Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Much closer, the third group had also leaned into a long easy curve, sweeping northward up through the valley. They would soon pass overhead and the vibrations of the engines ran ahead of the planes like another quake, trembling through rock and forest. Cam stared up at the machines. Then he had another thought. Maybe they were landing below the barrier wherever there were roads, as close to safety as possible. If they touched down with their cabins held at low pressure, the crews and passengers could line up at the doors, then crack the seals and run for elevation.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Newcombe said. He gave Ruth the binoculars and immediately began to worm out of his sleeping bag. He grabbed the top and rolled it up, getting ready to go.

  “They could be American,” Ruth said. “Overseas military.”

  “No. We pulled everybody back. No way.” Newcombe cinched his sleeping bag into a tight bundle and laid it next to his pack, strapping the two together. “This was choreographed with the bomb. Don’t you get it? The electromagnetic pulse must have blinded our radar and communications across the entire hemisphere, which gave them a big fat chance to sneak in without anyone seeing them. First they stayed back far enough to make sure the EMP didn’t hurt them. Now they’re here. Shit.”

  “Aren’t the Japanese on our side?” Cam asked. He didn’t think Japan had nuclear weapons, or the Koreans, but China did and there was no way to know who had stolen what.

  Newcombe grunted, huh. “Maybe it’s somebody all the way out of Europe. We had a lot of bases there, too, and I know the plague hit before we cleaned everything out.” He began to load Ruth’s pack for her, picking up a can opener, a dirty fork, and a half-empty canteen.

  A miniscule orange blossom licked up from a peak in the south. “They crashed,” Ruth said.

  Then there was another puff of fire and a third. To Cam’s eyes, it appeared that the second explosion was in the sky. A missile? Someone was shooting at the new enemy.

  “Leadville’s forward base,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Newcombe quickly returned to packing but Cam stared at the distant battle, wondering if there was any reason to cheer. An odd feeling. They’d been trying to avoid the jets and choppers out of Leadville’s forward base for weeks, but now he was glad there was an American power in the Sierras.

  The gunfire that hammered them was from behind. Cam whirled to see one of the new fighters strafing a mountaintop about four miles to the north. One of the larger planes also made a leisurely pass, its right side erupting with incredible force. Smoke and light burst from its guns. Each hail of bullets was as large and straight-edged as a city block, two huge rectangular patches.

  The wind took the shredded brown earth away in sheets and Cam felt that paralyzing fear again. The new enemy was decimating any survivors who might resist after they landed, and there was nothing he could do against such strength.

  He tried to shake his numbness. “We’ll be okay,” he said as much to himself as to Ruth. “They don’t care about us. This mountain’s too small.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Someone was invading California.

  16

  The three of them strode onto the mountaintop with their guns drawn. They made a triangle with Newcombe’s assault rifle in front and Ruth and Cam on either side. She knew they must have looked faceless and alien in their masks and tattered gear as they staggered into sight. Ruth felt her pulse slamming through her limbs, but her good arm was anchored by the weight of her pistol.

  “Stop!” a man shouted. Thin, black, he had blots of pink rash on his nose and chin. He’d turned his shoulder as if to hide the stub of a knife in his hand—or to put his full weight into swinging it.

  Behind him, a white girl crouched and grabbed up a rock, and the rest of the loose crowd seemed to duck at the same time. The sound was very human. Voices. Boots. They created a small rustle of bodies against the endless drone of the planes and suddenly Ruth was aware again of how exposed they must be on this light-washed peak. The day was coming to an end. They stood far above the sunset. Ruth’s shadow stretched away in front of her, joined with the outlines of Newcombe and Cam, whereas the others’ eyes and teeth glinted in the orange dusk.

  Some of the strangers hid in their low stone-and-earth burrows. Most of them spread out. Ruth focused on a limping man who quickly reappeared from behind the nearest shelter. He paced sideways to flank her, holding a shovel like a spear. His face was lopsided by old blister rash and a badly cauterized wound. He had only one eye.

  “Gun,” Cam breathed. Ruth’s gaze flickered left to his side of the rock field. There was a shaggy-haired man with a hunting rifle and her heart beat so hard that it felt like it had stopped, one painful throb and then nothing else.

  “What do you want!” the first man shouted.

  “We’re American,” Newcombe said, but the words came out like a bark. He was panting. Ruth and Cam, too. The rush up through the final hundred yards onto this island had taken everything from her. It was an effort just to stay on her feet. Each of them stood bent by their individual pains. Ruth hunched over her bad arm and Newcombe had set his rifle against his hip like a crutch. “American,” he said.

  The other man kept circling closer. Fifteen feet away. The round blade of his shovel was blunted but shiny, worn bright by the hard ground. Ruth twitched violently and straightened up through the pain in her side. She made sure he could see her pistol, but there was no change in his dead face.

  “There might be more of them,” the girl said, and the black man shouted, “Just get out of here!”

  Cam found his breath first. “U.S. Army Special Forces,” he said, tipping his head down at Newcombe’s shoulder patch. His pistol never wavered. “We’re here to help, so tell him to back off!”

  “U.S. Army,” the black man repeated.

  “We can stop the plague.” Newcombe took one hand from his rifle to push his goggles up, showing his face. “Look at us. How do you think we got here?”

  “They’re dropping people all over the place,” the girl said to the black man. “They could be anybody.”

  The evening sky hummed with far-off jets. There had been a second wave of transports three hours after the lead groups, and then a few stragglers, and the invaders had kept a good number of fighters in the air. Mostly the noise was a distant soaring whisper. The jets stayed high, but if the wind faltered or if a jet crossed nearby, the sound could be intense. Twice more they’d seen mountains torn clear by gunfire. Just standing here was like stepping in front of a train, waiting to get hit. Ruth understood their paranoia, but looking at the one-eyed man’s cold poise, she also had no doubt that the plague year had long ago turned some of these people into animals.

  “We can protect you from the plague,” Cam said. “There’s a new kind of nanotech.”

  “We came to help,” Newcombe said.

  The black man shook his head slowly as if rejecting them. It was a signal. The girl lowered the fist she’d made around her rock and the one-eyed man paused in his closing arc toward Ruth. Nearby, another man and two women also relaxed, although they didn’t drop their knives or clubs. One was hugely pregnant. The other had a fair complexion that had burned and peeled and burned again.

  There were about twenty survivors here, Ruth guessed. Cam and Newcombe had made only a brief effort to survey this island before all three of them lurched into camp, still afraid that there could be Leadville troops lying in wait. Despite everything else, that threat was still very real.

  Newcombe tipped his rifle down. Ruth let her pistol fall to her side, but Cam kept his weapon up. “We need to see everybody out in the open,” Cam said. “Is it just you guys here?”

  “What?” The man frowned, then glanced out into the great open space of the valley. “Nobody’s landed, if that’s what you mean. Not yet.” He was delaying, Ruth thought, reluctant to put his tribe in a line in front of their guns. He gestured at the roaring sky and said, “What the fuck is going on?”<
br />
  * * * *

  Cam refused to spend the night on the mountain. “We’re leaving in five minutes,” he said, kneeling as he unwrapped the dirty, stained gauze from his hand. One of the men had fetched a plastic bowl that Cam set on the ground beside his knife.

  Eighteen survivors gathered before him in a half-circle. Ruth saw uncertainty and distrust in their eyes—and the first incredulous glimmers of hope.

  “I know it’s getting dark, but grab your stuff and get below the barrier,” Cam said. “The vaccine works in a few minutes. Faster than the plague. The longer you stay, the better the odds that a plane’s gonna come overhead and kill everybody. You’ve seen what’s happening.” He tipped his head north toward the blasted mountaintops, but only a few people glanced away.

  He was trying to distract himself as much as convince them, Ruth thought. The cut hadn’t had any chance to heal and the skin was angry and red, well on its way to infection. Cam sunk the tip of his knife directly into it. Ruth caught her breath and heard several of them react as blood ran down Cam’s gnarled fingers into the bowl.

  “We sure could use some help first,” said the scrawny black man, Steve Gaskell.

  Ruth looked up, furious that he was so indifferent to Cam’s effort, but Gaskell’s expression was wide-eyed and yearning. He stared at the neat, clear vinyl components of Newcombe’s med kit, which she’d unfolded on the ground. Tape and gauze. Antibiotics. Salve. Ruth flushed with new stress. She was intensely aware of the bulk of strangers above her. Even with their packs nearly empty, the three of them must seem unbelievably wealthy—and Cam wouldn’t stop pushing.

  “There’s no time,” he said.

  “We’ve got two pregnant women and three people sick,” Gaskell said.

  “We’ll give you what we can spare, but get off the mountain if you want to live,” Cam said. “Tonight.”

  Ruth wondered at Cam’s disgust. Dealing with these people must be like staring into a mirror for him and he’d shown the same impatience toward the Boy Scouts for clinging to their islands. It was profoundly self-destructive. His behavior put them all at risk and she felt her own hot anger and fear.

  The crowd shifted restlessly in the dusk.

  Ruth looked for the rifleman.

  “They can’t leave,” the girl said to Gaskell, and another man grimaced at Cam and said, “Wait. You can wait.”

  “We can’t stay,” Newcombe said.

  “You don’t have to, either,” Cam said. “You can leave. You should.”

  “We’ll come with you,” Gaskell said.

  “It’s better if we split up.”

  “Just let us pack. Ten minutes.”

  “Try to reach as many other survivors as you can,” Cam said. “Pay us back.”

  “Tony, Joe, Andrea, start getting our food together,” Gaskell said, not looking away from Cam. Three of his people left the group and hurried to their shelters.

  “There are others like us,” Newcombe said. “We’re all spreading out.”

  A woman said, “But who’s in the planes?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Tomorrow, send out a couple of your strongest guys,” Cam said. “That’s the best thing you can do. Find another group. Pay us back.”

  “We’re coming with you,” Gaskell said.

  “That’s okay tonight,” Ruth told him quickly, before Cam could answer, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, fine, but then we spread out.”

  “We have to make sure somebody gets out,” Cam said. “Drink.” He’d squeezed his hand into a fist to stop the bleeding but kept his dripping knuckles over the bowl as he stood up, holding the scuffed green plastic picnicware with his good hand. He held the dark soup out to Gaskell.

  “It’s fine, you won’t feel anything,” Ruth said, trying to soften the moment, but these people weren’t as healthy as the Scouts, and she thought again of the first mountaintop they’d found, wiped out by disease. As the vaccine spread, so might bacteria and viral infections. Anyone with a seriously compromised immune system was likely to have died long ago, but there were any number of slow-acting pathogens. Hepatitis. HIV. Too many survivors would be weak and susceptible. Some islands would carry their own kinds of death, but it couldn’t be helped, not until they reached a place with a minimum of technology.

  Gaskell drank first, then the girl and another man and another. Ruth saw no hint of horror in their faces. They’d seen and done worse to survive, and she turned away to stare into the last fading red coals of the sun.

  Newcombe had offered to bleed himself, too. He’d taken Cam aside and said, Fair is fair. The two men had come a very long way, from allies to enemies to real brotherhood, and Cam just shook his head. You still have two good hands, he’d said. It would be stupid to change that. There was so much good in him. Ruth had to forgive his rage and his self-hate.

  The woman with the belly hesitated when the bowl came to her. “What will it do to my baby?” she asked, looking at her husband and Gaskell and Cam.

  “We don’t know,” Ruth said. “It will protect you both, I think. There shouldn’t be a problem.”

  She was doubly glad she hadn’t slept with Cam or anyone else. How much harder would their struggle have been if she was pregnant? Her first two periods back on Earth had been bad enough. After twelve months in zero gravity, both times she’d bled and bled through cramps and nausea—but each time it had only been four or five really bad days. What if she’d had morning sickness for weeks instead or developed complications like gestational diabetes or high blood pressure?

  This late in her term, the pregnant woman would be having back problems and sore feet. A mother’s bones began to soften noticeably in the third trimester to help the baby’s passage through the pelvic bone. Trudging down the mountainside would be brutal for her, and yet a new generation was beyond price. This woman was exactly who they were fighting for, so Ruth forced a smile and said the words again like a promise.

  “It will protect the baby, too,” she said.

  * * * *

  She lied again that night, huddled together with the others near eighty-five hundred feet in a clump of backpacks, tools, and weapons. Fighter jets crisscrossed the night, mumbling and echoing. The grasshoppers sang and sang. She told Gaskell they’d been given the vaccine by a squad of paratroopers, which was close enough to what had really happened to confuse things if the rumor ever caught up to the wrong people. She told him they’d survived the plague year on a mountaintop above one of Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts, south of here, and Cam was more than convincing in discussing a few local landmarks.

  The worst deceit was how Ruth explained their goggles. Gaskell’s group had jackets and hoods and they’d torn up a few rags for face masks, mimicking their rescuers, and Ruth told Gaskell that her goggles and other gear were because of the bugs. There was nothing more these people could do to minimize their absorption of the plague. She didn’t want to give up her own equipment and she didn’t want to fight.

  * * * *

  In the morning they left each other. Gaskell promised to send a few guys to another peak to the southeast. Ruth wasn’t sure he’d do it but she was glad just to get away from them, not only because they scared her but because a crowd would be more easily noticed. A pilot might spot them or a satellite. It was good to hurry into the woods again with Cam and Newcombe. Still, in the first few hundred yards she glanced back a dozen times, a little afraid of herself. Maybe it would have been better if they’d all stuck together, but Gaskell’s people seemed equally relieved to split up now that they had some answers.

  We’re all so much smaller than we used to be, she thought.

  * * * *

  They worked their way north even though it brought them closer to the nearest launch-point for the fighter patrols. The jets seemed especially close on landing, groaning overhead, but the aircraft were thousands of feet up and miles away. That distance increased with every step down the mountain. Their plan was to curve eastward tom
orrow. Ahead, the map showed a pair of valleys that fell all the way down into Nevada.

  Ruth went into herself. In fact, her concentration wasn’t wholly unlike sleeping. She moved in a trance, keeping just enough of her mind on the surface to be aware of Cam’s jacket and the rough ground between them. Everything outside this tunnel she tried to ignore. Her thirst. Her feet. The sun was high in the forest and flies buzzed all around.

  “Sst!” Cam turned and hooked his arm, catching her. Ruth immediately knelt with him beneath the scraping branches of a juniper, trusting his decision to hide.

  Newcombe had ducked down across from them and continued to inch away on his knees and one hand, but he’d kept his rifle over his shoulder. He was still holding his binoculars, so Ruth nudged Cam, a silent question. Cam pointed out through the trees. There was smoke on another slope not far away to the north, nearly level with them. A fire? Ruth was too tired for fear. She only waited. Finally, Newcombe stood up and walked back to them, and she felt Cam relax when the other man rose from his position.

  “It’s a plane,” Newcombe said. “A fighter. It’s messed up pretty good, but from what I can see it’s an old Soviet MiG. I mean really old, twenty, thirty years, like something they would have mothballed back in the eighties. My guess is it shorted out when he prepped to land or ran out of fuel before he got to a tanker. I don’t know. We haven’t seen any fighting, right?”

  “Not close by,” Cam said.

  “He could have limped away from the Leadville base,” Newcombe agreed. “But why come this far when they’re on mountaintops all over the place? I think he just went down.”

  Ruth managed to talk. “Is he dead?”

  “He probably chuted out. Hiked up hours ago.” Newcombe knelt with them and shrugged out his pack. He found water and gave it to her. “You sound awful.”

  “I’m okay,” she rasped.

  “You didn’t see me waving right in your face,” Cam said. “Let’s stop and eat. Thirty minutes.”