Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

Ruth walked across the landing pad and sat down on a supply crate, picking one fingernail through the splintered edge of the box. It was good to be out of her lab. Even her mouth hurt less outside. The tent was small and dark, and Ruth was more disturbed than ever by small and dark. The waiting was worse. Ten minutes ago, Beymer had sent a man to say that his team was inbound from L.A.

I should have been there.

The thought would always haunt her. How much differently would things have played out if she could have helped them? Would she be dead, too?

Ruth had come back to her senses in a residential home in the flood-ruined old town of Tabernash, twenty miles south of the V-22 hanger. Ingrid was with her in a locked bedroom, but Ingrid was infected and only one of Ruth’s hands was partially untied. Ingrid must have seen the others fall sick before running to free Ruth. She wasn’t fast enough. Ruth was still tied to the bed. Coaxing Ingrid to her had been impossible. Ruth had screamed and begged in the darkness, hungry, bleeding, and alone except for the senseless ghost of her friend. She watched Ingrid roam back and forth against the walls for hours, never finding the door, until the older woman finally stumbled close enough for her to grab her belt. Ruth was weak. Ingrid was clumsy. She fell on Ruth, then rolled away, but Ruth had already dragged the pistol from Ingrid’s hip. Her wrists were bound too close together to aim the gun at those ropes, nor did she want to shoot at her feet, but she was able to use the weapon as a tool to pry herself free. Then she found her way to their radio.

Earlier today, Ruth had successfully modified the first vaccine for the mind plague to outpace the counter-vaccine, thus creating an antidote. Reprogramming the antidote so it wouldn’t replicate except in specific conditions was more difficult, but they wanted to keep it from spreading to the Chinese — not until the enemy was gathered into prison camps. Ruth had devised a governor that limited the antidote to replicating only in high oxygen atmospheres. This was an artificial environment within her ability to create, especially at Sylvan Mountain’s altitude, using precious medical supplies. It meant she was able to cultivate the antidote in small doses. Then she secured it in vials of blood plasma for injection into one person at a time.

Ingrid, Emma, and General Walls were now in a private tent, recuperating. The rest of these heroes had vanished. From the data on Walls’s laptop, they knew who else had survived, but Bobbi Goodrich must have wandered away from their safe house before Ruth got free. Bobbi was missing. Nor had they been able to locate the other squad of immunized soldiers led by Lieutenant Pritchard. Wherever the USAF commando had gone into hiding, his men were infected, maybe starving or hurt, and Ruth hoped someone would find them before it was too late. As far as she was concerned, the places they’d earned in history were paramount even to her own, because it was these people, not her, who’d struggled on through the end.

Agent Rezac was another complication. Ruth’s antidote carried some of the same risks as the mind plague itself. Within seconds of her injection, Rezac had stroked out. She was dead. The same problem had crippled or killed dozens more just here in Sylvan Mountain as they awoke from the plague. It wasn’t fair.

The first reports out of Los Angeles were even worse. The recovery team said they’d found Deborah and Kendra dead in a parking lot outside the Chinese labs. The women’s bodies lay side by side, Kendra’s arm outstretched, Deborah’s hand pressed against her own face with a substrate in her mouth.

They’d done it. Even as they were overrun by Chinese troops, they’d won. From their bodies, the counter-vaccine had drifted to the enemy — and Cam.

He was alive. He was in the second stage of infection when the recovery team found him burrowing in the ruins. His body was in some indefinite form of hibernation. It had saved him. Most likely he hadn’t moved more than a few inches during the first, agitated phase of the mind plague. He was nearly dead from blood loss, but they’d done their best to increase his vital signs. They were rushing him back to Sylvan Mountain for surgery. Except for two Chinese prisoners taken on site, Cam was the sole witness to what had happened in L.A. Medrano was dead, too, as were a pair of Russian soldiers in the rubble — allies of the Chinese?

Cam might know something about Kendra’s design work or other labs or American survivors, but, in truth, there was no reason for Ruth to stop her own crash programs to wait for his helicopter. He’d never regained consciousness. Even if he opened his eyes, he was a zombie. Cam would have a better chance of pulling through if he was responsive, if he wouldn’t fight his restraints, but his body didn’t need any more immediate shocks. The doctors wouldn’t inject him with the antidote until he’d improved.

Ruth had only come to the landing pad because she needed to see him one more time before they took the chance of killing him like Agent Rezac.

She hoped she was pregnant. It seemed unlikely. They’d only made love once, but she would have been ovulating, so it wasn’t impossible. She wanted his child. Some part of him would carry on.

They both deserved that much, didn’t they?

Ruth leapt to her feet as two F-35s soared overhead, the recovery team’s escort from the West Coast. Where was the helicopter? Long seconds passed before a black dot materialized out of the sunset, whup whup whup whup, the drumbeat of its rotors slapping at the mountainsides.

Their mission had been delayed by the chopper’s need to refuel in Utah, California, and then in Utah again. Its flight into L.A. had been an exacting game of leapfrog, working with fighter escorts with far greater range and speed, but there were no more VTOL planes available. Ruth was grateful just to have been able to reach into California at all.

She broke her promise to stay off the pad as the Black Hawk entered its final approach.

“Dr. Goldman, wait!” the captain yelled. He ran to intercept her but Ruth shrugged him off with her head on a swivel, looking up, looking left, trying to anticipate where the chopper would land. She dodged a jeep loaded with wire. Then she bumped into two mechanics taking apart an engine and kicked through the parts spread on the ground.

“Hey!” one man shouted.

“Sorry—” The scattered metal at Ruth’s feet seemed like a bad omen and she wavered, fidgeting. She almost stooped down to help them sort through the jumble, but medical teams had emerged from the low buildings beside the field. Ruth hurried to join them even as the captain grabbed her sleeve.

“Goldman, wait.”

She stared at the much larger man. “Get your fucking hands off me,” she said. He hesitated. She pulled away. It wasn’t his fault — he was protecting her — but Ruth was no longer interested in being shielded from anything.

Somehow she controlled herself enough to make room for the medics and their gurneys as a soldier jumped from the Black Hawk. At her side, her fist clenched and unclenched.

The first man they lifted from the flight deck was unrecognizable, wrapped in blankets with his face obscured by an air mask and bandages. The blades overhead were still winding down. Ruth pressed into the crowd. “Cam!” she yelled. “Cam!” But the man’s dumbstruck eyes were Chinese. A prisoner.

“Where is Corporal Najarro!?” she yelled.

They were unloading someone else from the other side. Ruth shoved her way past the Black Hawk’s nose, joining the confusion as they strung IV bags above his gurney. She needed to touch him. She felt the power in her shaking hands. The two of them were a circuit that must be closed again, even if it was only for this instant.