Jeff Carlson - Plague War

Lord God, Ruth thought, ‚ghting her claustrophobia. She leaned her goggles against the window as if to escape, but the air beyond the scratched Plexiglas was a tangle of far-off jets and burning mountain peaks.

Cam’s seat belt cut into his hips as the plane jerked and bumped. The pilots had shoulder restraints. The rest of them did not and the †ight was like a roller coaster, tipping and diving. Again and again his seat snapped away from him, even with the belt cinched down.

Hills and rock whipped past the windows. A city. Once they paralleled a line of utility wires for a few seconds, dozens of poles stuttering by. It was a disappointment. They’d suffered so badly to get here and they still weren’t safe, although they were free of the plague. The Cessna 172 was not a pressurized aircraft, but the cabin windows and the cockpit glass had been sealed with silicon caulk, as had the instrument and control pass-throughs, the hatches, and one of the two doors. There was a vacuum pump bolted to the †oor, exhausting to the outside. It was a crude ‚x, but it worked. The pilot had leveled out for two minutes while the copilot applied a fast-setting caulk to the inside of the remaining door. Then they’d lowered the air density within the plane to the equivalent of eleven thousand feet.

“We’re okay!” the copilot called back, reading from a gauge strapped to his wrist.

Cam tore off his goggles and mask, scrubbing his bare hands against his beard, nose, and ears in a frenzy of relief. Ruth removed her gear more woodenly and he saw that her face was drained white.

“Look at me,” Cam said, leaning close to be heard over the engine noise. Then they tumbled left and banged their heads together. “Don’t look at the windows, look at me.”

She nodded but didn’t comply. Beneath her matted brown curls, her eyes were wide and dull, as if she was seeing something else. Cam knew the feeling. They were incredibly low. One mistake could †y them into a building or a hillside, and the back of his neck crawled with nervous strain. Would they know if missiles were closing in?

“We’ll be ‚ne,” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice was shaky and she clenched his hand in her own, bare skin on skin.

“Where are we headed?” Newcombe yelled toward the front. Cam felt a pang of worry for his friend. Newcombe didn’t have anyone to comfort, and Cam would have grabbed his arm or his shoulder if Newcombe were in the same row.

“Colorado,” the pilot shouted.

“What? Isn’t that where the nuke hit?”

“Leadville, yeah.” The plane veered left again and then jack-hammered up and to the right. “We’re out of Grand Lake, about a hundred miles north of there,” the pilot shouted. “The fallout didn’t reach us.”

* * * *

He answered their questions as best he could during the two-and-a-half-hour †ight. The plane settled down once they were out of the desert, but he obviously shared their tension and welcomed the distraction. He knew who they were. He was proud to serve. “You guys look like shit,” he said like a compliment.

* * * *

Grand Lake was among the largest of the U.S. rebel bases. They landed on a thin road and Cam saw a scattering of jets and choppers on either side, many of them draped in camou†age netting. Nearby stood four long barracks of wood and canvas. There were no trees. The land was trampled brown mud. There were people everywhere. These peaks were inhabited over an area of several square miles in a shape like a horseshoe. From the plane, Cam had seen tents, huts, trucks, and trailers spread across the rough terrain along with hundreds of ditches and rock berms. Latrines? Windbreaks? Or did those holes and simple walls serve as homes for people with nothing better?

Grand Lake had been a small town set on the banks of its namesake, a fold of blue water caught in a spectacular box canyon just nine miles west of the Continental Divide. It sat at eighty-four hundred feet elevation and couldn’t have supported many more than its original population of three thousand in any case, but during the ‚rst weeks of the plague, its streets had served as a staging ground for convoys and aircraft. The roads and trails that rose into the surrounding land became lifelines to safe altitude. Soon afterward the town itself was demolished for building material and other supplies.

From above, the movements of the ‚rst evacuation efforts were still visible, like tidemarks in the sand. Many of the vehicles didn’t look as if they’d moved since then, packed in among the refugee camps. In places the trucks and tanks also functioned as barriers, squeezing the population in some directions while protecting the people on the other side. There were also open areas where they seemed to be farming or preparing to farm, digging at the mountainsides to create level patches. Some looked better planned than others.

Cam’s impression was one of entrenched chaos, but he felt admiration that they were here at all. They’d done so much better than anything he’d known in California. They had more room and more resources, but more survivors, too. They could have lost control. They could have been overwhelmed. Instead, they’d kept tens of thousands of people alive even as they maintained a signi‚cant military strength.

The chaos had increased nine days ago. Cam saw that, too. Grand Lake was only ninety-six miles from Leadville. They had yet to recover from the damage. Many of the shelters were still being rebuilt and there was litter everywhere, often in long patches and streamers that ran northward in the direction of the pulse. The blast wave had swept through this area like a giant comb, tearing away fences, walls, and tents — and aircraft.

As they taxied and braked, Cam noticed a jet ‚ghter up the slope that had overturned and caught ‚re. Nearby, another F-22 still hung in a cradle of chains attached to a bulldozer as a team of engineers struggled to excavate beneath the plane, trying to right it again without damaging its wings.

“I’ll run interference for you if I can,” their pilot said, gesturing to the other side of the Cessna.

“Thank you, sir.” Newcombe spoke for them all.

At least a hundred men and women stood beside the road, grouped among the trucks and raised netting. Cam was on edge. The crowd was ‚ve times as many people as he’d seen in one place since the plague. In fact, a hundred people were nearly more than he’d seen alive at all, not counting helicopters and planes. He touched his face. He turned to Ruth. She was what mattered, and he saw a different strain in her eyes as she clutched her backpack and the data index.

She was breathing too fast. Her chest rose and fell against her T-shirt. Her arms were scored with red marks where she’d been scratching. They’d taken off their encrusted jackets and Ruth was slim and ‚rm but absolutely ‚lthy, speckled with old bites and sores and a few spots of blister rash.

“The man in the dark suit is Governor Shaug,” the pilot said. “Small guy. Not much hair.”

“I see him,” Newcombe said.

“Let’s head straight for him, okay?” The pilot had removed his eye patch and pocketed it as he walked to the door of the plane. Newcombe and Cam stood up. The copilot joined them.

Outside the round windows, Cam saw a team of Army medics and a gurney off to one side. That was good. They’d anticipated the most obvious need, but he resented the mob. He wanted food and sleep. But they wanted the vaccine. He had no right to blame them. The circus seemed like a bad idea, though, despite the netting that concealed most of them from satellite coverage. The Russians might be looking and listening. The best thing would be for Ruth to disappear.

Their pilot opened the door. The air felt wonderful on Cam’s skin, but the crowd stopped them close enough to the plane to feel the hot stink of the engines. Most of the people were in uniform, yet it was a civilian who took charge, a clean-shaven man in a smudged white dress shirt. Many of the others were bearded and sunburnt. This man was pale.