“Greg and Eric are dead,” he said, meeting her bluntness with his own. The two Rangers had been her squadmates first. “They stayed with us all this time, Sarah. They died last night.”
“I ...” she said.
“Our whole town was infected. There were hundreds of them, Sarah. Greg bought us enough time to get out.”
“Eric was my husband,” Bobbi said.
“I’m sorry.” Foshtomi’s gaze went from Cam’s face to Bobbi’s to Ruth‘s, but Ruth unzipped her backpack and took out her laptop with that old, stubborn focus.
Cam nodded to himself, admiring the same dedication that had infuriated him in the aspen grove. Ruth would never give up. Not if they gave her time. Her fingers rattled on her keyboard and Cam said, to Foshtomi, “If you have enough fuel, we can try to seal those Humvees. Make a break for it.”
“Where you gonna go?”
“Grand Lake.”
“You’re crazy. There’s a million fuckin’ zombies between here and there, and we think the Chinese took the base anyway.”
Zombies,
he thought. In a different life, Cam had loved those corny old movies. Maybe it was strange that his group had never called sick people anything except “the infected.” They were zombies in every way that mattered, lethal, stupid, and relentless. But they were family. Cam’s group hadn’t fought anyone except their own friends and neighbors. Foshtomi’s battle had been larger, more impersonal.
Zombies
was a way to make the killing easier, reducing the infected to caricatures instead of real victims.
Cam said, “The Chinese have a vaccine against the new plague. Ruth thinks we can steal it.”
“What about the parasite?”
“You ... What do you mean?” he said, even though he’d imagined the same thing himself. The parasite nanotech would shut off the first vaccine, the one that kept them safe from the machine plague. Anyone who couldn’t reach safe elevation would die, and Cam knew how badly that would disrupt the Chinese assault—but at what cost?
Foshtomi’s eyes were narrow with hate. “What if we let it go? That’d fuck up the Chinese in a big way.”
Ruth’s hands stopped on her keyboard but she didn’t look up, as if too afraid to let Foshtomi see anything in her expression. Cam worried what Foshtomi might have read in his own face. “Sarah,” he said. “The parasite would affect everyone below ten thousand feet, not just the Chinese.”
“Our people are already dead, aren’t they?”
She lost somebody last night, too,
he thought. There was a new, cold edge in Foshtomi’s voice, and it made him think she was just barely holding onto her composure, using her reckless tone as more than a front. Her attitude had become a crutch to keep herself sane.
“We don’t have the parasite anymore,” he said.
“Bullshit. I know it was for real. Deborah Reece gave up her vial. Grand Lake stashed it away somewhere, and everyone says it really would’ve done what Ruth said. So what could you do? Hide yours somewhere?”
“That’s exactly what we did,” Ruth said, tapping slowly at her laptop again. “We buried it fifteen feet down in a metal box.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I think you still have it,” Foshtomi said, and Cam wondered if he was going to have to fight her. Would her troops obey an order to seize and search his group?
Yes,
he thought.
They will. For her, they will.
Cam almost glanced down at his pocket before he caught himself. Even with the map, even knowing where they’d buried the nanotech outside of Jefferson, Foshtomi wouldn’t have much chance of retrieving it, but he needed her to stay focused in another direction, toward Grand Lake.
“Sarah, it’s not an option,” he said.
“They’ve hit us with nukes.”
“Even if we had it, which we don‘t, the parasite wouldn’t be instantaneous. It would take days to spread far enough. It might not reach California for a week. They’re up-weather from us. You wouldn’t accomplish anything except killing our own people until the wind took it all the way around the world to our coastline.”
“So you do have it.”
“Sarah, no. My point is that we can’t just stay here.”
“Driving to Grand Lake is crazy.”
“You were glad to see us,” Cam said. “You were already restless. Look at you.”
Foshtomi sneered even as she turned away. The motion was one of denial, rejecting what he’d said, except that by jumping up she’d proved him right. Yes, she was afraid to leave this canyon. One of her first responsibilities was to preserve her fighting strength—but for what? To sit and wait until Chinese planes attacked them, too?
“We’re short on masks,” Foshtomi said. “We only put them on our spotters and point men.”
“If we get the vaccine, it won’t matter.”
“You’ve seen how fast the plague jumps people. How would we get close enough to—”
“Cam?” Ruth said.
Foshtomi turned on her. “He’s not in charge here.”
“Cam. All of you.” Ruth’s eyes were stunned. “The extra bulk attached to the nanotech is a message,” she said. “It’s not meant to do anything. It’s just binary code. Someone built it into the machine like a note.”
“We don’t have anyone who can read Chinese,” Foshtomi said, but Ruth shook her head.
“It’s in English. Once I isolated the code, the computer translated it in seconds.”
“What? What do they want?”
Ruth blinked and wet her lips first, as if testing her words before sharing them out loud. “It says it’s from Kendra Freedman,” she said.
18
“That’s impossible,” Cam said
, but Ruth thought,
No, it’s the only thing that really makes sense.
She didn’t want to fight with him any more, so she tamped down on her excitement. She knew she could be too loud when she was in the grip of inspiration. “Let me show you how it says what it does.”
“What do you mean ‘how’?” Foshtomi asked. “What’s the message?”
Ruth turned her laptop to face them and said, “Look at the coding. It’s a spiral of ones and zeroes embedded in the nano. Most of the extra bulk is just nulls, but the binary string is unmistakable.”
Foshtomi glanced at Cam, who shook his head. “Look at it! I highlighted the ones. Here are the zeroes.” Ruth touched her keyboard again. “These specific molecular configurations are repeated hundreds of times. That’s why my analysis picked it out in the first place.”
“All I see is dots and bumps,” Foshtomi said.
“Exactly. She chose simple forms to represent her ‘ones’ and ’zeroes.‘ They don’t need to accomplish anything else. They’re static frames. That’s why Freedman was able to hide—”
Bobbi interrupted. “My God, Ruth, what does it say?”
“ ‘My name is Kendra Freedman,”’ she said, tipping the laptop back to face herself. “ ‘I designed the
archos
plague, the nanotech that kills below 9,570 feet. It was a mistake. Maybe it can be stopped. My lab should still be intact at 4411 68th Street, Sacramento, California, along with our design work, software, samples, and machining gear.’ ”
“That’s old news,” Cam said. “Years old.”
“Please. Just listen.”
“You’ve already been to Sacramento,” Bobbi said, echoing Cam. Her eyes were perplexed and, despite the fragrant heat of the greenhouse, Ruth felt cold and off-balance. The message had awakened too many ghosts.
“ ‘If you can read this, find me. I want I need—’” Ruth glanced up. “There’s a break here. Freedman didn’t have the chance to rewrite,” she said, irritated by the doubt in their eyes. She looked back at her laptop and read, “ ‘Andrew Dutchess is the man who released the
archos
plague. It was Dutchess. But I’ll do anything. I can fix this.’ ”
She sounds like me,
Ruth thought.
The realization was a poignant one. The two of them had never met, except through Freedman’s work, but Ruth had spent too much time pursuing Freedman’s brilliance to feel anything except admiration. On a personal level, she’d also learned to feel horror and pity for the other woman. Freedman’s vision had been one of immortality, wealth, and peace. She’d meant to change the world in a very different way. Without one man’s greed, she might have succeeded.
Ruth had never dreamed she would confront Freedman again in a new competition. Cause and effect had come full circle. The science teams in Leadville had designed the booster on the foundation of Freedman’s work. Then the booster gave Freedman the insights necessary to accelerate her own designs.
She was alive, and she was the creator of the mind plague.
“ ‘I reached the mountains in northern California,”’ Ruth read, “‘where I survived until the Russian invasion. They traded me to the Chinese.’ ”
“It has to be a trick,” Cam said.
“ ‘This machine is also mine. It is an unholy mistake, and it is mine. I was deceived. I thought I was working to bring peace in the Himalayas, but they lied to me. I was never in Tibet. There is no snow or Indians and I’m sure now that—’” Ruth frowned. “It breaks again.”
“She’s rambling,” Foshtomi said.
She lapsed,
Ruth thought.
She was tired or she was interrupted. She must have been constructing the message letter by letter.
They don’t understand.
Every sentence would have cost Freedman hours, the full message days or weeks, and it sounded like she was in prison. Were there guards? Other scientists? The Chinese must have caged Freedman so tightly it felt like she’d been pinned under a microscope herself, controlling everything about her: when to eat, where to sleep, and, most importantly, what to do and how to think. The idea of that never-ending scrutiny made Ruth claustrophobic.
It was amazing that Freedman had been able to construct her message at all, and yet Foshtomi was right even if she didn’t know it. Ruth was also bothered by Freedman’s verbosity.
If every letter counted, why so much? Her guilt must be unbearable. That was why she made her excuses, pointing the blame at Dutchess. Still, something in the tone of Freedman’s words seemed off. Was there another code hidden within this message? What if she’d used a cipher or some kind of subtle wordplay?
“ ‘Find me,’” Ruth read. “ ‘I know I can stop the new plague. As I write this, it is July twelfth, Year Three. I’ve learned I’m in southern California at sea level, but somehow we’re safe. These labs are in the Saint Bernadine Hospital in Los Angeles.”’
“Then we’re fucked,” Foshtomi said.
“What do you mean?”
“Our guys were hardwired to nuke Los Angeles if the Chinese hit us. That’s public knowledge. It had to be if we were gonna keep those bastards from overrunning us. Mutually assured destruction. So one way or the other, she’s dead.”
“We don’t know that!”
“How would you get to L.A. even if it’s still there? Flap your arms?”
“The whole thing could just be a trick,” Cam said.
Ruth shook her head, imploring him. “Why? What could they possibly gain by faking a message from her? You don’t realize how complicated it was, either.”
“If you tried to call her ... Is there more to the message?” he asked. “A specific radio frequency? What if Chinese are waiting?”
“The message ends there.”
“It’s the perfect trap, like a trip wire,” he said. “The only people who could find the message are the ones they’d want to kill the most—the nanotech experts on our side. If it’s her, why doesn’t she know about the vaccine? ‘We’re at sea level, but somehow we’re safe.’ That’s what it says.”
“She’s isolated. They control everything about her life.”
“You really think she’s alive?”
“Yes. The binary string runs
backward
or even splits in two in thirty places, hidden in the nulls. That’s why the Chinese didn’t see it. They might not have even realized such a thing was possible.”
“And we know Freedman was the best,” Cam said as if wanting to convince himself.
He believes me!
Ruth thought. He was taking her side against Foshtomi even after playing the devil’s advocate, and Ruth flashed him a big, girlish smile. “There’s no proof she didn’t make it to elevation!” she said. “Sawyer did.”
“Sawyer ran for the mountains as soon as possible,” Cam said quietly, “but Freedman went downtown to try to find the mayor or the police. That’s how he told it. Remember? She stayed behind.”
“We need to find her.”
Forty minutes later, Foshtomi’s
unit had done everything possible to seal three Humvees, a Ford Expedition, and a half-ton Army truck. There were only seventeen of them. Foshtomi considered leaving the truck, but they also wanted to carry water, gas, and other supplies. She also hoped they might find other survivors and take them along.
The vehicles were a gamble. Foshtomi’s troops didn’t have any welding gear, only the plastic sheeting used for the greenhouses and a limited amount of tape. They’d covered most of the doors and seams. Once inside, they planned to finish the job, but if they drove through an invisible fog of nanotech, would the plastic be enough? It was the best they could do.
Ruth wanted to talk to Cam alone, but first he was busy with their medic and then Foshtomi wanted to compare notes with him over her maps. Ruth took her laptop to a spot alongside one of the planters, pursuing a new effort to find secondary codes hidden within the original message.
If Freedman knew how to turn off the mind plague, wouldn’t she have recorded that information, too? What if the awkward lapses were on purpose? Ruth tried writing down only the first letters of a dozen words, then only the second letters or the third. Each time, she ended up with nonsense and cursed herself.
