Alekseev had already answered two radio challenges in Mandarin. After their near miss, there was a third. Deborah waited for a missile—would they even feel it?—but death never came. Alekseev’s codes were MSS, he said, and he posed as a high-level officer, even rebuking Chinese air traffic control for contacting him again. He wanted radio silence.
Eventually they were clattering alongside the San Gabriel Mountains. Obruch also had a railroad track and the dry, broken channel of an aqueduct to follow, both of which led to 1-40 and then into the pass.
The land transformed. Gas stations and truck lots appeared first. Warehouses. A car dealership. A quarry. There were homes, too, and freeway billboards and an endless row of great metal trusses supporting electrical lines. Everything looked as if it had been lifted and thrown. The buildings sagged. Even the freeway was buckled and split. Ash covered the world, robbing it of any color.
The destruction grew worse as they thundered through the pass. There were vast residential areas—thousands of homes in neat, boxy patterns on the hills. Street after street had been built on terraces like broad steps down the mountain slope, spotted with larger structures like apartment buildings and shopping centers. From the air, even now, the order that had been imposed was impressive. These roads and foundations might last for eons, although the lighter elements had been torn away. The roofs of the houses were gone. Many of those square little buildings had collapsed. The larger apartments and malls were often missing their tops, too, or had lost one or more walls. Even brick and concrete hadn’t survived. Not a single window looked intact. All of that material had ava lanched into the streets as it was lifted by the blast waves, creating drifts and dunes that covered earlier disasters. Long before the missiles fell, San Bernadino had been wracked by quakes and flash floods. It didn’t rain here often—but when it did, the insect-ravaged yards and hills had melted away, clogging the streets with erosion and debris. Deborah could still see unintended riverways carved through some neighborhoods, spilling down the mountainside.
A small percentage of the debris was bones. Hundreds of thousands of people had died here in the first plague. Their skulls and rib cages mixed with the furniture and other household possessions strewn among the shattered lumber, drywall, doors, shingling, and insulation. Signs were down. Trees and cars had overturned. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived, but Deborah did her part, staring into the ruins for any clue. They were about two hundred feet up. Visibility was no more than a few hundred yards. Even the mountains had faded into the gloom. Everything looked the same. All that stood were broken walls—the endless, straight-edged fins of broken walls.
Beside her, Medrano compared notes with Alekseev in the cockpit, trying to make sense of the holocaust. Up front, the two Russians murmured together in their own language until Alekseev turned and said, “We are overshooting our mark. We must turn back north.”
“I’ve been counting streets,” Medrano said.
“As have we,” Alekseev said. “The hospital is behind us.”
“Look,” Cam said. “What’s that?” He rapped on his window and Deborah straightened against Medrano, wanting to see past him, which became easier when Obruch banked in a slow glide to Cam’s side.
There were people sprawled in the rubble—fresh, whole people, not skeletons. Deborah guessed there were at least ten. They were ash-colored like everything else, but they’d fallen on top of the debris. That meant they’d come after the bombing.
“He cÀu
wºOM
npu6Àuamecb,”
Alekseev said.
The helicopter had been descending but Obruch adjusted his elevation, rising again and then banking away to keep from passing over the kill zone. Deborah tried to glance back at the corpses through her window. The angle was too sharp.
“What do you think happened to them?” Medrano said, and Deborah thought, They weren’t shot. They
looked...
melted.
Limbs and heads had come away from some of the bodies.
“It must have been recent,” Cam said. “There are no bugs. No ants. The way those people were chewed up—”
“TaM!”
Alekseev shouted. “On your right.”
That was Deborah’s side, and she glanced through the broken shapes of the city. She felt both hope and trepidation, because she knew exactly what Cam was thinking.
Those men looked like
they’d
been killed by nanotech.
“There are more bodies to the north,” Alekseev said.
“So we have a trail,” Medrano said. “But in which direction? Which group was killed first?”
“There’s a chopper on the ground to my side,” Cam said.
“Oh, shit,” Medrano said. Alekseev barked at Obruch in Russian, but Cam said, “No, it crashed. It’s not a problem. I don’t see anyone moving there or—”
Deborah gasped.
There was a witch in the rubble below, dark-skinned and wild-haired. She flung one hand up at them as if casting a spell.
“Pull up!” Deborah screamed. “Pull up!”
Obruch obeyed instantly. The engine whined as he lifted the chopper into a hard leftward turn. The additional thrust pulled Medrano against Deborah, squeezing her bad shoulder, but she had never been so glad for a sense of motion.
What was she throwing
at
us? Did we get
away?
“What did you see!” Alekseev said.
“She’s below us. She was on my side.” Deborah had lost track of the helicopter’s direction as they curled into the sky, but Obruch leveled out and brought the nose around. Deborah spotted her again. The witch leapt through the black dunes and fell and bounced up, her coat flapping in the helicopter’s downdrafts.
“I see her!” Deborah shouted.
Was it Freedman? Their file photos showed a heavyset woman. This fast-moving spook was wiry and hunchbacked, her shoulders bulging above her waspish frame.
Who else would it be? This woman appeared to have waded through two or three platoons of Chinese soldiers, hurling nanotech, downing helicopters—but it could be anyone, couldn’t it? What if the Chinese had captured other American researchers or some of the top scientists in Europe or India?
“Hue Hac,
” Obruch said.
The witch scampered down the smooth, fallen length of a cinder block wall and limped into the space between a car and a tangle of wire. Then she disappeared like magic.
“Onycmume Hac Ha 3eMÀO,”
Alekseev said to Obruch, gesturing.
Deborah interrupted. She’d recognized the word down and said, “Colonel, wait. You better put us on the ground away from her or she’ll kill us, too.”
If Alekseev’s calculations were correct—if it was really her—Freedman had gone southward as she left the hospital for some other destination. They would have missed her without the fields of dead men to mark her path. Where was she headed?
Obruch powered the chopper down into the wreckage fifty yards from where they’d last seen her. “Cam, you’re with me!” Deborah shouted, opening her door to the noise and dust of the rotors. “The rest of you stay here!”
“Nyet!”
Alekseev said. “I am also coming!”
“Fine. Don’t let her get past you, but don’t crowd her, either! Do you understand?” Deborah squinted through the ash with more dread than excitement. “She’s carrying some kind of nanotech!”
“Da.”
Alekseev drew a walkie-talkie from his belt and yelled back at Obruch, waving him up.
If Freedman kills us,
at
least Medrano
and
Obruch can try
again,
Deborah thought. That was the extent of her plan. Everything hinged on Cam’s tenuous link to the woman ... and if it was someone else, someone who didn’t even speak English ...
We have to take that chance.
The three of them ran into the choking wreckage beneath the helicopter. Deborah only had one hand to grab at the debris. She slipped and banged through a heap of bricks and mortar, bent pipes, a cracked porcelain toilet. Soot burst up from every footstep. She heard Alekseev barking for directions from Obruch, but she was too busy fending her way through a soft, rotting skin of cloth to look back. Then she was startled by two sounds in front of her. Metal banged on wood and Deborah was confronted by the witch, surprisingly close.
She ran toward me! Deborah thought, stunned. Her throat was too dry to get out more than a rasp: “Wait—”
The witch stood above her. She’d climbed over a heap of wooden slats propped up on a fallen street sign. Ash streaked the two bent white panels set in a crisscross on the pole, and yet the black lettering was legible: CRESTVIEW AVE. and EAST I6TH ST. The military officer in Deborah thought that was important. This was ground zero. They’d found their woman.
It had to be Freedman, didn’t it? But the witch was faceless. Bodiless. She might have been a walking silhouette. The dark oval where her face should be blended perfectly into her straggly black hair, and her clothes were powdered with ash. The only definition in her thin, hunchbacked frame was her eyes. The white eyes smoldered with power and torment and then her arms spasmed, too.
Deborah stared at those dark hands for one jagged heartbeat, transfixed by the other woman. She wore a knapsack. That was the odd bump on her back. Deborah also saw a thick welt up her left forearm, a failed suicide’s mark. At some point she’d cut herself.
“Wait. My name is Major Reece—”
The witch raised both fists.
She’ll kill me, Deborah thought, but then Cam shouted, “Kendra! Kendra Freedman!”
The witch turned her head.
“U.S. Army Rangers!” he shouted. “United States Army Rangers! We’re here to rescue you!”
24
Every muscle in Freedman’s body tensed like a hair trigger. Whatever she was holding, Cam didn’t want her hands to snap forward and throw it. “I knew Albert Sawyer!” he shouted. “I’m your friend!”
One problem was that they wore Russian uniforms. Another was that Freedman’s face was a wild mask. Her eyes rolled and popped with fear.
“I’ll kill you!” she barked. “Stay back!”
“I knew Albert Sawyer,” he said.
This time his words seemed to register. Her head ducked and lifted again, not in a gesture like a nod but like a woman double-checking her thoughts. For an instant, Freedman seemed unaware of them. But she didn’t lower her arms.
Cam slid into the shallow pit where Deborah stood below Freedman, putting himself at the same disadvantage. He thought it might calm her.
“Sawyer’s dead now,” he said gently. He hoped this news was something they could share.
Instead, when Freedman’s eyes rose, her expression was filled with new terror. “They’re all dead,” she said, and yet her voice seemed disconnected from the rest of her. It was flat and distant. Was she even talking to them?
Kendra Freedman was insane. At some point, she’d experienced a psychotic break.
Deborah repressed a low sound like a moan, but she didn’t try to run. She stood her ground, entrusting her life to him. He wanted to take her hand. He wanted to say We’re going to be a// right, but Freedman needed to be the sole focus of his attention. Her sleeve had shot back from her hand and Cam stared at the scar on her wrist. He had known would-be suicides. Sometimes they were beyond reach.
“We’re here to rescue you,” he said. “My name is Cam.”
She ignored him. The chopper was still hammering over the ruins behind him to his right. Her gaze flickered in that direction, then shifted to his left. At what? Alekseev? Cam would have yelled at the Russian to keep away if he hadn’t been afraid to raise his voice.
“I’m your friend,” he said.
“Stay back!”
“We’re here to—”
“I’ll kill you!” Freedman nearly fell when the pile beneath her shifted, her left hand slashing outward for balance. But she stayed up, and they didn’t die.
It was the second time she’d reacted violently to that word. Friend. Why? The Chinese must have promised her the same thing, and Cam struggled to find a different way to connect with her. Sawyer. She’d stopped when he mentioned Sawyer, so he said, “I knew Al. He told me everything. We know it wasn’t your fault.”
“What was his first patent number?”
“I, uh—”
Freedman’s left hand rose away from her body again, threatening. “He loved that number like it was a million dollars,” she said. All at once she was in total possession of herself and this change was uniquely frightening, because now Cam saw her true presence and her intellect. Could she really be smarter than Ruth?
If he tried to fool her, she would know.
He said, “Al told me how your sister gave you all of those old ABBA records on CD for Christmas. You brought them into the lab and played them there. It made him crazy.” Don’t say that word! he warned himself. Crazy. Friend. Watch your mouth. His head was racing but he was careful to speak slowly. “Al liked hip-hop, and you made him listen to ancient rock like ABBA and Duran Duran. He laughed about it.”
Sawyer had cursed her for a stupid bitch. Sawyer’s guilt had turned him cold and mean. He denied that he was even slightly to blame for the end of the world, yet he’d been an integral part of the
archos
tech’s design team.
These people were unique. Their rare education set them apart. Ruth had always felt responsible because she could do something, just never enough. How much worse would that self-loathing be for the woman who’d been the main force in the creation of the machine plague? A planet had died because of her.
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