The Osprey was in a tailspin.
No, Cam thought. No! He glanced forward again, looking for the sky—for God—for anything other than this horror. Beyond the pilots, he saw a patch of blue. Then the horizon tilted into view.
The hard orange color of the desert filled the windshield. The ground was very close.
It’s not supposed to end like this! he thought, but the Osprey caught its starboard wing against the earth and whipsawed into an uneven leaping cartwheel as the fuselage disintegrated.
23
In the cyclone of bodies and metal, Deborah felt a snapping pain through her left shoulder. She breathed hot dust and smoke. Then it was done. The tornado stopped, but the pain stayed with her, crippling that arm.
She was outside the plane. The ground beneath her was tough and dry, and she felt a breeze and daylight. Despite the curtains of dust, she saw most of the fuselage nearby. Then the hazy sun disappeared. When she lifted her head, she’d moved into the shadows beneath the high, broken line of one wing.
There must be other survivors.
“Bornmann!” she shouted, rasping for air. “Cam? Hey!”
Why didn’t they answer?
Somehow she staggered up, twisted nearly in half by the dislocated shoulder. Her ribs on that side were hurt, too, and she was covered with grit and blood. Most of it wasn’t her own.
Foshtomi,
she thought, trying to calculate how badly the other woman was hurt by how much of her uniform was soaked. Is there
any
way she’s still
alive?
Gnarled oak trees and scrub brush covered the hillside. The brown plants were peppered with gray and white debris. Fire licked at the brush in several places. The Osprey had flung jagged chunks of aluminum and steel into the hillside along with wiring, glass, and plastic. The wind stank of jet fuel.
Deborah didn’t think to run away, not even faced with the rising flames. She was nothing without her squadmates. She barely remembered the self-doubt she’d felt before Walls led them out of Complex 3. Deborah had come a very long way just to find herself back where she’d begun, as a reliable cog in the machine, but she was pleased to be that woman again. It was all she’d ever wanted. Her suffering had reinforced everything that was best in her—her willingness to give of herself. The team needed her, not only as another gun but as a doctor, especially now.
She turned into the wreckage. There was a man crumpled beneath a flat chunk of a propeller blade. She hurried toward him but Sweeney was dead, his neck wrenched backward. His legs were broken, too, and maybe his spine. Looking away, Deborah noticed one of the engines behind her. In one sense, she was still inside the plane. The main bulk of the aircraft surrounded her, forming an uneven barricade.
The sky reverberated with the distant roar of jets. That seemed unimportant. Within two steps, she spotted two more human shapes. Deborah heard someone groan and lurched closer. “Bornmann?” she said. “Hey—”
The first man was Lang. A small area on the left side of his face was unharmed. Otherwise she might not have recognized him. Impact had rubbed most of the skin and muscles from the side of his skull.
Translator, copilot, commando—Lang might have been the most versatile element of their team and Deborah paused over his corpse, feeling demoralized and lost. Then she banished her grief with a bit of gallows humor she’d learned from Derek Mills, the pilot of the shuttle Endeavour. “Pilots are always the first to the scene of a crash,” he’d said when they were planning their descent from the ISS. She had to honor Lang. Her sense was that their pilots had pulled the Osprey out of a death spiral, bringing the aircraft up at the last minute. If they hadn‘t, she would have been killed, too, so she moved past him with a firm sense of gratitude.
The next man was Captain Medrano. He groaned again. “It’s me,” Deborah said meaninglessly. He was barely conscious. His arm was broken and his face was cut. His pulse was steady, though, and her cursory examination detected no other bleeding or major injuries.
In the short time they’d known each other, Medrano seemed like a badger to her. He was short and roundish and skeptical. Deborah wasn’t sure if she liked him, but he was her brother nevertheless. There weren’t enough of them left to pick and choose.
As she applied pressure to his face wound, she glanced through the wreckage again. She felt as if she’d failed Ruth for being unable to find Cam. Had Cam and Ruth become a couple at last? What if he was dead like Sweeney and Lang?
Deborah had never approved of Cam. He was dangerous, untrained, and seemed to bring out all the worst in Ruth. He made her so emotional. He was also fiercely loyal. Deborah couldn’t help but respect that level of commitment, and, like Medrano, she was also bound to Cam.
“Get up,” Medrano said as if to himself.
“Easy,” Deborah warned him, but he spoke again, clearly, trying to focus his dazed eyes on her.
“Get up. Run. The fighters—”
The Chinese fighters were coming back.
Deborah had been listening to the distant engines change in volume and pitch without realizing what it meant. The sound galvanized her. “You’re coming with me,” she said, flush with new strength.
“Can’t walk,” Medrano said. “My ankle—”
“My shoulder—” she retorted.
A long section of the fuselage rocked toward them. The metal shrieked against smaller chunks of debris. Deborah dragged at Medrano’s uniform with her good hand, gaining a few inches as the wreckage teetered overhead.
Someone walked out of the plane like a miracle.
He was filthy, maybe burned. He was also bent much like Deborah, protecting his ribs, and she recognized the shoulder-length black hair. Cam. His luck seemed like something learned—a trait she envied for herself.
“Help me!” she yelled, but Cam stopped and looked up.
The noise in the sky was increasing. It echoed from the hills. Deborah pulled Medrano upright as Cam raced closer. He grabbed Medrano’s other side and the three of them ran downhill into the widely spaced trees. Medrano screamed as his wrist banged against Deborah’s back. Her shoulder was agony. Their ragged forward motion carried them past the wreckage and an orange, snarling clump of poison oak.
Cam leaned in front of Medrano, his lips drawn back from his teeth. Two of his incisors were gone. The rest looked like misplaced fangs. “This way!” he yelled, hauling everyone to his side like a human chain.
We’re not going to make it, Deborah thought, glancing back as the Chinese fighters screamed overhead. She wanted to face her own death.
Their turbulence washed through the oak trees and her short, dirty hair. In the same heartbeat, one missile slammed into the Osprey’s remains. Ordnance was precious. If those pilots knew there were survivors, they must have believed a single missile was enough. The explosion threw the Osprey’s belly and starboard wing into the air. There were secondary blasts from the fuel tanks in the wing. Ribbons of fire sprayed over the hillside.
Concussion shoved Deborah into the trees, separating her from Medrano and Cam. Maybe she bounced. The pain in her shoulder was incandescent and she blacked out.
She was brought back by someone pounding on her chest. Cam gasped as he hit her, and she realized this new pain was too sharp to attribute to his fist. She stank of charred skin and cloth. He’d doused a spot of burning fuel on her uniform, scalding his bare hand in the process. They were enveloped in smoke. The forest had ignited.
“Deborah,” he said. “Deborah?” He was obviously woozy himself, but she knew he’d had EMT training—nothing like her own schooling, but she was glad just the same.
“My shoulder. Can you reset it?”
“I’ll try.” He turned and said, “Medrano. Help me.”
He bent her arm at the elbow, rotating it outwards as Deborah tried not to twist away from the pain. Then he lifted her elbow even further, wrenching the ball of her humerus back into its socket through the torn ring of cartilage. Deborah grayed out again. But afterwards, the pain was reduced, and she’d even regained some motion.
There wasn’t time to make a sling. The smoke was suffocating, and they could see the flames crackling up through the hooked branches of two trees.
“Go,” Cam said.
Deborah outranked him—they both outranked him—but she let him take over. She remembered how he’d convinced Walls to send them west. The same characteristics that made him dangerous were exactly what the three of them needed now—decisive, unrelenting nerve. She had to trust his aggression. It was the real basis of Cam’s luck. Sometimes the chances he took were the best and only path.
The three of them jogged downhill, groaning, limping. They had nothing but each other. No radio. No water. Where did he think they were going?
The smoke thinned but Cam changed direction suddenly, moving them sideways across the slope when they might have escaped the fire by continuing downhill. Deborah almost spoke up. What
are you
doing? There was a clear area like a meadow below them, empty of brush. Why not run through it? Then she realized those trees were leafless and dead. Worse, something slithered on the rotting gray oaks. Ants coated the naked wood.
“Wait,” Cam said. “No.” He turned with his arms out as if to collect them—to change direction again—but he froze with his hands up.
There were enemy soldiers waiting in the brush.
Deborah saw at least eight men in a skirmish line, their faces hidden by tan biochem hoods or black, older-model gas masks. Their jackets were dark green. Most of them held AK-47 rifles. Others carried submachine guns she’d didn’t recognize.
One of them shouted in Mandarin.
“Bié dòng! Xià jiàng!”
She didn’t understand, but the intent was clear. He gestured for them to get down. Within seconds, three more soldiers appeared uphill. There was no way out except back into the smoke and the ants, but Medrano was willing. “I’ll draw their fire,” he said.
“Hold it,” Deborah said. “Don’t move.”
Neither of them carried any weapons except their sidearms, and Cam’s gun belt had been torn away in the crash.
Cam raised his hands even higher and Medrano got one arm up, keeping his broken limb against his side. Deborah didn’t see any choice except to mimic her friends, although her disappointment was keen.
The man who’d shouted turned to his men, pointing at two of them.
“Onycmume ux Ha
They’re Russian! Deborah thought. She should have known. Chinese troops wouldn’t have worn this hodgepodge collection of masks and gloves—they were immune. These people were Russian, and they were also on the run from the plague.
“3aumecb eÀ0!”
one said.
“3aMumecb eÀ0!”
Deborah had learned the feel and pacing of their language during her months in orbit with Commander Ulinov. Nikola had even taught her several phrases. She tried them now as the pair of soldiers approached, concealed in their biochem hoods. “
o6poe ympo, moapuu!”
she said, Good morning, comrades, even though the day was well into late afternoon. It was a game she’d played with Ulinov.
“Kaº Bbl nouaeme?”
How are you living today?
In Russian, the words were ambiguous. The phrase served as a basic “hello,” but could also mean more. It surprised them. The two soldiers hesitated.
“You’re American,” the officer called.
They were so grungy and burned, they were unrecognizable. He’d thought they must be Chinese. That was why he’d shouted first in Mandarin.
“Da
,” Deborah said.
Yes.
“Where are we?”
“Put yourself on your knees,” the officer replied, with a curt motion for his soldiers to take them.
“Wait!” Cam said. “Stay back. We can protect you from the Chinese nanotech, but we’re probably crawling with it. We came out of the plague zones. You might be infected if you touch us.”
“You would be sick,” the officer said. “Not flying.”
“I’m Major Reece with the United States Army,” Deborah said, asserting herself, but Cam surprised them all. He was honest.
“We have the new vaccine,” he said. “If you help us, we can give it to you, too.”
The fire was getting closer. Deborah could hear it licking its way across the hill behind her as the smoke thickened. “We should move,” she said, but the officer refused.
“Nyet.
Give us the vaccine,” he said, before barking out a dozen words she didn’t understand. The nearest Russians backed off, but none of them lowered their weapons.
“Let me clean myself,” Cam said. “I can try to decontaminate, at least a bit.”
The officer nodded, but hit the charging handle on his AK-47. Deborah flinched. One wrong
move ...
she thought, barely allowing herself to breathe as Cam scrubbed himself down with brush and dirt. It was a crude decon procedure but clever as always. Deborah wondered what else Ruth had taught him. Would he have come up with this idea by himself? He was intelligent, just uneducated. That made him unpredictable.
“Major Reece and I are in charge here,” Medrano said to him.
“Right.”
“Then keep your mouth shut from now on.”
“We need them. Look at us.” Cam paused with a handful of crumbling brown earth against his sleeve, ignoring the scuffs and gashes beneath his burned uniform. “But they need us, too.”
“We should have
negotiated,”
Medrano said in a growl. He glanced at Deborah. “Major? It’s not too late.”
