by Jeff Carlson
“Can’t walk,” Medrano said. “My ankle—”
“My shoulder—” she retorted.
A long section of the fuselage rocked toward them. The metal shrieked against smaller chunks of debris. Deborah dragged at Medrano’s uniform with her good hand, gaining a few inches as the wreckage teetered overhead.
Someone walked out of the plane like a miracle.
He was filthy, maybe burned. He was also bent much like Deborah, protecting his ribs, and she recognized the shoulder-length black hair. Cam. His luck seemed like something learned — a trait she envied for herself.
“Help me!” she yelled, but Cam stopped and looked up.
The noise in the sky was increasing. It echoed from the hills. Deborah pulled Medrano upright as Cam raced closer. He grabbed Medrano’s other side and the three of them ran downhill into the widely spaced trees. Medrano screamed as his wrist banged against Deborah’s back. Her shoulder was agony. Their ragged forward motion carried them past the wreckage and an orange, snarling clump of poison oak.
Cam leaned in front of Medrano, his lips drawn back from his teeth. Two of his incisors were gone. The rest looked like misplaced fangs. “This way!” he yelled, hauling everyone to his side like a human chain.
We’re not going to make it, Deborah thought, glancing back as the Chinese fighters screamed overhead. She wanted to face her own death.
Their turbulence washed through the oak trees and her short, dirty hair. In the same heartbeat, one missile slammed into the Osprey’s remains. Ordnance was precious. If those pilots knew there were survivors, they must have believed a single missile was enough. The explosion threw the Osprey’s belly and starboard wing into the air. There were secondary blasts from the fuel tanks in the wing. Ribbons of fire sprayed over the hillside.
Concussion shoved Deborah into the trees, separating her from Medrano and Cam. Maybe she bounced. The pain in her shoulder was incandescent and she blacked out.
She was brought back by someone pounding on her chest. Cam gasped as he hit her, and she realized this new pain was too sharp to attribute to his fist. She stank of charred skin and cloth. He’d doused a spot of burning fuel on her uniform, scalding his bare hand in the process. They were enveloped in smoke. The forest had ignited.
“Deborah,” he said. “Deborah?” He was obviously woozy himself, but she knew he’d had EMT training — nothing like her own schooling, but she was glad just the same.
“My shoulder. Can you reset it?”
“I’ll try.” He turned and said, “Medrano. Help me.”
He bent her arm at the elbow, rotating it outwards as Deborah tried not to twist away from the pain. Then he lifted her elbow even further, wrenching the ball of her humerus back into its socket through the torn ring of cartilage. Deborah grayed out again. But afterwards, the pain was reduced, and she’d even regained some motion.
There wasn’t time to make a sling. The smoke was suffocating, and they could see the flames crackling up through the hooked branches of two trees.
“Go,” Cam said.
Deborah outranked him — they both outranked him — but she let him take over. She remembered how he’d convinced Walls to send them west. The same characteristics that made him dangerous were exactly what the three of them needed now — decisive, unrelenting nerve. She had to trust his aggression. It was the real basis of Cam’s luck. Sometimes the chances he took were the best and only path.
The three of them jogged downhill, groaning, limping. They had nothing but each other. No radio. No water. Where did he think they were going?
The smoke thinned but Cam changed direction suddenly, moving them sideways across the slope when they might have escaped the fire by continuing downhill. Deborah almost spoke up. What are you doing? There was a clear area like a meadow below them, empty of brush. Why not run through it? Then she realized those trees were leafless and dead. Worse, something slithered on the rotting gray oaks. Ants coated the naked wood.
“Wait,” Cam said. “No.” He turned with his arms out as if to collect them — to change direction again — but he froze with his hands up.
There were enemy soldiers waiting in the brush.
Deborah saw at least eight men in a skirmish line, their faces hidden by tan biochem hoods or black, older-model gas masks. Their jackets were dark green. Most of them held AK-47 rifles. Others carried submachine guns she’d didn’t recognize.
One of them shouted in Mandarin. “Bié dòng! Xià jiàng!”
She didn’t understand, but the intent was clear. He gestured for them to get down. Within seconds, three more soldiers appeared uphill. There was no way out except back into the smoke and the ants, but Medrano was willing. “I’ll draw their fire,” he said.
“Hold it,” Deborah said. “Don’t move.”
Neither of them carried any weapons except their sidearms, and Cam’s gun belt had been torn away in the crash.
Cam raised his hands even higher and Medrano got one arm up, keeping his broken limb against his side. Deborah didn’t see any choice except to mimic her friends, although her disappointment was keen.
The man who’d shouted turned to his men, pointing at two of them. “Onycmume ux Hahe said.
They’re Russian! Deborah thought. She should have known. Chinese troops wouldn’t have worn this hodgepodge collection of masks and gloves — they were immune. These people were Russian, and they were also on the run from the plague.
“3aumecb eÀ0!” one said. “3aMumecb eÀ0!”
Deborah had learned the feel and pacing of their language during her months in orbit with Commander Ulinov. Nikola had even taught her several phrases. She tried them now as the pair of soldiers approached, concealed in their biochem hoods. “o6poe ympo, moapuu!” she said, Good morning, comrades, even though the day was well into late afternoon. It was a game she’d played with Ulinov. “Kaº Bbl nouaeme?”
How are you living today?
In Russian, the words were ambiguous. The phrase served as a basic “hello,” but could also mean more. It surprised them. The two soldiers hesitated.
“You’re American,” the officer called.
They were so grungy and burned, they were unrecognizable. He’d thought they must be Chinese. That was why he’d shouted first in Mandarin.
“Da,” Deborah said. Yes. “Where are we?”
“Put yourself on your knees,” the officer replied, with a curt motion for his soldiers to take them.
“Wait!” Cam said. “Stay back. We can protect you from the Chinese nanotech, but we’re probably crawling with it. We came out of the plague zones. You might be infected if you touch us.”
“You would be sick,” the officer said. “Not flying.”
“I’m Major Reece with the United States Army,” Deborah said, asserting herself, but Cam surprised them all. He was honest.
“We have the new vaccine,” he said. “If you help us, we can give it to you, too.”
The fire was getting closer. Deborah could hear it licking its way across the hill behind her as the smoke thickened. “We should move,” she said, but the officer refused.
“Nyet. Give us the vaccine,” he said, before barking out a dozen words she didn’t understand. The nearest Russians backed off, but none of them lowered their weapons.
“Let me clean myself,” Cam said. “I can try to decontaminate, at least a bit.”
The officer nodded, but hit the charging handle on his AK-47. Deborah flinched. One wrong move… she thought, barely allowing herself to breathe as Cam scrubbed himself down with brush and dirt. It was a crude decon procedure but clever as always. Deborah wondered what else Ruth had taught him. Would he have come up with this idea by himself? He was intelligent, just uneducated. That made him unpredictable.
“Major Reece and I are in charge here,” Medrano said to him.
“Right.”
“Then keep your mouth shut from now on.”
“We need them. Look at us.” Cam paused with a handful of
crumbling brown earth against his sleeve, ignoring the scuffs and gashes beneath his burned uniform. “But they need us, too.”
“We should have negotiated,” Medrano said in a growl. He glanced at Deborah. “Major? It’s not too late.”
“No, I think he’s right,” she said.
“These are the same guys who bombed Leadville and started the whole fucking war—”
“They’re not. At this point, they’re just survivors like us.” Deborah turned to Medrano with as much poise as she could muster, watery-eyed in the smoke. “We don’t even know where we are, Captain. We’re hurt. Unarmed. I think he’s right.”
“What’s to stop them from shooting us as soon as he gives up the vaccine?”
“Information. Tell them, Cam.”
Cam aimed a thin smile at her. It was a sign of approval, and, for the first time, Deborah felt some glimpse of Ruth’s attraction to him. Beneath the scars, he was lean and dark and competent.
Pulling a jackknife from his belt, he crouched and sank the blade into the ground, trying to clean it of nanotech. Then he stood and held the knife over his left hand. “I need one man,” he said to the Russians.
“Sidorov,” the officer said.
In response, a soldier gave his rifle to his mates and walked closer.
“Tell him not to take off his hood!” Cam said. “Hold his breath. Give me his arm.”
This better work, Deborah thought as the officer translated for Cam. If he’s infected, if he falls down twitching — They’ll kill us.
Cam wet the tip of the blade in his own hand. Next, he worked the soldier’s jacket sleeve back from his glove and lightly cut him there. “We were trying to get into Los Angeles,” he said as he worked. “My team has information on the original source of the plague. We think we can stop it.”
“Kpbiwa noexaÀa?” the officer said. “How?”
“We need to get into Los Angeles,” Cam said, taking a hard line with him, but the officer met Cam’s stubbornness with a deflection of his own.
“How long is it before our man is safe?” the officer said.
“It’s already happened. You know how fast nanotech is.”
“But how are we knowing? There is no proof.”
“Tell him to take off his gear.”
This is it, Deborah thought. She tensed as the officer spoke to his man, ready to draw her pistol, ready to run, making her shoulder throb like a drum.
The soldier removed his biochem hood. He was startlingly young, blond like Deborah and nearly as smooth-faced, no more than a teen, and yet his eyes were like stone. Deborah wanted to say something to him, but he wouldn’t understand even if she found the words. We’re your friends, she thought. o6poe ympo, she blurted.
The boy’s veteran gaze flitted up and down her tall, haggard body. Still no emotion showed.
“You can see he’s fine,” Cam said. “Who’s next?”
“We wait,” the officer said.
“We need to get into Los Angeles, a place on the far edge of the city. We think it survived the bombs.”
“That is not impossible,” the officer said.
Deborah felt a thin spark of hope. Could they have a plane? she wondered. Where are we?
“You come with us,” the officer said. “Keep your distance. Sidorov will be your guard. 06e3opycbme ux!”
The boy gestured for Deborah’s sidearm. She didn’t resist. Medrano might have planned otherwise, but there were half a dozen rifles trained on him, so he let the boy have his weapon, too.
They hiked across the hill. Deborah gained new energy as the sun emerged from the haze, dappling through the tangled oaks. It was a soft, sweet yellow. They reeked of smoke and jet fuel and yet she breathed all the way into her belly from the clean air of the breeze. The earth smelled different here than in Colorado, dustier and less green. She’d never tasted anything so beautiful.
The Russian officer tried to maintain his quarantine, walking the rest of his men several paces from Deborah, Cam, Medrano, and the boy — but Deborah quickly flagged. Medrano tried to support her, but he wasn’t much better off. Within minutes, the officer called for a halt and asked Cam to vaccinate two more of his men. He needed someone to carry his prisoners.
A few soldiers had already disappeared, running ahead. Deborah thought two or three of them had also gone back into the smoke. Why? To fight the fire?
Dividing his platoon left the officer with only four men, including himself and the boy. Deborah supposed if there was a time to overpower them, it was now, but she’d slumped to the ground, feeling nauseous. She was only faintly aware of Cam repeating his procedure with the jackknife or of Medrano removing her gun belt to make a combat sling for her arm.
This is what shock feels like, she thought. You’re in shock.
“Water,” she said. “I–Is there water?”
Medrano got a canteen from the boy. Maybe it helped. When they carried her into the Russian camp fifteen minutes later, Deborah was still conscious. She saw one truck in the rock-strewn gully. There was also camouflage netting strung from a fat gray boulder. They brought Deborah beneath it. Her last memory was of the sunlight in the fabric.
Two hours later, they were slashing over the brown land in a helicopter. Deborah remained numb. She felt hypnotized by the yammering vibration of the rotors and the rolling pattern of shadows in the gullies and foothills below. The sun shone low in the west. Darkness reached away from every ridge and peak.
Enjoy it while you can, she thought.
The air here was clean, but, ahead of them, the southern sky was lost behind gigantic black clouds. Fallout and smoke hovered over the L.A. basin like a mountain range, all of its massive slopes, bulk, and pinnacles leaning inland, blown east by the ocean wind. It was a different world. Not all of them would come out again. Even if there wasn’t more shooting — even if Freedman was alive and they found her — there wasn’t room in the helicopter. At least one person would need to give up their seat.
The aircraft was an old KTVC News 12 chopper, narrow-bodied and short. It was also bright red. At first, Deborah thought they were dangerously exposed inside its Plexiglas windows, but the color of the helicopter was immaterial. It was their radar signature that mattered, and, more importantly, their transponder and radio codes.
They were a hundred and forty miles from San Bernadino. The Osprey had crashed on the eastern face of the Sierras near Mt. Whitney and Sequoia National Park in the central part of California. Bornmann must have veered north before they were hit, trying to escape the fighters. Even so, they were in Chinese-occupied territory. The Russians weren’t supposed to be here. Their border with the People’s Liberation Army had been drawn another fifty miles north, just south of Fresno, and yet they’d maintained Special Forces inside that line. The officer, Lt. Colonel Artem Alekseev, had commanded several covert surveillance units whose isolation saved them. A third of Alekseev’s men fell victim to windborne drifts of nanotech, but there was no one else to fight off. They survived. Now they’d joined with the Americans — or vice versa.
After he decided to risk everyone in his command to Cam’s inoculations, Alekseev had rummaged up some spare clothes, putting the three Americans in Russian uniforms. Medrano did what he could to keep them distinct. He insisted on removing the name tapes from his uniform and Deborah’s in addition to her Army patch and his own USAF patch, all of which he sewed onto their new uniforms — but there were only four identifiers for the three of them. REECE. MEDRANO. U.S. ARMY. U.S. AIR FORCE. In combat, American soldiers wore nothing else, not even the flag. He put the u.s. ARMY patch on Cam, but the effect was negligible. All of them looked like Russians.
Alekseev proved to be in his forties when he finally took off his biochem mask. His face was dark from sun and weather except along one cheek, where the skin was branded with three white puncture scars Deborah couldn’t identify. What could have made those marks? Barbed wire?
Deborah didn’t trust him. To convince Medrano to sha
re the vaccine, she’d said the Russians were no longer their enemy. They all wanted to live, and that was true, but Deborah wasn’t so forgiving.
Alekseev was a ferret. She planned to watch him closely, even if he didn’t seem to have anything to gain by betraying them to the Chinese. Easy prison sentences for his men? His ambitions were larger than that.
Much like General Walls, Alekseev had divided the remainder of his troops into two squads and told them to find other survivors. His assets were too minimal to mount a serious counterattack. Throughout the day he’d waited and listened, raging at his helplessness. By now, the Chinese must have completed their takeover of the top U.S. installations. Before sunrise tomorrow, if not sooner, they would turn their attention to cleaning up any pockets of resistance in Russian California, so Alekseev chose to support the three Americans in their all-or-nothing gambit to find Kendra Freedman.
First, he owned the helicopter, stashed at an old refugee camp seven miles north of his hiding place. Second, Russian intelligence had been monitoring Chinese radio traffic since the occupation with a great deal of luck. It had been necessary for the allies to coordinate their air missions, which gave the Russians many more opportunities than the U.S.-Canadian side to study, hack, and infiltrate the Chinese system. Colonel Alekseev believed he could fool Chinese air control where the Americans failed. Unfortunately, the KTVC chopper only contained four seats. Alekseev had had far more volunteers than he could send. None of his troops wanted to stay behind. Deborah felt a grudging respect for their courage even as she joined Cam and Medrano in arguing with Alekseev. She didn’t want to remain behind, either. What would she do? Nap?
It didn’t help that Deborah, Cam, and Medrano were hurt. Alekseev’s medic tended their wounds, setting Medrano’s arm with a splint and stitching their cuts, but the three of them were a mess. As far as Alekseev was concerned, the only American to fill one of the precious seats would be Cam. They’d explained that Cam knew Freedman and some nanotech, but Deborah extended this half-truth to herself. I’ve been a research assistant, she said, and Medrano’s studied the Los Angeles area. He’s also an engineer. We need him if we’re going to be digging through what’s left of the city.