by Jeff Carlson
Just by itself, the long walk was too much. The two of them weren’t enough people to watch Newcombe and still look out for bugs and other hazards, watch their maps and compass, find water, find food, make camp. They’d had to talk it out with Newcombe and ultimately they’d had to trust him. He didn’t have any great options, either. What could he do? Wrestle with Cam to get his rifle back, then shoot Cam and keep Ruth as a prisoner, tying her legs to keep her from running?
In this at least she and Cam had the upper hand. In camp they always lay down close together. Two would be harder to overpower than one, but the implications of bedding down side by side were only deepening that particular trouble. In the cool spring nights, Cam was warm. Even wrapped up in his gloves and jacket, he was much softer than the ground. Last night Ruth had burrowed against him, knowing she was wrong to encourage him but unable to forsake the basic comfort of it.
* * * *
Of everyone who’d been a part of her life, Ruth missed her step-brother most of all. Not her parents, not her few close friends. Ari had always been her favorite distraction. They still had yet to resolve their relationship and never would, not with him killed or, less likely, lost among the scattered refugees. He was the perfect memory, good and strong. He was safe. She recognized that. Even the cruel things he’d done were part of the easier world before the plague. He’d hurt her badly, in fact, because he was never quite in reach. Legally they were family and they’d been scared of what people would think. So he’d left her. Twice. A third time, she had been the one to call things off. It was messy. It was intense.
Ruth Ann Goldman had been an only child. Probably that was for the best. Her father was an independent software programmer/analyst, brilliant at his work and in high demand. He had few hours for his daughter and less for his wife. That he could have hired on with one company and settled into a steady nine-to-five, yet chose not to, wasn’t something Ruth understood until much later. She was a loud girl, antic and capering, hungry for approval at home and therefore everywhere else—in school, with her peers.
After the divorce her mother found a better man, not so driven. Her step-father was a lot like her dad, enthusiastic and smart. He was more disciplined in giving of himself, however, more appreciative, having lost his first wife to cancer.
It wasn’t the Brady Bunch, no matter how many times her mother made that idiotic joke. Ruth shared a bathroom with Susan and Ari, which was both excruciating and thrilling for a thirteen-year-old who had always had a toilet and a shower to herself. The Cohen kids were casual about busting in on each other wearing only underwear or a towel. There were glimpses of skin and slammed doors and apologies, and it was all very dramatic. Both of them were older than Ruth, Susan by four years, Ari by two, and they were always running around getting ready for dates or, in Ari’s case, cleaning up after baseball and basketball. Ruth managed to get in the way often enough.
If love is indeed just chemistry, it shouldn’t have shocked anyone that step-brother and sister ended up together. His dad and her mom made a good fit. There was an echo of that attraction in the next generation and they circled each other for years, Ruth pushing him back with sarcasm and drawing him close in a thousand ways, teasing him and herself by asking about his girlfriends, by flaunting around the house in her pajamas, by sitting with him and his math homework—a low-charge erotic tension much like she would develop with Nikola Ulinov nearly two decades later. Alone in the house, they wrestled for possession of the TV remote, and they played dunk wars in the community pool in front of everyone, smooth skin on wet skin.
Ari was popular and athletic. Ruth was more on the outside of the social scene, a brain. She had a decent body and great hair but a face that looked like she’d borrowed an adult’s nose and ears.
They first kissed when she was seventeen and still a virgin, after she came home unhappy after a bad time at a school dance. The boy she liked hadn’t been interested in her. Maybe Ari took advantage of that. Maybe she let him. He touched her through her clothes and she grabbed him once. But it was awkward the next day. Confusion drove them apart and silence filled their friendship. Fortunately, Ari went off to college. They only saw each other over holiday breaks and the next summer, after which Ruth left home herself for Cincinnati U. Then he had a serious girlfriend. Then she had her first internship.
Ruth was more experienced when they both came home for Hanukkah the year she was twenty-one. She made eyes at him over dinner and across the living room while the family watched TV. After the house had settled down for the night, she left her light on, pretending to read a book. He rapped quietly on her bedroom door and it was exciting and nice and romantic as hell.
Things went on like that for years, stealing an afternoon or a few nights together. They certainly could have tried harder to make a relationship of it, but Ruth was too busy and Ari never had any trouble talking other women into bed, which flustered her.
It was that unsettled karma that kept him in her heart.
Most of what Ruth knew and believed about religion, she’d learned from her step-father. She had hardly grown up Orthodox, eating tasty animal by-products on pizza with her friends, her dad banging away on his computer on the Sabbath, but this part of her life underwent a change after her mother remarried. Ari often had games on Saturdays and her step-father happily drove the family to attend, and yet the Cohens disdained pig meat as proscribed. They also made some effort to avoid work and to leave the TV off on the Sabbath. Her step-father’s faith was less a matter of worship than a practiced respect for all things. If pressed, he could boil it down to one cliché not typically perceived as Jewish. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It wasn’t scientific or even particularly logical, given human nature, but it had balance and it appealed to her.
Ruth had been a child at first with Ari, and later she had been selfish. She couldn’t afford to make that mistake again.
* * * *
The fact of the matter was that Ruth had gone out of her way to grab a box of condoms from a Walgreens while the men were three aisles over in the canned-foods section, wondering what the hell she was going to say if they caught her. Because I have to. Even if she said no, Cam might say yes, and her choices were limited. She’d encouraged him.
She resented him. Sometimes it was no fun being a woman, being smaller, being alone.
As she followed Cam past a dented van, Ruth willed herself not to ask him for a rest. More and more, she was afraid of appearing weak. She reached for the vehicle’s side mirror to balance herself, glancing up to regard Cam’s back. Then she reeled away from the broken skull pressed against the glass, its teeth smashed into an everlasting scream.
Ruth felt her doubt swelling, and new shame. Try not to think about it. Unfortunately her body hurt in too many places to ignore, and where she didn’t hurt she itched. She didn’t understand how Cam could get up and keep moving every day.
Don’t think. That’s the trick. Don’t think.
There were too many decisions to make among the cars. Cam stepped over a skeleton, but she had to walk around. Then he backtracked from several vehicles crammed together into a dead end, whereas Ruth was far enough behind that she could shortcut to his new path.
She stopped suddenly, gazing past him with sick disbelief. They had neared the top of a low rise and in front of them the Interstate swept upward for more than a mile, cutting in between steep hills of grass and gnarled oak trees. The road was studded with eastbound traffic on both sides. Cars filled the shoulders and dropped into some of the lower points off-road and she could see a rockslide that had given way from one of the embankments, an iron-red vein of dirt and gravel. It looked like forever. Newcombe was right. There was no way they were going to reach elevation in less than another week or even two, laboring through every damned inch of wreckage.
Don’t. Please. Please don’t think, she warned herself, but the cold dread in her would not fade. Ruth couldn’t help staring at the long band o
f road as they pushed in between the hoods of two cars—
Cam turned and caught at her as a dry, shaking sound filled her ears. Rattlesnakes. A host of muscular bodies were curled in the space in front of them, territorial and aggressive. Cam moved sideways and then backpedaled from more rattling. He’d obviously found more snakes beyond the nearest cars and Ruth glanced left and right, thinking to climb up onto something.
She struggled for words. “What do we do?”
“They like the road,” Cam said. “It’s nice and hot. Lots of places to hide. We might be better off going cross-country like we talked about.”
“Goddammit, this is crazy,” Newcombe said. “You don’t have any idea what we’re getting into.”
“I do. We can make it.”
“I can get a plane for us today!”
“They’ll kill us as soon as they see it land.”
“Stop,” Ruth said. “Stop fighting.” But her voice was a whisper and the men didn’t respond, their faces locked on each other. She turned away, trembling.
The environment seemed to be changing with the rise in the land. They’d walked into an area where at least some reptiles had survived—and they were still barely five hundred feet above sea level with at least eighty miles to go in this bizarre, lethal world. She did not want to fail Cam, but what if they’d made the wrong choice?
He was already scouting a way past the snakes, hauling himself onto the hood of a Toyota to look around. The car rocked against another vehicle, screeching. Beyond him, though, the road stretched on and on, and her feet were already a mess of blisters and strained tendons and bones.
Ruth was no longer sure they could make it.
8
The intelligence agent following Ulinov carried an open flip phone down alongside his body like a knife, allowing the two of them to be tracked every step of the way through the congested streets of downtown Leadville.
Nikola Ulinov was a big man, but he constantly let himself be delayed as people shifted and ebbed around the sandbagged gun emplacements. For one thing, it made it very difficult to tail him. He’d already spotted a second agent struggling to remain unseen despite his stop-and-go pace.
Ulinov stood at a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters. The Americans would have said six-two in their quick slang. He normally had the edge in any crowd. The former cosmonaut was large for a graduate of the Russian Federal Space Agency, thick in the shoulders and chest. His limp only made him more imposing. Most people angled away from him without thinking, but he was in no hurry. It had been two days since he’d had an excuse to cross the city and he was taking notes.
He was a weapon. That was the basic truth of it, and that was how he felt, not hateful but full of purpose. A weapon does not hate. It only serves. His ammunition was merely what he stole from them with his eyes and ears—and yet day by day he became more dangerous.
He kept his face down like most of the civilians, hunched into his coat. Each time his gaze flickered up, he was afraid he would give himself away. Every step he took sideways or back to avoid the other men and women was more than an act. He walked among them as if he was wearing a bomb and it seemed impossible that no one could sense what was different in him, his thoughts, his poise. He was the enemy.
Perhaps that would change. He hoped for it. Nearly from the beginning, his people and the Americans had established an alliance, although that partnership had consisted of little more than words transmitted from one side of the world to the other. The Americans were too engrossed in their own survival, and by the end of the second winter, all that remained of Russia were a few million refugees with no real wealth or power. Until now.
On the face of it, that was why Ulinov had been brought down from the space station, as a proven and highly visible representative for his shattered government, bilingual, trained in diplomacy, experienced at working with and even commanding Americans. But he needed to be more. His people were desperate for any advantage.
He hadn’t found it. As far as Ulinov could tell, Leadville’s strength was growing. Not by much. They had their own problems, yet even a slight improvement went drastically against the global trend. He had witnessed this firsthand aboard the ISS, looking down on the planet as survivors everywhere fell silent.
You don’t realize your luck, he thought, and found himself glancing up too long. He made eye contact with a sunburnt young Army corporal standing at the edge of the sidewalk in full battle rattle—helmet, parka, gloves, and submachine gun. The boy’s expression tightened and Ulinov worried what had shown in his own eyes. Envy? Anger?
Ulinov didn’t dare look back. It was important that the two intelligence agents didn’t think he was aware of them, and yet his bitterness stayed with him like a shout.
You don’t realize. You have so much.
The new U.S. capital sat at 10,150 feet on a bit of flat ground cradled among towering white peaks. There had never been many trees at this elevation—absolutely none, now, all burned for fuel during the first winter—and Leadville was a collection of old brick and modern concrete. Anchoring main street were two heritage museums and a well-preserved opera theater built in 1870.
Even in the twenty-first century, the wide boulevard still had the shape of the American frontier, designed to accommodate wagons and horses. Before the plague, this town had been home to less than four thousand people, but all of the historical buildings and breakfast cafes had been turned into command centers for civil, federal, and military staffs.
It was a foothold. Hotels, offices, and private homes had been packed with survivors, even the gas stations and the laundromat. Prefab warehouses and tents filled many of the side streets, rooftops, and parking lots. It was enough.
If he closed his eyes, the crowd almost reminded him of Kiev and Moscow and Paris, boot heels on pavement, the rustle of people wisking against each other. And yet the pace was wrong, as were the human sounds. No one ran because they were late for work or a show or lunch. No one laughed or shouted.
Ulinov came up against the back of a man who was engrossed with his cell phone, turned to face the brick wall of a bank. The man did not speak. He only texted, working his thumb on the phone’s touch pad. Ulinov slipped by and immediately saw another woman tapping into her cupped hands, the bridge of her nose chapped and pink much like the young soldier’s face. At this altitude, daylight seethed with ultraviolet, and there was no longer any sunscreen to be had at any price.
The important thing was the phones. The government staffers, soldiers, doctors, machinists, electricians, and other critical personnel were all linked together by a local array of cellular towers and wireless Internet built during the plague year, and yet Ulinov had never heard anyone speaking into them in more than a hush. They were afraid of infiltrators. Their war was against their own people, and how could they be sure who was on their side when the enemy looked like them and talked like them?
In many ways it was as if winter still held Leadville beneath eight feet of snow and subzero temperatures. These people were still waiting. They were frozen. Even with the fighting, too many of them didn’t have enough to do, and every mouth to feed was a strain. Everyone worried that they were expendable.
For the most part, Ulinov had only seen what the government wanted him to see in the eighteen days since he’d evacuated the ISS. There had been a parade. He had received superb medical care and extra rations. But the pretense was gone.
Leadville was a fortress, walled in by layer upon layer of garrisons, armored units, outposts, and scouts—and like a muscle, it was flexing. The sky had reverberated for days as they launched air sorties, the roar of jets and support craft lifting away from the mountains. Ulinov had trouble keeping a sure count. He couldn’t always be outside or move to a window. The USAF also seemed to be simply repositioning their planes, clearing out the crowded little airport on the south side of town, landing many nearby on the highways to the north instead, and some of the short flights overhead were only sma
ll civilian craft or fat commercial planes.
Leadville was also reequipping special ground units, filling the main thoroughfare with missile carriers and Abraham tanks, cracking the surface of the road beneath these lumbering machines. Ulinov had counted at least six motorized units in each of the four blocks he’d covered so far, and he glimpsed roughly the same number on the street ahead. Motorized cannon. Squat APCs for the soldiers who would support the artillery. Yesterday the streets had rumbled early in the day and again at night, the vehicles moving in and out to be followed by another group this morning. A second wave.
How many more? he wondered, and bumped into a soldier cutting across the sidewalk to the door of a shop. A captain, he realized. “Excuse me,” Ulinov said, being careful with his enunciation. He had the proper identification, but he didn’t want to be stopped for something as simple as his accent. He was already going to be late.
The captain barely glanced at him, though, before moving inside. Black spray paint covered the old shop name. CAV4. The graffiti was everywhere and Ulinov tried to remember it all. FBI F2. ODA S/S. Everything went into his reports, and to him it looked as if Leadville was doing much more than reinforcing what was already a powerful base. He believed they were mounting an attack. But where?
There were rumors, of course; the obvious air war; stories of nanotech weapons and stories that Ruth turned traitor with another new device; word that James Hollister had been executed and that many others were in jail or under house arrest.
Ulinov knew it would only be a very short time now before he was caught out himself.
* * * *
In a small room in an old hotel—a small, private room with electricity and a computer and two phones—Ulinov met with Senator Kendricks and General Schraeder. His tension worked in their favor, yet there was no concealing it. Still, he tried.