vaccine back to Leadville? What if the president’s council had been able to deal with the Russians from a position of absolute strength, rather than scrambling to put down the rebellion in the United States at the same time they were negotiating overseas? And yet his smile was genuine. It touched his dark eyes and softened his posture, too.
It felt like forgiveness, so Ruth was surprised when Hernandez stepped back and let another soldier lift her down from the truck. Was she wrong? No. His gaze †icked away from her with something like embarrassment.
Hernandez wasn’t strong enough to hold her weight. The burns. His bad color. He had radiation poisoning, but he swiftly covered the moment by looking past her at Cam and Deborah.
He didn’t seem to recognize Deborah — they’d barely known each other — but Deborah moved protectively to Ruth’s side while Cam crouched at the back of the truck with his left arm tucked against his ribs. One of the Marines helped Cam down and Hernandez said, “Hey,
Ruth didn’t know what that meant. She was hardly listening anyway. She had touched Hernandez with such care, thinking her own tentativeness was for other reasons, although it was obvious once she realized how his clothes hung on him.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.
He was dying.
“Yes. You, too.” Hernandez surveyed her tears before he smiled again. “Let’s get you patched up. You can rest. Then we need to talk.”
“I want blood samples from everyone here,” Ruth said.
“You can start that later, okay?”
“You do it,” Deborah told him. “Sir. You do it while we’re with the doctors. Otherwise there might not be time.”
Hernandez said, “You’re the astronaut. Reece.”
“Yes, sir.”
He rubbed at the gray hollows under his eyes and shook his head. “Grand Lake didn’t say who was coming. A tech with an escort. If I’d known, I would have moved more people to try to run off the Chinese, but they’ve got us outnumbered almost everywhere.” He said, “I’m sorry about your friends.”
Ruth nodded. While they were safe, Somerset lay bleeding out on the mountainside, but Grand Lake had kept quiet about their mission because there was such a concentration of electronic surveillance focused on the Rockies. It would have taken just one slip. One clue. If the Russians or the Chinese learned she was on the move, the enemy might have redirected their entire force to kill or capture her.
“The people we left behind,” she said. “Can you get them?”
“I sent another truck hours ago. We don’t know if they’ll be able to drive through a few places, but if the terrain’s too hard they’ll hike the rest of the way to your guys.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get some teams on the blood samples. Can you tell me what we’re looking for?”
“Nanotech. I—”
“I know that. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Hernandez let them see some of the warrior inside the gentleman, challenging her with a stare. “But we already have the vaccine, and you weren’t driving around out there because you didn’t rate a helicopter—”
Ruth interrupted, too. “I don’t need more than a drop from each man. Needle pricks are ‚ne. Just make sure you isolate each one and make sure you tag them with the man’s unit, where he is now, and where he was before the bombing.”
“Before the bombing,” Hernandez said.
“Yes.” Ruth cleared her throat. She didn’t want to hurt him any more, but he deserved the truth. “Leadville was testing new technology on its own people,” she said.
* * * *
They were led to a crowded tent and her sense of deja vu continued. She almost laughed, but that would have been crazy. Too many times she’d found herself surrounded by medical staff, like a damaged race car that had to return to the track. She hoped she’d never need this sort of attention again, and yet more blood was all she saw in her future. Kill or be killed. What else would end the ‚ghting? Surrender? She didn’t know if the enemy would even allow that.
A man helped her undress and then gingerly scrubbed at the smoke-blackened earth and blood on her hip. Ruth wore only her T-shirt and socks and wasn’t embarrassed except for the xylophone of ribs that showed when she lay down on her good side and her shirt rode up. Nearby, Deborah was topless, stripped to her undies as they assessed the wounds on her back — and even after so long on minimum rations, Deborah looked good. Really good. She was long and smooth-skinned with small, perfect breasts.
Ruth saw Cam glancing at Deborah’s ‚gure and suddenly he caught her looking, too. Ruth blushed. The medical staff didn’t notice the exchange. They must have seen thousands of patients come and go. As a doctor herself, Deborah also seemed aloof. Ruth thought that was a shame, the human body reduced to a vehicle or a tool. She was glad to be a woman stealing glances with a man. She worried for him. Cam rubbed his left ear again and again, reaching across his scarred chest with his right hand. Estey had said he thought Cam’s ribs were only bruised, but it obviously hurt Cam too much to lift his other arm and he said he was still deaf on that side.
Her surgeon arrived, a sick man with a face like wet ash. The radiation. He coughed and coughed inside his mask, holding his breath to steady his hands for a few moments at a time. Ruth would have asked for someone else, except that a nurse leaned down and whispered, “Colonel Hanson is the best.”
He was even worse off than Hernandez, and yet he’d stayed on duty. Ruth wondered how many others were already buried or on their deathbeds. She knew she could never stop going until she was killed herself.
He shot her hip full of novocaine, a dental anesthesia. Nothing more. They were down to the very last of their supplies and every day there were more wounded. Ruth shrieked at the grinding pressure against her pelvic bone as he dug out the shrapnel, but it was Cam’s hand wrapped tightly in her own that she remembered later.
* * * *
Hernandez sought them out again after dark. Ruth had forced herself to eat a cup of broth despite her nausea. She lay on a cot with her eyes half closed, hovering somewhere between her pain and the dim, ever- changing light.
They had been taken to a different tent, one that was longer, colder, and more crowded. The only illumination was a single lantern at the far end. Nurses periodically walked through the light, and dozens of patients shifted on the beds and on the †oor, drawing long black shadows across the tent.
Cam and Deborah made bookends on either side of Ruth, both of them stiff with their own wounds. The two women shared the bed, spooning for warmth. Deborah lay on the outside to protect the stitches in her back. Cam sat against the thin metal frame of the cot with his shoulders nearly touching Ruth’s feet, asleep with his head on his knees. Ruth would have asked them to switch places if she weren’t afraid of offending Deborah, but Deborah couldn’t sit against the bed. Putting her on the †oor would have been inexcusable and Ruth had already been cruel enough to Cam, pushing him away, drawing him in.
She’d never intended to be a tease. She wanted to cement their relationship even if it was nothing more than a quick fuck. When had there ever been time? She supposed the Rangers would have averted their eyes if she and Cam bundled together in a sleeping bag, but she would have felt so vulnerable. Worse, someone had stolen the box of condoms from her pack while she was in the medical tents in Grand Lake.
Ruth wondered what Cam and Allison had done together. Had they limited themselves to oral sex and hands or had they engaged in full intercourse? Ruth wanted to be better. She wanted him to want her more than the younger woman, and she thought of Ari and the fun little kinky things they’d played at, stroking each other, licking and kissing. The memories made her uncomfortably aware of Deborah sleeping against her back. She pressed her thighs together as snugly as the stitches in her hip would allow, trying to contain the warmth there.
She thought she’d been more hesitant with Cam than she might have been with anyone else because he’d seen her at her worst, but there was always something else holding her back. It would be frivolous. It would be wrong. She didn’t feel like she deserved the relief, much less any pleasure, when it was her mistakes that had led to the war and killed a tremendous number of people across the planet.
