“Da,” Deborah said. Yes. “Where are we?”
“Put yourself on your knees,” the officer replied, with a curt motion for his soldiers to take them.
“Wait!” Cam said. “Stay back. We can protect you from the Chinese nanotech, but we’re probably crawling with it. We came out of the plague zones. You might be infected if you touch us.”
“You would be sick,” the officer said. “Not flying.”
“I’m Major Reece with the United States Army,” Deborah said, asserting herself, but Cam surprised them all. He was honest.
“We have the new vaccine,” he said. “If you help us, we can give it to you, too.”
The fire was getting closer. Deborah could hear it licking its way across the hill behind her as the smoke thickened. “We should move,” she said, but the officer refused.
“Nyet. Give us the vaccine,” he said, before barking out a dozen words she didn’t understand. The nearest Russians backed off, but none of them lowered their weapons.
“Let me clean myself,” Cam said. “I can try to decontaminate, at least a bit.”
The officer nodded, but hit the charging handle on his AK-47. Deborah flinched. One wrong move… she thought, barely allowing herself to breathe as Cam scrubbed himself down with brush and dirt. It was a crude decon procedure but clever as always. Deborah wondered what else Ruth had taught him. Would he have come up with this idea by himself? He was intelligent, just uneducated. That made him unpredictable.
“Major Reece and I are in charge here,” Medrano said to him.
“Right.”
“Then keep your mouth shut from now on.”
“We need them. Look at us.” Cam paused with a handful of crumbling brown earth against his sleeve, ignoring the scuffs and gashes beneath his burned uniform. “But they need us, too.”
“We should have negotiated,” Medrano said in a growl. He glanced at Deborah. “Major? It’s not too late.”
“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.