Plague Year (19 page)

Deb said, “I need help up here.”

“No. Evacuate now.”

“Okay, go go go,” Gus said, and he went through. The two firefighters had been joined by a soldier and an EMT in white, all of them shouting and waving.

The bravery of these men was striking.
They had run toward the bomb.
Without equipment, without any of their plans intact, they had run into danger for her.

Deb’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I have three wounded on the flight deck, one critical.”

Ruth could have saved herself. She should have. It was exactly how they’d trained for this moment—yet she hesitated at the brink of safety.

Like the first responders on the ground outside, the ISS crew had gambled everything for her. They had sacrificed their families and their homes. Gus and Ulinov had abandoned their countries just to serve her. If she left them now, she might never recover from the decision. The impulse to sabotage the space station and force this landing, no matter that she hadn’t acted on it, had damaged her in ways that could never be erased.

For one instant Ruth gauged the balance inside herself, but there was never really a choice.

She turned back inside. The men below her wouldn’t be able to help, not immediately. Lord knew where the shuttle had come to rest but clearly it was a disaster outside. They might need several minutes just to reach the hatch.

Ruth slipped and banged her faceplate against the inter-deck ladder. Her body didn’t work right. It was unbelievable that she’d ever been so heavy. The ladder leaned over her like a wave and she was forced to wedge both hands and one foot into the rungs before raising her other leg to keep climbing.

“Ruth! Ruth, jump!” That was Gus, apparently on the ground now and looking for her at the side hatch.

She froze with her head above the floor of the flight deck. She saw glass and dirt blasted over the cockpit—wet crumbly brown
dirt
—and heaved herself up on a new flood of adrenaline.

Riding copilot, Bill Wallace leaned past what looked like two bodies to reach the pilot’s panel. Derek Mills had been rolled up in his seat, up despite the downward-tilting floor, by a crumpled shaft of metal jammed through the windshield. It was the twisted roof of the ambulance that the
Endeavour
had carried over the embankment.

Blood covered Wallace’s arm, some of which must have been his own. Shrapnel had flayed open the elbow and shoulder of his insulated orange sleeve, wounding the arm he’d extended to complete his work. Emergency power-off. A complete shutdown of every onboard system was their best chance to prevent a fire and the man left with this responsibility had never formally trained as a pilot.

“Hurry!” Ruth screamed at him, at herself, at all of them.

“Go back down. Evacuate.” Ulinov was still in his seat, directly beside Ruth at the rear wall of the flight deck. He had also taken shrapnel. His faceplate was partly masked by opaque chips and Deb slapped his gory knee with one hand, hanging on to his seat with the other. The adhesive patch she’d put on his leg bulged as if there were other patches folded beneath it, pushed against his torn skin, a crude but effective pressure bandage despite the bulk of his suit.

“Get him out,” Deb said to Ruth, gesturing. “Try to hold him so he doesn’t fall down the ladder.”

Ulinov waved them off. “Your orders are to—”

“Do it,” Deb said, imperious as ever, before she left Ulinov for Wallace. There hadn’t been time yet for Deb to work on Mills, and Ruth realized that he must be dead. The metal bulk nestled into his lap and chest had hit him hard enough to bend his seat.

“I gotcha,” Ruth promised Ulinov, grabbing his armrest with one trembling hand.

Maneuvering on the crowded deck was like a puzzle. She hauled her legs out of the access hatch, then did her best to slow Ulinov as he left his chair and squeezed past her.

“You go next,” Deb told Wallace, probing at his shoulder wounds, but Bill Wallace stayed in his seat. He slapped at a computer, either because it wasn’t responding or to clear away the debris, but he never even turned his head.

Ruth hurt her back when Ulinov lost his footing at the top of the ladder. Bracing her feet against the wall on either side of his torso, she clenched his arm with a strength that seemed entirely mental. His blood had rubbed off onto her sleeves.

Ulinov collapsed at the base of the ladder, on the floor of the crew cabin. Ruth stepped on him and fell.

They crabbed out into the awful white sun together and Ulinov swan-dived from the round plank of the hatch. Ruth screamed, but caught her breath. He hadn’t fallen—he’d jumped, turning to protect his leg—and the knot of people below them had become a group of forty or more, uniformed in black or olive drab or blue or white. Ulinov’s big orange body knocked down a wide swath of them.

The men had their arms up for her, too. Nearly every face was bearded, which looked strange, rough, animal. Ruth knelt to minimize the distance but slipped off before she could kick outward. Three guys dived to break her fall.

No one bothered to set her on her feet. Half a dozen arms clamped around her boots and armpits and elbows, hoisting her up, and a confusion of silhouettes in caps and firefighter helmets bobbed above her faceplate as they carried her.

“Wallace,” she said. “Wallace!” But the radio chatter in her ears was only a confusion again.

Someone at her left shoulder tripped and they dropped her, two bodies slamming into her midsection. She might have grayed out. She lost her thin breath altogether.

Then she was upright, suddenly, propped on the low bumper of an army jeep. A rangy Santa Claus in dirty paramedic whites squinted at her through sun-darkened wrinkles and bushy eyebrows. His hands fumbled with the seals of her helmet. Ruth stared past him. But the panorama of sky and mountains was too big for her and she deliberately lowered her eyes, reeling, even as curiosity forced her to glance up again.

They were about a hundred yards from the
Endeavour
, north up the highway, and she froze as she realized the mountain face was alive with bodies. Lord God. There must be
miles
of people up there watching—

The shuttle had gone off the highway between her and the impossible crowd, its path marked by the wreckage of two or more fire engines. Other emergency vehicles had come up the road to that point, lights winking, horns blaring, trundling through the swarm of firefighters and soldiers and NASA pad rats.

Then they pulled off her helmet and the radio chatter in her ear was replaced by a less immediate, more chaotic hubbub of yelling. Ruth winced at the sun, and the sweet fragrance of the air made her close her eyes.

Savoring it, she remembered Derek Mills.
Impact
. His last word, warning them. She looked up.

“Dizzy?” the medic asked, putting his palm to her cheek and thumbing down on the skin beneath her eye. “You’re not bleeding, are you?”

“It’s just his,” she said.

They’d seated Ulinov next to her while she was catching her breath. Two medics, one also in dirty whites and another in combat fatigues, had knifed open the leg of Ulinov’s suit to wrap gauze over his thigh. Another busy cluster of medical personnel had formed at the back of an ambulance across from them, and Ruth caught glimpses of an orange suit. Gus.

“Are they out?” she asked. “The astronauts?”

“I think—” The medic jerked and lifted his head.

Then the rifle shot reached them. Ruth wouldn’t have noticed the distant clap amidst the engines and hundreds of voices, except that his motion alerted her and the general din instantly went quiet.

She thought to wonder how the medic had heard a sound before it existed. Then he took his hand off her cheek and reached for his side. Blood seeped there through the medic’s grimy white shirt. His beard parted with a question.

Then he sagged away from her as the voices roared. People everywhere belly flopped onto the ground or ran for cover behind the many vehicles, hiding from the great eastern slope. The mountainside itself undulated as three hundred thousand refugees fled in conflicting, colliding masses.

“Sniper!” yelled the soldier kneeling before Ulinov, seizing Ulinov’s arm to haul him down.

Ruth didn’t make sense of it, didn’t realize that her bright orange suit was the target, even after a ricochet whined off of the jeep’s hood not two feet away. She gawked at the riot surrounding her until Nikola Ulinov hit her in the side.

His bulk drove her into the asphalt like the heel of God’s boot and snapped both bones in her forearm.

16

Leadville had become a fortress. The barricade across its northern border choked the highway into what must have been the world’s only traffic jam.

Ruth and Ulinov were hustled into the ambulance after Gus, and their siren cleared a lane through the emergency and military vehicles for a mile and a half—not far beyond the spot where the
Endeavour
’s tires first hit ground. But at the knoll that James had dubbed the front row, other sirens interceded and blocked their way, three civilian police cars and two military police jeeps. Another ambulance came up on their tail while they waited and Ruth assumed that it held Doc Deb and Wallace.

Gus blabbered, “Do they know who we got in here? Tell ’em who we got here, go, go, let’s go.”

No one else said anything, except for the EMT working a protective brace around the sleeve of Ruth’s suit. “Lie down, you’re very pale,” the woman said, but Ruth couldn’t look away from the windshield. The ambulance driver had shut off his siren and made no move to force his way into the stream of olive drab trucks and black Suburbans bumping down onto the highway. Both of the MP jeeps had long machine guns mounted in back, gunners ready, and all of the cops had weapons in hand.

Ruth realized several things about the “front row” that James hadn’t mentioned on the radio. This knoll was distanced from the main body of the mountain by a shallow ravine filled with fencing and soldiers. Presumably the blockade went all the way around. Also, this side of the knoll paralleled the bigger slope, so that no one up there would have a good view of the people down here—or a good shot. It wasn’t so much the front row as it was elite seating, separate and protected.

They had expected trouble.

A trace of that wild panic hammered through her blood again but was muted by shock and utter exhaustion. She’d burned out. There wasn’t anything left. Ruth sat with her snapped arm in her lap, listlessly roasting inside her suit. The air was so fresh, even in the close quarters of the ambulance, that she was aware of her own moist heat rising from her round metal collar. In another time and place, the stink would have been humiliating.

Less than a minute passed before they were moving again. Another army jeep skidded up behind the cops and MPs blocking the way, and a man like a lean wire flung himself from the passenger seat. He wore army green but a cap instead of a helmet, and was unarmed except for a pistol on his hip. None of the military police saluted him, yet the debate only lasted ten or twelve words. The MPs pulled one of their jeeps off the road.

“Oh yeah, wow, I like that guy,” Gus said.

The lean man waved at their ambulance driver, then turned and hustled to his jeep. His driver weaved aggressively toward two of the vehicles still coming down from the hill, cutting them off, and the lean man popped up in the passenger seat with one hand jutting forward to deflect a military truck.

They didn’t get far. The road bent around the knoll and then dropped into a riverbed, sheer hills closing in on both sides. The dozens of vehicles slowed and backed up across what amounted to three lanes, all pointed southeast, using the shoulder and nosing out onto any level patch. Ruth wanted to laugh—it was goofy, feeling nostalgia for a jam of red taillights—but again she experienced only a tick of emotion beneath her weariness. Hard gravity had flattened her butt and compacted her innards, and drew open an aching space between the ends of the broken bones in her forearm.

“What a mess,” Gus said.

The lean man stood on his seat again. Ruth waited dully for him to go ballistic, screaming the other vehicles off the road into the reed marsh and lazy water. Instead, he looked back at their ambulance and lifted both hands in a shrug. He was Hispanic, late forties, trim and hard with a formfitting uniform to show it. He had a dark bar of a mustache but no beard.

He looked left and right, contemplating the hills overhead, then ducked over and grabbed a walkie-talkie. Ruth bent forward to look herself. She saw hundreds of people trudging down the slope on their left, a solid mass in the bright sun, and there were dozens more gathered along the bank upriver.

She felt more than a faint spark then. Not hearing the rifle shot until after the bullet hit the medic, that would stay with her as long as she lived. There would always be a small absence of sound chasing after her.

“Okay, now what?” Gus said, jarring Ruth to get a better view himself. “What a mess. Who planned—”

“Gus.” Ulinov had his eyes closed.

“Why is there shooting?” Ruth asked the driver, blurting her fear like a child, but it was the female EMT who answered.

“A lot of people lost everything.” She was Ruth’s age, and no better washed than any of them. Grease had wicked her long brown bangs into points. “They want to get even.”

The ambulance inched forward. Ruth turned this statement over in her mind just as ponderously.

She said, “What?”

“Some people just want to get even.”

“I didn’t build the locust!
I’m
trying to stop it.”

“Might’ve been rebels,” the driver put in, uselessly revving his engine. He was only a kid, his facial growth spotty except for a hanging tuft on his chin.

Ulinov spoke one word again. “Rebels.”

“Got us boxed in fucking good right now, waste the whole government if they wanted.” The kid revved and revved, knuckles flexing on his steering wheel.

Somewhere there were helicopters thumping.

“I’m trying to stop it,” Ruth repeated.