Plague Zone

it swirled against his face.

Cam was already badly spooked. The transition from that quiet instant back into the wind made him stop at the edge of another protected space. His mind roared with old gunfire and the howl of planes — the stark image of a one-eyed man lifting a shovel like an axe — the feel and smell of an emaciated young woman coughing blood into his face. He could also see Allison’s grin, though he tried to suppress that image. The memories inside him were hellish and raw and he didn’t want to pollute his favorite things about her.

He turned back into the wind with his M4 swinging beside him in one hand, leaning his weight forward as if walking through deep mud or snow. The truth was that they were already buried in another plague. They lived deep within an invisible ocean, but they had all learned to ignore it as best they could. Earth’s atmosphere was permeated by the dead. Trillions of people, animals, birds, and insects had been exploded into dust by the machine plague. Replicating without end, the archos tech used every available speck of carbon and iron to build more of itself, disintegrating untold megatons of living flesh into microscopic machines — machines that, in their own fashion, still lived on.

The archos tech would forever seek new hosts. Thousands of inert nanos covered every short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With each step Cam stirred up great puffs of it. The only reason they could survive below ten thousand feet was because they’d beaten it. Their own bodies had become tiny processing stations, destroying insignificant amounts of the machine plague every day, after Ruth and her colleagues found a way to shield them.

Could she do it again?

Protect her, he thought. Protect her and maybe everything will be okay again.

Their only salvation was the vaccine nano. Originally, it had been an inefficient savior. It could be overwhelmed. In an ideal scenario it would have killed the machine plague as soon as the plague touched their skin or lungs. Realistically, its capacity to target the plague was limited and it functioned best against live, active infections. That was a problem. The plague took minutes or even hours to “wake up” after it was absorbed by a host. In that time, it could travel farther than was easily understood. Human beings were comprised of miles upon miles of veins, tissue, organs, and muscle — and once the machine plague began to replicate, the body’s own pulse became a weakness, distributing the nanotech everywhere.

The first version of the vaccine was not so aggressive. It couldn’t be. It was able to build more of itself only by tearing apart its rival. Otherwise it would have been another plague. Ruth had taught it to recognize the unique structure of the plague’s heat engine, which it shared, and she had given it the ability to sense the fraction of a calorie of waste heat that the plague generated repeatedly as it constructed more of itself, but the first vaccine was always behind its brother. Smaller and faster than the plague, the earliest model of the vaccine was able to eradicate its prey, but only after the chase.

The final version of the vaccine surpassed all those weaknesses. It suffused their bodies like disease-specific antibodies, attacking the constant absorption of the machine plague before the plague nanos could activate.

Maybe the vaccine can be reprogrammed to make us immune to the new plague, too, Cam thought.

“I’m here,” he said into his headset, reaching up to knock on the cabin wall. Then he realized he wasn’t upwind of her home. What if it was leaking?

“Cam?” Her voice was muffled, wrapped inside her containment suit. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the wall,” he said, although he’d backed away from the small building. Her place was dark. Even in the daytime, in fact, it looked no different than the rest of their huts, except that this cabin had even fewer windows than most, just one in the small living room and another in Eric and Bobbi’s space. Ruth needed electricity at all hours, so they’d wired her room with more outlets than normal and left it with no openings to betray what was inside.

This hut was the secret heart of their village. Ruth actually slept in the front room, which lacked any privacy, but her bedroom was a clean lab partitioned with plastic sheeting. It was crude and inefficient — and it worked. Eric had been her closest bodyguard, a role that once belonged to Cam. He hadn’t been inside for months. There was never a good excuse since they’d upgraded the electrical lines, and he’d promised himself to leave her alone for Allison’s sake. Even so, he remembered sharing a cool glass of tea with Ruth and Eric, sitting on the living room floor beside the other man but acutely aware of Ruth’s narrow bedroll and the open-faced cupboard she used to store her clothes, her toothbrush, a lipstick, a book. The tidy space had been full of the little personal things he never saw anymore.

“Is there anyone with you?” she asked.

Cam glanced over his shoulder, suddenly uncomfortable with where she was going. “It’s just me,” he said.

“Can you switch channels? I want to talk alone.”

“Greg?” he asked his headset, and the former Army Ranger sergeant said, “This is bullshit. You stay on the line.”

Other voices filled the frequency. “He’s right!” Owen shouted, as another man said, “We let you live here. We took you in when nobody else wanted anything to do with nanotech and now you’re going to hide something from —”

Cam shut off his radio, leaving the headset in place. Then he stepped closer to the cabin and rapped his knuckles against the wood. “Can you hear me? Ruth?”

There was a noise from another part of the hut, a thump, thump like someone convulsing on the floor.

“Ruth!” he yelled, imagining Patrick or Michael loose in the cabin. He jogged alongside the building to the front room before he realized he couldn’t fire through the window or break down the door. If he did, the new plague would have him, too. But what if the infected men grabbed Ruth or tore her suit? Cam turned on his flashlight and aimed the beam inside. “Hey!” he yelled. The plastic on the window distorted the light. He couldn’t see more than the long shape of the cupboards, so he banged on the glass, hoping to distract anyone at the door to Ruth’s lab. “Hey!”

The thumping increased, an uneven drumbeat. It sounded like someone was thrashing back and forth. Cam also heard a woman moan inside. Linda? There were other voices hollering across the village. He saw another flashlight. Then he realized Ruth was shouting in the other end of the hut.

“Cam? Cam, I’m okay! Where are you?”

He ran to the wall of her room again. “I’m here! I thought—”

“They won’t stop moving. Linda and Patrick especially, they’re so restless! I taped their hands and feet, even tied them to the table, but they won’t stop moving.”

Cam grimaced, trying to calm the storm inside his head. It was too easy to picture her inside. Ruth was trapped. Lunatics and corpses blocked the way to the only door… and yet she had to stay.

“What can I do?” he called.

“Get me out!”

“I — We can’t do that.”

Her voice cracked. “Get me out, Cam! I know how to do it. I’m already decontaminating this section of the lab. Then you guys cut open the wall.”

The wall? he thought. This hut was wood like all the rest, but they’d lined the inside of the building with bricks and aluminum sheeting, reinforcing it like no other. Cam supposed they could chop out a hole with saws and pry bars, but why?

“You have to stay,” he said.

“Please, Cam!”

“Aren’t you working in there?”

Ruth only banged on the wall as if echoing the spasms in the other room. Whether she’d done it consciously or not, the sound filled Cam with alarm.

“We can’t build you another lab!” he yelled.

The paddle wheels in the creek were a triumph of engineering. They’d hired two guys out of Morristown to install a series of wheels and gears in the strongest part of the current, trading in corn futures for a five-kilowatt generator to transform that energy into electricity. Then, after those men left, Cam, Eric, and some others buried most of the power lines to disguise the real focal point of their grid.

Allison and the mayors of Freedom and New Jackson had managed to equip Ruth with an atomic force