Plague Year (32 page)

Cam knelt clumsily, rocking his head from side to side until he drew Sawyer’s attention. “How do you feel? Your ears hurt?”

“The suit’s fine,” the captain said, softly enough that Sawyer wouldn’t hear since he lacked a radio.

“Mm tired.” Sawyer stared at Cam with puzzled misery, perhaps blaming him.

“Try to rest.” He stood before his anger could show.

The ski patrol had not been much of an elite, with never more at stake than a broken leg or some kid separated from his parents. These men were of an entirely different class. Highly trained, highly motivated, with everything in the world on the line—it was a privilege to be associated with them and a disgrace to have wasted their time.

Hernandez started toward the plane and Cam took one step after him, leaving Sawyer. Hernandez turned back.

Cam said, “I’m sorry, sir.”

Hernandez studied his face again, quickly, then gave a nod. “Shout out anytime,
hermano
. We need to keep him happy.”

“
Lo que usted diga,
” Cam said.
Whatever you say.

He wanted so much to be one of them.

26

Ruth realized she had been right not to trust Cam with the secret of the conspiracy. He was too close to Hernandez. Too bad. She liked him. He tried so hard. But the strength of his commitment was its own liability.

Crammed into the back of the jeep with D.J., writing new code and arguing over every line of it, Ruth managed to ignore her anxiety until the bulldozer began crashing around. Lord knew she had always been able to hide in her work—and using the keyboard and ball mouse with one glove-thickened hand was a real chore, enough to keep her occupied.

“I can’t see when you do that,” D.J. said, reaching across her to steady the laptop. Ruth bumped his arm, grabbing at her belt and changing frequencies.

She needed to hear what Hernandez was saying.

It was unfair to doubt Cam for a choice he hadn’t made, of course. He didn’t know that two sides existed, and it was only natural for him to respond to the resources and the sense of control Hernandez had brought into his life.

He was a good man but profoundly wounded—and so he might disbelieve everything she’d say about the atrocities of the Leadville government. The quickest way for him to be done with this mess was to fly back to Colorado. He would be a champion. He could in some way consider himself whole again. Ruth wasn’t sure he would be
able
to choose a path that led anywhere else, a path that meant more running, more effort, as they diverted north into Canada and reorganized a working lab and tried to gather enough allies to hold off the inevitable assaults as Leadville pursued them. It was too much to expect.

Nevertheless, tension and guilt had kept her awake most of the night. Her brain ached from the blunt rubber stink of the suit and her body felt heavy with exhaustion even as it twitched with nervous energy, ill and uneasy.

D.J. pulled on the laptop and complained again, a muted buzz outside her suit. She’d caught Hernandez midsentence: “—ooner we get you on the trailer.” He made a sweeping motion in her direction and Cam rolled Sawyer after him toward the jeep.

The bulldozer punched into another vehicle.
Ka-rang!
One of the car’s tires popped as the ’dozer shoved it sideways, the metal rim digging into the asphalt with a hair-raising wail. It didn’t stop until the car tottered over the embankment at the top of the exit ramp, tumbling down with three distinct impacts.

“Lowrey, Watts.” Hernandez raised his voice only slightly. “We’re lifting this chair up onto the trailer.”

“Yes, sir, I was gonna put him up front against that crate.”

“Fine. Let’s move it. The ramp will be clear in a minute.”

Cam noticed Ruth’s attention and lifted one glove. She thought he might have smiled but the low sun was on his faceplate, obscuring the middle of his expression. She turned away.

In her uncertainty, some part of her actually wanted to find the labs stripped clean. Once they had Sawyer’s schematics, the Special Forces would instigate their takeover—and Hernandez would fight. Ruth was sure of that much.

No matter the odds, Hernandez would fight them.

* * * *

Overall the city appeared only lightly damaged. Commercial buildings loomed above them, impassive weight, a thousand white glints of sunshine on unbroken glass. If they failed, if Sawyer’s files and prototypes were truly lost and the machine plague held sway over the planet forever, this place was a monument that would exist in some form until ultimately the continental shelf rolled into the Pacific Ocean. Concrete and iron would withstand quakes, fires, and weather for eons.

Ruth gazed all around, gripped by dark wonder.

The frozen traffic here surged only one way—west, toward the freeway, every car nosing into the next. They came up onto sidewalks. They diverted through parking lots and hedges and fences. They were full of stick shapes, and the crowded street itself had become the grave of hundreds, color-fast rags on yellowing bone, screaming jaws and eroded fingers, the skeletons of dogs and birds scattered among the human remains like strange half-grown monsters.

The carnage looked even worse in contrast to the commonplace icons of America, most of which survived untouched. Rising on poles, bolted to storefronts, were the garish plastic signs of Chevron and Wendy’s and 24 Hour Donuts.

Their progress eastward was a crawl at first, the jeep hanging back with the big white pickup truck the soldiers had gotten started. The man in the bulldozer had a lonely job. He thrust into the packed cars, always a half block or more ahead of the group, and he was even more isolated by the metal slats that Leadville mechanics had welded to the operator’s cage to protect him from the shrapnel that sometimes crashed up.

With each roar of the bulldozer’s engine, each shriek of metal, echoes rattled against the high faces of the buildings and fled into the silence, sometimes returning to them from odd directions. Sometimes the sounds that came back did not match those that had gone away, lower in pitch or delayed too long.

Ruth wasn’t the only one who kept looking over her shoulder.

Dangerous hooks and teeth lined their path, torn hoods, bent fenders, windshields mashed into opaque spiderwebs.

Debris gritted beneath the jeep’s tires as it advanced, scattered dunes of safety glass and chunks of bone. They rolled over puddles of antifreeze and gasoline—and Ruth instinctively drew a long breath through her nose, though of course she could only smell the thickening odor of her own sweat.

It would be appalling for them to have made it this far only to lose their lives to one spark, fifty cars igniting around them like explosive dominos. The image shocked her, veins of fire throughout the city...but good engineering prevented most of the vehicles from leaking fuel as they were smashed or overturned, and the man in the bulldozer exercised some care when pushing his blade into a vehicle’s underside.

Ruth saw patterns in the devastation. The people who’d left their cars to continue on foot had collected in drifts on the far sides of the standstill traffic. Obviously they’d kept fighting toward the freeway, every skull and arm leaning forward as if to meet her, but why had so many died in groups?

She understood suddenly and was nauseous. Those stained bones, settled now, would have been a real barrier with flesh and muscle on them, stacked waist high in places, slick with fluids, perhaps still moving. Hemorrhaging or blind, thousands of men and women had staggered through the maze of cars until they reached obstacles they couldn’t pass...and it had been bodies that filled the spaces between the never-ending vehicles...

Ruth was glad for her containment suit. At first, in the plane, wearing it had been like wrapping herself inside a small prison, prickles of goose bumps lifting against the rubber skin, but now it helped her feel removed from her surroundings.

Now she knew better than ever that her solitary, stubborn focus on her work had been correct. There was no doubt that she had been right to come here. The hard question was if she would be good enough, smart enough, quick enough.

A distant shriek turned her head again, a living sound, high and ragged. A cat?
No.
Her gaze darted over the colorful jam of cars, the tall face of an office complex. Was it some trick of the breeze? Then she noticed Cam patting at Sawyer’s shoulder and realized the sound was his, muffled by his suit.

But was the son of a bitch mourning or—it was cruel to think it—was he only frustrated with his suit, his own stink, the isolation of being without a radio?

Hernandez and his Marines made a great business of reporting each landmark and reading quadrants off their maps, as if they might get lost despite moving at a near crawl. The pilots, who’d stayed with the planes, were relaying both the general frequency and the command channel back to Colorado. Ruth supposed the theory was that another team could benefit from their observations if they didn’t make it out.

The constant chatter was also a way to overcome the desolation, concentrating on each other instead.

But it too was a danger. She didn’t think Senator Kendricks would listen himself, not hour after hour; he was too busy, too important, but if she were in his shoes she would insist on regular updates—and her name would be mentioned. It was not an
if
but
when
.

Kendricks would know that something was wrong.

After four blocks—after more than forty minutes—they escaped the main thoroughfare and turned north on 35th Street, into residential streets leading nowhere except into a warren of low-rise apartments and duplexes. These narrower roads were spotted with stalls, but the residents here had mostly escaped their immediate neighborhood and left these streets passable. The ’dozer ranged ahead as they pointed eastward again.

“Keep it under thirty,” Hernandez told Gilbride, who sat at the jeep’s wheel. Hernandez himself had picked out a spot on the trailer with his map unfolded, sitting alongside Cam and Sawyer and Marine Corporal Ruggiero, Corporal Watts, and Sergeant Lowrey.

The Special Forces unit followed in the pickup truck, minus Staff Sergeant Dansfield, who was running the bulldozer, and Ruth worried that by segregating themselves they’d alert Hernandez, if only subconsciously. Were they making plans, their radios off? What if he realized they’d shut down their headsets?

She knew they’d made one obvious blunder. When they left the plane, most of the soldiers brought only their sidearms. In this place, guns were just something else to carry. But two of the Special Forces had grabbed their assault rifles, and Hernandez must have noticed—

Ruth squirmed, shifting her cast inside the tight pocket of her chest and making a fist. The strain hurt her still-healing break and helped her center herself.
Stop it. Calm down.

Hernandez didn’t know. He couldn’t. If Leadville sent warning he’d confront her immediately, along with D.J. and Todd, or arrest the Special Forces depending on the extent of his information. Only the conspirators had reason to hold back, but if they waited too long and a warning came— If they decided to back out because Sawyer’s lab was stripped clean—

Stop. Just stop.
Ruth clenched her fist once more and held it, hurting, furious with herself.

They went nineteen blocks to 55th Street quickly, but then the frozen traffic crowded in again. Weaving south, they managed another block before the road was impassable. As planned, the bulldozer swung into a driveway and crashed through a six-foot fence, then another. They cut across two lots back toward 54th. One yard was a small Eden, ivy, brick, sun chairs. The next was carpeted with dead lawn as dry as cereal. Dusty particles wafted up behind the ’dozer, and Todd, in his fidgety way, brushed his suit clean and then tried to smooth the folds in his sleeves.

“We’re eight minutes over our mark,” Hernandez said. “Not bad, gentlemen.” They had expected to reach this point after three-quarters of an hour. Ruth felt like she’d aged a month.

“How are we doing on air?” Todd asked.

“Lots of time,” Hernandez told him.

“Look at my gauge, okay?” From his gesture, Todd intended these words for Ruth and D.J., directly behind him, but Hernandez said, “I’m not going to endanger you unnecessarily, believe me. Let’s hang on until we reach the labs.”

Ruth leaned forward and put her glove on Todd’s shoulder. Twenty-plus minutes in flight, ten more unloading the vehicles, another sixty to come this far— He was still outside the red, which surprised her. “You have twelve minutes,” she said.

They drove south on 54th and then swung eastward again on Folsom, another main thoroughfare that was comparatively open for several blocks.

The jeep blew a tire just past 64th Street. They had been about to stop anyway, to allow the ’dozer to clear the thickening stalls, and now Hernandez said, “Buddy check, buddy check. We change out the man with the lowest gauge first.”

Two of the Special Forces guys wrestled with a spare tire and car jack, moving deliberately to keep from snagging their suits. Captain Young and two others began switching air tanks, Sawyer first, then Sergeant Lowrey, then Todd. A person alone could not have done it. The hose attachment was shut, leaving the wearer with no more than the air in his suit. Simple brackets held the canisters into their packs, easily freed and easily screwed down again—but the threat of contamination had a complex solution. A semi-rigid plastic hood attached to a compressor pump was fitted over the hose and tank spigots, then taped to secure the seal. The pocket of low pressure destroyed any
archos
that had gathered there, before Captain Young reopened first the hose connection and then the tanks.

A suit alone contained maybe fifteen minutes of breathable air, but Ruth clenched her fist each time they began the process, no matter that they never took longer than two minutes. She was fourth. She kept from babbling her phobia only with concentrated effort, staring down at an orange shard of taillight plastic rather than the men around her.