Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

You must be the last one left, she thought. Cam, Medrano, they’re all dead.

She dragged and fought and got no closer, reaching, reaching… She knew she could forget. She could escape this misery if she succeeded. The counter-vaccine would erase her mind, and she yearned for whatever peace the nanotech might bring. It was her duty and her revenge. With one motion she could honor her friends and infect the Chinese, and that was enough. It had to be enough.

Just get to Kendra.

Dust leapt from the earth. At first she didn’t make sense of the horizontal rain. The guns were beyond her tunnel vision. Deborah felt two or three tugs in her dead, outstretched legs, but forgot them.

Kendra.

Then a bullet crashed through Deborah’s forearm, knocking it aside. The pain was like a cleaver.

She wasn’t going to make it.

Jia ceased fire and rolled over the top of the dune, preparing to run for the labs. His moment was now. There were no more Americans in front of him and he didn’t have the ammunition or the time to allow the fight to continue.

“Go! Go!” he yelled to the copilot.

Someone rose from the wreckage beside him, a bloody figure as dirty as the night. Jia dragged his submachine gun up. Unfortunately, the man held a firing system between them — a clamshell like a small laptop. The faint light of the fires revealed a beard and old blister rash on his dark face. He was Hispanic.

They stared at each other. Perhaps it was like looking into a mirror. Jia had never put a face on the enemy. They had always been “the Americans.” Compassion was not what Jia expected to feel, and yet he’d always been attuned to other men. This soldier was no less human than his own troops. Maybe Jia was the only one who truly grasped how the warriors on both sides were alike, noble and courageous.

Jia would have spoken to the other man if they shared a language. Even so, he tried to communicate. “Bié dng! Tng!” he shouted. Don’t move! Stop!

The copilot’s feet ticked in the wreckage nearby. His presence added a second gun to Jia’s. Jia thought the American might attempt to negotiate, but the man never said a word. Maybe he grinned. A feral expression split his face, yet his hatred and his spite never touched the sadness in his eyes.

He pressed his hand down on his device. The ruins convulsed. Explosions lifted in a broken ring all around the labs, at least ten blinding flashes in the night. Shrapnel crashed against the dunes, but the nearest detonations were behind Jia. He was inside their lines. The bombs threw most of the debris away from him.

It was a final diversion.

Jia shot the American even as they ducked the blasts together. Both men crouched without thinking. Only Jia stayed down. The American flailed upward as Jia’s submachine gun blazed into his chest, yet he’d bought his comrades a few more heartbeats of time.

As the explosions lifted through the ash, the blond American lying in the parking lot squirmed once more, scrabbling toward the corpse nearby. Jia took aim again. Beside him, the copilot brought up his Type 85. Their guns raked the fallen Americans — but in that split second, Jia Yuanjun thought he saw both bodies in the parking lot reach for each other. The corpse’s arm dropped away from its side, either rocked by the bombs or Jia’s own bullets.

The two Americans touched each other.

Then the blond figure jerked one hand to her mouth.

Her teeth hurt. Two in front were loose. She was sure she’d crunched through an old filling, and yet she seemed unable to stop pressing her jaws together. In her sleep, the habit was even more severe. She needed some kind of nightguard if it could be fabricated. Otherwise she was going to peel those incisors right out of her head.

The Army doctors said it was PTSD. They’d seen a lot of stress and fear. Ruth believed her neural pathways were permanently altered, because her jitters weren’t confined to her grinding. Her left hand tended to make a fist and squeeze like a heart. She glanced constantly to that side. The mind plague had changed her, and she’d noticed the same fidgeting in most of the survivors. The doctors wanted to pass it off as a normal traumatic reflex because a few calm words were all they had to offer. That wasn’t true for Ruth. She could build something to fight it.

The worst cases were being treated with weed, alcohol, or restraints. Most people seemed okay. In fact, Ruth was impressed that less than two days had passed since she woke up. The best elements of the U.S. military were quick to regain their feet, staggering up to fight a battle that never came.

The war was over.

Sixteen hours ago, they’d landed her in Sylvan Mountain, ninety miles southwest of Grand Lake. Grand Lake had been abandoned for now, its complexes too damaged by the Chinese assault. Sylvan Mountain was mostly a surface base, a simple garrison lined with armor, artillery, and chopper pads, so it hadn’t merited air attacks. The mind plague had been enough to incapacitate this place.

The fallout had also reached these mountains, but the sky was clearing, leaving only a rime of soot. Faint threads of it still curled in the wind, tightening, opening, and tightening again — like her hand.

Ruth watched the horizon, trying to ignore herself. A small part of her basked in the heat of the late yellow sun. Soon it would be dark, and she cherished the light. She also welcomed the bustle of troops around the only helicopter on this broad concrete slab. They were loading the Black Hawk with wire cut from their own fences, shouting in the cold as they wrestled the steel with pliers and gloves. None of it was enough to distract her. She could only watch and wait, pacing, twitching.

A captain with an M4 intercepted her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “Dr. Goldman? You shouldn’t be out here.”

“Beymer,” she said, tugging at the white badge on her uniform. Go ask Colonel Beymer. The overwhelmed Navy colonel was acting CO, and he hadn’t known what to do with her except to give her anything she needed, medical attention, food, rest, and a quiet space for the microscopy gear they’d recovered with her. No one had time to babysit.

The badge was supposed to give her top clearance, which suited Ruth just fine. Speaking was an effort. In addition to hurting her teeth, she’d chewed her tongue and the insides of her cheek while she was infected, possibly because she’d been tied and her body couldn’t find any other way to respond to the mind plague’s commands to move.

“This isn’t a good idea,” the captain said. “Not without containment suits.”

Ruth didn’t answer.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he said, “but we don’t know what they might be carrying. What if there are other strains of nanotech?”

Only a few of his words rang through her anxiety. You don’t know what I’m feeling, she thought. I should have been there. But the captain was right, if not the reasons he’d stated. The landing pad was a zoo whenever new birds arrived. After everything that had happened, it would be idiotic for her to be squished by a chopper or run over by their ground crews.

“I’ll move out of the way,” she said, enunciating slowly through her swollen mouth.

“Thank you, ma‘am.” The captain hesitated, trying to meet her eyes, but Ruth couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. They wanted so much from her.

She’d used that need against them. Everyone was afraid of another contagion, something else cooked up in Los Angeles, but Ruth had convinced Colonel Beymer to send a helicopter after her friends nevertheless. Kendra Freedman was the name she’d cited. We have to find her, she’d said, and that was true, but she was less interested in saving Freedman than in discovering if Cam and Deborah were alive.