Plague War (29 page)

“I’m staying with him.”

The nurse checked with three doctors before turning on the X-ray, which was isolated in its own tiny space by hanging blankets. This tent was hooked into Grand Lake’s power grid, fed by turbines far below in the river, but the amperage on their line was weak and couldn’t support more than a few pieces of equipment at once.

While the ‚lm was developed, Cam and Ruth were led to a second tent where they were given antibiotics. Ruth grabbed something from her pants before a man took their ‚lthy clothes away. A rock. She tried to hide it, but Cam recognized the lines scored into the granite.

“Jesus, Ruth, how long have you been...”

“Please. Please, Cam.” She wouldn’t look at him. “Please don’t be mean about it.”

He nodded slowly. The rock was obviously safe. Otherwise they would have gotten sick weeks ago.
But why would you want to take anything from that place with you?
he wondered. Maybe she wasn’t sure, either. “It’s okay,” he said.

They were given stinging sponge baths with soap and water and rubbing alcohol. Then their multitude of wounds were treated, stitched, and bandaged. Ruth wasn’t shy about her body, although there were half a dozen people in between them and Cam turned his back, trying not to stare.

The medical staff wore cloth masks and a hodgepodge of gloves, some latex, some rubber. They were almost certainly exposed to the nanotech. Cam coughed and coughed to purposely infect them. The vaccine wouldn’t replicate inside them because there was no plague here for it attack, but he wanted to spread the technology to as many people as possible.

A man with glasses came in and said, “Goldman? Your arm’s healed fairly well, but I’m going to recommend a brace for at least three weeks. Don’t overuse it.”

They cut off her battered ‚berglass cast and Ruth gasped at the sight of her arm. The skin was wrinkled and albino pale, the muscles wasted. Trapped sweat had puckered her skin and in places the doughy tissue was infected. She wept. She wept and Cam knew her tears weren’t for her arm, not entirely. She was ‚nally able to let go of all the horror she’d repressed.

Cam hurried through the strangers and held her. Neither of them wore anything except a †imsy hospital smock. Ruth’s clean-smelling hair had †uffed up in waves and curls and Cam kept his nose against the top of her head, marveling in the small pleasure of it.

Things got worse. The two of them had already received a fortune in pharmaceuticals and the medical staff refused to give her painkillers before they cleaned her arm. “It’s super‚cial,” the surgeon said. He scraped at her mushy skin and swabbed the wounds with iodine as Ruth screamed and screamed, clinging to her little rock.

* * * *

“We need to rest,” Cam said. “Food and rest. Please.”

“Of course. We can follow up tomorrow.” The surgeon was testing Cam’s left hand now, pricking the scar tissue, but he turned and gestured at a nurse, who left the narrow room.

Ruth had lain down, shaking. Her forearm was wrapped in a black fabric sleeve reinforced with metal struts, although the surgeon had said to take it off as much as possible to let her wounds breathe.

The nurse returned with four soldiers. Cam recognized one of them from the landing strip and fought to hide his reaction, bristling with distrust and aggression. It was misplaced. It came too easily. “Can you help her?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the squad leader said. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we’re going to carry you, okay?”

Cam and Ruth were dressed in Army green themselves, old shirts and pants—old but clean. The nurse hadn’t been long ‚nding things in their exact sizes. Cam tried not to dwell on the fact that the spare clothes must have come from dead men. It wouldn’t have bothered him except that he didn’t want to offend the soldiers for any reason.

Cam leaned on one of the young men as they left the tent. Ruth was half-conscious in their arms. Outside, a blond woman stood waiting in the last light of the sun, her chin tipped up almost combatively. From her rich hair and complexion, Cam thought she was in the prime of her early thirties, a lot like Ruth. She was beautiful, but she wore the same Army green as all of them beneath a white lab coat and it was the coat that unsettled Cam. Was she from Shaug’s nanotech team?

Just go away,
he thought.

The woman’s legs scissored as she moved into their path. There were nonre†ective black bars on her shirt collar and the squad leader said, “Excuse me, Captain.”

She didn’t even look at him. “Ruth?” she asked. “Ruth, my God.” Her smooth hand went to Ruth’s shoulder, as deft as a bird.

Cam said, “Leave us alone.”

“I know her,” the woman insisted.

He would have shoved past, but Ruth wriggled free of the soldiers and took one step, unsteady, smiling, before she buried her face in the woman’s long hair and embraced her. “Deborah,” she said.

* * * *

The wind picked up as the light changed, fading to orange, but Ruth clung stubbornly to her friend in the same way she’d refused to lose sight of Cam.

“Please, ma’am,” the squad leader said.

“Can’t you just bring our dinner here?” Ruth asked. She sat between Cam and Deborah on the tracked bare earth near the corner of the surgical tent, where they were mostly out of the breeze but could still look across the mountains in the west.

“Ma’am,” the man repeated, but Deborah said, “Just do it, Sergeant. Send one of your guys. The rest of you can keep her plenty safe for a few minutes.”

“My orders are to get her inside, Captain.”

“I like the air,” Ruth said distantly.

Cam worried that she might be confused, but Deborah only repeated herself in that haughty way. “A few minutes,” Deborah said. “Go on.”

The squad leader jerked his thumb at one of his men, who moved off. There were other people passing by, two doctors, two mechanics, a teenager in civilian clothes.

“What can I do?” Deborah asked softly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m cold,” Ruth said, still gazing at the horizon.

Deborah glanced past her at Cam with a worried look and he felt for the ‚rst time that they might be friends, too, although it was strange. If he remembered right, the two women had been adversaries before today.

Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., had been the physician and a support systems specialist aboard the International Space Station. All of the astronauts had worked two or more jobs to maintain the station, and she was a formidable woman. Most impressive of all was that Ruth had last seen her in Leadville. Somehow Deborah had walked away from the nuclear strike, and yet Cam held his tongue, watching the people come and go until Ruth shook herself, coming into focus at last.

“Deb, what are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought Grand Lake was a rebel base.”

“It’s not important. Did you get what you went for?”

“Yes. Yes, we did.” Ruth set her good hand on Cam’s knee and squeezed, although she didn’t look at him.

Deborah noticed the contact. She glanced past Ruth again, and Cam tried to smile. “We need to know everything about this place,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what I can.” But mostly Deborah talked about Leadville. She had yet to make peace with it, Cam realized, and that was no surprise.

“Bill Wallace is dead,” she told Ruth, counting friends. “Gustavo. Ulinov. Everyone in the labs.”

Nikola Ulinov had sacri‚ced four hundred thousand people for the Russians, saving only one. Playing on the authority he’d once had aboard the ISS, Ulinov quietly suggested that Deborah volunteer for a combat unit. Her medical training could be of real use, he said, helping the men and women on Leadville’s front lines rather than babying the politicians in town.

“It was a warning,” Deborah said. “It was the best he could do. If he ran...If our entire crew disappeared, Leadville would’ve known. They would have shot down the plane that brought in the warhead.”

Cam let her talk, watching the ‚ne wrinkles that appeared at the corners of her eyes and mouth as she struggled with herself.

“When I think of him waiting,” Deborah said. “When I think of him being sure, but still waiting...” She leaned against Ruth and sighed, blinking back tears even as her eyes sparked with rage.

“It’s okay,” Ruth said. “Shh, it’s okay.”

Cam frowned and turned to gaze out across the mountains again, wondering at the man’s determination in bringing such force down on himself. He had seen all kinds of bravery and evil. Sometimes they were one and same. The only difference was in where you stood, and that made Cam uneasy. He believed in what he was doing, but maybe it was a mistake.

He coughed hard into his palm. Then he touched the back of Deborah’s hand as if to comfort her, infecting her with the vaccine. “I’m sorry,” he said.

* * * *

Grand Lake had gone underground. Many of the trailers and huts concealed tunnel entrances. On their way from the medical tent, Cam saw a wide shape of camou†age netting that covered new excavations. Work had stopped for the day, but it looked as if they’d dug a ‚fty-foot pit by hand and were still hacking at one edge while other teams built wooden frameworks into which they’d pour concrete. He supposed that after the boxy shapes of the walls had set, they’d add ceilings, then pile the dirt back in to hide and insulate the bunker. A wasted effort.

You can all go back down again,
he thought.
You should all be able to walk off this mountain.

That was probably why Shaug sought to control it. If too many people ran, he’d lose his ‚ghting force. A mass exodus down from the Continental Divide could be its own disaster, because without an organized military, they would be helpless against the Russians.

Maybe the governor was right.

Cam felt new adrenaline as the squad leader led them to a sun-faded mobile home with a tarp for an awning, hiding its door. Deborah had already left, promising to visit Ruth again before breakfast, and Cam was glad that someone else knew where to ‚nd them. What if Shaug meant to lock them in?

He was unarmed and outnumbered. He went through the door when the squad leader gestured. Inside, the prefab home was little more than a shell, no furniture, no carpet. Most of the wall panels had been torn apart for ‚rewood and to get at the wiring and plumbing. Only two light ‚xtures remained. The kitchen was gutted of its cabinets, sink, and counters, and in this bizarre scene stood a short-haired Asian woman with a cigarette. The home was only here to cover the stairwell and the ventilation holes in the †oor.

Cam hesitated at the top of the dark stairs. “I need to talk to Shaug,” he said. It was all he could think of.

“We’ll walk you over in the morning, sir,” the squad leader said.

Ruth glanced into Cam’s eyes, ready to play along, but the noise from below did not sound like a prison and the woman with the cigarette was disinterested and relaxed. Cam heard laughter as a man shouted, “Five bucks! That’s ‚ve bucks!”

They went down nearly twenty feet. The walls were un‚nished concrete lined with a single black wire. Two lamps had been bolted to the ceiling. Eight doorways ‚lled a short hall, hung with blankets, and Cam worried at the damp cold.

“This is you, sir,” the squad leader said, pointing at the ‚rst door. “We’ll be right across, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.” Cam led Ruth into their room. It was cramped but private, and equipped with an electric coil space heater. He turned it on. There was also one narrow Army cot and four blankets, although he was too keyed up to sleep.

Ruth gently touched her ‚ngers against his chest and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Cam.”

He only nodded. There was no anxiety in the moment. That made him feel pleased. She trusted him and he was very glad for his sense of kinship and safety.

Ruth lay down on the cot and Cam sat awake on the †oor, his mind churning. Deborah had vouched for Shaug.
I think he’s a good man who’s done his best with very little,
she said, and she knew more than he did. She had been here for two days before they arrived, and her medical training had been a ticket straight into the middle echelons of the leadership.

After the bombing, Deborah’s unit had surrendered to the large contingent of rebels aligned under Grand Lake, the nearest surviving American stronghold. Loveland Pass had burned, too close to ground zero, and White River might as well have been on the moon because of the huge plague zones in between—but Deborah said there had been similar movements up and down the Continental Divide as the American forces rejoined. Grand Lake’s ‚ghting strength was actually larger than it had been before the bombing, although most of the new troops were infantry or light armored units. The surprise attack had done that much good, at least, pushing most of the shattered United States back together once more.

Now the vaccine would turn everything upside down again, as would the data index. Ruth believed that researchers everywhere must be on the verge of weaponized nanotech like the snow†ake. Could her presence here become the boost that Grand Lake’s small lab needed?

When she kissed him, Cam had seen the haunted, rising dread in her eyes. He ‚nally recognized the distance he’d heard in her voice outside the medical tent. It was the fear of so much responsibility. Given a moment to reassess, given a full lab and equipment, he wondered how Ruth would change the war.

There was a second nano in Cam’s blood sample, a new machine shaped like a twisted
X
. Ruth had never seen it before, although she immediately thought of the dead mountaintop etched with thousands of crosses. The emotions in her now were the same—lonely confusion and despair. She leaned back from her tunneling scope and clenched her left ‚st in her brace, unable to get past the truth. It should be impossible, and yet the strange nanotech existed in his blood alongside the vaccine. His, but not hers. The nanotech was benign for the moment. Ruth expected it was waiting for some trigger.

Where had it come from?

“Let me out,” she said suddenly, turning to the microphone on her left. The clean booth was equipped with two open mikes, one to record her observations, the other to keep in contact with the outside because this booth was too small to enter or exit without help. For a laboratory, Grand Lake had built a reinforced steel box too small to hold all the equipment they’d gathered. A rack of electronics partially blocked the door and the bulk of an electron microscope crowded Ruth on her right, but the lab was sterile and well-lit and could draw more power than she needed, even to purge the box.