Jeff Carlson: Plague War

Go, she told herself, hefting her pack. The two men were puncturing every last jar and can and they’d ‚nish in seconds. They’d be right behind her.

Ruth jogged into the maze of cars and skeletons, trying to keep her head down. The choppers hadn’t moved and she angled away from the noise as much as possible, staggering once when her boot caught in a drift of bones. Then she ricocheted off a brown minivan and hunkered down, coughing, sick with exhaustion. Her face and mouth throbbed but she was mostly free of ants. She rose just enough to peer through the dusty windows of a sedan, trying to spot the enemy.

Some of the soldiers had fallen in the low, living fog. They staggered up, but somehow one man’s suit had ripped. Maybe he’d caught it on the fence. Ruth thought his rubberized sleeve was †apping at the elbow, although it was impossible to tell in the leaping black mass of ants.

His ragged arm swung up like a †ag, trailing a dark mist of blood and insects. The bugs were inside him. His shape barely looked human anymore, knotting and jerking as he was eaten alive. Two of the other soldiers tried to lift him away but a third soldier rammed himself into the bleeding man and knocked him down, pointing his submachine gun at the man’s chest.

No, Ruth thought. The realization left her stunned. No, he’s aiming at his friend’s arm .

The weapon blazed, amputating the furious buldge of ants but leaving the man’s body wide open to more. Ruth couldn’t watch. She jerked her eyes away, looking for Cam and Newcombe. But there was another horror behind her. New eruptions had come up out of the earth and covered the road like smoke. There was also a reddish streak pushing in from the northeast, beetles or something else. At the same time, another phenomenon stirred through the haze of ants. The machine plague. Even the bugs were not immune, as Ruth had long suspected. In their frenzy, the ants were generating too much heat despite the cool May afternoon — and within the cloud, holes burst open like ‚reworks as the ants disintegrated.

Ruth stared in mute awe. Then her heart leapt as a human form sprinted between two cars nearby. Cam. He ran with an odd limping motion, swatting at his collar and hood. Newcombe appeared close behind. Ruth waved frantically even as she cut her eyes back to the enemy, trying to see the wounded soldier again.

One glimpse convinced her. Newcombe was right. Leadville had almost certainly detected some trace of her group, but as the helicopters †ew in, the larger heat signature of the ant colony had deceived them. Now they were done. It was a spectacular mess. Dense spirals of ants whipped through downdrafts and currents as the last men on the ground †ed, hauling the bloodied soldier aboard a crowded †ight deck. He was limp now, dead or unconscious, but the writhing shadow of ants remained attached to him even after his friends kicked and slapped at his body.

The other chopper was already lifting away and Ruth allowed herself a small, savage smile.

It looked like her luck was holding.

The water gleamed in the sunrise, white and treacherous. “Stop,” Cam said, even as he took several more steps himself— but now he moved sideways instead of forward, feeling wary and restless.

There was no wind this morning and the valley below them held a †at inland sea, dazzling in the light. The highway disappeared into it, although he saw the road hump up again brie†y about two miles off. The water wasn’t deep. It was rotting and stagnant, cluttered with buildings and power lines and cars. Spiderwebs. Small patches of silk clung to the ruins by the thousands.

“Where are we?” Ruth asked behind him, and Cam said, “Stop. Stay there.” Then he realized his voice was too harsh and he shook his head. “Sorry.”

“You’ve been here before,” she said, her eyes searching for his through their dirty goggles.

“Yeah.”

He knew she’d lived in Ohio and Florida, and Newcombe said he grew up in Delaware, but there was little question that Cam’s parents and brothers lay dead somewhere on these same roads. Maybe they’d even made it this far. Northern California had once rivaled Los Angeles for bad traf‚c, however, because the greater Bay Area sat in a massive delta crammed with rivers and gullies, which meant bridges, levees, and bottlenecks.

He was not as sad as she probably thought. The land down here was too strange and dangerous to be home. More than anything, Cam felt frustrated, trying to grasp the scale of what they were facing.

Their goal looked close enough. They wanted to spread the vaccine to other survivors, and the Sierras made an imposing band across the horizon — brown foothills, dark mountains — like a wall of pyramids with the highest peaks still capped in snow. In another life he’d driven there in three hours. But those memories were deceptive. As the land rose, it buckled, and walking all the way there would have been an up-and-down nightmare even without the traf‚c and other wreckage.

The city in front of them was Citrus Heights, one of the nicer suburbs that made up the dense urban sprawl all around Sacramento. It had burned before it drowned. Despite the name, most of the Heights sat on the same low plain as its neighbors. This quiet marsh must have seen a torrent of water when it ‚rst went under, judging from the debris wedged against the slumping homes and telephone poles as high as three feet up. There were mud banks among the overturned cars and snarls of brush and charred lumber, all of it softened by the glimmering white silk of webs and egg sacs. The water kept the spiders safe from the ants.

“Let’s check your map again,” Cam said, but Newcombe had the same idea. Newcombe was unbuttoning a pouch on his jacket as he strode closer.

Cam looked back at the glinting sea. They had been lucky not to run into other new basins and swamps before now. Hundreds of miles of earthworks spread across northern California, channeling the †ow down from the mountains. Two winters with no one at the gates had been too much. Everywhere they’d seen plant life sick or destroyed entirely — and without grass and reeds, the levees were vulnerable.

“What do you think,” Cam said. “North, right?”

“We have to go north anyway.” Newcombe crouched easily and set his map on the asphalt, moving his glove to the hooked line of pen marks he’d drawn.

Cam bent more slowly, careful of his right knee. Ruth settled down with a thump. She was clearly desperate to rest, but so awkward with her cast. He saw her raise her good hand to her face mask to scratch her bites.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “Look.” East of the city, the American River had been dammed on two sides to form a giant, square-cornered lake. Some part of that huge berm must have given way. Cam covered a section of the map with his glove and said, “If this whole valley is †ooded, we’ll actually need to go west to work around it. That could take forever.”

“North was our direction,” Newcombe said.

“Cam knows the area,” Ruth said, and he was glad.

It was childish, but he was glad. He said, “We don’t want to be down here any longer than we have to.”

“We stay north,” Newcombe said, drawing his ‚nger south across one short inch of map. “The other guys must be around here, maybe a little farther. It’s just not smart to bunch up and make it any easier to ‚nd us.”

Cam only nodded, sifting through his doubt.

There had been two more people with them in downtown Sacramento, Captain Young and Todd Brayton, another scientist like Ruth. The division was obvious. It meant a better chance that someone would reach elevation with the vaccine, so they had angled away from each other as quickly as possible. But they faced another problem. By the second day, Newcombe became certain that Leadville had established a forward base in the Sierras, probably straight east of Sacramento. There was no other way they could mount so many helicopter searches. The range from Colorado was too far.