friend, bucking all over with short, rigid, stuttering movements. Both men were volunteers, but that didn’t make the decision any easier for Major Reece, who stood across the room with her pistol in her small hands.
Dry-eyed, Deborah Reece fired. She had always taken pride in the clarity of her self-discipline, no matter what she was feeling. But she couldn’t breathe and her balance was off. She missed her first shot. The round sparked from the concrete floor and banged into the wall.
“Please,” she said, like a prayer.
The first soldier was already trying to wrestle free of his buddy, pinned by the other man’s weight. Impossibly, he looked straight at her despite his struggle. His pupils were the same enormous holes she’d seen in every other casualty.
She didn’t know his name. He was simply one of the J2 specialists who’d been inside the complex when the nanotech swept over the Continental Divide. He looked to be about thirty-five, the same age as Deborah, and very much in his prime. A captain. Lean and sunburnt, he was exactly the sort of man she preferred for her discreet, almost professional affairs, and in that instant Deborah felt a startling intimacy with this stranger.
Grand Lake was buried in the new plague. Even at eleven thousand feet, sealed within the mountain, their superstructures were vulnerable. Everyone up top was infected. Some of them seemed to
These warrens had been built by engineers who were limited in equipment and supplies. Most of the subterranean complexes had been designed only to withstand the brutal winters at this elevation. Air strikes had been a secondary concern, and, possibly, the chance of surviving a nuclear near-miss.
Over time, many sections had settled badly, shifting out of plumb. Snowmelt seeped through the mountain and pushed against the bulkheads, eroding the rock alongside or beneath them, creating new pressures and holes. Today, the steel doors would stop people, even fire, but not microscopic machines. Attempts to retrofit the base after the war had been brief. Far more energy had gone into expanding these warrens than into improving the existing, upper levels. Complex 1 had grown to include three entrances to the outside — and from the last reports, the nanotech was cascading inward from all three directions.
It wasn’t just the doors. The air systems were also a weak point, as were the thousands of conduits for electrical and communication lines. Once inside, the nanotech was unstoppable. The warrens were too small. Built like honeycombs, even the largest complex barely covered one full acre with its offices, storerooms, and other areas stacked in a tight, vertical puzzle. Deborah had asked for volunteers and the Marine captain turned to his buddy and said, “It’s us.” Then they gave their lives trying to secure a door with nothing more than medical tape.
The other Marine’s spasms had slowed to a pace that was erratic and weak. He was dying. Her way was quicker. Deborah shot him, too.
She turned and ran past an overturned desk at the back of the room. Her long legs danced easily through the mess as she clapped one hand against the white Navy shirt she’d cinched over her nose and mouth, snarling the knot in her blond hair even though she’d taken to wearing it short.
The mask was still there. So was the team at the rear entrance of the room, which shouldn’t have surprised Deborah, but they were less a squad than a hastily picked group without an obvious chain of command. Most of the eleven men and woman were Army, and therefore her subordinates, yet she’d also ended up with an Air Force major and three Navy officers, and their orders were more important than any individual’s life.
That duty might have been easier because many of them didn’t know each other. Instead, Deborah was saved by the same thing she’d learned to value most in herself — their loyalty to the uniform. They could have slammed the door shut with her locked on the other side, but first they made a hole, lifting their rifles and sidearms so she could pass.
Focused on their weapons, Deborah wasn’t light-footed enough to clear their legs. She tripped and sprawled on the hard floor.
“Major!” one of her soldiers cried, Emma Kincaid, a medical corps officer like Deborah.
“I told you to abandon that door!” Mendelson yelled. He was the USAF major, a square-headed man of fifty. His words were directed at the other troops instead of Deborah, challenging her for command.
This short concrete hall was lined with office doors. Several of the men and women held armloads of paperwork and more files lay on the floor. Like most of the complex, these offices served intelligence personnel from all five branches of the military, and yet the low cubicles hadn’t only been ransacked for priority files but also for simple, precious desk supplies like Scotch tape. They had no other way to seal the doors. Deborah, Emma, and two nurses had snatched as many medical kits as they could find, breaking out adhesive bandages and tape, but those were almost gone.
Behind her, one soldier had closed the steel door. Three more slapped sheets of paper over the lock and hinges. Half a dozen hands held the sheets in place as others jabbed at the paper with tape or an incongruous tube of toothpaste, anything to create a seal.
“We should give up this door, too!” Mendelson yelled. “We need to get ahead of the nanotech! Don’t you see? It’s getting deeper into the complex because of us! It needs people!”
Two men had died because of her. That much was true. Still, Deborah said, “No.”
She should have volunteered herself, but a CO couldn’t afford that luxury. If she’d taken the Marines’ place, she would be dead now, too, leaving Mendelson in charge, and either he didn’t have the guts or he didn’t understand. The air systems had been shut down, so an empty room might serve as a buffer — it might have been best to lock several doors and hope that some dead space between them and the infected soldiers would be enough — but they didn’t have any more space to give up. From this hallway, there were barely fifty yards left before they hit the command center. It was critical to protect the operations room. Otherwise they would be deaf and blind to the outside world even if they found their way into a few safe corners inside the complex — and then what?
Without this base, the war was lost. Communications had ceased with nearly every other major installation across North America. Spokane. Calgary. Salt Lake. Flagstaff. Two hours ago, the president was reported safe in Missoula, and there were survivors in Yellowstone and in Albuquerque, but more than 80 percent of U.S. and Canadian forces seemed to have been wiped out. The rest were isolated and in chaos.
“I’m staying!” Deborah said.
“We’re with you,” an Army man said, as another yelled, “This isn’t working! We need to try something else!” His fingers were smeared with blue gel toothpaste, which he’d used like caulk in the doorjamb.
“They were laying insulation in Sector Four,” one of the Navy officers said. “What if we—”
“Four is cut off,” the Army man said.
“The rest of you get going!” Deborah shouted. “Move!” She turned to the troops at the door and said, “We’ll wedge paper into the cracks where you haven’t sealed it already. Maybe we can get it wet, too, make some sort of paste.”
“We can chew it if we have to,” the Navy officer said.
Behind them, there was a rustle of boot steps. Mendelson went with those soldiers, yelling back at Deborah. “Goddammit, leave the door!”
But her orders were straight from General Caruso. Maybe she couldn’t walk away from the men she’d shot in the other room, either. She could still see the captain’s face and feel her pistol jump in her hands.
What was the plague doing to them? Anything that increased pressure in the skull would push the brain downwards through the foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord exited. The cranial nerves that controlled pupil response were in the brain stem and quit working if they were squashed. Were the infected people hemorrhaging? Maybe the nanotech hit them like a concussion. Deborah wondered if anti-inflammatory drugs could possibly slow or stop the effect.
Then her friend Emma grabbed her arm. Emma’s eyes were alive and clean, and Deborah spoke urgently to her. “We need someone to cover us,” Deborah said.
“I — No,” Emma said.
