by Jeff Carlson
“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 ‚rst 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 ‚eld 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 ri†es. Cam and Goodrich lugged the AFM. Other men had dumped precious rations and clothing from 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 ‚ghter 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 ‚re 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 of‚cers. 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 ‚eld, 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 of‚cers 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 ‚red 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 ‚rst 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 ‚nd Hernandez, using him as a decoy as the ‚ght 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 ‚nding Deborah. It was like ‚nding 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 ‚eld cap low as if to hide his scars.
Blinding tears ‚lled 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 ‚ngertips 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 †icked away from her with something like embarrassment.
Hernandez wasn’t strong enoug
h 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 ‚ne. 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 ‚ghting? 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.
Ruth saw Cam glancing at Deborah’s ‚gure 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 †oor, 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 †oor 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 de‚nitely 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 of‚cers 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.