Plague War Read online

  Plague War

  Plague

  Book II

  Jeff Carlson

  Synopsis

  Researcher Ruth Goldman has developed a vaccine with the potential to inoculate the world's survivors against the nanotech plague that devastated humanity. But the fractured U.S. government will stop at nothing to keep it for themselves.

  Advance Praise for

  PLAGUE WAR

  “A breakneck ride through one of the most deadly—and thrilling—futures imagined in years. Jeff Carlson has the juice!”

  —Sean Williams, New York Times bestselling author of Earth Ascendant

  Praise for

  PLAGUE YEAR

  “An epic of apocalyptic fiction: harrowing, heartfelt, and rock-hard realistic. Not to be missed.”

  —James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Oracle

  “Unlike anything I’ve read before.”

  —Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Metal Swarm

  “Frightening, plausible, and action-packed. One of the best debut novels in years.”

  —David Brin, New York Times bestselling author of Sky Horizon

  “Jeff Carlson debuts boldly and strongly, providing a thrilling, fast-paced novel that’s sure to be gulped down in a single sitting by avid readers.”

  —Paul Di Filippo, Sci Fi Weekly

  “Plague Year proposes a frightening new nanotech catastrophe and uses it as a crucible to explore the best and worst of human nature. Tightly written and well-told.”

  —Robert Charles Wilson, Hugo Award–winning author of Axis

  “Plague Year is exactly the kind of no-holds-barred escapist thriller you would hope any book with that title would be. Jeff Carlson’s gripping debut is kind of like Blood Music meets The Hot Zone. It might also remind some readers of Stephen King’s The Stand . . . He keeps the action in fifth gear throughout.”

  —SF Reviews.net

  “This is a book and an author I’m very excited about. [Plague Year] is gruesome, dramatic, and exhilarating.”

  —Lou Anders, Hugo Award–nominated editor of Fast Forward 1

  “An engrossing story that pulls the reader in quickly. If you’re looking for a good science fiction read that’ll make you think, fret, and hope for intelligence in the future, this is a good book.”

  —SFScope

  “Jeff Carlson is a terrific writer, and Plague Year is a marvelous book full of memorable characters, white-knuckle scenes, and big ideas. Get in on the ground floor with this exciting new author.”

  —Robert J. Sawyer, national bestselling author of Rollback

  “Unique. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.”

  —Bookgasm

  “There is considerable talent at work here.”

  —Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass

  “Carlson has crafted an exceptional, gripping debut that exposes the worst and best of humanity while maintaining a constant tension level that will keep the pages turning to the very end. The personal and political machinations are credible, the characters are well-developed, and the climax satisfying. This apocalyptic view of nanotechnology provides plenty to think about.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “Plague Year is a masterful debut novel that has me putting Jeff Carlson on my must-read list without a second thought... Carlson’s character development is meticulous, with believable characters alert to all the nuances of human behavior. Please, sir, send more!”

  —SFRevu

  “The fascination with Plague Year is how fast humanity becomes beasts with survival all that matters. Exciting.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Carlson’s debut grips the reader from its opening sentence. A strong, character-driven tale, it contrasts people’s heroic side with their basest instincts. Delving into fears regarding technology, weapons of mass destruction, and political intrigue, this book is both chilling and timely.” —Romantic Times Book Reviews

  PLAGUE WAR

  JEFF CARLSON

  Copyright

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PLAGUE WAR

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2008 by Jeff Carlson.

  Maps by Meghan Mahler.

  Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

  ISBN: 1-4362-4416-1

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  This one is for her, too.

  North American Combat Theater

  Central Colorado

  Content

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Ruth kicked her way through another tangle of bones, stumbling when her boot caught in a fractured chunk of ribs and vertebrae. Interstate 80 was a graveyard. Thousands of cars packed every mile of the wide road, each one full of slumping ghosts— each one pointing east.

  Always east, toward the mountains.

  Ruth hiked in the same direction, huffing for air against her face mask. Her movements were less like walking than dancing. She lunged and sidestepped through the wreckage, because many people had also continued on foot as far as they were able. Everywhere their skeletons huddled among endless garbage. Some still held boxes or bags or rags or jewelry. Most had gathered in clumps wherever the standstill traffic pinch
ed too closely together, blocking the way.

  Each step was made more difficult by her broken left arm. The cast affected her balance. Worse, she never wanted to look down. The skulls were a silent crowd. Ruth tried to avoid their gaping eyes, so she blinked constantly and glanced sideways and up as she walked, letting her gaze move like a pinball. In three days, that dizzy feeling had become normal. Ruth barely remembered anything else. It helped that she always had Cam in front of her and Newcombe behind, walking single file through the ruins. The steady clumping sound of the men’s bootsteps were markers for her to follow.

  Then they came to a clot of vehicles that had burned and exploded, throwing doors and bodies into the confusion. The spaces in between the cars were thick with splintered bones, steel, and glass.

  Cam stopped. “We need to try something else,” he said, turning his head from the raised Interstate toward the neat, sprawling grid of the city below. All three of them were wrapped in goggles and face masks, so Ruth couldn’t tell exactly where he was looking, but the streets were even worse in the downtown areas. The neat lines of the city were deceptive, full of traps and dead ends. The carnage was unimaginable. The human debris filled hundreds of square miles just here in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, mixed with dogs and birds and every other warm-blooded species.

  “This way,” Newcombe said, pointing past the blackened cars to the downward slope of the shoulder.

  Ruth shook her head. “We’d be better off pushing through.” Several drivers had tried to escape by ramming the guardrail, only to overturn on the hill below. She didn’t want to start an avalanche of cars.

  “She’s right,” Cam said. “We’ll just take it slow.”

  “Then let me and him go first,” Newcombe said to Ruth, stepping past her.

  Mark Newcombe was twenty-two, the youngest of them, younger than Ruth by more than a decade, and he had trained as an Army Special Forces soldier for two years before the machine plague. The end of the world had only continued to harden him. His assault rifle, pack, and gun belt weighed fifty pounds—and barely slowed him at all.

  Cam’s stride was more uneven. He was hurt, like Ruth, which she thought made him a better leader. Cam wasn’t so sure. He worried about things, and Ruth liked him for it. He was more willing to admit he was wrong, which was why they were still on the Interstate. The road was bad, but at least it went through. Their small trio had tried to hike cross-country more than once, wherever the residential areas or commercial buildings eased back from the highway, but they’d encountered too many fences and creeks and brittle gray thickets crowded with beetles and deadfalls. Even the burned traffic was better.

  Newcombe cut his elbow and both knees before they were through. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, but as soon as they cleared the burn, Cam made him stop and immediately flushed the wounds with a canteen, trying to outrace the plague. Then he bandaged the cuts, wrapping Newcombe’s pantlegs with gauze.

  Cam stood up before he was done. “Wait,” he said, tilting his head to listen to the sky.

  It was a clear blue May afternoon, sunny and calm. Goose bumps prickled up the back of Ruth’s neck. I don’t hear anything, she thought, but the cool, vulnerable shiver in her spine made her turn to stare behind them. She glanced through the dead cars, seeking any threat. Nothing.

  Cam shoved at her. “Move! Move!”

  They ran beneath the twisted metal bulk of a truck rig. Cam and Newcombe had their guns drawn but Ruth needed her good arm to crawl under the wreckage, suddenly half-blind out of the sun. Her glove crunched in a litter of glass and plastic.

  “What—” she said, but then she felt it, too, a low, menacing drumbeat. Helicopters. Again. In the vast ruins of what had been Sacramento, California, there were no longer any sounds except the wind and the rivers and sometimes the bugs. It was a small advantage. So far they’d always heard the choppers while they were still tens of miles away.

  Closer this time, and coming fast.

  “There was a culvert about a quarter-mile behind us,” Ruth said, her mind jumping. Twice before they’d gone underground because the enemy had infrared.

  Newcombe grunted, huh. “I saw it. Too far.”

  “Oh.” Cam lifted one glove to the inhuman shape of his goggles and hood. “Ants,” he said.

  Ruth turned to see but cracked her head in the tight space. The crumpled bulk of the trailer read safeway in letters as long as her body and she said, quietly, “It’s a grocery truck.”

  “Christ.” Newcombe scuffled back toward the sunlight, moving on his elbows to keep his rifle out of the grit and dust. But his backpack caught on the metal above him and he had to squeeze even lower, pushing his weapon in front of him.

  Ruth clenched her teeth. The cutting roar of the helicopters, Newcombe’s struggle just to gain a few inches—it set the fear in her spinning and she realized there was another noise all around them, creeping and soft. The dead had begun to live again. The bones and the garbage vibrated in the rising thunder, rattling, sighing. Somewhere a car door wailed as it sagged open.

  “Go,” Cam said, just as Newcombe hissed, “Stay back.”

  Ruth shifted urgently. She had to move even if there was nowhere to go. She had seen ant swarms in the heart of the city like impossible black floods, surging over ceilings and walls, stripping entire buildings of carpet glue, rubber, and upholstery. If they were on top of a colony now, it would be a hideous death.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said.

  “Go,” Cam agreed.

  Ruth tried to ease past him, shoving herself between the broken asphalt and the white-and-red bulk of the trailer. Then she saw two tendrils of ants.

  The choppers slammed across their position, overwhelming her pulse and her mind. Everything in her shook. Everything was noise. The trailer overhead echoed with it and Ruth thought to scream—and then the thunder tipped away, sliding by like a falling building or a train—and Newcombe grabbed her arm.

  “Goddammit, stay back!” he yelled as the crushing sound continued past. “They might not be sure! They might only be following the highway!”

  Ruth made herself nod. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to look out, but when the truck rolled it had hit at least one other vehicle. There was a badly dented beige sedan in front of her, and yet the noise was still a solid thing and easy to follow. It hadn’t gone far. It was landing.

  Suddenly she could see through a gap between the car’s torn fender and wheel well. At first there was only sky and trees. Then she saw two helicopters. Maybe there were more. The aircraft dropped smoothly, meeting the ground with almost perfect symmetry. The side doors on both helicopters were open, spilling men in green containment suits—men without faces or shoulders, deformed by long hoods and air tanks.

  “They’re down,” she said.

  There were open fields on this side of the highway, an irregular stretch of flat brown earth where the commercial buildings stopped short of the road. Ruth saw a chain-link fence that might slow the soldiers, but it was leaning over in one spot where they could probably shove it down. The sound of the choppers echoed and rapped from the tall face of a warehouse.

  Cam pushed in beside her, craning his neck to see. Ants covered his shoulder. “We can’t make our stand here,” he told Newcombe.

  “The bugs,” Ruth said. “Get the bugs between us and them.”

  “Okay, yeah. Move.” Newcombe rolled over and began to pull off his pack.

  Ruth turned and scrambled away, looking for Cam as soon as she hit daylight. He came out slapping at one sleeve and they ducked into the motionless cars together.

  The glinting she had seen, sunlight on air tanks and weaponry, were there ten soldiers? Twenty?

  “Here! Stop!” Cam pulled at her and they circled behind a white Mercedes. “If they come up the embankment we can try to force them back toward the truck.”

  Ruth nodded, dry-mouthed. Where was Newcombe?

  Waiting, she became intensely aw
are of her exhaustion, old bruises, new hurts. Waiting, she drew her pistol. In another life this much pain would have stopped her already, but she was not who she had been. None of them were. And that was both good and bad. In many ways Ruth Goldman was less complicated now, thinking less, feeling more, and there was real strength in her anger and frustration and shame.

  She owed it to her friends to fight. She owed it to herself, for every mistake she’d made.

  Panting through the bitter taste of her face mask, Ruth kicked aside the small, partially melted ribcage of a child to reach the car’s rear bumper, where she brought her pistol up and braced for the assault.

  * * * *

  A lot of survivors called it Plague Year, or Year One, but it wasn’t only human history that had crashed in the long fourteen months since the machine plague. The invisible nanotech devoured all warm-blooded life below ten thousand feet elevation. What remained of the ecosystem was badly out of whack, with only fish, frogs, and reptiles left to whittle down the exploding insect populations—and the land suffered for it. Entire forests had been chewed apart by locusts and termites. Riverways were forever changed by erosion.

  States and nations had been obliterated, too. The plague had left few habitable zones anywhere in the world, the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, and a few scattered high points here and there. New Zealand. Japan. California.

  Leadville, Colorado, was now the U.S. capital and the greatest military force on the planet. Their capabilities had been reduced by several orders of magnitude, but on every other continent the refugee populations were entrenched in savage land wars, devastated by each other and two winters.

  The civil war across North America was tame in comparison. The rebels declared independence and claimed possession of the nearest cities below the barrier, and for the most part everyone had been able to recover enough food, fuel, medicine, and tools to get by.