spasmed. “Oh shit,” Ruth said, but Linda didn’t seem to associate the pain with her. She reacted to things Ruth couldn’t see, groaning and straining.
Ruth left her in the corner, tied to the only piece of furniture, a low, heavy table. There were only three rooms in the hut — two thin bedrooms in back and this bigger space by the door. Ruth had normally eaten breakfast here with Bobbi and Eric, sitting on the floor, and she regretted the mood of all those mornings together. She was often envious of the couple, happy to be included but edgy because of what she couldn’t share. She hated to see herself as the old maid. Now she was the lucky one. Bobbi was a widow, Eric lay dead in Greenhouse 3, and this house was already saturated with nanotech.
She dragged Patrick in next, then Michael and Andrew. Then she returned outside and began to wrap the dead bodies in plastic sheaths, sealing them as best she could. More than once, she stuck her gloves to the tape. Every time, her heart leapt with adrenaline. But the suit held.
She paused over Denise. The woman had died uninfected, hadn’t she? Ruth was very tired, but she had never been one to cut corners. She rolled Denise in plastic, too. Then she dragged each of the six corpses inside, turning her home into a prison and a morgue.
The gruesome feeling in Ruth’s chest grew louder as Linda squirmed against the table, moaning. She ran back outside. She knew she had to go in again, but there was another job to do first. Maybe she was more meticulous about it than necessary. Ruth dug in the earth until she had enough dirt to cover the bloodstains. In the shallow pits, she buried the tools and the gear they’d used to subdue their friends. She even gathered as many of the rocks they’d thrown as she could find, even though she could never completely sterilize this place. Poisoned ground, she thought. A lot of the nanotech would remain on the surface, exposed to the breeze or lifting away in the morning heat when the sun rose tomorrow.
If they survived the night, even if they sealed this place in concrete and built a heavy fortress to contain her home, Ruth knew they could never stay. The village needed to be permanently abandoned. Still, her best efforts might buy them some extra time. Ruth continued to work despite her exhaustion.
Her mind wandered.
She glanced at the stars, remembering better times. She knew she was trying to get away from herself, but at last she turned and walked back into her small, crowded home. Then she began to tape the door shut from the inside.
Originally, Cam and Allison led their party east from the Rockies down into the plains beyond Boulder and Greeley, where they were sure the summers were hot enough to destroy the insects. In sufficient heat, even bloodless or cold-blooded organisms became vulnerable to the machine plague. Their guess proved to be true, but the absence of bugs also turned those areas into deserts. The insect swarms were the only pollinators available. Every species that required hives or cocoons had been destroyed by the ants. There were no bees, butterflies, or moths left of any kind. In their greenhouses, they’d manually brushed pollen from one plant to another. Outside in the world, however, it was only the clumsy, brutal movements of the swarms that continued this process, spreading the delicate powder even as they obliterated forests and meadows everywhere.
Ruth could only guess what the Midwest had become. She’d seen the edges of it herself, and there were rumors supposedly passed on from pilots and scouts and the specialists who controlled the remaining U.S. spy satellites. Without grass, the prairies had been peeled down to the bedrock, stuffing away in the rain and ever-more frequent windstorms. Megatons of silt had displaced the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into a continent-wide swamp, filling low places like Arkansas and Louisiana with stagnant, creeping bogs of mud.
Ruth and her friends quickly abandoned the plains. At the time, she’d still hoped to lure Cam from Allison, but there were other problems besides her wounded heart. They would always be regarded as criminals by some. They’d planned to keep their heads down, but they were recognized and betrayed in the second town where they made their home. In the third, there was an outbreak of some respiratory disease — a normal disease, not nanotech — and Cam ran a fever of 104° for two days, frightening both women badly.
As always, it was Allison who was the boldest. She led them into the heart of the Rockies again, where they hid almost directly under the noses of Grand Lake. Jefferson lay just forty miles west of that mountain peak. Grand Lake was no longer home to the president and Congress — those people had been relocated to Missoula, Montana, far, far away from occupied California — but the Air Force maintained Grand Lake as a fortress, and Allison believed the military would never think to look for Ruth so close within reach.
Mostly Ruth was happy. Certainly she was never bored. They’d spent seven of the past fifteen months on the move, hiking and scouting, negotiating with other survivors. Most of their energy went into the basic necessities. Food. Shelter. Ruth was even glad to forget her research, contributing instead to their day-to-day struggles. It was selfish, she knew. More critical than any other challenge was the next-generation nanotech that must be designed as quickly as possible. A second invasion wasn’t impossible. The Russians and the Chinese had dragged their feet as they prepared to leave, bickering with each other and haggling with the disunited American government, even constructing new bases to house their airmen and soldiers in the meantime, playing for every advantage as they developed their own nanotech.
Ruth had no illusions about what had finally happened.
Her hands shook as she double-sealed the windows of her home. She thought her tremors were only bad nerves and exhaustion, but what if it was something else?
Another thought occurred her, and it was even more awful. What if their village had been specifically targeted because of her? They knew Colorado was under intensive electronic surveillance. What if the invaders had heard something or if a facial recognition program had finally made a match? The nanotech could be meant for
Michael woke up behind her. He thrashed against his bonds and huffed for air in guttural, rhythmic grunts.
Ruth turned only to make sure he wasn’t pulling free of the tape. But her gaze lingered. Michael’s eyes were half closed and roamed endlessly behind his eyelids, almost as if he was in REM sleep. His mouth hung open like a cave.
He was ugly, wrapped in the flopping bandage of the shirt. Ruth fought down an urge to smash his head with the lantern. The infection wasn’t his fault, but she couldn’t look at him anymore. She was embarrassed by the sounds he made.
Her claustrophobia was like a tidal wave inside her, swelling and hurting. Her pulse didn’t make it any easier to be careful with the knife, slicing another big square of plastic. Every minute, she was sealing herself deeper in plastic and tape. Would she ever get out?
“Listen,” Cam said to Bobbi, gesturing for her to join him by the radio. They crouched together in a busy hut as other people hammered plastic sheeting over the windows. “We need to find somebody,” he said, but Bobbi was distracted.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
“Listen to
“Why can’t you just call?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
The hut stank of marijuana, which was their only anesthetic except for alcohol. Brett had been gutshot. They were afraid to let him drink, although Susan had used a jar of 150 proof moonshine to sterilize his torso as best she could. The alcohol was expensive. Marijuana was not. The plant was called “weed” for good reason. It had survived in the wild only to be recultivated in Morristown, where it was grown for its fibrous stalks for cloth and rope and as an easy cash crop as a drug.
Cam breathed clean air as people continued to hurry in and out of the door, piling backpacks, canteens, and other gear in the corner. Jefferson was consuming itself. They’d torn down Greenhouse 2 as well as 4, intending to use the plastic and the last of their tape, staples, and nails to seal most of the villagers inside.
They had to assume the worst. No one had responded to his calls on the civilian channels. Morristown,
