Plague Zone

she would need to freeze and save her program before switching out.

Once there had been planes in the night. They’d also heard gunshots rolling through the hills up north. There were probably survivors out of Morristown, but even if those people remained free of the plague, the shots would attract more of the infected. Ruth’s group faced the same problem with their engine and their lights. They needed to make sure they were alone.

Ingrid slung her rifle. “I’ll go.”

“Wait. Help me with Cam.”

“I’m all right,” he said.

“You’re still bleeding!” Ruth swung to face him, catching his good arm. He’d leaned forward to climb down from the jeep, which frightened her. “Let me help you,” she said.

“All right.”

“Let us help,” she repeated, correcting herself. Me. Us. The words were a small distinction when everyone else they knew was gone, but Ruth was vividly aware of trying to quiet her emotions. The loyalty she felt for him was savage and blind. Ruth wouldn’t hesitate to kill for Bobbi or Ingrid, because they were all that was left of her home, but she would die for Cam.

“Here,” she said, gesturing toward the downwind side of the jeep. The vehicle offered some protection from the cold. It would do no good if the breeze was threaded with nanotech, but the alternative was to be completely exposed and she couldn’t accept that.

The three of them got Cam out of the jeep without jarring the rags she’d cinched under his arm. Then they sat him against the front tire, where Ruth smelled oil and hot metal and the cool scent of the crushed short grass.

She grabbed her backpack. They had almost nothing else except for her laptop — no tent, no blankets, and only the few canteens she’d stuffed into her pack with some cornmeal, potato powder, and dried tomatoes. She was hungry. She ignored it. She flipped open her computer and nodded once in the blue glow of its screen. Her analysis of the nanotech’s surface scan was still running. The progress bar stood at 46 percent. She would have liked to use the laptop’s screen for a light source, but it was smarter to conserve power.

The screen went dark when she shut its clamshell. Ruth took off her face mask and tried to remove her bloodstained gloves, too, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. It took her a moment to rip away the duct tape sealing her jacket cuffs. Then she knelt in front of Cam. He’d also pushed off his goggles and mask while Bobbi put hers back on. The lack of armor made Ruth and Cam different from the other two.

“Okay, I’ll take care of him,” Ruth said to them. “You should…” She stopped and tried to soften her tone. “Can you set up an LP?”

Ingrid shook her head. “What?”

“Listening post,” Ruth said. She’d spent so much time with Cam and Eric, she’d forgotten that not everyone in Jefferson was part of their militia. Ingrid had been an unofficial grandmother to their babies, a seamstress, a barber, and their dentist, often working in Morristown and sometimes as far away as New Jackson. The older woman had been an oral hygienist before she retired, years ago, and they’d been lucky to have her as part of their community.

“Maybe we should stick together,” Bobbi said unhappily.

“No, she’s right,” Ingrid said. “If we split up… if something happens…

If any of them were hit by the nanotech, the others would have a better chance of stopping the infected one if they weren’t too close together. If there was any warning at all in the dark.

Ruth took Ingrid’s glove with her bare fingers before the older woman could leave. “Don’t go too far,” she said. “We just want to make some kind of perimeter. I think on the west side. Downhill. Okay? Find a place where you’re out of the wind, but close enough that we can hear you if you shout.”

“I don’t like it,” Bobbi said.

“I’ll trade places with you in an hour. Please.” Ruth must have let her possessiveness show in her voice or the way she knelt with Cam. Behind her goggles, Bobbi’s face was impossible to read, but the small, birdlike movement of her head was full of knowing.

“I can take a shift, too,” Cam said.

“You were shot! You need to rest.”

Ingrid left them to their quarrel, walking into the darkness. “Let her take care of you,” Ingrid said gently. Perhaps her tone was as much for Ruth as it was for Cam.

Bobbi hesitated. She was still in shock and afraid and jealous, too, Ruth thought, but Ruth fixed her attention on Cam, closing her world down to him. She did this without meeting his eyes, studying his torso instead.

“Can you lift your arm?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We need to get your jacket off without moving the bandage, but I don’t want to cut it. You need it to stay warm.”

Bobbi turned and left with a grunt like impatience.

Everywhere, the crickets sang. The wind curled around either side of the jeep and underneath it. Cam winced as Ruth helped him strip his gloves. She pulled his good arm free of its sleeve, then stood over him to unwrap the jacket from his body. Everything they did felt like a slow dance, moving together. At last, she drew the sleeve from his other arm.

His shirt was damp with blood down to his belt.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“I don’t think my ribs are broken.”

“Shush. Let me clean the wound.”

Ruth used her knife to remove his shirt because she needed to save the cleanest parts for a sponge and fresh bandaging. But he was right. The wound wasn’t too bad. The bullet had grazed his pectoral muscle just below his armpit, leaving a gash about two inches long, wider in back, like a sideways V. In some places he was already clotting, so Ruth was careful not to scrub, pressing delicately at the wound instead.

Cam’s body was dark and lean with muscle. His scars were disturbing, though. Most of his chest was peppered with old blister rash, and yet the smooth areas prickled with goose bumps from the cold where his skin was ordinary and perfect.

“Ruth,” he said.

She looked up, hoping. But he wasn’t watching her. He was gazing at the sky. You can say anything to me, she thought.

There was only the crickets. The wind.

He said, “Why is this happening?”

Ruth could barely admit to herself that she’d wanted to hear something else. What was wrong with her? They’d seen so much death. She was crazy to expect him to kiss her.

Kiss me, she thought, even as she rebuked herself. “I don’t know,” she said. But she knew. Some ideas were too powerful to ignore, forever changing the course of history. The wheel. Agriculture. Industry. The bomb. Today, Earth’s population was barely more than five hundred million people. Many of them had dispersed from the mountains, but, for the most part, they were still gathered into a handful of safe zones.

There had never been a better time to attack. One nation or creed could take possession of the entire planet, remaking humankind in its own image. Maybe there would always be one warlord or another returning to the same scheme in different ways, from Senator Kendricks to the Russian generals who’d initiated the war to the men in the Chinese government who must have overseen the development of the new plague.

It’s always men, she thought. Too aggressive. Too afraid. Women would find another way.

Ruth put all of her concentration into stitching his wound. It was ugly work. The needle was blunt and the heavy thread in her kit was meant for sewing. Nor did they have any anesthetic, not even weed or moonshine. Cam’s tolerance for pain was well learned, however, and he said nothing as she fumbled and squinted in the dark.

“Fuck,” she said when she lost the needle in the gore. She had to dig for it. “Sorry. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

He was bleeding again. She tried to hurry.

She believed the only reason they’d escaped Jefferson was because the plague was its most dangerous in