The engineers pushed into the crowded hall. Deborah heard them talking on their suit radios as they filed past, bearing their M4s and welding gear. “—get started,” the first man said, muffled.
Seconds passed.
No one was infected.
The last engineer through the door closed it behind him and the tension went out of the hallway.
“You must have hurt yourself when you fell,” Emma said, taking Deborah’s elbow at last. They both welcomed the distraction. Emma’s hands were skilled and light, gently investigating the bloody tear in Deborah’s sleeve.
Her forearm was scraped in two places. Strange. She hadn’t felt it. Deborah even smiled at the absurdity of a few cuts. It made her think of Band-Aids and her mother and a song Mom had sung when she was small and hurt herself, something about “oh green grow the rushes, oh.”
Emma smiled, too, not understanding but needing the human contact. Then their quiet moment was over.
“What are you doing!?” Mendelson yelled.
The engineers pulled at Deborah’s troops, herding them in the direction of the command center. “Down the hall! Down the hall!” one man shouted. They looked like they were preparing to burn the next door, but Deborah realized they were also disarming her soldiers.
“No!” she cried.
“Stay where you are,” said an engineer with a Beretta.
“Major Reece,” said another man. “You’re with me.”
“What?”
“Let’s go. They need you inside.”
“Inside the command center? What about the rest of my team!? These people are fine. You can see everyone’s fine!”
“They’ll be safe here.”
“That’s idiotic,” Deborah said coldly. “If there’s any risk of infection, I have it, too! You’ll be taking the same risk when you let me in!”
“I’m sorry, Major. Let’s go.”
Deborah had come too far to disobey orders now.
The command center stood separate from the rest of the complex. That was one reason why the corridors leading into it were cracking. The command center was a massively reinforced box seated upon forty steel coils, each one as tall as a man and weighing a quarter ton. These shock absorbers were bolted deep into the bedrock, whereas the rest of the complex was simply laid upon the cut, naked stone. They’d never had the resources for better, but the design they’d chosen by necessity also provided the center with an additional, last line of defense. There were only two passageways inside. Both were lined with explosives and could be destroyed to stop invaders or contagion.
A crude decon station had been set up in the main antechamber. Building it might have been what delayed the engineers from reaching Deborah’s group any sooner. She barely recognized the small room, which had been a simple, exposed cube with nothing more than an armed guard, a phone to the inside, and security cameras. Now it was crammed full of clear plastic in sheets and channels. The guard on the other side wore a containment suit just like the engineers.
“I’m sorry, ma‘am, I need you to strip,” said the engineer, pointing for her to walk into the maze of plastic. “There’ll be a new uniform for you on the other side.”
This was why her entire squad hadn’t been allowed to come. In fact, the engineer looked as if he intended to stay outside himself. The maze contained a flimsy shower stall with two tanks alongside it. They must be limited in the amount of water they could run. There were also at least three fans that would blow back into the complex.
It was a pointless effort. If she had nanotech in her blood, they could clean her skin and her hair until Jesus came back in a Ferrari and yet accomplish nothing. Deborah tried not to show her condescension or her disapproval, although she held tightly to these feelings as she removed her gun belt, her boots, and her uniform, wincing at the twinge in her arm. Nor could she stop herself from glancing at the nearest camera in the ceiling. Who was watching? Did it matter? She was mad at herself for reacting at all. People were dying. Taking off her clothes was nothing compared to what she’d already been asked to do, and yet Deborah hated the indignity of it.
She protected herself with her irritation as she removed her bra and underwear. The engineer had the courtesy to turn his head. The guard on the other side of the plastic did not. Fine. He was only a distorted shape to her, so he must not be able to see her clearly, either, especially inside his hood, although she expected to be freezing and humiliated when she reached the other side.
“Wash your hair first,” the guard called. “Now your body. Scrub your face, please. Now your, um, your front and your behind. Thank you, ma‘am. Turn off the water.”
Deborah was not allowed a towel. They probably hoped to whisk away any nanotech remaining on her skin as the water evaporated in the blast of the first fan, which the guard operated from his end. Then she walked into a second cell and he hit her again. Each section of the maze was blocked off with long flaps that fluttered backward while the fans were on, then closed again after the guard shut off the power.
When she finally emerged from the plastic, her mind was as cold and tight as her body. She ignored the guard except to nod when he gestured at a rack of uniforms sealed in bags. Deborah took the first Army kit she could find, only to discover it was too big in the waist and too short for her legs. She didn’t care. She wasn’t undressing again. “I’m ready,” she said.
Cradling his M4, the guard lifted the handset on the wall. “We’re clear,” he said.
The bolts in the door clicked like rifles.
They’d constructed an opaque white plastic tent on the inside of the door, so Deborah couldn’t see anything — but the voices were deafening. She knew the command center was no bigger than a single-family home, and the ceiling, floor, and three walls were bare concrete. Every sound echoed in the box.
“Major Reece?” An Air Force captain intercepted her as soon as the door was sealed by two USAF commandos who wore containment suits of their own, although both men had their hoods open. Their air tanks must be turned off, preserving their air. “This way,” the captain said, leading Deborah from the small tent.
The noise was impossible. More than fifty men and women spoke at the same time, few of them to each other. Most wore Air Force blue. There were also people in tan or camouflage or civilian clothes. Nearly everyone was gathered in four rows facing away from her. They stood or sat at overcrowded desks in a forest of display screens. Others shoved through the mob on errands from one station to another.
Larger flatscreens were mounted on the far wall. The smallest flickered and scrolled through aircraft counts. The other two were situation maps. In blue and white, one showed the outlines of the world’s continents overlaid with dense, busy symbols wherever there were known populations. The other screen was also a blue field with white lines denoting U.S., Canadian, and enemy borders in North America. Symbols and text blinked on the map in a hundred locations, mostly on the Russian and Chinese side.
Deborah stared as she followed the Air Force captain through the noise. Individual words leapt at her and then an Army officer crashed into her, too, rising from his chair. He didn’t stop to apologize or even glance back.
“Roger that,” another man said. “Can you confirm—”
“—to coordinates eight seven five—”
If she was reading the situation map correctly, things had grown worse since she’d heard any news. Winking dots showed the remaining elements of the U.S. — Canadian governments and military. There were very few. More than a dozen? As she watched, one of the dots in New Mexico froze and then dimmed, left on the screen like a gravestone. The map was crowded with static information in faint text. Only the blinking locations were uninfected, and Deborah realized Europe was also crippled. Less than twenty symbols pulsed among a film of dead, gray data, mostly in Britain and Germany. The marks on the rest of the continent were frozen. Gone. Farther east, India was equally silent.
