Jeff Carlson: Plague Zone

Ruth had wanted to hold Cam’s baby even more than she’d realized, and her hand paused above Allison’s belly. But no. No. Stay with your mother, she thought, weeping inside her helmet. They lacked the technology to care for a premature birth. Even before the machine plague, saving a fetus early in its second trimester would have been remarkable. Today, it was impossible — so they’d lost the child, too.

I can’t let Cam see her like this, she realized, pressing her glove to Allison’s swollen face. She turned the girl’s head and hid her partly in her jacket hood. Now her tears were hot and thick and she tried to wipe her eyes, which was stupid. It would have infected her if she got inside her helmet. Instead, she only smeared blood and dust across her faceplate.

Her voice broke when she called back to the stabbing flashlights. “Allison’s dead. So is Tony. And the stranger. Michael’s alive.”

“You better hurry,” Greg yelled back. “Linda’s starting to move her arms.”

Ruth walked toward the lights again. Greg, Cam, and another man had stayed to hold three beams on her. Deeper in the village, other flashlights and lanterns swarmed. Then she knelt beside Linda Greene, who was weakly stretching her arms as if dreaming. Ruth pulled Linda’s wrists together and secured them with duct tape, binding the other woman like a criminal.

What’s happening to you? she wondered.

Doug Tillman quit breathing before Ruth got to him, and Martha Shemitz had a broken neck. The other four were still alive. Michael had lost some teeth and Ruth tried to staunch the gash on his chin, tying Doug’s shirt around Michael’s head as a crude bandage. Andrew also seemed unlikely to recover, his scalp split in two places where he’d been beaten.

Meanwhile, both Linda and Patrick woke up. Linda was agitated, grunting and shuffling on the ground as she fought her bonds. In contrast, Patrick nearly seemed lucid. He trembled, but he was silent, blinking his distorted eyes. Ruth also noticed a recurrent tic in his cheek. What did he see? Was he feeling nonexistent stimuli like cold or heat? Itching?

“You need to get out of here,” she called to Cam. “Leave everything inside my place. I’ll seal the doors and windows.”

“Ruth,” he said distantly.

“Get out of here.”

“Ruth, how long can you breathe in that suit?”

That was the least of her worries. She should be able to swap out her air tanks without contaminating herself, so dehydration became the greater threat. Even though it was made for a much larger man, her suit was like wearing an individually sized sauna. Already she could smell her own sweat, and she’d forgotten to drink her fill before she suited up. In the short term, that was fine. The suit had no sanitary features, so if she had to go to the bathroom, it would run down into her boots, but ultimately the water problem meant that Ruth only had hours, when she might need days to take care of these people and to study them.

She wanted to go to him. She knew she couldn’t.

“Leave me a walkie-talkie and a pistol,” she said. “Make sure I have lots of tape.” I love you, she added to herself. Be careful.

She was stunned when Cam echoed the thought exactly.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Yes.”

He set his weapon beside his flashlight, near her door, where the others had stacked plastic sheeting, rope, tape, batteries, a med kit, and jugs of water. Someone had lit two kerosene lanterns for Ruth, leaving one in the open, the other inside her hut. The bandages and the water were for the people she hoped to save, but already her mouth was dry. Stop crying, she thought, summoning a grim resolve from within. She was alone. That was the truth.

Ruth dragged Linda inside first, cracking the woman’s head against the doorframe when she jerked and spasmed. “Oh shit,” Ruth said, but Linda didn’t seem to associate the pain with her. She reacted to things Ruth couldn’t see, groaning and straining.

Ruth left her in the corner, tied to the only piece of furniture, a low, heavy table. There were only three rooms in the hut — two thin bedrooms in back and this bigger space by the door. Ruth had normally eaten breakfast here with Bobbi and Eric, sitting on the floor, and she regretted the mood of all those mornings together. She was often envious of the couple, happy to be included but edgy because of what she couldn’t share. She hated to see herself as the old maid. Now she was the lucky one. Bobbi was a widow, Eric lay dead in Greenhouse 3, and this house was already saturated with nanotech.

She dragged Patrick in next, then Michael and Andrew. Then she returned outside and began to wrap the dead bodies in plastic sheaths, sealing them as best she could. More than once, she stuck her gloves to the tape. Every time, her heart leapt with adrenaline. But the suit held.

She paused over Denise. The woman had died uninfected, hadn’t she? Ruth was very tired, but she had never been one to cut corners. She rolled Denise in plastic, too. Then she dragged each of the six corpses inside, turning her home into a prison and a morgue.

The gruesome feeling in Ruth’s chest grew louder as Linda squirmed against the table, moaning. She ran back outside. She knew she had to go in again, but there was another job to do first. Maybe she was more meticulous about it than necessary. Ruth dug in the earth until she had enough dirt to cover the bloodstains. In the shallow pits, she buried the tools and the gear they’d used to subdue their friends. She even gathered as many of the rocks they’d thrown as she could find, even though she could never completely sterilize this place. Poisoned ground, she thought. A lot of the nanotech would remain on the surface, exposed to the breeze or lifting away in the morning heat when the sun rose tomorrow.

If they survived the night, even if they sealed this place in concrete and built a heavy fortress to contain her home, Ruth knew they could never stay. The village needed to be permanently abandoned. Still, her best efforts might buy them some extra time. Ruth continued to work despite her exhaustion.

Her mind wandered.

She glanced at the stars, remembering better times. She knew she was trying to get away from herself, but at last she turned and walked back into her small, crowded home. Then she began to tape the door shut from the inside.

Originally, Cam and Allison led their party east from the Rockies down into the plains beyond Boulder and Greeley, where they were sure the summers were hot enough to destroy the insects. In sufficient heat, even bloodless or cold-blooded organisms became vulnerable to the machine plague. Their guess proved to be true, but the absence of bugs also turned those areas into deserts. The insect swarms were the only pollinators available. Every species that required hives or cocoons had been destroyed by the ants. There were no bees, butterflies, or moths left of any kind. In their greenhouses, they’d manually brushed pollen from one plant to another. Outside in the world, however, it was only the clumsy, brutal movements of the swarms that continued this process, spreading the delicate powder even as they obliterated forests and meadows everywhere.

Ruth could only guess what the Midwest had become. She’d seen the edges of it herself, and there were rumors supposedly passed on from pilots and scouts and the specialists who controlled the remaining U.S. spy satellites. Without grass, the prairies had been peeled down to the bedrock, stuffing away in the rain and ever-more frequent windstorms. Megatons of silt had displaced the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into a continent-wide swamp, filling low places like Arkansas and Louisiana with stagnant, creeping bogs of mud.