Jeff Carlson - Plague War

Ruth went into herself. In fact, her concentration wasn’t wholly unlike sleeping. She moved in a trance, keeping just enough of her mind on the surface to be aware of Cam’s jacket and the rough ground between them. Everything outside this tunnel she tried to ignore. Her thirst. Her feet. The sun was high in the forest and †ies buzzed all around.

“Sst!” Cam turned and hooked his arm, catching her. Ruth immediately knelt with him beneath the scraping branches of a juniper, trusting his decision to hide.

Newcombe had ducked down across from them and continued to inch away on his knees and one hand, but he’d kept his ri†e over his shoulder. He was still holding his binoculars, so Ruth nudged Cam, a silent question. Cam pointed out through the trees. There was smoke on another slope not far away to the north, nearly level with them. A ‚re? Ruth was too tired for fear. She only waited. Finally, Newcombe stood up and walked back to them, and she felt Cam relax when the other man rose from his position.

“It’s a plane,” Newcombe said. “A ‚ghter. It’s messed up pretty good, but from what I can see it’s an old Soviet MiG. I mean really old, twenty, thirty years, like something they would have mothballed back in the eighties. My guess is it shorted out when he prepped to land or ran out of fuel before he got to a tanker. I don’t know. We haven’t seen any ‚ghting, right?”

“Not close by,” Cam said.

“He could have limped away from the Leadville base,” Newcombe agreed. “But why come this far when they’re on mountaintops all over the place? I think he just went down.”

Ruth managed to talk. “Is he dead?”

“He probably chuted out. Hiked up hours ago.” Newcombe knelt with them and shrugged out his pack. He found water and gave it to her. “You sound awful.”

“I’m okay,” she rasped.

“You didn’t see me waving right in your face,” Cam said. “Let’s stop and eat. Thirty minutes.”

“Make it an hour,” Newcombe said. “I want to run over there and see if I can pull the radio. There might even be a survival kit if the pilot didn’t get out.”

First he stayed with them to eat. He shared the last dry fragments of beef jerky in his pack, spreading his map to show Cam and Ruth where he wanted to rejoin them. Chewing on the leathery meat made her jaws ache even as it softened and burst with †avor. Cam opened one can of soup. They also pulled several handfuls of grass and ate the sweet roots.

The radio spluttered beside Newcombe, catching erratic bursts of voices. American voices. All of it was thick with static, but they caught the phrase saying Colorado and then to this channel and Newcombe forgot about the wrecked ‚ghter.

They needed to reestablish contact with either the rebel

U.S. forces or the Canadians. A rendezvous seemed like their only option now. For twenty minutes Newcombe tried again and again to raise someone even though he didn’t have the transmitting power, captivated by the possibility of real information.

All forces stand. Repeating this. Of civil.

Waiting was a mistake. They weren’t the only ones who’d seen the smoke across the valley. “Turn it off,” Cam said, shoving his bandaged left hand against Newcombe like a club.

Ruth jumped. There were other human sounds in the forest now. The voices called to each other, coming fast. She’d regained some energy with the food and water, and with it her senses had expanded again. The group was above them, angling across the slope. Was it Gaskell?

The three of them pressed in tight beneath the junipers. Newcombe’s ri†e clacked once as he braced it against his pack, but the group passed without noticing them. Ruth had a clear look at one man and glimpses of others, a white man in a ‚lthy blue jacket with a rag over his mouth. No glasses or goggles. He did not appear to be armed and Ruth thought they were probably natives, not invaders. They spoke English.

“I said just stop for a minute—”

“—from the †ies!”

They were loud to keep themselves brave, exactly like the Scouts had done. They probably couldn’t believe anyone else was down here. They were still in shock at this change in their lives, and Ruth surprised herself. She smiled. She knew that if she popped up and yelled like a jack-in-the-box, they would absolutely shit themselves. That was kind of funny.

Newcombe stirred from under the tree and stood listening. Then he knelt and spread his map. “The Scouts must have reached this island here,” he said. “We don’t know those people.”

“Do we talk to them?” Ruth asked.

“I say no. We don’t want to get tied up with anybody.”

Cam shook his head, too. “They already have the vaccine.”

But the other group was obviously in fair shape. Ruth was sure that Gaskell’s tribe couldn’t hike at that pace. The lesson learned was that anyone who was weak, hungry, and hurt was fundamentally less trustworthy — including themselves.

She wished their little trio could have kept some of the Scouts with them. She needed help. The boys could have carried her gear and supported her.

“What about the plane?” she said.

“They’re headed right for it and we can’t wait,” Newcombe said. “They might be there all day. It might attract others, too. This was a bad place to rest.”

They slipped off carefully, keeping to the trees rather than moving into any open space. Ruth glanced back with the same regret she’d felt when they split from Gaskell’s people, until she pulled together a more important idea despite her exhaustion. It was the real reason for her doubt.

If the vaccine’s already spread to that many islands, the invaders might have it, too, she realized.

* * * *

Gunshots rattled through the valley, two or three hunting ri†es and then the heavier stutter of machine guns. Cam and Ruth immediately went to ground again and Newcombe joined them against a thatch of brush. They’d gone less than a mile since encountering the other group.

“Those are AK-47s,” Newcombe said. “Russian or Chinese. Arab. That ‚ts with the MiGs. I think it’s one of them.”

Meanwhile the echoes came and went, pop, pop , the lighter ri†es mixed with the deeper kng kng kng kng of the other guns, a small, personal battle for territory inside the larger war. Ruth thought it was happening on a peak to the north behind them, but she wasn’t certain that the ‚ghting was above the barrier. They’d changed the world again. The plague zones were reawakening. For the ‚rst time in sixteen months, men and women ‚lled the silence — murdering each other. The truth made Ruth sick in her heart.

“You said a lot of the planes are Russian, too,” Cam said.

“Yeah, but they’ve been selling weapons tech in Asia and the Middle East for sixty years. Could be China.”

They knew, Ruth thought, but she didn’t want to believe it, so she spoke the words as a question. “What if they knew?”

“What?” Cam looked up from his boot, where he was tightening down his laces again.

“Why come to California if they didn’t know about the vaccine?” It made too much sense. “Why not †y someplace where they wouldn’t have to ‚ght so hard?”

“Actually, this might be pretty easy,” Newcombe said with a strange gleam in his eye. Pride. “Who’s in their way here?” he asked. “A few red-blooded guys with deer ri†es? Every other place above the barrier is covered with armies.”

“But they’re right up against the American military,” Ruth said. “We’re just a couple hours away for planes, right?”

“You mean from Leadville? They’re gone. And don’t expect much out of the rebels or the Canadians. The whole continent is still blind after the EMP and might be for days. It’s perfect. They hit us hard, came in fast, and now they’re digging in.”