Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

“You know how to use that headset?” Pritchard asked, pointing at Ruth’s helmet.

“Yes.”

“Listen in, okay? Don’t say anything.”

Ruth fumbled with the control belt at her hip as Cam voiced the same problem that had been bothering her. “I don’t see a plane or anywhere to take off.”

“Black ops,” Pritchard said. “We tried to prepare for as much shit like today as possible. There are aircraft stashed all over the Rockies.”

“You mean in the warehouse? Where do you take off?”

“It’s a V-22 Osprey. Vertical takeoff and landing. What do you hear, Goldman?”

“They’re not saying anything.”

“Where are we going?” Cam said.

“Albuquerque. Last I heard, they were still okay. Rezac’s trying to confirm. Now shut up. Watch behind us if you can.”

They had a bad moment when the Chinese jets roared overhead, unseen in the haze, but the fighters kept going. Bornmann’s team cut the fence and ran into the lot. Ruth could just barely see them across the highway. The warehouse had huge rolling bay doors, which they left shut, entering through a man-sized door instead.

“We’ve got our wings,” Bornmann said on his suit radio. Deborah relayed this message to the other vehicles but Ruth had already told her group, raising a small cheer inside their Humvee.

Then the real work began. Bormann’s team had to assume the interior of the warehouse was dusted with the plague, too, even though there was no sign of chaos. Before allowing Bornmann inside to begin his preflight checklist, they decontaminated a wide swath of the fuselage. They also turned the blanket on the air itself as best they could. Meanwhile, Walls asked Ruth to take over as their radio relay. She agreed even though it meant Deborah would be sent into the depot with her friend, Emma Kincaid. They needed the extra hands.

At the same time, eighteen miles north, Sergeant Huff reported that her squad had driven as far as possible to the downed Chinese plane. They were proceeding on foot.

A nasty thought occurred to Ruth. She didn’t know what the Osprey looked like and she wondered if there was room onboard for everyone. If Huff’s team managed to rejoin the larger group, there were twenty-one of them. Who would stay if their plane was too small?

The wait was excruciating. Ruth was hungry again and her body grew stiff and uncomfortable. Pretty soon Pritchard would have to give her the last air tank in their Humvee. Before then, she was sure she’d need to pee inside her suit. Foshtomi had already crouched under the steering wheel, shucked down her pants and wet the floor. It was unavoidable.

Despite these distractions, Ruth continued to analyze her surface scan of the nano. What she really wanted was a look at the new vaccine through the magnetic resonance force microscope that the commandos had brought with them. Unfortunately, it sounded as if it would be at least an hour before Huff’s team caught up even if they didn’t have any trouble securing a few samples of the vaccine. Nor was there room for Ruth to set up the MRFM inside the Humvee in any case.

Cam operated Ruth’s laptop for her, since she was too clumsy in her gloves. His bare hands were scarred and ugly, but, to her, they were only proof of his incomparable toughness. She was ineffective. Her head was fuzzy. She could have napped, but no one else had slept, either. All of them kept going, so Ruth blinked and shook herself and cursed.

No one’s going to buy you a goddamned coffee, she thought.

In the Army truck, Walls and Rezac were also crunching data, and Rezac came on the Harris radio. “Goldman, are you sure your translation of Freedman’s message is correct?”

“I’m sure,” Ruth said.

“There is no Saint Bernadine Hospital in Los Angeles.”

“What kind of maps are you using?”

“We’ve got data files like you wouldn’t believe. Google. State. Fed. That hospital isn’t there.”

It must be, Ruth thought with new despair. If the message was wrong — if Freedman didn’t really know where she was — they would never find her. She could be anywhere. That meant Ruth was alone again.

The suited troops began to clear the tarmac in front of the warehouse, led by Captain Medrano, their engineer. Some of the traffic jam was easy to move. The trucks and jeeps in front were simply driven out onto the highway, but twice they discovered zombies. These people had been infected long enough to reach the second stage. Once it was a single man, apparently dozing. The next time they found four men and a woman hiding in a truck. The woman jumped Lang and knocked him down. Sweeney shot them all. Then another man stumbled out of a bunker into the hammering sound of Sweeney’s M4.

The damage was done. Gunshots echoed up and down the valley, so Lang killed the fifth man with his pistol — but now they could expect more zombies and maybe the Chinese, too. It was hard to gauge how far the sound carried through the fallout.

Medrano urged his team to move the vehicles at double-time, even after Emma nearly ripped her glove after catching it on a belt buckle inside a car. Meanwhile, he sent Deborah into the warehouse with the blanket again to decontaminate as much surface area as possible. More trucks rolled out of the depot. One of the burned RVs was still in the way, but Medrano didn’t think it would drive even if he could risk entering it, so they cleared a number of other vehicles just to make room to shove it aside. The half-melted tires peeled away when he nosed a truck into the RV’s side, its rims shrieking on the asphalt.

“Two, this is Rezac,” the radio said. “I think I have some good news. There’s a hospital by the same name in San Bernadino, one of the cities in the Los Angeles sprawl. Saint Bernadine. San Bernadino.”

Ruth gestured for Pritchard to give her the handset, which she clunked against her helmet. “This is Goldman, nice work,” she said, but Rezac was still talking.

“—makes sense. Most of their people are inside Los Angeles proper or in the desert, using our old military bases. They might have put their nanotech labs away from everything else in case there was an accident.”

“I think you’re right. Nice work.”

“It gets better. Saint Bernadine might have survived the nukes. I mean, it won’t be in great shape, but there are some hills and terrain that would have shaded it from the blasts.”

“Is there any way you can get a satellite on that area?”

“No. Maybe. I’m still trying to get a signal from anyone else in NORTHCOM.”

“Thank you,” Ruth said, and Pritchard muttered, “Shit. I hope Albuquerque’s okay.” Ruth turned to Cam and said, “She’s alive. Did you hear? Freedman could still be alive!”

“Yeah.” He tried to smile.

Ruth went back to her laptop, but her concentration was shot. It didn’t help that she was cramping. Finally she had to pee. Relaxing those muscles was humiliating, even though no one else could feel or smell the trickling puddle. Ruth tried to emulate Foshtomi’s tomboy attitude to herself. Just be glad you only have to pee, she thought, but she wasn’t looking forward to taking off her suit and revealing what had happened. Maybe it was childish, but she wanted to be a giant like Freedman, and legends didn’t wet their pants.

Her anger was a spark.

“I might have found a weakness,” she said, returning to an earlier idea. “The new vaccine must recognize the same marker that the mind plague uses to identify people who are already infected.”

“What does that mean?” Pritchard asked.

“Both nanos are limited by the marker. They communicate with each other. The mind plague only replicates to a certain maximum within any given individual. Otherwise it would tear them apart just like the first plague. The vaccine works almost in the same way. It only protects people in which it finds the mind plague isn’t already present. The marker makes all the difference. Without it, the Chinese would lose their advantage. The vaccine would be transmitted to our side, too, the way every other nanotech spread around the world, and Freedman’s conceptual work has always been too advanced for that.”