Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  Just getting a hug was super. He smelled clean. She might have clung long enough to make him uneasy, then babbled the words she’d held back from Kendricks. “There’s a war going on out there! How did— What’s happening?”

  But James didn’t want to talk seriously, another change. To this point their entire relationship had been nothing except scheming and big ideas. He murmured pleasant things. “Your pilot was incredible, they’re talking about a plaque or something,” and pulled his ear and touched his index finger to his mouth and shrugged. Ruth swallowed her questions.

  They might be listening.

  She was released the next morning with a quarter-full bottle of calcium supplements and a handful of aspirin. She had been invaded by a gynecologist, and attacked by a dentist who made her gums bleed, and an optometrist had briefly tested her eyes, and they needed her bed. An ATF assault group had been brought in with gunshot wounds and the peculiar subdermal rash caused by nano infestations.

  Major Hernandez personally escorted Ruth out into the vast, crisp light of the open sky, along with James and no less than nine soldiers in three jeeps. James seemed to know Hernandez well, asking after someone named Liz, and Ruth was glad. The two of them were a lot alike, she thought, assured, methodical.

  It was good to know that there were still good men.

  Yet it felt damned surreal, listening to them chitchat as the jeeps rattled south through residential streets.

  “Come by tonight for a drink,” James told him. “And bring your lady. I can definitely scrounge up a little more of that boo juice if you’ve got another can or two of sardines.”

  “You know if I find that still, I’ll have to confiscate it,” Hernandez said, with a glance back at his gunner.

  “Just don’t look too hard, Major.”

  The optometrist had given her sunglasses, giant bug-face aviator shades that she’d donned immediately after James rolled her wheelchair outside. Daylight stung her eyes, muting colors, burning the edges off of the high white mountain peaks.

  Ruth stared all around.

  The original residents had done everything possible to help the mass of refugees, putting them up in living rooms and sheds and garages, in campers and tents and horse trailers. The locals were definitely not city folk. Everyone had outdoor gear and camping equipment and, briefly, it had been enough. A majority of the displaced population ended up in the hills east of Leadville, but Ruth could still see the results of the locals’ resolve and generosity. Open lots and backyards remained full of improvised shelters. She noticed very few people, though. Why? There could hardly be an economy, jobs, anywhere to go...

  They reached a checkpoint, a low wall of cars stacked across the street, two machine guns and a full platoon. Then they left the heart of the fortress, turning out onto a small highway that formed Leadville’s southern border.

  James and Hernandez shut up and Ruth hunched over her cast. She’d already been shot at once, and Hernandez hadn’t brought along two extra jeeps just to impress her.

  Thousands of bodies worked at the long slope rising away from town, scraping the mountainside out into level terraces. For housing? Ruth couldn’t make sense of it. Several hundred more people clogged the highway, walking in both directions, a bizarre pilgrimage, moving pushcarts and wagons by muscle alone. There were no horses left. In fact she had seen no animals at all except one bird, maybe a hawk, drifting far overhead.

  The lead jeep hit its horn constantly. Some of the heavier loads were slow to move aside, though, and the three vehicles managed only ten or fifteen miles per hour, weaving, braking. Ruth saw people with boxes and backpacks, with shopping carts.

  They were carrying dirt.

  She understood then, but it was easier to turn her head to James than to face the envy and numbed hope of these filthy strangers. “What are they doing?”

  “The soil here is lousy, especially up off the valley floor. It’s nothing but rock and hardpack.”

  “But the riverbed is...two, three miles from here?”

  He just nodded. They turned off the highway after a hundred yards, into another checkpoint, then followed an empty road up the hillside. Ruth looked over at the excavation project and wondered how they would irrigate the cropland they’d built. Surely not by hand, bucket by bucket.

  The space and resources dedicated to the nanotech labs were better than she’d feared. Timberline College, a small outdoor and environmental studies school that had often used the field as the classroom, was as large as the hotel and resembled a Swiss chalet. Stout white walls, high windows framed in dark wood, heavy beams jutting out beneath a roof steep enough to prevent snowfall from accumulating.

  The courtyard was a jumble of RVs and trailers and aluminum sheds, but this clutter seemed unnecessary, since the two- and three-story building could easily house thirty-eight scientists, their fifty-four family members, and at least most of the security detachment—but the soldiers lived outside, even Hernandez. It was a tactical decision, putting themselves between the scientists and any potential threat. Reaching along the hillside were coils of wire and bulldozed gun positions.

  When the jeep stopped, Major Hernandez offered one hand and helped Ruth out. He had brought a collapsible wheelchair that looked newer and better padded than the heavy, rigid frame she’d been using. “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled for the first time before turning back to his men.

  James pushed Ruth inside, where he’d secured a ground-floor room for her. It was almost the same white as her lab aboard the ISS. The view was of the hectic courtyard. Her gaze went instead to an off-color rectangular patch that marred the wall adjacent to the window, where a blackboard or a painting had hung for years. The furniture was practically nonexistent, a mattress on the floor and two metal shelves for a dresser. Everything else had been used for firewood.

  He said, “Do you feel up for the five-dollar tour?”

  “I’m wiped out. I know it’s dumb.” The brisk air had been good but her own apprehension had sapped her energy. Ruth met his eyes, tapped a finger to her lips.

  James nodded. Yes. He said, “You should get a little sun. Your body needs the vitamin D.”

  She just wanted to nap. Let them listen to her breathing. But she was desperate for answers and didn’t know when she’d have a chance to be alone with him again. “Okay. Yeah.”

  He left. To get permission? Wasn’t the whole point to sneak out together and find a quiet corner? Ruth patted the duffel bag in her lap, a few personal effects retrieved from the Endeavour and someone else’s reasonably clean clothes. The comfort she needed wasn’t there.

  James returned with another wheelchair, not as padded as her new one. It wasn’t the room that he suspected was bugged, or not just the room. The chair, too. She nearly shouted. She nearly gave them an earful. But James saw it in her expression. His eyes widened and he spread his hands as if to catch her.

  Ruth kept quiet, exactly as she had done with Ulinov.

  The courtyard seemed like a dangerous place to talk, packed with idle soldiers. Too many heads turned to watch as James rolled her along the concrete path, hunched close to her ear. “I don’t know if a directional mike could pick our voices out of all this,” he said, “or if they’re even equipped with anything like that, but let’s make this quick.”

  “You don’t trust Hernandez.”

  “I think he’d give his life to protect us.”

  “But then...You switched chairs.”

  “We don’t know where he got it or who had it before him. And there are too many unemployed intelligence people trying to make themselves useful.”

  They passed a Winnebago, a bare-chested soldier mending his sleeve, a young lieutenant scowling at a clipboard.

  “I trust him,” James said. “I do. But it’s not realistic to expect him to withhold information from his superiors or not cooperate with them.”

  By that logic I shouldn’t even trust you.

  “Yo
u need to be careful how you act and what you say. I know you like to push buttons. Don’t do that here.”

  Ruth was bitter. “You sound like Kendricks.”

  “He came to see you? He was talking about it. I thought maybe I’d convinced him that I had you on a short leash, but shit, Ruth, you were nothing but trouble up there, mouthing off, always arguing. And the last month or so you just got worse and worse.”

  “Keeping me up there was a waste.”

  “It’s not always about you.”

  Four soldiers jogged toward them down the walkway. James stopped her chair and a miserable frustration squeezed down on Ruth’s thoughts like a cramp. She felt helpless on so many levels, physically, mentally.

  The men dodged around her wheelchair and kept going.

  James began pushing her again. Ruth wished she could see his face but it was like old times, just his voice at her ear. He said, “Kendricks isn’t somebody you want to fight.”

  “No, I don’t. I barely even knew who he was until he came and put his foot up my butt.”

  “This winter there was cannibalism in some of the mines.”

  He said this without changing his mild, scolding tone, and Ruth grabbed the wheel beneath her good hand, a beltlike sting of pain. James stumbled. Ruth craned her neck around.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s not just rumors. There’s proof that it happened on a wide scale.”

  She tried to anticipate where he was heading. The habit of analysis was, as always, more comforting than dealing with her own emotional reaction.

  The military and FEMA stocks, the thousands of cattle herded to elevation, the subbarrier-scavenging efforts—all of this should have been enough, even now, to sustain two-thirds of a million people.

  “They held back most of the food from the start,” she said.

  James began rolling her forward again. “You can understand the decision. The council wanted to make sure that somebody, at least, would still be here in the long run.”

  Ruth shook her head. It was a very human phenomenon, making a fear real by taking action intended to be preventative. They had created a problem that otherwise might not have arisen for years, if ever. There had never been much living up here—short grasses and shrubs, rodents, birds, some elk—and by cutting off the supplies they had made a rebellion inevitable. No doubt it had started slow, with sneak thieves and hoarders.

  “When did the opposition get organized?” she asked.

  “Ruth, just listen to me.”

  The rebuke, his tired, paternal patience, made her wonder at herself. She didn’t need to prove anything to James.

  “The council had been doling out some food,” he said. “It was a starvation diet but enough to keep people waiting, keep them dependent, even though almost none of it got too far up the canyons.”

  Some of the larger mines were more than five miles east of Leadville, she knew, deep in the snarl of gullies and peaks.

  James sighed, an mm-mah sound she recognized as the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t know that there was anything else they could have done, really, short of using choppers to fly supplies in that far. It’s a lousy situation.”

  It was criminal. It was murder. But she said nothing. He was right—and it had been done in part to protect the labs.

  The path forked and James chose to angle back toward the main building, squeezing past a pickup truck with a tall camper shell. “There have always been raiders,” he said, “guys with hunting rifles, nothing that stood up to army troops, especially since the army was getting fed every day.”

  Words came out of her in a hush. “What did they do?”

  “We’re under martial law. We have been since the beginning, for whatever it was worth. Not every place had a solid military presence.” He made his shrugging noise again, mmm. “Last fall that changed. They sent out a third of the troops here, and moved other groups around to establish garrisons in key spots.”

  They had wanted control. They had wanted order. And they had simultaneously eased the local situation by ridding themselves of thousands of hungry bellies.

  “It backfired,” James said. “The first snow came early and a lot of those units got caught before they were ready. Scavenging efforts stopped. The chain of command was already a mess, with different groups from all over the country, different branches of the military... The first breakaway was the White River Plateau, in December, and Loveland Pass went over in February. They declared independence and then they declared possession of the nearest towns and cities below the barrier.”

  Ruth closed her eyes, a useless denial, and opened them immediately. The emotions inside her were like that dream of tornados and falling.

  He stopped her chair beside two aluminum garden sheds, the nearest stamped with fake, curlicue ivy. Opposite them stood a wide tent. Half a dozen soldiers sat outside, doing nothing, not playing cards or tossing a ball, just resting right there on the ground. One man mumbled something and the others turned to look.

  James knelt and pointed at the top floor of the college, as if they were discussing the labs inside. This was his life now. This was their life. She would always be onstage.

  “It’s not much of a war,” he said. “Nobody has the resources, and we’re too far apart.”

  The high region that Ruth thought of as Colorado actually stretched over what had been seven Western states, along the spine of the Continental Divide. It was separated from the Canadian Rockies by wide gaps in Montana, and humped as far south as Arizona and New Mexico before falling into desert. Much of this far-flung line of small continents and islands were set apart from each other by shallow channels or valleys that plunged away for tens of miles—but Leadville sat roughly in the center of the main bulk of the habitable zone.

  The White River Plateau was a freestanding body between Leadville and the heights of Utah. Ruth didn’t see how anything had truly changed if they chose to be their own small kingdom. Loveland Pass, on the other hand, lay only forty miles north.

  That was why such an immense wall of steel had been built across the far side of town.

  “So far it’s been mostly harassment,” James said, “patrols and scavenging parties chasing each other off. But there used to be some huge military bases in this state. Nobody’s short on guns. The breakaways have been arming the refugees here and encouraging them to overthrow the government.”

  Gustavo must have known. He must have heard, he lived for his radios, but he had kept the truth from her. Why? On whose orders? All the while she’d been sharing everything she learned from the labs...and Gus had almost certainly reported her indiscretion back to Leadville...

  It hurt her too that James was taking such risks for her.

  His voice was low and relentless. “Unfortunately you can’t just wall off an area this size, especially since people need to get in and out to the farms. The nearest mines are all army barracks now, and they’ve been stacking cars and stringing wire and placing guns. And hanging people. They—”

  “Dr. Hollister!” A black-haired soldier ducked out of the big tent. One of the men sitting in front must have passed word inside. Ruth thought she recognized him as part of their escort. “Sir, you shouldn’t be this close to the perimeter.”

  James had a smile for him. “Dr. Goldman is still adjusting to the altitude, she needed a little air.”

  The soldier glanced at her and then from side to side, clearly looking for an officer. His hand had gone to his collarbone as if to finger the strap of a slung rifle, though he was armed only with the pistol on his hip.

  “We’ll start back,” James said and Ruth chimed in, too loud, thrumming with her own blood. “The sun hurts my eyes!”

  The man watched them go, his hand still at his shoulder.

  James didn’t hurry. “Look, I think maybe half of why Kendricks voted to bring you down was that I sold him on the idea that it would increase his stature to have you under the council’s direct authority rather than tucked away u
nder NASA’s umbrella. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t rock the boat. It will reflect on him now, the space hero running around saying what a lousy job everyone’s done.”

  Bitterness wormed through her again. “Then why not just leave me up there forever?”

  “It’s not about you, Ruth. It was never about you.”

  Could they really have only wanted her equipment? She knew they’d lost most of their gear when the locust broke loose inside NORAD, it was total chaos—

  James said, “They evacuated the space station for Ulinov.”

  Enough. Lord knew she’d already heard enough. Ruth shut her eyes. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Shit. I was hoping you knew why.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I have connections but I’m not on the inside. I just hear things.” James stopped her chair and leaned close, making a charade of pointing at the building again. “Rumor is, they need him for top-level negotiations with the Russians, because the Chinese are mobilizing.”

  Before the locust hit Asia, China had invaded and occupied much of the Himalayan range. They’d already possessed a foothold in Tibet, of course, and rose over this region like a human plague. Then they had stopped communicating with the world.

  James turned his eyes to her face, then cut one glance back behind her. “India’s provided too much work on the ANN for us to just forget about them,” he said, “but there’s no way they can hold off the Chinese by themselves. Not without going nuclear.”

  And even now, at the extreme, no one would want to take that step. No one could afford to contaminate the rare fragments of land above the invisible sea.

  “They say India’s agreed to a real estate deal in exchange for protection, and the Russians are in trouble. They’ve been pushed almost all the way off of the Caucasus and Afghanistan mountains.” James got up and moved to the rear of her chair as Major Hernandez strode toward them, no doubt summoned by the black-haired soldier.

  Ruth waved and smiled.

  “Rumor is,” James said, “American planes are going to airlift the Russians in to cut off the Chinese.”