Jeff Carlson: Plague War

The entry hall had a dark wood †oor. Ruth glimpsed the open space of a dining room. Newcombe was at the stairs to the second †oor and waved for them, his ‚ngers spasming. “Here,” he said, leading the way. His †ashlight sparked on a collection of small glass pictures. Family. Faces. Ruth forced her legs to carry her. She banged against the wall and knocked down two pictures and Cam kicked into one, shattering the glass.

Newcombe went left at the top into a boy’s bedroom. It was blue with two silver-and-black posters — football players. Their †ashlights cut back and forth. Cam shut the door. Newcombe leaned over the twin bed and pulled up the blankets, then knelt at the door and wedged the loose mass into the crack at the bottom.

“The window,” Ruth said.

Cam tore open the dresser drawers, throwing them onto the †oor. He took great handfuls of clothes and jammed the shirts and underwear into the windowsill as best he could. They were all breathing hard. “Good?” he asked.

Ruth shook her head and nodded in a confusion of pain. “Best we can do,” she said. “It’ll get worse.”

In this safe room, their vaccine only had to deal with the plague already in their blood and the particles they’d carried with them on their clothes and in the gust of motion. Still, running and sweating had accelerated their absorption rate.

Ruth wept. There was a new thread of plague scratching through her left foot and the blades within her arm had turned to molten ‚re, consuming the bone, cramping every muscle. Her ‚ngers made a palsied claw. In the half-light, the destroyed room matched her thinking exactly, a tight, haphazard mess packed with restless bodies. Her claustrophobia became a living thing like cancer, numbing her intelligence and leaving only childish terror and remorse.

Cam endured in silence, but Newcombe beat his hand on the wall.

“Don’t,” Ruth whispered. “Don’t.”

At last the burning faded into more normal pain. It was done. They tugged off their masks and goggles and luxuriated in the stale air, but Ruth avoided their eyes, feeling too vulnerable, even ashamed. She felt grateful, and yet at the same time she was repelled.

Cam was a monster. Old wounds. His dark Latino skin had erupted dozens of times, often in the same places, leaving dull ridges on his cheek and patchy spots in his beard. His hands were worse. His hands were covered in scars and blister rash, and on his right he only had two strong ‚ngers and his thumb. The pinky there was only a weak, snarled hook of dead tissue, nearly eaten to the bone.

Ruth Goldman was not particularly religious. For most of her adult life, she’d let her work take up too much time to bother with Hanukkah or Passover unless she was visiting her mom, but the emotions in her now bordered on the mystic, too fervent and complex to understand at once. She would rather die than suffer as he had, but she wanted to be like him — his calm, his strength.

Cam dug out the last of his water and some peppered jerky and crackers. Ruth’s belly was an acid ball, yet he urged her to eat and it helped a little. He also had a bottle of Motrin and shook out four apiece, a minor overdose. Then they all tried to settle down again, beyond exhaustion. The men let her use the narrow bed, clearing a little space on the †oor for themselves, but Ruth did not sleep any more that night.

* * * *

The room looked bigger in the yellow-gray dawn and still had some semblance of neatness above the †oor. The posters. The toy robots and books on the shelves. Ruth tried not to let it affect her, but she was very tired. She hurt. She mourned this anonymous boy and everything he represented — and wrapped up in her misery was a cold, stubborn anger.

She was ready to keep moving.

She knew it was worth it.

Even as hard as life had become in the mountains, there was no excuse for the decisions made by the Leadville government. If they won, if they left most of the world’s survivors to die above the barrier, in many ways it would be a crime worse than the plague itself. What this place and every graveyard like it deserved was new life. A cleansing. The ruins should be bulldozed where they couldn’t be repaired, repopulated where the damage hadn’t been so bad, and there were desolate cities across the globe, far more than could be reclaimed for generations. They’d forgotten. The leadership was too insulated, trapped on their island fortress.

Ruth made herself eat with grim focus, even though her stomach still felt like a knot and breakfast was a few cans of cold, gluey potatoes and beef. Cam ate like it hurt him, and Ruth wanted to say something, she wasn’t sure what. Her taste buds stung at the fresh reek of gasoline. The stench made her head ache, but at least she could barely smell the corner of the closet they’d had to use as a toilet.

“Show me your map again,” she said.

Newcombe set down his can and unbuttoned his jacket pocket. He invariably folded his map and tucked it away, in case they had to run — but his neatness was also about control, Ruth thought, watching his long, hawk-nosed face. Sandy blond eyebrows and beard stubble. Newcombe looked so young, even beneath the ant bites and dirt and the †aking raw pink spots that were being worn into his skin by his goggles and mask.

She didn’t like his silence. Newcombe was impatient, jerking at the map when a corner of it hung up in his pocket. Yes, they were all sore and irritable, and they’d already talked through their options after the planes had gone, but they couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.

Their plan was to sprint back to the truck and drive out of the hot spot as fast as possible. The boat trailer was already attached and Newcombe had ripped open the truck’s ignition, so that starting it was a matter of pressing two wires together. Even after fourteen months of disuse, the battery had kept enough power to crank the engine once. Then they’d run it for more than an hour to generate a charge. We built good, Newcombe had said with surprising softness, leaning his hand on the truck’s tall, broad hood. He might have only been talking to himself, but Ruth believed he’d felt the same melancholy pride that haunted her now, sitting in the wreckage of this child’s room. She was glad. Even the relentless Special Forces soldier wasn’t untouchable.

Newcombe was con‚dent the truck would start again, and the boat’s enormous motor had also ‚red right up. The question was where were they going.

The chair is against the wall. That strange sentence had changed everything, shifting the balance between them. It was almost as if there were suddenly other people among the three of them, just when she’d ‚nally begun to adapt to being so utterly on their own. Ruth had become accustomed to outnumbering Newcombe. Cam always backed her, but now Newcombe had new power, and Ruth thought Cam was wavering.

The radio code was a rendezvous point. Despite the chaos of the plague year, it was still the twenty-‚rst century. The Canadians had their own eyes in the sky. The rebels controlled three American satellites themselves. The surge of radio traf‚c in Leadville could not be hidden, especially in this now-empty world. Nor could the sudden †ux of aircraft. Even if the Canadians hadn’t been involved in the conspiracy, promising aid and shelter, they would have known something big was going on.

Newcombe’s squad had gone into Sacramento with no less than eight contingency plans, ‚ve of which led to open stretches of road where a plane could touch down, and Ruth did not doubt that those men could have reached one of their rendezvous points long before now if they’d been moving on their own, even wearing containment suits, even hauling extra air tanks.