They heard Allison call out at the edge of the village, challenging the newcomer. Her voice was strong in the wind. A moment later, she repeated herself. Cam and Greg began to suit up with the other three people on their smoke team, donning goggles and masks.
“I’ll go in first,” Cam said.
Then somebody screamed from Allison’s direction, a high, boyish shriek. It was Tony. Cam whirled, trying to place the sound beyond the blocky silhouettes of homes and greenhouses. He saw flashlights and human shapes. One was familiar, fair-haired and lean, yet round in the middle. The others were only shadows. They seemed to dance spastically.
Jefferson was under attack.
3
Ruth was standing at her door when Tony and Allison hurried past. She almost said something, but what? Allison didn’t even like to hear
Her mild tone was an odd counterpoint to Tony’s M16, which the boy seated against his shoulder with the barrel pointed skyward. It was a position that made the weapon more visible in the glinting white beams of their flashlights. Ruth nearly went to add herself to the guns beside Allison. The girl was a force to be reckoned with, but she was pregnant, and that increased her importance in more ways than Ruth could put into words.
They should have been friends. They owed each other their lives, but it wasn’t only Cam who stood between them. Allison excelled at being mayor and she had always been very watchful of Ruth, seeing her as a potential rival for this role as well. Ruth’s nanotech skills were a brand of authority that Allison could not match. The girl had never believed Ruth when she said she wished she could give it up. Allison was always thirsty for more control over their lives, whereas Ruth’s decisions had led to thousands of deaths during the course of the war. Given the choice, Ruth would have become just a regular person again, anonymous and ignored — and yet she felt that old conflict of responsibility now.
It was a woman about fifty years old. She was short and thin and dirty. Ruth thought there was blood on the woman’s elbow, staining her jacket sleeve. She was unarmed. She wasn’t even wearing a backpack. Had she been robbed? She looked skittish as hell, turning away from them when Michael’s light traced over her pale face.
Even so, Allison was cautious, holding her ground instead of going to help. “It’s okay,” Allison called. “We have food and water and a place where you can sleep.”
Michael aimed his flashlight into the dirt. Tony lowered his rifle, and, well behind them, Ruth lifted her hand from the 9mm Beretta on her hip.
There was no question that she and Cam would have been a better fit cosmetically. He was black-haired and black-eyed and Ruth’s coloring was dusky, whereas the darkest thing about Allison was her sunburn. Ruth often wondered what their baby would look like, but it had been the same with Bobbi and Eric. Bobbi was black, Eric was white, and neither of the mismatched couples turned many heads. They were
The only exceptions were people of Chinese or Russian descent. There was still widespread hatred since the war, which made things tough on anyone with Asian heritage. Some idiots didn’t bother to differentiate between Japanese, Koreans, or Chinese — or even Filipinos or Malaysians — not even those who’d lived in the U.S. for generations.
Racism had become a very different thing after the plague. Yes, there were some communities where people were trying to preserve ethnic purities, breeding only with fellow whites or Hispanics or blacks. Once a runner came through their village with marriage offers for anyone who was at least 50 percent Jewish. Ruth hadn’t been tempted, but it did make her wonder. Had the Israelis reestablished themselves on the other side of the world? Were there enough Jews alive to sustain their culture? For nearly everyone, though, race was trivial, and Ruth knew she was grasping at straws comparing her skin to Allison’s.
She was jealous of the younger woman. She was afraid for Allison, too. They had all been exposed to high levels of insecticide and other chemicals, not just in their village but during the plague year. Many of the pathetic refugee shelters had been slapped together with welding torches or made of vinyl or rotting carpet or cardboard, exposing the inhabitants to heavy metals, mold, or toxic compounds like vinyl chloride. Everyone had burned furniture, tires, plastic, and dung for warmth and cookfires, filling their homes with poisonous smoke.
Ruth had missed most of that. She’d spent the first thirteen months of the plague aboard the International Space Station as the centerpiece of a crash nanotech program, but the ISS was its own hostile environment, like a submarine. The recycled air became foul with human smells and bacteria. They were exposed to solar radiation and the more subtle damages of zero gravity, losing bone and muscle mass. Later, Ruth had also spent weeks on the outskirts of the Leadville crater, absorbing fallout. Perhaps worse, her body had been a war zone for different kinds of nanotech.
The next generation faced all the same problems as their parents and more. Babies required not only nourishment and warmth. First they needed a healthy start. The human body was capable of extraordinary resilience, but the most sinister wounds were those that went unseen, inside, at the cellular level or even deeper within their DNA.
So far, the women in Jefferson had suffered only four stillbirths and one toddler who showed every sign of being autistic. The other two children were okay. From what Ruth heard, however, the infant mortality rates were even more severe in Morristown. She hoped that was only because Morristown was thirty times larger, thus allowing for more data. It surely didn’t help that most of the people there were New Evangelicals, who pushed for as many babies as possible, no matter if the women were in their teens or in their forties or worn out from earlier pregnancies. Either way, the statistical curves were alarming. If the numbers continued to play out so poorly, the human race was no more than a hundred years from extinction.
There was a more personal insult. Ruth was thirty-eight. Her best years of fertility were already behind her, with few prospects in sight. She knew Cam tried to avoid her, which was impossible. They didn’t have enough firewood to make hot meals individually or to provide warm water in every home, nor were there enough pipes to install central plumbing throughout the village. It wasn’t safe to eat alone, either, so they ate in shifts and they bathed in the same hut beneath sun-warmed tanks, always with guards on duty. She saw Cam every day.
Who could blame her if she lived a bit vicariously through Allison? The girl should have been a sister to her, even if they were sisters who mistrusted each other.
Then the screaming began. Ruth jerked backward, staring, just in time to see someone drop to the ground with her spine bucking in the grip of a violent seizure.
The stranger killed Allison first.
The flashlights added to the confusion. One of the white beams spun into the ground, rocking up through the human shapes. The other two briefly pinned the old woman. Then another flashlight fell away. The sight paralyzed Ruth. She lost crucial seconds trying to understand what she was witnessing.
Allison had touched the old woman, reaching for her shoulder. In fact, Allison’s left arm was still thrown sideways from her body and clawed at the earth with a short, ripping motion. It peeled her fingers to the bone. Then her cheeks ran dark with blood as she chewed through her tongue.
There was one thing more that struck Ruth despite her wrenching shock. The old woman’s expression never changed. The wide look in her eyes was nervous, even rattled, but she didn’t even glance down at Allison as the others reacted.
