by Jeff Carlson
But he’d rattled the words out too quickly, as if speaking to a child. His tone brought her face up again and he saw that she was there, inside herself, listening and coherent. Her eyes gleamed with triumph.
“They built a sister lab nearby,” she said. “I know it’s there.”
“You mean in the Saint Bernadine hospital?”
“They built a sister lab nearby. They said no, but they used the same couriers and I saw the same man on the same day. I know it’s there.”
Couriers, he thought, doubting her. Could she really have discerned the existence of a second lab within walking distance of Saint Bernadine from such a small clue? She keeps repeating herself exactly, he thought. She clung to some phrases like a drowning woman tightening her grip on a life ring, as if she questioned or even forgot herself.
This was more than sustained shock and guilt. Had the Chinese tortured her?
“Please.” Deborah brushed her good hand through her ash-darkened blond hair, perhaps to reinforce that she wasn’t Asian. Then she held her palm up to the woman above them. “Please, Kendra. Come with us.”
“We don’t have much time,” Cam said. “The Chinese will send more men—”
“I’ll kill them.”
“—and we don’t have much fuel.”
Freedman began to crouch, settling herself on the loose slats where she paused and stared. “We won’t have to go far,” she said. “I know it’s there.”
“Come down,” Deborah said. “Please.”
“No.”
“We can take you back to American lines,” Cam said with more certainty than he felt. They would need to refuel even if they weren’t blocked by Chinese aircraft.
And if they stop us, he thought, do I put a bullet in her head? Or do I let them have her because they’ve won and she might help them succeed in repopulating the planet?
My God. Is it better if we all die?
Who knows what she could build if the Chinese keep her locked up for the rest of her life. What will they do to us? If they improve the mind plague, they might be able to control everyone on the planet for thousands of years, breeding people like cows or dogs for strength and obedience. Beauty. Sex. It’s better to kill her, he realized, wondering if he could draw his pistol before she threw her nanotech.
“I won’t go,” Freedman said.
“You don’t understand,” Deborah said. Some of her old arrogance showed in her voice and posture, and Cam liked her for it. “A lot of good people died just to get us here,” she said. “We need you.”
“I need to see the other lab,” Freedman said. “They built the vaccine there.”
“We have the vaccine! You must have it, too,” Cam said, but Freedman didn’t move on her heap of rubble, squatting on her haunches. He was reminded of a child again. What would she do? Hold her breath?
Abruptly she shoved herself back to her feet, extending her fists to both sides as she looked over Cam’s head. Deborah wasn’t the only one losing patience. Colonel Alekseev had kept his distance, acting as a lookout, but now he picked his way through the ruins with his AK-47. “We must leave!” he called.
“I won’t go.”
“It doesn’t sound like you even know where this lab is,” Cam said, pleading with her, and Deborah said, “We can keep you safe in Colorado. We have some gear. There’s an MRFM and—”
“The lab is nearby. I know it’s there!”
Freedman’s passion reminded him again uncomfortably of Ruth. Maybe that was why he hesitated. They were so intent on getting her out of the Los Angeles sprawl, too tired and rushed to imagine any change in plans. What if it made more sense to stay?
“Why?” he asked, trying not to flinch from a gust of ash. The helicopter thundered closer in response to some signal from Alekseev, whipping the ruins with dust and shreds of paper, but Cam persisted. “Why do you want the vaccine?” he asked. Then: “We’ll take you there!”
The worst of the downdrafts shifted away from them as the helicopter landed, making it easier to hear — but Freedman cocked her hands on either side of her body, ready to fight.
Cam bent his body, too, reflexively dropping into a gun-slinger’s crouch. “We can move a lot faster in the sky,” he said.
Beside him, Deborah had also touched her sidearm. “Please!” she said. “Please, Kendra.”
“Andrew Dutchess released the archos tech,” Freedman said. “Not me. It was Dutchess.” Her voice was small again, and she fidgeted and blinked.
Jesus, Cam thought. Jesus Christ, I think she’s forgotten where she is.
He stepped toward her. His legs were stiff. Every movement was reluctant, even as his skin shivered with anticipation. Either he would force her to recognize her surroundings or he would tackle her. If he was lucky, he could disarm her. Her nanotech must be in glass or plastic vials exactly like Ruth had done.
“There’s a new plague,” he said. “The mind plague.”
Snap. Her eyes shifted to him, clear and afraid. “I can stop it,” she said.
“How?”
“There’s a marker in the vaccine. I helped them build it, but they did as much work as possible without me. I need key components and software if I’m going to design my cat’s paw ”
“Cat,” he said, not understanding.
“I know it’s there.”
“You saw the same man on the same day,” Deborah said, prompting her. She also distracted Freedman. Cam nearly scrambled up the broken wood slats — he could knock her feet out from under her if he lunged — but Freedman smiled and said, “Yes. The other lab is nearby.”
“How can you stop the mind plague?”
“I can alter the vaccine and make it a cat’s paw. A new kind of nanotech.” She was lucid now, speaking rapidly, as if from a memorized speech.
She must have recited those words to herself hundreds of times in captivity, but Cam wondered. Could they trust her? She seemed no more substantial than sunlight caught in a set of window blinds. Snap — open. Snap — closed.
“It will attack the new plague and its vaccine, too,” she said. “Anyone who’s currently infected will be freed from the plague and it will shut off the vaccine in everyone who’s been inoculated.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cam said.
If they could find the other lab — if Freedman could do what she said — they would turn the tables on the Chinese. Millions of people around the world would regain their intelligence even as China’s armies became vulnerable to the mind plague.
Deborah wasn’t buying it. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why wouldn’t this thing just turn around and leave our side open to infection again, too?”
“Because I can give it the same self-governing markers we developed for the plague,” Freedman said. “My cat’s paw will know who’s immune and who isn‘t, and it will establish itself individually in everyone it finds.”
“Smart tech,” Cam said, looking for Deborah’s eyes. “Remember what a jump they’ve made. The mind plague and its vaccine aren’t just machines. On some level, they’re both able to think, even more so than the booster. They remember what they’ve done.”
“It still won’t work,” Deborah said. “None of us are sick. There’s nobody except us and the Chinese for hundreds of miles, and none of us are carrying the plague. Even if she can reverse who’s immune and who isn‘t, that doesn’t solve anything if the Chinese stop us. Don’t you see? They don’t even have to kill us. All they need to do is keep us contained.”
“We are carrying the plague,” Cam said. “Right? We came out of Colorado. We must have traces of it in our blood. Our lungs. Our skin.”
Freedman nodded. “Their vaccine is the only thing protecting you. My cat’s paw will attack the vaccine.”
“That’s how it’ll spread,” Cam said. He touched Deborah’s arm, trying to convey both tenderness and brutal resolve. “The mind plague will infect the Chinese. Everyone we left behind will wake up.”
“But this includes u
s,” Alekseev said behind him. “My men and us. What she wants to build will infect us, too, yes?”
“Yes.”
Deborah didn’t say anything, staring at Cam, but then Alekseev nodded.
“Okay, let’s go,” Cam said to Freedman. “You have my word. We’ll find the lab.”
He would have done it to save Ruth if nothing else.
Alekseev bodysearched Freedman with a pistol in his hand, relieving her of four plastic vials that Cam was sure contained nanotech. They also took off her knapsack. Deborah sorted through it gingerly. “There’s nothing in here but canteens,” she said as Medrano and Alekseev pestered Freedman for more information. “What are we looking for?” Medrano said, but Freedman only cried on Cam’s lap once they were aboard, cramming all six of them into the chopper. She turned into his chest and neck and cried like a broken girl, weeping against his ash-black fatigues as she formed words inside her breathless sobs.
“It was Dutchess,” she whispered. “Not me. It was Dutchess.”
Cam strained to hear. Maybe she needed that secrecy. She’d obviously learned to hide herself during her imprisonment, both from her captors and her own conscience.
“She doesn’t know where we’re going,” Deborah said. “One thing I can tell you, there won’t be aircraft or trucks. The Chinese wouldn’t have risked constant flights or traffic between the labs. Our satellites would have seen the pattern. That means it’s close by.”
“There are five thousand buildings close by,” Medrano said.
“Look for another hospital,” Cam said, “maybe an office complex or a school. They’d need space — clean rooms for labs, storage, barracks. Go south. She was heading south.”
“She’s out of her mind,” Medrano said.
“She’s smarter than the rest of us put together. I think she noticed something. There were clues. Kendra?” Cam lowered his voice. “Kendra, where is their other lab?”
“I found the police,” she said. “I told them. Nine thousand five hundred and seventy feet. I told them.”
She was babbling. She was sick — physically sick. The round face and double chins from Rezac’s photos were shrunken down to something more like a living skull. Her cheekbones pressed tightly through her skin, which was why her eyes seemed too large, squeezed out of her face.
She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.
25
Kendra Lelei Freedman survived the plague year only by the strangest karma. As the nanotech ravaged northern California, spreading swiftly, somehow she reached the governor’s office in Sacramento. Kendra was still wearing her lab coat, which must have helped. She was also louder than the other people in the crowd outside the capital buildings, using her weight to shove to the front. She convinced a National Guardsman she knew what was behind the confused reports. An officer escorted her through their barricades.
State police put her and the governor aboard a CHP helicopter only to be overwhelmed themselves by the mob, and the pilot’s frantic radio calls went unnoticed in the chaos. It didn’t help that the March rain turned to snow as they hurried east. Then they were infected, flying beneath ten thousand feet. Their pilot managed to lift the chopper to safe altitude through the storm, but he was bleeding from one eye and semiconscious when they smashed into a mountainside.
Other people reached the same small peak. Too many. They only lasted until summer before they played their first round of Stones. It was a contest Kendra invented herself, a bait-and-switch guessing game that she controlled. The losers were killed and eaten. Kendra knew she would never fail, not with her memory. She talked the majority into supporting it because their first victims were the most traumatized, the less aware, the least helpful. They believed it was fair. They winnowed themselves down with Kendra manipulating the group the whole time.
It split her mind. She wasn’t brave enough to commit suicide, so she died in other ways. Nevertheless, Kendra was still alive when the plague war began. The Russians found her. Kendra told them who she was to escape being shot, and they traded her to the Chinese.
The MSS went to work on her brittle soul. They said America had been eradicated by a full-scale nuclear attack and offered proof in satellite photos, some of which must have been real. They took her aboard a plane and flew for nearly a day, then said they’d landed in the Himalayas, where they were desperately fending off India’s tanks and infantry.
They gave her a chance to redeem herself: to create new nanotech. Their own people had been working on the mind plague. Kendra was the catalyst in making it operational. They said the new contagion was intended to be a bloodless method of ending the war. They said they only wanted to unite both countries under a single government before another nuclear exchange wiped out these last few safe islands above the machine plague. They didn’t tell her Ruth’s vaccine was widespread by then, permitting everyone to reclaim the world below ten thousand feet. Nor did Kendra ask to go outside to verify her location. She’d seen enough of snow and wind and desolate rock. She loved her warm prison. The women who tended to her were soft-voiced and kind, completely unlike anything on her mountaintop. She wanted to believe them.
Kendra began to work again. She escaped into the pristine logic of her microscopes, and, when she occasionally stalled on the mind plague, she turned her skills to other projects, daring to reexamine the archos tech for weaknesses. There must be some way to destroy it.
Her handlers let her play with different lines of research because it kept her happy. She also came to understand that they hoped her efforts would jump-start new possibilities in their weapons programs. Too late, she discovered Ruth’s vaccine in her own blood along with the booster nanotech. Too late, she learned she’d repeated her unholy mistake, providing them with the power to tear the world apart again.
She went on strike. It didn’t last. The MSS used sleep deprivation, drugs, and cold to compel her. She quit eating, but they inserted a gastric feeding tube and IVs to sustain her — and when she failed to rouse herself, the pain began. Electricity. Knives. She swore to help again just to make it stop.
She’d become erratic. She knew that. Sometimes she exaggerated her behavior when she was actually in control of herself, creating opportunities to conceal and deceive. It also helped that she’d picked up a good deal of their language by then. She pretended she wanted to be one of them, which she hoped was comforting to her overseers. She refused to speak in anything except Mandarin, deliberately confusing her words and mixing her written notes.
Kendra knew they hoped to improve the mind plague to introduce thoughts to infected people, not only disrupting their capacity to think but shaping and encouraging cooperative moods. They were years away from this magic. Merely teaching the nanotech to interrupt higher brain function was impressive enough — but, showing ambition, she convinced them to increase the nano’s AMU to allow the space necessary to eventually house those programs. The Chinese didn’t realize the extra bulk she built into it also held a coded message.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t be sure anyone would ever find her cry for help. Worse, she didn’t make the mental leap to using the new self-governing markers to reverse who the mind plague infected until after they’d taken both kinds of nanotech away from her.
Her best chance to stop them was her continued work with the archos tech. She crafted a new machine plague, first paring down its size for increased speed. She also replaced its heat engine with a simple protein-based reaction. That was easy. The archos tech was nothing if not efficient in disintegrating organic tissue, which she taught it to burn for energy. It would be enough to destroy everyone in their nanotech programs, including herself.
At last she was ready. Too late. More than anything, those bleak, miserable words summed up her life. Too late. She hadn’t been able to cut her wrists deeply enough on her mountaintop, and she’d kept eating in small amounts even after she swore an oath to God and the devil to let herself waste away, but the pared-down archos tech would kill he
r exactly as the original model should have done years ago. Kendra never expected to survive beyond opening the first or second vial.
She was wrong.
Saint Bernadine had been retrofitted by the Chinese. Even so, the missiles’ shock waves brought most of the building down. Trapped in its dark halls, their research teams and military personnel needed hours to pull each other free. At least a dozen people were hurt or missing. No one else came to help. They kept her away from the windows, and the gloom was everlasting, but Kendra thought it was afternoon before they escorted her to her basement labs to recover her gear. Major Su said they needed to be ready to move.
There weren’t enough of them to carry everything, so Kendra filled her pockets with sample cases and flash drives — and eight slim vials of nanotech. Then they brought her outside into the growing beat of a helicopter.
The aircraft flew out of the south as she walked away from the other men and women, staring out across the black, flattened city. They let her keep her distance. They were accustomed to her moods, and there was nowhere for her go.
The helicopter landed in an area cleared by Major Su’s men. Kendra didn’t know if they intended to ferry her to the sister lab or if they were bringing those teams north. Maybe she should have waited. She didn’t have that much self-control. She screamed in anguish and rage as she threw the first vial.
Major Su fell with his cheek eaten away, clawing at his pistol. Others were torn apart through their necks and chests. Like the original archos tech, her accelerated machine plague found its quickest entrance through the sinus cavities and lungs.
Watching them die was hellish.
It felt like coming home.
She had killed unimaginable numbers and, more personally, she had directed people to murder and cook eighteen human beings on her little mountaintop. What were a few more? Kendra delighted in feeling anything other than helpless. She became a dark goddess — the destroyer of the worlds.
Laughing, she strode toward the chopper as the pilots powered up again. They began to lift away. She threw another vial, hoping to feel the nanotech across her own body in the blistering wind. But her aim was true. The vial passed through the open side door and the plague never escaped the aircraft, which wheeled onto its side and slammed into the ruins a hundred yards away. Then she was alone except for three wounded and a woman who called herself Jane, one of her caregivers, who had always been respectful and sweet.