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.
Alekseev had already answered two radio challenges in Mandarin. After their near miss, there was a third. Deborah waited for a missile — would they even feel it? — but death never came. Alekseev’s codes were MSS, he said, and he posed as a high-level officer, even rebuking Chinese air traffic control for contacting him again. He wanted radio silence.
Eventually they were clattering alongside the San Gabriel Mountains. Obruch also had a railroad track and the dry, broken channel of an aqueduct to follow, both of which led to 1-40 and then into the pass.
The land transformed. Gas stations and truck lots appeared first. Warehouses. A car dealership. A quarry. There were homes, too, and freeway billboards and an endless row of great metal trusses supporting electrical lines. Everything looked as if it had been lifted and thrown. The buildings sagged. Even the freeway was buckled and split. Ash covered the world, robbing it of any color.
The destruction grew worse as they thundered through the pass. There were vast residential areas — thousands of homes in neat, boxy patterns on the hills. Street after street had been built on terraces like broad steps down the mountain slope, spotted with larger structures like apartment buildings and shopping centers. From the air, even now, the order that had been imposed was impressive. These roads and foundations might last for eons, although the lighter elements had been torn away. The roofs of the houses were gone. Many of those square little buildings had collapsed. The larger apartments and malls were often missing their tops, too, or had lost one or more walls. Even brick and concrete hadn’t survived. Not a single window looked intact. All of that material had ava lanched into the streets as it was lifted by the blast waves, creating drifts and dunes that covered earlier disasters. Long before the missiles fell, San Bernadino had been wracked by quakes and flash floods. It didn’t rain here often — but when it did, the insect-ravaged yards and hills had melted away, clogging the streets with erosion and debris. Deborah could still see unintended riverways carved through some neighborhoods, spilling down the mountainside.
A small percentage of the debris was bones. Hundreds of thousands of people had died here in the first plague. Their skulls and rib cages mixed with the furniture and other household possessions strewn among the shattered lumber, drywall, doors, shingling, and insulation. Signs were down. Trees and cars had overturned. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived, but Deborah did her part, staring into the ruins for any clue. They were about two hundred feet up. Visibility was no more than a few hundred yards. Even the mountains had faded into the gloom. Everything looked the same. All that stood were broken walls — the endless, straight-edged fins of broken walls.
Beside her, Medrano compared notes with Alekseev in the cockpit, trying to make sense of the holocaust. Up front, the two Russians murmured together in their own language until Alekseev turned and said, “We are overshooting our mark. We must turn back north.”
“I’ve been counting streets,” Medrano said.
“As have we,” Alekseev said. “The hospital is behind us.”
“Look,” Cam said. “What’s that?” He rapped on his window and Deborah straightened against Medrano, wanting to see past him, which became easier when Obruch banked in a slow glide to Cam’s side.
There were people sprawled in the rubble — fresh, whole people, not skeletons. Deborah guessed there were at least ten. They were ash-colored like everything else, but they’d fallen on top of the debris. That meant they’d come after the bombing.
“He cÀuwºOM npu6Àuamecb,” Alekseev said.
The helicopter had been descending but Obruch adjusted his elevation, rising again and then banking away to keep from passing over the kill zone. Deborah tried to glance back at the corpses through her window. The angle was too sharp.
“What do you think happened to them?” Medrano said, and Deborah thought, They weren’t shot. They looked… melted.
Limbs and heads had come away from some of the bodies.
“It must have been recent,” Cam said. “There are no bugs. No ants. The way those people were chewed up—”
“TaM!” Alekseev shouted. “On your right.”
That was Deborah’s side, and she glanced through the broken shapes of the city. She felt both hope and trepidation, because she knew exactly what Cam was thinking.
Those men looked like they’d been killed by nanotech.
“There are more bodies to the north,” Alekseev said.
“So we have a trail,” Medrano said. “But in which direction? Which group was killed first?”
“There’s a chopper on the ground to my side,” Cam said.
“Oh, shit,” Medrano said. Alekseev barked at Obruch in Russian, but Cam said, “No, it crashed. It’s not a problem. I don’t see anyone moving there or—”
Deborah gasped.
There was a witch in the rubble below, dark-skinned and wild-haired. She flung one hand up at them as if casting a spell.
“Pull up!” Deborah screamed. “Pull up!”
Obruch obeyed instantly. The engine whined as he lifted the chopper into a hard leftward turn. The additional thrust pulled Medrano against Deborah, squeezing her bad shoulder, but she had never been so glad for a sense of motion.
What was she throwing at us? Did we get away?
“What did you see!” Alekseev said.
“She’s below us. She was on my side.” Deborah had lost track of the helicopter’s direction as they curled into the sky, but Obruch leveled out and brought the nose around. Deborah spotted her again. The witch leapt through the black dunes and fell and bounced up, her coat flapping in the helicopter’s downdrafts.
“I see her!” Deborah shouted.
Was it Freedman? Their file photos showed a heavyset woman. This fast-moving spook was wiry and hunchbacked, her shoulders bulging above her waspish frame.
Who else would it be? This woman appeared to have waded through two or three platoons of Chinese soldiers, hurling nanotech, downing helicopters — but it could be anyone, couldn’t it? What if the Chinese had captured other American researchers or some of the top scientists in Europe or India?
“Hue Hac, ” Obruch said.
The witch scampered down the smooth, fallen length of a cinder block wall and limped into the space between a car and a tangle of wire. Then she disappeared like magic.
“Onycmume Hac Ha 3eMÀO,” Alekseev said to Obruch, gesturing.
Deborah interrupted. She’d recognized the word down and said, “Colonel, wait. You better put us on the ground away from her or she’ll kill us, too.”
If Alekseev’s calculations were correct — if it was really her — Freedman had gone southward as she left the hospital for some other destination. They would have missed her without the fields of dead men to mark her path. Where was she headed?
Obruch powered the chopper down into the wreckage fifty yards from where they’d last seen her. “Cam, you’re with me!” Deborah shouted, opening her door to the noise and dust of the rotors. “The rest of you stay here!”
“Nyet!” Alekseev said. “I am also coming!”
“Fine. Don’t let her get past you, but don’t crowd her, either! Do you understand?” Deborah squinted through the ash with more dread than excitement. “She’s carrying some kind of nanotech!”