Jeff Carlson: Plague Zone

It jumped the gap, Ruth thought. She meant to shout a warning but she couldn’t breathe. The reflex was too powerful. Don’t breathe. The nanotech was multiplying, swirling unseen from everyone it touched, and she wondered if she would be next.

Michael continued to wade toward them through the barrage. Unfortunately, the hail of rocks and equipment was slowing as they cleaned the ground and emptied their pockets. Ruth heard a woman swearing desperately as she scratched at the dirt. Someone else turned and ran. Then a flashlight pegged Michael in the face, its white beam spinning. He collapsed. But the other two men who’d been infected would rise in seconds.

“Give me your shovel,” Cam said to Greg. Both of them still wore their makeshift armor. Their goggles, hoods, and gloves would offer the slightest protection.

“Stay upwind!” Ruth yelled. “Cam!”

Otherwise they were helpless. Every survivor knew how easily the invisible machines could penetrate their lungs. A new plague was their most intimate and public nightmare, shared by everyone. They would have been less unnerved by another distant nuclear exchange. Panic took over.

Someone fired in the dark, then someone else. Orange muzzle flashes tore the crowd apart, because not all of the shots were directed outward. Tony died in a burst of rifle fire, flailing into the ground. Denise fired, too, driving one man to his knees before a third gun popped at the base of Denise’s skull, silencing her high-pitched screams.

It had been less than five minutes since the old woman transferred the nanotech to Allison.

Cam and Greg took the front line in the fight, clubbing three infected men as Ruth turned and ran. She pinballed through a jumble of silhouettes. “Wait!” someone yelled. Let them think she was a coward. Ruth crashed through her cabin door and slammed it shut, throwing the lock behind her.

Someone was pounding at the door when she yanked it open again, holding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand. Outside, the storm of lights and voices continued. Ruth had thought maybe Cam was trying to reach her, but it was Bobbi Goodrich.

Bobbi’s face was a grimace of terror, her fist raised to strike again. “You—” she said.

“Take this.” Ruth’s voice echoed in her helmet. She handed Bobbi the shotgun. “Don’t let anyone grab me.”

“I can‘t — Just watch out,” Bobbi said.

The two women moved into the darkness together. Ruth walked ponderously in her bright yellow gear, a Level A microbiological containment suit with two SCBA tanks on its back. One of the air tanks was only half full. Even so, the aluminum cylinders weighed thirty pounds. Both the Nomex jumpsuit underneath and the suit itself were too big. The chest piece billowed around her small breasts like a giant bag. The sleeves rubbed against her torso, filling her ears with the rsssh rsssh of the loose, heavy rubber.

Despite the suit, she knew immediately that a lot of the noise had moved away from them. Ruth barely recognized Jefferson anymore. The buildings were the same, except for the fallen greenhouse, but she’d never heard screaming in this place before. Their community had become a riot.

She turned into the sound of hoarse voices. “We can’t just kill everyone!” Cam said, pleading with an array of other villagers. Everyone kept their distance from each other. They had also been smart enough to throw their tools away after beating down the infected people, although doing so only left them with guns if there was another outbreak. Worse, now they faced each other with pistols and carbines.

Greg had sided with the larger contingent of the group. “There’s no other way,” Greg said. “We can’t tie them up.” He meant because they were afraid to touch their sick friends. Prolonged contact would be even more dangerous than jumping into range with a club.

Ruth shouted inside her helmet. “I can do it!”

The villagers didn’t notice, locked on each other.

“You could be next,” Cam said. “Don’t you get it? What if the nanotech hits you next?”

Ruth saw they’d lost more people. There were six men and women on the ground between the huts, plus, farther out, Michael and the sprawled corpses of Tony, Allison, and the old woman. She didn’t see the man who’d been shot by Denise. They must have carried him away along with any other uninfected casualties. Were more people hurt? At least 20 percent of the village had been incapacitated or killed and Ruth moved slower than she wanted, devastated by the scene.

Some of the figures closest to her were probably dead, too. Even in the sporadic light, she could see head wounds where they’d been beaten. One of them was Denise, her skull blasted open beneath her dark hair. Another of the crumpled figures was still alive, straining for air through a throat obstructed by blood or dirt. His breath came in hoarse gasps.

Was it possible Allison was also alive? Cam must have been clinging to the belief that she could be saved — but if she was, she’d sustained horrible injuries to her mouth and one hand. Ruth would be surprised if Allison hadn’t also experienced a massive stroke, and their medical abilities were limited to setting broken bones or helping women through childbirth. Even the doctors in Morristown might not be able to perform the surgeries Allison would require.

Please be dead, Ruth thought, closing her eyes against her grief. But she couldn’t ignore the doubt she also felt. Do I want her to be dead?

“There has to be something we can do!” Cam shouted.

“We can’t let them get up again,” Greg said as another man drew his pistol and a third turned away from Cam.

“Enough,” the third man said. “Let’s do it.”

Cam grabbed his arm. “No.”

The debate might have been harder because most of their faces were wrapped in goggles and masks. They were friends, but their armor was another layer between them, like the darkness, their guilt, and their fear.

“Wait!” Bobbi said. “Wait. Look!”

Some of the flashlights came around, playing on Ruth’s suit. “I can do it,” she called through her brightly lit faceplate. “I can take care of them.”

“Ruth,” Cam said, desperate with relief.

She was glad, faintly, but she couldn’t forget that she had been the first to start shooting. What if there had been another way? Could they have subdued Tony and the old woman without killing them? Denise would still be alive, too.

Ruth was afraid of walking into the field of bodies alone. What if they woke up? She might tear her gloves or her sleeves when she tried to carry them. The suit wasn’t designed for heavy labor, much less for combat — but she couldn’t leave those people to die.

“We’ll use my cabin to hold them,” she said, “but I need help. Rope. Water.” Her windows and doors were bug-proofed, but those seals wouldn’t hold nanotech. “Get me as much plastic sheeting as we have.”

“Tear down Greenhouse 4,” Cam said, shoving at the man who’d drawn his gun. “Go.”

Maybe they still could save most of their friends.

Ruth went to Allison first, sidestepping Linda and Doug. She should have tied some of the unconscious men and women before doing anything else — she had a bit of duct tape left after sealing her gloves to her sleeves — but she was drawn to her longtime foe. She told herself it was because Allison was pregnant, but the girl was dead, her crimson eyes bulging from the pressure of some intracranial rupture.

Whatever the nanotech is doing, the process doesn’t always work, she thought, taking the only lesson she could from Allison’s death.

Somewhere in her sadness, Ruth was also comforted. It was a backward sort of feeling, as if she’d lost a burden she would have preferred to keep, but she couldn’t imagine this bright young woman living with her hideously chewed mouth, especially if her mind was gone.