Plague Zone

28

Her teeth hurt. Two in front were loose. She was sure she’d crunched through an old filling, and yet she seemed unable to stop pressing her jaws together. In her sleep, the habit was even more severe. She needed some kind of nightguard if it could be fabricated. Otherwise she was going to peel those incisors right out of her head.

The Army doctors said it was PTSD. They’d seen a lot of stress and fear. Ruth believed her neural pathways were permanently altered, because her jitters weren’t confined to her grinding. Her left hand tended to make a fist and squeeze like a heart. She glanced constantly to that side. The mind plague had changed her, and she’d noticed the same fidgeting in most of the survivors. The doctors wanted to pass it off as a normal traumatic reflex because a few calm words were all they had to offer. That wasn’t true for Ruth. She could build something to fight it.

The worst cases were being treated with weed, alcohol, or restraints. Most people seemed okay. In fact, Ruth was impressed that less than two days had passed since she woke up. The best elements of the U.S. military were quick to regain their feet, staggering up to fight a battle that never came.

The war was over.

Sixteen hours ago, they’d landed her in Sylvan Mountain, ninety miles southwest of Grand Lake. Grand Lake had been abandoned for now, its complexes too damaged by the Chinese assault. Sylvan Mountain was mostly a surface base, a simple garrison lined with armor, artillery, and chopper pads, so it hadn’t merited air attacks. The mind plague had been enough to incapacitate this place.

The fallout had also reached these mountains, but the sky was clearing, leaving only a rime of soot. Faint threads of it still curled in the wind, tightening, opening, and tightening again — like her hand.

Ruth watched the horizon, trying to ignore herself. A small part of her basked in the heat of the late yellow sun. Soon it would be dark, and she cherished the light. She also welcomed the bustle of troops around the only helicopter on this broad concrete slab. They were loading the Black Hawk with wire cut from their own fences, shouting in the cold as they wrestled the steel with pliers and gloves. None of it was enough to distract her. She could only watch and wait, pacing, twitching.

A captain with an M4 intercepted her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “Dr. Goldman? You shouldn’t be out here.”

“Beymer,” she said, tugging at the white badge on her uniform. Go ask Colonel Beymer. The overwhelmed Navy colonel was acting CO, and he hadn’t known what to do with her except to give her anything she needed, medical attention, food, rest, and a quiet space for the microscopy gear they’d recovered with her. No one had time to babysit.

The badge was supposed to give her top clearance, which suited Ruth just fine. Speaking was an effort. In addition to hurting her teeth, she’d chewed her tongue and the insides of her cheek while she was infected, possibly because she’d been tied and her body couldn’t find any other way to respond to the mind plague’s commands to move.

“This isn’t a good idea,” the captain said. “Not without containment suits.”

Ruth didn’t answer.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he said, “but we don’t know what they might be carrying. What if there are other strains of nanotech?”

Only a few of his words rang through her anxiety. You don’t know what I’m feeling, she thought. I should have been there. But the captain was right, if not the reasons he’d stated. The landing pad was a zoo whenever new birds arrived. After everything that had happened, it would be idiotic for her to be squished by a chopper or run over by their ground crews.

“I’ll move out of the way,” she said, enunciating slowly through her swollen mouth.

“Thank you, ma‘am.” The captain hesitated, trying to meet her eyes, but Ruth couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. They wanted so much from her.

She’d used that need against them. Everyone was afraid of another contagion, something else cooked up in Los Angeles, but Ruth had convinced Colonel Beymer to send a helicopter after her friends nevertheless. Kendra Freedman was the name she’d cited. We have to find her, she’d said, and that was true, but she was less interested in saving Freedman than in discovering if Cam and Deborah were alive.

Ruth walked across the landing pad and sat down on a supply crate, picking one fingernail through the splintered edge of the box. It was good to be out of her lab. Even her mouth hurt less outside. The tent was small and dark, and Ruth was more disturbed than ever by small and dark. The waiting was worse. Ten minutes ago, Beymer had sent a man to say that his team was inbound from L.A.

I should have been there.

The thought would always haunt her. How much differently would things have played out if she could have helped them? Would she be dead, too?

Ruth had come back to her senses in a residential home in the flood-ruined old town of Tabernash, twenty miles south of the V-22 hanger. Ingrid was with her in a locked bedroom, but Ingrid was infected and only one of Ruth’s hands was partially untied. Ingrid must have seen the others fall sick before running to free Ruth. She wasn’t fast enough. Ruth was still tied to the bed. Coaxing Ingrid to her had been impossible. Ruth had screamed and begged in the darkness, hungry, bleeding, and alone except for the senseless ghost of her friend. She watched Ingrid roam back and forth against the walls for hours, never finding the door, until the older woman finally stumbled close enough for her to grab her belt. Ruth was weak. Ingrid was clumsy. She fell on Ruth, then rolled away, but Ruth had already dragged the pistol from Ingrid’s hip. Her wrists were bound too close together to aim the gun at those ropes, nor did she want to shoot at her feet, but she was able to use the weapon as a tool to pry herself free. Then she found her way to their radio.

Earlier today, Ruth had successfully modified the first vaccine for the mind plague to outpace the counter-vaccine, thus creating an antidote. Reprogramming the antidote so it wouldn’t replicate except in specific conditions was more difficult, but they wanted to keep it from spreading to the Chinese — not until the enemy was gathered into prison camps. Ruth had devised a governor that limited the antidote to replicating only in high oxygen atmospheres. This was an artificial environment within her ability to create, especially at Sylvan Mountain’s altitude, using precious medical supplies. It meant she was able to cultivate the antidote in small doses. Then she secured it in vials of blood plasma for injection into one person at a time.

Ingrid, Emma, and General Walls were now in a private tent, recuperating. The rest of these heroes had vanished. From the data on Walls’s laptop, they knew who else had survived, but Bobbi Goodrich must have wandered away from their safe house before Ruth got free. Bobbi was missing. Nor had they been able to locate the other squad of immunized soldiers led by Lieutenant Pritchard. Wherever the USAF commando had gone into hiding, his men were infected, maybe starving or hurt, and Ruth hoped someone would find them before it was too late. As far as she was concerned, the places they’d earned in history were paramount even to her own, because it was these people, not her, who’d struggled on through the end.

Agent Rezac was another complication. Ruth’s antidote carried some of the same risks as the mind plague itself. Within seconds of her injection, Rezac had stroked out. She was dead. The same problem had crippled or killed dozens more just here in Sylvan Mountain as they awoke from the plague. It wasn’t fair.

The first reports out of Los Angeles were even worse. The recovery team said they’d found Deborah and Kendra dead in a parking lot outside the Chinese labs. The women’s bodies lay side by side, Kendra’s arm outstretched, Deborah’s hand pressed against her own face with a substrate in her mouth.

They’d done it. Even as they were overrun by Chinese troops, they’d won. From their bodies, the counter-vaccine had drifted to the enemy — and Cam.

He was alive. He was in the second stage of infection when the recovery team found him burrowing in the ruins. His body was in some indefinite form of hibernation. It had saved him. Most likely he hadn’t moved more than a few inches during the first, agitated phase of the mind plague. He was nearly dead from blood loss, but they’d done their best to increase his vital signs. They were rushing him back to Sylvan Mountain for surgery. Except for two Chinese prisoners taken on site, Cam was the sole witness to what had happened in L.A. Medrano was dead, too, as were a pair of Russian soldiers in the rubble — allies of the Chinese?

Cam might know something about Kendra’s design work or other labs or American survivors, but, in truth, there was no reason for Ruth to stop her own crash programs to wait for his helicopter. He’d never regained consciousness. Even if he opened his eyes, he was a zombie. Cam would have a better chance of pulling through if he was responsive, if he wouldn’t fight his restraints, but his body didn’t need any more immediate shocks. The doctors wouldn’t inject him with the antidote until he’d improved.

Ruth had only come to the landing pad because she needed to see him one more time before they took the chance of killing him like Agent Rezac.

She hoped she was pregnant. It seemed unlikely. They’d only made love once, but she would have been ovulating, so it wasn’t impossible. She wanted his child. Some part of him would carry on.

They both deserved that much, didn’t they?

Ruth leapt to her feet as two F-35s soared overhead, the recovery team’s escort from the West Coast. Where was the helicopter? Long seconds passed before a black dot materialized out of the sunset, whup whup whup whup, the drumbeat of its rotors slapping at the mountainsides.

Their mission had been delayed by the chopper’s need to refuel in Utah, California, and then in Utah again. Its flight into L.A. had been an exacting game of leapfrog, working with fighter escorts with far greater range and speed, but there were no more VTOL planes available. Ruth was grateful just to have been able to reach into California at all.

She broke her promise to stay off the pad as the Black Hawk entered its final approach.

“Dr. Goldman, wait!” the captain yelled. He ran to intercept her but Ruth shrugged him off with her head on a swivel, looking up, looking left, trying to anticipate where the chopper would land. She dodged a jeep loaded with wire. Then she bumped into two mechanics taking apart an engine and kicked through the parts spread on the ground.

“Hey!” one man shouted.

“Sorry—” The scattered metal at Ruth’s feet seemed like a bad omen and she wavered, fidgeting. She almost stooped down to help them sort through the jumble, but medical teams had emerged from the low buildings beside the field. Ruth hurried to join them even as the captain grabbed her sleeve.

“Goldman, wait.”

She stared at the much larger man. “Get your fucking hands off me,” she said. He hesitated. She pulled away. It wasn’t his fault — he was protecting her — but Ruth was no longer interested in being shielded from anything.

Somehow she controlled herself enough to make room for the medics and their gurneys as a soldier jumped from the Black Hawk. At her side, her fist clenched and unclenched.

The first man they lifted from the flight deck was unrecognizable, wrapped in blankets with his face obscured by an air mask and bandages. The blades overhead were still winding down. Ruth pressed into the crowd. “Cam!” she yelled. “Cam!” But the man’s dumbstruck eyes were Chinese. A prisoner.

“Where is Corporal Najarro!?” she yelled.

They were unloading someone else from the other side. Ruth shoved her way past the Black Hawk’s nose, joining the confusion as they strung IV bags above his gurney. She needed to touch him. She felt the power in her shaking hands. The two of them were a circuit that must be closed again, even if it was only for this instant.

Cam wore an air mask like the other man. One side of his beard had been scorched down to stubble, but she recognized his hair and the muscles along his neck, even though his dark skin was gray and shiny like wax.

“Miss, you can‘t—” someone said.

Her hand reached Cam’s shoulder as she burst into tears. Her grief was a lover’s and a friend‘s, wretched and deep. Stay with me, she thought. Be with me. We haven’t had our turn yet. Please.

There was nothing in his eyes except the slack, uncaring look of the plague, so unlike his anger or his strength. Ruth turned away even before another medic said, “Let us get him inside.” She nodded. It didn’t matter if they saw her head move or not. She was already retreating and the gesture was as much for herself as anyone else.

The gesture was his, tough-minded and succinct.

She would fight on with him or without him. She owed them that much, but she honestly wasn’t sure how far to take the next generation of nanotech. Where did self-defense become something more? Was it possible to draw the line at healing people when she knew how easily new advances would spread to everyone in the world?

As she walked away from the helicopter, the soldiers on board were met by two jeeps and more men. If anyone recognized her, they didn’t say. They were following orders, unloading carefully bagged computers, lab gear, and paperwork. Sorting through the material would be a colossal chore. Ruth wasn’t looking forward to it. The job would keep her mind off of Cam, but maybe worrying about him would have been better.

I can’t go back to that tent right now, she thought. I should. I have to. Instead, she walked onto the rutted earth beyond the chopper pads, drinking in the sky and the cold. Her body was as restless as her head.

I can’t.

Ruth had considered killing everyone else on Earth. She’d always thought her role was defensive, but what if it was time for her to launch her own attacks? She could become the planetary warlord that men like Senator Kendricks had envisioned as themselves.

Like earlier technologies, the mind plague and its vaccines were available for anyone to use. Soon enough, there might be yet another plague unless she preempted every enemy. No matter how vigilant they might be, there was no way to know who was becoming a threat. Russia. India. Japan. Brazil. Even on her own side, there would be people who insisted on developing their own weapons without her. Steve McCown was dead, killed in Grand Lake, and Meghna Katechia was missing, possibly taken by the Chinese, but there must be other survivors with at least a rudimentary knowledge of nanotech. Overseas, there would be more.

The same curiosity and ambition that made Homo sapiens such an appealing success was also a weakness. Their intelligence was a double-edged sword. Ruth believed the next step in their evolution must be to grow beyond their own suspicion and greed. Maybe they were already too late. The environment was in tatters. War had become a reflex. Her faith was the only thing that had grown stronger.

None of what happened needed to be in vain. All of them had done well, achieving more than anyone had a right to expect. That was also true of their opponents among the Chinese.

Ruth was feeling superstitious. She could almost grasp the pattern that had unfolded. Her premonition of losing Cam had even come true, though differently than she’d expected.

Deborah and Kendra’s places in the puzzle were undeniable. Ruth only wished she knew where to find Sarah Foshtomi. In a sense, Foshtomi had saved Ruth by causing the accident that infected her. Maybe the young woman had been instrumental in helping Cam, too? Ruth hoped so. Like so many people, Foshtomi was missing, probably dead, but her life hadn’t been without consequence.

Ruth would never have imagined a new mind plague if there hadn’t been another war — and without the war, she wouldn’t have possessed this next-generation technology.

What if that was why she was still alive?

She had failed the responsibilities that came with her education. Now she had another chance, and even greater tools at hand. Freedman’s mind plague offered an intriguing possibility. Ruth did not doubt that some people would argue for doing to the Chinese exactly what had been planned for them, turning their enemies into laborers and slaves.

There was a better way. Ruth could force a lasting peace. She would need to see what sort of progress the Chinese researchers had made, but if the secondary programs they’d developed were as sophisticated as she expected, her idea was to selectively interfere with the brain functions of everyone on the planet. She could release her own mind plague, not only destroying their memories of nanotech but limiting their aggression, their hate, and their imagination. She’d do it to herself as well. Once those traits were curbed, she would have altered the human race, making a change so fundamental that no one knew why or how it had been done.

Ruth couldn’t hide their true nature forever. It would persist in books and digital files, even if they were unable to comprehend certain words or concepts. The mental block would be that complete — but eventually, maybe lifetimes from now, someone would unlock the truth. They might begin to teach themselves nanotechnology again. They would experiment with the mysteries concealed in their own DNA, rediscovering the power of fear and rage. In the meantime there would be peace. They would be different, calmer and less selfish. Maybe they could learn new ways of working together. The environment itself would heal.

The paradox she felt was agonizing. Ruth was afraid to cut away a major part of human nature for the same reasons she would never commit genocide outright. She didn’t want to become a monster even if her motives were for the best. What if there were side effects? If she inhibited their most basic drives, they might lose the skills they needed to persist in this fractured world. But the fighting had to end. Another war would destroy them.

Go back to your tent, she thought, glancing out across the first stars in the evening sky. You owe so much to so many people. Go back to your tent and tell Beymer you want the Chinese records now. Tonight.

Developing a new mind plague would take months, maybe longer, but she couldn’t ignore her own urgency. The race had begun. It would be wrong for her to ignore a solution when it was within her abilities, wouldn’t it?

Don’t be wrong again.

Ruth walked back to her tent.

The light beyond her tiny lab was dim and green in the tent’s canvas when a man called outside. “Dr. Goldman? He’s awake.”

Ruth glanced up from her computer with mixed feelings of joy, relief, and self-doubt. Three days had passed. It was morning. She saved her work and shut the laptop down, hiding what she doing in case Beymer sent anyone into her tent while she was gone. She thought somebody had investigated her equipment before during one of her short breaks.

She pushed through the plastic inside the tent and then a second compartment like an airlock, finding a soldier she recognized from the post-op units. “How is he?” she asked.

“Stabilized. Very weak.”

“Thank you.”

The soldier led her to a stunted-looking building buried partway in the earth. They went down six stairs into the concrete structure, then to the third door on the left. Ruth had developed a compulsion about numbers. She knew Cam was two more doors down, five total, not six like the stairs. It was a meaningless equation but she worried about it just the same — five, not six — as if trying to fight down her heartbeat.

The third door led to a nurse’s station. The narrow space was cluttered with water jugs, a sink, and bloody laundry. Ruth washed up. The soldier gave her a cloth mask and a baggy suit to cover her uniform.

When she approached Cam’s room at last, it was with the same piercing uncertainty that had affected her since her decision to improve upon the mind plague. She knew it was better for her to design such a thing than anyone else, but she was afraid of what Cam would think. Why? He would agree with her, wouldn’t he?

They’d put him in semi-isolation. They said it was because of his burns and stomach wounds, both of which carried a high risk of infection. Ruth knew the private room was really because they were still leery of unknown nanotech, even though she’d screened his blood and that of the two prisoners, finding nothing — yet she welcomed their solitude.

His skin had regained most its brown tone. That was the first thing she noticed. His face and hands were the right color again, especially dark against the white sheets. His eyes were closed. She would have left if she hadn’t already visited twice before without the chance to talk.

“Cam?” She went to his bed, a thin, handstitched mattress on a low metal frame. There was no chair. “Cam? It’s Ruth. Are you…”

“Hey.” He didn’t open his eyes but his hand lifted from the bed an inch or two, groping.

She seized his palm in her own. “It’s me. I’m here.”

“Your voice.”

Ruth smiled through a sting of tears. “I’m okay.” Her mouth was healing. “How do you feel?”

“Hurts.”

“Yes.”

They stayed together for several minutes, just listening to each other live and breathe. Elsewhere, voices sounded in the corridor. Ruth kissed his hand through her gauze mask.

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

She tried to explain what she was doing with the Chinese nanotech. His instincts had always been stronger than her own, and she trusted his answer more than herself. She didn’t get far. Cam opened his eyes to search her face.

“No,” he said. “Don’t.”

“But if someone else—”

He struggled to sit up and Ruth jumped with her own sense of alarm, pressing at his shoulder to keep him down. “Cam, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“We’ll find another way!” he said. “Don’t.”

“I won’t. I swear it. You’re right. I won’t.” She kissed his hand again to hide her stricken face from his uncompromising gaze.

Don’t you see how I need you? she thought.

“Please, Ruth,” he said, tiring. He closed his eyes again. “Don’t make us fight you, too.”

“No. Never.”

They stayed together until he slept.

He woke briefly from a nightmare and she was glad she hadn’t left. “Shh, Cam, I’m here. You’re safe. I’m here.”

“I love you,” he said.