Plague Zone

vehicles.”

“Yes, ma‘am.” Huff picked up the radio again. “This is Two,” she said. “Form up in a circle, but stay inside your wheels. Watch for planes. Weapons tight. Remember, we’re looking for friendlies on the ground.”

“This is Five,” the radio said. “I’ve got zombies two hundred yards behind us.”

“Shit.” Foshtomi stopped the Humvee. “We probably need to get uphill if we can, but I don’t know if Five will make it. That truck was a bad idea. Call Viper first. Is he still inbound?”

Ruth was barely listening. Lord God, she thought. If she was right, the Chinese wouldn’t only gain tens of thousands of slaves in victory. There would be concubines, too, and the idea left a cold weight deep in her chest.

“It will be even worse for women,” she said. “Remember what happened in the labor camps. There was rape and forced pregnancies—”

“Not now,” Foshtomi said. “Christ.”

Ruth raised her head at last. She was surprised to find a brick building on one side of the vehicle, an old bank, which Foshtomi was using for cover. Everywhere else, there were only ruins, the square-cornered shapes of foundations lost among brush and weeds. They were in the remains of the original town of Grand Lake, most of which had been dismantled for building material. That meant they were just six miles from the peaks where the military base had been overrun.

Driving here was incredibly dangerous. The Chinese might find them at any minute — and yet they’d come to hunt the Chinese themselves. Rescuing the other Americans was a secondary goal as far as Ruth was concerned. Unfortunately, they could expect heavy casualties when they left their vehicles. After smashing through the infected people, the outsides of their Humvees and trucks would be laced with nanotech.

We’ll be lucky if half of us survive, Ruth thought as Huff switched frequencies and said, “Viper Six, this is Gray Fox. Viper Six, this is Gray Fox. Over.”

“We have you in sight, Gray Fox,” a woman answered. “Stay off the radio. Over.”

“Roger that, Viper Six. Be advised there’s a crowd of zombies coming up behind us,” Huff said. “I see thirty or more.”

“We see them, too. Hold your fire. We don’t want the Chinese to hear shots. How are your vehicles for space? We want to jump onboard, but we’re contaminated.”

“What?” Foshtomi barked. “Ask them what the fuck that means,” she said as Huff clicked at her SEND button and said, “Say again, Viper. Your people are infected?”

“We’re in suits but we’re covered with nanotech,” the woman answered. “You can’t touch us. Not yet.”

“What do we do?” Bobbi asked. “Ruth? What do we do?”

There’s nothing we can do, she thought, but it was her job to find a way. “The lake,” she said. “They need to wash off in the lake. They’ll probably just pick up more nanotech on the shore, but they have to try. Then I’d have them scrub each other with dirt.”

“Those zombies will be on top of us in five minutes,” Cam said.

19

“We need twenty minutes,” the woman on the radio said. “Then we can clear your vehicles, too. Buy us some time.”

“Roger that, Viper,” Sergeant Huff said.

“I want One and Three to sweep the road,” Foshtomi said as she dug for a pair of binoculars. “No guns. Just run ‘em down. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma‘am,” Huff said without meeting her eyes, and Ruth felt the same squeamish sense of alarm. It was one thing to shoot innocent people from a distance. Intentionally using the Humvees as battering rams was hideous, but Huff began to relay Foshtomi’s orders. “This is Two,” she said. “Listen up.”

Foshtomi turned to Ruth. “How is Viper going to decontaminate?”

“I don’t know.”

An engine rumbled behind them as one of the Humvees rolled past. The other Humvee appeared from the corner of the bank and followed. Ruth was very, very glad she wasn’t in those vehicles, but it had always been that way, hadn’t it? Other people did the dirty work while she was safe.

“I think I see them,” Foshtomi said. She lowered her binoculars and got up on her seat, twisting in the confines of the Humvee to find a better angle through the windshield. “Shit. They’ve got a drape or something like a tent.”

“You mean an airtight tent?” Bobbi asked.

“That wouldn’t work,” Ruth said. “This plague doesn’t have the hypobaric fuse.”

“It’s just some kind of blanket.” Foshtomi slid back into her driver’s seat and handed the binoculars to Ruth. “Tell me what you see.”

Suddenly the radio squawked, full of the sound of a growling motor. “Watch out!” a man yelled. Then the noise shut off. He was gone.

“One and Three,” Huff said. “One and Three, are you okay?”

Please be okay, Ruth thought, but the radio answered in the same man’s voice. “This is One,” he said. “I think Three’s infected. They nearly hit us.”

Foshtomi punched the ceiling. “Fuck!”

“We’re coming back around,” the man said. “He’s off the road. We — Yeah, I can see Coughlin. He’s sick. They’re all sick.”

Ruth was trembling too hard to see through the binoculars when she finally brought them to her eyes. Then she realized she was crying again. We just let five soldiers be infected to save a few others, she thought. We just lost five people, plus everyone they killed in the street… Maybe that kind of math was necessary, but it felt evil, and she struggled with her helpless guilt and self-reproach.

The hillside beyond the remnants of the town was brown and green. Ruth spotted a yellow figure, someone in a hazmat suit. Other soldiers gathered around him. She was disappointed by the size of the group. Is that it? she wondered. Were there more in hiding? Maybe a larger group wouldn’t have been able to sneak away, so eight or nine commandos and scientists were all that had escaped Grand Lake.

They wrapped one of their own in a peculiar blanket, an olive green Army-issue blanket that looked like it was pierced with wire. Dimples filled the sheet. Ruth thought they’d attached a great many small things to the other side of the blanket, but what? At eighty yards, from a poor angle, it was difficult to see what they were doing, but they walked the blanket from one person to another, positioning it against their knees, chests, air tanks, and helmets. However the blanket functioned, Ruth supposed it was also how they’d replenished their air tanks, by sterilizing the connections first.

A rain of ash flittered from the sky, then cleared again. Ruth caught several glimpses of the blanket’s other side. It was lined with irregular hunks of circuit boards — some barely an inch across, others as much as three — which they’d sewn to the blanket with an odd collection of wire and string. Here and there, a few of the circuit boards were still whole. They were round and set in shallow white plastic caps.

“So what is it?” Foshtomi asked. “Is this gonna work?”

For once, Ruth was a total loss. “They must have rigged some kind of radioactive material,” she said. Those caps look familiar, too, she thought. Where have I seen them before?

Faintly, she heard the screech of tires as the other Humvee continued to cover the road behind her. The commandos hiked down in a group. Two of them were lugging microscopes, which was good, but Ruth was more interested in their blanket, which they immediately spread in front of Foshtomi’s vehicle. After thirty seconds, they laid it over the hood.

“Smoke detectors,” Foshtomi said. “That thing’s got five hundred fucking smoke detectors on it.”

They lifted the blanket and brought it to the driver-side fender, then to the door. Ruth shook her head in