Plague Zone

Concussion shoved Deborah into the trees, separating her from Medrano and Cam. Maybe she bounced. The pain in her shoulder was incandescent and she blacked out.

She was brought back by someone pounding on her chest. Cam gasped as he hit her, and she realized this new pain was too sharp to attribute to his fist. She stank of charred skin and cloth. He’d doused a spot of burning fuel on her uniform, scalding his bare hand in the process. They were enveloped in smoke. The forest had ignited.

“Deborah,” he said. “Deborah?” He was obviously woozy himself, but she knew he’d had EMT training — nothing like her own schooling, but she was glad just the same.

“My shoulder. Can you reset it?”

“I’ll try.” He turned and said, “Medrano. Help me.”

He bent her arm at the elbow, rotating it outwards as Deborah tried not to twist away from the pain. Then he lifted her elbow even further, wrenching the ball of her humerus back into its socket through the torn ring of cartilage. Deborah grayed out again. But afterwards, the pain was reduced, and she’d even regained some motion.

There wasn’t time to make a sling. The smoke was suffocating, and they could see the flames crackling up through the hooked branches of two trees.

“Go,” Cam said.

Deborah outranked him — they both outranked him — but she let him take over. She remembered how he’d convinced Walls to send them west. The same characteristics that made him dangerous were exactly what the three of them needed now — decisive, unrelenting nerve. She had to trust his aggression. It was the real basis of Cam’s luck. Sometimes the chances he took were the best and only path.

The three of them jogged downhill, groaning, limping. They had nothing but each other. No radio. No water. Where did he think they were going?

The smoke thinned but Cam changed direction suddenly, moving them sideways across the slope when they might have escaped the fire by continuing downhill. Deborah almost spoke up. What are you doing? There was a clear area like a meadow below them, empty of brush. Why not run through it? Then she realized those trees were leafless and dead. Worse, something slithered on the rotting gray oaks. Ants coated the naked wood.

“Wait,” Cam said. “No.” He turned with his arms out as if to collect them — to change direction again — but he froze with his hands up.

There were enemy soldiers waiting in the brush.

Deborah saw at least eight men in a skirmish line, their faces hidden by tan biochem hoods or black, older- model gas masks. Their jackets were dark green. Most of them held AK-47 rifles. Others carried submachine guns she’d didn’t recognize.

One of them shouted in Mandarin. “Bie dong! Xia jiang!”

She didn’t understand, but the intent was clear. He gestured for them to get down. Within seconds, three more soldiers appeared uphill. There was no way out except back into the smoke and the ants, but Medrano was willing. “I’ll draw their fire,” he said.

“Hold it,” Deborah said. “Don’t move.”

Neither of them carried any weapons except their sidearms, and Cam’s gun belt had been torn away in the crash.

Cam raised his hands even higher and Medrano got one arm up, keeping his broken limb against his side. Deborah didn’t see any choice except to mimic her friends, although her disappointment was keen.

The man who’d shouted turned to his men, pointing at two of them. “Onycmume ux Hahe said.

They’re Russian! Deborah thought. She should have known. Chinese troops wouldn’t have worn this hodgepodge collection of masks and gloves — they were immune. These people were Russian, and they were also on the run from the plague.

“3aumecb eA0!” one said. “3aMumecb eA0!”

Deborah had learned the feel and pacing of their language during her months in orbit with Commander Ulinov. Nikola had even taught her several phrases. She tried them now as the pair of soldiers approached, concealed in their biochem hoods. “o6poe ympo, moapuu!” she said, Good morning, comrades, even though the day was well into late afternoon. It was a game she’d played with Ulinov. “Ka? Bbl nouaeme?”

How are you living today?

In Russian, the words were ambiguous. The phrase served as a basic “hello,” but could also mean more. It surprised them. The two soldiers hesitated.

“You’re American,” the officer called.

They were so grungy and burned, they were unrecognizable. He’d thought they must be Chinese. That was why he’d shouted first in Mandarin.

“Da,” Deborah said. Yes. “Where are we?”

“Put yourself on your knees,” the officer replied, with a curt motion for his soldiers to take them.

“Wait!” Cam said. “Stay back. We can protect you from the Chinese nanotech, but we’re probably crawling with it. We came out of the plague zones. You might be infected if you touch us.”

“You would be sick,” the officer said. “Not flying.”

“I’m Major Reece with the United States Army,” Deborah said, asserting herself, but Cam surprised them all. He was honest.

“We have the new vaccine,” he said. “If you help us, we can give it to you, too.”

The fire was getting closer. Deborah could hear it licking its way across the hill behind her as the smoke thickened. “We should move,” she said, but the officer refused.

“Nyet. Give us the vaccine,” he said, before barking out a dozen words she didn’t understand. The nearest Russians backed off, but none of them lowered their weapons.

“Let me clean myself,” Cam said. “I can try to decontaminate, at least a bit.”

The officer nodded, but hit the charging handle on his AK-47. Deborah flinched. One wrong move… she thought, barely allowing herself to breathe as Cam scrubbed himself down with brush and dirt. It was a crude decon procedure but clever as always. Deborah wondered what else Ruth had taught him. Would he have come up with this idea by himself? He was intelligent, just uneducated. That made him unpredictable.

“Major Reece and I are in charge here,” Medrano said to him.

“Right.”

“Then keep your mouth shut from now on.”

“We need them. Look at us.” Cam paused with a handful of crumbling brown earth against his sleeve, ignoring the scuffs and gashes beneath his burned uniform. “But they need us, too.”

“We should have negotiated,” Medrano said in a growl. He glanced at Deborah. “Major? It’s not too late.”

“No, I think he’s right,” she said.

“These are the same guys who bombed Leadville and started the whole fucking war—”

“They’re not. At this point, they’re just survivors like us.” Deborah turned to Medrano with as much poise as she could muster, watery-eyed in the smoke. “We don’t even know where we are, Captain. We’re hurt. Unarmed. I think he’s right.”

“What’s to stop them from shooting us as soon as he gives up the vaccine?”

“Information. Tell them, Cam.”

Cam aimed a thin smile at her. It was a sign of approval, and, for the first time, Deborah felt some glimpse of Ruth’s attraction to him. Beneath the scars, he was lean and dark and competent.

Pulling a jackknife from his belt, he crouched and sank the blade into the ground, trying to clean it of nanotech. Then he stood and held the knife over his left hand. “I need one man,” he said to the Russians.

“Sidorov,” the officer said.

In response, a soldier gave his rifle to his mates and walked closer.

“Tell him not to take off his hood!” Cam said. “Hold his breath. Give me his arm.”