Cam nodded. “How does that blanket work?”
“Smoke detectors have a bit of Americium-241 inside,” Pritchard said, staring outside as they passed another camp of infected people. “It emits alpha particles into an ionization chamber. If you obstruct it with smoke, the alpha flux drops and the alarm goes off. Complex 3 was full of ‘em. Cut away the shielding and you have a very small radiation flashlight.”
“Why didn’t they tell us? Ruth? Why didn’t
you
tell us? We could have had a bunch of these things.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Cam, I consulted on large-scale OECs, but I never knew how smoke detectors work until Pritchard told us.”
And now it’s too late,
she thought.
How many stockpiles were never utilized because we’ve been too busy growing food or arguing politics with ourselves?
“What do you mean by large-scale?” Foshtomi asked. “Like more bombs?”
“Yes. But what’s the point? We talked about laying down huge sterilized areas with nuclear waste, too, but no one could stay there. They tested it in parts of Denver and Phoenix just to give scavenging efforts more time, but then we were losing people and supplies in a different way.”
“So the fallout is a good thing as far as we’re concerned,” Foshtomi said. “It might hurt the plague.”
“Yes. That’s one reason why we used to be safe in the mountains. The atmosphere’s thinner, so we got more UV. A lot of ultraviolet is hard on nanotech.”
“The machine plague self-destructed at altitude,” Cam said.
He was still angry, so Ruth’s tone was cautious. “That’s what happened above the barrier,” she said, “but sometimes we gained some extra room because nanobots are delicate little fuckers. They burn easily.”
People forgot that nanotech was man-made, whereas living things were the result of two billion years of evolution and had learned ways to heal that nanobots couldn’t mimic. Not yet. They wouldn’t need a great leap from existing replication keys to self-repair mechanisms. It was only one more program to develop—but it would slow both plagues and vaccines.
Self-repairing nanotech would be more durable but less volatile. That was why it hadn’t happened yet, which was fortunate. Otherwise an OEC might not work at all.
“Viruses can be killed by a few hundred radioactive impacts,” Ruth said. “Nanobots are probably disabled by no more than five or ten. Imagine a well-made watch being shot by a dozen BB guns. Something inside it’ll break.”
“So we should be driving up again,” Cam said. “Not down.”
“It’s like nighttime with the smoke,” Foshtomi said. “We’re not getting any UV today.”
“But it’ll clear. We could—”
“Hey,” Pritchard said. “This isn’t open for discussion. General Walls knows where he’s going.”
“Ruth?”
“Let’s see what they’ve planned,” she said. “Okay? If we can get the new vaccine, that’s a thousand times better than hoping there’ll be enough sun tomorrow to make a difference.”
Cam nodded, but she was afraid of his silence. So was Pritchard. The USAF lieutenant turned in his seat and said, “You with me on this, Najarro? We follow orders.”
“Yes, sir,” Cam said.
Ruth would have touched his leg if she wasn’t in the suit, because it wasn’t fair that she was safe and he wasn’t. She wanted to take it off because she wanted to share his fate, but she knew that would be stupid and disrespectful. Everyone had sacrificed too much for her to reject the thin, temporary luck of her suit.
Then her frustration became something darker. A chill drew up her spine like one slow finger and Ruth tried to ward off the premonition, bowing her head inside her helmet to pray.
Oh please, God, don‘t,
she thought.
She’d remembered her dream of losing Cam. Was it an omen? Ruth did not believe a higher power was on her side. No one was handpicked for glory or salvation. That was obvious. Their losses were horrific. So were their mistakes. There certainly wasn’t a big white Zeus in the sky who favored them over anyone else. To think otherwise was simplistic, even stupid. They made themselves what they were—hero, villain, bystander, linchpin—even as they were influenced by everything around them. The world was always in flux. That was destiny. Ruth had utter faith in the laws of probability, and each step she took was like a promise, leading her in one direction or another. She knew her subconscious often grasped things ahead of her waking mind. Was there a pattern she should have seen? Or was it simply that in a bad situation, she knew Cam would give his life to save hers?
She needed to be ready to stop him.
20
Their convoy decelerated suddenly
as they came around a bend in the highway. Ruth looked up, expecting trouble. They’d arrived at the depot and their four vehicles split into pairs to cover the road from both directions.
The depot was larger than she expected. Some of the small base was fresh construction, but the squat new bunkers and fences had also absorbed two preexisting green aluminum warehouses. They were old and weather-streaked. Some sort of company sign had been removed from the face of one warehouse, leaving a less-faded square where the sign had protected the metal for years. The few open areas inside the fence were packed with trucks, an Abrams tank, and several trailers and RVs, which the soldiers would have used for offices and living space. Most of the vehicles were still parked in neat lines. Otherwise the depot was a mess.
To Ruth, it looked as though the mind plague had spared a few people inside the trailers. Then they’d been attacked by the rest. In many places, the windows were blown out by gunfire. Two of the RVs had burned. At least five corpses sprawled on the tarmac, some of them charred.
“This is Bornmann,” the radio said. “Hold your positions, but sing out if you see anybody. Over.”
Some of the infected would still be alive. Were they hiding ? Or had they gotten through the wire and walked away? Ruth’s gaze traced along the fence but didn’t find any breaks. “You need to call off your general,” she said to Pritchard. “We can do better than this.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Look at it! This place is crawling with nanotech, and everything’s burned. We can do better. Even a regular house—”
“There’s a plane inside.”
“What? There’s a plane in where?”
“We never planned to stay at this location,” Pritchard said. “Just relax. We know what we’re doing.”
Ruth scowled inside her helmet. Then the radio crackled again. “This is Bornmann. We’re stepping out. Route to us through Reece’s suit if you see anything. Over.”
General Walls had put all of his suited personnel in the back of the Army truck with the blanket. It was a decision that allowed him to leave the first Humvee alone, neither removing nor adding people. The suited troops were able to jump out of the covered truckbed freely. They were his strongest force, even if one of them was Deborah, rather than another commando—but only four suited people left the truck, striding quickly to the fence.
“You know how to use that headset?” Pritchard asked, pointing at Ruth’s helmet.
“Yes.”
“Listen in, okay? Don’t say anything.”
Ruth fumbled with the control belt at her hip as Cam voiced the same problem that had been bothering her. “I don’t see a plane or anywhere to take off.”
“Black ops,” Pritchard said. “We tried to prepare for as much shit like today as possible. There are aircraft stashed all over the Rockies.”
“You mean in the warehouse? Where do you take off?”
“It’s a V-22 Osprey. Vertical takeoff and landing. What do you hear, Goldman?”
“They’re not saying anything.”
“Where are we going?” Cam said.
“Albuquerque. Last I heard, they were still okay. Rezac’s trying to confirm. Now shut up. Watch behind us if you can.”
They had a bad
moment when the Chinese jets roared overhead, unseen in the haze, but the fighters kept going. Bornmann’s team cut the fence and ran into the lot. Ruth could just barely see them across the highway. The warehouse had huge rolling bay doors, which they left shut, entering through a man-sized door instead.
“We’ve got our wings,” Bornmann said on his suit radio. Deborah relayed this message to the other vehicles but Ruth had already told her group, raising a small cheer inside their Humvee.
Then the real work began. Bormann’s team had to assume the interior of the warehouse was dusted with the plague, too, even though there was no sign of chaos. Before allowing Bornmann inside to begin his preflight checklist, they decontaminated a wide swath of the fuselage. They also turned the blanket on the air itself as best they could. Meanwhile, Walls asked Ruth to take over as their radio relay. She agreed even though it meant Deborah would be sent into the depot with her friend, Emma Kincaid. They needed the extra hands.
At the same time, eighteen miles north, Sergeant Huff reported that her squad had driven as far as possible to the downed Chinese plane. They were proceeding on foot.
A nasty thought occurred to Ruth. She didn’t know what the Osprey looked like and she wondered if there was room onboard for everyone. If Huff’s team managed to rejoin the larger group, there were twenty-one of them. Who would stay if their plane was too small?
The wait was excruciating. Ruth was hungry again and her body grew stiff and uncomfortable. Pretty soon Pritchard would have to give her the last air tank in their Humvee. Before then, she was sure she’d need to pee inside her suit. Foshtomi had already crouched under the steering wheel, shucked down her pants and wet the floor. It was unavoidable.
Despite these distractions, Ruth continued to analyze her surface scan of the nano. What she really wanted was a look at the new vaccine through the magnetic resonance force microscope that the commandos had brought with them. Unfortunately, it sounded as if it would be at least an hour before Huff’s team caught up even if they didn’t have any trouble securing a few samples of the vaccine. Nor was there room for Ruth to set up the MRFM inside the Humvee in any case.
Cam operated Ruth’s laptop for her, since she was too clumsy in her gloves. His bare hands were scarred and ugly, but, to her, they were only proof of his incomparable toughness. She was ineffective. Her head was fuzzy. She could have napped, but no one else had slept, either. All of them kept going, so Ruth blinked and shook herself and cursed.
No one’s going to buy you a goddamned coffee,
she thought.
In the Army truck, Walls and Rezac were also crunching data, and Rezac came on the Harris radio. “Goldman, are you sure your translation of Freedman’s message is correct?”
“I’m sure,” Ruth said.
“There is no Saint Bernadine Hospital in Los Angeles.”
“What kind of maps are you using?”
“We’ve got data files like you wouldn’t believe. Google. State. Fed. That hospital isn’t there.”
It must be,
Ruth thought with new despair. If the message was wrong—if Freedman didn’t really know where she was—they would never find her. She could be anywhere. That meant Ruth was alone again.
The suited troops began to clear the tarmac in front of the warehouse, led by Captain Medrano, their engineer. Some of the traffic jam was easy to move. The trucks and jeeps in front were simply driven out onto the highway, but twice they discovered zombies. These people had been infected long enough to reach the second stage. Once it was a single man, apparently dozing. The next time they found four men and a woman hiding in a truck. The woman jumped Lang and knocked him down. Sweeney shot them all. Then another man stumbled out of a bunker into the hammering sound of Sweeney’s M4.
The damage was done. Gunshots echoed up and down the valley, so Lang killed the fifth man with his pistol—but now they could expect more zombies and maybe the Chinese, too. It was hard to gauge how far the sound carried through the fallout.
Medrano urged his team to move the vehicles at double-time, even after Emma nearly ripped her glove after catching it on a belt buckle inside a car. Meanwhile, he sent Deborah into the warehouse with the blanket again to decontaminate as much surface area as possible. More trucks rolled out of the depot. One of the burned RVs was still in the way, but Medrano didn’t think it would drive even if he could risk entering it, so they cleared a number of other vehicles just to make room to shove it aside. The half-melted tires peeled away when he nosed a truck into the RV’s side, its rims shrieking on the asphalt.
“Two, this is Rezac,” the radio said. “I think I have some good news. There’s a hospital by the same name in San Bernadino, one of the cities in the Los Angeles sprawl. Saint Bernadine. San Bernadino.”
Ruth gestured for Pritchard to give her the handset, which she clunked against her helmet. “This is Goldman, nice work,” she said, but Rezac was still talking.
“—makes sense. Most of their people are inside Los Angeles proper or in the desert, using our old military bases. They might have put their nanotech labs away from everything else in case there was an accident.”
“I think you’re right. Nice work.”
“It gets better. Saint Bernadine might have survived the nukes. I mean, it won’t be in great shape, but there are some hills and terrain that would have shaded it from the blasts.”
“Is there any way you can get a satellite on that area?”
“No. Maybe. I’m still trying to get a signal from anyone else in NORTHCOM.”
“Thank you,” Ruth said, and Pritchard muttered, “Shit. I hope Albuquerque’s okay.” Ruth turned to Cam and said, “She’s alive. Did you hear? Freedman could still be alive!”
