“I don’t understand,” she protested, but she was hardly a fool or a helpless girl. She was trying to draw him out.
Shaug didn’t bother to answer. “Clean that up,” he said to the remaining medics, pointing at their trays and equipment. Then he looked back at Ruth like an afterthought. “Let’s get you inside,” he repeated, glancing at another man.
It was the of‚cer who’d stopped Newcombe by the plane. A colonel. “Let’s go,” the colonel said, and Cam watched the crowd separate as men and women in uniform stepped forward and Luce’s civilian agents held back. Had Luce really expected to outmaneuver the governor?
Ruth was being used for barter or political gain, he thought. Shaug wanted to hold on to her and the vaccine in exchange for guarantees from the other Americans and the Canadians, and it was true that Grand Lake had rescued her when no one else could. But it was divisive. That was why Luce had rushed their plane. Luce hoped to spread the vaccine before some catastrophe destroyed it altogether, another bomb, or a Russian assault.
Cam wanted him to succeed, and maybe that was all Luce had intended to accomplish — to make a friend. Shaug probably couldn’t control the vaccine no matter what he did. The three of them were exhaling traces of it just sitting here. As soon as they showered or went to the bathroom, the vaccine would be in the water and in the latrines. In fact, their jackets must be crawling with it, rubbed inside and out with blood, skin, and sweat. If they only knew, Luce and his people could slice the jackets into pieces and package the material aboard any number of jets. They could even ingest a pinch of the dirty fabric themselves and then set out below the barrier on foot.
Cam didn’t say it out loud. There was another way. He coughed and brought his hand to his mouth, spitting lightly into his palm.
“Have you heard from Captain Young, sir?” Newcombe asked. The colonel only frowned. “My squad leader in Sacramento,” Newcombe explained. “He and another man went south.”
“I don’t know, son.”
“We saw ‚ghting on May twenty-third, west of the Sierras. We thought it was them.”
Cam paced through the soldiers and made eye contact with Luce, extending his hand. “Thank you,” he said.
“Sure,” Luce said doubtfully, yet he reached out and Cam completed the gesture, pressing his wet palm against the other man’s dry skin. The uncertainty in Luce’s expression deepened, but then he nodded. It was done. The vaccine was loose in Grand Lake.
* * * *
A blue-eyed soldier with sunburn on his ears and cheeks took Ruth’s pack. Cam would always remember his face.
“We have a small lab,” Shaug said. “There are some people who’ll start looking things over tonight. Tomorrow you can help them.”
“Yes.” Ruth nodded, but her mouth was set in a grimace and Cam felt no better, watching the soldier turn and go. They’d carried that battered green pack for hundreds of miles and now it wasn’t theirs anymore.
Newcombe disappeared with the colonel. A persistent nurse also tried to separate Cam and Ruth in the small, overcrowded medical tent, where row after row of people lay groaning on blankets and cots and the bare earth, mostly soldiers. Even with the tent sides rolled up, the air was putrid. Stomach †u. But this was where Grand Lake had an X-ray machine.
The nurse said, “We really don’t want anyone in here who doesn’t need to be here.”
“No. I’m staying with him,” Ruth said.
“We just want to take a quick look at—”
“I’m staying with him.”
The nurse checked with three doctors before turning on the X-ray, which was isolated in its own tiny space by hanging blankets. This tent was hooked into Grand Lake’s power grid, fed by turbines far below in the river, but the amperage on their line was weak and couldn’t support more than a few pieces of equipment at once.
While the ‚lm was developed, Cam and Ruth were led to a second tent where they were given antibiotics. Ruth grabbed something from her pants before a man took their ‚lthy clothes away. A rock. She tried to hide it, but Cam recognized the lines scored into the granite.
“Jesus, Ruth, how long have you been…”
“Please. Please, Cam.” She wouldn’t look at him. “Please don’t be mean about it.”
He nodded slowly. The rock was obviously safe. Otherwise they would have gotten sick weeks ago. But why would you want to take anything from that place with you? he wondered. Maybe she wasn’t sure, either. “It’s okay,” he said.
They were given stinging sponge baths with soap and water and rubbing alcohol. Then their multitude of wounds were treated, stitched, and bandaged. Ruth wasn’t shy about her body, although there were half a dozen people in between them and Cam turned his back, trying not to stare.
The medical staff wore cloth masks and a hodgepodge of gloves, some latex, some rubber. They were almost certainly exposed to the nanotech. Cam coughed and coughed to purposely infect them. The vaccine wouldn’t replicate inside them because there was no plague here for it attack, but he wanted to spread the technology to as many people as possible.
A man with glasses came in and said, “Goldman? Your arm’s healed fairly well, but I’m going to recommend a brace for at least three weeks. Don’t overuse it.”
They cut off her battered ‚berglass cast and Ruth gasped at the sight of her arm. The skin was wrinkled and albino pale, the muscles wasted. Trapped sweat had puckered her skin and in places the doughy tissue was infected. She wept. She wept and Cam knew her tears weren’t for her arm, not entirely. She was ‚nally able to let go of all the horror she’d repressed.
Cam hurried through the strangers and held her. Neither of them wore anything except a †imsy hospital smock. Ruth’s clean-smelling hair had †uffed up in waves and curls and Cam kept his nose against the top of her head, marveling in the small pleasure of it.
Things got worse. The two of them had already received a fortune in pharmaceuticals and the medical staff refused to give her painkillers before they cleaned her arm. “It’s super‚cial,” the surgeon said. He scraped at her mushy skin and swabbed the wounds with iodine as Ruth screamed and screamed, clinging to her little rock.
* * * *
“We need to rest,” Cam said. “Food and rest. Please.”
“Of course. We can follow up tomorrow.” The surgeon was testing Cam’s left hand now, pricking the scar tissue, but he turned and gestured at a nurse, who left the narrow room.
Ruth had lain down, shaking. Her forearm was wrapped in a black fabric sleeve reinforced with metal struts, although the surgeon had said to take it off as much as possible to let her wounds breathe.
The nurse returned with four soldiers. Cam recognized one of them from the landing strip and fought to hide his reaction, bristling with distrust and aggression. It was misplaced. It came too easily. “Can you help her?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the squad leader said. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we’re going to carry you, okay?”
Cam and Ruth were dressed in Army green themselves, old shirts and pants — old but clean. The nurse hadn’t been long ‚nding things in their exact sizes. Cam tried not to dwell on the fact that the spare clothes must have come from dead men. It wouldn’t have bothered him except that he didn’t want to offend the soldiers for any reason.
Cam leaned on one of the young men as they left the tent. Ruth was half-conscious in their arms. Outside, a blond woman stood waiting in the last light of the sun, her chin tipped up almost combatively. From her rich hair and complexion, Cam thought she was in the prime of her early thirties, a lot like Ruth. She was beautiful, but she wore the same Army green as all of them beneath a white lab coat and it was the coat that unsettled Cam. Was she from Shaug’s nanotech team?