Plague War

Newcombe’s decision was inarguable. His sacri‚ce.

If there were skeletons inside, the home would be packed with nanotech. The plague was bad along the highway, where so many people had been disintegrated, but it had also been swept by wind and rain. There were safer pockets here and there, and they tended to settle down on the upwind side, using their own nerves to gauge how thick the plague might be. They’d had mixed luck trying to camp inside. A sealed room was priceless, but a single body could be exploded into millions of the damned things and they needed to avoid concentrated spikes in exposure. Worse, it might not be obvious that anyone was dead inside a building. In the ‚nal extreme, most people had hidden themselves away, crawling into corners and closets.

Opening every door was a good way to overload the vaccine, but that kind of inspection was necessary. Houses with bodies were also houses with bugs. Either the ants had come through, often leaving a colony behind, or the rot eventually made the place more attractive to termites and beetles.

Hunched over her arm, Ruth watched Newcombe approach the two-story home. He skimmed his light along the front of the building, making sure there were no broken windows.

Cam said, “What else can we do? Ruth? What else?”

“Nothing. Wait.” Oh God, she thought. Maybe she said it out loud, too.

“Here’s another mask. Put it on over your other one. You need help? Here.” He dropped his backpack and carefully snugged the band of fabric down over her hood and goggles. “I’m going to check next door in case we —”

“Bones!” Newcombe shouted, and Cam pulled at her.

“Go,” he said. “Go.”

They were all speaking as if surrounded by a loud noise, repeating words for clarity. They were each alone, Ruth understood. She hurried alongside Cam as Newcombe’s bootsteps ran up behind them and it was eerie and horri‚c to feel caged when there was nothing around her except the open street— caged on the inside.

Then she was in darkness. Both men had aimed their †ashlights at the next house. Its front door hung open and Newcombe said, “Skip it, keep moving.”

Ruth dropped one foot off the edge of the sidewalk. She fell, ramming her shin, but she scrambled up again with the dogged focus that had served her so well in her career. Her thoughts narrowed down to one rigid point. Keep moving.

Cam seized her jacket. “Slow down,” he said. “We need to be careful.”

She ran after Newcombe’s light. She knew too much. Few teenagers and no children survived any signi‚cant infection. Their smaller bodies were a liability, and Ruth would always be closer to major trauma than the two men.

The hate she felt was senseless and crazy and yet it was there, crashing against her pain. She tried to hide it. “Come on!” she yelled. She had nothing to gain by accusing him, but why hadn’t Cam warned them? He had been awake. He was supposed to be awake, whispered the new hate. Then she fell again. Her boot stubbed on something and she rolled over a brittle hedge and collapsed. It was like being slapped.

Ruth didn’t move, trembling, quiet, listening to the agony in her arm. Even the seesaw of emotions had left her.

“I said slow down!” Cam’s light strobed up and down her body. The beam was full of swirling dust and Ruth saw a little black yard lantern tangled around her shin, its power cord uprooted. “You could break your fucking leg,” Cam said roughly, kneeling. He yanked at the cord and for the ‚rst time she realized he was twitching. He snapped his head again and again, trying to rub his ear on his shoulder.

Ruth looked up at a nearby whump. Newcombe was at the front door, putting his shoulder into it. Suddenly the frame splintered and he stumbled in.

“We’re going to be all right,” Cam said, but the words were just useless sounds. Helpful sounds.

Ruth nodded. None of this was his fault. The truck might simply have more nanotech adhered to it than the boat, and Cam had his size advantage. Long ago, he’d also suffered considerable damage to his feet and hands and one gruesome ear. He was unlikely to notice an infection before her. It was just that she’d come to expect everything of him, fair or unfair.

“Can you get up?” he asked, reaching for her.

“Clear! I think it’s clear!” Newcombe yelled inside the house, and Ruth and Cam hurried to the neat front walk with its welcome mat still in place.

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