Plague War by Jeff Carlson Page A

his calm faith and then she was angry and jealous and she looked up again, her breath thick in her chest.
    She reeked of gasoline and repellent. They all did. Cam had grown uneasy at the number of †ies persisting at them despite the perfume, bumping at their goggles, squirming to get inside their collars and hoods. He’d done the only thing he could think of to further conceal them. He’d soaked their jackets with fuel and entire bottles of bug repellent and it made the pain in Ruth’s head like a dull nail.
    “What do you think?” Cam asked. “Forty guys? Fifty?”
    “Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said, hefting his pack. Then, too loudly, he turned back and said, “Yeah. Which means there were probably a hundred altogether.”
    Scattered like the ‚rst man we came across, Ruth thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to provoke them. Cam and Newcombe were still learning to read each other as well as she understood the two men herself, and they clashed even when the argument was already said and done.
    Ruth tried to end it before it started again. She hurried after Newcombe, and Cam fell in behind her. They hiked hard and fast, pushing themselves. Ruth saw the skeleton of a dog and a wad of money and then a red blouse that hadn’t faded at all. Otherwise the carnage was numbing—cars, bones, garbage, bones—and her mind caught in a loop as she struggled on.
    A hundred men, she thought. A hundred more, dead for me. She knew that wasn’t fair. Her role had always been defensive, reacting to the holocaust. She could never be blamed for the machine plague, but it felt like the truth. It felt like she should have done more. She should have done better.
    “We need to rethink what we’re doing,” Newcombe said.
    Cam shook his head. “Let’s not waste the time.”
    “That plane was a show of commitment.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it, Newcombe.”
    Every hour the temptation to agree with Newcombe was stronger. Ruth was unspeakably tired. She obsessed about her arm. Was it healing straight? Cam needed medical care even more, and yet he remained single-minded.
    “I don’t know what more you want,” Newcombe said. “That mess back there, that was a hundred guys who knew they had pretty bad odds even if they actually found us—and they never even got that far, did they? But they came anyway.”
    Ruth turned her head. More and more, the gesture was becoming a habit, denying what was in front of her. Nothing had changed despite the snatch of rebel broadcasts they’d picked up last night. They were still down here beneath a sky full of aircraft, no matter if the rebels declared themselves the legal American government. Both sides had made those claims before. So what? It was only words, and yet it had given Newcombe something else to argue with.
    Newcombe hadn’t given up on persuading them. He probably wouldn’t. They had made the radio even more important to him, because he had no other friend, and Cam admitted it was smart to listen as much as possible. Whenever they stopped to eat or nap, the two men monitored the airwaves together. Cam had to be sure Newcombe never transmitted. He kept their radios in his pack and slept against it, and his hard pillow also included Newcombe’s pistol.
    “Every day we hike east is another day we’ll have to hike back out again,” Newcombe said. “They’ll never try to get us right up against the Leadville base. It was high-risk for them already.”
    “High-risk is the problem,” Cam said. “Listen to yourself. We’re not getting on a plane just to get shot down.”
    He walked left suddenly into an open pocket like a strange asphalt meadow. Then they crunched through a puddle of glass alongside a Buick that had veered into a tiny Geo, smashing it against two other vehicles.
    “Shit.” Newcombe waved his arms helplessly. “Pretty soon they’ll scrub the whole operation if you stay off the radio. They’ll think we’re