Plague Zone

The war was over.

Sixteen hours ago, they’d landed her in Sylvan Mountain, ninety miles southwest of Grand Lake. Grand Lake had been abandoned for now, its complexes too damaged by the Chinese assault. Sylvan Mountain was mostly a surface base, a simple garrison lined with armor, artillery, and chopper pads, so it hadn’t merited air attacks. The mind plague had been enough to incapacitate this place.

The fallout had also reached these mountains, but the sky was clearing, leaving only a rime of soot. Faint threads of it still curled in the wind, tightening, opening, and tightening again — like her hand.

Ruth watched the horizon, trying to ignore herself. A small part of her basked in the heat of the late yellow sun. Soon it would be dark, and she cherished the light. She also welcomed the bustle of troops around the only helicopter on this broad concrete slab. They were loading the Black Hawk with wire cut from their own fences, shouting in the cold as they wrestled the steel with pliers and gloves. None of it was enough to distract her. She could only watch and wait, pacing, twitching.

A captain with an M4 intercepted her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “Dr. Goldman? You shouldn’t be out here.”

“Beymer,” she said, tugging at the white badge on her uniform. Go ask Colonel Beymer. The overwhelmed Navy colonel was acting CO, and he hadn’t known what to do with her except to give her anything she needed, medical attention, food, rest, and a quiet space for the microscopy gear they’d recovered with her. No one had time to babysit.

The badge was supposed to give her top clearance, which suited Ruth just fine. Speaking was an effort. In addition to hurting her teeth, she’d chewed her tongue and the insides of her cheek while she was infected, possibly because she’d been tied and her body couldn’t find any other way to respond to the mind plague’s commands to move.

“This isn’t a good idea,” the captain said. “Not without containment suits.”

Ruth didn’t answer.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he said, “but we don’t know what they might be carrying. What if there are other strains of nanotech?”

Only a few of his words rang through her anxiety. You don’t know what I’m feeling, she thought. I should have been there. But the captain was right, if not the reasons he’d stated. The landing pad was a zoo whenever new birds arrived. After everything that had happened, it would be idiotic for her to be squished by a chopper or run over by their ground crews.

“I’ll move out of the way,” she said, enunciating slowly through her swollen mouth.

“Thank you, ma‘am.” The captain hesitated, trying to meet her eyes, but Ruth couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at anyone. They wanted so much from her.

She’d used that need against them. Everyone was afraid of another contagion, something else cooked up in Los Angeles, but Ruth had convinced Colonel Beymer to send a helicopter after her friends nevertheless. Kendra Freedman was the name she’d cited. We have to find her, she’d said, and that was true, but she was less interested in saving Freedman than in discovering if Cam and Deborah were alive.

Ruth walked across the landing pad and sat down on a supply crate, picking one fingernail through the splintered edge of the box. It was good to be out of her lab. Even her mouth hurt less outside. The tent was small and dark, and Ruth was more disturbed than ever by small and dark. The waiting was worse. Ten minutes ago, Beymer had sent a man to say that his team was inbound from L.A.

I should have been there.

The thought would always haunt her. How much differently would things have played out if she could have helped them? Would she be dead, too?

Ruth had come back to her senses in a residential home in the flood-ruined old town of Tabernash, twenty miles south of the V-22 hanger. Ingrid was with her in a locked bedroom, but Ingrid was infected and only one of Ruth’s hands was partially untied. Ingrid must have seen the others fall sick before running to free Ruth. She wasn’t fast enough. Ruth was still tied to the bed. Coaxing Ingrid to her had been impossible. Ruth had screamed and begged in the darkness, hungry, bleeding, and alone except for the senseless ghost of her friend. She watched Ingrid roam back and forth against the walls for hours, never finding the door, until the older woman finally stumbled close enough for her to grab her belt. Ruth was weak. Ingrid was clumsy. She fell on Ruth, then rolled away, but Ruth had already dragged the pistol from Ingrid’s hip. Her wrists were bound too close together to aim the gun at those ropes, nor did she want to shoot at her feet, but she was able to use the weapon as a tool to pry herself free. Then she found her way to their radio.

Earlier today, Ruth had successfully modified the first vaccine for the mind plague to outpace the counter- vaccine, thus creating an antidote. Reprogramming the antidote so it wouldn’t replicate except in specific conditions was more difficult, but they wanted to keep it from spreading to the Chinese — not until the enemy was gathered into prison camps. Ruth had devised a governor that limited the antidote to replicating only in high oxygen atmospheres. This was an artificial environment within her ability to create, especially at Sylvan Mountain’s altitude, using precious medical supplies. It meant she was able to cultivate the antidote in small doses. Then she secured it in vials of blood plasma for injection into one person at a time.

Ingrid, Emma, and General Walls were now in a private tent, recuperating. The rest of these heroes had vanished. From the data on Walls’s laptop, they knew who else had survived, but Bobbi Goodrich must have wandered away from their safe house before Ruth got free. Bobbi was missing. Nor had they been able to locate the other squad of immunized soldiers led by Lieutenant Pritchard. Wherever the USAF commando had gone into hiding, his men were infected, maybe starving or hurt, and Ruth hoped someone would find them before it was too late. As far as she was concerned, the places they’d earned in history were paramount even to her own, because it was these people, not her, who’d struggled on through the end.

Agent Rezac was another complication. Ruth’s antidote carried some of the same risks as the mind plague itself. Within seconds of her injection, Rezac had stroked out. She was dead. The same problem had crippled or killed dozens more just here in Sylvan Mountain as they awoke from the plague. It wasn’t fair.

The first reports out of Los Angeles were even worse. The recovery team said they’d found Deborah and Kendra dead in a parking lot outside the Chinese labs. The women’s bodies lay side by side, Kendra’s arm outstretched, Deborah’s hand pressed against her own face with a substrate in her mouth.

They’d done it. Even as they were overrun by Chinese troops, they’d won. From their bodies, the counter- vaccine had drifted to the enemy — and Cam.

He was alive. He was in the second stage of infection when the recovery team found him burrowing in the ruins. His body was in some indefinite form of hibernation. It had saved him. Most likely he hadn’t moved more than a few inches during the first, agitated phase of the mind plague. He was nearly dead from blood loss, but they’d done their best to increase his vital signs. They were rushing him back to Sylvan Mountain for surgery. Except for two Chinese prisoners taken on site, Cam was the sole witness to what had happened in L.A. Medrano was dead, too, as were a pair of Russian soldiers in the rubble — allies of the Chinese?

Cam might know something about Kendra’s design work or other labs or American survivors, but, in truth, there was no reason for Ruth to stop her own crash programs to wait for his helicopter. He’d never regained consciousness. Even if he opened his eyes, he was a zombie. Cam would have a better chance of pulling through if he was responsive, if he wouldn’t fight his restraints, but his body didn’t need any more immediate shocks. The doctors wouldn’t inject him with the antidote until he’d improved.

Ruth had only come to the landing pad because she needed to see him one more time before they took the chance of killing him like Agent Rezac.

She hoped she was pregnant. It seemed unlikely. They’d only made love once, but she would have been ovulating, so it wasn’t impossible. She wanted his child. Some part of him would carry on.

They both deserved that much, didn’t they?

Ruth leapt to her feet as two F-35s soared overhead, the recovery team’s escort from the West Coast. Where was the helicopter? Long seconds passed before a black dot materialized out of the sunset, whup whup whup whup, the drumbeat of its rotors slapping at the mountainsides.

Their mission had been delayed by the chopper’s need to refuel in Utah, California, and then in Utah again. Its flight into L.A. had been an exacting game of leapfrog, working with fighter escorts with far greater range and speed, but there were no more VTOL planes available. Ruth was grateful just to have been able to reach into California at all.