“No, I think he’s right,” she said.
“These are the same guys who bombed Leadville and started the whole fucking war—”
“They’re not. At this point, they’re just survivors like us.” Deborah turned to Medrano with as much poise as she could muster, watery-eyed in the smoke. “We don’t even know where we are, Captain. We’re hurt. Unarmed. I think he’s right.”
“What’s to stop them from shooting us as soon as he gives up the vaccine?”
“Information. Tell them, Cam.”
Cam aimed a thin smile at her. It was a sign of approval, and, for the first time, Deborah felt some glimpse of Ruth’s attraction to him. Beneath the scars, he was lean and dark and competent.
Pulling a jackknife from his belt, he crouched and sank the blade into the ground, trying to clean it of nanotech. Then he stood and held the knife over his left hand. “I need one man,” he said to the Russians.
“Sidorov,” the officer said.
In response, a soldier gave his rifle to his mates and walked closer.
“Tell him not to take off his hood!” Cam said. “Hold his breath. Give me his arm.”
This better work, Deborah thought as the officer translated for Cam. If he’s infected, if
he falls
down
twitching
—
They’ll
kill us.
Cam wet the tip of the blade in his own hand. Next, he worked the soldier’s jacket sleeve back from his glove and lightly cut him there. “We were trying to get into Los Angeles,” he said as he worked. “My team has information on the original source of the plague. We think we can stop it.”
“Kpbiwa noexaÀa?”
the officer said. “How?”
“We need to get into Los Angeles,” Cam said, taking a hard line with him, but the officer met Cam’s stubbornness with a deflection of his own.
“How long is it before our man is safe?” the officer said.
“It’s already happened. You know how fast nanotech is.”
“But how are we knowing? There is no proof.”
“Tell him to take off his gear.”
This is it, Deborah thought. She tensed as the officer spoke to his man, ready to draw her pistol, ready to run, making her shoulder throb like a drum.
The soldier removed his biochem hood. He was startlingly young, blond like Deborah and nearly as smooth-faced, no more than a teen, and yet his eyes were like stone. Deborah wanted to say something to him, but he wouldn’t understand even if she found the words. We’re your friends, she thought.
o6poe ympo,
she blurted.
The boy’s veteran gaze flitted up and down her tall, haggard body. Still no emotion showed.
“You can see he’s fine,” Cam said. “Who’s next?”
“We wait,” the officer said.
“We need to get into Los Angeles, a place on the far edge of the city. We think it survived the bombs.”
“That is not impossible,” the officer said.
Deborah felt a thin spark of hope. Could they have
a plane?
she wondered. Where
are
we?
“You come with us,” the officer said. “Keep your distance. Sidorov will be your guard.
06e3opycbme
ux!”
The boy gestured for Deborah’s sidearm. She didn’t resist. Medrano might have planned otherwise, but there were half a dozen rifles trained on him, so he let the boy have his weapon, too.
They hiked across the hill. Deborah gained new energy as the sun emerged from the haze, dappling through the tangled oaks. It was a soft, sweet yellow. They reeked of smoke and jet fuel and yet she breathed all the way into her belly from the clean air of the breeze. The earth smelled different here than in Colorado, dustier and less green. She’d never tasted anything so beautiful.
The Russian officer tried to maintain his quarantine, walking the rest of his men several paces from Deborah, Cam, Medrano, and the boy—but Deborah quickly flagged. Medrano tried to support her, but he wasn’t much better off. Within minutes, the officer called for a halt and asked Cam to vaccinate two more of his men. He needed someone to carry his prisoners.
A few soldiers had already disappeared, running ahead. Deborah thought two or three of them had also gone back into the smoke. Why? To fight the fire?
Dividing his platoon left the officer with only four men, including himself and the boy. Deborah supposed if there was a time to overpower them, it was now, but she’d slumped to the ground, feeling nauseous. She was only faintly aware of Cam repeating his procedure with the jackknife or of Medrano removing her gun belt to make a combat sling for her arm.
This is what shock feels like, she thought. You’re in shock.
“Water,” she said. “I—Is there water?”
Medrano got a canteen from the boy. Maybe it helped. When they carried her into the Russian camp fifteen minutes later, Deborah was still conscious. She saw one truck in the rock-strewn gully. There was also camouflage netting strung from a fat gray boulder. They brought Deborah beneath it. Her last memory was of the sunlight in the fabric.
Two hours later, they were slashing over the brown land in a helicopter. Deborah remained numb. She felt hypnotized by the yammering vibration of the rotors and the rolling pattern of shadows in the gullies and foothills below. The sun shone low in the west. Darkness reached away from every ridge and peak.
Enjoy it while
you
can, she thought.
The air here was clean, but, ahead of them, the southern sky was lost behind gigantic black clouds. Fallout and smoke hovered over the L.A. basin like a mountain range, all of its massive slopes, bulk, and pinnacles leaning inland, blown east by the ocean wind. It was a different world. Not all of them would come out again. Even if there wasn’t more shooting—even if Freedman was alive and they found her—there wasn’t room in the helicopter. At least one person would need to give up their seat.
The aircraft was an old KTVC News 12 chopper, narrow-bodied and short. It was also bright red. At first, Deborah thought they were dangerously exposed inside its Plexiglas windows, but the color of the helicopter was immaterial. It was their radar signature that mattered, and, more importantly, their transponder and radio codes.
They were a hundred and forty miles from San Bernadino. The Osprey had crashed on the eastern face of the Sierras near Mt. Whitney and Sequoia National Park in the central part of California. Bornmann must have veered north before they were hit, trying to escape the fighters. Even so, they were in Chinese-occupied territory. The Russians weren’t supposed to be here. Their border with the People’s Liberation Army had been drawn another fifty miles north, just south of Fresno, and yet they’d maintained Special Forces inside that line. The officer, Lt. Colonel Artem Alekseev, had commanded several covert surveillance units whose isolation saved them. A third of Alekseev’s men fell victim to windborne drifts of nanotech, but there was no one else to fight off. They survived. Now they’d joined with the Americans—or vice versa.
After he decided to risk everyone in his command to Cam’s inoculations, Alekseev had rummaged up some spare clothes, putting the three Americans in Russian uniforms. Medrano did what he could to keep them distinct. He insisted on removing the name tapes from his uniform and Deborah’s in addition to her Army patch and his own USAF patch, all of which he sewed onto their new uniforms—but there were only four identifiers for the three of them. REECE. MEDRANO. U.S. ARMY. U.S. AIR FORCE. In combat, American soldiers wore nothing else, not even the flag. He put the u.s. ARMY patch on Cam, but the effect was negligible. All of them looked like Russians.
Alekseev proved to be in his forties when he finally took off his biochem mask. His face was dark from sun and weather except along one cheek, where the skin was branded with three white puncture scars Deborah couldn’t identify. What could have made those marks? Barbed wire?
Deborah didn’t trust him. To convince Medrano to share the vaccine, she’d said the Russians were no longer their enemy. They all wanted to live, and that was true, but Deborah wasn’t so forgiving.
Alekseev was a ferret. She planned to watch him closely, even if he didn’t seem to have anything to gain by betraying them to the Chinese. Easy prison sentences for his men? His ambitions were larger than that.
Much like General Walls, Alekseev had divided the remainder of his troops into two squads and told them to find other survivors. His assets were too minimal to mount a serious counterattack. Throughout the day he’d waited and listened, raging at his helplessness. By now, the Chinese must have completed their takeover of the top U.S. installations. Before sunrise tomorrow, if not sooner, they would turn their attention to cleaning up any pockets of resistance in Russian California, so Alekseev chose to support the three Americans in their all-or-nothing gambit to find Kendra Freedman.
First, he owned the helicopter, stashed at an old refugee camp seven miles north of his hiding place. Second, Russian intelligence had been monitoring Chinese radio traffic since the occupation with a great deal of luck. It had been necessary for the allies to coordinate their air missions, which gave the Russians many more opportunities than the U.S.-Canadian side to study, hack, and infiltrate the Chinese system. Colonel Alekseev believed he could fool Chinese air control where the Americans failed. Unfortunately, the KTVC chopper only contained four seats. Alekseev had had far more volunteers than he could send. None of his troops wanted to stay behind. Deborah felt a grudging respect for their courage even as she joined Cam and Medrano in arguing with Alekseev. She didn’t want to remain behind, either. What would she do? Nap?
It didn’t help that Deborah, Cam, and Medrano were hurt. Alekseev’s medic tended their wounds, setting Medrano’s arm with a splint and stitching their cuts, but the three of them were a mess. As far as Alekseev was concerned, the only American to fill one of the precious seats would be Cam. They’d explained that Cam knew Freedman and some nanotech, but Deborah extended this half-truth to herself. I’ve been
a
research
assistant,
she said,
and
Medrano’s studied the Los Angeles
area.
He’s
also an
engineer. We need him if we’re going to be digging through what’s left of the city.
Alekseev believed the chopper’s load allowance would permit six people. It would be tight, but they needed everyone they could fit. There must be a large Chinese guard at the labs. Their best hope might be a sudden blitz. When their pilot returned with the chopper, Alekseev’s troops loaded it with one person’s equivalent weight of rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry. That left five slots—just four, after the pilot, an unfortunately heavyset man called Obruch.
They were saved from an even tougher decision. In the smoke, Alekseev had sent three men to investigate the plane. These soldiers reported no trace of Tanya Huff or Lewis Bornmann. If they’d survived the crash, which seemed unlikely, they must have been killed in the missile strike.
Like Foshtomi, Huff had been a part of saving Cam and Deborah. Huff’s death made her feel small and humble and yet unspeakably proud. She would carry on for them as far as possible.
Deborah expected to die with these strangers. Their entire strike force consisted of herself, Cam, Medrano, Colonel Alekseev, and Sergeant Obruch—and the chopper’s tanks were only two-thirds full. That meant their maximum range was 160 miles. They would need to find an airfield and refuel in order to leave L.A.
She was glad she had one friend. Jammed together in back, Cam worked to familiarize himself with a Russian AK-47 as Medrano inspected an RPG. Deborah merely rested her shoulder. She watched the sun and the land below. Impossibly, she was at peace.
Deborah Reece was a good soldier.
They were still a hundred miles from San Bernadino when their chopper hit the ash like a solid membrane. The aircraft rocked. Even the beat of the rotors changed. The
whup whup whup whup
of the blades deepened into a shorter, harsher sound as if everything was closer now.
One thing Deborah didn’t worry about was radiation. The booster nanotech would protect them from all but the worst dosage. In any case, she didn’t expect to live long enough to get sick.
She stared into the darkness. Dust ticked and clattered against the Plexiglas.
There were layers in the clouds. Sometimes she couldn’t see anything but the swirls of gray and black. Other times, the haze opened up and she could see the ground, which was mostly blackened desert. Occasionally there was a road or fences or a line of blown-down telephone poles.
They knew the Chinese had taken over the U.S. military bases in the Mojave. Medrano thought these targets must have been hit, too. The earth was empty and burned, which didn’t make their job any easier. They’d lost their maps and electronics in the plane crash. That meant they’d also lost their sporadic satellite connection. They’d memorized the GPS coordinates for Saint Bernadine Hospital, but the News 12 chopper had had its global positioning system torn out long ago to support the Russian war effort.
Working with Medrano, Alekseev thought he’d pinpointed the right spot on a map of his own. By using compass headings, some landmarks in the terrain and dead reckoning, they believed they could find the general neighborhood. Fortunately, San Bernadino lay on Interstate 40 on the south side of a narrow pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, which formed the eastern border of the Los Angeles sprawl. Those peaks would be tough to miss. A few of the highest nubs actually poked above ten thousand feet, and the Interstate should act like a red carpet, creating a long, distinct ribbon in the terrain.
Four times they saw Chinese aircraft in the murk. The fighters’ jetwash cut through the ash like bullets, dragging the soot into straight lines. One plane flew very close, nearly flipping the chopper as Obruch cursed and fought the controls.
