arms out as if to collect them — to change direction again — but he froze with his hands up.

There were enemy soldiers waiting in the brush.

Deborah saw at least eight men in a skirmish line, their faces hidden by tan biochem hoods or black, older-model gas masks. Their jackets were dark green. Most of them held AK-47 rifles. Others carried submachine guns she’d didn’t recognize.

One of them shouted in Mandarin. “Bié dòng! Xià jiàng!”

She didn’t understand, but the intent was clear. He gestured for them to get down. Within seconds, three more soldiers appeared uphill. There was no way out except back into the smoke and the ants, but Medrano was willing. “I’ll draw their fire,” he said.

“Hold it,” Deborah said. “Don’t move.”

Neither of them carried any weapons except their sidearms, and Cam’s gun belt had been torn away in the crash.

Cam raised his hands even higher and Medrano got one arm up, keeping his broken limb against his side. Deborah didn’t see any choice except to mimic her friends, although her disappointment was keen.

The man who’d shouted turned to his men, pointing at two of them. “Onycmume ux Hahe said.

They’re Russian! Deborah thought. She should have known. Chinese troops wouldn’t have worn this hodgepodge collection of masks and gloves — they were immune. These people were Russian, and they were also on the run from the plague.

“3aumecb eÀ0!” one said. “3aMumecb eÀ0!”

Deborah had learned the feel and pacing of their language during her months in orbit with Commander Ulinov. Nikola had even taught her several phrases. She tried them now as the pair of soldiers approached, concealed in their biochem hoods. “o6poe ympo, moapuu!” she said, Good morning, comrades, even though the day was well into late afternoon. It was a game she’d played with Ulinov. “Kaº Bbl nouaeme?”

How are you living today?

In Russian, the words were ambiguous. The phrase served as a basic “hello,” but could also mean more. It surprised them. The two soldiers hesitated.

“You’re American,” the officer called.

They were so grungy and burned, they were unrecognizable. He’d thought they must be Chinese. That was why he’d shouted first in Mandarin.

“Da,” Deborah said. Yes. “Where are we?”

“Put yourself on your knees,” the officer replied, with a curt motion for his soldiers to take them.

“Wait!” Cam said. “Stay back. We can protect you from the Chinese nanotech, but we’re probably crawling with it. We came out of the plague zones. You might be infected if you touch us.”

“You would be sick,” the officer said. “Not flying.”

“I’m Major Reece with the United States Army,” Deborah said, asserting herself, but Cam surprised them all. He was honest.

“We have the new vaccine,” he said. “If you help us, we can give it to you, too.”

The fire was getting closer. Deborah could hear it licking its way across the hill behind her as the smoke thickened. “We should move,” she said, but the officer refused.

“Nyet. Give us the vaccine,” he said, before barking out a dozen words she didn’t understand. The nearest Russians backed off, but none of them lowered their weapons.

“Let me clean myself,” Cam said. “I can try to decontaminate, at least a bit.”

The officer nodded, but hit the charging handle on his AK-47. Deborah flinched. One wrong move… she thought, barely allowing herself to breathe as Cam scrubbed himself down with brush and dirt. It was a crude decon procedure but clever as always. Deborah wondered what else Ruth had taught him. Would he have come up with this idea by himself? He was intelligent, just uneducated. That made him unpredictable.

“Major Reece and I are in charge here,” Medrano said to him.

“Right.”

“Then keep your mouth shut from now on.”

“We need them. Look at us.” Cam paused with a handful of crumbling brown earth against his sleeve, ignoring the scuffs and gashes beneath his burned uniform. “But they need us, too.”

“We should have negotiated,” Medrano said in a growl. He glanced at Deborah. “Major? It’s not too late.”

“No, I think he’s right,” she said.

“These are the same guys who bombed Leadville and started the whole fucking war—”

“They’re not. At this point, they’re just survivors like us.” Deborah turned to Medrano with as much poise as she could muster, watery-eyed in the smoke. “We don’t even know where we are, Captain. We’re hurt. Unarmed. I think he’s right.”

“What’s to stop them from shooting us as soon as he gives up the vaccine?”

“Information. Tell them, Cam.”

Cam aimed a thin smile at her. It was a sign of approval, and, for the first time, Deborah felt some glimpse of Ruth’s attraction to him. Beneath the scars, he was lean and dark and competent.

Pulling a jackknife from his belt, he crouched and sank the blade into the ground, trying to clean it of nanotech. Then he stood and held the knife over his left hand. “I need one man,” he said to the Russians.

“Sidorov,” the officer said.

In response, a soldier gave his rifle to his mates and walked closer.

“Tell him not to take off his hood!” Cam said. “Hold his breath. Give me his arm.”

This better work, Deborah thought as the officer translated for Cam. If he’s infected, if he falls down twitching — They’ll kill us.

Cam wet the tip of the blade in his own hand. Next, he worked the soldier’s jacket sleeve back from his glove and lightly cut him there. “We were trying to get into Los Angeles,” he said as he worked. “My team has information on the original source of the plague. We think we can stop it.”

“Kpbiwa noexaÀa?” the officer said. “How?”

“We need to get into Los Angeles,” Cam said, taking a hard line with him, but the officer met Cam’s stubbornness with a deflection of his own.

“How long is it before our man is safe?” the officer said.

“It’s already happened. You know how fast nanotech is.”

“But how are we knowing? There is no proof.”

“Tell him to take off his gear.”

This is it, Deborah thought. She tensed as the officer spoke to his man, ready to draw her pistol, ready to run, making her shoulder throb like a drum.

The soldier removed his biochem hood. He was startlingly young, blond like Deborah and nearly as smooth-faced, no more than a teen, and yet his eyes were like stone. Deborah wanted to say something to him, but he wouldn’t understand even if she found the words. We’re your friends, she thought. o6poe ympo, she blurted.

The boy’s veteran gaze flitted up and down her tall, haggard body. Still no emotion showed.

“You can see he’s fine,” Cam said. “Who’s next?”

“We wait,” the officer said.

“We need to get into Los Angeles, a place on the far edge of the city. We think it survived the bombs.”

“That is not impossible,” the officer said.

Deborah felt a thin spark of hope. Could they have a plane? she wondered. Where are we?

“You come with us,” the officer said. “Keep your distance. Sidorov will be your guard. 06e3opycbme ux!”

The boy gestured for Deborah’s sidearm. She didn’t resist. Medrano might have planned otherwise, but there were half a dozen rifles trained on him, so he let the boy have his weapon, too.

They hiked across the hill. Deborah gained new energy as the sun emerged from the haze, dappling through the tangled oaks. It was a soft, sweet yellow. They reeked of smoke and jet fuel and yet she breathed all the way into her belly from the clean air of the breeze. The earth smelled different here than in Colorado, dustier and less green. She’d never tasted anything so beautiful.

The Russian officer tried to maintain his quarantine, walking the rest of his men several paces from Deborah, Cam, Medrano, and the boy — but Deborah quickly flagged. Medrano tried to support her, but he wasn’t much better off. Within minutes, the officer called for a halt and asked Cam to vaccinate two more of his men. He needed someone to carry his prisoners.

A few soldiers had already disappeared, running ahead. Deborah thought two or three of them had also gone back into the smoke. Why? To fight the fire?

Dividing his platoon left the officer with only four men, including himself and the boy. Deborah supposed if there was a time to overpower them, it was now, but she’d slumped to the ground, feeling nauseous. She was only faintly aware of Cam repeating his procedure with the jackknife or of Medrano removing her gun belt to make a combat sling for her arm.

This is what shock feels like, she thought. You’re in shock.

“Water,” she said. “I–Is there water?”

Medrano got a canteen from the boy. Maybe it helped. When they carried her into the Russian camp fifteen minutes later, Deborah was still conscious. She saw one truck in the rock-strewn gully. There was also camouflage netting strung from a fat gray boulder. They brought Deborah beneath it. Her last memory was of the sunlight in the fabric.

Two hours later, they were slashing over the brown land in a helicopter. Deborah remained numb. She felt hypnotized by the yammering vibration of the rotors and the rolling pattern of shadows in the gullies and foothills below. The sun shone low in the west. Darkness reached away from every ridge and peak.

Enjoy it while you can, she thought.

The air here was clean, but, ahead of them, the southern sky was lost behind gigantic black clouds. Fallout and smoke hovered over the L.A. basin like a mountain range, all of its massive slopes, bulk, and pinnacles leaning inland, blown east by the ocean wind. It was a different world. Not all of them would come out again. Even if there wasn’t more shooting — even if Freedman was alive and they found her — there wasn’t room in the helicopter. At least one person would need to give up their seat.

The aircraft was an old KTVC News 12 chopper, narrow-bodied and short. It was also bright red. At first, Deborah thought they were dangerously exposed inside its Plexiglas windows, but the color of the helicopter was immaterial. It was their radar signature that mattered, and, more importantly, their transponder and radio codes.

They were a hundred and forty miles from San Bernadino. The Osprey had crashed on the eastern face of the Sierras near Mt. Whitney and Sequoia National Park in the central part of California. Bornmann must have veered north before they were hit, trying to escape the fighters. Even so, they were in Chinese-occupied territory. The Russians weren’t supposed to be here. Their border with the People’s Liberation Army had been drawn another fifty miles north, just south of Fresno, and yet they’d maintained Special Forces inside that line. The officer, Lt. Colonel Artem Alekseev, had commanded several covert surveillance units whose isolation saved them. A third of Alekseev’s men fell victim to windborne drifts of nanotech, but there was no one else to fight off. They survived. Now they’d joined with the Americans — or vice versa.

After he decided to risk everyone in his command to Cam’s inoculations, Alekseev had rummaged up some spare clothes, putting the three Americans in Russian uniforms. Medrano did what he could to keep them distinct. He insisted on removing the name tapes from his uniform and Deborah’s in addition to her Army patch and his own USAF patch, all of which he sewed onto their new uniforms — but there were only four identifiers for the three of them. REECE. MEDRANO. U.S. ARMY. U.S. AIR FORCE. In combat, American soldiers wore nothing else, not even the flag. He put the u.s. ARMY patch on Cam, but the effect was negligible. All of them looked like Russians.

Alekseev proved to be in his forties when he finally took off his biochem mask. His face was dark from sun and weather except along one cheek, where the skin was branded with three white puncture scars Deborah couldn’t identify. What could have made those marks? Barbed wire?

Deborah didn’t trust him. To convince Medrano to share the vaccine, she’d said the Russians were no longer their enemy. They all wanted to live, and that was true, but Deborah wasn’t so forgiving.

Alekseev was a ferret. She planned to watch him closely, even if he didn’t seem to have anything to gain by betraying them to the Chinese. Easy prison sentences for his men? His ambitions were larger than that.

Much like General Walls, Alekseev had divided the remainder of his troops into two squads and told them to find other survivors. His assets were too minimal to mount a serious counterattack. Throughout the day he’d waited and listened, raging at his helplessness. By now, the Chinese must have completed their takeover of the top U.S. installations. Before sunrise tomorrow, if not sooner, they would turn their attention to cleaning up any pockets of resistance in Russian California, so Alekseev chose to support the three Americans in their all-or-nothing gambit to find Kendra Freedman.

First, he owned the helicopter, stashed at an old refugee camp seven miles north of his hiding place. Second, Russian intelligence had been monitoring Chinese radio traffic since the occupation with a great deal of luck. It had been necessary for the allies to coordinate their air missions, which gave the Russians many more opportunities than the U.S.-Canadian side to study, hack, and infiltrate the Chinese system. Colonel Alekseev believed he could fool Chinese air control where the Americans failed. Unfortunately, the KTVC chopper only contained four seats. Alekseev had had far more volunteers than he could send. None of his troops wanted to stay behind. Deborah felt a grudging respect for their courage even as she joined Cam and Medrano in arguing with Alekseev. She didn’t want to remain behind, either. What would she do? Nap?

It didn’t help that Deborah, Cam, and Medrano were hurt. Alekseev’s medic tended their wounds, setting Medrano’s arm with a splint and stitching their cuts, but the three of them were a mess. As far as Alekseev was concerned, the only American to fill one of the precious seats would be Cam. They’d explained that Cam knew Freedman and some nanotech, but Deborah extended this half-truth to herself. I’ve been a research assistant, she said, and Medrano’s studied the Los Angeles area. He’s also an engineer. We need him if we’re going to be digging through what’s left of the city.

Alekseev believed the chopper’s load allowance would permit six people. It would be tight, but they needed everyone they could fit. There must be a large Chinese guard at the labs. Their best hope might be a sudden blitz. When their pilot returned with the chopper, Alekseev’s troops loaded it with one person’s equivalent weight of rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry. That left five slots — just four, after the pilot, an unfortunately heavyset man called Obruch.

They were saved from an even tougher decision. In the smoke, Alekseev had sent three men to investigate the plane. These soldiers reported no trace of Tanya Huff or Lewis Bornmann. If they’d survived the crash, which seemed unlikely, they must have been killed in the missile strike.

Like Foshtomi, Huff had been a part of saving Cam and Deborah. Huff’s death made her feel small and humble and yet unspeakably proud. She would carry on for them as far as possible.

Deborah expected to die with these strangers. Their entire strike force consisted of herself, Cam, Medrano, Colonel Alekseev, and Sergeant Obruch — and the chopper’s tanks were only two-thirds full. That meant their maximum range was 160 miles. They would need to find an airfield and refuel in order to leave L.A.

She was glad she had one friend. Jammed together in back, Cam worked to familiarize himself with a Russian AK-47 as Medrano inspected an RPG. Deborah merely rested her shoulder. She watched the sun and the land below. Impossibly, she was at peace.

Deborah Reece was a good soldier.

They were still a hundred miles from San Bernadino when their chopper hit the ash like a solid membrane. The aircraft rocked. Even the beat of the rotors changed. The whup whup whup whup of the blades deepened into a shorter, harsher sound as if everything was closer now.

One thing Deborah didn’t worry about was radiation. The booster nanotech would protect them from all but the worst dosage. In any case, she didn’t expect to live long enough to get sick.

She stared into the darkness. Dust ticked and clattered against the Plexiglas.

There were layers in the clouds. Sometimes she couldn’t see anything but the swirls of gray and black. Other times, the haze opened up and she could see the ground, which was mostly blackened desert. Occasionally there was a road or fences or a line of blown-down telephone poles.

They knew the Chinese had taken over the U.S. military bases in the Mojave. Medrano thought these targets must have been hit, too. The earth was empty and burned, which didn’t make their job any easier. They’d lost their maps and electronics in the plane crash. That meant they’d also lost their sporadic satellite connection. They’d memorized the GPS coordinates for Saint Bernadine Hospital, but the News 12 chopper had had its global positioning system torn out long ago to support the Russian war effort.

Working with Medrano, Alekseev thought he’d pinpointed the right spot on a map of his own. By using compass headings, some landmarks in the terrain and dead reckoning, they believed they could find the general neighborhood. Fortunately, San Bernadino lay on Interstate 40 on the south side of a narrow pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, which formed the eastern border of the Los Angeles sprawl. Those peaks would be tough to miss. A few of the highest nubs actually poked above ten thousand feet, and the Interstate should act like a red carpet, creating a long, distinct ribbon in the terrain.

Four times they saw Chinese aircraft in the murk. The fighters’ jetwash cut through the ash like bullets, dragging the soot into straight lines. One plane flew very close, nearly flipping the chopper as Obruch cursed and fought the controls.

Alekseev had already answered two radio challenges in Mandarin. After their near miss, there was a third. Deborah waited for a missile — would they even feel it? — but death never came. Alekseev’s codes were MSS, he said, and he posed as a high-level officer, even rebuking Chinese air traffic control for contacting him again. He wanted radio silence.

Eventually they were clattering alongside the San Gabriel Mountains. Obruch also had a railroad track and the dry, broken channel of an aqueduct to follow, both of which led to 1-40 and then into the pass.

The land transformed. Gas stations and truck lots appeared first. Warehouses. A car dealership. A quarry. There were homes, too, and freeway billboards and an endless row of great metal trusses supporting electrical lines. Everything looked as if it had been lifted and thrown. The buildings sagged. Even the freeway was buckled and split. Ash covered the world, robbing it of any color.

The destruction grew worse as they thundered through the pass. There were vast residential areas — thousands of homes in neat, boxy patterns on the hills. Street after street had been built on terraces like broad steps down the mountain slope, spotted with larger structures like apartment buildings and shopping centers. From the air, even now, the order that had been imposed was impressive. These roads and foundations might last for eons, although the lighter elements had been torn away. The roofs of the houses were gone. Many of those square little buildings had collapsed. The larger apartments and malls were often missing their tops, too, or had lost one or more walls. Even brick and concrete hadn’t survived. Not a single window looked intact. All of that material had ava lanched into the streets as it was lifted by the blast waves, creating drifts and dunes that covered earlier disasters. Long before the missiles fell, San Bernadino had been wracked by quakes and flash floods. It didn’t rain here often — but when it did, the insect-ravaged yards and hills had melted away, clogging the streets with erosion and debris. Deborah could still see unintended riverways carved through some neighborhoods, spilling down the mountainside.

A small percentage of the debris was bones. Hundreds of thousands of people had died here in the first plague. Their skulls and rib cages mixed with the furniture and other household possessions strewn among the shattered lumber, drywall, doors, shingling, and insulation. Signs were down. Trees and cars had overturned. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived, but Deborah did her part, staring into the ruins for any clue. They were about two hundred feet up. Visibility was no more than a few hundred yards. Even the mountains had faded into the gloom. Everything looked the same. All that stood were broken walls — the endless, straight-edged fins of broken walls.

Beside her, Medrano compared notes with Alekseev in the cockpit, trying to make sense of the holocaust. Up front, the two Russians murmured together in their own language until Alekseev turned and said, “We are overshooting our mark. We must turn back north.”

“I’ve been counting streets,” Medrano said.

“As have we,” Alekseev said. “The hospital is behind us.”

“Look,” Cam said. “What’s that?” He rapped on his window and Deborah straightened against Medrano, wanting to see past him, which became easier when Obruch banked in a slow glide to Cam’s side.

There were people sprawled in the rubble — fresh, whole people, not skeletons. Deborah guessed there were at least ten. They were ash-colored like everything else, but they’d fallen on top of the debris. That meant they’d come after the bombing.

“He cÀuwºOM npu6Àuamecb,” Alekseev said.

The helicopter had been descending but Obruch adjusted his elevation, rising again and then banking away to keep from passing over the kill zone. Deborah tried to glance back at the corpses through her window. The angle was too sharp.

“What do you think happened to them?” Medrano said, and Deborah thought, They weren’t shot. They looked… melted.

Limbs and heads had come away from some of the bodies.

“It must have been recent,” Cam said. “There are no bugs. No ants. The way those people were chewed up—”

“TaM!” Alekseev shouted. “On your right.”

That was Deborah’s side, and she glanced through the broken shapes of the city. She felt both hope and trepidation, because she knew exactly what Cam was thinking.

Those men looked like they’d been killed by nanotech.

“There are more bodies to the north,” Alekseev said.

“So we have a trail,” Medrano said. “But in which direction? Which group was killed first?”

“There’s a chopper on the ground to my side,” Cam said.

“Oh, shit,” Medrano said. Alekseev barked at Obruch in Russian, but Cam said, “No, it crashed. It’s not a problem. I don’t see anyone moving there or—”

Deborah gasped.

There was a witch in the rubble below, dark-skinned and wild-haired. She flung one hand up at them as if casting a spell.

“Pull up!” Deborah screamed. “Pull up!”

Obruch obeyed instantly. The engine whined as he lifted the chopper into a hard leftward turn. The additional thrust pulled Medrano against Deborah, squeezing her bad shoulder, but she had never been so glad for a sense of motion.

What was she throwing at us? Did we get away?

“What did you see!” Alekseev said.

“She’s below us. She was on my side.” Deborah had lost track of the helicopter’s direction as they curled into the sky, but Obruch leveled out and brought the nose around. Deborah spotted her again. The witch leapt through the black dunes and fell and bounced up, her coat flapping in the helicopter’s downdrafts.

“I see her!” Deborah shouted.

Was it Freedman? Their file photos showed a heavyset woman. This fast-moving spook was wiry and hunchbacked, her shoulders bulging above her waspish frame.

Who else would it be? This woman appeared to have waded through two or three platoons of Chinese soldiers, hurling nanotech, downing helicopters — but it could be anyone, couldn’t it? What if the Chinese had captured other American researchers or some of the top scientists in Europe or India?

“Hue Hac, ” Obruch said.

The witch scampered down the smooth, fallen length of a cinder block wall and limped into the space between a car and a tangle of wire. Then she disappeared like magic.

“Onycmume Hac Ha 3eMÀO,” Alekseev said to Obruch, gesturing.

Deborah interrupted. She’d recognized the word down and said, “Colonel, wait. You better put us on the ground away from her or she’ll kill us, too.”

If Alekseev’s calculations were correct — if it was really her — Freedman had gone southward as she left the hospital for some other destination. They would have missed her without the fields of dead men to mark her path. Where was she headed?

Obruch powered the chopper down into the wreckage fifty yards from where they’d last seen her. “Cam, you’re with me!” Deborah shouted, opening her door to the noise and dust of the rotors. “The rest of you stay here!”

“Nyet!” Alekseev said. “I am also coming!”

“Fine. Don’t let her get past you, but don’t crowd her, either! Do you understand?” Deborah squinted through the ash with more dread than excitement. “She’s carrying some kind of nanotech!”

“Da.” Alekseev drew a walkie-talkie from his belt and yelled back at Obruch, waving him up.

If Freedman kills us, at least Medrano and Obruch can try again, Deborah thought. That was the extent of her plan. Everything hinged on Cam’s tenuous link to the woman… and if it was someone else, someone who didn’t even speak English…

We have to take that chance.

The three of them ran into the choking wreckage beneath the helicopter. Deborah only had one hand to grab at the debris. She slipped and banged through a heap of bricks and mortar, bent pipes, a cracked porcelain toilet. Soot burst up from every footstep. She heard Alekseev barking for directions from Obruch, but she was too busy fending her way through a soft, rotting skin of cloth to look back. Then she was startled by two sounds in front of her. Metal banged on wood and Deborah was confronted by the witch, surprisingly close.

She ran toward me! Deborah thought, stunned. Her throat was too dry to get out more than a rasp: “Wait—”

The witch stood above her. She’d climbed over a heap of wooden slats propped up on a fallen street sign. Ash streaked the two bent white panels set in a crisscross on the pole, and yet the black lettering was legible: CRESTVIEW AVE. and EAST I6TH ST. The military officer in Deborah thought that was important. This was ground zero. They’d found their woman.

It had to be Freedman, didn’t it? But the witch was faceless. Bodiless. She might have been a walking silhouette. The dark oval where her face should be blended perfectly into her straggly black hair, and her clothes were powdered with ash. The only definition in her thin, hunchbacked frame was her eyes. The white eyes smoldered with power and torment and then her arms spasmed, too.

Deborah stared at those dark hands for one jagged heartbeat, transfixed by the other woman. She wore a knapsack. That was the odd bump on her back. Deborah also saw a thick welt up her left forearm, a failed suicide’s mark. At some point she’d cut herself.

“Wait. My name is Major Reece—”

The witch raised both fists.

She’ll kill me, Deborah thought, but then Cam shouted, “Kendra! Kendra Freedman!”

The witch turned her head.

“U.S. Army Rangers!” he shouted. “United States Army Rangers! We’re here to rescue you!”