Jeff Carlson: Plague War

Then her gaze shot back to Newcombe’s gear and froze there in sudden understanding. The top †ap was unbuckled and Ruth saw their radio inside, a med kit, socks. No food.

The decoys had been Cam’s idea, exploiting this strange environment. Struggling to feed themselves, they’d found stores and homes scoured clean, everything in boxes or paper bags demolished, so Cam and Newcombe had included as many cans of lard and syrup in their packs as they could carry. It was a clever plan. There were no other living heat sources down here, which could have made them comparatively easy to spot. Six times now, Newcombe had run north or gone back west to leave food traps, drawing in huge frenzies of roaches, ants, beetles, and †ies. Frenzies of heat and noise. Two days ago he’d rejoined them as a hazy black storm swelled on the horizon, a violent fog of competing species and colonies, and that had been at least a mile away. How many cans had Newcombe just hacked open?

Cam regularly dosed them with a foul mix of bug spray and perfume, yes, perfume, to hide the mammal smell of their sweat and pheromones, but they weren’t more than twenty yards from the truck. If there was a swarm, they would be in the middle of it.

Ruth clenched her left ‚st, a new habit to ‚ght for control— to punish herself. Several days ago, both bones had been snapped at the wrist, and the grind in the break was always a distraction. She wanted to be more like her friends. She wanted to be as relentless. Her own pack was the lightest and she clawed at it now, too clumsy with her arm in its cast. Somehow her ‚lthy mask had pulled down and she gulped clean-tasting air without regret. Dust and hot sun.

Ruth carried the data index from the archos lab, a few computer discs and a sample case of nano-structures. She also had a grenade. She believed it was better to destroy the index than to let it be captured. A brutal choice. The design work might be used to truly defeat the machine plague, but it could also lead to advanced new weaponized nanotech and Leadville had already used a crude nano “snow†ake” to liquefy sixteen hundred men and women on the White River Plateau, rebels who dared to try to race them to the archos lab. If the soldiers overran her, if the bugs tore her apart—

She closed her ‚ngers on the hard, wire pin of the grenade as the choppers ripped into the sky, sunlight †ashing from metal and Plexiglas.

There was no way to keep the vaccine itself from them. Even if she and Cam and Newcombe set a hundred cars on ‚re, consuming themselves, the microscopic nanotech could still be harvested from their remains, and the human race had been pushed too close to the brink to destroy the vaccine outright. It was better to let Leadville have it than no one, but that was a dangerous idea. It felt like failure.

Ruth stared at the roaring aircraft and let her hatred and bitterness ‚ll her. In that instant, she knew she could do it. She tensed her hand on the arming pin.

“Down!” Cam hit her bad shoulder and Ruth fell, gasping. She was vaguely aware of Newcombe behind him. The other man had hidden against a red commuter car and then Cam blinded her, throwing his body over her head and chest.

She fought him, trying to get to her pack again. He didn’t understand and kept shouting, “Down, stay dow—”

Above them, the deafening thunder veered away. The change was abrupt and distinct. At the same time, a blast wave of twitchy black muck spattered across her bare face and goggles. Ants. Shredded ants.

Ruth bent back from it and screamed, trapped between the road and Cam’s weight. Then he swiped at the black rain with his entire upper body and she was free.

A huge spout of insects jetted into the sky. They were carpenter ants, well out of their normal reproductive cycle. Maybe they were always breeding now. The nests and passageways of their colony extended ‚fty yards in every direction beyond the berm of the highway and the ground there had exploded with thousands of winged males and immature queens, although Ruth saw only the aftereffect of the swarm’s collision with the helicopters. The billowing hole immediately ‚lled in again, a cloud of small bodies ready for war.

They were protecting the food that Newcombe had left out. The truck formed a crumpled wall near the center of the storm, fortunately. It de†ected most of the †ying ants as well as the warriors and worker drones that boiled across the earth. Backwash from the helicopters had dragged the upper layers away, too — and on the far side, the bugs also found competition.

Fourteen months ago, in the space of a few weeks, the ants’ food supply had skyrocketed and then dropped off again and the tiny scavengers had evolved to meet the change, ravaging every opportunity, surviving by aggression alone. The Leadville troops would have only a residue of human scent on their containment suits, but they were new. They were moving. And they were nearly on top of the colony.

Dark threads swirled together in the air and lashed down out of Ruth’s sight, twisting up and back in the cyclone winds. Both helicopters had swung away but one went low as the other climbed, its engines straining, clogged with ants. In some brief gap in the noise Ruth heard the rattle of submachine guns on full auto, the soldiers ‚ghting back any way they could.

Then she recoiled, her cheek and neck burning with half a dozen bites. “Aaaaa—”

The wet blast of ants that painted her were not all dead. Not by far. Many had been chewed apart by the rotors and many more were stunned, some of them stuck in the moisture of their own pulverized companions, but some were still free, and confused and enraged.

Ruth fell to the ground, clubbing at her face and neck. One thought stayed with her. My pack . She looked for it as she tottered back onto her knees and Cam was there, stumbling through the junk of his own upturned pack. He had a handful of little glass bottles. He fumbled off the caps and made a pitching motion at her. Perfume. Sweet. It scalded her nostrils and Ruth clutched at her face mask, roughly dragging the fabric up to dislodge any ants still on her cheeks.

“Where—” she said, but he caught her arm, shaking the rest of the bottles out over their heads.

Newcombe joined them, bumping hard. He had a squeeze bottle of insect repellant and punched it against her, crushing ants, spraying juice. It was like breathing turpentine.

“I don’t think they’ve seen us!” Newcombe yelled.

But the drumbeat of the choppers changed again, coming back.

“Run for the culvert!” Cam shouted at her.

“Where’s my pack?”

“No, stay down!” Newcombe yelled. “If they see—”

“I have more trap food! There!” Cam yanked at Ruth even as he knelt, propelling her toward the Mercedes and her backpack. “If we stay here we’ll die!” he shouted.

He was right. The sun was fading as the bugs thickened. In the shifting new pitch of sound, Ruth understood that one of the chopper pilots must be using his aircraft like a powerful fan, blowing the swarm off of the ground troops.

Off of them and onto us.

“Go! Run!” Cam hollered, jamming a knife into a can of milk. But she hesitated.

He threw the dripping can as hard as he could and bent to stab at another, ignoring the haze of ants on his gloves and knees. He was like that, quick to make the best decision. Cam Najarro was neither a soldier nor a scientist, but he had lived through the entire plague year on a barren, isolated peak where eighty people were ultimately reduced to six by starvation and cold and bugs and madness, and that was an education of a kind that few could match.

He was a good man, though profoundly wounded — and maybe not entirely sane, Ruth sometimes worried. He was so single-minded. He had committed himself to her even before she suggested that advances in nanotech might someday rebuild his damaged body, taking on every role available to him. Scout. Bodyguard. Friend. It was wrong that he should stay while she escaped. Wrong to waste his effort.