Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

He pressed Bu against himself, yearning for more — but his self-control was stronger. He broke their kiss. “I can’t stay,” he said.

“No,” Bu agreed, holding him.

Jia didn’t go. In fact, his only movement was to return Bu’s embrace, bringing the other man’s cheek against his own. His heart continued to beat rapidly and his erection was stiff and eager, but everything else about him softened.

We can never be together, Jia thought. That only makes you more special to me. Your eyes. Your caring. “I didn’t think I’d see you,” he said.

“You almost didn‘t,” Bu said. “My unit’s on standby and then back on duty in another hour.”

“I can’t stay,” Jia said again.

“You shouldn’t have come at all,” Bu said, fishing for more.

Jia wanted to smile and say exactly what Bu wanted to hear, but after a lifetime of deception, he was too good at shielding himself. He didn’t know how to reveal something so honest. I love you. The words just wouldn’t leave his throat.

“Zheng is watching you,” Bu said.

“I know.”

Jia had been relieved of his duties as superior officers hurried to involve themselves in the assaults, and Jia hadn’t argued. Indeed, he had been most subservient. Their victories would be his success, too, so Jia detached himself from Sergeant Bu and ran his hands over his own shirt, straightening his uniform.

There was regret in Bu’s gaze. “I’m glad you came, zhng gun,” he said. It was Bu’s pet name for him. Sir.

This time Jia did smile. “Me, too,” he said, reaching for Bu’s hand. Could he actually say what he needed to? Revealing his heart would be insignificant compared to the crimes they’d committed together, and Jia decided he was going to do it.

Tell him, he thought.

Then they were thrown against the ceiling in an upheaval so loud that Jia went blind, too, his senses wiped out by the deafening roar. Slammed up and back, he fractured his left arm. He felt the bones crack within the endless black sound. His chest struck something hard, too. Then his face. He might have been screaming. The sound was too loud to know and he tumbled and crashed inside it.

When it stopped, there was more light than Jia understood. Daylight. Somehow the base had been torn open, leaving him in a pit filled with gray slabs of concrete and smaller debris. The air was choked with dust. It smelled like charred flesh, and Jia groped to place himself. The sky overhead was dim and gray. The predawn was much brighter than a few lightbulbs, but it would still be an hour before morning in California — if morning ever came.

Voices echoed from the rock. Paperwork spilled everywhere in thin white rectangles. Some of the pages took flight as the dust lifted and surged in the same hot wind. As he staggered to his feet, Jia identified the unexpected shapes of crushed beds and electronics and, incredibly, an entire truck that must have rolled into the base. The jumble was also full of bodies. Only some were moving. Not all of them were whole. Jia saw a dead man pinned beneath a mass of concrete and another who was missing his jaw and one arm.

He felt as if he was waking from a nightmare. Deep down, perhaps, he was still screaming, but it was as if he was too small to absorb what had happened. His surroundings only came to him in bits and pieces. He saw a shattered door and an exploded water tank and a desk drawer without a desk. There was also a blue plastic comb in the rubble and Jia stared at it without comprehension.

Then he stepped toward the mutilated soldier. The face wasn’t Bu’s and the awful, blank feeling in Jia’s head lifted for an instant. Where had they been standing? Was this the corridor?

The base shuddered again and hundreds of voices reacted above him, shouting in the wind. A pile of debris crumbled nearby, burying some of the dead and a wounded man who thrashed once before he disappeared. No! Jia thought. But the man was gone. A few people were picking themselves up inside the pit, yet most of the other survivors seemed to be on the shattered floor above. He couldn’t immediately count on them for help.

“Bu?” he yelled. “Bu, can you hear me!?”

Everywhere the collapsed walls formed barriers and unstable pockets, any of which could be hiding the other man. The voices were an obstacle of another kind, making it difficult to hear.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!” His voice rose. “Answer me!”

Later, Jia would learn that a pair of Minuteman ICBMs had detonated on either side of the Los Angeles sprawl, bracketing the city on its northeast and southeast borders. The yield of these warheads was only one megaton each — the Americans had tried to limit the danger of fallout to themselves — yet that was several times the strength of the first atomic bomb used in Hiroshima. Worse, the two blasts slammed together with gale-force winds.

At the same time, other missiles hit Oahu and Hawaii, which the Russians and the Chinese both used as staging grounds. These strikes might also have been a signal, walking the devastation out into the Pacific, like a feint toward China. Much closer, more warheads detonated in Santa Barbara, Oceanside, and San Diego. The Americans also destroyed the three large military bases far inland among the Mojave Desert, where the Chinese kept most of their aircraft — but there were no strikes on mainland China itself. The American launch was precise. Possibly they no longer had enough operational silos for a larger response.

For now, Jia knew only his private horror. He clawed at a snarl of wreckage with both hands, ignoring the bolt of agony through his forearm. There was blood in the gray dust. So much blood.

“Sergeant!” he yelled.

He found a naked foot. It was crushed and bent, and yet Jia felt relief. His thoughts were still divorced from him, but he couldn’t imagine how Bu would have lost his boot, much less his sock. This was someone else, a man who’d been sleeping in their barracks overhead.

Jia kept moving. The ground was a strange up-and-down ruin. Most of the dunes gave way beneath his feet. His instinct was to shy away from the larger slabs, but he ducked his head beneath them nonetheless, calling for the other man.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!”

He found a live wire sparking in the rubble. He walked across a slew of ghosts made of empty clothes. Then he jumped when another survivor limped out of the dust abruptly like one of the ghosts come to life.

“You!” Jia shouted. “Help me. We’re looking for a Second Department noncom in—”

The man didn’t respond, shambling away. Was he deaf? There was blood in his hair, so Jia let him go. He’d heard someone else groan and he followed the sound, pushing his way past a massive hunk of concrete.

Bu Xiaowen lay beyond it. Each breath was a strained rasp. He was bent and gray with dust, but Jia recognized the other man’s voice even in this extreme. He ran to him, stumbling once and jamming his fractured arm. “Bu,” he said, marveling that they could have been so widely separated by the quake. They were together now. Jia felt himself awaken at last. The emotions in him were terrible — and honest — as he laid his hand on Bu’s cheek, assessing his lover’s airways. Bu’s mouth looked clear of gravel or loose teeth. That was good, but Jia could see that he was seriously injured.

“I can‘t,” Bu groaned. “I can’t feel…”

“Hold still. I’m here. Just hold still. We’ll get you out as soon as we can,” Jia said, promising something that he had no right to guarantee. Bu’s throat was mashed and swollen. His left arm twisted away from his body like a dead thing. Jia thought he must have been rolled beneath the nearest debris, a tangle of concrete and rebar. One of the steel rods had punctured Bu’s leg, spurting blood through the dust.