Jeff Carlson - Plague War

“They could be American,” Ruth said. “Overseas military.”

“No. We pulled everybody back. No way.” Newcombe cinched his sleeping bag into a tight bundle and laid it next to his pack, strapping the two together. “This was choreographed with the bomb. Don’t you get it? The electromagnetic pulse must have blinded our radar and communications across the entire hemisphere, which gave them a big fat chance to sneak in without anyone seeing them. First they stayed back far enough to make sure the EMP didn’t hurt them. Now they’re here. Shit.”

“Aren’t the Japanese on our side?” Cam asked. He didn’t think Japan had nuclear weapons, or the Koreans, but China did and there was no way to know who had stolen what.

Newcombe grunted, huh . “Maybe it’s somebody all the way out of Europe. We had a lot of bases there, too, and I know the plague hit before we cleaned everything out.” He began to load Ruth’s pack for her, picking up a can opener, a dirty fork, and a half-empty canteen.

A miniscule orange blossom licked up from a peak in the south. “They crashed,” Ruth said.

Then there was another puff of ‚re and a third. To Cam’s eyes, it appeared that the second explosion was in the sky. A missile? Someone was shooting at the new enemy.

“Leadville’s forward base,” he said.

“Yeah.” Newcombe quickly returned to packing but Cam stared at the distant battle, wondering if there was any reason to cheer. An odd feeling. They’d been trying to avoid the jets and choppers out of Leadville’s forward base for weeks, but now he was glad there was an American power in the Sierras.

The gun‚re that hammered them was from behind. Cam whirled to see one of the new ‚ghters stra‚ng a mountaintop about four miles to the north. One of the larger planes also made a leisurely pass, its right side erupting with incredible force. Smoke and light burst from its guns. Each hail of bullets was as large and straight-edged as a city block, two huge rectangular patches.

The wind took the shredded brown earth away in sheets and Cam felt that paralyzing fear again. The new enemy was decimating any survivors who might resist after they landed, and there was nothing he could do against such strength.

He tried to shake his numbness. “We’ll be okay,” he said as much to himself as to Ruth. “They don’t care about us. This mountain’s too small.”

“Okay,” she said.

Someone was invading California.

The three of them strode onto the mountaintop with their guns drawn. They made a triangle with Newcombe’s assault ri†e in front and Ruth and Cam on either side. She knew they must have looked faceless and alien in their masks and tattered gear as they staggered into sight. Ruth felt her pulse slamming through her limbs, but her good arm was anchored by the weight of her pistol.

“Stop!” a man shouted. Thin, black, he had blots of pink rash on his nose and chin. He’d turned his shoulder as if to hide the stub of a knife in his hand — or to put his full weight into swinging it.

Behind him, a white girl crouched and grabbed up a rock, and the rest of the loose crowd seemed to duck at the same time. The sound was very human. Voices. Boots. They created a small rustle of bodies against the endless drone of the planes and suddenly Ruth was aware again of how exposed they must be on this light-washed peak. The day was coming to an end. They stood far above the sunset. Ruth’s shadow stretched away in front of her, joined with the outlines of Newcombe and Cam, whereas the others’ eyes and teeth glinted in the orange dusk.

Some of the strangers hid in their low stone-and-earth burrows. Most of them spread out. Ruth focused on a limping man who quickly reappeared from behind the nearest shelter. He paced sideways to †ank her, holding a shovel like a spear. His face was lopsided by old blister rash and a badly cauterized wound. He had only one eye.

“Gun,” Cam breathed. Ruth’s gaze †ickered left to his side of the rock ‚eld. There was a shaggy-haired man with a hunting ri†e and her heart beat so hard that it felt like it had stopped, one painful throb and then nothing else.

“What do you want!” the ‚rst man shouted.

“We’re American,” Newcombe said, but the words came out like a bark. He was panting. Ruth and Cam, too. The rush up through the ‚nal hundred yards onto this island had taken everything from her. It was an effort just to stay on her feet. Each of them stood bent by their individual pains. Ruth hunched over her bad arm and Newcombe had set his ri†e against his hip like a crutch. “American,” he said.

The other man kept circling closer. Fifteen feet away. The round blade of his shovel was blunted but shiny, worn bright by the hard ground. Ruth twitched violently and straightened up through the pain in her side. She made sure he could see her pistol, but there was no change in his dead face.

“There might be more of them,” the girl said, and the black man shouted, “Just get out of here!”

Cam found his breath ‚rst. “U.S. Army Special Forces,” he said, tipping his head down at Newcombe’s shoulder patch. His pistol never wavered. “We’re here to help, so tell him to back off!”

“U.S. Army,” the black man repeated.

“We can stop the plague.” Newcombe took one hand from his ri†e to push his goggles up, showing his face. “Look at us. How do you think we got here?”

“They’re dropping people all over the place,” the girl said to the black man. “They could be anybody.”

The evening sky hummed with far-off jets. There had been a second wave of transports three hours after the lead groups, and then a few stragglers, and the invaders had kept a good number of ‚ghters in the air. Mostly the noise was a distant soaring whisper. The jets stayed high, but if the wind faltered or if a jet crossed nearby, the sound could be intense. Twice more they’d seen mountains torn clear by gun‚re. Just standing here was like stepping in front of a train, waiting to get hit. Ruth understood their paranoia, but looking at the one-eyed man’s cold poise, she also had no doubt that the plague year had long ago turned some of these people into animals.

“We can protect you from the plague,” Cam said. “There’s a new kind of nanotech.”

“We came to help,” Newcombe said.

The black man shook his head slowly as if rejecting them. It was a signal. The girl lowered the ‚st she’d made around her rock and the one-eyed man paused in his closing arc toward Ruth. Nearby, another man and two women also relaxed, although they didn’t drop their knives or clubs. One was hugely pregnant. The other had a fair complexion that had burned and peeled and burned again.

There were about twenty survivors here, Ruth guessed. Cam and Newcombe had made only a brief effort to survey this island before all three of them lurched into camp, still afraid that there could be Leadville troops lying in wait. Despite everything else, that threat was still very real.

Newcombe tipped his ri†e down. Ruth let her pistol fall to her side, but Cam kept his weapon up. “We need to see everybody out in the open,” Cam said. “Is it just you guys here?”

“What?” The man frowned, then glanced out into the great open space of the valley. “Nobody’s landed, if that’s what you mean. Not yet.” He was delaying, Ruth thought, reluctant to put his tribe in a line in front of their guns. He gestured at the roaring sky and said, “What the fuck is going on?”

* * * *

Cam refused to spend the night on the mountain. “We’re leaving in ‚ve minutes,” he said, kneeling as he unwrapped the dirty, stained gauze from his hand. One of the men had fetched a plastic bowl that Cam set on the ground beside his knife.