Plague Zone

microscope and basic machining gear. The military had informants everywhere, but Allison trusted her underground.

Cam switched off his flashlight. “It’s only been an hour and a half,” he said. “You can fix this.”

“I can’t.”

“If you leave your equipment—”

“Listen to me! I’ve done what I can here. This AFM is old, Cam. I need better equipment if I’m really going to be able to understand this nanotech, much less take it apart.”

He shut his eyes in the dark. It was the best we could find, he thought, and you’ll never know how much food Allison gave up just to buy that gear.

“It doesn’t make sense to wait until the helicopters show up,” she said. “I don’t think you realize how long it’ll take me to decontaminate or to open the wall! We need to be ready when they show up.”

“I don’t think we can count on them, Ruth.”

She paused. Then she got loud again. “You said Grand Lake is sending a chopper!”

“I said I asked for one.”

“I can’t… I…”

There was another noise from her side of the wall that sounded like the infected people, aimless and insane. Was she pacing? “You can retool the vaccine,” he said.

“With what!? Goddammit, with what!? Are you listening to me? Most of my work here has been theoretical, Cam! This equipment is junk!”

He wanted to shout back at her, but the fire went out of him. For the second time that night, he knew what Ruth intended to say next, although he shied away from it, hoping he would hear something else. He had left so many people behind in other fights.

“What about our friends in there?” he asked.

“My advice is to run for it. We might have some chance at staying ahead of this thing if we go now. Right now. We need to get away from Morristown.”

It was exactly what he’d been thinking, and he hated them both for it. “Not everyone will go,” he said. “They’ll never go, Ruth. You know they won’t. What about Susan or Jen? Their husbands are in there.”

“There’s no other way,” she said.

8

Ruth scratched at the wall again. “Please!” she yelled, begging now. Her claustrophobia was alive in her chest, twisting and lashing like the monsters in the other room. More than anything, she wanted out.

She wanted to be with him.

“Cam!?” she yelled inside the hot shell of her helmet. Her containment suit was damp with sweat. She was roasting in it. Each breath was an effort and her faceplate had fogged along one edge, creating a blind spot to her right. The lab was a neat white cube and well-lit with four bulbs, but Ruth kept turning her head, thinking she’d seen the shadow of someone who wasn’t there.

Her heart jumped each time Patrick lurched against the floor, setting off moans and shuffling from Linda, Michael, and Andrew, too, if he was still alive. Patrick had grown increasingly agitated. Ruth could only imagine the tangled mess of the living and the dead in the next room as Pat dragged himself through his friends. What if she hadn’t tied him well enough?

She set her gloves against the plastic sheeting on the wall. How thick was the cabin’s exterior? Eight inches? Ruth could nearly feel every layer of wood, brick, aluminum, and wood again, but there was a thinner and more vital barrier between herself and Cam — the plastic itself. Her lab was like a tent inside the white room, and she wondered how long the plastic sheeting would hold if Patrick or Michael burst in. Not long.

“We don’t have much time!” she shouted. “Cam!?”

“I’ll ask Greg,” he said at last.

“Get me out!”

“I’ll ask, Ruth.”

She could barely hear him, panting inside the muggy air of her helmet. Normally she would have been moving slowly, trying not to overheat, with the knowledge that she could always take the suit off if necessary. Instead, she’d run a marathon. Worse, this work space was filthy with nanotech. Her clean lab had been breached.

The plastic tent in the room consisted of two unequal compartments. The first section was secured to three of the room’s four walls, a six-by-six foot area jammed with her small desk, her laptop, the short, stumpy pylons of her microscopes, and other electronics. The second pocket was much smaller, a closet-sized airlock that stood just inside the door to the room. It served as a decon/dressing space, complete with an ordinary vacuum cleaner and storage bags for the blue hospital scrubs she typically wore in the lab. There was also a rack for her containment suit, which was almost impossible for one person to put on alone.

In her hurry to get outside wearing the suit, Ruth must have pulled open one of the seals between the decon chamber and the main tent. The lab was equipped with an emergency kit to resecure the plastic — a low-tech assortment of tape, a box knife, two rolls of plastic sheeting, extension cords, and a soldering gun — but she was uncertain what she could have done about the tear even if she’d seen it before she reentered the tent. There was little chance she could have sterilized her suit in the first place. The vacuum cleaner was only intended to remove dust, lint, and hair from her clothing before she went inside.

They’d installed other emergency measures: a makeshift air exchange system, and powerful UV lamps that should at least hinder an out-of-control nano if not burn it completely. Ruth believed she could reseal the lab from within, then decontaminate it and her suit, but then what? Making a break for the front door wouldn’t do her any good. Without the suit, she wouldn’t get two steps into the next room, and, wearing it, she would only contaminate herself again with no way left to remove the protective skin before she ran out of air. She needed help. She couldn’t cut through the exterior wall herself…

What if they said no?

Her sense of deja vu took her back to the International Space Station. The Leadville government had refused to bring her back to Earth because she was an asset they couldn’t replace once she was gone, no matter that she swore there was nothing else she could do in orbit. Now she faced the same dilemma. The terrified people in Jefferson might insist on keeping her in her lab, which was why she’d asked Cam to come alone. Not so long ago, the two of them had been very close, although she could only guess how his grief had changed him.

He sounded as if he’d been about to suggest she had to stay if only to take care of the infected people. No one else could approach them.

But I can give someone else my suit if I’m outside, she thought.

Maybe a better person would have volunteered to tend to their friends. Unfortunately, in her own way Ruth had become as damaged as any survivor, not only because of the bloodshed she’d witnessed but also because of her long months spent in solitude, second-guessing everything she’d done.

Her equipment was not as bad as she’d told Cam. None of the things she’d said were lies, just exaggerations to make her point. The atomic force microscope was an IBM Centipede exactly like the one she’d used in Grand Lake. Instead of the traditional, single probe, it had a tip array of a hundred points working in parallel. Once she’d secured a plague nano to her test surface, Ruth had been able to map its general exterior in less than seventeen minutes, after which she’d begun to probe deeper into the machine, which was covered with wrinkles and furrows, ironically, much like the human brain.

There was no question that she could do better in a real lab with assistants and more computing power — but she could have stayed. She was afraid to remain here alone. She was too full of bad energy, which only compounded her guilt.

These people had put their faith in her. They’d worked so hard, from constructing this lab to selling corn futures to buy the small Ingersoll Rand air compressor they’d modified to recharge her suit’s tanks after those rare