Jeff Carlson - Plague War

* * * *

They picked their way down into the growing shadows on the east side of the mountain, moving north toward a small ‚eld of snow. They wanted to stay above the barrier, but they couldn’t risk catching whatever had killed these people.

“We should scrub our boots and gloves,” Newcombe said.

“Let’s hit that snow.” Cam gestured. “We can use some for water, too.”

Ruth squeezed one of the etched pebbles in her hand. She had taken it in secret. She didn’t know why, except that the impulse had been too strong to repress. “I don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “Everyone there…”

Cam stayed with her as Newcombe ranged ahead. “It won’t be like that on every island,” he said. “We’ll ‚nd somebody.”

“But that’s what I mean. If there was anything good about the machine plague, it’s that most diseases must have been wiped out at the same time. The †u. Strep. The population’s too scattered.”

“Don’t people carry a lot of that stuff inside them even when they’re not really sick?”

He had EMT training, she knew. She nodded. “Yes.”

“So some islands would just be unlucky. The people get weak, they’re always cold, a virus takes over.” Cam hesitated, then said, “It’s not your fault. You know that.”

“You mean some diseases might have adapted.” Ruth seized on that part of what he’d said because she didn’t know how to answer to the rest. “Yes. We’re going to have to be more careful. There might be other islands that… Some islands might be Typhoid Marys, where everyone’s built speci‚c immunities that we don’t have.”

“How do we test for that?”

“I don’t know.” Some islands would also be thick with rats and †eas, pests that were extinct everywhere else for lack of hosts. “If we ‚nd anyone who’s obviously sick, we might have to back off. Leave them alone.” Ruth pushed her thumb against the patterns etched into the rock, her mind reeling with quiet horror.

There was another threat they were certain to ‚nd among the pockets of survivors. Insanity and delusion could prove to be an even greater problem than disease. Aboard the ISS, Gustavo had reported religious fervor in Mexico, Afghanistan, the Alps, and Micronesia. Holy men had risen everywhere in the apocalypse.

Ruth had never had much use for God. People cited the mysteries and wisdom of faith, pointing to the great understanding of their teachings, but what they’d really done was to close their minds against the true complexity of the planet, to say nothing of the incomprehensibly vast universe. The idea was laughable. What kind of half-wit God would bother to create billions of other galaxies if Earth was the focus of His energies?

It was a very human thing to believe. People were lazy. They were egocentric. Ruth understood wanting a small, controlled world. No one liked uncertainty. It tested the boundaries of human curiosity and intelligence. The monkey was still very strong in modern man. The monkey had limited patience, so people resisted time and change. They developed rationales to show that they were the center of everything, ‚ghting to teach “intelligent design” in schools instead of biology and science. Nonsense. Tall parents tended to have tall kids. Short parents tended to have short kids. Everyone wasn’t identical. It was that easy to see — evolution in a single generation. Otherwise people would have been perfect clones of each other throughout history. To think that life was immutable was a fantasy. Bacteria grew drug-resistant. Dogs could be cultivated into ridiculously specialized breeds like her step-father’s terrier. Religions themselves had evolved with time, some growing more open, some more closed.

There were real answers if you sought the truth. The world was knowable. That was what she’d learned, but it was hard. She would have liked to feel that a larger hand was guiding her, but why her and not the people who died on this mountaintop? Because they were evil?

Ruth clenched down on the pebble again as a slow, stubborn fury worked its way through her. She wouldn’t stop. That was what the rock meant to her. She couldn’t stop even though her feet were broken and sore and her arm was throbbing in its cast.

“Hey!” Newcombe shouted. He stood on an open granite slope about ‚fty yards downhill, waving his arms.

At ‚rst Ruth thought he was warning them away. More bodies? Then she realized he was pointing east and she brie†y glanced down at the rock inside her ‚st, struck by doubt and new hope.

“Look,” she said, touching Cam in celebration.

Far across the valley, barely visible in the yellow dusk, a thread of smoke rose from another mountaintop.

* * * *

It took them two days to hike down and up. Once they saw a large, slow C-130 cargo plane in the south, dragging long cables through the air that Newcombe said were a sensor array. Once there were more snakes.

The cook‚res were repeated both days, late in the morning and again at sunset. There was de‚nitely someone up there, but who? Would soldiers give themselves away?

* * * *

Ruth jostled Cam from a dead sleep and he twisted up into the pale moonlight with his hand balled in a ‚st.

“Shh, it’s okay,” she said.

The moon was a gleaming white crescent in the valley, low enough to the horizon that it appeared nearly level with them at ninety-‚ve hundred feet. Its light cast bars of shadows from the tree trunks — and the shadows moved, creaking. There was a chill breeze in the treetops and the forest was alive. The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang. Ree ree ree ree. The mindless noise lifted and fell on the wind, invading every lull in the sound of the trees.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He relaxed. His mask rustled as he opened his mouth, but he kept quiet. He only nodded and Ruth felt a small, quixotic smile. A lot of things were wrong, obviously. The whole fucking world was wrong. Maybe he’d been about to make the same joke, but there had been new tension between them.

“I’m sorry,” Ruth continued. For what? She was still kneeling very close to him and she tipped her head back, trying to redirect his attention away from herself. “It’s supposed to be Newcombe’s shift, but I thought…I wanted to talk again. Without him.”

“Yeah.”

She had volunteered to stand guard through the ‚rst six hours of the night because tomorrow she would stay behind as the men hiked the rest of the way up without her. She would be safe down here. They knew there was no one else below the barrier, whereas the islands above might hold any number of threats.

Ruth had spent three hours in darkness before she woke Cam, three hours with the bugs and the wind. Her head was crowded with fear and loss and distance, poised on this invisible border with thousands of miles of dead zone below them and tiny safe areas above that might not be safe after all.

She didn’t know how to say good-bye.

She owed Cam her life. She should have been able to give him the response he wanted, even if she hadn’t felt an honest attraction. She was tempted. She had become too self-conscious of her backpack whenever she reached into it for water or food or a clean face mask, being very careful to let neither man see the glossy purple box of condoms. She needed comfort and warmth, and yet Cam still frightened her. It wasn’t only the capacity for violence that she saw in him, but his own wretched hunger. She was afraid to get too near because she couldn’t predict how he would react, so she was quiet, sitting beside him in the whispering night.

There was another danger that Ruth had kept to herself. She didn’t want to rush Cam and Newcombe. Her science team had not incorporated the hypobaric fuse into the vaccine, so that it wouldn’t self-destruct like the plague, but the vaccine was also unlike the plague in another way. It was able to replicate only by attacking and breaking down a single target — its rival. Every minute they spent above the barrier was a new danger, because without its ongoing war against the plague, the vaccine had no way to maintain its own numbers. In fact, if they stayed too long they might become trapped like anyone else after sweating it out, exhaling it, losing it by the millions each time they went to the bathroom.