Plague War

“Tomorrow, send out a couple of your strongest guys,” Cam said. “That’s the best thing you can do. Find another group. Pay us back.”

“We’re coming with you,” Gaskell said.

“That’s okay tonight,” Ruth told him quickly, before Cam could answer, and Newcombe said, “Yeah, ‚ne, but then we spread out.”

“We have to make sure somebody gets out,” Cam said. “Drink.” He’d squeezed his hand into a ‚st to stop the bleeding but kept his dripping knuckles over the bowl as he stood up, holding the scuffed green plastic picnicware with his good hand. He held the dark soup out to Gaskell.

“It’s ‚ne, you won’t feel anything,” Ruth said, trying to soften the moment, but these people weren’t as healthy as the Scouts, and she thought again of the ‚rst mountaintop they’d found, wiped out by disease. As the vaccine spread, so might bacteria and viral infections. Anyone with a seriously compromised immune system was likely to have died long ago, but there were any number of slow-acting pathogens. Hepatitis. HIV. Too many survivors would be weak and susceptible. Some islands would carry their own kinds of death, but it couldn’t be helped, not until they reached a place with a minimum of technology.

Gaskell drank ‚rst, then the girl and another man and another. Ruth saw no hint of horror in their faces. They’d seen and done worse to survive, and she turned away to stare into the last fading red coals of the sun.

Newcombe had offered to bleed himself, too. He’d taken Cam aside and said, Fair is fair. The two men had come a very long way, from allies to enemies to real brotherhood, and Cam just shook his head. You still have two good hands, he’d said. It would be stupid to change that. There was so much good in him. Ruth had to forgive his rage and his self-hate.

The woman with the belly hesitated when the bowl came to her. “What will it do to my baby?” she asked, looking at her husband and Gaskell and Cam.

“We don’t know,” Ruth said. “It will protect you both, I think. There shouldn’t be a problem.”

She was doubly glad she hadn’t slept with Cam or anyone else. How much harder would their struggle have been if she was pregnant? Her ‚rst two periods back on Earth had been bad enough. After twelve months in zero gravity, both times she’d bled and bled through cramps and nausea — but each time it had only been four or ‚ve really bad days. What if she’d had morning sickness for weeks instead or developed complications like gestational diabetes or high blood pressure?

This late in her term, the pregnant woman would be having back problems and sore feet. A mother’s bones began to soften noticeably in the third trimester to help the baby’s passage through the pelvic bone. Trudging down the mountainside would be brutal for her, and yet a new generation was beyond price. This woman was exactly who they were ‚ghting for, so Ruth forced a smile and said the words again like a promise.

“It will protect the baby, too,” she said.

* * * *

She lied again that night, huddled together with the others near eighty-‚ve hundred feet in a clump of backpacks, tools, and weapons. Fighter jets crisscrossed the night, mumbling and echoing. The grasshoppers sang and sang. She told Gaskell they’d been given the vaccine by a squad of paratroopers, which was close enough to what had really happened to confuse things if the rumor ever caught up to the wrong people. She told him they’d survived the plague year on a mountaintop above one of Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts, south of here, and Cam was more than convincing in discussing a few local landmarks.

The worst deceit was how Ruth explained their goggles. Gaskell’s group had jackets and hoods and they’d torn up a few rags for face masks, mimicking their rescuers, and Ruth told Gaskell that her goggles and other gear were because of the bugs. There was nothing more these people could do to minimize their absorption of the plague. She didn’t want to give up her own equipment and she didn’t want to ‚ght.

* * * *

In the morning they left each other. Gaskell promised to send a few guys to another peak to the southeast. Ruth wasn’t sure he’d do it but she was glad just to get away from them, not only because they scared her but because a crowd would be more easily noticed. A pilot might spot them or a satellite. It was good to hurry into the woods again with Cam and Newcombe. Still, in the ‚rst few hundred yards she glanced back a dozen times, a little afraid of herself. Maybe it would have been better if they’d all stuck together, but Gaskell’s people seemed equally relieved to split up now that they had some answers.

We’re all so much smaller than we used to be, she thought.

* * * *

They worked their way north even though it brought them closer to the nearest launch-point for the ‚ghter patrols. The jets seemed especially close on landing, groaning overhead, but the aircraft were thousands of feet up and miles away. That distance increased with every step down the mountain. Their plan was to curve eastward tomorrow. Ahead, the map showed a pair of valleys that fell all the way down into Nevada.

Ruth went into herself. In fact, her concentration wasn’t wholly unlike sleeping. She moved in a trance, keeping just enough of her mind on the surface to be aware of Cam’s jacket and the rough ground between them. Everything outside this tunnel she tried to ignore. Her thirst. Her feet. The sun was high in the forest and †ies buzzed all around.

“Sst!” Cam turned and hooked his arm, catching her. Ruth immediately knelt with him beneath the scraping branches of a juniper, trusting his decision to hide.

Newcombe had ducked down across from them and continued to inch away on his knees and one hand, but he’d kept his ri†e over his shoulder. He was still holding his binoculars, so Ruth nudged Cam, a silent question. Cam pointed out through the trees. There was smoke on another slope not far away to the north, nearly level with them. A ‚re? Ruth was too tired for fear. She only waited. Finally, Newcombe stood up and walked back to them, and she felt Cam relax when the other man rose from his position.

“It’s a plane,” Newcombe said. “A ‚ghter. It’s messed up pretty good, but from what I can see it’s an old Soviet MiG. I mean really old, twenty, thirty years, like something they would have mothballed back in the eighties. My guess is it shorted out when he prepped to land or ran out of fuel before he got to a tanker. I don’t know. We haven’t seen any ‚ghting, right?”

“Not close by,” Cam said.

“He could have limped away from the Leadville base,” Newcombe agreed. “But why come this far when they’re on mountaintops all over the place? I think he just went down.”

Ruth managed to talk. “Is he dead?”

“He probably chuted out. Hiked up hours ago.” Newcombe knelt with them and shrugged out his pack. He found water and gave it to her. “You sound awful.”

“I’m okay,” she rasped.

“You didn’t see me waving right in your face,” Cam said. “Let’s stop and eat. Thirty minutes.”

“Make it an hour,” Newcombe said. “I want to run over there and see if I can pull the radio. There might even be a survival kit if the pilot didn’t get out.”

First he stayed with them to eat. He shared the last dry fragments of beef jerky in his pack, spreading his map to show Cam and Ruth where he wanted to rejoin them. Chewing on the leathery meat made her jaws ache even as it softened and burst with †avor. Cam opened one can of soup. They also pulled several handfuls of grass and ate the sweet roots.

The radio spluttered beside Newcombe, catching erratic bursts of voices. American voices. All of it was thick with static, but they caught the phrase saying Colorado and then to this channel and Newcombe forgot about the wrecked ‚ghter.

They needed to reestablish contact with either the rebel

U.S. forces or the Canadians. A rendezvous seemed like their only option now. For twenty minutes Newcombe tried again and again to raise someone even though he didn’t have the transmitting power, captivated by the possibility of real information.

All forces stand. Repeating this. Of civil.

Waiting was a mistake. They weren’t the only ones who’d seen the smoke across the valley. “Turn it off,” Cam said, shoving his bandaged left hand against Newcombe like a club.

Ruth jumped. There were other human sounds in the forest now. The voices called to each other, coming fast. She’d regained some energy with the food and water, and with it her senses had expanded again. The group was above them, angling across the slope. Was it Gaskell?