Plague Zone

flight as the dust lifted and surged in the same hot wind. As he staggered to his feet, Jia identified the unexpected shapes of crushed beds and electronics and, incredibly, an entire truck that must have rolled into the base. The jumble was also full of bodies. Only some were moving. Not all of them were whole. Jia saw a dead man pinned beneath a mass of concrete and another who was missing his jaw and one arm.

He felt as if he was waking from a nightmare. Deep down, perhaps, he was still screaming, but it was as if he was too small to absorb what had happened. His surroundings only came to him in bits and pieces. He saw a shattered door and an exploded water tank and a desk drawer without a desk. There was also a blue plastic comb in the rubble and Jia stared at it without comprehension.

Then he stepped toward the mutilated soldier. The face wasn’t Bu’s and the awful, blank feeling in Jia’s head lifted for an instant. Where had they been standing? Was this the corridor?

The base shuddered again and hundreds of voices reacted above him, shouting in the wind. A pile of debris crumbled nearby, burying some of the dead and a wounded man who thrashed once before he disappeared. No! Jia thought. But the man was gone. A few people were picking themselves up inside the pit, yet most of the other survivors seemed to be on the shattered floor above. He couldn’t immediately count on them for help.

“Bu?” he yelled. “Bu, can you hear me!?”

Everywhere the collapsed walls formed barriers and unstable pockets, any of which could be hiding the other man. The voices were an obstacle of another kind, making it difficult to hear.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!” His voice rose. “Answer me!”

Later, Jia would learn that a pair of Minuteman ICBMs had detonated on either side of the Los Angeles sprawl, bracketing the city on its northeast and southeast borders. The yield of these warheads was only one megaton each — the Americans had tried to limit the danger of fallout to themselves — yet that was several times the strength of the first atomic bomb used in Hiroshima. Worse, the two blasts slammed together with gale-force winds.

At the same time, other missiles hit Oahu and Hawaii, which the Russians and the Chinese both used as staging grounds. These strikes might also have been a signal, walking the devastation out into the Pacific, like a feint toward China. Much closer, more warheads detonated in Santa Barbara, Oceanside, and San Diego. The Americans also destroyed the three large military bases far inland among the Mojave Desert, where the Chinese kept most of their aircraft — but there were no strikes on mainland China itself. The American launch was precise. Possibly they no longer had enough operational silos for a larger response.

For now, Jia knew only his private horror. He clawed at a snarl of wreckage with both hands, ignoring the bolt of agony through his forearm. There was blood in the gray dust. So much blood.

“Sergeant!” he yelled.

He found a naked foot. It was crushed and bent, and yet Jia felt relief. His thoughts were still divorced from him, but he couldn’t imagine how Bu would have lost his boot, much less his sock. This was someone else, a man who’d been sleeping in their barracks overhead.

Jia kept moving. The ground was a strange up-and-down ruin. Most of the dunes gave way beneath his feet. His instinct was to shy away from the larger slabs, but he ducked his head beneath them nonetheless, calling for the other man.

“Bu! Sergeant Bu!”

He found a live wire sparking in the rubble. He walked across a slew of ghosts made of empty clothes. Then he jumped when another survivor limped out of the dust abruptly like one of the ghosts come to life.

“You!” Jia shouted. “Help me. We’re looking for a Second Department noncom in—”

The man didn’t respond, shambling away. Was he deaf? There was blood in his hair, so Jia let him go. He’d heard someone else groan and he followed the sound, pushing his way past a massive hunk of concrete.

Bu Xiaowen lay beyond it. Each breath was a strained rasp. He was bent and gray with dust, but Jia recognized the other man’s voice even in this extreme. He ran to him, stumbling once and jamming his fractured arm. “Bu,” he said, marveling that they could have been so widely separated by the quake. They were together now. Jia felt himself awaken at last. The emotions in him were terrible — and honest — as he laid his hand on Bu’s cheek, assessing his lover’s airways. Bu’s mouth looked clear of gravel or loose teeth. That was good, but Jia could see that he was seriously injured.

“I can‘t,” Bu groaned. “I can’t feel…”

“Hold still. I’m here. Just hold still. We’ll get you out as soon as we can,” Jia said, promising something that he had no right to guarantee. Bu’s throat was mashed and swollen. His left arm twisted away from his body like a dead thing. Jia thought he must have been rolled beneath the nearest debris, a tangle of concrete and rebar. One of the steel rods had punctured Bu’s leg, spurting blood through the dust.

Jia clamped his good hand down on the calf wound. Mastering the pain in his other arm, he took off his gun belt and wrapped it twice below Bu’s knee before cinching the buckle tight. Then he turned and began to open his lover’s shirt.

“The roof,” Bu groaned. “What…”

“Quiet now. Breathe. Listen to me. Just breathe. The base was hit, but we’re going to be okay.”

Bu’s collarbone had come through his skin. His lung was surely punctured, perhaps in several places. That was why he couldn’t get enough air, and Jia was unsure if mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would help. What can I do? he thought, when really there was a different question he needed to ask himself.

What have I done?

All of his certainty from last night gave way to blame and guilt. He had been so aggressive in lobbying to attack the Americans. Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened without him. There were other men with ambition, but his circumstances were unique. Perhaps another officer wouldn’t have rushed to prove himself. What if they’d waited until the mind plague was even more virulent? The Americans might never had survived long enough to fight back, and the war would truly have been one-sided.

Jia grimaced through a mask of tears. Then he leaned down to Bu’s dazed, pale face. He didn’t want this kiss to be farewell, but, more than anything, he didn’t want Bu to die without feeling their love again.

Bu was still very confused, but his lips opened to Jia’s. They shared this tiny warmth. There was a rattle of someone’s boots in the debris and Jia jerked his head up from the other man.

Dongmei stood on the other side of the gray dunes. Her uniform was cleaner than either Jia’s or Bu‘s, and she held a canteen and a small pouch of medical supplies. She was lovely, like an angel. Her readiness was only what Jia would have expected — but while her broad hips were poised to continue forward, the rest of her body seemed unsure. She leaned slightly to one side as if to turn and run.

She gaped at them, open-mouthed.

Jia stared back at her, not believing his bad luck. The women’s barracks were set away from the basement. Dongmei had escaped the bombing. Then she’d either climbed into the pit or even jumped down to help. She was a good soldier. She might have run into danger entirely by herself without an officer to direct her.

Jia saw his own choice as other people shouted behind Dongmei. There was no way to silence her without the risk of being discovered, not even if he used his hands instead of his pistol. First he would need to chase her, and Dongmei was thirty meters away. It also sounded as if more troops were entering the pit to look for survivors.

They would need leadership. His role would be even more essential now than ever, especially if the command center was gone. That responsibility was greater to him than anything else and Jia scrubbed at his damp eyes, smearing one cheek with his grime-ridden hand.

“He can’t breathe,” Jia said, pretending he had been trying to give Bu mouth-to-mouth. “His neck. His ribs.”

“I, I,” Dongmei stammered.

“Is there a bag and mask in your kit? His leg is cut, too. Are there medics?”

The fear in her round face was disarming, even juvenile. It was the look of a young woman confronted with monsters she’d never believed were real. Could she genuinely be that innocent? Or was she so scared because she admired him and didn’t know how to process his homosexuality?

“Lieutenant Cheng!” he barked. “Are there medics?”

Dongmei seemed to grasp at the familiar tone, recovering herself at last. “No, sir,” she said. “Not down here.