Deborah crept forward in the orange light, torn in two directions as her body shook with adrenaline and fear. Were any of her people still alive?
Jia slogged through the
rubble on both knees and one hand, keeping his pistol up. He’d slung his slender-barreled Type 85 submachine gun in order to climb. The wasteland was peppered with sharp edges and gaps. It slid. It creaked. He’d lost count of the bruises on his legs. His left arm ached inside its cast.
Only Jia and the copilot were still mobile. The other soldier was dead and they’d left their pilot behind after he was wounded in both thighs.
Jia thought they were very close. In the half-light, past the ragged shapes of the debris and a bent lamppost, he glimpsed a somewhat open field that must have been a parking lot. Several cars were strewn across it in clumps, and the flat ground was covered in soot and trash, but compared to the rest of the city, this clear space was a garden. Beyond it stood larger buildings that might have been the same size and shape before the quakes—the lab site.
The enemy was using AK-47s, not American rifles. Nor was the one man he’d glimpsed wearing a containment suit, so why weren’t they sick with the mind plague? Who were they really?
Jia was out of grenades. Otherwise he would have thrown one to mask his approach. It was very quiet. Every movement was painstaking. He crept toward the lamppost through glass and tree branches and the soft cushions of a sofa, testing each bit of junk for noise. He wanted to holster his pistol—he needed both hands—but couldn’t bring himself to climb without any weapon at all.
He wondered if he would hear his planes before the bombs fell. How much time was left? Jia was close enough to the site that napalm or high explosives would incinerate him, too, and yet he pressed on, caught between the need for silence and the need to hurry.
Almost there,
he thought.
A running shape broke across the field, sprinting out from the buildings. Jia did not hesitate. He leaned up from the wreckage and opened fire.
The pistol barked in
Cam’s face—but it was not directed at him. It was pointed over his head.
Where?
Someone was racing from the campus.
Deborah?
The figure was too scrawny. Too short. Too crazy. With all the dense clarity of a nightmare, Cam knew Deborah had more sense than the charge into the open.
It was Kendra. What was she doing? He caught one hint of her expression in the fires, huge white eyes, white teeth, black cheeks streaked with sweat or tears.
The gunfire cut her down.
“No!” Cam screamed.
Jia reeled backward when
an AK-47 stuttered in the ruins beneath him, surprisingly close. It chewed through the lamppost, then cut within centimeters above his head. Jia was lucky the copilot was to his left. He heard the copilot’s submachine gun chatter.
The two guns dueled, exchanging bursts. In a sudden break, Jia swung himself up and fired, too, emptying his pistol.
His reward was a thrashing body in the night. The enemy soldier collapsed.
Deborah saw the new
firefight break out on the perimeter—and just as quickly, she saw the rifle on her side fall silent. Was it Cam or Alekseev? Deborah scrambled to help. She left her corner.
The enemy guns swung toward her. She was spotted against the open face of the building, drawing fire from at least two Chinese.
She leapt into the parking lot, finding safety behind an overturned car. Her shoulder felt like an oven, a hot box of bone and meat. The vehicle rang with bullets. Glass and paint showered her hair, but that didn’t stop her from peering through the wheelwell for her friends.
What she found was an even greater surprise. Twenty feet away, Kendra lay dying as she groped at her ruptured chest. No. The crazy witch seemed to be making passes at the air above herself, reaching for heaven or hell or something else only she could see.
Where did she come from!?
Deborah thought.
Then:
I shouldn’t have trusted her! But she said she was okay. The men needed me.
Deborah’s conflict of pride and disgust was directed as much at herself as the other woman.
We knew she was unstable. Cam told me to
—
A trick of light changed everything in Deborah. As the fires licked and danced, a tiny square gleamed in Kendra’s hand. A substrate. Deborah’s low-level training was enough for her to recognize what had happened.
She wanted to celebrate. She needed to cry.
The stupid goddamned witch,
she thought. They’d won! Kendra had built her counter-vaccine—but the nanotech needed to be absorbed by a host before it could multiply. It might not have escaped if Kendra inhaled it inside the lab. The mind plague would rob her of her senses. What if she’d become trapped in her tent or if the Chinese sealed her in the building? She needed other people for the new plague zone to expand beyond anyone’s control.
Maybe the crazy witch wanted to die. On some level, she must have realized how close the enemy had come. Why hadn’t she run to Deborah? Had she been looking for her in the night? The two of them could have infected each other, hiding beside the building or even here among the cars.
Kendra was trying to ingest the substrate, but she couldn’t lift her hand to her mouth. Blood dripped from her elbow as she trembled with weak, useless spasms.
This is it,
Deborah thought.
All we need to do is get the nanotech inside her. Or me.
Deborah ran into the open.
Jia fired on the
third American, too, grimacing in pleasure as the blond-headed soldier jerked and fell. Then his pistol was empty again. He had no more spare clips, only his submachine gun.
He began to press forward again. He stopped when he realized the American sprawled in the parking lot was still moving. A ruff of yellow hair shone in the guttering light. Jia seated his submachine gun against his shoulder. The weapon was designed for brute power, not accurate shots, but it was critical to stop the Americans from whatever they were doing. Bringing nanotech? Wiring more explosives? Nothing else made sense. They wouldn’t have left their fighting holes without good reason, so he would shoot the wounded.
“Kill them!” Jia shouted to the copilot.
Deborah scrunched her eyes
shut against the pain, then opened them again in a blur of tears and caustic ash. Her world had shrunk down to a few inches. She clawed at it with one good arm, dragging her body behind her, but the level asphalt seemed like a wall. It felt too steep.
Get to Kendra,
she thought.
That’s all. Just get to her. There are too many people counting on you.
Each breath was a struggle. She could feel her stamina oozing away with the blood from her mangled belly. Everything below that was numb. Her nerves were cut somewhere beneath her abdomen except for a single unsteady wire tricking up from her left thigh, where the muscles cramped and bunched.
Kendra lay three feet in front of her—three feet—but it was too far for either of them. Kendra’s loose fist hung motionless, propped just above her chest. Her wide eyes stared up. She was dead. Dead, but still warm. The two of them would be enough for the nanotech’s gestation if only Deborah could swallow it.
You must be the last one left, she thought. Cam, Medrano, they’re all dead.
She dragged and fought and got no closer, reaching, reaching ... She knew she could forget. She could escape this misery if she succeeded. The counter-vaccine would erase her mind, and she yearned for whatever peace the nanotech might bring. It was her duty and her revenge. With one motion she could honor her friends and infect the Chinese, and that was enough. It had to be enough.
Just get to Kendra.
Dust leapt from the earth. At first she didn’t make sense of the horizontal rain. The guns were beyond her tunnel vision. Deborah felt two or three tugs in her dead, outstretched legs, but forgot them.
Kendra.
Then a bullet crashed through Deborah’s forearm, knocking it aside. The pain was like a cleaver.
She wasn’t going to make it.
Jia ceased fire and
rolled over the top of the dune, preparing to run for the labs. His moment was now. There were no more Americans in front of him and he didn’t have the ammunition or the time to allow the fight to continue.
“Go! Go!” he yelled to the copilot.
Someone rose from the wreckage beside him, a bloody figure as dirty as the night. Jia dragged his submachine gun up. Unfortunately, the man held a firing system between them—a clamshell like a small laptop. The faint light of the fires revealed a beard and old blister rash on his dark face. He was Hispanic.
They stared at each other. Perhaps it was like looking into a mirror. Jia had never put a face on the enemy. They had always been “the Americans.” Compassion was not what Jia expected to feel, and yet he’d always been attuned to other men. This soldier was no less human than his own troops. Maybe Jia was the only one who truly grasped how the warriors on both sides were alike, noble and courageous.
Jia would have spoken to the other man if they shared a language. Even so, he tried to communicate.
“Bié dng! Tng!”
he shouted.
Don’t move! Stop!
The copilot’s feet ticked in the wreckage nearby. His presence added a second gun to Jia’s. Jia thought the American might attempt to negotiate, but the man never said a word. Maybe he grinned. A feral expression split his face, yet his hatred and his spite never touched the sadness in his eyes.
He pressed his hand down on his device. The ruins convulsed. Explosions lifted in a broken ring all around the labs, at least ten blinding flashes in the night. Shrapnel crashed against the dunes, but the nearest detonations were behind Jia. He was inside their lines. The bombs threw most of the debris away from him.
It was a final diversion.
Jia shot the American even as they ducked the blasts together. Both men crouched without thinking. Only Jia stayed down. The American flailed upward as Jia’s submachine gun blazed into his chest, yet he’d bought his comrades a few more heartbeats of time.
As the explosions lifted through the ash, the blond American lying in the parking lot squirmed once more, scrabbling toward the corpse nearby. Jia took aim again. Beside him, the copilot brought up his Type 85. Their guns raked the fallen Americans—but in that split second, Jia Yuanjun thought he saw both bodies in the parking lot reach for each other. The corpse’s arm dropped away from its side, either rocked by the bombs or Jia’s own bullets.
The two Americans touched each other.
Then the blond figure jerked one hand to her mouth.
28
Her teeth hurt. Two
in front were loose. She was sure she’d crunched through an old filling, and yet she seemed unable to stop pressing her jaws together. In her sleep, the habit was even more severe. She needed some kind of nightguard if it could be fabricated. Otherwise she was going to peel those incisors right out of her head.
The Army doctors said it was PTSD. They’d seen a lot of stress and fear. Ruth believed her neural pathways were permanently altered, because her jitters weren’t confined to her grinding. Her left hand tended to make a fist and squeeze like a heart. She glanced constantly to that side. The mind plague had changed her, and she’d noticed the same fidgeting in most of the survivors. The doctors wanted to pass it off as a normal traumatic reflex because a few calm words were all they had to offer. That wasn’t true for Ruth. She could build something to fight it.
The worst cases were being treated with weed, alcohol, or restraints. Most people seemed okay. In fact, Ruth was impressed that less than two days had passed since she woke up. The best elements of the U.S. military were quick to regain their feet, staggering up to fight a battle that never came.
The war was over.
Sixteen hours ago, they’d landed her in Sylvan Mountain, ninety miles southwest of Grand Lake. Grand Lake had been abandoned for now, its complexes too damaged by the Chinese assault. Sylvan Mountain was mostly a surface base, a simple garrison lined with armor, artillery, and chopper pads, so it hadn’t merited air attacks. The mind plague had been enough to incapacitate this place.
The fallout had also reached these mountains, but the sky was clearing, leaving only a rime of soot. Faint threads of it still curled in the wind, tightening, opening, and tightening again—like her hand.
Ruth watched the horizon, trying to ignore herself. A small part of her basked in the heat of the late yellow sun. Soon it would be dark, and she cherished the light. She also welcomed the bustle of troops around the only helicopter on this broad concrete slab. They were loading the Black Hawk with wire cut from their own fences, shouting in the cold as they wrestled the steel with pliers and gloves. None of it was enough to distract her. She could only watch and wait, pacing, twitching.
A captain with an M4 intercepted her. “You shouldn’t be out here,” he said. “Dr. Goldman? You shouldn’t be out here.”
“Beymer,” she said, tugging at the white badge on her uniform.
Go ask Colonel Beymer.
