Jeff Carlson - Plague War

Ruth shook her head. “There was so much radio traf‚c before we went into Sacramento and probably ten times as much after we disappeared. They could have intercepted something or heard about it from sympathizers or spies. Maybe they even saw what happened with their own satellites.”

They want me, too, she realized. They’re looking for me.

That was why they’d preemptively killed everyone on so many mountaintops, not only to spare themselves a few casualties as they charged the barrier but also to keep the nanotech from getting away. They didn’t know exactly where she was or how far the vaccine might have spread, and sorting through dozens of bodies would be far easier than chasing every American survivor into the valleys and forests.

The vaccine could be extracted easily from a corpse. In fact, with a little luck, the new enemy almost certainly hoped to ‚nd Ruth and her data index lying among the people they’d gunned down.

“She’s right,” Cam said. “You know she’s right. We gotta ‚gure they’ll be under the barrier any time now if they’re not already. They only need to ‚nd one person with it in his blood.”

The emotions in Ruth were ugly and thick. She saw the same contempt in their eyes, too. All of their choices up until this point, all of their suffering — it was wasted. They had just given the West to the new enemy, not only the scattered high points along the coast but everything from California across to the Rockies. More. They’d given up the world.

Whoever the invaders were, they were about to become the ‚rst well-equipped population to own the vaccine. They could keep it for themselves, inoculating their pilots and soldiers. They could simply retreat to their homeland, taking the vaccine with them even as they pressed their war here.

It was an incomparable advantage. They would be able to land anywhere, scavenge fuel and weapons anywhere, move troops and build defenses anywhere, whereas the U.S. and Canadian forces were still limited by the plague.

My God, she thought, dizzy with understanding.

The invasion would already be a success if the enemy thought the vaccine alone was enough. If the enemy gave up on recovering her data index, the decision had probably already been made. They could nuke everything above ten thousand feet and scrape the planet clean of anyone else. They could do it now.

Ruth pushed herself up, staggering. “We need to get out of here,” she said.

They should have stopped long before sunset, but Cam shared her urgency and they were so goddamned slow on foot. Every step counted. He wanted to get out in front again, ahead of everyone else. They had to assume that most people were also heading east, not just other Californians but the invaders, too.

They still didn’t know who it was. Life wasn’t like the movies, where heroes and villains came with stupid dialogue to make sure everyone understood what was happening. Maybe it didn’t matter, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that if they knew what they were up against it might improve their chances.

Behind them, the small arms ‚re had continued for nearly an hour, popping and cracking. More than once they’d stopped to look back, trying to place the ‚ght. Cam also wondered how many other eyes were watching. Two groups besides Gaskell’s? Could the Scouts have been that successful? He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. The planes would drive any survivors into the same plummeting maze of ridgelines and gullies, and everyone was a threat of one kind or another. But they all deserved to live. Cam had been angry with Gaskell, and yet now that those people were behind him, he was glad.

He’d come full circle. Saving them was a way to save himself. Ruth would always come ‚rst, but the two goals were dif‚cult to separate.

It was criminal to abandon anyone above the barrier. What could that possibly feel like, watching the invasion and then the activity in the valleys below with no way to move or save yourself? The idea left Cam shaking. They’d been so close. Another week, another month, and the vaccine could have reached survivors over an area of a hundred miles and thousands of lives. The invasion had stunted everything. Ultimately it might kill more Americans than had died in Leadville. Ruth was right. As soon as the new enemy immunized enough of their own men, they could put them on planes back to China or Russia to reactivate their missile bases.

How long would it be? Hours to cross the oceans, hours to power up their silos and retarget their ICBMs. The planes might have left California yesterday — but it wasn’t impossible that the rebel forces in the U.S. controlled their own missiles, some fraction of the American arsenal. Maybe there had been nuclear strikes across Asia or Europe, destroying the enemy’s capacity to hit North America again. Maybe the U.S. had already blasted the Himalayas or the mountains in Afghanistan. The invasion †eet might be the last remnant of the enemy, only powerful for the moment.

It was a cold thought, and it comforted him, because Cam was in agony. His ear smoldered with nanotech and a second infection had begun to spread through his ‚ngers. They’d walked into a hot spot.

Ruth had it, too. She lurched like a crab, trying to stay off her left foot even as she bent to that side and thumped her cast against her ribs, beating at her own pain. Cam was to blame. He’d wanted to protect her. He’d stayed in a †atter area of the valley because the going was easy, ignoring the confetti of sunbleached plastic garbage in the trees. The blast wave must have eddied here, depositing trash and a higher concentration of the plague, and at sixty-‚ve hundred feet they were far below the barrier. The trees had become ponderosa and sugar pine. The underbrush was often snarled and thick.

“ ’M sorry,” Cam said, glancing through the long shadows. He was looking for garbage in the branches as an indicator, but his mask was damp and smothering and his goggles fogged as he tried to maintain a quicker pace, stupid with exhaustion.

He led them straight into an ant colony.

* * * *

There were dozens of powdery brown cones on the ground, low circles of clean dirt as large as bread plates. Red mound ants. They had denuded the area of most of its brush and attacked many of the pines, too. Cam instinctively jogged into the clear space as he ran with his eyes up.

The colony boiled over their feet and shins before any of them noticed. Then Newcombe yelled as the ants rushed inside his pantleg, biting and stinging. “Yaaaa!”

Newcombe turned to swat his leg. Ruth fell. Cam clawed at her jacket but couldn’t keep her off of the spastic earth. The bugs were a living carpet, shiny, red, wriggling. They surged over her on every side.

“God oh God oh—” she screamed.

They were in Cam’s sleeves, too, in his collar and in his waist. He dragged Ruth up from the seething ants and †ailed at her clothes with one hand. No good. They were both crawling with tiny bodies and the twitching mass surrounded them in every direction — the ground, the trees.

Newcombe seized Ruth from behind and Cam shoved the two of them away. “Move!” he shouted. He used his pack like a club, banging it against Ruth to clear as many ants as possible.

It was the gasoline in the outer pocket that he wanted. He splashed the †uid ahead of them, very close. He was clumsy with the pack hanging on one arm and the bites like nails in his cheeks, neck, and wrists. They were near the edge of the colony. Cam saw open ground, and yet there were still ‚ve yards of writhing bugs between them and safety.

He ‚red his pistol against the mouth of the empty canteen. The ‚re seared his cheek and hair as the fumes ignited. The small explosion kicked his hands apart and he spun over backward, knocking all three of them down into the spotty blaze.