Tony’s M16 fired a three-round burst. The shots were inef fective, aimed into the sky. Ruth saw him stagger as Allison continued to hammer herself against the ground. Then the boy fumbled his assault rifle and went to one knee, trembling. It was only a spasm that pulled the trigger.
Michael should have known better. He tried to drag Tony away from the old woman and suddenly he swooned, affected by the same shambling movements.
“Michael!” Denise yelled, but her instincts were stronger. Instead of charging after her husband, she hesitated. “Michael! Oh Jesus, no!”
Allison had stopped moving, bloody and limp. Ruth was aware of more flashlights and yelling behind her. A small crowd was hurrying toward them, and her neighbors had emerged from their home with a lantern — but there was an enormous danger in bringing reinforcements, because they would go to their friends. Cam would run to his wife.
Ruth pulled her sidearm and shot the old woman dead, firing twice over Allison’s body.
“No!” Denise screamed.
The old woman toppled, knocking Michael down, too. Her blood must have been contagious, but they were partially upwind. If there was nanotech in the explosions across the woman’s chest, the microscopic disease was swept away from them.
Ruth shoved Denise farther into the slow current of the breeze. It was critical to keep their distance. Then she turned her pistol on Michael and Tony.
Denise drove Ruth to the ground, punching at her chest and gun hand. The worst part was that Ruth understood. Denise still had some frantic hope for her husband, but Ruth struck her in the head with two quick panicky blows.
Denise fell sideways and Ruth leapt up. “Stop!” she yelled in a flurry of lights. The other villagers had arrived while she was down, blazing with lanterns and flashlights.
Cam shoved through the crowd. His face was hidden in his goggles and mask. “Allison!” he yelled, as another man shouted, “What are you—”
“They’re contagious! Get back!”
“Oh my God,
He must have been thinking of his baby. She was, too, but she struggled for control of herself. “Stop! It’s some kind of nanotech! Cam, if the wind changes—”
Behind her, there was a distinct gritting noise as Tony rose to his feet.
Ruth swung around.
Tony was already advancing in a clumsy, looping path. He stumbled on Allison’s hand but kept coming. Something was wrong with his eyes. They were like holes. In the many beams of light, his brown irises looked black, as if his eyes consisted only of the whites and giant, hyper-dilated pupils.
“Stop him!” she yelled.
Cam hurled his flashlight. Someone else threw a spare clip for a rifle. The clip bounced off of Tony’s arm, but Cam’s flashlight banged into his shoulder. It knocked him back. Suddenly everyone was bobbing up and down, scratching at the ground for dirt and rocks, pelting the boy and shouting as if their voices might also drive him off. Their flashlights stabbed and winked. Tony staggered in the onslaught. Then he lost his balance, stepping on Allison again and falling down.
Michael came at them next. His eyes were lopsided. Only one pupil was distorted. The other had shrunk to a pinpoint, and his body hunched to that side as if to compensate.
“Oh, fuck, shoot them!” a man yelled, but Denise drew her own pistol and thrust it at the nearest person who was also armed, a woman with a rifle.
“Don’t you touch him!” Denise cried.
“No, wait!” Ruth yelled. There were too many voices. The crowd hurled rocks and gear at Michael, a knife, a belt, even stripping off their jackets just to have something to throw. In the madness, two people fled. Ruth saw another man stagger. He wasn’t running away. He simply let his head slump. Was he infected? The man dropped to the ground as someone else began to jerk beside him, shaking all over.
It jumped the gap, Ruth thought. She meant to shout a warning but she couldn’t breathe. The reflex was too powerful.
Michael continued to wade toward them through the barrage. Unfortunately, the hail of rocks and equipment was slowing as they cleaned the ground and emptied their pockets. Ruth heard a woman swearing desperately as she scratched at the dirt. Someone else turned and ran. Then a flashlight pegged Michael in the face, its white beam spinning. He collapsed. But the other two men who’d been infected would rise in seconds.
“Give me your shovel,” Cam said to Greg. Both of them still wore their makeshift armor. Their goggles, hoods, and gloves would offer the slightest protection.
“Stay upwind!” Ruth yelled. “Cam!”
Otherwise they were helpless. Every survivor knew how easily the invisible machines could penetrate their lungs. A new plague was their most intimate and public nightmare, shared by everyone. They would have been less unnerved by another distant nuclear exchange. Panic took over.
Someone fired in the dark, then someone else. Orange muzzle flashes tore the crowd apart, because not all of the shots were directed outward. Tony died in a burst of rifle fire, flailing into the ground. Denise fired, too, driving one man to his knees before a third gun popped at the base of Denise’s skull, silencing her high-pitched screams.
It had been less than five minutes since the old woman transferred the nanotech to Allison.
Cam and Greg took the front line in the fight, clubbing three infected men as Ruth turned and ran. She pinballed through a jumble of silhouettes. “Wait!” someone yelled. Let them think she was a coward. Ruth crashed through her cabin door and slammed it shut, throwing the lock behind her.
Someone was pounding at the door when she yanked it open again, holding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand. Outside, the storm of lights and voices continued. Ruth had thought maybe Cam was trying to reach her, but it was Bobbi Goodrich.
Bobbi’s face was a grimace of terror, her fist raised to strike again. “You—” she said.
“Take this.” Ruth’s voice echoed in her helmet. She handed Bobbi the shotgun. “Don’t let anyone grab me.”
“I can‘t — Just watch out,” Bobbi said.
The two women moved into the darkness together. Ruth walked ponderously in her bright yellow gear, a Level A microbiological containment suit with two SCBA tanks on its back. One of the air tanks was only half full. Even so, the aluminum cylinders weighed thirty pounds. Both the Nomex jumpsuit underneath and the suit itself were too big. The chest piece billowed around her small breasts like a giant bag. The sleeves rubbed against her torso, filling her ears with the
Despite the suit, she knew immediately that a lot of the noise had moved away from them. Ruth barely recognized Jefferson anymore. The buildings were the same, except for the fallen greenhouse, but she’d never heard screaming in this place before. Their community had become a riot.
She turned into the sound of hoarse voices. “We can’t just kill everyone!” Cam said, pleading with an array of other villagers. Everyone kept their distance from each other. They had also been smart enough to throw their tools away after beating down the infected people, although doing so only left them with guns if there was another outbreak. Worse, now they faced each other with pistols and carbines.
Greg had sided with the larger contingent of the group. “There’s no other way,” Greg said. “We can’t tie them up.” He meant because they were afraid to touch their sick friends. Prolonged contact would be even more dangerous than jumping into range with a club.
Ruth shouted inside her helmet. “I can do it!”
The villagers didn’t notice, locked on each other.
“You could be next,” Cam said. “Don’t you get it? What if the nanotech hits you next?”
