Jeff Carlson - Plague War

* * * *

“There she is,” Foshtomi said as lantern light spilled through the gorge. Two silhouettes held open the side of the tent, Deborah and Ruth.

Directly in front of the two women, a Marine ducked his head, pinned in the yellow light. Hernandez had ordered a total blackout. “Hey!” someone shouted. Ruth’s shape hesitated, but Deborah’s taller ‚gure let go of the tent †ap.

Cam set down his canteen and started toward them, blinking to regain his night vision. “Cam, wait,” Goodrich said. He didn’t stop. If the sergeant pressed the matter, he would say he hadn’t understood because of his ear.

“Where is General Hernandez?” Deborah asked the soldiers in front of the tent. She was supporting Ruth as well as speaking for her. Ruth stood awkwardly, protecting her hip, and Deborah kept one arm around her waist. Cam edged through the few Marines to reach her side. One of them said something that Cam only caught part of, “—ight now,” but the man pointed as he spoke and that was enough. Cam was more interested in trying to assess Ruth’s health in the dark.

She noticed him and smiled.

“How are you?” she asked. Then they were separated again as Deborah guided Ruth forward, walking through the Marines. Ruth looked back once, her curly hair like a soft tangle in the moonlight.

What did you ‚nd? Cam thought. He knew her moods well enough to recognize this exhausted pleasure. Good news. It was good news, and that meant none of their losses had been in vain. The thrill of it made him grin as he strode after the group. The wind sifted through the gorge, cold and alive. Cam was aware of another kind of motion around them as other soldiers got up and paced alongside them. Most of the twenty-six Rangers and Marines were in foxholes outside the gully, but Ruth drew the remainder to her in twos and threes.

Like the trucks, the jeep was also draped in netting. Hernandez slept beside the vehicle and its radio. A Marine corporal sat nearby, leaning against a tire with his submachine gun in his lap. He woke Hernandez, who coughed and pushed himself up. Then he coughed again, uncontrollably.

Deborah let go of Ruth and knelt close to him, laying her hand on his back as he rasped for air. “General,” she said.

“I’m ‚ne.” He choked the words out.

Deborah stayed with him. She was obviously trying to gauge the strength of his breathing and Cam didn’t like the obvious tension in her shoulders. Shit. Hernandez had hidden his respiratory problems from them, but even if it was just a cold, not radiation sickness, the man was in dangerously bad shape to be ‚ghting off a virus.

Hernandez was gaunt and pale. “Doctor Goldman,” he said, quickly locating the most important face in the crowd.

“They trusted you,” Ruth said. “They trusted you more than you think.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Leadville,” she said. “The labs.”

To the west, a clump of explosions †ared up from the black mountains. The booming reached them an instant later as Ruth knelt, too, twisting to protect the wounds in her left hip. Some of the Marines also crouched down and Cam was not surprised by this sudden intimacy. Everyone wanted to hear.

“They were testing nanotech on forward units,” Ruth said, “but they must have been almost certain how well the new vaccine would work. They trusted you.”

“A new vaccine,” Hernandez said.

“Yes.” Her eyes were large and childlike. “There are two nanos in you right now, and they’re both different from anything else I’ve seen.”

Hernandez coughed again, wincing. Beside Cam, one of the Marines touched his own chest and several others glanced down at themselves or ‚dgeted with their hands, afraid of the machinery that they could not see.

“They targeted you deliberately, General,” Ruth said. “They trusted you. We’ve taken hundreds of blood samples and no one else had the vaccine or a working ghost.”

“What does that mean?” a woman asked behind Cam. It was Foshtomi, and he turned to see that she stood away from the group, as if that could possibly save her. But she was loyal and brave. The wind blew Foshtomi’s dark hair across her face and she strode forward with the rush of the breeze, joining them despite her nervousness.

Ruth glanced at the younger woman, then turned back to Hernandez. It might have been Cam’s imagination but he thought Ruth looked at him, too, after dismissing Foshtomi. Why? Because she didn’t like it that he and Sarah were friends?

“How long were you stationed outside Leadville before the bombing?” Ruth asked Hernandez. “Were you above the barrier that whole time?”

“What are you saying — we were immune to the plague?”

“At some point. Absolutely. The atmospheric effects of the bomb had nothing to do with the fact that your troops were able to run below ten thousand feet and survive.”

Hernandez shook his head. “We would have noticed.”

“No. Not if you never tried it. You wouldn’t have launched any attacks below the barrier until after Grand Lake brought you the vaccine that Cam and I carried out of Sacramento, right?”

“We mounted a few strikes. We thought there were still areas where the bombing had wiped out the plague.”

“You were immune. The vaccine out of Grand Lake wasn’t half as good as what you already had.” Ruth laughed, but it was a melancholy sound. “You must have gotten it some time during the two weeks before the bomb. Leadville caught our friends in the Sierras, which is where they got the early model of the vaccine. Then they infected you with an improved version and a spin-off technology to see how the two would interact.”

The soldiers moved uneasily again. “Jesus,” Watts said with his hand at his mouth. It was another protective gesture, no different than the way Foshtomi had hung back from the group. These men and women still thought of the nanotech as a disease.

Ruth said, “Did they give any kind of inoculations or pills? Something they said was a vitamin?”

“No.”

“It could have been in your water or your food. As far as I can tell, the improved model has the same weakness as the ‚rst generation. It only replicates when it’s exposed to the plague, which means the infection would have been sporadic unless you all ate or drank the same thing.” Ruth paused, embarrassed. “After the bomb, when you left your mountain, did you lose anyone?”

“It was chaotic,” Hernandez said. “And dark and very hot.”

Ruth reached for his arm, making contact. “Is there any way to know if some of them died because of the machine plague?”

He looked down at her hand. He shook his head.

“Please,” Ruth said. “This is important.”

“It was chaotic,” he repeated, and Cam marveled at the understatement.

“We have to assume it’s a possibility,” Ruth said. She glanced at Deborah, as if resuming a different conversation. Or maybe she couldn’t bear to face Hernandez anymore.

The general still had his head down, either wrestling with his illness or his grief. He appeared uncharacteristically weak and Cam also turned away. The soldiers had done the same. Their respect for Hernandez demanded it, and Cam wondered what they would do when he was gone.

“I’ll need blood again,” Ruth said slowly. “We need to make sure we get the new vaccine to as many people as possible, and I think… I’m sure the second nano is the only reason you’re alive.”

“They brought us steak a few days before the bombing,” Hernandez said. “Fresh steak. Not a lot. But we were surprised.”

“That was probably it,” Ruth said.

“We’d already started communicating with other units up and down the line. I…We were talking about leaving our posts.”