Plague War (33 page)

They avoided the largest groups. Twice they’d †ed below the barrier after being surprised by shantytowns. Ruth wanted as many blood samples as possible, but they were afraid they’d be overrun. The squad carried four M60 machine guns in addition to their carbines and two snub Mac-10s that Foshtomi called “meat grinders,” but twelve people could never be a match against a thousand. Their supplies made them a target. Fortunately they’d kept ahead of word of mouth. Their vehicles were a huge advantage, and almost everyone they met was learning about them for the ‚rst time.

Their group was small for several reasons. They needed to be able to scavenge enough food and fuel to keep going. It was also important to avoid the attention of Russian-Chinese planes and satellites. A large convoy would have been more visible, and the sky was a greater threat than any starving survivors.

Much like the expedition into Sacramento, this squad was all chiefs and no Indians. Foshtomi and Ballard were the only corporals. The others were sergeants of various sub-ranks, and John Park and Deborah were both captains, although it had been made clear that Park was in command.

Deborah was an outsider like Ruth and Cam. She was never far from her friend. The tall blond had been charting her own notes, but now she got up and walked four paces and sat down again, joining Ruth. “Can I talk to you about the second group today?” she asked, interrupting whatever else Cam might have said.

On purpose,
he thought. Deborah had been quietly writing by herself for twenty minutes. She’d only stepped in after he came over. Had he missed a signal? Ruth might have looked past his shoulder and caught Deborah’s eyes... No. Ruth answered Deborah with a nod, but she turned to Cam and gave him an apologetic look. She wanted the chance to talk, even if he made her nervous, and Cam frowned to himself as he watched the two women. His rivalry with Deborah was just getting worse.

“Four of those refugees also said they’d come from the east,” Deborah said, touching her notepad. “Do you want me to put their samples with the ‚rst group?”

“Absolutely not,” Ruth said. “Let’s make a subset, though. Cross-reference them.”

“Okay. And everyone out of the south has priority.”

“Yes.”

Deborah’s job had become more dif‚cult when they packed up and ran this afternoon. Keeping the samples organized was vital to their mission, but that wasn’t why she’d intervened.

The two of them were like moths competing for a light. Cam had seen the same polarizing effect between himself and Mark Newcombe. Deborah was here to protect Ruth. Her motivation was much like his own. Being with Ruth was a chance to share her incredible sense of purpose.

“I should get ready for my shift,” he said. It was partly true. He stood up and Ruth rose with him.

“Are you—” she began, but Cam stopped her.

“It’s okay. You have a lot of work to do.”

Her face was uncertain, but she nodded. She hadn’t even unpacked her microscope yet. The night before she’d taken hours to screen less than twenty samples, huddled beneath a silver foil survival blanket to hide her †ashlight, and today they’d accumulated thirty-one vacuum caps of blood. Tomorrow there would be more. The job was already too big for her, even with Deborah and Captain Park as assistants. Ruth was too thorough. Cam would have taken half as many samples and doubled their travel time, but she was terri‚ed of missing any clue.

It would be perverse, but Cam also wondered if she was upset because she wasn’t responsible for the advances that had brought the nanotech this far. Life wasn’t like TV, where every success belonged only to the hero. Sometimes you could only react to other people’s accomplishments. They’d seen enough twists and surprises to know that was true. Cam thought Ruth had learned not to let her own ego work against her, and yet the fact remained that she was playing catch-up to other people’s work, when for most of her career she had been the hotshot. That must be tough, so he only smiled at her.

“Sit with me for breakfast,” she said.

“If I can.” Cam was important to the job, too, standing guard in three-hour watches just like the other Rangers, supporting the team and contributing to their ever-changing plans. Given a moment of privacy, Cam would have said more.
You know why I’m here,
he thought, but Deborah stirred beside Ruth with her chin tilted up in that aggressive way, so Cam only smiled again and turned to go.

Deborah disapproved of him. Their backgrounds could not have been more different. The basic EMT classes he’d taken before the plague were a joke compared to her years of education, and he was de‚nitely not a book that was judged well by its cover. A haircut and a clean uniform had only made his scarring more prominent, whereas Deborah’s skin was clear and unblemished— and Ruth’s temples and left cheek remained lightly marked from their long run in goggles and masks.

Whether she realized it not, Cam thought that on some level Deborah was pulling at Ruth to keep her from becoming any more like him. Deborah was a good friend to Ruth. Cam liked her for it even if they didn’t get along. The bottom line was that Deborah Reece could be arrogant, even rude, but she had been safe in Grand Lake and she’d walked away from it for the greater good.

* * * *

Cam still wondered how close Ruth had come to being told she couldn’t leave. Governor Shaug hadn’t wanted to see Deborah go, either, or the elite troops or the atomic force microscope that Ruth demanded.

In the end, Ruth convinced him there was far more worth to be had if she succeeded. She had also lost her value as a bargaining chip. Shaug could no longer †y her to the labs in Canada in exchange for food or weaponry, because Grand Lake’s allies had issued a quarantine. The ghost nanotech seemed limited to Colorado. They didn’t want to be infected themselves. They continued to coordinate their militaries with Grand Lake, but planes out of Colorado were no longer permitted to divert anywhere else even if they were hit or low on fuel. Colorado ground troops in need of help would not see reinforcements except from other Colorado units.

Governor Shaug must have been desperate to change that edict, and Ruth could be forceful when the mood struck her. In Sacramento, Cam had seen her yell at seven armed men when she disagreed with them, so it intrigued him that she was tentative with him.

There was no reason to ask him to join her except that she trusted him. Loved him. The Rangers were a top-notch escort, whereas he was a complication.

Newcombe had opted out. Cam was disappointed, but he couldn’t resent the soldier for his choice. Newcombe had ‚t himself back into the larger whole of Grand Lake exactly as he’d always intended. Newcombe just didn’t have the same ties to Ruth. During all their time together, she’d chosen Cam instead, and he hoped she would do it again if Deborah continued to force the issue.

* * * *

She did. The next morning she brought Cam tea and oatmeal as he helped Wesner and Foshtomi load their gear into the jeeps. Later that day she even used Allison as an excuse to talk to him about their days in Grand Lake. She took another blood sample herself. She said she had to monitor how they were being exposed themselves, dealing with the refugees, but Foshtomi noticed that she let Deborah draw blood from the rest of the group.

Foshtomi was delighted by their slow-motion romance because she was just one of the guys in her squad, Cam thought. She kept tabs on Ruth because it allowed her to be a woman.

That Ruth was watching you again last night,
Foshtomi would say, or,
Did you see how that Ruth waited to eat until you were done helping Mitchell with the fuel cans?

It was true. “That Ruth” found time to be with him despite everything else, even if it was just for a few minutes—and she had to be the one who approached him, because Captain Park gave her all the latitude she wanted, whereas Cam was always busy as a member of the squad.

In many ways he enjoyed that pressure. The Rangers were a well-oiled machine. Their power appealed to Cam. They imposed order and direction on their world, which was a remarkable feat.

By their ‚fth day, the land above the barrier pinched into a thin neck of ground along the Continental Divide, forcing them to turn west below ten thousand feet. Highway 40 ran eastward through the sheer peaks, zigzagging up through to the other side of the Divide and the refugee populations that had formed above the small cities of Empire, Lawson, and Georgetown, but the highway was thick with old traf‚c and new rockslides. Fires had blackened the mountainsides even where there was nothing to burn except damp moss and weeds. Ash and dust lay across the earth in vast streamers. It whispered up beneath their tires and boots. Three of the Rangers now wore radiation badges clipped to their jackets and Captain Park also had a Geiger counter that chittered and clacked at times. They seemed to be edging through an area where the fallout had settled after the explosion. They were lucky the prevailing weather was out of the northwest, behind them. It had carried most of the poison east, but the radiation was another reason to go west from the Divide.

They spent two days in a long, green valley cut into the mountains by a good-sized creek that had brie†y become a colossal †ood. Nearer to ground zero, most of the snowpack had been vaporized, but at this distance the snow immediately slumped away as water and slush, increasing the landslides caused by the quake. Their jeeps rocked and crashed through banks of gravel, muck, and driftwood. They broke one of their four shovels digging a way through. They also encountered three groups of survivors. This valley faced north and had escaped the worst of the damage. Many of the aspen and spruce were still standing and the water ran clear—and there was nothing in this place to attract the air war, only wilderness.

Finally they made it up through the Ute Pass, where Highway 9 arrowed south toward Interstate 70. On this high point, the blast wave had lifted cars by the thousands, overturning the old metal shapes. The road was a mess of broken glass and odd drifts of rust and paint †akes, and Captain Park took them back north instead of following the highway toward Leadville. He refused to move deeper into the blast zone. Ruth’s few protests were soft-spoken and confused.

Ruth was haggard beneath her sunburn. She worked nights with her AFM and tried to nap in the day when they were on the move, but it must have been like sleeping on the back of an elephant. The jeeps bumped and seesawed on the rocky earth, stopping and starting as the Rangers jumped down to push wrecks or boulders out of the way. She was exhausted. She carried that goddamn stone everywhere.

She thought she’d failed. Two of the refugee groups they’d met in the valley had been clean. They’d infected those people themselves. Yes, she’d given them the vaccine, but at the cost of tainting them with the ghost, too.
We couldn’t have known,
Cam told her. Ruth only grimaced and shook her head. They seemed to have lost the trail.

They were running out of time. Open broadcasts out of Grand Lake constantly advised American forces of enemy action, and Chinese armored units had pushed into Colorado.

The Chinese had taken southern California and most of Arizona with relative ease. There was no one to oppose them except the tiny populations on the few peaks east of Los Angeles, who were quickly burned away. The Chinese armies numbered at least a hundred and ‚fty thousand soldiers, pilots, mechanics, and artillery men—and their naval †eets were rushing away for more.

Interstates 40 and 70 became the lifelines of the invasion. At low elevations, the freeways were mostly clear, except where American ‚ghters had destroyed bridges and causeways. Planes from both sides clashed above the desert while, far below, Chinese combat engineers struggled to move their trucks and APCs across every break in the road.

The Chinese armies were also disrupted by hot spots. There had been huge drifts of the plague out of the L.A. basin and it scattered the Chinese reserves, overwhelming the vaccine. At the Arizona border, the Colorado River was also seething with nanotech. U.S. surveillance put the enemy’s casualties in the thousands, and North American Command did their best to channel the invader into these death zones.

The Chinese couldn’t slow down. They also had the bugs and the desert heat to contend with. Their best strategy was that of momentum and speed. They plundered every city and military base within reach and they were brie†y rich for it, squandering fuel and ammunition.

Flagstaff only lasted ‚ve days. While Cam and Ruth were in their quiet valley just west of the Continental Divide, the Chinese effectively claimed Arizona and turned toward the Rockies in full strength.

The Grand Canyon served as a critical defensive line. This deep, ancient gash in the Earth stretched for hundreds of miles through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, and not a single bridge or dam survived the American strikes. It split the Chinese in two. The enemy could provide air support for themselves across the entire Southwest, but their generals were faced with a decision as far back as Las Vegas, at the mouth of the Canyon, beyond which their armies were no longer able to reach each other.

The Russians helped them in Utah, pounding at the largest American outposts in the mountains east of Salt Lake, but the enemy bogged down there. Interstate 70 ran north from Vegas and stayed tight along another high range for nearly a hundred miles before it squeezed into a series of passes and bent east toward Colorado. The Chinese advance was hit every step of the way.

If they’d tried to charge through, they probably would have succeeded, with heavy losses, but the northern Chinese group didn’t want Utah at their backs as they assaulted Colorado. They appeared to settle in for a long ‚ght.

Their southern force had always been the larger one, however. It was also where they directed all reinforcements. The thrust by their northern army was only to hold Utah in check. Meanwhile, their southern force angled up into Colorado on as many smaller highways as they could access, swarming north and east as the roads curled away from the vast, sprawling bulk of the front side of the Rockies.