Plague Year (38 page)

Let’s be pessimistic
, Young had said.
Assume forty-five effectives
. That put maybe fifteen troops about three miles east of them, dropped at the
archos
lab to prevent a retreat, to secure any files or gear they’d missed, to help Major Hernandez and in effect become reinforced by his Marines—and Cam had assumed the other thirty or more all took part in the ambush.

Leadville, however, correctly figured that twenty riflemen in a box could decimate their small, lightly armed party. And as they drove into the waiting guns, the remaining ten troops had already been hustling toward their plane.

The three men wounded by Sergeant Olson were likely the difference between a squad pursuing them now and Leadville deciding instead to regroup. The wounded needed care. The trailer needed to be guarded and moved. And why bother risking more casualties in a building-by-building mouse hunt? Leadville knew they’d run out of air. Leadville also knew exactly where they were. The spy satellites must have tracked them since they’d left the lab.

It was over, all of it, and the feeling was like carrying Erin as she bled out with four thousand feet of elevation still between them and the barrier.

Cam saw the same weary dread in Ruth’s flushed, sweating face as she blinked up at Young. Todd had also frozen, his expression locked in a grimace, one glove at his helmet as if to fidget with the minor scarring on his nose.

But Young was shaking his head. “Update me on high ground.”

“Why don’t you give it up?” the pilot said, gently now. “There’s no way—”

“Update me on high ground!”

A code name. Did they have more planes heading in from the breakaways or maybe Canada? The entire fucking world was going to be here on top of them soon, until the fighting became a small war and cost a hundred lives, a thousand.

Cam was willing to take it that far to win.

“Last call was affirmative but I cannot confirm,” the pilot said. “They jammed my downlink as soon as the F-15s showed on radar. Either way it’s no good, man, they got us, we’re opening our doors—”

“Radios off!” Young shouted. “Everyone shut your radio off, they’ll track our broadcasts.”

Cam was willing but Todd was more rational.

“Sir,” Todd said carefully, “they’ve got us.” He did not obey the order, holding both hands wide now in a shrugging motion. “What difference—”

Ruth turned on her friend. “If there’s any chance—”

“Radios off,” Young repeated and Newcombe echoed it, checking their belts. “Radios off. Radios off.”

Todd was patient, as if speaking to madmen. He was, Cam realized, still trying to protect them. “Even if you bring in another plane there’s no way we’re going to sneak off somewhere to meet it. They can see everything. They can—”

“The satellites are down,” Young said, and the spike of exaltation that Cam felt was new energy and strength.

High Ground.

* * * *

Six hundred miles away in the heart of the fortress that was Leadville, a man—or maybe two, maybe a woman—had taken action that was almost certain to be traced back to its source. The number of technicians monitoring the spy sats was too small.

Maybe their co-conspirator was already on the run. Maybe he had already been identified and shot.

Sometime in the past hour, corrective sequences had been sent to the five KH-11 Keyhole satellites still under Leadville’s control, deliberately misfiring their jets, pushing the sats down into Earth’s atmosphere where they tumbled and burned.

* * * *

“Leadville is blind,” Young said, leading them farther south. A clump of skyscrapers rose from that horizon.

Ruth also seemed to have discovered some reserve of stamina. She kept up the pace but Todd needed prodding. Newcombe, still at the rear, repeatedly pressed the stock of his M16 against Todd’s air tanks with a mute chiming.

“But they’re not,” Todd argued. “They still have radar. Even if your plane comes in below this side of the mountains all the way from Canada, they have fighters—”

Young said, “Nobody’s flying in for us.”

“What?” Ruth slowed abruptly. “Then what are we—”

Young waved them close to a panel truck before he paused and swung around. His cheek had swollen, and the fine crack through his faceplate seemed to split his right eye into unmatching halves. “There are three hospitals and a med center right in this area of town,” he said. “We can find air, enough to get us to the mountains.”

“Christ.” The word was out before Cam knew it, an honest reaction but one he wished he’d suppressed.

“I know it’s a long shot,” Young said.

“Long shot!” Todd glanced at Cam for support. “Even if our tank fittings match up, even if you figure out how to make the switch without contamination—”

“We can rig something.”

“Even if you filled a car with a hundred extra tanks—”

Young did not use physical intimidation, although it would have been easy for him to gesture with his pistol or merely to lean too close. He did not even raise his voice. “You want to talk yourselves into giving up? Five of my guys are dead.”

“It’s just not feasible,” Ruth said, reluctantly, and she also turned to Cam. “How long do you think it would take us to reach elevation from here with the highways jammed?”

Cam didn’t answer—there was an idea in him—and Todd said, “It’s too far. It would take us days. I don’t know if we could even drive out of the city.”

“We have an hour,” Young told them. “Two or three hours before we really have to give up.”

Todd’s hand went to his faceplate again, his nose.

“Maybe we can take over the plane,” Newcombe said.

“We gotta try something.” Young studied each of them in turn. “We gotta see what we can do.”

“I, no—” Todd visibly shuddered. “They’ll know the hospitals are our only option! They’ll be there anyway just to raid for oxygen while they’re down here, medicine, all of—”

“Bullshit. They’re gonna have their hands full collecting their people and getting the lab equipment on board.”

“What if they leave us here?”

“It’s better if we give up,” Ruth said, slowly. “Better than if we get caught. And you were smart about Major Hernandez. They won’t hurt us.”

“They won’t hurt
you
,” Young corrected her.

“The vaccine,” Cam said. “Let me at least try to—”

Behind them, a high screech of metal echoed up the street like a living thing in flight.

* * * *

The paratroopers loped by in two pairs, the second trailing the first at an interval of nearly sixty seconds. What the noise had been Cam could only guess, the shriek of a damaged car door pushed out of the way, some other wreckage. It saved them.

So did Young, again, motioning for everyone to keep quiet after the first men had gone. The next two were well positioned to catch anyone emerging from hiding, thinking it was safe. Young seemed to expect them and he was right.

The optometrist’s office was a lousy place to disappear, down on the ground floor with a big window—a broad waiting area that doubled as display space, lined with mirrors and revolving stands of glasses. But the entrance was locked and the film of dust over the front room was undisturbed. They’d found their way inside through an open side door after taking cover behind a Dumpster.

The paratroopers barely glanced in, a ripple of silhouettes across the window and then nothing more.

“The vaccine,” Young said. He looked at Cam but turned to Ruth as he continued. “Is that even possible? I thought you needed a lot more time.”

All of them sat on the firm carpet, scattered unevenly behind two freestanding counters and a desk. Overhead the walls held posters of beaming young white people, close-ups that might have been more appropriate in a hairstylist’s except for the inhuman sapphire blue of their contact lenses.

A genuine strangeness walked inside Cam, measured and intent. He was too calm, and the mood had grown as they waited. He felt the shape of it on his numb face and he saw it in Ruth as well—in her steady, solemn gaze.

She was uncharacteristically mute.

Todd said, “It’s just a first-gen. We’d be better off running for the goddamn hospitals while they’re out there hunting us down.”

“No, you were right about that,” Young said. “The nearest hospital is five blocks and they gotta be everywhere now. But it’s good odds we won’t see another sweep through here. They’ve got too much ground to cover.”

Outside, the F-15s grumbled southward.

“We’re probably safe to hole up in this place,” Young added, and Ruth stirred at last.

“It might work,” she said. “If it doesn’t it’s harmless.”

“If it doesn’t he’ll be infected!” Todd’s glove bumped at the lower half of his faceplate restlessly, obsessively. “How do you even expect to deliver it into his system—is he going to eat the wafer?”

“It can be breathed in.”

“He’ll get a lungful of plague at the same time.”

“Yes,” Ruth said.

“Then what?” Young asked, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, what about the rest of us?”

“If it works, he’ll incubate.”

Young said, “But what does that mean?”

“We—” She dropped her eyes. “It could be passed from one person to another via body fluids. Blood.”

“Let me try.” Cam pulled the sample case from his chest pocket and held it out, meaning for her to identify which vacuum wafer contained the prototype.

“We should draw straws,” she said.

He pulled it back from her. “No.”

“No way, Doc,” Young agreed.

Cam pressed the case against his chest. “It has to be me.”

“That’s wrong,” Ruth told him. “We’re all in this, we should all—”

“I’m your best bet. I know better than anybody what an infection feels like.” It would collect first in his oldest and worst wounds, his ear, his hands. “I’ll know if the vaccine is working or not before you’re out of air.”

She shook her head. “Yes. Okay. I’m sorry.”

He was glad she said the last. He shrugged for her benefit and said, “I’ve got the least to lose.”

* * * *

He had the most to gain. Ultimately, his decision was the same choice he’d made after Hollywood had struggled up to their barren rock peak.

It was what he wanted to be remembered for. Succeed or fail, this was who he wanted to be.

* * * *

His collar locks were loud and the air sighed out of his suit up over his face as he lifted his helmet, suddenly and unbelievably rank in comparison to the atmosphere inside the shop. Musty and stale, the shop was still far sweeter than the baking stink of himself. Ruth had instructed him not to breathe but Cam tasted the change even with his mouth shut, the brush of wind at his nostrils like a promise.

“Ready?” she asked, and Todd brought the vacuum wafer up to Cam’s lips. Ruth hadn’t wanted to chance the operation herself, having just one hand, and Cam had needed both of his to remove his helmet. “One, two, now,” she said.

Todd pushed his finger and thumb between Cam’s open teeth and broke the wafer, pinching it, as Cam inhaled sharply. They’d agreed that he might as well swish it around his tongue and actually swallow it too.

“Okay, hold your breath as long as you can.” Ruth offered him a strip of sturdy white fabric, cut from a jacket exactly like medical doctors wore on TV. Newcombe had found it hanging in back after Ruth suggested that they’d better try anything to minimize Cam’s initial exposure.

He wrapped the dusty fabric over his nose and mouth with practiced movements, then slipped free from his air pack, feeling soreness and bruises all through his shoulders and back, and along his hips and stomach where the waist belt had sawed against him. He would have liked to lose the suit completely. His body itched and hurt in a hundred places, and the smell was like wearing a toilet. Unfortunately he was dressed only in a T-shirt, to reduce chafing from his pack, along with the damp adult diaper and socks and boots, and there didn’t seem to be any more clothing available in the shop.

They were long past modesty but he couldn’t afford to reveal his many abrasions to the machine plague, though it was likely that some of the
archos
nano had already wafted inside his suit.

They arranged another bundle of fabric around his collar, a bunchy scarf. Young took Cam’s pack, triple-checked that the spigots were off and then studied its gauge. He inspected Todd and Ruth before trading exams with Newcombe.

Then there was nothing else to do.

“Forty-six minutes,” Young said. After that, Todd would be out of air and Ruth would be well into the red.

Cam pushed his broken teeth out of his gums, mashing his glove-thick finger against his mask. The eyetooth peeled free easily but he winced at the pain that the molar caused as one of its roots clung to him. His stomach reacted wildly to the warm new trickles of blood he swallowed, and he burped and burped again. Absurd.

Young turned on his radio and switched repetitively through the few channels, trying to intercept enemy communications, but there was only an open broadcast meant for them: surrender. He clicked off but was soon listening again, his map spread beside him, obviously planning the quickest route back to the planes and the Leadville troops.

Newcombe prowled the shop, searching through drawers and cabinets for anything useful. The receptionist’s desk held a can of Pepsi and two cheese-and-cracker packets. In back he found a tray of snorkeling goggles with plastic insets that could be replaced with prescription lenses, and brought one to Cam.

Ruth and Todd sat on either side of him protectively, resting, trying to make their air last. There was so much to say but at the same time nothing at all.

None of them wanted to act like last words were necessary.

Inside Cam’s bloodstream and throughout his body now, either
archos
was beginning to multiply uninhibited, devouring his tissues to form more and ever more of itself—or the vaccine nano was disassembling the invaders and remaking this material into more defenders, a war of tides.

At first
archos
would replicate freely even if the vaccine prototype worked, just by sheer force of numbers, yet without this machine cancer the vaccine would have nothing upon which to grow itself.