The Reaper Plague (20 page)

Jill reached down to her boot and drew forth
her slim, carbon-steel combat knife. Its design hearkened back to
the classic KA-BAR of World War Two Marines, but it was a handmade
custom blade her father had bought for her when she’d graduated
from Basic. She handed it to the doctor hilt-first.

“
I don’t think you’ll find
anything sharper.” She looked over at Colonel Muzik on the radio,
caught his eye. “Are they coming after us, sir?”

He shook his head. “I think they’re content
to loot our stuff. One of our people is pinned in the wreckage and
giving me reports. If they leave, we may be able to get him out.
I’m hoping the enemy pulls back to their lines and we can sneak
back in, try to salvage some equipment, save some people.”

“
All right,” Jill said
mildly, looking in the doctor’s eyes. “Let’s do some surgery. You
up for this, Doc?”

She nodded sharply. “As long as you are. We
have no anesthetic.”

“
Damn.” Jill had forgotten
about that. “Donovan. Grab three other guys and come over here.
Anyone got a poncho in their ruck? Spread it out on the flat place.
Okay, gentlemen, pick me up and put me down on my stomach on that
poncho.”

Once they had done that thing she reached up
to pull her tunic and t-shirt off, leaving herself bare-backed. She
unbuckled and unbuttoned her trousers and shoved them down a couple
of inches, exposing skin to her tailbone. “You understand what you
have to do, Doc?”

“
Sure.” She put a
comforting hand on Jill’s back. “All right, I want each of you men
to pin her down by a limb. Sit on her if you have to.” Once they
had, Jill felt the doctor put her knee, with increasing weight, on
her buttocks, immobilizing her lower back.

“
Okay miss, this is going
to hurt like hell. Don’t fight passing out. The best thing you
could do is lose consciousness. Now tell me where it is.” The
doctor started probing with her fingers, soon finding the place in
Jill’s spine where the hot ache lived.

“
My name is Jill,
Doc.”

“
And my name is Hazel.
Someone find Jill something to put in her mouth – a smooth green
stick, or a leather belt. Don’t want to aspirate broken
teeth.”

When a piece of soft fresh wood was in place,
tasting like nature and smelling of greenness and woods, Jill put
her head down on the poncho and mumbled, “Ready.”

That was a lie. Pain like this was a
completely different animal from the hurts of blows, of a fight, or
even the sudden searing touch of a bullet or the point of a knife.
It began but did not end, and she could feel the blade going in
slowly, feel the hot screaming bite of it. Her stomach protested
with nausea and she fought to keep her muscles from seizing up,
from deflecting the doctor’s razor probes and leaving her worse
than before. Mercifully her vision grayed and she drifted off to a
place where the pain was just a dream.

“
Horse my body
stumbled
,” she quoted vaguely to herself before oblivion seized
her.

-31-

Major Vargas smoked and stared at death with
straining eyes. Through his binoculars he could see two M1 Abrams
tanks obviously flanking the road, and two M2 Bradleys back on a
small hill on overwatch.
I’m not a big-war officer, I’m a
counterinsurgency specialist, but I do know one thing: a well-aimed
main gun round will demolish this MRAP and me in it.

He could also see some Humvees near what
looked like a tactical operations center, tents with radio antenna
masts reaching for the sky. It was about where he had expected the
first possibility of an encounter with the locals. Ashland was big
enough that it might be worth controlling the road going by – and
through. He also had to find out whether Governor Allaine and
Richmond controlled Ashland, or someone else.

The convoy was stopped in the middle of the
pavement on top of the last rise before the edge of the town. He’d
backed up the MRAPs behind the crest of the hill, with just the
tops of the hulls showing to the tank gunners.

Just in case.

“
Anybody got a marker? Get
me a piece of cardboard, one of those MRE boxes will do.” When he
got them Vargas wrote a frequency and the word “CLEAR” in big block
letters and held the cardboard up, facing forward. He could see one
of the tanks was lined up on him and knew the gunner was looking at
him through its superb optics.
He can probably see my mole hairs
at this range.
He hoped the man was smart enough to understand
the sign.

“
Furth, put me on this
freq.” He tossed the cardboard down to her. “In the clear.” He
began calling for contact.

-32-

Jill Repeth awoke in Corporal Donovan’s lap.
The man I beat to a pulp
, she thought as she looked up into
his simple clear eyes.
Holding me like a baby. Men are funny
creatures.

Seeing her awake he lifted a canteen to her
lips, a smile on his own.

She let him pour some water down her throat,
trying to assess her condition. She slowly stretched, working her
back muscles, then tried to shift her toes.

Thank God!
She moved her booted feet
backward and forward, left and right, then gently drew her legs up.
Nodding thanks she sat up, then rolled over onto her knees and
hands. Carefully she stretched out her muscles, searching for
twinges or lingering problems, then stood up, using Donovan’s
shoulder as a support.
Thank you Lord. You make the lame to
walk. You and good doctors.

“
Thanks, Corporal,” she
said, squeezing his shoulder as she let go. “Maybe you should apply
to the Nurse Corps.”

His smile got wider. “Maybe ah should. Always
did like helpin’ God’s creatures get better. Mama said I should be
a vet but that was too much schoolin’ and the recruiter said the
Army needed policemen.”

“
Well, things are changing
all the time. When we get out of this mess I’ll put in a word for
you. Maybe we can get them to retrain you for a medical MOS.” She
checked her watch, saw it had been two hours since they had started
cutting.
We’ve become so blasé about these medical miracles. It
took nearly getting killed to remind me how amazing this body
is.

“
Naw. People don’ hardly
need no nurses no more with the Eden Plague.” He looked sad. “But
maybe the animals do.”

“
I think we’ll always need
people who care,” she said distractedly as she looked around their
little hideout. She walked the perimeter where troops crouched or
lay behind cover and concealment, accepting quiet congratulations
on her recovery, encouraging them in the face of the disaster,
finally coming up next to Colonel Muzik.

“
Good to see you up and
around, Jill,” he greeted her. “I knew you were too tough to keep
down.”

“
Thank you, sir.” She
looked over his shoulder across the golf course at the wreckage of
the battalion’s former position. “We should have dug
in.”

“
Don’t beat yourself up
over it. Who knew someone would hit us the day after we landed,
with armored vehicles and enough force to take on five hundred
troops? Right now, though, we need to go get some people out of
there.”

“
Are the Fredericksburgers
gone?”

Muzik smiled up at her. “That’s what I’m
going to go find out.”

“
No, sir.”

“
What?” He looked at her in
quizzical disbelief.

“
I’m going.”

“
You’re barely up and
around.”

“
And you’re short an arm.
Everything’s fine, sir. I’d tell you if it wasn’t.” She squatted
down by him, leaning in close. “I can’t hold these people together
the way you can, and losing you might break them. You’re in
command, sir. So command. This is NCO work. Let me do my job. I’m
sure you’ll get a chance for appropriate heroics later.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then
shook his head, resigned. “All right. Good hunting. Best horses get
ridden the most.”

“
Wouldn’t have it any other
way, sir.”

He raised binoculars to his eyes. “I haven’t
seen any hostile movement over there in a while. I think they
withdrew back the way they came. The tank crews bailed out and got
picked up by their Strykers. So take a radio and go do some recon.
If it’s clear we’ll come back and dig the survivors out. There has
to be someone alive underneath all that mess. It’s mostly drywall
and wood construction. Edens should make it if we get them out
soon.”

“
All right, let me gear
up.” She recovered her load-bearing equipment and weapons, picked
up ammo, and was back in two minutes. “Here I go. Give me what
cover you can.”

It was déjà vu all over again as she jogged
out of the woods, across the thick grass of the verge and onto the
fairway toward the wrecked buildings. A haze of smoke drifted
eastward to her left, smelling of burning plastics and wood. Fires
smoldered among the rubble.

She angled rightward to take advantage of the
smoke and approached the mess from inside the plume, suppressing a
cough. Once she reached the cover of wreckage she worked her way
around to the right, up the eastward side. When she got to the edge
of the smoke she got down and low-crawled forward.

When she had examined the open ground to the
north she reached for her radio. “Sir, you copy?” She abandoned
code names to rely on simple voice recognition. The radios were
encrypted anyway, it was unlikely anyone would overhear; code names
were mostly for net control. With a network of only three radios,
that wouldn’t be a problem.

“
I copy.”

“
They’ve withdrawn. I can’t
see anyone. There might be observers in the treeline to the north
but there are none visible. Advise you come back and we try to find
our people.”
Any that are left.

Five minutes later Muzik led the double dozen
survivors in beginning the process of dragging pieces of rubble out
of the way and calling to find anyone trapped beneath. Jill put two
observers on the north corners and then set to work with a
will.

They found nineteen of their people in
various states of injury. Food and water restored most of them once
they were free, though one had lost a leg at the knee.

During this time Jill made a cursory recon of
the perimeter, then she hustled back to the remnant of the
battalion and reported to Colonel Muzik that she had found no
enemy.

“
That’s good news,” he
responded. “They must have fallen back to their defense lines. But
now they have a problem, though they might not know it.”

She looked a question at him.

“
The have Edens as
prisoners. They took most of our people.”

“
How do you
know?”

He swept his hand around in a semicircle.
“Not enough bodies. Normal wounded to killed ratio in a firefight
is something like four or five to one. We have almost a hundred
dead bodies here. That means four hundred are missing.”

“
Some of these have been
executed. Effing sons of bitches.” Jill turned over a body with her
foot, one with an extra hole in its head. “This is Sergeant Shute.
He was a good kid.”

“
They were all good
kids.”

“
Why did they do it?” She
raised her head to stare to the north with cold anger.

“
General meanness? You said
the Onesie you talked to seemed paranoid.”

“
Yes…Demon Plague One
effect. Boss…how come I don’t see any dead Homies?”

Muzik looked at her sharply and shook his
head, but the damage was done. Others nearby had heard and were all
looking at the Colonel. He sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter much
now. They had a classified mission. They took off yesterday at
nightfall.”

Jill bit back angry words. Eighty more troops
might have made a difference, along with the Homies’ MRAPs, armored
trucks with heavy weapons mounted – and they weren’t Edens. They
might have been able to employ their lethal antitank weapons to
take out the enemy LAVs. But she kept her mouth shut. There was no
way for Muzik to have foreseen this, no reason to hold back the
Homeland Security company. What they should have had was air cover
on standby overhead ready to hit armored vehicles with precision
guided munitions. But they’d messed it up, top to bottom, herself
just as much as anyone because she didn’t foresee it either, didn’t
speak up.

“
In hindsight, we should
have kept them another day,” he admitted, looking around at his
people. “I screwed up. But I won’t screw up again,” he declared
grimly.

Jill let out a hiss, changing the subject.
“We should have insisted on air cover overhead. We should have run
earlier. Should woulda coulda.”

“
Would you have run? If you
weren’t crippled?”

She grimaced at her boss. “I guess not. Not
until it was too late.”

Muzik cleared his throat. “But back to the
problem at hand – we have to find a way to get our people. And then
there are all the ones we shot with Needleshock. There are a couple
of dozen dead Fredericksburgers scattered around but they didn’t
leave any live ones, not even unconscious ones…”

Jill broke in excitedly, “If they don’t die,
most’ll be new Edens. Their friends and neighbors will see them get
healed from their burns and scars and wounds – and the old ones
will become young. What do you think the Onesies will do?”