Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Earth was a very late planet in the life span of this galaxy, flung deep into its spiral arms. If there was a God, maybe he’d used the farthest, most forgotten worlds of his creation for experiments, knowing that most of them would be half-perfect mistakes. What could He hope to learn? The limits of their imagination and strength?

  Her little stone, etched with crosses, had become more than a reminder. It was a talisman. It had power. She could sense it.

  The stone protected her.

  “What do you think?” Cam asked.

  Newcombe was peering north through his binoculars. Ruth turned and squinted into the desert herself. The town of Doyle was a squat collection of buildings like boxes and square signs elevated on long metal poles. Mobil. Carl’s Jr. Beyond it, brown hills and ridges rolled upward into the dazzling light.

  Newcombe shrugged and traded Ruth the binoculars for a plastic bottle of mineral water. She swung her gaze away from town to the few structures of the airfield, feeling both wary and hopeful. She couldn’t deny that she was also pleased. The men were beginning to trust her as much as they relied on each other, and she’d earned it.

  Her transformation was complete. Ruth had always been tough but now she was a warrior in every aspect, lean and hard and too sensitive all at the same time. To say that she was twitchy would not be incorrect. And yet the twitch was a cool, distant feeling, insulated by experience.

  She let her eyes drift over the airfield’s fences and high buildings. “Looks good,” she said.

  Still they waited, drinking more. Newcombe passed around some candy for quick energy and dug out the radio, too. He didn’t speak. He only clicked at his send button a few times, transmitting three short ticks of squelch. It meant I’m here but there was no reply, only empty white noise.

  They’d established direct contact with the rebel forces twice more, once for nearly a full minute with a fighter that jettisoned an automated relay. Both times Newcombe had talked nonstop, accepting the chance of being triangulated or overheard, using as much slang as possible in case the enemy was recording him. He had never been explicit, though, and the pilots had also hedged their language. No one ever came right out and said the Doyle airfield or June 11th, before noon.

  “Okay,” Newcombe said. “You know your marks.”

  Cam nodded. “Ten minutes.”

  “Thirty,” Ruth said.

  Newcombe touched her shoulder and then Cam’s before he moved out, intending to reconnoiter wide around the airfield. They were badly hamstrung by the short range of their equipment, and the relay had vanished in the dust. They just didn’t know what to expect. U.S. soldiers couldn’t wait below the barrier, unless a pilot had landed in a containment suit with a stack of air tanks. That seemed unlikely. They’d had the airfield in sight for a day and a half now with no sign of activity, but there were any number of ways the Russians could stop them.

  Because they had the vaccine, the enemy might have left men at every airport within a hundred miles. Or they could have simply dropped motion detectors or antipersonnel mines. An effort that widespread would have used a lot of fuel and gear, of course. It was a good bet that the invaders hadn’t done it. The stakes weren’t quite so high for them.

  The same couldn’t be said for the United States, because the

  U.S. had yet to gain possession of the vaccine. The two fighters they’d spoken with weren’t the only ones Newcombe identified as their own. Four days ago, a trio of F/A-18 Super Hornets had slashed into the mountains. Yesterday, a lone bomber came limping out of the southwest before two MiGs overtook the wounded aircraft and gunned it down.

  Their side was trying to cover them and misdirect the enemy. They’d been surprised to find an ongoing exchange between a weak transmission from a man who said he was Newcombe and a stronger signal urging him toward a pickup in Carson City. The weaker transmissions were still more powerful than their own, and so more easily overheard, and Carson City lay sixty miles away from Doyle in the direction they would have gone if they’d chosen to head south instead of north. It was a neat trick, and Ruth appreciated the help—but meanwhile other people were sacrificing their lives.

  Larger conflicts were taking place in Yosemite and farther south. The Russians had been airlifting the rest of their people into California, which was good and bad. It meant the enemy was preoccupied with shielding their planes from American and Canadian interceptors, but they were also growing stronger and better established.

  The U.S. was crippled in meeting the enemy. A large part of the nation’s air force had disappeared with Leadville—and for hundreds of miles, the surviving planes were only so much aluminum, plastic, and rubber. The EMP had burned out electronics even below the barrier, where U.S. forces might have scavenged new parts and computers.

  Estimates on the radio said the Russians had already landed tens of thousands of troops and civilians. More were on the way. In fact, their numbers were surging. There were more and more planes every day, because the Russians had carried the vaccine overseas. The Russians had freed every available pilot and engineer to scavenge below the barrier, lifting aircraft out of the Middle East and their homeland.

  Ruth was certain her tiny group couldn’t stay ahead of the invaders much longer. The Russians would spread out if only to improve their defenses and food stocks. They would find her.

  She still kept her grenade with the data index and slept with both under her head.

  She also worried about her arm and whether it was healing correctly. How would they know when to cut off the worn, stinking cast? The men could fashion a splint easily enough, but their opinions differed on when she would be ready to lose the fiberglass sheath. She was honest. She explained that the doctors in Leadville had been concerned about her bone density and said the break might be a long time knitting together. It still hurt, which couldn’t be a good sign.

  “How’s he doing?” Ruth whispered. Cam didn’t answer. Her job was to continue to guard behind them, but it took all of her self-discipline not to turn and watch Newcombe. That was Cam’s responsibility, studying the area between them and the airfield in case Newcombe flushed any threat. The ground was deceptive. The desert blended into a single red expanse, but the flats weren’t flat, as they’d learned too well. The land rolled with hidden pockets and gullies and rock.

  Ruth said, “Hey, are you listening?”

  “He’s fine.”

  The sun flashed across her goggles as she leaned too far from the boulder, glancing sideways, but Cam didn’t look at her. Empty static on the radio. Warm sweat down her ribs.

  You’re angry with me, she thought.

  Sleeping side by side now carried an electric charge, and more than once she’d been restless despite her exhaustion. Their situation was still the all-time worst for romance, caked in dirt, strung out on adrenaline, in danger of bugs and enemy troops. The friction between the two of them was maddening.

  They both found excuses to get away from Newcombe. Scavenging for food was a good one, or calling a short rest as Newcombe scouted ahead. There had been more kissing and careful hands. Ruth enjoyed pressing her body against Cam’s despite all their bulky gear. At night she’d considered more. They could touch each other, at least. Was it worth risking the machine plague? No. But she knew their clothes only gave them the slightest protection. She thought about it incessantly. If I push down my pants and he takes off his glove ...Two nights ago, when Cam was asleep, she’d rubbed her fingers in her crotch to no satisfaction, her blunt glove against her jeans.

  “Remember our signal,” Cam said, handing her the binoculars.

  “Be safe,” she answered.

  He didn’t seem to want more. He dropped his pack beside Newcombe’s and quickly loped away, circling out to the left to form a pincher with the other man.

  Ruth trapped her peppermint against the back of her teeth and set her good hand against the inside of her hip, centering herself, touching her frayed pants and the round stone
in her pocket. She should have jumped him. That was what she would have done in her old life, take the opportunity, have some fun. They could both be dead in minutes.

  Cam faded into the terrain, leaving only dust. The horizon shimmered in the heat. Ruth kept her head on a swivel, trying to cover a full three hundred and sixty degrees now that she was the last one in hiding, and yet she caught herself looking after Cam more often than not. She smiled grimly.

  You’re not in love with him, she thought.

  * * * *

  The sky shook before her thirty minutes were up. Jet fighters lanced out of the northeast in three arrowheads, barely off the ground. One group was different than the other two. She’d come to recognize the twin vertical tails of F-35s, but the third group consisted of a sharp-nosed model she’d never seen before, with lean, swept wings. It didn’t matter. Ruth felt her heart leap with elation—and a new concern.

  The planes weren’t slowing. They ripped past and cut into the Sierras, transmitting in bursts: “Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. Hotel Yankee, Bravo Quebec. George, respond. This is Flicker Six.”

  Ruth gawked at the thundering sky. She thought wildly of leaping onto a rock and screaming for Cam and Newcombe, maybe firing her pistol, but there was still no guarantee that the three of them were alone out here. She couldn’t chance giving them away. The decision was hers, and the simple code matched what Newcombe had told her.

  “This is Goldman, confirm, confirm,” Ruth told the radio. She bent to take the men’s packs with her own. Then the desert shook again. The mountains behind her rattled with sound and motion, enveloped in torn cyclones of dark lines and fire—jets and missiles.

  Somehow the same voice acknowledged her, even though the fighters were engaged. “Roger, George, your retrieval is in fifteen. Repeat, your retrieval is in fifteen.” The rebels had come in force. There was no way to hide a plane over the basins of Nevada, so they were using themselves as a battering ram, clearing space between the enemy and the Doyle runways.

  Ruth hiked with her pistol out and the radio hissing softly beneath the roar of the jets and a distant explosion—a smoke trail down into the mountainside. Somehow she turned her back on the spectacle and kept moving.

  There was a rifleman in the desert. Oh please, no, she prayed even as she freed her gun hand.

  It was Newcombe. “What are you doing!” he shouted, glancing away from her to the mountains. Ruth did the same. The air war was fast and terrifying and had visibly separated into two conflicts now, bright specks and smoke.

  “Where is Cam?” she asked, panting. “Plane for us. Twelve minutes. We need to get to the airfield.”

  Newcombe took the radio from her but simply walked away from his pack and Cam’s. “We can’t mess with this stuff. You have the nanotech, right?”

  “I’m not leaving him!”

  “Do you have the nanotech?” Newcombe said. “He’ll see us down there. Come on. Goddammit, come on. There’s no point running around looking for him. We could miss each other and miss the plane!”

  Ruth nodded, but the irrational feeling stayed with her as they ran. She hadn’t understood how deeply she was attached. She had been fooling herself pretending that her relationship with Cam was just physical, just circumstance, just anything. She would have paired herself with Newcombe if it was really only about a warm body.

  Too soon another plane darted out of the heat, smaller, slower. The fighters had come in very low, but this one kept within a few feet of the terrain, swerving and diving like an old barnstormer. The buzz of its engine was very different than the high scream of the jets. It was a stubby little Cessna.

  Newcombe banged against a chain-link fence and cursed, rocking the wire violently. “Damn it!” They were a hundred yards from the airfield with no way through. He could have climbed it with no problem, but she had her arm.

  Ruth glanced out into the rocks and bare earth again. What if Cam ran all the way back to our hiding place for me? she worried. She wanted to shout. Where are you?

  Newcombe led her forty yards to a gate. He put his rifle barrel against the lock and fired. They hustled between two long aluminum hangars as the Cessna droned into the open space ahead, but suddenly the plane lifted away.

  “Wait, wait, we’re here!” Newcombe yelled into the radio. Then they got past the hangars and saw the runways were drifted over with sand. The desert had long since reclaimed this field exactly as it had buried the highways. The plane swung back again in a loop and Ruth glimpsed black skids against its belly. Of course. They knew what to expect from satellite photos. Their first pass had only been to get a closer look.

  “Stay back,” Newcombe told her, maybe thinking of fire and shrapnel if it crashed.

  The white Cessna kicked up sand as it touched down, bouncing. Newcombe waved and yelled as the plane trundled back around for takeoff, but he was looking past her shoulder. Ruth turned to see Cam behind them. She touched her hand to her chest as if to hold the warm feeling there.

  “I told you,” Newcombe said. “Move!”

  She resisted. She wanted to help Cam, but he waved her away so she turned and ran. The door of the plane was open. Ruth tried to climb aboard with Newcombe’s help. A man leaned out and grabbed her jacket.

  Ruth looked up. “Thanks—”

  There was something wrong with his face. A bandage. He was not wearing a containment suit or even a gas mask. She glanced at the cockpit. In the pilot’s seat was another man with the same perfect wound. No. The first man wore a square of white gauze over his right eye, while the second had a square taped over his left. Otherwise they seemed unhurt and even clean. New uniforms. Both of them held submachine guns.

  Ruth began to push back against Newcombe, but he was stronger and the other man yelled, “Let’s go, let’s go!”

  “Come on, Ruth!” Newcombe shouted.

  She leaned inside despite her instincts. Maybe it was okay. The man in the cockpit had lowered his gun, and the first guy reached down to help Newcombe and Cam, too. No one else was aboard. The less weight, the longer their range. In fact, the thin carpet was spotted with holes where rows of seats had been torn out.

  Ruth took one of the few that remained, and Cam fell heavily beside her. Newcombe dropped into a seat behind them. Then the other man bolted the door. “Strap in,” he said as he ducked into the cockpit.

  The pilot was already accelerating. The plane slammed against the dunes and a familiar cold weight filled Ruth’s chest like a ball of snakes, choking her. She’d forgotten. Her long months in the space station had left her uneasy with tight places. The rattling cabin felt like a deathtrap. Then they heaved into the air.

  “What happened to their eyes?” she asked Cam, mostly to be close to him. The pilots’ wounds were too symmetrical, which made her wonder if they were self-inflicted. Why?

  Cam only shook his head, still gathering himself. Then he turned to Newcombe and indicated his face.

  “Nukes,” the soldier said quietly. “They’re afraid of more nukes. The flash. If they only lose one eye, they can still land the plane.”

  Lord God, Ruth thought, fighting her claustrophobia. She leaned her goggles against the window as if to escape, but the air beyond the scratched Plexiglas was a tangle of far-off jets and burning mountain peaks.

  19

  Cam’s seat belt cut into his hips as the plane jerked and bumped. The pilots had shoulder restraints. The rest of them did not and the flight was like a roller coaster, tipping and diving. Again and again his seat snapped away from him, even with the belt cinched down.

  Hills and rock whipped past the windows. A city. Once they paralleled a line of utility wires for a few seconds, dozens of poles stuttering by. It was a disappointment. They’d suffered so badly to get here and they still weren’t safe, although they were free of the plague. The Cessna 172 was not a pressurized aircraft, but the cabin windows and the cockpit glass had been sealed with silicon caulk, as had the instrument and control pass
-throughs, the hatches, and one of the two doors. There was a vacuum pump bolted to the floor, exhausting to the outside. It was a crude fix, but it worked. The pilot had leveled out for two minutes while the copilot applied a fast-setting caulk to the inside of the remaining door. Then they’d lowered the air density within the plane to the equivalent of eleven thousand feet.

  “We’re okay!” the copilot called back, reading from a gauge strapped to his wrist.

  Cam tore off his goggles and mask, scrubbing his bare hands against his beard, nose, and ears in a frenzy of relief. Ruth removed her gear more woodenly and he saw that her face was drained white.

  “Look at me,” Cam said, leaning close to be heard over the engine noise. Then they tumbled left and banged their heads together. “Don’t look at the windows, look at me.”

  She nodded but didn’t comply. Beneath her matted brown curls, her eyes were wide and dull, as if she was seeing something else. Cam knew the feeling. They were incredibly low. One mistake could fly them into a building or a hillside, and the back of his neck crawled with nervous strain. Would they know if missiles were closing in?

  “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was shaky and she clenched his hand in her own, bare skin on skin.

  “Where are we headed?” Newcombe yelled toward the front. Cam felt a pang of worry for his friend. Newcombe didn’t have anyone to comfort, and Cam would have grabbed his arm or his shoulder if Newcombe were in the same row.

  “Colorado,” the pilot shouted.

  “What? Isn’t that where the nuke hit?”

  “Leadville, yeah.” The plane veered left again and then jack-hammered up and to the right. “We’re out of Grand Lake, about a hundred miles north of there,” the pilot shouted. “The fallout didn’t reach us.”