Plague Zone

7

Eight hundred miles from Los Angeles, in the town of Jefferson, very little was as it seemed, either. Cam stood at the northern edge of their village with his head ringing, looking inward at the huts when his job was to watch the fences beyond their home. The wind crawled on his jacket hood, sinister and quiet. He tried to ignore it. He’d cinched his mask and goggles tightly across his face. His hands were thickened by old leather gloves. Duct tape sealed his wrists and the cuffs of his pants. Still, he felt exposed. The wind was like a voice at his back. It whispered against his armor, cold and persistent, defining every wrinkle in his sleeves and collar.

The night was absolute. The only light was from the stars — but the darkness was full of technology. Most of Jefferson’s homes were wired for electricity, even if they held only a few lightbulbs, and some of the men had brought out floodlamps, too, preparing to light up the perimeter until sunrise. They were far from helpless. The town boasted an M60 machine gun and a Russian Army rocket-propelled grenade launcher in addition to dozens of rifles, carbines, handguns, and military radios.

“This is One,” Greg said in Cam’s headset, beginning their status checks clockwise around the huts.

“Two,” a woman said.

“Three.”

The sound-off continued through eleven guard posts until it reached Cam at the northernmost point. “Twelve,” he said.

“Thirteen,” Bobbi added. Inside the first sealed hut, she continued to monitor their Harris radio as well as the local net on their headsets and walkie-talkies. For nearly an hour, they’d been confirming each other’s status every ten minutes. They were afraid they might have to turn on themselves again. Already there had been a burst of flashlights and yelling at Station Eight when David’s batteries failed and the people at Seven and Nine thought they’d have to shoot him.

One of their guards wore a painter’s dual cartridge respirator. Three others had flak jackets, which were useless against nanotech but might save their lives in combat. It had been decided. Jefferson was under quarantine. Even if outsiders looked like they were okay, even if they needed help, the guards intended to warn off or kill anyone else who walked out of the hills, defending their own families above all else. Cam was ready to take part in a slaughter if necessary, yet he’d convinced them to black out the town instead of powering up their small grid. What if that old woman came here because she saw the fire? he’d said. Cam would be a long time forgetting Tony’s wide-eyed face. The kid had seemed to target them, reeling around to focus on their shouting voices.

There were other ways to watch the darkness. They had two nightscopes in addition to the one they’d lost with Tony when it was contaminated like the boy, and their fences were still a decent early warning system.

Cam believed himself to be an honorable man. Since the war he’d become a public leader much like Allison, supporting her, learning from her, taking charge of Jefferson’s economy and politics because he thought he could help. Now a lot of that person was gone. The survivor was back, his instincts and old traumas winning out over the cool, more rational mind of the statesman.

He’d taken the twelve o‘clock point in Jefferson’s defenses for a reason. Morristown lay just eleven miles north. The nanotech had dropped Allison in seconds and paralyzed Marsha down her left side, but even if the plague crippled or killed 20 percent of its victims, that could leave nine hundred men, women, and children staggering out of the much larger town.

Cam was obsessed with the way the old woman had been heading into the wind, walking out of the southeast where there were no settlements on their maps. Where had she come from? A group of nomads? He was more concerned about what they were going to do if the old woman’s direction was not entirely random. He thought she might have been moving into the wind in the same way Tony had responded to their voices — because it was a stimulus. If so, everyone in Morristown might have staggered northwest themselves, chasing the wind. That would lead them farther away from Jefferson. Good. But how long would it be until the first traces of nanotech swept over this village? What if the plague had originated first in Utah or Idaho?

The night must be threaded with poison, and Cam realized he was breathing shallowly, trying to separate himself from one of his most basic instincts. If you breathe, you die, he thought, wrestling with the impossible challenge. It had been the same with the machine plague. There was no way to stop nanotech, and he cradled the weight of his M4 instead of pacing. He wanted to save his energy. Even so, it was profoundly unnerving to stand alone in the night with his vision darkened by the bronze lens of his goggles, waiting to die.

The stars were dim points overhead. The buildings around him existed only as square shadows. Then his headset crackled again. “Where is Cam?” a woman asked.

“Ruth?” he said, and there was a burst of chatter from the other guards.

“How are Michael and—”

“—did you—”

“Stay off the radio!” Greg said. “Hey! Stay off the radio so she can talk!”

Cam looked across the village again. He heard more voices in the darkness now. The two men at Station Ten were arguing with each other, and Cam wondered how long they would stay put. It wasn’t even midnight.

“Ruth?” he asked, brooding over the tone of her few words. He knew her too well. Bad news, he thought. It’s bad news.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

Cam stalked through the village without needing a light. The layout was simple, with seventeen huts set in a ring around their four greenhouses, a storage shed, the dining hall, and the showers. Nor did they own enough luxuries to scatter hazards like children’s toys or spare engine parts on the ground.

He passed through the leeside of a hut, leaving the wind. Then he moved back into the current. It rushed around his legs and through the spaces between his arms and chest, seeking any gap in his armor. Cold and hungry, it swirled against his face.

Cam was already badly spooked. The transition from that quiet instant back into the wind made him stop at the edge of another protected space. His mind roared with old gunfire and the howl of planes — the stark image of a one-eyed man lifting a shovel like an axe — the feel and smell of an emaciated young woman coughing blood into his face. He could also see Allison’s grin, though he tried to suppress that image. The memories inside him were hellish and raw and he didn’t want to pollute his favorite things about her.

He turned back into the wind with his M4 swinging beside him in one hand, leaning his weight forward as if walking through deep mud or snow. The truth was that they were already buried in another plague. They lived deep within an invisible ocean, but they had all learned to ignore it as best they could. Earth’s atmosphere was permeated by the dead. Trillions of people, animals, birds, and insects had been exploded into dust by the machine plague. Replicating without end, the archos tech used every available speck of carbon and iron to build more of itself, disintegrating untold megatons of living flesh into microscopic machines — machines that, in their own fashion, still lived on.

The archos tech would forever seek new hosts. Thousands of inert nanos covered every short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With each step Cam stirred up great puffs of it. The only reason they could survive below ten thousand feet was because they’d beaten it. Their own bodies had become tiny processing stations, destroying insignificant amounts of the machine plague every day, after Ruth and her colleagues found a way to shield them.

Could she do it again?

Protect her, he thought. Protect her and maybe everything will be okay again.

Their only salvation was the vaccine nano. Originally, it had been an inefficient savior. It could be overwhelmed. In an ideal scenario it would have killed the machine plague as soon as the plague touched their skin or lungs. Realistically, its capacity to target the plague was limited and it functioned best against live, active infections. That was a problem. The plague took minutes or even hours to “wake up” after it was absorbed by a host. In that time, it could travel farther than was easily understood. Human beings were comprised of miles upon miles of veins, tissue, organs, and muscle — and once the machine plague began to replicate, the body’s own pulse became a weakness, distributing the nanotech everywhere.

The first version of the vaccine was not so aggressive. It couldn’t be. It was able to build more of itself only by tearing apart its rival. Otherwise it would have been another plague. Ruth had taught it to recognize the unique structure of the plague’s heat engine, which it shared, and she had given it the ability to sense the fraction of a calorie of waste heat that the plague generated repeatedly as it constructed more of itself, but the first vaccine was always behind its brother. Smaller and faster than the plague, the earliest model of the vaccine was able to eradicate its prey, but only after the chase.

The final version of the vaccine surpassed all those weaknesses. It suffused their bodies like disease-specific antibodies, attacking the constant absorption of the machine plague before the plague nanos could activate.

Maybe the vaccine can be reprogrammed to make us immune to the new plague, too, Cam thought.

“I’m here,” he said into his headset, reaching up to knock on the cabin wall. Then he realized he wasn’t upwind of her home. What if it was leaking?

“Cam?” Her voice was muffled, wrapped inside her containment suit. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the wall,” he said, although he’d backed away from the small building. Her place was dark. Even in the daytime, in fact, it looked no different than the rest of their huts, except that this cabin had even fewer windows than most, just one in the small living room and another in Eric and Bobbi’s space. Ruth needed electricity at all hours, so they’d wired her room with more outlets than normal and left it with no openings to betray what was inside.

This hut was the secret heart of their village. Ruth actually slept in the front room, which lacked any privacy, but her bedroom was a clean lab partitioned with plastic sheeting. It was crude and inefficient — and it worked. Eric had been her closest bodyguard, a role that once belonged to Cam. He hadn’t been inside for months. There was never a good excuse since they’d upgraded the electrical lines, and he’d promised himself to leave her alone for Allison’s sake. Even so, he remembered sharing a cool glass of tea with Ruth and Eric, sitting on the living room floor beside the other man but acutely aware of Ruth’s narrow bedroll and the open-faced cupboard she used to store her clothes, her toothbrush, a lipstick, a book. The tidy space had been full of the little personal things he never saw anymore.

“Is there anyone with you?” she asked.

Cam glanced over his shoulder, suddenly uncomfortable with where she was going. “It’s just me,” he said.

“Can you switch channels? I want to talk alone.”

“Greg?” he asked his headset, and the former Army Ranger sergeant said, “This is bullshit. You stay on the line.”

Other voices filled the frequency. “He’s right!” Owen shouted, as another man said, “We let you live here. We took you in when nobody else wanted anything to do with nanotech and now you’re going to hide something from—”

Cam shut off his radio, leaving the headset in place. Then he stepped closer to the cabin and rapped his knuckles against the wood. “Can you hear me? Ruth?”

There was a noise from another part of the hut, a thump, thump like someone convulsing on the floor.

“Ruth!” he yelled, imagining Patrick or Michael loose in the cabin. He jogged alongside the building to the front room before he realized he couldn’t fire through the window or break down the door. If he did, the new plague would have him, too. But what if the infected men grabbed Ruth or tore her suit? Cam turned on his flashlight and aimed the beam inside. “Hey!” he yelled. The plastic on the window distorted the light. He couldn’t see more than the long shape of the cupboards, so he banged on the glass, hoping to distract anyone at the door to Ruth’s lab. “Hey!”

The thumping increased, an uneven drumbeat. It sounded like someone was thrashing back and forth. Cam also heard a woman moan inside. Linda? There were other voices hollering across the village. He saw another flashlight. Then he realized Ruth was shouting in the other end of the hut.

“Cam? Cam, I’m okay! Where are you?”

He ran to the wall of her room again. “I’m here! I thought—”

“They won’t stop moving. Linda and Patrick especially, they’re so restless! I taped their hands and feet, even tied them to the table, but they won’t stop moving.”

Cam grimaced, trying to calm the storm inside his head. It was too easy to picture her inside. Ruth was trapped. Lunatics and corpses blocked the way to the only door… and yet she had to stay.

“What can I do?” he called.

“Get me out!”

“I — We can’t do that.”

Her voice cracked. “Get me out, Cam! I know how to do it. I’m already decontaminating this section of the lab. Then you guys cut open the wall.”

The wall? he thought. This hut was wood like all the rest, but they’d lined the inside of the building with bricks and aluminum sheeting, reinforcing it like no other. Cam supposed they could chop out a hole with saws and pry bars, but why?

“You have to stay,” he said.

“Please, Cam!”

“Aren’t you working in there?”

Ruth only banged on the wall as if echoing the spasms in the other room. Whether she’d done it consciously or not, the sound filled Cam with alarm.

“We can’t build you another lab!” he yelled.

The paddle wheels in the creek were a triumph of engineering. They’d hired two guys out of Morristown to install a series of wheels and gears in the strongest part of the current, trading in corn futures for a five-kilowatt generator to transform that energy into electricity. Then, after those men left, Cam, Eric, and some others buried most of the power lines to disguise the real focal point of their grid.

Allison and the mayors of Freedom and New Jackson had managed to equip Ruth with an atomic force microscope and basic machining gear. The military had informants everywhere, but Allison trusted her underground.

Cam switched off his flashlight. “It’s only been an hour and a half,” he said. “You can fix this.”

“I can’t.”

“If you leave your equipment—”

“Listen to me! I’ve done what I can here. This AFM is old, Cam. I need better equipment if I’m really going to be able to understand this nanotech, much less take it apart.”

He shut his eyes in the dark. It was the best we could find, he thought, and you’ll never know how much food Allison gave up just to buy that gear.

“It doesn’t make sense to wait until the helicopters show up,” she said. “I don’t think you realize how long it’ll take me to decontaminate or to open the wall! We need to be ready when they show up.”

“I don’t think we can count on them, Ruth.”

She paused. Then she got loud again. “You said Grand Lake is sending a chopper!”

“I said I asked for one.”

“I can’t… I…”

There was another noise from her side of the wall that sounded like the infected people, aimless and insane. Was she pacing? “You can retool the vaccine,” he said.

“With what!? Goddammit, with what!? Are you listening to me? Most of my work here has been theoretical, Cam! This equipment is junk!”

He wanted to shout back at her, but the fire went out of him. For the second time that night, he knew what Ruth intended to say next, although he shied away from it, hoping he would hear something else. He had left so many people behind in other fights.

“What about our friends in there?” he asked.

“My advice is to run for it. We might have some chance at staying ahead of this thing if we go now. Right now. We need to get away from Morristown.”

It was exactly what he’d been thinking, and he hated them both for it. “Not everyone will go,” he said. “They’ll never go, Ruth. You know they won’t. What about Susan or Jen? Their husbands are in there.”

“There’s no other way,” she said.