Plague Zone

through a few pencils, file clips, and a voice recorder. The next drawer held her working notes, and the third was empty. She had so little to show for her time in this place.

“I don’t know how it’s replicating,” she said, “but it’s closely based on the booster tech. The heat engine is similar, even the general structure, except they’ve added a lot of bulk. It’s bigger. More sophisticated. At a guess, I’d say this thing is made of nearly two billion AMU.”

No one questioned the acronym. Atomic mass units. Most of them had soaked up as much technical knowledge as possible, and Bobbi said, “If it’s using the same heat engine, can’t you reprogram the vaccine to attack it, too?”

What had Cam told them?

“We can try,” Ruth said. “It’s a very different machine. I also subjected it to low air pressure and I don’t think it has the hypobaric fuse, so it won’t self-destruct above ten thousand feet.” She paused over her desk, then aimed the UV lamp at the walkie-talkie, too, uncertain if it would fry the radio.

There was another clunking sound in front of her and this time she was sure it was from outside. Good.

“Cam?” she said.

“What is the nanotech doing to us?” he asked, and Ruth smiled with relief that the walkie-talkie was fine. But her smile evaporated in the harsh light. “I don’t know,” she said. “It goes for the brain, obviously. Maybe the nervous system, too. It’s some kind of biological warfare.”

“I’ll get a work crew together,” he said.

“Thank you.” Oh, God, thank you, she thought. Then she turned the radio over and irradiated its other side.

The UV bath wasn’t guaranteed to pulverize the nanotech. At most, it should damage the invisible machines. It would be more effective in combination with X-rays, but they hadn’t been able to find what they needed in the small hospital in Steamboat Springs. Like electrical generators, the most common medical equipment had been scavenged long ago. They hadn’t even been able to buy one on the local market.

Trying to scour the light over every millimeter of her suit was infuriating. The tanks on her back nearly threw her on her head when she tried to reach her boots. Once she pressed her knuckles against the plastic on the floor, yanking the lamp away just in time. She knelt against the desk just to keep her balance, working the lamp over every crease in her legs, neck, and sleeves with cold-blooded precision.

Ruth pointed the lamp sideways across her faceplate, too, with her eyes scrunched tight against the purple heat. She twisted to aim the light up and down her air tanks, contorting her upper body. Finally she turned to the tent itself. She was patient, sweeping the light back and forth like a paintbrush.

In the other room, Patrick continued to worm against the floor. Bam. Scraaatch. Bam. Bam.

“Huuh,” Linda groaned. “Huuh.”

“I’m going to turn on the fans,” Ruth said. “You guys should back off in case something goes wrong.”

“Ruth, wait,” Bobbi said, just as Greg said, “No! You have to tell us more.”

“That’s all I know. Where is Cam?”

“This isn’t a good idea!”

“Greg, it would take me days to pull the nano apart with this AFM. What I have is a surface scan. It’s in my laptop. I can keep trying to make sense of it, but I’m coming out.”

She hoped Cam would say something, too. Anything. She ached for reassurance and a friendly voice. She just wanted to make contact again. Didn’t he realize it might be for the last time? But he must have been busy redistributing their guards and finding tools.

“I’ll call you when I’m ready,” she told Greg. Then she punched the emergency switch bolted to her desktop.

The room jumped. Ruth almost fell. Loose pages ripped up past her face as the plastic snapped tight on all sides. Behind her, it ballooned outward like a sail. The tent was secured to the ceiling, floor, and three of the four walls, where hundreds of carpenter’s staples had been shot through reinforced patches, but the airlock and the decon tent were only tied to the floor. That end of the tent wanted to pull free. Her suit leapt in the same way. The chest piece hiked up against her collar and her sleeves trembled in the cyclone.

There were two square metal frames set in the tent, a small one in the ceiling and a larger one beneath her. They’d bolted a heavy-duty exhaust fan into the floor and an air compressor overhead. The fan was nearly four feet wide. Eric and Cam had taken it from a press shop, where it was used to vent bad air away from the shop’s employees. Here, it fed clean air into the room through two openings hidden in the cabin’s foundation. They hadn’t wanted to seat it in the wall where it might raise questions if the military ever came through town.

Ruth rubbed her hands over as much surface area as she could reach in quick, arcing motions, hoping to scrape free any nanotech clinging to the tent.

Suddenly the plastic on her right tore loose from its staples, bumping her shoulder and hip. Ruth screamed. “Aaaah!” The plastic itself was intact — only the stapled patches on the outside had torn — but if any more of the plastic came free, the tent might collapse around her like a net — or it might rip.

Either accident would probably kill her.

Don’t stop, she thought, clapping her gloves together as she glanced up through the howling channel overhead. Then she began to scrub feverishly at the plastic again.

The A-frame roof of her hut was sturdier than it needed to be. It was designed to bear the weight of snow, but the beams in the ceiling also supported the air compressor and duct work leading to a storage tank about the size of a small car. They’d found the compressor in the garage of a pipeline testing company. It was powered by the huge diesel engine from a Peterbilt truck, which they’d hidden in a cellar beneath the cabin, running a drive belt and an exhaust line into the roof. Ruth couldn’t hear the engine because of the fan, but it was probably adding to the dangerous vibrations throughout the building.

The compressor was rated at 2,700 cubic feet per minute. That meant it could swap the air out of her lab in seconds, again and again and again, but it was impossible to ensure that the room was safe. Even if 90 percent of the contamination was sucked away in the first minute, and, in the second minute, 90 percent of the remainder was taken, there would always be a miniscule amount left behind.

Unfortunately, the tent wasn’t holding up well, and Ruth worried about the rest of the system, too. If she continued to subject it to full power, the compressor might blow out or the ducts might leak, which was why they’d situated her hut on the southern edge of Jefferson. This cabin was generally downwind. An accidental discharge should be carried away from town.

What if it wasn’t?

Shaking from exhaustion, Ruth climbed onto the desk with a fold of plastic from the repair kit. It shook and leapt in her hands like a flag. The vent in the ceiling was already partially blocked by wads of paper and she let go of her patch, clogging the vent completely. Then she kicked her boot into the emergency switch and turned off the system.

The fan died before the diesel engine sputtered and quit. There was no need to hold the patch in place. Most of it had been sucked tight into the grill and Ruth taped the edges as fast as possible, securing it to the ceiling of the tent.

She repeated the process with another, larger square. Then she got down and surveyed her lab. The tent was still secured to the wall behind the desk. That wasn’t the wall she’d intended to have them chop open, but it would have to do. Outside the tent, the room itself hadn’t been decontaminated. She would need to melt and seal the plastic to the wall before they cut their way in.

She found her walkie-talkie. “I’m okay,” she said, leaning over the desk to knock on the wall.

Cam said, “Ruth? Jesus, Ruth, it sounded like the whole place was coming apart.”

“Change of plans. I want you to come through this wall instead.” She knocked again and was answered by a dull chak like a pry bar hitting the wood. There must have been a group of them outside and she yelled, “No, stop! Stop!”

Cam echoed her. “Stop it! Stop! We need to make sure we’re in the right place!”

Ruth looked away from the wall, feeling wistful and scared and glad. He was always so fast to understand her, except when she tried to talk about her feelings — but there was another reason for them to hold off. “I want to hit the entire lab with UV again,” she said, reaching for the lamp. “Give me ten minutes.”

Twenty minutes later, she realized she was only delaying the inevitable. She had to trust the