Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Foshtomi helped as best she could for fifteen staggering yards, screaming with effort. Her cheek was cut and there was blood in her hair, too, but she kept her arm around Wesner’s back.

  Cam glimpsed other people to his left, partially eclipsed between smoke and daylight. Friends? Enemy troops? Ruth, he thought. Her name was like a small cool space inside his panic. He slowed down, intending to run in that direction.

  Foshtomi tripped him. Foshtomi stamped her boot down on his ankle and the three of them fell behind a bump of granite as the giants pounded the vehicles again. The sound was enormous. Cam jammed his hands over his ears without thinking, uselessly trying to block the hypersonic blows.

  The wetness on his palm reminded him of Wesner. He turned to apply pressure to the man’s wounds again, but Craig Wesner was dead, slack-faced with dirt in his eyes.

  Foshtomi shouted distantly. “Break!” she cried. “Okay?” She leaned close and Cam watched her mouth as she repeated it. “We run again in the next break!”

  “No!” Even his own voice had the faraway quality, and Cam gasped at a stabbing pain in his left side. A broken rib, maybe. “We need to find Ruth!”

  “We can’t help her!”

  Cam shook his head and twisted awkwardly to look up, keeping his body flat. He hadn’t seen or heard any planes, but the sky was dark with windswept banners of pulverized dirt and smoke.

  “The jeeps!” Foshtomi yelled. “They’re shelling the jeeps, not us! We have to—”

  But the giants danced away suddenly, spreading across the hillside. Half a dozen fireballs punched into the green earth in what appeared to be random lines, moving southward and down the mountain. Chasing someone? Cam knew from talking with the Rangers that modern warfare could take place over a range of tens of miles. Tanks and cannon were capable of remarkable precision at that distance. Their jeeps had been spotted by a forward observer or a plane or a satellite. Somewhere, Chinese artillerymen were lobbing shells at a target they couldn’t even see, simply obeying a series of coordinates.

  There was no way to fight back, other than to radio for help. Foshtomi was right that they needed to get out of the grid, but the Chinese seemed to be hitting the entire mountainside now, mopping up. If they ran, they could just as easily move into the next salvo as move to safety.

  Cam wasn’t leaving without Ruth. The thought steadied him and he risked another glance up the hill.

  It was the lead jeep that had overturned. One wheel had blown off and the axle was ripped away. There was only one body in the open, a man lying in a dark blotch of fluid. The second jeep, Ruth’s jeep, had crashed into the destroyed vehicle but looked abandoned. She’d gotten clear.

  She must have gotten clear, Cam thought. But the giants were coming back again, slower this time. The explosions picked their way along the slope, lifting brush and rock in powerful, bone-shuddering detonations. Cam pressed himself into the earth. Each breath was laced with smoke. Then the impacts were past and he was up and running.

  He fell. His balance was still off and he discovered that he needed to stay bent over his left side. The ground was littered with dirt clods and rock, sometimes in large hunks. Then the ground itself jumped. Cam was barely halfway on his feet again. He managed not to collapse onto his bad side. He rolled into a crater and found Estey and Goodrich hunched against the fresh, crumbling earth.

  Estey was trying to staunch a wound on Goodrich’s forearm and didn’t see him. Goodrich shouted but Cam only heard his warning tone, not the words. He’d gone less than thirty feet. It felt like another world, especially in the buzzing silence. The artillery had briefly concentrated here and the hill was a moonscape.

  Ruth should have been with them. She rode with Estey, Ballard, Mitchell, and Deborah in the second jeep, but they’d obviously scattered in all directions. Cam wondered what he was going to do if she was uphill of the vehicles.

  He kept looking for her across the wasted ground. He fought off Estey’s hand when Estey tried to drag him down. He’d spotted another human shape in the dark, drifting clouds, one running man followed by another. The giants were gone. The sun split through the dust and Cam scrambled out of the crater, only to throw himself down again and claw for his pistol. He’d lost his carbine with the jeep, but Estey still had his weapon and Cam glanced back and screamed, “Look out! Estey!”

  There were at least ten human shapes dodging through the haze, far more than the missing part of his group. Their yelling was muffled and strange. They were also the wrong color. Cam’s squad wore olive drab, whereas these people dressed in tan camouflage and seemed to be misshapen. Uneven brown rags hung from their heads and arms, and Cam did not recognize their long rifles or submachine guns.

  He took aim but didn’t fire as someone else stood up in another crater in front of him. Deborah. Her blond mane was filthy, but still unique. Cam lifted himself to run to her, sick with fear. He was certain that he would see her gunned down. Then she waved to the approaching troops, and Cam struggled to discern the men’s voices.

  “U.S. Marines! U.S. Marines!”

  He lowered his pistol and ran to the crater.

  * * * *

  Ruth embraced him and hurt his ribs and he laughed, breathing in the good, complex smell of unwashed girl. She was alive. She’d escaped with scrapes and bruises and one peppered rash of shrapnel on her hip, where she would need surgery not just to remove the flecks of metal but also the fabric from her shredded uniform, which had been imbedded into her wounds.

  Others hadn’t been so lucky. Park and Wesner were dead and Somerset was critically wounded in the belly and face. Hale, also from the lead jeep, had broken his collarbone and both legs when the vehicle went over. It was only a bizarre miracle that Goodrich was only cut on his arm.

  Cam absorbed most of this information through the aching cotton that blocked his ears, but they were all yelling. Most of them had difficulty hearing and everyone was wild with adrenaline. They knew the artillery could start again any time.

  “My rock,” Ruth said. “I lost my rock!”

  She must have known it was irrational—even crazy—but she pawed at her clothes anyway, staring helplessly across the torn hillside.

  “Shh,” Cam said. “Shh, Ruth.”

  Their first decision was to move everyone who could move except Mitchell and Foshtomi, who volunteered to stay with Somerset. “We’re not leaving him,” Foshtomi said, and the Marine captain nodded and gave them his radio.

  The scout/snipers belonged to a long-range SR patrol sent to look for defensible ground above Interstate 70, although their mission changed when Park’s squad drove into their sector. They’d moved to cover the Rangers if possible. Two of their men had been hurt in the shelling, too, because they’d run into the killing field instead of turning away. Cam marveled at their courage and discipline.

  Their strength was crucial to evacuating Ruth, her gear, and the battered Rangers. Estey was nominally in command of the squad now, despite Deborah’s rank, yet it was Deborah who walked back to the second jeep with Goodrich and Cam to be sure the Marines recovered everything Ruth needed.

  They might have driven away—they might have used the jeep to carry Somerset—except the front axle was broken and the radiator was torn. Some of the paperwork was confetti and the sample case had four ragged holes blown through it that were leaking blood, but Deborah insisted on wrapping everything up just the same. Then she sagged and let a Marine get his arm around her. She was bleeding herself from a nasty laceration up her back.

  Ruth wept openly. Before they walked away, Cam squeezed Foshtomi’s hand and the young woman nodded tersely. She had already taken Park and Wesner’s tags. She planned to bury her friends in one of the craters, and Cam suspected that within a day at most she would bury Somerset as well.

  Three men carried Hale on a short, broad stretcher they’d fashioned from a blanket and two rifles. Cam and Goodrich lugged the AFM. Other men had dumped precious rations and clothing fro
m their packs to make room for the blood samples and paperwork. Ruth limped by herself, her teeth gritting in her pale face. They’d covered less than a quarter-mile when a pair of F-22 Raptors soared out of the northeast, ripping down into the valleys far below to hit the Chinese artillery.

  * * * *

  His right ear improved. His left did not, and the uneven sound of the people around him continued to affect his balance. Another fighter rushed overhead and Cam was unable to place it until he saw the others looking east. It scared him.

  They managed to keep going for thirty minutes before Ruth and one of the Marines needed to rest. Cam didn’t think they’d reach the secured area before dark, no matter that it was still mid-morning. Too many of them were hurt. They were carrying too much. But within a few hours, they were met by a pair of trucks.

  Late that afternoon they rode in past line after line of earthworks and razor wire.

  These mountainsides faced west and hadn’t burned in the nuclear strike. In the following weeks, however, the land had been reduced to sterile mud slopes. Defensive barriers ringed the mountains as far as Cam could see, many of them studded with gun emplacements and vehicles and wreckage. Enemy planes and artillery had pounded the hill repeatedly. Nearly as much damage had been done by thousands of American feet and the weight of their trucks, tanks, and bulldozers.

  The rutted earth stank of fire and rot, and the smell thickened as they drove into the series of berms. There were dirty people everywhere, some of them eating, some of them digging. They might have been living in any preindustrial age. It was the radar dishes and tanks that looked out of place.

  At last the trucks drove into a prefab warehouse, hiding from the sky. Somehow Ruth had fallen asleep. Cam tried to protect her from the jostle of Rangers and Marines as everyone stood up. No good. Her eyes widened with fear. Then she saw him and smiled wanly. Cam set his hand on her knee. Meanwhile, a medical team quickly unloaded Kevin Hale, who was feverish with trauma.

  “Clear a hole, clear a hole,” a man said, pushing through the other medics and officers. Something in the man’s lean build was familiar and Cam tipped his head to stare through the many soldiers, dazed with exhaustion.

  It was Major Hernandez.

  22

  Ruth struggled up from the slat bench in back of the truck and forced herself to walk on her stiff, throbbing hip. “Watch out,” she said. “Please.”

  Sergeant Estey had moved to the rear of the vehicle with the scout/sniper captain, speaking urgently to the uniforms gathered below. “I left three men in the field, sir,” Estey said, repeating the most important part of his report, which he’d called in hours ago.

  “We’re still trying to get a chopper,” one of the officers replied, extending his hand to help Estey down.

  “Please!” Ruth craned her neck to see.

  Then the scout/sniper captain stepped off the back of the truck. Estey and Goodrich followed. The warehouse echoed with voices and movement. Somewhere a door banged and a distant set of artillery fired several rounds, and Ruth heard none of it.

  She knelt clumsily in the truck to bring herself level with Frank Hernandez. A spasm went through the gashed muscles in her hip, but it was the surge of emotions that nearly made her fall, remorse and joy and a powerful sense of déjà vu. She stammered, “Huh, how did you—”

  “Hello, Doctor Goldman,” he said in his smooth way.

  Ruth had first met Hernandez from the back of an ambulance in Leadville, faint from the pain of a newly broken arm and the body-wide shock of returning to Earth’s gravity. For a brief time they had been allies. She respected him more than he might have believed, even after she betrayed him. He was a good man, but too loyal, supporting the Leadville government without question. They’d last seen each other in the lab in Sacramento, at gunpoint. Newcombe’s squad had killed one of Hernandez’s Marines before leaving him and three others immobilized deep within the invisible sea of nanotech, tied with duct tape, their radio cords severed, with less than two hours of air inside their containment suits.

  Ruth and the other traitors had not intended for him to smother, and the death of his Marine was a mistake. They told Leadville forces where to find Hernandez, using him as a decoy as the fight began for possession of the vaccine...and Ruth had always hoped that he made it out, although later she assumed that if he was rescued, he must have perished in the U.S. capital when the bomb went off.

  It was like finding Deborah. It was like finding family. This was the second time she’d rediscovered someone she thought was dead—until she realized that to some extent she’d been right. His appearance was very different. The man she’d known had been as neat as the U.S. Military Code, healthy and trim. He was skinny now, and the brown hue of his skin was tinged by an ugly gray pallor. The mustache he’d worn was a full beard and it concealed burns that reached up his left cheek like dribbles of pink wax, though he wore his field cap low as if to hide his scars.

  Blinding tears filled Ruth’s eyes and she didn’t even try to hold her feelings back, allowing the droplets to fall into the narrow space between herself and Hernandez. “You.” She hesitated, then lightly set her fingertips on his uniform. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  He smiled. He could have responded in so many other ways, but perhaps he felt the same welcome sense of familiarity. He could have blamed her for everything and Ruth would not have disagreed. What if he’d taken the vaccine back to Leadville? What if the president’s council had been able to deal with the Russians from a position of absolute strength, rather than scrambling to put down the rebellion in the United States at the same time they were negotiating overseas? And yet his smile was genuine. It touched his dark eyes and softened his posture, too.

  It felt like forgiveness, so Ruth was surprised when Hernandez stepped back and let another soldier lift her down from the truck. Was she wrong? No. His gaze flicked away from her with something like embarrassment.

  Hernandez wasn’t strong enough to hold her weight. The burns. His bad color. He had radiation poisoning, but he swiftly covered the moment by looking past her at Cam and Deborah.

  He didn’t seem to recognize Deborah—they’d barely known each other—but Deborah moved protectively to Ruth’s side while Cam crouched at the back of the truck with his left arm tucked against his ribs. One of the Marines helped Cam down and Hernandez said, “Hey, hermano.”

  Brother. The two men had their Latino heritage in common, when so many of the other survivors were white, which had formed an additional bond between them.

  “Mucho gusto en verte,” Cam said.

  Ruth didn’t know what that meant. She was hardly listening anyway. She had touched Hernandez with such care, thinking her own tentativeness was for other reasons, although it was obvious once she realized how his clothes hung on him.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.

  He was dying.

  “Yes. You, too.” Hernandez surveyed her tears before he smiled again. “Let’s get you patched up. You can rest. Then we need to talk.”

  “I want blood samples from everyone here,” Ruth said.

  “You can start that later, okay?”

  “You do it,” Deborah told him. “Sir. You do it while we’re with the doctors. Otherwise there might not be time.”

  Hernandez said, “You’re the astronaut. Reece.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He rubbed at the gray hollows under his eyes and shook his head. “Grand Lake didn’t say who was coming. A tech with an escort. If I’d known, I would have moved more people to try to run off the Chinese, but they’ve got us outnumbered almost everywhere.” He said, “I’m sorry about your friends.”

  Ruth nodded. While they were safe, Somerset lay bleeding out on the mountainside, but Grand Lake had kept quiet about their mission because there was such a concentration of electronic surveillance focused on the Rockies. It would have taken just one slip. One clue. If the Russians or the Chinese learned she was
on the move, the enemy might have redirected their entire force to kill or capture her.

  “The people we left behind,” she said. “Can you get them?”

  “I sent another truck hours ago. We don’t know if they’ll be able to drive through a few places, but if the terrain’s too hard they’ll hike the rest of the way to your guys.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll get some teams on the blood samples. Can you tell me what we’re looking for?”

  “Nanotech. I—”

  “I know that. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Hernandez let them see some of the warrior inside the gentleman, challenging her with a stare. “But we already have the vaccine, and you weren’t driving around out there because you didn’t rate a helicopter—”

  Ruth interrupted, too. “I don’t need more than a drop from each man. Needle pricks are fine. Just make sure you isolate each one and make sure you tag them with the man’s unit, where he is now, and where he was before the bombing.”

  “Before the bombing,” Hernandez said.

  “Yes.” Ruth cleared her throat. She didn’t want to hurt him any more, but he deserved the truth. “Leadville was testing new technology on its own people,” she said.

  * * * *

  They were led to a crowded tent and her sense of déjà vu continued. She almost laughed, but that would have been crazy. Too many times she’d found herself surrounded by medical staff, like a damaged race car that had to return to the track. She hoped she’d never need this sort of attention again, and yet more blood was all she saw in her future. Kill or be killed. What else would end the fighting? Surrender? She didn’t know if the enemy would even allow that.

  A man helped her undress and then gingerly scrubbed at the smoke-blackened earth and blood on her hip. Ruth wore only her T-shirt and socks and wasn’t embarrassed except for the xylophone of ribs that showed when she lay down on her good side and her shirt rode up. Nearby, Deborah was topless, stripped to her undies as they assessed the wounds on her back—and even after so long on minimum rations, Deborah looked good. Really good. She was long and smooth-skinned with small, perfect breasts.