Jeff Carlson - Plague War

“We just want to take a quick look at—”

“I’m staying with him.”

The nurse checked with three doctors before turning on the X-ray, which was isolated in its own tiny space by hanging blankets. This tent was hooked into Grand Lake’s power grid, fed by turbines far below in the river, but the amperage on their line was weak and couldn’t support more than a few pieces of equipment at once.

While the ‚lm was developed, Cam and Ruth were led to a second tent where they were given antibiotics. Ruth grabbed something from her pants before a man took their ‚lthy clothes away. A rock. She tried to hide it, but Cam recognized the lines scored into the granite.

“Jesus, Ruth, how long have you been…”

“Please. Please, Cam.” She wouldn’t look at him. “Please don’t be mean about it.”

He nodded slowly. The rock was obviously safe. Otherwise they would have gotten sick weeks ago. But why would you want to take anything from that place with you? he wondered. Maybe she wasn’t sure, either. “It’s okay,” he said.

They were given stinging sponge baths with soap and water and rubbing alcohol. Then their multitude of wounds were treated, stitched, and bandaged. Ruth wasn’t shy about her body, although there were half a dozen people in between them and Cam turned his back, trying not to stare.

The medical staff wore cloth masks and a hodgepodge of gloves, some latex, some rubber. They were almost certainly exposed to the nanotech. Cam coughed and coughed to purposely infect them. The vaccine wouldn’t replicate inside them because there was no plague here for it attack, but he wanted to spread the technology to as many people as possible.

A man with glasses came in and said, “Goldman? Your arm’s healed fairly well, but I’m going to recommend a brace for at least three weeks. Don’t overuse it.”

They cut off her battered ‚berglass cast and Ruth gasped at the sight of her arm. The skin was wrinkled and albino pale, the muscles wasted. Trapped sweat had puckered her skin and in places the doughy tissue was infected. She wept. She wept and Cam knew her tears weren’t for her arm, not entirely. She was ‚nally able to let go of all the horror she’d repressed.

Cam hurried through the strangers and held her. Neither of them wore anything except a †imsy hospital smock. Ruth’s clean-smelling hair had †uffed up in waves and curls and Cam kept his nose against the top of her head, marveling in the small pleasure of it.

Things got worse. The two of them had already received a fortune in pharmaceuticals and the medical staff refused to give her painkillers before they cleaned her arm. “It’s super‚cial,” the surgeon said. He scraped at her mushy skin and swabbed the wounds with iodine as Ruth screamed and screamed, clinging to her little rock.

* * * *

“We need to rest,” Cam said. “Food and rest. Please.”

“Of course. We can follow up tomorrow.” The surgeon was testing Cam’s left hand now, pricking the scar tissue, but he turned and gestured at a nurse, who left the narrow room.

Ruth had lain down, shaking. Her forearm was wrapped in a black fabric sleeve reinforced with metal struts, although the surgeon had said to take it off as much as possible to let her wounds breathe.

The nurse returned with four soldiers. Cam recognized one of them from the landing strip and fought to hide his reaction, bristling with distrust and aggression. It was misplaced. It came too easily. “Can you help her?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the squad leader said. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we’re going to carry you, okay?”

Cam and Ruth were dressed in Army green themselves, old shirts and pants — old but clean. The nurse hadn’t been long ‚nding things in their exact sizes. Cam tried not to dwell on the fact that the spare clothes must have come from dead men. It wouldn’t have bothered him except that he didn’t want to offend the soldiers for any reason.

Cam leaned on one of the young men as they left the tent. Ruth was half-conscious in their arms. Outside, a blond woman stood waiting in the last light of the sun, her chin tipped up almost combatively. From her rich hair and complexion, Cam thought she was in the prime of her early thirties, a lot like Ruth. She was beautiful, but she wore the same Army green as all of them beneath a white lab coat and it was the coat that unsettled Cam. Was she from Shaug’s nanotech team?

Just go away, he thought.

The woman’s legs scissored as she moved into their path. There were nonre†ective black bars on her shirt collar and the squad leader said, “Excuse me, Captain.”

She didn’t even look at him. “Ruth?” she asked. “Ruth, my God.” Her smooth hand went to Ruth’s shoulder, as deft as a bird.

Cam said, “Leave us alone.”

“I know her,” the woman insisted.

He would have shoved past, but Ruth wriggled free of the soldiers and took one step, unsteady, smiling, before she buried her face in the woman’s long hair and embraced her. “Deborah,” she said.

* * * *

The wind picked up as the light changed, fading to orange, but Ruth clung stubbornly to her friend in the same way she’d refused to lose sight of Cam.

“Please, ma’am,” the squad leader said.

“Can’t you just bring our dinner here?” Ruth asked. She sat between Cam and Deborah on the tracked bare earth near the corner of the surgical tent, where they were mostly out of the breeze but could still look across the mountains in the west.

“Ma’am,” the man repeated, but Deborah said, “Just do it, Sergeant. Send one of your guys. The rest of you can keep her plenty safe for a few minutes.”

“My orders are to get her inside, Captain.”

“I like the air,” Ruth said distantly.

Cam worried that she might be confused, but Deborah only repeated herself in that haughty way. “A few minutes,” Deborah said. “Go on.”

The squad leader jerked his thumb at one of his men, who moved off. There were other people passing by, two doctors, two mechanics, a teenager in civilian clothes.

“What can I do?” Deborah asked softly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m cold,” Ruth said, still gazing at the horizon.

Deborah glanced past her at Cam with a worried look and he felt for the ‚rst time that they might be friends, too, although it was strange. If he remembered right, the two women had been adversaries before today.

Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., had been the physician and a support systems specialist aboard the International Space Station. All of the astronauts had worked two or more jobs to maintain the station, and she was a formidable woman. Most impressive of all was that Ruth had last seen her in Leadville. Somehow Deborah had walked away from the nuclear strike, and yet Cam held his tongue, watching the people come and go until Ruth shook herself, coming into focus at last.

“Deb, what are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought Grand Lake was a rebel base.”

“It’s not important. Did you get what you went for?”

“Yes. Yes, we did.” Ruth set her good hand on Cam’s knee and squeezed, although she didn’t look at him.

Deborah noticed the contact. She glanced past Ruth again, and Cam tried to smile. “We need to know everything about this place,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what I can.” But mostly Deborah talked about Leadville. She had yet to make peace with it, Cam realized, and that was no surprise.

“Bill Wallace is dead,” she told Ruth, counting friends. “Gustavo. Ulinov. Everyone in the labs.”

Nikola Ulinov had sacri‚ced four hundred thousand people for the Russians, saving only one. Playing on the authority he’d once had aboard the ISS, Ulinov quietly suggested that Deborah volunteer for a combat unit. Her medical training could be of real use, he said, helping the men and women on Leadville’s front lines rather than babying the politicians in town.