Plague War (5 page)

With Ruth, he read more into everything. He felt hope, and it was good and it upset him at the same time. Cam had no expectations that she regarded him the same way, not with his rough, blistered face. Not with his ragged hands.

He could have been angry, but he had seen what that kind of bitterness did to so many others. Sawyer. Erin. Manny. Jim. All of them dead. Cam had come far enough from those memories to see those people in a different light, and to see himself differently. Either you discovered how to live with yourself or you self-destructed, in hundreds of little ways or all at once, and Cam was thankful to be a part of something so much larger than himself. To be someone new.

But you can’t tell her,
he thought.
Things are too complicated as it is, and there’s no way she could
—

Explosions pounded the earth. The vibrations hit in three or four rolling impacts and Cam jolted onto his knees and peered up out of the drain, looking for ‚re or smoke.

Newcombe wrestled past him. “Let me see.”

“It was that way.”

A steadier noise washed over them, a collection of howling engines that cut out of the southwest. The ‚ghters. Cam realized that what he’d thought were missile strikes had been sonic booms as the jets accelerated close above the city, ahead of their own sound, but then he saw two specks brie†y, darting east at an angle that did not correspond with the direction of the turbulence overhead.

There were other planes in the sky, maneuvering for position. They were already miles away and Cam held still as he tried to picture the chase in his head, seeking any advantage. Should they use this chance to run? Where?

“Fuck, I’m an idiot,” Newcombe said as he turned to grab his pack. His radio.

“What’s happening?” Ruth asked, blocked in behind them.

“The ‚rst planes are from the rebels, maybe Canada,” Newcombe said. “That’s good. They’ll help us. I just never thought they’d risk it.”

Cam frowned as he glanced at the other man, sharing his disgust. They had all made the wrong assumption, always afraid of the sky, but it had only made sense to act as if they were alone. Except for Leadville’s new forward base, there were no organized forces here along the coast, either rebel or loyalist. The mountains in California and Oregon offered little more than a few scattered islands above the barrier, with few survivors. Their nearest allies were in Arizona and northern Colorado and Idaho, where the refugee populations had declared their independence from Leadville. But with the lion’s share of the United States Air Force, Leadville had claimed military superiority even before developing weaponized nanotech. Cam and Newcombe had never expected anyone to interfere.

Their radio was a small, broken thing—a headset and a control box. It was designed to be worn with a containment suit, the earpiece and microphone inside, the controls on the suit’s waist. They had cut it free of Newcombe’s gear on the ‚rst day, splicing the wires back together again. They’d also packed up Ruth and Cam’s radios as extras.

Newcombe held up the headset and then there was a woman whispering inside their little concrete box. The same woman as always. Every day, every night, Newcombe worked to ‚nd a signal other than the loop broadcast cajoling them to surrender, but the suit radio was more of a walkie-talkie than a real ‚eld unit. It had limited range and only operated on ten military bands, and Leadville was jamming all frequencies except this one.

Her words were calm and practiced. “. . . come for you anywhere, save you, just answer me...”

In the city and on the highway, they had also found police, ‚re‚ghter, and army radios for the taking. Ri†es, too, although Cam couldn’t use a larger weapon with the knife wound on his hand.

During the ‚rst days of the plague, local and federal forces had tried everything to meet the threat, often with opposing intents. There were roadblocks. There were eastbound convoys and escorts. Once they’d come across an old battle‚eld where an armored Guard company had turned back CHP and sheriff units, uselessly. It was all just part of the mess.

Good batteries were a problem, though. Many of the civilian and military radios had been left on as their operators †ed or died, maybe hoping, impossibly, that help could still come. Even when Newcombe got something working, the civilian frequencies were deserted, and the Sierras made it easier for Leadville’s forward base to override the military bands. Sitting on top of the immense wall of the mountains, Leadville could block out every other voice.

The woman taunted them. “If you’re hurt, if you’re tired, we have medical personnel standing by and we . . .”

Newcombe switched through his channels rapidly. Static. Static. “Those jets have been trying to reach us this whole fucking time,” he said. “That’s why they’re down so low, to get under the jamming. To stay off Leadville’s radar net.”

“But what can they do?” Ruth asked. “Would they land?”

“No. Not ‚ghters. Not here. But they can give us information and they can keep Leadville off our backs. We had contingencies. We—”

A lot of things happened fast. Two of the planes roared back again almost directly overhead, an invisible pair of shock lines that hammered through the ruins. It was as if a giant hand dragged two ‚ngers across the houses and the water, lifting waves and debris—and inside this hurricane, a †urry of white-hot sparks tumbled down toward the sea, so bright that a con†ict of shadows rippled over the drowned city, stark and black even in full daylight. It was chaff, a defensive tool intended to blind and distract heat-seeking missiles. But if there were missiles, Cam didn’t notice. A smaller line of destruction chased after the jets, stitching its way through mud banks, buildings, and cars. Gun‚re. Cam saw the large-caliber explosive rounds kick apart an entire home, tearing through wood and brick like it was paper, before he winced and ducked away and three more jets screamed past.

At the same time Newcombe grunted,
ha
, triumphant. Beneath the noise, the radio was chanting in a man’s voice loud with popping static:

“. . . air is against the wall, the chair is against . . .”

It faded out. The jets were gone. Cam didn’t understand the weird phrase, but Newcombe was nodding. Newcombe clicked twice at his SEND button, a quick and untraceable signal of squelch, acknowledging the message even as he looked back and forth at Cam and Ruth. “Good news,” he said.

Ruth woke up hurting. Her ‚ngers. Her wrist. The feeling was a hard, grinding itch and Ruth thrashed out of her sleeping bag, frantic to move away from the pain. It was a re†ex as basic as lifting your hand off of a ‚re, but these embers were inside her. The machine plague. She knew that but she moved anyway, screaming in the dark.

“Get up! Get up!”

The stars were intense, close and sharp, like a billion fragments of light. Even through the bronze lens of her goggles, Ruth could see the neat, open canyon of the residential street around her—but as she tried to stand, she cracked her knee on something. Then the ground rocked and clanged beneath her. She nearly fell. She grabbed with both arms and struck Newcombe as he sat up.

The two of them were in the truck bed of a big Dodge pickup, she remembered. They’d found a boat at last, well before sunset, but spent forty minutes looking for a vehicle capable of towing it. Negotiating the truck through the ruins cost them another hour. By then they were losing daylight and Cam suggested using the truck itself for camp, two of them sleeping as the third stood guard. The tires were as good as stilts and they’d soaked the road beneath with gasoline in case ants or spiders came hunting.

“What—” Newcombe said, but he stopped and stared at his gloved hands. “Christ.”

He felt it, too.

“We’re in a hot spot!” Ruth cried, wrenching her bad arm as she staggered up again. “Cam? Cam, where are you!? We have to get out of here!”

A white beam slashed across the darkness from inside the long, thin ‚shing boat, parked on its trailer. Then the †ashlight jogged higher, re†ecting on the beige paint as Cam stepped onto the bow. “Wait,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“We can’t—”

“We’ll go. Just wait. Get your stuff. Newcombe? We’d better splash ourselves with more gasoline. Who knows what the hell else is awake right now.”

His methodical voice should have helped Ruth control herself. He was right. There were too many other dangers to run blindly into the night, but the pain was bad and growing worse and every breath carried more nanotech into their lungs.

Their ski gear was only designed to repel snow and cold. Jackets, goggles, and fabric masks could never be proof against the plague. In fact, the masks were nearly useless. They wore their makeshift armor only to reduce their exposure, but it was an impossible battle. Thousands of the microscopic particles covered each short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With every step they stirred up great puffs of it, yet even holding still would be no help. They were deep within an invisible ocean. Airborne nanos blanketed the entire planet, forming vast wells and currents as the weather dictated, and this fog would be its worst down here at sea level. The wind might sweep it up and away, but rain and runoff and gravity were a constant drag on the subatomic machines. Newcombe hadn’t wanted to drink the water because he was afraid of bacteria, but even if he’d had puri‚er tablets, Ruth would have stopped him because this shoreline must be dense with the machine plague.

Their only true protection was the vaccine nano. But it could be overwhelmed. In an ideal scenario, it would kill the plague as soon as the invader touched their skin or lungs. In reality, its capacity to target the plague was limited, and it functioned best against live, active infections. That was a problem. Inhaled or otherwise absorbed into a host body, the plague took minutes or even hours to reactivate, and in that time it could travel farther than was easily understood. A human being was comprised of miles upon miles of veins, tissue, organs, and muscle—and once the plague began to replicate, the body’s own pulse became a weakness, distributing the nanotech everywhere.

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 machine 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 plague nanos generated repeatedly as they constructed more of themselves, but the vaccine was always behind its brother. It was always reacting. It was smaller and faster, able to eradicate its prey, but only after the chase.

Fortunately, in one sense, the plague had a tendency to bunch up in the extremities and in scar tissue, attacking the body’s weakest points ‚rst. The vaccine gathered in the same way, but more than once they had all suffered some discomfort as the endless war continued inside them.

With Ruth, it was her broken arm. The swollen, clotted tissue there seemed to act as a screen, trapping the nanos in her wrist and keeping them down in that hand, eating her away a bit at a time. She was terri‚ed of being crippled. She worried about it almost compulsively because anything more was unthinkable. Hemorrhaging. Stroke. Heart attack. Death.

For an instant she stared at Cam, shaking all over. But behind the white light in his hand, he was only a shadow, faceless and distant. Ruth bent and grabbed her pack, pushing off of Newcombe as he switched on his own †ashlight. There was no chance she’d bother to pack up her sleeping bag. She immediately began to climb down from the truck, swinging her foot over the side.

“Ruth—”

“You’re sixty pounds heavier than me!” she screamed, wild with fear and envy. “Goddammit! I’ll always have it worst! I’ll always be closer to maxing out!”

“Just let me get in front,” Cam said, jumping down from the boat. He landed hard. The beam of the †ashlight splashed over his chest, but he quickly gathered himself and took one step away from the truck.

Ruth gritted out words. “We need to get inside. Somewhere clean.”

“Okay.” Cam played his light over the street and changed direction, glancing back once at Newcombe. “Move,” he called. “We can douse ourselves on the move.”

Newcombe hustled after them, a second wand of light. He caught up as they reached the sidewalk and gestured with his free hand. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check this house. You two stay here.”

Ruth made a sound like laughter, like sobbing. It felt insane to wait out at the edge of the patchy dry lawn beside the mailbox. In the dark, this small space looked so normal and perfect, even as she burned, but Newcombe’s decision was inarguable. His sacri‚ce.

If there were skeletons inside, the home would be packed with nanotech. The plague was bad along the highway, where so many people had been disintegrated, but it had also been swept by wind and rain. There were safer pockets here and there, and they tended to settle down on the upwind side, using their own nerves to gauge how thick the plague might be. They’d had mixed luck trying to camp inside. A sealed room was priceless, but a single body could be exploded into millions of the damned things and they needed to avoid concentrated spikes in exposure. Worse, it might not be obvious that anyone was dead inside a building. In the ‚nal extreme, most people had hidden themselves away, crawling into corners and closets.

Opening every door was a good way to overload the vaccine, but that kind of inspection was necessary. Houses with bodies were also houses with bugs. Either the ants had come through, often leaving a colony behind, or the rot eventually made the place more attractive to termites and beetles.

Hunched over her arm, Ruth watched Newcombe approach the two-story home. He skimmed his light along the front of the building, making sure there were no broken windows.

Cam said, “What else can we do? Ruth? What else?”

“Nothing. Wait.”
Oh God,
she thought. Maybe she said it out loud, too.

“Here’s another mask. Put it on over your other one. You need help? Here.” He dropped his backpack and carefully snugged the band of fabric down over her hood and goggles. “I’m going to check next door in case we—”