Plague War (2 page)

“Then let me and him go ‚rst,” Newcombe said to Ruth, stepping past her.

Mark Newcombe was twenty-two, the youngest of them, younger than Ruth by more than a decade, and he had trained as an Army Special Forces soldier for two years before the machine plague. The end of the world had only continued to harden him. His assault ri†e, pack, and gun belt weighed ‚fty pounds—and barely slowed him at all.

Cam’s stride was more uneven. He was hurt, like Ruth, which she thought made him a better leader. Cam wasn’t so sure. He worried about things, and Ruth liked him for it. He was more willing to admit he was wrong, which was why they were still on the Interstate. The road was bad, but at least it went through. Their small trio had tried to hike cross-country more than once, wherever the residential areas or commercial buildings eased back from the highway, but they’d encountered too many fences and creeks and brittle gray thickets crowded with beetles and deadfalls. Even the burned traf‚c was better.

Newcombe cut his elbow and both knees before they were through. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, but as soon as they cleared the burn, Cam made him stop and immediately †ushed the wounds with a canteen, trying to outrace the plague. Then he bandaged the cuts, wrapping Newcombe’s pantlegs with gauze.

Cam stood up before he was done. “Wait,” he said, tilting his head to listen to the sky.

It was a clear blue May afternoon, sunny and calm. Goose bumps prickled up the back of Ruth’s neck.
I don’t hear anything,
she thought, but the cool, vulnerable shiver in her spine made her turn to stare behind them. She glanced through the dead cars, seeking any threat. Nothing.

Cam shoved at her. “Move! Move!”

They ran beneath the twisted metal bulk of a truck rig. Cam and Newcombe had their guns drawn but Ruth needed her good arm to crawl under the wreckage, suddenly half-blind out of the sun. Her glove crunched in a litter of glass and plastic.

“What—” she said, but then she felt it, too, a low, menacing drumbeat. Helicopters. Again. In the vast ruins of what had been Sacramento, California, there were no longer any sounds except the wind and the rivers and sometimes the bugs. It was a small advantage. So far they’d always heard the choppers while they were still tens of miles away.

Closer this time, and coming fast.

“There was a culvert about a quarter-mile behind us,” Ruth said, her mind jumping. Twice before they’d gone underground because the enemy had infrared.

Newcombe grunted,
huh
. “I saw it. Too far.”

“Oh.” Cam lifted one glove to the inhuman shape of his goggles and hood. “Ants,” he said.

Ruth turned to see but cracked her head in the tight space. The crumpled bulk of the trailer read safeway in letters as long as her body and she said, quietly, “It’s a grocery truck.”

“Christ.” Newcombe scuf†ed back toward the sunlight, moving on his elbows to keep his ri†e out of the grit and dust. But his backpack caught on the metal above him and he had to squeeze even lower, pushing his weapon in front of him.

Ruth clenched her teeth. The cutting roar of the helicopters, Newcombe’s struggle just to gain a few inches—it set the fear in her spinning and she realized there was another noise all around them, creeping and soft. The dead had begun to live again. The bones and the garbage vibrated in the rising thunder, rattling, sighing. Somewhere a car door wailed as it sagged open.

“Go,” Cam said, just as Newcombe hissed, “Stay back.”

Ruth shifted urgently. She had to move even if there was nowhere to go. She had seen ant swarms in the heart of the city like impossible black †oods, surging over ceilings and walls, stripping entire buildings of carpet glue, rubber, and upholstery. If they were on top of a colony now, it would be a hideous death.

“We need to get out of here,” she said.

“Go,” Cam agreed.

Ruth tried to ease past him, shoving herself between the broken asphalt and the white-and-red bulk of the trailer. Then she saw two tendrils of ants.

The choppers slammed across their position, overwhelming her pulse and her mind. Everything in her shook. Everything was noise. The trailer overhead echoed with it and Ruth thought to scream—and then the thunder tipped away, sliding by like a falling building or a train—and Newcombe grabbed her arm.

“Goddammit, stay back!” he yelled as the crushing sound continued past. “They might not be sure! They might only be following the highway!”

Ruth made herself nod. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to look out, but when the truck rolled it had hit at least one other vehicle. There was a badly dented beige sedan in front of her, and yet the noise was still a solid thing and easy to follow. It hadn’t gone far. It was landing.

Suddenly she could see through a gap between the car’s torn fender and wheel well. At ‚rst there was only sky and trees. Then she saw two helicopters. Maybe there were more. The aircraft dropped smoothly, meeting the ground with almost perfect symmetry. The side doors on both helicopters were open, spilling men in green containment suits—men without faces or shoulders, deformed by long hoods and air tanks.

“They’re down,” she said.

There were open ‚elds on this side of the highway, an irregular stretch of †at brown earth where the commercial buildings stopped short of the road. Ruth saw a chain-link fence that might slow the soldiers, but it was leaning over in one spot where they could probably shove it down. The sound of the choppers echoed and rapped from the tall face of a warehouse.

Cam pushed in beside her, craning his neck to see. Ants covered his shoulder. “We can’t make our stand here,” he told Newcombe.

“The bugs,” Ruth said. “Get the bugs between us and them.”

“Okay, yeah. Move.” Newcombe rolled over and began to pull off his pack.

Ruth turned and scrambled away, looking for Cam as soon as she hit daylight. He came out slapping at one sleeve and they ducked into the motionless cars together.

The glinting she had seen, sunlight on air tanks and weaponry, were there ten soldiers? Twenty?

“Here! Stop!” Cam pulled at her and they circled behind a white Mercedes. “If they come up the embankment we can try to force them back toward the truck.”

Ruth nodded, dry-mouthed. Where was Newcombe?

Waiting, she became intensely aware of her exhaustion, old bruises, new hurts. Waiting, she drew her pistol. In another life this much pain would have stopped her already, but she was not who she had been. None of them were. And that was both good and bad. In many ways Ruth Goldman was less complicated now, thinking less, feeling more, and there was real strength in her anger and frustration and shame.

She owed it to her friends to ‚ght. She owed it to herself, for every mistake she’d made.

Panting through the bitter taste of her face mask, Ruth kicked aside the small, partially melted ribcage of a child to reach the car’s rear bumper, where she brought her pistol up and braced for the assault.

* * * *

A lot of survivors called it Plague Year, or Year One, but it wasn’t only human history that had crashed in the long fourteen months since the machine plague. The invisible nanotech devoured all warm-blooded life below ten thousand feet elevation. What remained of the ecosystem was badly out of whack, with only ‚sh, frogs, and reptiles left to whittle down the exploding insect populations—and the land suffered for it. Entire forests had been chewed apart by locusts and termites. Riverways were forever changed by erosion.

States and nations had been obliterated, too. The plague had left few habitable zones anywhere in the world, the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, and a few scattered high points here and there. New Zealand. Japan. California.

Leadville, Colorado, was now the U.S. capital and the greatest military force on the planet. Their capabilities had been reduced by several orders of magnitude, but on every other continent the refugee populations were entrenched in savage land wars, devastated by each other and two winters.

The civil war across North America was tame in comparison. The rebels declared independence and claimed possession of the nearest cities below the barrier, and for the most part everyone had been able to recover enough food, fuel, medicine, and tools to get by.

Mammals and birds could dip into the invisible sea for a time, sometimes hours. Without host bodies, the nanotech was inert. Then it got into the lungs or the eyes or any microscopic break in the skin. It multiplied and spread and multiplied again, disintegrating soft tissue, muscle, and bone to build more of itself.

Scientists everywhere had made huge strides during the past year, especially in the consolidated labs in Leadville, using the plague itself to learn and experiment. The
archos
tech was a versatile prototype, meant to target and destroy cancerous cells. It could have been a godsend. Instead it had killed all of its design team except one when it broke loose in the San Francisco Bay Area—a small tragedy inside the global extinction. No one knew where to ‚nd their lab. When they died, their computers and their secrets vanished with them. The one man who escaped had been caught on a high island of rock in the California Sierra until just twenty-nine days ago, when he dared to run for another peak with a ski patrolman named Cam Najarro.

He was dead now, but ‚rst he’d devised a cure.

Using his ideas, Ruth and other top researchers became sure they could put together a nano capable of protecting the body from within, like a vaccine—and the slow American war turned hot. The Leadville government thought the situation was too far gone to simply share this new technology and trust in any peace. Overseas, starving armies ate each other’s dead and kept prisoners like cattle, and there had been atrocities here as well.

Leadville saw an opportunity to control the only way down from the mountains. It was a chance to own the entire planet, ensuring loyalty, establishing new states, leaving every enemy and undesirable to gradually succumb to famine and war unless perhaps they agreed to come down as slaves. The prize was too great, after too much hardship.

But not everyone felt this greed. The strike team that †ew out of Colorado to ransack the
archos
lab was full of moles. A few men and women in key positions disagreed with Leadville’s plan, sacri‚cing their own safety and well-being to get the right people on the plane. All three nanotech experts, all three pilots and seven of the twelve soldiers who landed in Sacramento had gone there hoping to grab the new technology and take it north to Canada, spread it freely and end the ‚ghting. Things went badly. The good guys came out on top only to ‚nd themselves trapped in the city, more than half their number killed or captured.

In the end they chose to strip off their containment suits and gamble on the vaccine nano, a hurriedly built, ‚rst-generation construct. It proved not to be absolute protection against the plague. At times the vaccine was overwhelmed, which left them vulnerable to some pain—but they could stay. They could hide.

Three days ago, Ruth and Cam and Staff Sergeant Newcombe had set out on foot through the never-ending destruction to carry the nanotech to survivors everywhere. They thought they’d won. But they were still ninety miles from elevation.

* * * *

The pounding scream of the helicopters increased again, tilting closer, and Ruth gaped up at the clear May sky for an instant before she turned and shut her eyes, dizzy with new fear and adrenaline. The choppers would come overhead, she realized. They would cover the squads on the ground. The idea took all the strength out of her and she leaned against the Mercedes—the heavy Mercedes, which Cam must have picked because its solid design might stop ri†e ‚re.

Please, God,
she thought.

Newcombe came dodging through the wreckage and bones. He was covered in ants. Unfortunately he couldn’t slap at them, clutching his pack against his chest with both arms. He twisted and bucked, banging off of a big gray SUV.

Cam tackled him. The two men hit the ground and then they seemed to be ‚ghting. They †ailed at each other, frantic to crush as many ants as possible. Bugs weren’t only dangerous because of bites or stings. After all this time, the ants would be enshrouded in nanotech. Every tiny puncture wound might also inject the plague directly into Newcombe’s blood, but there wasn’t time to hunt out every ant hidden in his gear. Newcombe was already scrambling for his ri†e, which he’d dropped, and Cam got one hand on Newcombe’s pack and dragged it behind the Mercedes.

“Here, over here!” Cam yelled.

The choppers had de‚nitely lifted off now, cutting the air with their thick, pulsing thunder. Any moment they would rise beyond the truck. Ruth looked at the Mercedes, wondering if she and Cam would ‚t beneath. Not with their packs.

Then her gaze shot back to Newcombe’s gear and froze there in sudden understanding. The top †ap was unbuckled and Ruth saw their radio inside, a med kit, socks. No food.

The decoys had been Cam’s idea, exploiting this strange environment. Struggling to feed themselves, they’d found stores and homes scoured clean, everything in boxes or paper bags demolished, so Cam and Newcombe had included as many cans of lard and syrup in their packs as they could carry. It was a clever plan. There were no other living heat sources down here, which could have made them comparatively easy to spot. Six times now, Newcombe had run north or gone back west to leave food traps, drawing in huge frenzies of roaches, ants, beetles, and †ies. Frenzies of heat and noise. Two days ago he’d rejoined them as a hazy black storm swelled on the horizon, a violent fog of competing species and colonies, and that had been at least a mile away. How many cans had Newcombe just hacked open?

Cam regularly dosed them with a foul mix of bug spray and perfume, yes, perfume, to hide the mammal smell of their sweat and pheromones, but they weren’t more than twenty yards from the truck. If there was a swarm, they would be in the middle of it.

Ruth clenched her left ‚st, a new habit to ‚ght for control— to punish herself. Several days ago, both bones had been snapped at the wrist, and the grind in the break was always a distraction. She wanted to be more like her friends. She wanted to be as relentless. Her own pack was the lightest and she clawed at it now, too clumsy with her arm in its cast. Somehow her ‚lthy mask had pulled down and she gulped clean-tasting air without regret. Dust and hot sun.