Jeff Carlson - Plague War

What if one of her friends had gotten away? Captain Young might have covered Todd as he ran from the choppers…No. Ruth was through fooling herself. The responsibility was hers. It had always been hers. She glanced at the stars again, ‚ghting tears. Then she clenched her ‚st and held on to the grinding ache inside her cast.

It’ll be light soon, she thought.

She walked to her sleeping bag and began to pack up.

* * * *

It took them seven days to cover eighty-‚ve miles, the last twenty-‚ve away from any roads. Newcombe was afraid that Leadville had dropped motion detectors or even a few soldiers on every peak in the area, equipping small squads with radios and rations and then ordering them to wait. Cam pointed out how many islands there were throughout the nearest ‚fty square miles, and Leadville had no way of knowing they’d gone north out of Sacramento, not south. There would be countless acres of safe ground on the plateaus of Yosemite. Much closer to their real position, around Lake Tahoe, were dozens of high mountains and ridgelines. Even if Leadville only targeted the major highways that branched up toward elevation, they would need to commit hundreds of troops. Still, the chance existed, so Ruth, Cam, and Newcombe had bypassed the largest islands within reach and hiked toward a smaller line of bumps instead.

Eight more times they’d felt the burn of nano infections. There was now a dark, thready patch of subcutaneous hemorrhaging on the back of Ruth’s left hand — her broken arm, the nanotech always going after any preexisting weakness. The bruise was healing but she suspected it would scar. Another mark on her. Worse, her feet were rubbed raw in her boots because she didn’t want to complain. Her pack had chafed her left shoulder badly because it rode funny, the strap catching on the sling for her cast.

There were helicopters again. There were jets. They stumbled into another stretch of land that was thick with lizards and snakes, and then a dead forest littered with dead beetles, and then the hike abruptly got easier.

The Sierra range had been in its third day of blizzard conditions when the plague spread. The snow stopped a lot of vehicles. They began to see the traf‚c breaking apart around sixty-‚ve hundred feet, the cars falling off the road or lined up in strange ways. Cam attributed the new patterns to bad visibility and traction. At one point Newcombe got a Ford Expedition started and they made fourteen miles in a hurry. Another time they went three miles in a van, and nearly twenty in a pickup truck. Unfortunately there were still plenty of stalls and crashes, especially wherever the road curved. In the snow, the turns had become traps. They had to leave all three of their vehicles. Thousands of four-wheel drives and military trucks and tanks had fought up through the blizzard, as had little snowmobiles and more unexpected things like farm tractors and ‚re engines, whatever was heavy enough to bull through the snow. But even these vehicles had gathered in clumps and fence-like formations. Wherever one stopped, others hit or steered wide and got stuck. The drivers had been hysterical and bleeding and blind.

Newcombe rummaged through most of the military trucks, not only looking for food and batteries but for clothing. They had all been in civilian gear they’d scavenged in Sacramento, but Newcombe took a stained Army jacket for himself. He had always found comfort in his training and experience. This was different. Ruth thought he wanted to have conducted himself well if they were captured or killed. He wanted to belong to his squad in the end, and she admired him for it.

She wasn’t sleeping well. She dreamed too much and constantly woke despite her exhaustion, as if her mind was in overdrive trying to process it all.

That the air kept getting thinner didn’t help. Any decrease in oxygen made the body anxious. The heart beat harder, and the brain reacted. Cam gave her melatonin and he gave her Tylenol PM, ‚rst a minor overdose, then as many as ‚ve pills at once. He even tried antihistamines because a side effect was drowsiness, and still Ruth muttered and twitched.

The nightmare was real.

* * * *

“Don’t touch anything,” Newcombe said, stepping backward into the rushing wind. The sky was clear and perfect but the few, thin clouds were moving very fast. The cold ripped across the desolate earth, whistling through the gaps in the small rock structure in front of them.

Cam stared into the low hut with one hand on his gun belt, although Ruth didn’t think he was aware of his defensive pose. “It looks like some kind of…like murder-suicide,” he said.

No, she thought. No, I don’t think so.

This mountaintop was a dead place. Walking across the barrier had been a dizzying experience. There were thousands of crosses scraped into the rock. The shape was everywhere. Hundreds of the marked stones had also been arranged into larger crosses themselves, laid across the ground. Some stretched as long as twenty feet. Others, made of pebbles, covered only a few inches. It was the work of countless days.

“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said.

“We need to bury them.” Ruth couldn’t bear to look at shriveled corpses anymore. She let her eyes follow the wind instead. Farther east and south, toward Tahoe, the Sierras created a high, ragged skyline as far as she could see. They’d reached ten thousand feet, but only barely. This peak stood alone above the barrier, separated by miles of open space from the nearest other peaks.

In the late afternoon, the distance looked much greater, crowded with shadows. Her grief was equally vast. Ruth’s face twisted suddenly and she slumped down, catching herself on one knee and her good hand. The marked pebbles lay all around.

Cam knelt beside her. “Ruth? Ruth, whatever happened here was a long time ago,” he said, but that didn’t change her exhaustion or her lonely despair.

How many islands were like this one?

All this way for nothing, she thought. Then, like a different voice, They suffered for nothing .

These people had lived through the ‚rst winter or even longer, stacking rocks for shelter, breaking the pine trees and brush beneath this tiny safe zone for ‚rewood. Now they were gone. There were six big graves, each too big for a single person. Two more bodies sprawled inside their pathetic little shack with no one left to put them in the ground.

A knife and a special rock lay in between the two women, a nearly round boulder etched all over with crosses. It had been used to crush the smaller woman’s head and then the last survivor seemed to have sawed open her own throat.

Cam thought there had been some sort of religious holocaust. Ruth believed the crosses were something else. They had begged the sky for salvation. They’d tried to direct their souls away from this misery. Disease had taken them. The men might have missed it, because birds had been at the corpses, but the tight rotted ‚lm of their skin was distended and black behind their ears. They had endured the machine plague only to be destroyed by another contagion.

“We need to bury these people,” Ruth said.

Cam nodded. “Okay. Okay. But there’s no shovel.”

“It’ll be dark in an hour,” Newcombe said.

“We can’t just leave them here!”

“I know what to do.” Cam walked to the shack. He set one hand on the rock wall, testing it. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved. The corner gave. Most of the branches holding the roof fell in. He hit the wall again and the rest of it collapsed. The rubble formed a poor cairn, but it would have to be enough.

“Please,” Ruth whispered. “Please be safe. Find somewhere safe.” Her words weren’t for these strangers, of course, and ultimately she hadn’t insisted on putting them to rest for their sake, either. It was a way to try to heal a few of her own terrible wounds.