Plague Zone

3

Ruth was standing at her door when Tony and Allison hurried past. She almost said something, but what? Allison didn’t even like to hear thank you from her, much less complaints, so Ruth stood quietly against her home as their flashlights rocked by, followed by Michael and Denise. There was someone in the fences. Ruth could hear him banging through the car parts, and Allison called, “Hey there! What’s your name?”

Her mild tone was an odd counterpoint to Tony’s M16, which the boy seated against his shoulder with the barrel pointed skyward. It was a position that made the weapon more visible in the glinting white beams of their flashlights. Ruth nearly went to add herself to the guns beside Allison. The girl was a force to be reckoned with, but she was pregnant, and that increased her importance in more ways than Ruth could put into words.

They should have been friends. They owed each other their lives, but it wasn’t only Cam who stood between them. Allison excelled at being mayor and she had always been very watchful of Ruth, seeing her as a potential rival for this role as well. Ruth’s nanotech skills were a brand of authority that Allison could not match. The girl had never believed Ruth when she said she wished she could give it up. Allison was always thirsty for more control over their lives, whereas Ruth’s decisions had led to thousands of deaths during the course of the war. Given the choice, Ruth would have become just a regular person again, anonymous and ignored — and yet she felt that old conflict of responsibility now.

I should back her up, Ruth worried, watching Allison. Then her gaze shifted. Michael’s flashlight had picked out the stranger in the fences.

It was a woman about fifty years old. She was short and thin and dirty. Ruth thought there was blood on the woman’s elbow, staining her jacket sleeve. She was unarmed. She wasn’t even wearing a backpack. Had she been robbed? She looked skittish as hell, turning away from them when Michael’s light traced over her pale face.

Even so, Allison was cautious, holding her ground instead of going to help. “It’s okay,” Allison called. “We have food and water and a place where you can sleep.”

Michael aimed his flashlight into the dirt. Tony lowered his rifle, and, well behind them, Ruth lifted her hand from the 9mm Beretta on her hip.

There was no question that she and Cam would have been a better fit cosmetically. He was black-haired and black-eyed and Ruth’s coloring was dusky, whereas the darkest thing about Allison was her sunburn. Ruth often wondered what their baby would look like, but it had been the same with Bobbi and Eric. Bobbi was black, Eric was white, and neither of the mismatched couples turned many heads. They were alive. Nothing else was important.

The only exceptions were people of Chinese or Russian descent. There was still widespread hatred since the war, which made things tough on anyone with Asian heritage. Some idiots didn’t bother to differentiate between Japanese, Koreans, or Chinese — or even Filipinos or Malaysians — not even those who’d lived in the U.S. for generations.

Racism had become a very different thing after the plague. Yes, there were some communities where people were trying to preserve ethnic purities, breeding only with fellow whites or Hispanics or blacks. Once a runner came through their village with marriage offers for anyone who was at least 50 percent Jewish. Ruth hadn’t been tempted, but it did make her wonder. Had the Israelis reestablished themselves on the other side of the world? Were there enough Jews alive to sustain their culture? For nearly everyone, though, race was trivial, and Ruth knew she was grasping at straws comparing her skin to Allison’s.

She was jealous of the younger woman. She was afraid for Allison, too. They had all been exposed to high levels of insecticide and other chemicals, not just in their village but during the plague year. Many of the pathetic refugee shelters had been slapped together with welding torches or made of vinyl or rotting carpet or cardboard, exposing the inhabitants to heavy metals, mold, or toxic compounds like vinyl chloride. Everyone had burned furniture, tires, plastic, and dung for warmth and cookfires, filling their homes with poisonous smoke.

Ruth had missed most of that. She’d spent the first thirteen months of the plague aboard the International Space Station as the centerpiece of a crash nanotech program, but the ISS was its own hostile environment, like a submarine. The recycled air became foul with human smells and bacteria. They were exposed to solar radiation and the more subtle damages of zero gravity, losing bone and muscle mass. Later, Ruth had also spent weeks on the outskirts of the Leadville crater, absorbing fallout. Perhaps worse, her body had been a war zone for different kinds of nanotech.

The next generation faced all the same problems as their parents and more. Babies required not only nourishment and warmth. First they needed a healthy start. The human body was capable of extraordinary resilience, but the most sinister wounds were those that went unseen, inside, at the cellular level or even deeper within their DNA.

So far, the women in Jefferson had suffered only four stillbirths and one toddler who showed every sign of being autistic. The other two children were okay. From what Ruth heard, however, the infant mortality rates were even more severe in Morristown. She hoped that was only because Morristown was thirty times larger, thus allowing for more data. It surely didn’t help that most of the people there were New Evangelicals, who pushed for as many babies as possible, no matter if the women were in their teens or in their forties or worn out from earlier pregnancies. Either way, the statistical curves were alarming. If the numbers continued to play out so poorly, the human race was no more than a hundred years from extinction.

There was a more personal insult. Ruth was thirty-eight. Her best years of fertility were already behind her, with few prospects in sight. She knew Cam tried to avoid her, which was impossible. They didn’t have enough firewood to make hot meals individually or to provide warm water in every home, nor were there enough pipes to install central plumbing throughout the village. It wasn’t safe to eat alone, either, so they ate in shifts and they bathed in the same hut beneath sun-warmed tanks, always with guards on duty. She saw Cam every day.

Who could blame her if she lived a bit vicariously through Allison? The girl should have been a sister to her, even if they were sisters who mistrusted each other.

Is it my fault we never got along? Her thoughts boiling, Ruth turned her eyes from Allison and the stranger and opened the door into her home at last. I’ll try harder, she thought.

Then the screaming began. Ruth jerked backward, staring, just in time to see someone drop to the ground with her spine bucking in the grip of a violent seizure.

The stranger killed Allison first.

The flashlights added to the confusion. One of the white beams spun into the ground, rocking up through the human shapes. The other two briefly pinned the old woman. Then another flashlight fell away. The sight paralyzed Ruth. She lost crucial seconds trying to understand what she was witnessing.

Allison had touched the old woman, reaching for her shoulder. In fact, Allison’s left arm was still thrown sideways from her body and clawed at the earth with a short, ripping motion. It peeled her fingers to the bone. Then her cheeks ran dark with blood as she chewed through her tongue.

There was one thing more that struck Ruth despite her wrenching shock. The old woman’s expression never changed. The wide look in her eyes was nervous, even rattled, but she didn’t even glance down at Allison as the others reacted. She’s contagious, Ruth thought before she added her voice to the yells rising across the village. “Get back, get back!” she screamed, running toward them.

Tony’s M16 fired a three-round burst. The shots were inef fective, aimed into the sky. Ruth saw him stagger as Allison continued to hammer herself against the ground. Then the boy fumbled his assault rifle and went to one knee, trembling. It was only a spasm that pulled the trigger.

Michael should have known better. He tried to drag Tony away from the old woman and suddenly he swooned, affected by the same shambling movements.

Nanotech, Ruth thought. Nothing else spread so fast.

“Michael!” Denise yelled, but her instincts were stronger. Instead of charging after her husband, she hesitated. “Michael! Oh Jesus, no!”

Allison had stopped moving, bloody and limp. Ruth was aware of more flashlights and yelling behind her. A small crowd was hurrying toward them, and her neighbors had emerged from their home with a lantern — but there was an enormous danger in bringing reinforcements, because they would go to their friends. Cam would run to his wife.

Ruth pulled her sidearm and shot the old woman dead, firing twice over Allison’s body.

“No!” Denise screamed.

The old woman toppled, knocking Michael down, too. Her blood must have been contagious, but they were partially upwind. If there was nanotech in the explosions across the woman’s chest, the microscopic disease was swept away from them.

Ruth shoved Denise farther into the slow current of the breeze. It was critical to keep their distance. Then she turned her pistol on Michael and Tony.

Denise drove Ruth to the ground, punching at her chest and gun hand. The worst part was that Ruth understood. Denise still had some frantic hope for her husband, but Ruth struck her in the head with two quick panicky blows.

Denise fell sideways and Ruth leapt up. “Stop!” she yelled in a flurry of lights. The other villagers had arrived while she was down, blazing with lanterns and flashlights.

Cam shoved through the crowd. His face was hidden in his goggles and mask. “Allison!” he yelled, as another man shouted, “What are you—”

“They’re contagious! Get back!”

“Oh my God, Allison.” His voice was raw with agony. Ruth didn’t think he’d even heard what she was saying.

He must have been thinking of his baby. She was, too, but she struggled for control of herself. “Stop! It’s some kind of nanotech! Cam, if the wind changes—”

Behind her, there was a distinct gritting noise as Tony rose to his feet.

Ruth swung around.

Tony was already advancing in a clumsy, looping path. He stumbled on Allison’s hand but kept coming. Something was wrong with his eyes. They were like holes. In the many beams of light, his brown irises looked black, as if his eyes consisted only of the whites and giant, hyper-dilated pupils.

“Stop him!” she yelled.

Cam hurled his flashlight. Someone else threw a spare clip for a rifle. The clip bounced off of Tony’s arm, but Cam’s flashlight banged into his shoulder. It knocked him back. Suddenly everyone was bobbing up and down, scratching at the ground for dirt and rocks, pelting the boy and shouting as if their voices might also drive him off. Their flashlights stabbed and winked. Tony staggered in the onslaught. Then he lost his balance, stepping on Allison again and falling down.

Michael came at them next. His eyes were lopsided. Only one pupil was distorted. The other had shrunk to a pinpoint, and his body hunched to that side as if to compensate.

The brain, Ruth thought. It’s something in the brain.

“Oh, fuck, shoot them!” a man yelled, but Denise drew her own pistol and thrust it at the nearest person who was also armed, a woman with a rifle.

“Don’t you touch him!” Denise cried.

“No, wait!” Ruth yelled. There were too many voices. The crowd hurled rocks and gear at Michael, a knife, a belt, even stripping off their jackets just to have something to throw. In the madness, two people fled. Ruth saw another man stagger. He wasn’t running away. He simply let his head slump. Was he infected? The man dropped to the ground as someone else began to jerk beside him, shaking all over.

It jumped the gap, Ruth thought. She meant to shout a warning but she couldn’t breathe. The reflex was too powerful. Don’t breathe. The nanotech was multiplying, swirling unseen from everyone it touched, and she wondered if she would be next.

Michael continued to wade toward them through the barrage. Unfortunately, the hail of rocks and equipment was slowing as they cleaned the ground and emptied their pockets. Ruth heard a woman swearing desperately as she scratched at the dirt. Someone else turned and ran. Then a flashlight pegged Michael in the face, its white beam spinning. He collapsed. But the other two men who’d been infected would rise in seconds.

“Give me your shovel,” Cam said to Greg. Both of them still wore their makeshift armor. Their goggles, hoods, and gloves would offer the slightest protection.

“Stay upwind!” Ruth yelled. “Cam!”

Otherwise they were helpless. Every survivor knew how easily the invisible machines could penetrate their lungs. A new plague was their most intimate and public nightmare, shared by everyone. They would have been less unnerved by another distant nuclear exchange. Panic took over.

Someone fired in the dark, then someone else. Orange muzzle flashes tore the crowd apart, because not all of the shots were directed outward. Tony died in a burst of rifle fire, flailing into the ground. Denise fired, too, driving one man to his knees before a third gun popped at the base of Denise’s skull, silencing her high-pitched screams.

It had been less than five minutes since the old woman transferred the nanotech to Allison.

Cam and Greg took the front line in the fight, clubbing three infected men as Ruth turned and ran. She pinballed through a jumble of silhouettes. “Wait!” someone yelled. Let them think she was a coward. Ruth crashed through her cabin door and slammed it shut, throwing the lock behind her.

Someone was pounding at the door when she yanked it open again, holding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand. Outside, the storm of lights and voices continued. Ruth had thought maybe Cam was trying to reach her, but it was Bobbi Goodrich.

Bobbi’s face was a grimace of terror, her fist raised to strike again. “You—” she said.

“Take this.” Ruth’s voice echoed in her helmet. She handed Bobbi the shotgun. “Don’t let anyone grab me.”

“I can‘t — Just watch out,” Bobbi said.

The two women moved into the darkness together. Ruth walked ponderously in her bright yellow gear, a Level A microbiological containment suit with two SCBA tanks on its back. One of the air tanks was only half full. Even so, the aluminum cylinders weighed thirty pounds. Both the Nomex jumpsuit underneath and the suit itself were too big. The chest piece billowed around her small breasts like a giant bag. The sleeves rubbed against her torso, filling her ears with the rsssh rsssh of the loose, heavy rubber.

Despite the suit, she knew immediately that a lot of the noise had moved away from them. Ruth barely recognized Jefferson anymore. The buildings were the same, except for the fallen greenhouse, but she’d never heard screaming in this place before. Their community had become a riot.

She turned into the sound of hoarse voices. “We can’t just kill everyone!” Cam said, pleading with an array of other villagers. Everyone kept their distance from each other. They had also been smart enough to throw their tools away after beating down the infected people, although doing so only left them with guns if there was another outbreak. Worse, now they faced each other with pistols and carbines.

Greg had sided with the larger contingent of the group. “There’s no other way,” Greg said. “We can’t tie them up.” He meant because they were afraid to touch their sick friends. Prolonged contact would be even more dangerous than jumping into range with a club.

Ruth shouted inside her helmet. “I can do it!”

The villagers didn’t notice, locked on each other.

“You could be next,” Cam said. “Don’t you get it? What if the nanotech hits you next?”

Ruth saw they’d lost more people. There were six men and women on the ground between the huts, plus, farther out, Michael and the sprawled corpses of Tony, Allison, and the old woman. She didn’t see the man who’d been shot by Denise. They must have carried him away along with any other uninfected casualties. Were more people hurt? At least 20 percent of the village had been incapacitated or killed and Ruth moved slower than she wanted, devastated by the scene.

Some of the figures closest to her were probably dead, too. Even in the sporadic light, she could see head wounds where they’d been beaten. One of them was Denise, her skull blasted open beneath her dark hair. Another of the crumpled figures was still alive, straining for air through a throat obstructed by blood or dirt. His breath came in hoarse gasps.

Was it possible Allison was also alive? Cam must have been clinging to the belief that she could be saved — but if she was, she’d sustained horrible injuries to her mouth and one hand. Ruth would be surprised if Allison hadn’t also experienced a massive stroke, and their medical abilities were limited to setting broken bones or helping women through childbirth. Even the doctors in Morristown might not be able to perform the surgeries Allison would require.

Please be dead, Ruth thought, closing her eyes against her grief. But she couldn’t ignore the doubt she also felt. Do I want her to be dead?

“There has to be something we can do!” Cam shouted.

“We can’t let them get up again,” Greg said as another man drew his pistol and a third turned away from Cam.

“Enough,” the third man said. “Let’s do it.”

Cam grabbed his arm. “No.”

The debate might have been harder because most of their faces were wrapped in goggles and masks. They were friends, but their armor was another layer between them, like the darkness, their guilt, and their fear.

“Wait!” Bobbi said. “Wait. Look!”

Some of the flashlights came around, playing on Ruth’s suit. “I can do it,” she called through her brightly lit faceplate. “I can take care of them.”

“Ruth,” Cam said, desperate with relief.

She was glad, faintly, but she couldn’t forget that she had been the first to start shooting. What if there had been another way? Could they have subdued Tony and the old woman without killing them? Denise would still be alive, too.

Ruth was afraid of walking into the field of bodies alone. What if they woke up? She might tear her gloves or her sleeves when she tried to carry them. The suit wasn’t designed for heavy labor, much less for combat — but she couldn’t leave those people to die.

“We’ll use my cabin to hold them,” she said, “but I need help. Rope. Water.” Her windows and doors were bug-proofed, but those seals wouldn’t hold nanotech. “Get me as much plastic sheeting as we have.”

“Tear down Greenhouse 4,” Cam said, shoving at the man who’d drawn his gun. “Go.”

Maybe they still could save most of their friends.

Ruth went to Allison first, sidestepping Linda and Doug. She should have tied some of the unconscious men and women before doing anything else — she had a bit of duct tape left after sealing her gloves to her sleeves — but she was drawn to her longtime foe. She told herself it was because Allison was pregnant, but the girl was dead, her crimson eyes bulging from the pressure of some intracranial rupture.

Whatever the nanotech is doing, the process doesn’t always work, she thought, taking the only lesson she could from Allison’s death.

Somewhere in her sadness, Ruth was also comforted. It was a backward sort of feeling, as if she’d lost a burden she would have preferred to keep, but she couldn’t imagine this bright young woman living with her hideously chewed mouth, especially if her mind was gone.

Ruth had wanted to hold Cam’s baby even more than she’d realized, and her hand paused above Allison’s belly. But no. No. Stay with your mother, she thought, weeping inside her helmet. They lacked the technology to care for a premature birth. Even before the machine plague, saving a fetus early in its second trimester would have been remarkable. Today, it was impossible — so they’d lost the child, too.

I can’t let Cam see her like this, she realized, pressing her glove to Allison’s swollen face. She turned the girl’s head and hid her partly in her jacket hood. Now her tears were hot and thick and she tried to wipe her eyes, which was stupid. It would have infected her if she got inside her helmet. Instead, she only smeared blood and dust across her faceplate.

Her voice broke when she called back to the stabbing flashlights. “Allison’s dead. So is Tony. And the stranger. Michael’s alive.”

“You better hurry,” Greg yelled back. “Linda’s starting to move her arms.”

Ruth walked toward the lights again. Greg, Cam, and another man had stayed to hold three beams on her. Deeper in the village, other flashlights and lanterns swarmed. Then she knelt beside Linda Greene, who was weakly stretching her arms as if dreaming. Ruth pulled Linda’s wrists together and secured them with duct tape, binding the other woman like a criminal.

What’s happening to you? she wondered.