Plague War

the winch snapped his elbow before Park shut it down.

Escaping the machine plague had to be their ‚rst priority. Ballard toughed it out, cursing himself, and eventually Deborah and Sergeant Estey reset his joint on a lush mountainside spotted with white and yellow †owers. Cam stared at the little blossoms. This place seemed completely untouched by the vast con†ict of men and machines, and he imagined there were other safe pockets everywhere, even beyond enemy lines.

The thought shouldn’t have made him sad. Angry and sad. If we’d just shared the vaccine, he thought. Had the entire war really hinged on that one decision? Where would the ‚ghting stop? Even if Ruth was successful, even if she developed a perfect vaccine, that didn’t seem like enough of an advantage to push back the Chinese. Cam saw no end to it.

They stayed in the meadow for lunch, bolting down a meal of tinned ham and fresh, bitter roots as distant percussions echoed from the mountains. Artillery ‚re. Cam looked out into the pale blue sky but saw nothing, no smoke, no movement. The war was still hidden down in the west, but it was hurrying closer even as they drove toward the U.S. lines.

Park expected it would be at least another day before they reached the northern edge of the Aspen group. They were only six miles from the nearest secured area, a base on Sylvan Mountain, but they weren’t moving much faster than a person could walk. The terrain was too rough. Park stayed on the radio constantly, trading coordinates with †ank units and requesting information on the Chinese. He could call in air support if needed, if there was time, but until they reached Aspen Valley, ultimately they had no one to rely on except themselves.

On the morning of the 28^th that wasn’t enough.

* * * *

The hillside erupted in geysers of ‚re and dirt. Four or ‚ve towering blasts appeared out of nowhere, bracketing the jeeps, hot and bright. Then the explosions seemed to walk together like two drunken giants, stomping through the vehicles and then back again.

One of the jeeps †ipped. Captain Park’s? Ruth’s? In the third jeep, separated from the others by curtains of debris, Cam lost track of the two vehicles ahead of him. He’d gone deaf in the ringing impacts, yet he was aware of rocks and earth clattering against the jeep. The hood twisted up and stopped again, a jagged metal sheet. In the driver’s seat, Wesner twisted sideways as something whipped into his head. Cam was struck in the arm and chest, but the other man shielded him from the worst of it, even when the windshield cracked and imploded. Bits of fender and other shrapnel had rattled through the torn shape of the hood. Wesner took most of that, too.

He was still alive. He pawed feebly at the steering wheel as Cam grabbed the biggest wound on Wesner’s neck, trying to stop the bleeding.

“Get out!” Foshtomi yelled, directly behind Cam in the backseat. She sounded like she was at the bottom of a well and it wasn’t until she bumped past that Cam realized they’d quit moving. His inner ears were in shock. His balance was gone and he swayed as if the ground was an ocean wave when he left the jeep, dragging Wesner behind him.

Foshtomi helped as best she could for ‚fteen staggering yards, screaming with effort. Her cheek was cut and there was blood in her hair, too, but she kept her arm around Wesner’s back.

Cam glimpsed other people to his left, partially eclipsed between smoke and daylight. Friends? Enemy troops? Ruth, he thought. Her name was like a small cool space inside his panic. He slowed down, intending to run in that direction.

Foshtomi tripped him. Foshtomi stamped her boot down on his ankle and the three of them fell behind a bump of granite as the giants pounded the vehicles again. The sound was enormous. Cam jammed his hands over his ears without thinking, uselessly trying to block the hypersonic blows.

The wetness on his palm reminded him of Wesner. He turned to apply pressure to the man’s wounds again, but Craig Wesner was dead, slack-faced with dirt in his eyes.

Foshtomi shouted distantly. “Break!” she cried. “Okay?” She leaned close and Cam watched her mouth as she repeated it. “We run again in the next break!”

“No!” Even his own voice had the faraway quality, and Cam gasped at a stabbing pain in his left side. A broken rib, maybe. “We need to ‚nd Ruth!”

“We can’t help her!”

Cam shook his head and twisted awkwardly to look up, keeping his body †at. He hadn’t seen or heard any planes, but the sky was dark with windswept banners of pulverized dirt and smoke.

“The jeeps!” Foshtomi yelled. “They’re shelling the jeeps, not us! We have to—”

But the giants danced away suddenly, spreading across the hillside. Half a dozen ‚reballs punched into the green earth in what appeared to be random lines, moving southward and down the mountain. Chasing someone? Cam knew from talking with the Rangers that modern warfare could take place over a range of tens of miles. Tanks and cannon were capable of remarkable precision at that distance. Their jeeps had been spotted by a forward observer or a plane or a satellite. Somewhere, Chinese artillerymen were lobbing shells at a target they couldn’t even see, simply obeying a series of coordinates.

There was no way to ‚ght back, other than to radio for help. Foshtomi was right that they needed to get out of the grid, but the Chinese seemed to be hitting the entire mountainside now, mopping up. If they ran, they could just as easily move into the next salvo as move to safety.

Cam wasn’t leaving without Ruth. The thought steadied him and he risked another glance up the hill.

It was the lead jeep that had overturned. One wheel had blown off and the axle was ripped away. There was only one body in the open, a man lying in a dark blotch of †uid. The second jeep, Ruth’s jeep, had crashed into the destroyed vehicle but looked abandoned. She’d gotten clear.

She must have gotten clear, Cam thought. But the giants were coming back again, slower this time. The explosions picked their way along the slope, lifting brush and rock in powerful, bone- shuddering detonations. Cam pressed himself into the earth. Each breath was laced with smoke. Then the impacts were past and he was up and running.

He fell. His balance was still off and he discovered that he needed to stay bent over his left side. The ground was littered with dirt clods and rock, sometimes in large hunks. Then the ground itself jumped. Cam was barely halfway on his feet again. He managed not to collapse onto his bad side. He rolled into a crater and found Estey and Goodrich hunched against the fresh, crumbling earth.

Estey was trying to staunch a wound on Goodrich’s forearm and didn’t see him. Goodrich shouted but Cam only heard his warning tone, not the words. He’d gone less than thirty feet. It felt like another world, especially in the buzzing silence. The artillery had brie†y concentrated here and the hill was a moonscape.

Ruth should have been with them. She rode with Estey, Ballard, Mitchell, and Deborah in the second jeep, but they’d obviously scattered in all directions. Cam wondered what he was going to do if she was uphill of the vehicles.

He kept looking for her across the wasted ground. He fought off Estey’s hand when Estey tried to drag him down. He’d spotted another human shape in the dark, drifting clouds, one running man followed by another. The giants were gone. The sun split through the dust and Cam scrambled out of the crater, only to throw himself down again and claw for his pistol. He’d lost his carbine with the jeep, but Estey still had his weapon and Cam glanced back and screamed, “Look out! Estey!”

There were at least ten human shapes dodging through the haze, far more than the missing part of his group. Their yelling was muf†ed and strange. They were also the wrong color. Cam’s squad wore olive drab, whereas these people dressed in tan camou†age and seemed to be misshapen. Uneven brown rags hung from their heads and arms, and Cam did not recognize their long ri†es or submachine guns.

He took aim but didn’t ‚re as someone else stood up in another crater in front of him. Deborah. Her blond mane was ‚lthy, but still unique. Cam lifted himself to run to her, sick with fear. He was certain that he would see her gunned down. Then she waved to the approaching troops, and Cam struggled to discern the men’s voices.

“U.S. Marines! U.S. Marines!”

He lowered his pistol and ran to the crater.

* * * *

Ruth embraced him and hurt his ribs and he laughed, breathing in the good, complex smell of unwashed girl. She was alive. She’d escaped with scrapes and bruises and one peppered rash of shrapnel on her hip, where she would need surgery not just to remove the †ecks of metal but also the fabric from her shredded uniform, which had been imbedded into her wounds.