Plague War

by Jeff Carlson

  Ruth saw Cam glancing at Deborah’s figure and suddenly he caught her looking, too. Ruth blushed. The medical staff didn’t notice the exchange. They must have seen thousands of patients come and go. As a doctor herself, Deborah also seemed aloof. Ruth thought that was a shame, the human body reduced to a vehicle or a tool. She was glad to be a woman stealing glances with a man. She worried for him. Cam rubbed his left ear again and again, reaching across his scarred chest with his right hand. Estey had said he thought Cam’s ribs were only bruised, but it obviously hurt Cam too much to lift his other arm and he said he was still deaf on that side.

  Her surgeon arrived, a sick man with a face like wet ash. The radiation. He coughed and coughed inside his mask, holding his breath to steady his hands for a few moments at a time. Ruth would have asked for someone else, except that a nurse leaned down and whispered, “Colonel Hanson is the best.”

  He was even worse off than Hernandez, and yet he’d stayed on duty. Ruth wondered how many others were already buried or on their deathbeds. She knew she could never stop going until she was killed herself.

  He shot her hip full of novocaine, a dental anesthesia. Nothing more. They were down to the very last of their supplies and every day there were more wounded. Ruth shrieked at the grinding pressure against her pelvic bone as he dug out the shrapnel, but it was Cam’s hand wrapped tightly in her own that she remembered later.

  * * * *

  Hernandez sought them out again after dark. Ruth had forced herself to eat a cup of broth despite her nausea. She lay on a cot with her eyes half closed, hovering somewhere between her pain and the dim, ever-changing light.

  They had been taken to a different tent, one that was longer, colder, and more crowded. The only illumination was a single lantern at the far end. Nurses periodically walked through the light, and dozens of patients shifted on the beds and on the floor, drawing long black shadows across the tent.

  Cam and Deborah made bookends on either side of Ruth, both of them stiff with their own wounds. The two women shared the bed, spooning for warmth. Deborah lay on the outside to protect the stitches in her back. Cam sat against the thin metal frame of the cot with his shoulders nearly touching Ruth’s feet, asleep with his head on his knees. Ruth would have asked them to switch places if she weren’t afraid of offending Deborah, but Deborah couldn’t sit against the bed. Putting her on the floor would have been inexcusable and Ruth had already been cruel enough to Cam, pushing him away, drawing him in.

  She’d never intended to be a tease. She wanted to cement their relationship even if it was nothing more than a quick fuck. When had there ever been time? She supposed the Rangers would have averted their eyes if she and Cam bundled together in a sleeping bag, but she would have felt so vulnerable. Worse, someone had stolen the box of condoms from her pack while she was in the medical tents in Grand Lake.

  Ruth wondered what Cam and Allison had done together. Had they limited themselves to oral sex and hands or had they engaged in full intercourse? Ruth wanted to be better. She wanted him to want her more than the younger woman, and she thought of Ari and the fun little kinky things they’d played at, stroking each other, licking and kissing. The memories made her uncomfortably aware of Deborah sleeping against her back. She pressed her thighs together as snugly as the stitches in her hip would allow, trying to contain the warmth there.

  She thought she’d been more hesitant with Cam than she might have been with anyone else because he’d seen her at her worst, but there was always something else holding her back. It would be frivolous. It would be wrong. She didn’t feel like she deserved the relief, much less any pleasure, when it was her mistakes that had led to the war and killed a tremendous number of people across the planet.

  Ruth bit her lip and watched the man in the next cot, an Army trooper with gashes on his chin and nose. She’d seen a nurse changing bandages along his collarbone, too, before replacing his blankets. His skin was yellow-gray in the dark, but his breathing was steady and Ruth tried to wish as much of her own strength into him as he needed.

  Hernandez came slowly through the gloom, stopping to murmur with someone a few rows over from her. He stopped again before he reached her cot, peering down at the three of them.

  “I’m awake,” Ruth said.

  Hernandez nodded. He had a plastic canteen with him and held it out. Ruth felt the bottle’s heat even before she touched it. “Soup,” he said.

  “Thank you, General.”

  He didn’t react to what she’d meant as a compliment. He glanced at Cam again, who was still sleeping, and then to the trooper on the next cot. He seemed as reverent as a man in church. He was definitely not impressed himself. More than anything, Hernandez was unwilling to disturb their rest, and Ruth knew very well the crushing sense of connection that she saw in everything he did.

  Sergeant Estey had also checked in with her an hour ago. Ruth appreciated the update, even though Estey was all business. The two of them had never had any reason for small talk and Ruth knew that attitude to be an excellent coping mechanism. Still, she’d tried to soften him. She wanted to be more than a job to Estey. She’d asked him to give her best to Hale and Goodrich, but he only nodded and moved on to other useful data.

  Frank Hernandez was now a one-star general. He had become third-in-command of the central Colorado army, in part because there was no one else left, but also because he’d succeeded when the situation demanded it. Hernandez had been instrumental in reorganizing the area’s ground forces in time to meet the enemy. Many of the Guard and Reserve officers who technically outranked him had stepped aside.

  It was his decisions that won or lost many of the battles along Highways 50 and 133. Whether an infantry company was in the right place or an artillery unit had the tools to maintain its guns, Hernandez was the key in every equation. His ability to anticipate the terrain and the capacities of his own people made every difference to hundreds of thousands of lives.

  He was inextricably tied to them. Ruth thought it was this sense of obligation that had really brought him to the front line. Hernandez wasn’t supposed to be here. Sylvan Mountain had experienced a huge increase in attacks as the Chinese pressed north, spearing toward I-70. Local U.S. command was hidden deep in the Aspen Valley in a larger, more secure base. Hernandez had risked his life to drive across. He’d insisted on meeting the survivors of the Ranger squad, but he couldn’t have been sure that Ruth was among them. It was an excuse. He needed to see the troops he’d known only as numbers on his maps, and she respected him for it.

  He spoke in a whisper. “We’ve started taking your blood samples right here in the tents.”

  Ruth nodded. Good. This is where the bulk of their medical staff could be found, along with the few rosters and charts they’d kept despite being overwhelmed.

  “What else do you need?” he said. “We’re refrigerating the needle pricks, but I don’t know if we’re capable of building a clean room for you.”

  “Don’t waste the refrigerator space. Room temperature is fine, and any work space is great. It doesn’t have to be much. I’ve been getting a lot of my work done from the back of a jeep.”

  “Then I’d like to move you tomorrow. Their planes are hitting us everywhere, but this base gets too much artillery. I’d rather have you somewhere farther back.”

  “Okay. Thank you.” Ruth wasn’t going to pretend to be so brave that she didn’t want protection.

  He looked for her eyes again in the shadows. Then he set his hand on the cot near her face. The gesture was almost aggressive, she realized, a display of his ability to corner and control her. “What am I up against?” he asked.

  “General—”

  “I need to know, Ruth.”

  She winced. Hernandez had never used her first name before and the informality was at odds with his little show of strength. He was trapped. He had to help her and yet he remained suspicious, either because of her treason in Sacramento or because of the staggering power of nanotech
. Probably it was both. Ruth might as well have been a witch from the way that Hernandez treated her, with a mix of reverence and mistrust. He understood men and guns. She represented a different threat.

  “I don’t have an answer for you,” Ruth said. “I swear. But I don’t think the ghost is a weapon. I think Leadville was experimenting with new vaccine types.”

  “That’s the only reason you’re here?”

  “Of course!” She forgot to keep her voice down and Deborah stirred against her, drowsy and soft. Cam was already awake. His eyes had turned to study Hernandez, and Ruth said, “What are you really trying to say?”

  “We’ve been through your notebooks.”

  “A lot of that is speculative.” She sounded defensive even to herself.

  “I need to know about the saturation trigger.”

  Ruth stared at him, her mind racing. What guesses had his people made from her numbers and shorthand? It seemed unlikely that Hernandez had anyone trained in nanotechnology. Had he simply asked combat engineers or computer techs to figure out her notes as best they could? Based on its helix shape, Ruth had theorized that the ghost might be designed to coalesce into larger structures after crossing some threshold of density in a population...but that idea was still nothing more than an idea.

  Firmly, she said, “If you read everything, you know I had serious questions about that line of thinking. And I gave it up days ago.”

  “That’s not what my people tell me.”

  “Then they’re wrong.”

  Cam said, “What is he talking about?”

  “Doctor Goldman has considered a way of stopping the Chinese army that would also kill everyone in these mountains,” Hernandez said. “Some kind of critical mass.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Cam said, taking the argument upon himself.

  “I believe Grand Lake would do anything to win,” Hernandez said, and Ruth finally grasped the sheer depth of the changes he’d been through. He was the one who’d lost in Sacramento. He was the one who’d watched Leadville vaporized. Hernandez was testing her. If she failed his questions, if he truly believed that Grand Lake intended to destroy him, the American civil war might erupt again when they could least afford it. Even joined together, the forces in Colorado were barely holding a line against the Chinese.

  “You think we came all this way just to die?” Ruth asked with biting sarcasm. “Like we thought a suicide mission was our best choice?”

  “I know you have a lot of guilt.” He cut through her scorn as easily as that. “Your friends wouldn’t have to know what you were doing,” Hernandez said, and he was right.

  He turned her contempt into self-doubt and she immediately reached for Cam. “It’s not true,” she said.

  “I know.” Cam covered her hand with his own.

  Behind her, Deborah lifted herself on one elbow to gaze at Hernandez. She laid her other hand on Ruth’s waist. It was an affectionate moment and Ruth would never forget their loyalty to her. She was grateful for it, because she still had one secret.

  “I came to help you,” she told Hernandez. Her voice was tight with tears. “I came to help everyone,” she said, and slowly Hernandez began to nod in the darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to be sure.”

  “You...But we didn’t . ..”

  “I’m sorry.” His hand rose uncertainly, as if to find a place on her and join the small chain that connected her to Cam and Deborah. Ruth wished he would. Instead, Hernandez lowered his arm to his side. “My first responsibility is to the people here,” he said. “And your notes are terrifying.”

  “Yes.”

  They were quiet for an instant, listening to the restless sounds in tent—the rustle of wounded soldiers who were alone and cold despite sharing this nightmare.

  “You shouldn’t get in her way,” Deborah said. “Ruth is the best chance we’ve got.”

  “We’ll see.” Hernandez stood up.

  Ruth reached after him. “Wait. Please.”

  “There’s too much to do.”

  “I don’t want you to leave like this,” she said honestly. “Please. Just a few minutes.”

  “All right.” Hernandez sat again.

  Ruth struggled to find something pleasant to say. “Do you want some of the soup?” she asked.

  “No. It’s for you.”

  But there were too many important things to know and never enough time. “We thought you were in Leadville when the bomb went off,” she said.

  Hernandez nodded. “I was.”

  * * * *

  His company only survived because of the mountains surrounding the capital. The enemy plane must have been well below those fourteen-thousand-foot peaks when it detonated its cargo. The high ring of the Divide had acted like a bowl, reflecting the explosion up instead of outward. U.S. intelligence estimated the blast at sixty megatons. A doomsday device.

  There was no reason to pile so many warheads into the plane except the Russians must have been concerned they would be turned back or shot down. With an airburst of that strength, they might have leveled the city from fifty miles away or damaged it at a hundred.

  Hernandez was lucky they’d gotten so close. Aerial and satellite reconnaissance showed nothing but slag at ground zero. There was no longer the slightest trace of anything human in that valley. The land itself was unrecognizable. Untold amounts of earth and rock had been vaporized, and the remainder briefly turned liquid. The eerie new flat land was studded with lopsided hillocks and dunes. It almost looked as if someone had dumped an incredible flood of molten steel from the sky. The effect was uneven. The shock wave had roared through every low point and gap, washboarding against the terrain. It was what had saved Deborah. The blast leapt and splashed and bounced, devastating some valleys and sparing others.

  Hernandez had been on a south-facing slope away from the flash. The long series of ranges between his position and Leadville redirected the worst of it. Even then his escape was a near thing. Impact jolted his mountainside sharply enough to close many of his fighting holes like hands snapping into fists. He had five dead and seventeen wounded in those first immeasurable seconds. Daylight turned to black. Then the windstorm hit with choking heat and dust.

  They ran downhill, abandoning everything but their wounded. They were afraid of the machine plague, but they knew they would smother if they stayed. Later they realized the atmospheric pressure had plummeted over an area of tens of miles as the nuclear reaction sucked air into an immense, superheated column. It was the slightest bit of good fortune. The region was temporarily wiped clean of the plague. Once they reached the base of the mountain, they were able to stay on Highway 24, hurrying along the buckled asphalt. Then the mushroom cloud fell in on itself and collapsed, blanketing them in ash and unseen bands of heat.

  Hernandez was sick like so many of his troops, which made it easier for the Chinese to surge northward against them. None of the surviving American forces had been any closer to the strike than his unit, but nearly a third of them had been exposed to the fallout. It ravaged their effectiveness. They were unable to mount the counteroffensives they needed simply to shore up their defensive positions, and the Chinese generals knew it. The Chinese continued to race past American emplacements, leaving their supply routes vulnerable but accepting that risk in exchange for the gains in territory.

  The central Colorado army was being encircled. Soon the enemy would reinforce its advance units on I-70 and face Aspen Valley from three sides. There were other U.S. populations throughout the state, but other than Grand Lake, none of them had significant military strength.

  The tipping point was here. That seemed to be why the Chinese gambled. Their need for fuel, food, and tools was part of it. Every small town they absorbed was a help, and they made it tougher on the American Air Force by sprawling out. Widespread targets were harder to hit and had more time to cover each other, but Ruth wondered if the Chinese were also pushing so hard in this area because, li
ke her, they hoped to recover some trace of the nanotechnologies developed in Leadville.

  They might have already found it in the American dead. Here and there, they would have taken prisoners, too. In fact, it wasn’t impossible that the U.S. had transmitted the nanotech to the Chinese with their bullets and missiles. Every time a soldier loaded his weapon, each time a ground crew rearmed a jet, their skin, sweat, and breath were tainted with it.

  Ruth had no way of guessing if Chinese researchers were outpacing her or if the enemy had already developed new weaponized nanotech themselves.

  * * * *

  “You know about the snowflake,” she said to Hernandez. She needed to warn him to be careful of his own planes if it looked like he was losing his fight to keep the enemy from I-70.

  If the Chinese flanked the Aspen group, if Grand Lake thought this was the last place to catch the Chinese in a bottleneck before the enemy surged toward the new capital, there was no telling what they might do. The snowflake was the easy solution. There was no way to defend against it, and after its initial burst, the snowflake was clean.

  “The weapons teams were trying—” Ruth said, but she stopped when she realized she was distancing herself from what she’d done by using the past tense.

  “I’ve heard about it,” Hernandez said. “I don’t think Leadville ever let the nanotech out of their control.”

  He was trying to help. He thought the snowflake was gone forever. For a moment, Ruth couldn’t even speak, overcome with self-loathing and embarrassment. His troops had saved her, and in return... “Grand Lake has it now,” she said. “I built it for them.”

  His dark eyes stared at her in the gloom.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Ruth said, and Cam murmured, “Jesus Christ.”

  She hadn’t told him. What could he do? It had seemed like the right decision at the time. She’d thought she was providing her country with a powerful new deterrent, and that was still true, but now everyone in this place was in jeopardy.