“We may have to wound them,” she said.
“Do it!” Neil screamed.
The first of the infected people staggered out of the fences, a young man in a MICHIGAN T-shirt and a skinny girl with filthy white socks beneath her blue gown. Cam recognized one of them. The young man’s thick hair and the plague scarring on his nose were unmistakable. He was a farmer’s son and loud in his religion, taking every chance to explain about the Resurrection any time a crew from Jefferson came to trade equipment or food. Jake. The young man’s name was Jake and he was a good kid, rightly proud of his family’s apple trees.
Cam raised his M4.
The floodlights switched on before anyone fired. David had finally gotten his tripod ready and hit the power, draining electricity away from Ruth’s lab. Its dual lights burned into the people in the fences, illuminating the night like stark white glaring suns. Two shadows leapt from each person in a fan of silhouettes. Glass and chrome winked among the car parts on the ground.
Their eyes looked incredibly strange. It was as if none of them had irises. Their pupils were huge, like black pennies, and did not shrink in the light. It was a permanent condition. They shared some uniform injury to their brains.
The floodlights hurt them. The young man reeled away as the skinny girl ducked her head and scuttled sideways. Others raised their arms or moaned. The light stopped them. The Bull Dog was too strong. At first, Cam thought it might work. Then he noticed the second wave of human shapes. The field of light held at least a hundred figures, and there were hundreds more beyond them in the darkness.
Cam felt his blood run cold. The nearest people were repelled by the glare, yet the larger crowd seemed to be attracted to it. It was an eerie sight. Most of the infected people had been headed toward Jefferson, but without purpose. Some had stopped or strayed in other directions. Others were looking at the sky or their feet.
As the Bull Dog lit up the fences, the entire crowd turned as one, their white and brown faces reflecting the light like dishes. Blood gleamed on hands or bare legs where they’d fallen and hurt themselves. Then the crowd began to separate into two halves, circling in toward the brilliant corona from either side.
“Oh my God,” Ingrid said.
“Shut ‘em off! Shut ’em off!” Cam yelled. Too late. The infected people had a clear goal and began to pick up speed, shambling through the obstacles and barbed wire. Metal clanked, but they were silent, only grunting or heaving for air. Even the young apple farmer seemed to regain his bearings, stalking toward them even though he bent sideways from the light as if it was a physical force.
“Open fire!” Greg shouted, blasting the young man in the head. The boy toppled.
Cam’s eyes stung inside his goggles but he repressed the emotion, screaming against his face mask. He welcomed the noise of his M4, too, because it overrode everything else.
The carbine rattled in his arms as he dropped the skinny girl with a three-round burst. Her blood looked purple in the high-intensity lights. Cam took down the man behind her. Then a woman. Then another man. The range was too close. The M4 and the older model M16 were designed to penetrate Soviet helmets at a hundred yards, not unarmored targets at forty feet. Cam’s shots passed through the fourth man’s shoulder without knocking him down.
At the same time, Owen and Ingrid blazed at the crowd with their M16s. Two more carbines and a shotgun ripped into action from Cam’s left, farther down the perimeter.
The guns were withering. Twenty people twisted and fell. One man lay screeching on a chrome bumper, making noises that sounded almost like words before their Russian grenade launcher coughed somewhere to Cam’s right. A small rocket jumped into the field of light, splashing fire and smoke. The men and women of Jefferson had moved to reinforce Cam and the others like a well-schooled platoon, but they were downwind of the infected mob.
The carbines on Cam’s left went silent first. He was reloading his own weapon when he noticed the change, yet it wasn’t until he set his M4 against his shoulder again that he realized the delay from the other position had lasted too long. Those men weren’t reloading. They were infected.
Cam peered at the nearest hut, looking for flashlights or muzzle flashes. There was nothing. Then someone stumbled past the corner of the building. The man was not empty-handed or half clothed like the people in the crowd. In fact, he seemed to be pawing at his jacket hood as he struggled to shake his hand loose from the trigger guard of his shotgun, treating the weapon like a burden rather than a tool.
“Oh shit we gotta move!” Cam yelled at Greg. “Fall back! Fall back!” He slapped at Ingrid’s shoulder, but the older woman was too focused on controlling her M16. She fired into the west side of the crowd.
The infected people continued to advance. The guns did not frighten them, nor did the dead and wounded on the ground. They stumbled through their bleeding friends with no more attention than they gave to the fences and car parts. If anything, the muzzle blasts seemed to draw them. It was as if they were so deeply submerged in their trance that they seized on any external sensation. They walked right into the guns, which were much fewer now.
“Hold your position!” Greg shouted, but Cam pointed and yelled, “We lost everyone on our left! Every time you shoot someone—”
The floodlight teetered over and crashed as Neil fell beside them, his body hammering stiffly at the ground. The nanotech was among them.
“Run!” Cam shouted. He dragged Ingrid away from the man. Greg moved with them and suddenly Owen and another villager were there, too, retreating from the floodlight.
Owen and Greg yelled into their headsets for their wives. If the town was overrun, hiding in the sealed huts was pointless. Their air would run out. “Tricia!” Greg yelled. “Tricia!”
“—out of the buildings and run east before—”
Two infected men walked into their path, the village guards who had been on Cam’s flank. Even in the half-light, it was obvious they weren’t normal. One man had pushed his goggles sideways across his head and was struggling with his hood and mask. The other kept his right arm lifted away from his body, twitching, as his head rocked in the same palsied movements.
It was Matthew. Cam recognized his green jacket. Matthew seemed absorbed with the tremors in his arm and neck, but his face turned at the sound of their voices.
“Watch out!” Ingrid said.
Somehow they needed to get past. Cam dodged left and the others came with him, only to find themselves pinned against a truck and the front of Greenhouse 1. The fifth man, David, raised his rifle, but Cam yelled, “No, you’ll make it worse!”
Cam reversed his M4 and took the short barrel in his hands. The muzzle was hot despite his gloves. He clubbed Matthew and then whipped the carbine at the other guy. Someone else threw a pistol, knocking him down. They ducked upwind of the two men and Cam saw it was Owen who’d helped him, emptying his holster. Cam would have said something if there was time.
Thank you.
They were on the same side, no matter if they’d argued.
But their chance was already gone. Forty yards away, the sealed huts were opening up. In the yellow light streaming from both cabins, the other villagers staggered and twitched. Some of them collapsed. Tricia screamed with Hope in her arms before suddenly she jerked, too. The baby’s cries shut off at the same time. Tricia fell to one knee and dropped her infant daughter, who rolled halfway out of plastic sheeting her mother had fashioned into a bag around her.
They’d run straight into a drift of the plague.
The baby,
Cam thought before his eyes cut left and right through the convulsing shapes. He was looking for Ruth.
“No!” Owen screamed. “No!”
Not all of them had fallen. Several people either tried to break free of the rest or turned to help the infected ones. In many cases it was hard to tell who was sick and who wasn’t. Sometimes it was the infected ones who lurched away, bouncing off their neighbors. The healthy people ran from each other or bent and dragged at a lover or a friend only to succumb themselves.
Cam grabbed Owen before the man could run to his wife.
“No! No!” Owen screamed.
His voice turned several heads among the infected. Their faces were horrible. They were
identical.
Dark, white, man, woman—there was only one expression in the group, a numb look that left their mouths sagging. Many of their faces rippled with spasms and tics, but those movements were like whitecaps on an empty, quiet sea, affecting only the surface. That slack expression appeared again and again. It affected their bodies, too, dulling every part of them except their eyes. Their eyes bulged with need.
“We can still make the cars,” Cam said. “Go. Run through the greenhouses.”
“No,” Owen said, no longer shouting. “No.”
“Hope,” Greg whispered. “Christ, she‘s—
Hope
.”
They couldn’t reach her. There were twenty villagers scattered around the baby. All of them were contagious—and they ignored the little girl. Even her mother was indifferent. Lying against a man who’d dropped dead, Hope pawed weakly at the earth with her tiny hands. The three-month-old girl was too young to crawl on her own. She lacked the motor skills and strength, but, regardless, she was exhibiting the same insistent drive they’d seen in everybody who was infected.
“There’s someone behind us,” Ingrid said.
The floodlights still shone on the north side of town, a white corona in the dark. Silhouettes walked between the square shapes of the huts.
From the other direction, some of their friends also began to pace toward them—three villagers, then four and five. Tricia joined the disorganized march. She tripped on one of the dead and staggered sideways.
Cam’s group backpedaled without a word, even Owen, even Greg. Especially in the dim light, the infected people no longer looked like family. They looked alien and deadly and Cam yanked his 9mm Beretta from his gun belt.
“Run for the cars,” he said.
Greg tore his eyes away from his wife. His face was hidden in his goggles and mask, but everything about his posture shrieked of conflict and suffering.
“Greg,” Cam said. “Run.”
He didn’t know what else to do. Without Ruth, they were only a handful of ordinary people, but he would lie to Grand Lake if they reestablished contact.
Get a helicopter,
he thought.
Save who you can. Maybe we can come back for her in hazmat suits—
A jeep horn startled him. It blared from the other side of the greenhouses. Cam’s nerves betrayed him. His hand clenched on his pistol and he put a bullet into the villagers. One of the oncoming shapes fell.
“No!” Owen screamed. He smashed Cam’s shoulder with his rifle, knocking Cam into Greg. Then he swung his M16 around and leveled it at Cam’s midsection.
The pistol shot must have sounded like an answering signal to whoever was in the jeep. The horn blared again and again. Maybe someone was shouting, too. Cam wasn’t sure. The pounding of his heart was too loud and Owen kept screaming.
“No, no, no, no!” Owen yelled.
“Put it down,” Ingrid said calmly, although she’d raised her M16 and moved to Owen’s left so his rifle couldn’t cover her, too. “Owen! Put it down.”
“I didn‘t—” Cam shouted.
“You son of a bitch, no!”
There wasn’t time. More and more silhouettes were bobbing through the lights on the north side of town. From the south, the infected villagers were also closing rapidly. In seconds, they would be overwhelmed.
Cam shoved Greg to one side and jumped the other way, trying to escape Owen’s weapon. He didn’t make it. The M16 blazed in his face, deafening and bright. A bullet smashed into the right side of his chest like an icy ball. Another might have nipped the inside of his arm. Impact threw Cam onto his back, but somehow he dragged his arm forward against that momentum. He shot Owen in the leg—partly because he didn’t want to kill the man. Mostly it was because it was the quickest shot from the ground.
The wound was devastating. At close range, the 9mm bullet ripped a melon-sized hole through the back of Owen’s thigh. It shattered his femur in a gush of dark arterial blood, but Ingrid killed him before he dropped. She emptied her clip into his chest, a burst of five or six shots. Sparks flew from Owen’s M16 as her rounds struck the weapon. Maybe it had been her real target.
Cam’s vision was fading, yet he heard David gasp as the man turned and fled. David ran into the corridor between the stripped frameworks of Greenhouses 2 and 3. The jeep horn was still bleating. Cam tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t work. The best he could do was to squeeze his arm against his side where his jacket was wet.
Then everything went dark.
He woke between Ingrid
and Greg as they hauled him forward. His feet dragged on the ground, adding to the strain on his side. It felt like his ribs were being pulled apart and he tried to run with Greg, who had most of his weight. He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. They were still five steps from the skeletal wood structure of Greenhouse 3, moving without flashlights.
The jeep horn had gone quiet, too. Whoever was at the cars had either been infected or decided to stop making himself a target.
“Wait,” Ingrid said, bumping against Cam.
Greg pulled on his other side and they went two more steps before Greg froze, too. “Oh, God,” he said.
David sprawled in the corridor between the greenhouses. Their friend lay on his back, trembling, as if he’d struck a nonexistent wall. But there was nowhere else to go. Behind them, the villagers had walked over Owen’s corpse and the flashlights they’d left nearby, filling the few white beams with legs and feet. At the same time, a larger, different group of silhouettes walked into the flashlights from the north.
