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.
“I just meant—” The EMT shut up, like the gray-bearded medic had done when he took the bullet.
Thunder swept toward them from downriver, closing fast, sheets of noise that intensified into a single bass vibration. The ambulance shook. So did Ruth’s heart. Rebels. The setup had been perfect. Start a panic, pack the leaders into a kill zone— Gus shouted and Ulinov reached for the rear doors as if to jump out—
The gunships went overhead, upriver, at least two of them, then swooped around and thudded back again. They were covering the slow wedge of trucks and Suburbans.
It was a disproportionate response to a lone rifleman, even to protect the president if he’d come. The fuel cost alone would be awesome. The response was also improbably quick. They must have readied the chopper crews before Endeavour even grazed the atmosphere and Ruth wished fleetingly, honestly, that she was back in her lonely little cell aboard the ISS.
This time she did laugh, one short huff.
Betrayal, disillusionment, she had no name for her tired anger. She’d long suspected that the situation down here wasn’t as stable as she’d been told, carefully worrying over the few reports of raiders and food riots, but if James had ever hinted at civil war, she’d missed his clues. What else didn’t she know?
They jockeyed around the next bend and the reason for the jam was obvious. Ruth knew the barricade existed, from orbital photographs, but her eye had skipped over it easily. She had wondered at its size, yet accepted that Leadville’s security needs were extraordinary. The harsh fact was that there wasn’t enough food or shelter for everyone who’d reached elevation, and it was mandatory to protect the labs and the nanotech experts who were the one hope of reversing the situation.
She had rarely considered what it would be like on the outside. She didn’t have to. She was one of the chosen. She always had been. Now she stared at the wall, following the helicopters with her ears, as the ambulance nudged forward a few yards at a time.