Jeff Carlson: Plague Zone

This book is for my father,

Gus Carlson,

who taught me to read.

Cam Najarro pushed into the fallen greenhouse with one arm, struggling through the torn sheets of plastic. In his other hand he held his flamethrower down against his leg, the blue fire in its muzzle guttering near the back of his knee. He didn’t want to start a blaze if he could avoid it, so he used his body like a shield, hiding the weapon as he waded into the tangled, slumping mess.

The fuel tanks on his back snagged in the plastic. Then he encountered a broken two-by-four and had to duck, awkwardly protecting the nozzle of the gun against his belly.

The plastic was clear in single layers — but when the greenhouse collapsed, its roof and walls had twisted into knots. Worse, the sunset was fading. Cam wore a flashlight on his belt, but he’d found that the light only reflected in the plastic, blinding him. He could see better in the shadows.

The greenhouse smelled like fresh earth and a dank, more humid scent. Everywhere the concrete floor was speckled with ants and locusts. Some were dead. Others jittered and flexed, trapped in the folds of plastic all around him.

His headset crackled in his ear. “What’s it look like?” Allison asked.

“It’s quiet,” he said.

“I’ve got a bad feeling, Cam.”

He smiled. “Don’t you always?”

“Get out. Please.”

“No. Eric might still be alive. What if he’s unconscious?” Cam reached into another curtain of plastic, but he could barely move its weight. He knelt and tried to squeeze past. On his right, the way was blocked by a long wooden planter, its soil blasted over the floor. Cam pushed left instead, crawling on one hand and both knees.

He stopped. There was a red-colored drift on the floor where the crushed ants were particularly dense. Cam brought up his weapon before he continued forward, wanting to be sure these ants were casualties, not a new invasion. He saw immature queens and winged males mixed with worker drones. By necessity, every man and woman on the planet had become a practicing entomologist, and Cam had a very healthy fear of these insects. The ants were both delicate and powerful. Their fragile legs and mandibles were capable of incredible force, as witnessed by the destruction around him.

He put his boot down, crunching the red bodies. “I think I know where they came in,” he said. Each word echoed in the silence. Beyond the greenhouse, he could hear the wind and people shouting, and he heard those voices more clearly when Allison answered on the radio.

“Just leave it alone,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it mattered to him. He’d built Greenhouse 3 with his own hands, and now one of his friends was missing inside.

Cam brushed at the ants with his glove, trying to make sense of the swarm’s direction. He found his clue against another ravaged planter. There was a hairline crack in the floor where they’d bolted the planter’s sides to the concrete pad, which was only inches thick. That hadn’t been enough. One end of the crack was now a ragged hole. The ant colony had scratched through with inhuman patience and strength.

Less than an hour ago, ten thousand fire ants had billowed into the greenhouse, surging through the protected area like a cyclone. The weight of the frantic people inside was enough to topple one wall. Then someone crashed against a support beam. The ants were more interested in the corn and tomato plants, but still they stung and bit. Three people made it out. Eric Goodrich was the only one who hadn’t emerged through the two doors that served as an airlock, sealing off the sweet, moist plants inside from the world of the machine plague.

The locusts came after the plastic had ripped. Like the fire ants, the black-spotted desert locusts were nonnative to Colorado, but they were adaptable and opportunistic, filling the gaps in the ecology like so many other species. The locusts were also suicidally ravenous, expending at least as much energy as they gained. They suffered huge losses just to attack the crops and their rival insects, allowing their own numbers to be decimated even as their dead provided more food for the surviving ants.

Cam would have burned them all if he could. “The ants came from underneath,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter!” Allison was impatient now, even rude. She could be combative when she was worried. “Just get out of there,” she said. “We can salvage things in the morning.”

Eric might still be alive, Cam thought, but he didn’t want to argue. He simply rose into a clear space and kept walking through the dark maze of lumber and plastic.

He moved with a limp. His hands were bad, too, already cramping on the nozzle of his weapon. Old injuries. There were few people who didn’t bear some mark of the machine plague or the wars that followed, but Cam Najarro had faced any number of hard choices. Sometimes he marveled that he was alive at all. He wanted to share his good fortune.

“Eric?” he called, forgetting to turn off his headset.

“Goddamn it,” Allison said. “He’s dead. We would have heard something.”

“What if it was me, Ally? You’d come in after me.”

“Get out. Idiot.”

Cam smiled again. Allison had softened now that she was four months pregnant, although she would have denied any change in her outlook. She was more selfish of him, more protective, which made her a better wife but not such an excellent leader. She no longer put everyone else first. And she’s probably right, he thought, peering into the shadows. There was a shape on the floor like two bags of fertilizer… or was it a man?

Suddenly he clapped his hand against his cheek, killing an ant before it could bite. Then he discovered more of the red bugs on his arm. Cam repressed a shudder, scraping his glove over his hood and his jacket sleeves. His hip was spotted with ants, too. Their stragglers and their wounded were beginning to focus on him in the swift, disturbing way of a hive mind that communicated solely through motion and scent.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said, looking for a way out. Unfortunately, the nearest wall of the greenhouse had rolled, creating a heavy barrier. “I’m on the north side,” he said. “Can you guys cut through?”

“Turn on your light so we can see you.” Allison’s voice was sharp with relief, and then he heard her yelling faintly outside the greenhouse. “Over here!”

The ants were unpredictable. They were always breeding now, and they became more vicious with each short-lived generation. Cam and Eric had led “smoke” teams to poison four colonies just last week. Obviously that hadn’t been enough. Maybe the area around their village would always be infested, no matter how careful they were with their garbage and other waste — but the ants’ metabolism was dependent on the heat of the sun. In the cold nights of the Rockies, especially in early September, the ants went to ground until morning. Cam knew it would be safe to look for Eric’s body in another hour if he could only convince himself to abandon his friend.

No, he thought. They’d served together in the Army Rangers, and dying here was a stupid way to go for a man who’d helped bring an end to World War III. It made Cam angry, so he turned back into the ruins of the greenhouse with his flashlight.