Plague War

hold.

Not so long ago the president’s council had been true representatives of the people, duly and fairly elected. They had made the best they could out of a very bad hand of cards, and yet… And yet he respected too many of the men and women who’d worked against him, James Hollister and Captain Young, Ruth Goldman and the survivor, Cam.

Hernandez shifted miserably in the cold and saw one dark bird †itting through the wind. He wondered again. How would all of the squares and arrows on his maps begin to rearrange themselves if the vaccine spread? There had been too many atrocities for America to easily reunite as one nation. All of them had seen too many good reasons to hate, and there would still be populations on other continents who were desperate for the vaccine. The only real question was the scope of the con†ict to come, who against who, on what ground, and when. He could almost grasp the shape of it. In many ways the new tide would be as vicious and all-consuming as the machine plague itself, and he was aware that small units like his own could be a deciding factor in the civil war, adding their weight to the ‚nal balance.

Frank Hernandez still had to decide where he would stand.

7

Ruth lifted her binoculars and grimaced, sweating inside her goggles and mask. The three of them had found a patch of shade beside a FedEx truck, but it barely helped. The truck had been soaking up heat all morning and now it radiated warmth as well as the odd, pasty smell of the packages baking inside. Cardboard and glue. The crowded highway was like a stove top. For a day and a half the sky had been utterly still, the clouds forgotten. Spring seemed to be giving way to early summer and the land was hot and windless, the sun like a white torch. They tried to avoid the darkest vehicles. Ruth could feel a black car through her glove or her jacket just leaning against it. Repeated contact had left her good hand feeling raw and pink. The outsides of her thighs were almost as bad, her knees, her hips, anywhere that rubbed constantly in the maze of cars.

Aching, she peered at the rows of homes below the highway. There was only a small chance she’d learn anything, but so far small things had made the difference — and she could not pretend that the ugly fascination in her didn’t exist.

More than a mile away, a steel meteor had furrowed through two residential blocks, hurling shrapnel as it went. At least a dozen houses had exploded or slumped open, leaving only hunks of walls and ceilings and great drifts of white plaster and furniture. Here and there were also torn segments of metal. This was the booming they’d heard the day before, the missiles that had brought the plane down. The aircraft must have been closing on their rendezvous point on Highway 65, although they were not. They were past Rocklin now, farther east and north.

The debris ‚eld was lost in a tornado of bugs. Attracted to the blood and bodies strewn among the wreckage, ants and †ies †ooded the ground and pillared up into the air, lifting and swirling. The three of them had tried to avoid the storm without realizing what was causing it until Newcombe spotted the fuselage within the haze. The largest piece was most of the nose-end of a big C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. It must be the aircarft that had carried the dead man they’d found yesterday, and it was nearly ten miles from that ‚rst corpse.

Lord God, my God, she thought, trying not to imagine it. The plane coming apart. The men thrown away into the sky. There would be more craters wherever the other parts of the C-17 had slammed down. Even roasting inside her jacket, Ruth felt a chill. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t asked them to come. These men had died for her, and their heroism was something she could never repay.

She closed her eyes. She wanted to pray but she didn’t believe in it. God was only an emphatic word to Ruth. Still, going through the motions made her think of her step-father and his calm faith and then she was angry and jealous and she looked up again, her breath thick in her chest.

She reeked of gasoline and repellent. They all did. Cam had grown uneasy at the number of †ies persisting at them despite the perfume, bumping at their goggles, squirming to get inside their collars and hoods. He’d done the only thing he could think of to further conceal them. He’d soaked their jackets with fuel and entire bottles of bug repellent and it made the pain in Ruth’s head like a dull nail.

“What do you think?” Cam asked. “Forty guys? Fifty?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said, hefting his pack. Then, too loudly, he turned back and said, “Yeah. Which means there were probably a hundred altogether.”

Scattered like the ‚rst man we came across, Ruth thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to provoke them. Cam and Newcombe were still learning to read each other as well as she understood the two men herself, and they clashed even when the argument was already said and done.

Ruth tried to end it before it started again. She hurried after Newcombe, and Cam fell in behind her. They hiked hard and fast, pushing themselves. Ruth saw the skeleton of a dog and a wad of money and then a red blouse that hadn’t faded at all. Otherwise the carnage was numbing — cars, bones, garbage, bones — and her mind caught in a loop as she struggled on.

A hundred men, she thought. A hundred more, dead for me. She knew that wasn’t fair. Her role had always been defensive, reacting to the holocaust. She could never be blamed for the machine plague, but it felt like the truth. It felt like she should have done more. She should have done better.

“We need to rethink what we’re doing,” Newcombe said.

Cam shook his head. “Let’s not waste the time.”

“That plane was a show of commitment.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Newcombe.”

Every hour the temptation to agree with Newcombe was stronger. Ruth was unspeakably tired. She obsessed about her arm. Was it healing straight? Cam needed medical care even more, and yet he remained single- minded.

“I don’t know what more you want,” Newcombe said. “That mess back there, that was a hundred guys who knew they had pretty bad odds even if they actually found us — and they never even got that far, did they? But they came anyway.”

Ruth turned her head. More and more, the gesture was becoming a habit, denying what was in front of her. Nothing had changed despite the snatch of rebel broadcasts they’d picked up last night. They were still down here beneath a sky full of aircraft, no matter if the rebels declared themselves the legal American government. Both sides had made those claims before. So what? It was only words, and yet it had given Newcombe something else to argue with.

Newcombe hadn’t given up on persuading them. He probably wouldn’t. They had made the radio even more important to him, because he had no other friend, and Cam admitted it was smart to listen as much as possible. Whenever they stopped to eat or nap, the two men monitored the airwaves together. Cam had to be sure Newcombe never transmitted. He kept their radios in his pack and slept against it, and his hard pillow also included Newcombe’s pistol.

“Every day we hike east is another day we’ll have to hike back out again,” Newcombe said. “They’ll never try to get us right up against the Leadville base. It was high-risk for them already.”

“High-risk is the problem,” Cam said. “Listen to yourself. We’re not getting on a plane just to get shot down.”

He walked left suddenly into an open pocket like a strange asphalt meadow. Then they crunched through a puddle of glass alongside a Buick that had veered into a tiny Geo, smashing it against two other vehicles.

“Shit.” Newcombe waved his arms helplessly. “Pretty soon they’ll scrub the whole operation if you stay off the radio. They’ll think we’re dead.”

“We can make contact when it’s time.”

“This is crazy.”

“It’s already decided, man. Stop working against us.”

Ruth huffed for air against her mask. Her boots clattered through a broken femur and a torn suitcase and then the three of them dodged left again to avoid a small oil slick where an SUV seemed to have accelerated and