Plague Zone by Jeff Carlson Read Free Book Online Page B

bloodstains. In the shallow pits, she buried the tools and the gear they’d used to subdue their friends. She even gathered as many of the rocks they’d thrown as she could find, even though she could never completely sterilize this place. Poisoned ground, she thought. A lot of the nanotech would remain on the surface, exposed to the breeze or lifting away in the morning heat when the sun rose tomorrow.
     
If they survived the night, even if they sealed this place in concrete and built a heavy fortress to contain her home, Ruth knew they could never stay. The village needed to be permanently abandoned. Still, her best efforts might buy them some extra time. Ruth continued to work despite her exhaustion.
     
Her mind wandered.
     
She glanced at the stars, remembering better times. She knew she was trying to get away from herself, but at last she turned and walked back into her small, crowded home. Then she began to tape the door shut from the inside.
     
     
     
     
     
Originally, Cam and Allison led their party east from the Rockies down into the plains beyond Boulder and Greeley, where they were sure the summers were hot enough to destroy the insects. In sufficient heat, even bloodless or cold-blooded organisms became vulnerable to the machine plague. Their guess proved to be true, but the absence of bugs also turned those areas into deserts. The insect swarms were the only pollinators available. Every species that required hives or cocoons had been destroyed by the ants. There were no bees, butterflies, or moths left of any kind. In their greenhouses, they’d manually brushed pollen from one plant to another. Outside in the world, however, it was only the clumsy, brutal movements of the swarms that continued this process, spreading the delicate powder even as they obliterated forests and meadows everywhere.
     
Ruth could only guess what the Midwest had become. She’d seen the edges of it herself, and there were rumors supposedly passed on from pilots and scouts and the specialists who controlled the remaining U.S. spy satellites. Without grass, the prairies had been peeled down to the bedrock, stuffing away in the rain and ever-more frequent windstorms. Megatons of silt had displaced the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into a continent-wide swamp, filling low places like Arkansas and Louisiana with stagnant, creeping bogs of mud.
     
Ruth and her friends quickly abandoned the plains. At the time, she’d still hoped to lure Cam from Allison, but there were other problems besides her wounded heart. They would always be regarded as criminals by some. They’d planned to keep their heads down, but they were recognized and betrayed in the second town where they made their home. In the third, there was an outbreak of some respiratory disease—a normal disease, not nanotech—and Cam ran a fever of 104° for two days, frightening both women badly.
     
As always, it was Allison who was the boldest. She led them into the heart of the Rockies again, where they hid almost directly under the noses of Grand Lake. Jefferson lay just forty miles west of that mountain peak. Grand Lake was no longer home to the president and Congress—those people had been relocated to Missoula, Montana, far, far away from occupied California—but the Air Force maintained Grand Lake as a fortress, and Allison believed the military would never think to look for Ruth so close within reach.
     
Mostly Ruth was happy. Certainly she was never bored. They’d spent seven of the past fifteen months on the move, hiking and scouting, negotiating with other survivors. Most of their energy went into the basic necessities. Food. Shelter. Ruth was even glad to forget her research, contributing instead to their day-to-day struggles. It was selfish, she knew. More critical than any other challenge was the next-generation nanotech that must be designed as quickly as possible. A second invasion wasn’t impossible. The Russians and the Chinese had dragged their