Plague Zone

“I need to find Ingrid,” she said.

“No. Don’t.”

“What?” Ruth would have argued or played dumb for hours just to stay in his lap. In the warm space against his chest, her nipples were still full, and the muscles up and down her belly and spine were tired and relaxed.

“Sleep if you can,” he said. “You need to be sharp if you’re going to make sense of the nanotech.”

“I don‘t—” I don’t have any gear except my laptop, she thought, but maybe he was right. Maybe they’d flag down a helicopter or meet up with a convoy, making their way to Grand Lake or any of the other labs scattered throughout the U.S.

Ruth got up at last. Her legs trembled and she smiled at that, flashing her teeth at Cam in the dark before she hid her feelings again. She’d been concealing things from him more and more, which felt especially wrong now that they’d been intimate, but it was the same night he’d lost his wife. She had to be careful.

She got dressed. She helped him back into his pants and his jacket. Then she walked several steps away to pee. She wished she could wash herself but there was no water to spare, and she was girlishly pleased by the evidence of their sex.

When she came back, he shared a little more of a canteen with her. They double-checked that their weapons were at hand. “Rest,” he said, staying upright against the jeep.

A large part of her wanted to stay awake. What if they were infected? Maybe it would better if she didn’t see the nanotech coming. Close your eyes, she thought. Then their time together would be the last thing she experienced.

Ruth curled up on the ground beside him. He set his hand on her side, and she was glad. She shouldn’t feel glad — she knew she shouldn‘t, because she crying, too — but a part of her that had been locked away was now content. She was in love, and, remarkably, she slept. But she dreamed that she lost him.

14

Cam listened to Ruth’s breathing change as she fell into a restless doze beside him. Despite her exhaustion, he didn’t think she really slept. Her hand closed on his leg, flexing and pulling. Her brain never seemed to stop. He remembered the same habit from their weeks together during the war. Ruth’s insomnia had become its own threat, never allowing her to recuperate even when she was staggering from her wounds.

In the darkness, Cam touched her cheek. “Shh, Ruth,” he said, listening for Bobbi or Ingrid. The crickets might be his only warning if one of them was infected. A person’s footsteps would quiet the bugs, so Cam closed his eyes and absorbed the familiar song.

Ree ree ree ree ree.

He was simultaneously elated and suicidal. He felt half insane. Having sex with her had been very good. His body was content where it didn’t hurt or where his muscles weren’t knotted from stress and grief, but his mind was twisted in the same way. What the hell had they been thinking?

In some ways, the worst part was that he supposed Allison would have understood — even approved. His wife was nothing if not pragmatic. Fine, she’d said, like a dare. The offhand remark was the last word she ever spoke to him, and Cam tried to hear it again now. She would forgive him. Wouldn’t she?

He could still feel Allison against himself, shorter than Ruth and even stronger, heavier in her breasts, wider in her hips. She liked to be kissed just under her ear.

Christ, he thought. You betrayed her. Allison died in front of you and hours later you’re fucking Ruth. But he couldn’t avoid how right it felt. Touching her was something he’d anticipated for years.

Cam opened his eyes to the stars and darkness. He tried to fight his way toward some kind of peace. Watching the sky made him feel small and lost and yet deeply connected with the earth around him. The grass rustled in the breeze. He smelled spruce or some other pines.

Are you out there? he wondered, but he didn’t believe in ghosts or any kind of god, not after so much killing. He knew it was different for Ruth. She’d had an epiphany during the war. They’d never talked about it much. Cam had grown up Spanish Catholic and Ruth as a secular Jew, and he thought she was embarrassed by her new faith because it couldn’t be quantified or explained like her research. Before they came to Jefferson, though, there had been times when Ruth said some interesting things. She seemed to need to share, and maybe she still thought she could pry him away from Allison.

On the first occasion, their group had been camped on a hot, dusty plain east of the Rockies with no wood for a cook-fire and only a few stale Army rations in their packs. Cam recalled everything about that evening clearly. Ruth had asked if they thought all of this — their lives, the world — might be some kind of test. “I don’t mean between good and evil,” she added with a wary look. “I mean like a materials test.”

Materials test was an engineering term for methods of determining the limits of any given machine or substance. If there was a Creator, she imagined He was a distant, uninvolved God who was only interested in them in ways they could never comprehend. The notion was typical Ruth. Her ideas were huge and convoluted and, ultimately, also very simple.

“What sort of half-wit God would bother to create quintillions of other star systems if we’re the most important thing to him?” she said. “And that’s just in this galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies around ours. Why not just one sun and one planet? He doesn’t have the whole world in his hands. That’s ridiculous.”

Earth was a very young planet in the life span of the Milky Way, lost deep in its spiral arms. Their home was just one extremely average ball of rock among an endless sea of others.

“It’s laughable to think any of our mythologies have much to do with reality,” Ruth said, and yet she obviously tried to conduct herself with goodwill, purpose, and self-restraint. Those were the traits professed by most religions, weren’t they? She believed it was what they were made for — to help each other, to cooperate, to show endurance and insight.

Ruth felt like she had something to prove — that her abilities weren’t just a randomly generated mistake. She believed there was a divine spark in everyone, something to be found and nurtured.

How did their relationship fit into her sense of destiny? Because he was meant to help her?

Shit, Cam thought. They didn’t need to sleep together to be a team, and he knew he was only using rationalizations to justify what they’d done. He wondered what Ruth would say if he asked.

Cam agreed with some parts of her philosophy. He believed everyone was responsible for his or her own life, either trying their best or failing to make the effort. It was so easy to blind yourself with selfishness, fear, or greed. But he still wasn’t sure. Had the two of them made a mistake or done something right?

What if the answer was both?

He touched Ruth’s cheek again. Stupid. She reacted, shifting her weight and her hand on his thigh. This time he didn’t say anything to reassure her subconscious. I love her, he thought. I do. Yet he was afraid to wake her up. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to look her in the face again.

The cloudless sky slowly lightened and Cam left Ruth to check on Bobbi and Ingrid, moving through the predawn in full armor — goggles, mask, jacket, gloves. The wind had died. The crickets were silent. The valley below him to the northwest seemed empty and peaceful. Morristown had burned out, and there was only a long, ancient row of electrical lines to indicate that people had ever lived down there.

Bobbi was asleep in a small fighting hole. Cam heard her snoring before his eyes were able to separate her shape from the pile of rocks she’d built. He stopped. Was there any way to be sure she wasn’t infected? Sleep was nearly as essential as eating. If the mind plague stopped people from fulfilling those basic needs, none of the infected would last more than a few days. The autumn nights were sharp in the Rockies, and Cam remembered how the crowd out of Morristown had been dressed only in their bed clothes, often barefoot or in socks at best.

They came for us, he thought. They walked eleven miles to find us even though it was midnight and barely thirty degrees out, so maybe they don’t sleep.

He crept away from Bobbi just the same. If he threw a pebble at her and she stood up and turned on him with that drunken, searching walk… He didn’t want to kill another friend. Either way, she needed her rest.