by David Poyer
But the locals knew the terrain, and guerrilla fighters with scoped rifles and hunting camouflage were apparently taking a deadly toll.
“Lenson.” The head nurse jerked her head toward a cabinet. “We saved you some breakfast. Feeling any hungrier today?”
Nan hugged herself, shivering, wishing she did. Food was scarce. But the very thought of eating was nauseating. “It’s sourdough, fresh baked, from that flour they captured. Rayfield sent it over special,” the nurse urged, her eyes still on the open chest cavity on the table.
Marshal Dallas Rayfield was the Covenanter leader. The provisional president, he called himself. Nan sighed. “I’ll try.” She opened the cabinet, but closed it again as the yeasty reek hit her nostrils.
The head nurse patted her back. “Are you really going out today? You look terrible.”
“She has to,” Glazer said over one shoulder, suturing by feel as the lights flickered off, then on again. “There’s nobody else, and the flu’s still spreading.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Yeah, I’m going,” Nan said flatly. “Release me another five hundred doses, please, Doctor.”
Glazer cocked his head. “You sign. Use my name. I’m wrist deep.”
She faked his signature, in huge loopy letters, and took the chit downstairs.
* * *
OUTSIDE, she tucked the packet into the saddlebag of a bullet-scarred Harley—yes, one of the Berzerkers’ machines—and threw a leg over. Hit the start button, and was rewarded by a hearty bellow.
Fuel was scarce, but a chit from Rayfield allowed her one gallon a day of home-brewed alcohol, eked out with raw gas from the single fracking-fed refinery in Covenanter territory. And a bike had another advantage, or so she hoped: the black drones that crossed the sky might be unwilling to expend an expensive missile on two-wheelers. At least they’d held off so far. But the black flyers kept coming over, so often that the rebel children included their threatening geometry in their scrawled drawings. A cross, with propellers. A black quincunx, hovering, omnipresent, ominous, ruling the blue now alongside the sun and moon in the crayoned pictures.
Her cooler contained five hundred doses of L packed in ice. She’d mapped out a distribution schedule and tried to hit three towns a day. Other than her supply, the rebels had no vaccines, though Patriot Radio said they were available in government-controlled areas. Whether that was true, she had no idea. Anyway, she needed to keep a continuous patrol going, skirting the steadily expanding radius of infection, treating those in the early stages and urging their quarantine until the danger was past. Fortunately the antiviral she’d rescued from the wrecked factory hadn’t lost its potency. When she could administer it in time, the initial fever held for about forty-eight hours, then dropped. Further symptoms, the deadly ones, didn’t seem to develop.
A heavyset, fiftyish white woman threw a thick blue-jeaned leg over another bike and started her engine too. Floral Puckett rode shotgun with Nan on her rounds. Literally. Puckett carried a twelve-gauge sleeved in the scabbard of her own motorcycle. Whether to protect her, or to prevent her escape, wasn’t quite clear.
The highway stretched empty to the horizon. They were headed for a small town to the south, near the border. Nan kept a wary eye on the cloudy sky. Government drones would strike rebel convoys, occasionally individual vehicles, but so far they’d not bothered the two riders.
The main fighting was raging farther east. Optimistic bulletins over local radio said the rebels were winning. Nan had her doubts, but kept them to herself. The Covenant Council dealt mercilessly with naysayers and suspected government sympathizers. She didn’t know a lot about the fighting, or about the Covenant, or about the Council. Mostly the Covenanters talked about freedom from government itself, which of course made it difficult to persuade them it was vital to take public health measures. What she received, fuel and food and security escort, was grudgingly given. But every kid she saved was a kid saved, after all.
She was telling herself that again when Puckett hit the horn. When she glanced back, the other rider jabbed a gloved finger at the sky.
Just below the clouds, a black shape slanted down. For a moment Nan thought: drone. Every muscle tensed and she nearly swerved off the road. But then she saw it wasn’t a drone after all.
It was even more dangerous.
The huge swollen-bellied aircraft, painted dead black, was a dark angel descending. Its steady swoop was accompanied by the faint, obviously muffled whine of idling jet engines.
She searched for a turnoff, a concealing copse, a viaduct, even. But the highway that stretched ahead was empty, flat, coverless. She glanced at Puckett, who’d faced forward again. Pretending, probably, to ignore the cameras that were even now zooming in on them. The craft was close enough now that Nan could make out the guns pointed from turrets beneath its belly.
Whoever was behind that camera guided those weapons. Or maybe there wasn’t a person there at all. No human heart with mercy or forbearance, but instead a program: a cold mechanical intelligence, sorting them against threat profiles with the speed of digital thought; evaluating; categorizing; deciding. Two riders. Hostile, friendly, nonthreat, ignore …
Kill.
Sweat broke under Nan’s jacket despite the cooling wind of her passage. She relaxed her death grip on the throttle to slow, then reconsidered and sped up again, to sixty. A steady mile a minute. When she glanced back again Puckett was a few yards behind. No; her partner was dropping back, edging slowly away. Maybe a good idea. Spreading out, so it would require two bursts of whatever those turrets carried to take them out. Nan sped up even more and the highway between them widened.
She stole another glance up. The black aircraft was pacing them. The gunship was much larger than she’d thought at first. So huge it seemed to float, nearly motionless, from her perspective, though all three vehicles were rushing along the highway. An angel of death with lifted sword. Coldly eyeing them. Trying to decide.
Fire, or refrain?
Destroy, or let them go?
She tried to master her breathing. Then reached back, into the saddlebags. Felt around, as the bike wobbled. Her fingertips brushed a square shape, yielding, but with harder objects within. Nearly twisting her shoulder out of its socket, she hauled the box free. Held it out, at arm’s length, so that it dangled by its strap, twisting in the blast of the wind.
Her medical kit. With the red cross on a white background.
When she glanced back Puckett’s face had gone pale. She was mouthing words, but nothing Nan could make out over the howl of engines, the now-oh-so-clearly audible whine of the black plane’s jets.
She glanced up again, and caught a gunflash. No … light sparkling off a lens. Which was apparently focused on her.
For several seemingly eternal seconds they rode locked together, observer and observed. Her arm tired and she had to lower the med pack. She hesitated, then tucked it behind her, to brace her back with. Her bangs whipped her forehead in the wind as she wondered with each heartbeat if it would be her last.
The black plane canted slightly, and banked off to one side. The turreted lens tracked away from them. With a surge of power, a renewed thunder of engines, it rose again.
Climbed.
Shrank.
Vanished, once more, into the low clouds.
Nan slumped in her seat. She eased her breath out, and returned her attention to the road. She pressed shaky thighs into the soft cushioned saddle, and tried to relax shoulders that felt like tightened wires. Suddenly she was nauseated all over again, though whether from fear or from the radiation exposure, who could tell. She craned over the side, turning her head away from the blasting wind, and tried at least to keep what she vomited off her pants.
* * *
THEY were headed for a town down south, near the Tennessee border. Reports of any kind were scarce, but someone had called in a new outbreak of what sounded like Flower. She had basic first aid stuff and reusable syringes in the
med kit. Puckett, who’d been an EMT before the war, was up to speed when it came to treating and stabilizing most traumas, though she didn’t seem confident about infectious disease.
When they pulled in, the main street of Lime Bluff looked deserted. A few nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century brick storefronts lined it, a block or two of shops, most with rain-warped particleboard nailed over the windows. Zooming around her to take the lead, Puckett steered them onto a side street, to a brick-and-aluminum one-story clinic building. AID STATION had been clumsily painted over a still-visible PLANNED PARENTHOOD sign. Two men in green-and-beige turkey-hunting camouflage, the Covenant patch prominent on their billed caps, stood guard outside. Puckett yelled, “Meds are here,” and after a moment’s hesitation the guards waved them to a loading zone.
Puckett handed Nan a face mask, then tied her own on. Snapped on green nitrile gloves. Nan gloved herself just as carefully. They had to recycle items one usually disposed of, soaking needles and scalpels in a weak bleach solution, but the supply of gloves, masks, and bleach was growing short.
Inside, one back room had been taped off with plastic into a rough isolation unit. Nan nodded approvingly. The single nurse back there wore blue scrubs and a face shield. Nan gave him the first injection, though he said, “I don’t feel sick yet.” The patients seemed mostly to be teenagers. “We had two older folks, but they died,” the nurse, Logan, added, rubbing his arm as he led them down a narrow aisle between what looked like folding camping cots. “This is Twila. She was the first one they brought in.”
The girl was restrained in the bunk with gay red-and-white poly rope. Nan bent over her for a quick exam. Twila stank of diarrhea. She was gasping for breath, cheeks purpling, with white blotches. Bloodshot eyes fixed on the nurse, then rolled away in panic as the teen struggled to suck in air. “One-hundred-and-three-degrees fever, pulse 93, blood pressure 170 over 120,” Logan said. “She’s in hypertensive crisis, I think. I treated her with intravenous saline for hydration. Gave her Cipro, too.”
“Antibiotics aren’t going to help. Save those for injuries, wounds, and secondary pneumonia,” she told him. Across the bed, Puckett was unwrapping a disposable airway. They had no respirators, of course.
Nan bent to the girl. “Twila, can you hear me? Blink twice if you can.”
The teenager stiffened, gasped for breath, then seemed to relax. She blinked with both eyes. Once. Twice.
“Good, she doesn’t seem confused,” Nan noted. “Just scared. Any seizures?”
“No, Doctor.”
Nan didn’t correct his honorific. She broke the ampule and filled the needle. Puckett lifted a sleeve, patted for a vein, and swabbed the site with alcohol. Nan double-checked the needle for air, then slid it in. She drew the girl’s sleeve back down and patted her shoulder. “You’ll start to feel better pretty soon, Twila. Give it a couple of hours. Rest, and let the medicine work.” Please God let it be still potent … but she’d kept it refrigerated; the antiviral should still be good.
Working swiftly, but with a reassuring word to each patient, they went from cot to cot. One of the men lay limp and unresponsive. She debated saving the dose for someone not as far gone, but finally injected him, too.
When she looked up from the last patient an older fellow with a close-cropped white Vandyke was watching from the door. He nodded when he caught her glance, and turned away.
Puckett came up. “About ready to head back, Floral?” Nan asked.
“I don’t think we’re going back,” the heavyset woman said. “At least not tonight.”
Nan frowned. “Sorry … what?”
Puckett lowered her voice. “There’s somethin’ going on. A ‘push,’ they’re calling it. The major here wants us with his unit.”
Nan frowned. “Wait, I’m confused. We’re due back. Rayfield shoots people for disobeying orders. I had enough trouble persuading him to let us fight the flu instead of waiting for it to come to us.”
Puckett murmured, “Sure. But we may not have a choice.”
The men who’d been guarding the door sauntered in. They grabbed the male nurse—Logan—Nan, and Puckett, and hustled them out. They thrust them toward a makeshift convoy of battered vans and pickups spray-painted in various conceptions of camouflage. Men and women sat in the beds, weapons propped on their knees. A battered Dodge Ram had a machine gun bolted atop the cab. A hastily welded tripod of unpainted steel pointed it at the sky.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, but was only boosted ungently into a van behind the machine-gun truck, along with Puckett and the nurse. The rear seats had been removed, so they sat on the floor. More Covenanters hurried out of the clinic, carrying cardboard boxes of bandages and boxes of sanitary napkins and throwing them into the van.
“Hey.” The woman driving craned back in her seat, looking down at them. A strawberry blonde in aviator-style sunglasses, freckles nearly invisible under smears of green and black camo paint. In cammies, with the Covenanter cap at a jaunty angle and a white armband stenciled with the Red Cross. She thrust back a hard, not very clean palm. “Tracy.”
“Floral.”
“Um … Nan.” She thought about asking again where they were going, but decided not to seem too curious. These people shot spies, too.
“Logan,” the nurse mumbled.
“Cool, good to meet cha. Which of you’s the doctor?”
“She is.” Puckett pointed to Nan.
Who shook her head. “No, I’m not a medical doctor. Just a biochemist. I worked on developing advanced drugs. Look, we’re here to fight the flu, not—”
“Yeah? A biochemist? Cool.” Tracy pulled armbands from inside her fatigue blouse and forced them into the reluctant hands of all three passengers. Nan’s had suspicious-looking brown spatters on it. “Congratulations, you’re gonna be part of the big push south. Eastern front’s linking up with the RECOs. The Re-Confederates. We manage this linkup, we cut the country in half. But there’s a Blackie force headed this way too. We’re beefing up the flank, in case they try to cut us off. You’re part of my team now, so put those on. We’re not covered by Geneva, but it might could get you better treatment if you’re captured.”
Nan gave up and pinned it on. Maybe the insignia had helped earlier, with the gunship. Who knew.
The convoy groaned and clattered into motion, gradually, like an uncoiling rattler. Raw exhaust from homemade fuel made her cough. Tracy pushed Nan’s scarf back and squinted at her nearly naked pate. “What happened? Dose of rad?”
“I was in Seattle when they nuked it.”
“And you made it out? Jesus God. Hey, you guys hungry? They issued us some sausage. Might’s well eat it now.”
Nan didn’t like the undertone of that last comment, but accepted a thick cut of intestine stuffed with ground meat. It was bland and unspiced, but after so long without protein she tore chunks off, wolfing the pork so greedily one bite stalled halfway and she nearly choked. Puckett pounded her back helpfully and she gulped again, then again, forcing it down her esophagus. The nausea still lingered, but miraculously her stomach didn’t reject the food. Was her appetite finally returning? That would be a good sign.
The convoy rolled between cornfields, then woods. The team on the machine-gun truck ahead of them swung the long barrel back and forth while a lookout searched the sky with binoculars.
“So how’d you get into this?” Nan asked Tracy.
“Into the militia, you mean?” She grinned like a happy kid. “Oh, I was in long before the war. My dad started me off when I was thirteen. He’s a tractor mechanic. I went to musters with him. Got some medical training, and then came the war … I was gonna join the Army, but then I realized we weren’t just fighting the Chinese. We were like superheroes, fighting the whole idea of tyrannical government. I mean, they tried to take our guns away. Nobody I know turned anything in. Then they started seizing crops, paying shit money for them—confiscating our livestock, drafting our kids. We just said, enough.”
The lead vehicles turned off the pavement onto a dirt track paralleling rusty rails. The van lurched and banged over ruts. Dust rolled up, smearing a yellowish paste across the windshield. Tracy hit the wipers and squinted ahead. Horns blared. Brush scraped the side of the truck like fingernails.
After half an hour on the dirt track they came out at an open field. It sloped gently down toward a flat sheet of lake, bounded on the far side by a straight concrete line. A reservoir. A dam. Tracy slowed, letting a gap open between her and the technical. She peered up at the sky. Then floored the accelerator, vaulting the van rocking and jolting across the open field before plunging into the tree cover again at the far side, where the dirt track resumed.
It was late afternoon when the convoy finally turned onto an asphalted road, went another mile, then turned right into woods again. A man on foot gestured them to pull off and park.
Tracy squinted ahead. “Good. They put us beside a stream.” She ratcheted the hand brake, cut the engine, and turned to them. “Looks like we’re here, folks. Grab the supplies. There’s a tent in that soft case. Let’s get it set up. Go fifty yards out from the campsite along the stream and build us a fire. But keep it small, with a bucket of water beside it. They’re gonna have drones out, looking for us.”