Plague Zone

2

“We’re going to starve if this keeps up,” Cam said bitterly. For the moment, he was alone with Allison at the short metal doors of their toolshed. Otherwise he never would have said what he was thinking. That was the price of leadership. He was never allowed to falter, and he worried that becoming a father would only increase that pressure. A small son or daughter would need unerring guidance to survive.

Cam knelt and set his flamethrower beside a fuel can. “I don’t know what else to do,” he said.

“It’ll be okay,” Allison said, handing him a funnel.

He stared out across the dark blocks of their homes and greenhouses. Beyond the village, the vast, pyramid shapes of the Rockies were still distinct against the night. Much closer, flashlights cut and swayed through the buildings, as restless as the wind. Batteries were priceless, and only four of their lights were rechargeable — but in an emergency, all rationing efforts were forgotten despite the fact that they had no industrial base whatsoever. This village was barely more than a collection of huts, like so many other towns, most of them with patriotic names like Freedom or Defiance or Washington, celebrating their lost heritage. There were probably ten villages called Independence in Colorado alone. At least these people had been more original, naming their home Jefferson after one of America’s slightly less popular founding fathers.

“We were going to have a tough winter even with all that corn,” he said. “There’s no way to tighten rations any more.”

Allison shook her head. “We can trade with Morristown if we have to. The other greenhouses are fine, right? We’ll inspect the floors, and we can rebuild the third one. We’ll make the concrete thicker this time.”

Cam opened the flamethrower’s tanks but stopped there. Then he stood and kissed her. Allison grinned and pressed against him. Cam slipped his hands on either side of her waist. Inside her jacket, Allison was strong and lean except for her rounding belly. She smelled like soap, a good, healthy, feminine smell.

They’d reversed their normal attitudes while Cam was inside the greenhouse — her pessimistic, him upbeat — when Allison was usually more positive, even bold. They handled danger differently. Cam tended to be clearheaded in the face of a threat. It was only afterward that he sometimes invented new problems, as if, deep down, he’d long since become more comfortable with stress than with calm.

He knew he would never have been a successful voice in Jefferson without her support. She steadied him. Allison had a huge grin that could be aggressive but she also used it to make friends, like a beacon, drawing everyone to her. It didn’t hurt that her willingness to work was unparalleled even now that she was in her second trimester. Allison just naturally found her way to the front of any group. She had no trouble riding herd on a township of forty-four souls, whereas Cam preferred to work in small groups on short missions like burning out the ants.

He lacked her easy calm — and he was always proud of her. He cupped his hand on her stomach. “You know you can’t build a whole city by yourself,” he said, teasing.

Allison flashed her teeth in the dark, obviously pleased by the joke. “We don’t need a city,” she said. Then she squeezed his hand and turned away, ready to get back to work.

Cam tried to share her optimism. He didn’t like it that he was always angry. Allison was right. Their village was more than he’d ever expected to have, and he clung to his sense of gratitude. But he knew he would miss Eric. Worse, they could no longer trust the ground under their feet.

Their homes were built on concrete pads like the greenhouses, with few windows, because every board and nail had to be pried out of the old cities, where the bug infestations were unimaginable. Every scavenging mission was a risk, but fabricating things such as glass, hinges, or doorknobs was beyond them. They were limited to what they could find, and they were always desperate for cement, paint, and caulking. Every seam needed to be sealed. Ants, termites, spiders, and beetles were all attracted by one appetite or another. Everything was a target, even electrical lines or simple items like motor oil or tea or clothing.

It was true that the machine plague had done some good. Pests like mosquitoes and ticks were practically extinct. Even the common cold seemed to have been wiped out because there hadn’t been enough people left to sustain it.

The flip side of this one benefit was that some of the long-isolated survivors were Typhoid Marys who’d developed immunities to their own nasty strains of spotted fever or herpes or a seeping black nail fungus called finger rot. Some of them had also harbored lice or fleas all this time, both of which were making a comeback. As the population mingled again, they made each other sick. Cam had heard of a measles outbreak in Wyoming, and people said most of the Idaho panhandle was under quarantine for some kind of dysentery that was killing babies.

So far, it was only insects that had been a problem in Jef ferson. The fire ants had migrated up from Texas last year, while the desert locusts were thought to have spread out of the Middle East with the Russian invasion.

They lived almost like astronauts, locking away every speck of food in airtight containers such as ammunition boxes and Tupperware. Their urine, excrement, and garbage all needed to be canned until they brought it to the greenhouses, where they sun-baked their waste into safe, rich fertilizer. It was a difficult way to live. Maybe it was pointless. Cam worried that the ants might surge through someone’s home, burying them in tiny, stinging bodies — and suddenly the images in his head became very personal. What if a colony erupted over Allison and their newborn child?

He finished reloading the flamethrower, then slung its tanks onto his back and looked at his wife, who’d lifted two more five-gallon cans herself. That was the extent of the gasoline in the village, except whatever was in the tanks of their few jeeps and trucks. Thirty gallons if we’re lucky, he thought, reaching for her. “Let me carry those.”

“I got it.”

“You can’t help us with the ants.”

“I’m going to tell you how much gasoline you can use,” Allison said, “and you’re going to listen.”

“We need to make sure we burn them all.”

“Tomorrow we’ll drive out to the highway and look for more fuel, but we need to be able to get there, Cam. So we save most of what we have.”

If we leave any part of the colony alive, they’ll tunnel somewhere else in a frenzy, he thought. The image of her disappearing beneath the ants… It won’t happen, he told himself, feeling anxious and grim, and yet those same emotions were bound up in the tenderness he felt for Allison and their baby. He would die to protect them, which is why he yelled at her. “Give me the cans, Ally! There’s plenty of fuel in the trucks. We’ll probably siphon some of that, too.”

“Goddammit,” she said.

Then several people hurried toward them in the night. In addition to their flashlights, everyone carried ski goggles, masks, and canteens. Greg Estey wore another flamethrower and the rest of the group bristled with crowbars and shovels, ready to dig open the colony. One of them was Ruth.

Cam and Allison hesitated, trying to shift gears from their private argument to assuming command of the group. “You guys ready?” Cam asked, looking only at Ruth, as Allison said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m so sorry about Eric,” Ruth said.

She was careful to keep her distance, but Cam would have recognized her silhouette even if he hadn’t memorized her voice. Ruth’s curly brown hair was longer than it had been during their run from California, and he knew her long nose and the slender lines of her shoulders and neck all too well. They had been lovers briefly. Ruth had also been the ring-leader in their conspiracy to end the war, using the threat of a new plague against the United States as well as the invaders.

Ruth Goldman was the last of the top nanotech researchers in America. She was the reason why Cam and Allison had invested themselves in Jefferson, making what had been a shantytown into a more permanent outpost.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Allison said again. “You can’t be on the smoke team.”

“Eric was my friend, too,” Ruth said.

“We can’t put you at risk,” Allison said, but the undercurrent of mistrust between the two women was achingly clear. Allison protected Ruth, accepting Cam’s friend for her own reasons, but the awkwardness of their triangle had never faded. If anything, Allison’s pregnancy heightened that tension, introducing a new kind of jealousy to their dynamic.

Ruth was thirteen years older than Cam. He thought the age difference was partly why things hadn’t worked out between them. It was also part of the allure. Ruth had not been shy at all with her body or his.

The two women were similar in many ways, not physically, but in character. Like all of the best survivors, they were both active, tough, and smart, and yet Ruth’s maturity gave her an edge over the younger woman. She could usually anticipate what Allison would do and say. On the other hand, that self-possession also worked against Ruth. She’d kept her heart from Cam, wanting time to understand her feelings, whereas Allison hadn’t hesitated.

Cam and Ruth had never fully consummated their interest in each other. Allison thought otherwise, because Cam had lied to his wife by implying it was over and done with. The truth was that he and Ruth were unfinished business.

“Ally’s right,” Cam said, emphasizing his wife’s nickname as he pointed for Ruth to leave. “You can’t help us.”

“I knew Eric better than you.” There was a dangerous tone in Ruth’s voice. She backed it up by stepping closer to them.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Cam said, but he regretted his honesty. That was the wrong thing to say, he thought. “Go. You’re not on the team.”

“Fuck you,” Ruth said. “I’m staying.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Allison said, and Greg Estey nodded with obvious relief.

“Yeah, let’s get started.” Greg gestured at his flamethrower and said, “This gun’s full, Cam. You want to drain some of it off?”

“Absolutely. We’ll soak the ground as deep as we can.”

“How big is the colony?” another man asked.

“Twenty feet across, maybe more,” Cam said.

Ruth scowled at them, clenching her hands on her shovel. Cam thought she might throw it down, but Ruth wasn’t given to melodrama. “Fine,” she said, thrusting the shovel into another woman’s hands.

Cam watched her walk away.

In the darkness, Greenhouse 3 continued to burn weakly. Some of the framework was exposed now, smoldering in the melted plastic. Cam knew they would be crazy to bring gasoline into the fire, but the longer they waited, the farther the ants might burrow from the heat. Okay, you’re off the team, too, he thought at Allison, preparing for another argument.

He got lucky. One of their scouts ran out of the night, a sixteen-year-old boy with an assault rifle. “Wait!” the boy said. “Hey!”

Tony Dominguez was the youngest person in the village except for three infants. He was also one of Allison’s most ardent supporters. The boy had a crush on her about the size of the moon, for which Cam forgave him. For one thing, he approved of Tony’s taste in women. The poor kid didn’t have anyone his own age to lust after in Jefferson and his mom never let him join their trips to Morristown, probably because she was afraid he’d stay there. With a population of twelve hundred people, Morristown was practically a city. It was also a religious enclave and worked like a shield for Jefferson, deterring most travelers even as it provided a welcome source of crops and wealth in the area.

“Someone’s coming!” Tony said. “I heard someone in the fences on my side!”

Allison said, “You’re at Station Five?”

“Yes, ma‘am.”

Cam glanced at the southern perimeter, impressed that Tony hadn’t abandoned his post despite the ant swarm. He knew for a fact that other lookouts had left their stations, because he was one of them.

The village was supposed to have three people on patrol during the day and twice that many at night. The best time to travel was in the cold and in the dark, when most of the bugs were dormant. That made it tough to see people coming, but they’d surrounded their home with irregular rings of early warning fences. In some places, they’d actually strung barbed wire. Mostly these “fences” were just fenders, hoods, and hubcaps stripped from the dead traffic on Highway 14, which they’d scattered on the ground like bells and gongs. Not everyone who walked out of the hills was friendly. Sometimes there were bandits, and they were constantly afraid the military would learn where Ruth was hiding.

“It’s just one person?” Allison asked, tipping her head at Tony’s weapon. The M16 was equipped with a big infrared sniper scope, and Tony said, “Yeah. I think he’s either shit-faced or hurt. He’s making a lot of noise in the fences.”

“Great.” Allison’s tone was sarcastic.

Their village was one of the smallest in northern Colorado, but they did business with Morristown and New Jackson. Word got around. Sometimes their permanence made them a target for people who hadn’t worked so hard, like the weed-heads, drunks, or other troublemakers who weren’t welcome elsewhere.

Cam seized the opportunity. “See what this guy wants,” he said to Allison. “We’ll take care of the ants.”

His wife met his gaze in the dark. She knew what he was doing, but she grinned like a cat. “Fine,” she said, almost daring him. It was precisely what Ruth had said. Cam didn’t know what to make of that, although Allison could be playful about the weirdest things.

She was very pretty. A few blond strands had pulled free of her ponytail and framed her steady eyes, flagging in the wind. Then she set down her gas cans and left. Tony hurried after her, toting his rifle.

Cam glanced at a couple named Michael and Denise Stone, who both wore pistols. “Go with them, okay?”

“No problem,” Michael said, dropping his shovel and ski mask. Denise added a pry bar and her own makeshift body armor.

Now we’ve got more tools than people, Cam thought. He considered going after Allison himself, but he was in no mood to be diplomatic to some lost, hungry loser. “Let’s throw some dirt on the fire,” he said. “I want to get Eric out of there.”

“Yeah.” Greg winced. In a different life, Greg had been Eric’s squad leader. Cam could barely imagine what he must be feeling. With Eric’s death, the best link to Greg’s days as an Army Ranger was gone.

They heard Allison call out at the edge of the village, challenging the newcomer. Her voice was strong in the wind. A moment later, she repeated herself. Cam and Greg began to suit up with the other three people on their smoke team, donning goggles and masks.

“I’ll go in first,” Cam said.

Then somebody screamed from Allison’s direction, a high, boyish shriek. It was Tony. Cam whirled, trying to place the sound beyond the blocky silhouettes of homes and greenhouses. He saw flashlights and human shapes. One was familiar, fair-haired and lean, yet round in the middle. The others were only shadows. They seemed to dance spastically.

Jefferson was under attack.