Plague Year (29 page)

“You can’t just leave us here!”

“I’m sorry. We’ll give you as many supplies as—”

“You can’t! You can’t!”

Ruth returned her gaze to the fire pit as Maureen pleaded in a lower voice and the other California woman began to cry. They didn’t realize they were so much better off here, even if the planes had been headed back to Leadville.

It was interesting that Maureen seemed to have the same false ideal of Colorado as Sawyer, and Lord knew Ruth had created her own unrealistic expectations while she was still aboard the ISS. Maybe everyone needed the possibility of a safe haven, somewhere, to keep them going. Ruth didn’t know how to feel about that. It made her sad and it made her afraid.

She rubbed her eyes to hide her face and wished again that there was another way.

* * * *

The meat was phenomenal, crisp fat, nearly raw against the bone, and she ate too quick, trying not to wolf it down but not entirely in control of herself.

* * * *

Hernandez made sure Ruth had her own tent, a low two-man dome made for backpacking. The soldiers staked it down between the long body of the C-130 and their own, larger tents.

She washed her face and hands at a plastic tub, wanting at least to pull off her top and sponge her neck and armpits. A bath would be better. But she had no privacy, walled in by soldiers, and water was a carefully measured resource here. Unlike Leadville, surrounded by mountain ranges and snowpack, this little island had only two dribbling springs, one of which dried up each summer. Maureen had warned Hernandez about rationing twice in Ruth’s hearing.

She lingered over the tub, dripping, reluctant to settle in for the night despite feeling totally depleted. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep. The bugs here were creepy, pervasive, and loud—and her fear was the same, nonstop flickers of adrenaline. Hernandez had relayed their clues over the radio, the names
archos
and Freedman, but it might be days before the FBI produced anything useful.

The conspiracy would be uncovered long before then.

If Hernandez had included her name in his report, even just to praise her efforts, it might be soon. Tonight. What would happen? Fuel was so precious, would they fly her back? Would there be a gunfight as one group of soldiers turned on the other?

She was glad when Cam banged on a supply crate and yelled, “I have to see her!”

From her perspective the knot of men were a single, complicated shadow, their flashlights aimed into Cam’s body. The soldiers appeared ready to turn him back. Ruth hurried over and said, “Hold on.”

“I want to try again with Sawyer,” he told her, “just you and me so he’s not so outnumbered.”

“I’ll go,” D.J. said, striding up beside Ruth’s shoulder.

Cam shook his head. “Didn’t ask you.”

* * * *

He moved through the dark like he was born to it, not at all hindered by his limp. Ruth and her Marine escorts kept to the bobbing white cone of their flashlights, staring down, sweeping the smooth asphalt road for nonexistent hazards. The fifty yards between their camp and the cabin were enough distance for Cam to leave them behind.

Two windows shone with lanternlight, at the cabin’s front and at the side. Sawyer’s room. The night, so absolute, might have made Ruth uneasy but instead heightened her sense of inclusion. The cool dark seemed so much smaller than daylight, hiding the miles of empty land that fell away below them.

She heard the boys inside, faintly, then the deeper voice of a man. The soldiers’ flashlights jabbed up and caught Cam and Dr. Anderson standing together by the front door. Their hands rose to shield their faces.

“Thank you,” she said to her two soldiers. “Why don’t you wait here.”

“Ah, no ma’am.” Staff Sergeant Gilbride shook his head.

“The whole point is to keep from overcrowding him—”

“We’ll stand outside his room. He won’t know we’re there.” Gilbride started forward, gesturing to Cam, and the rich lanternlight spilled over them as the door opened. They stepped inside, Ruth caught between Gilbride and the other soldier.

What had Hernandez told his men, to be careful that these people didn’t take her hostage and demand to be flown to Colorado? Sawyer was more valuable than she, and they had done everything in their power to make him available...

The three boys had several decks of cards laid out on the floor beside their lantern, a game she didn’t recognize. Dr. Anderson knelt among them. Cam led the two Marines and Ruth toward the short hall at the back of the room, pausing there.

“You seem like you have your head on straight,” Cam said, making eye contact, and Ruth shrugged at the compliment. Then he lowered his voice. “Flirt with him.”

“What? Yeah, okay.” She had been carrying her laptop at her side in her good hand. Now she brought the thin case up against her chest, smiling—and irritated—at the idea that the real reason he’d chosen her was for her boobs. Wrong woman.

He didn’t smile back. “I’m serious. Don’t go overboard, let’s just see what happens.”

“It’s not a problem.”

* * * *

Sawyer’s room had a rancid stink. His guts were a mess and his digestive process was inconsistent. Dr. Anderson had said that breaking down solid foods took nearly as much out of him as he gained in nutrition, describing lumpy stools and bloating and screaming fits, and Ruth wondered if this flatulence was the result of tempting him with beef ribs. She wondered if Cam had done it deliberately, to hurt and distract him.

The relationship between these men was one she might never fully comprehend, brother, enemy, each of them dependent upon and simultaneously dominant over the other.

“Hey, buddy,” Cam said, “you feel better?”

“Nuh.” Sawyer lay on his right side, his withered side, knees drawn up beneath the covers. His other hand shifted along the edge of the mattress, crablike, groping and pausing and groping again. His eyelids were low, his attention drifting.

A part of her wished she wasn’t here. She had no idea what to do. Her impulse was to shout and beg, but there was so little they could offer someone in Sawyer’s condition. She thought ruefully of Ulinov, poor Ulinov, who had tried for days and weeks to make her return to her work when she would only stare out through the lab module’s viewport.

Sawyer surprised her again. “Came back,” he said clearly enough, in a voice that was contrite, almost childishly so.

Ruth felt worn down to nerves and bone, but Sawyer, being so much weaker, had been reduced to an utterly vulnerable state—and Cam had expected it, planned for it.

“She wants to hear more about your ideas,” Cam said.

“A lot more.” Ruth hefted the laptop. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Hah.” Sawyer’s grunt was ambiguous to her, but he tried to raise his head, a tremor in his neck muscles quickly becoming a shudder. He slumped back down onto the mattress with a sigh.

Cam hauled him up into a sitting position, untangling his strengthless legs. Sawyer cried out. Ruth knelt away from them and busied herself with her laptop, sneaking glances. Finally he was settled. Too bad Cam had positioned himself on Sawyer’s left side, his strong side—probably by habit, because it was easier to talk to the living half of his face.

Ruth sat close, her bulky cast like a weapon or a wall between them, his drooping eye and cheek a barrier of a different sort. “This is the best we’ve put together,” she said, placing the open laptop on her legs.

The first graphic was Vernon’s, a simplified progression intended to wow nontechnical big shots. It had four squares across the top and four across the bottom, like the panels of a Sunday paper cartoon. It showed an oversized, two-dimensional star of an HK ANN attacking and then breaking down an oversized fishhook of an
archos
nano. The written description for each panel was ten words or less.

“Yuh yusing th’now?” Sawyer asked, blurting his sounds, and Cam said, “You’re using this now?”

“No, we’re still in trials. It’s a mock-up. But the groundwork is solid, we’ve hit 58 percent effectiveness. There’s no question that the discrim key is functional.”

“Fif ’y hey sno’good.” His slur remained incoherent but the smugness in his tone was unmistakable.

“Fifty-eight is awful,” she agreed, “but if we can operate faster than
archos
, it might not matter if the error rate is through the roof.”

Sawyer shifted, grunting again, and Ruth mourned his speech impediment. Was that
yes
or
no
or something else altogether? How much wasn’t he saying because it was too much effort? She looked across his misshapen profile at Cam, needing help.

It would be right to warn him, recruit him into the conspiracy. Cam would be instrumental in continuing to control Sawyer, and they might need another pair of hands during the takeover—but there was just too much at risk. She hardly knew him, and the chance existed that he might take her confession straight to Hernandez.

Always alert, Cam noticed her glance and seemed to interpret it as a prompt. “Maybe you can make this thing better,” he told Sawyer, “make it a hundred percent.”

“Yah.” Sawyer bobbed his head.

“I have proofs and schematics,” Ruth said.

“Lemme see.” Sawyer fumbled one-handed with the computer and Ruth tried to help, equally limited, her cast blocking her way. Cam reached in and the three of them managed to set the laptop on Sawyer’s thighs.

He scrolled through the data Vernon had assembled, sectional diagrams and test series analysis. He muttered. He beat his good hand on the bed. Cam stared at the screen as he translated Sawyer’s growl, maybe hoping to increase his own understanding of their terms and concepts: “Just the fact that we’re putting this ANN tech inside the body should improve its targeting ability. It will congregate in the same places as the
archos
, in the extremities and scar tissue.”

Ruth nodded with all the caution of someone in a minefield. “Sure.” She didn’t want to argue. What if he shut up for a week just to punish them? But human beings were not empty containers. A living organism was many times more complex than any equivalent area outdoors, tightly packed with miles of veins and tissue. The blood system might bring most vaccine nanos into proximity with most
archos
nanos, but every stray
archos
tucked away here and there would be free to replicate...

Sawyer was ahead of her. “The problem is the ones we miss,” he said, through Cam, “and this discrim key looks like good work. You could probably keep everyone you’ve got sweating over it for another year before you pushed that percentage up. So we add a new component.”

“More bulk will slow us down.” The criticism was out before she could catch it, even though she’d just reminded herself not to antagonize him.

But Sawyer seemed to enjoy the challenge. He made a throaty bullfrog laugh and said, “Iffah wurks awurks.”

Cam shook his head. “Sorry, what?”

“If
fit,
” Sawyer repeated, loud with anger, and Ruth said, “If it works, it works. Absolutely.”

The
archos
nano generated marginal amounts of waste heat, a fraction of a calorie, when it first awoke inside a host body and then seventy-one times more during replication. By modifying the vaccine nano to detect this signature pulse as a backup to the discrimination key, Sawyer thought they could ensure that it located every
archos
that hadn’t been destroyed while still inactive. The person whose body was this battlefield might experience some pain and a long-term accumulation of injury, but the best way to improve the vaccine nano would be to have a working prototype that could be tested and refined.

It was chancy, innovative. And it would be quick. Sawyer insisted they’d need only a bit of integral coding. There would be no new design work. He could craft a thermo-sensor from a single port of the heat engine, and his team had used EUVL fabrication gear—extreme ultraviolet laser—with machining capacities well beyond the MAFM or electron probe in Leadville.

“But a lot of Stockton burned,” Ruth said. It was the perfect opening, assuming the FBI report targeting that city was accurate. “What if your lab got wiped out?”

Sawyer turned stiffly, bringing the animate side of his face around to her. His pebbled lips drew back in a thin, numb smirk. Then he shook his head and carefully formed four syllables, pleased as always to correct her.

“Sacramento,” he said. “We move’tuh Sacramento ad for’y f ’reven six’y hey streed.”

Forty-four Eleven 68th Street.

Ruth caught her breath, unable to hide her elation. His good eye never left her face, though, clear and aware and so very weary. She hadn’t tricked him. He had chosen to give up his secret, after first impressing her again with his skill set.

It was not surrender but a change of strategy. He jabbered for another ten minutes, his cadence rushed, desperate to explain himself as his body failed him. Fatigue reduced his mumble to a slur and he soon became unable to follow his own thoughts. He repeated himself, slapping his hand on his leg, closing his eyes or staring at her with uneven, fading intensity.

Sawyer had one more surprise for them.

24

Kendra Freedman expected to live forever—two or three hundred years, at least. Destroying cancerous cells was only the beginning. The
archos
nanotech had the capacity to rid the body of all disease and pollutants. The potential existed to overcome age itself, scouring away plaques and fatty deposits, rebuilding bones depleted by osteoporosis, replenishing the tissues of the heart, liver, stomach.

Their parents’ generation might be the last to die.

Given two hundred years of good health in which to continue their work—and to allow other medical technologies to advance—they could become true immortals.

Four years before the plague, Al Sawyer jumped at the chance to work with Freedman. It wasn’t that he bought into her immortality rap. The field was full of enthusiastic kooks proposing everything from heads-up computers mounted inside the optic nerve to cold fusion in a Coke bottle. He joined Freedman because she was independent and because she offered him all the latitude he wanted and because she had money.