Plague War by Jeff Carlson Read Free Book Online Page B

confusion of pain. “Best we can do,” she said. “It’ll get worse.”
    In this safe room, their vaccine only had to deal with the plague already in their blood and the particles they’d carried with them on their clothes and in the gust of motion. Still, running and sweating had accelerated their absorption rate.
    Ruth wept. There was a new thread of plague scratching through her left foot and the blades within her arm had turned to molten ‚re, consuming the bone, cramping every muscle. Her ‚ngers made a palsied claw. In the half-light, the destroyed room matched her thinking exactly, a tight, haphazard mess packed with restless bodies. Her claustrophobia became a living thing like cancer, numbing her intelligence and leaving only childish terror and remorse.
    Cam endured in silence, but Newcombe beat his hand on the wall.
    “Don’t,” Ruth whispered. “Don’t.”
    At last the burning faded into more normal pain. It was done. They tugged off their masks and goggles and luxuriated in the stale air, but Ruth avoided their eyes, feeling too vulnerable, even ashamed. She felt grateful, and yet at the same time she was repelled.
    Cam was a monster. Old wounds. His dark Latino skin had erupted dozens of times, often in the same places, leaving dull ridges on his cheek and patchy spots in his beard. His hands were worse. His hands were covered in scars and blister rash, and on his right he only had two strong ‚ngers and his thumb. The pinky there was only a weak, snarled hook of dead tissue, nearly eaten to the bone.
    Ruth Goldman was not particularly religious. For most of her adult life, she’d let her work take up too much time to bother with Hanukkah or Passover unless she was visiting her mom, but the emotions in her now bordered on the mystic, too fervent and complex to understand at once. She would rather die than suffer as he had, but she wanted to be like him—his calm, his strength.
    Cam dug out the last of his water and some peppered jerky and crackers. Ruth’s belly was an acid ball, yet he urged her to eat and it helped a little. He also had a bottle of Motrin and shook out four apiece, a minor overdose. Then they all tried to settle down again, beyond exhaustion. The men let her use the narrow bed, clearing a little space on the †oor for themselves, but Ruth did not sleep any more that night.
    * * * *
    The room looked bigger in the yellow-gray dawn and still had some semblance of neatness above the †oor. The posters. The toy robots and books on the shelves. Ruth tried not to let it affect her, but she was very tired. She hurt. She mourned this anonymous boy and everything he represented—and wrapped up in her misery was a cold, stubborn anger.
    She was ready to keep moving.
    She knew it was worth it.
    Even as hard as life had become in the mountains, there was no excuse for the decisions made by the Leadville government. If they won, if they left most of the world’s survivors to die above the barrier, in many ways it would be a crime worse than the plague itself. What this place and every graveyard like it deserved was new life. A cleansing. The ruins should be bulldozed where they couldn’t be repaired, repopulated where the damage hadn’t been so bad, and there were desolate cities across the globe, far more than could be reclaimed for generations. They’d forgotten. The leadership was too insulated, trapped on their island fortress.
    Ruth made herself eat with grim focus, even though her stomach still felt like a knot and breakfast was a few cans of cold, gluey potatoes and beef. Cam ate like it hurt him, and Ruth wanted to say something, she wasn’t sure what. Her taste buds stung at the fresh reek of gasoline. The stench made her head ache, but at least she could barely smell the corner of the closet they’d had to use as a toilet.
    “Show me your map again,” she said.
    Newcombe set down his can and unbuttoned his jacket pocket. He invariably folded his map and tucked it away, in