Republic of the Covenant, Missouri
THE line was just as long today. Out around the block before the doors even opened. Not that they really ever closed; the clinic, set up in the basement of the building, was open around the clock.
The bone-thin, spindly-legged, haggard woman in dirty scrubs dragged herself toward the back. Each lifted foot was a slog. A kerchief over her head hid the patches of bare scalp where her hair had fallen out.
Nan had noticed the first effects—nausea, diarrhea, and loss of appetite—shortly after the shoot-out at the roadblock. At some point in their trip east, she and her escort of bikers had crossed a patch of fallout, or a shift in the wind had brought it down on them. Or maybe it was just from that initial blast of neutrons as she’d huddled in the stairway at Archipelago, arms locked over her skull, as the scarlet flash tore through her brain like a guillotine blade.
Anyway, the when of her exposure probably didn’t really matter. Most people here, just south of the main strikes on the missile fields, had been toasted to some degree.
She’d been here for weeks, but it seemed like months.
Her escort, a Seattle gang who called themselves the Berzerkers, had gone violent during a face-off with the militia. Barreling down the highway, convoying her truck in her escape from the stricken city, they’d disobeyed a shouted command to halt. Probably Ish, their leader, had expected to bulldoze through the roadblock, and signaled his men to open fire from the saddle fifty yards away. But the yokels hadn’t fled, and they’d been better armed than the bikers. The gang had been caught in a withering crossfire on the open highway, without cover other than their toppled Harleys and Indians.
When the shooting ended the bikes were burning, and Ish, Rollvag, and the other gang members lay dead or wounded. The Covenanters didn’t seem interested in taking prisoners; a shotgun blast to the head finished off any lingering sufferers.
When the fight was over, they’d dragged her out of the truck too. She’d screamed at them as they dragged her toward the heap of twitching corpses. But at last she’d convinced her new captors that she was a medic, not a combatant. That the crates in the refrigerator truck were essential to stemming the Central Flower virus spreading through the Midwest.
“The Chinese flu, you mean?” one of them had said at last, and held out a hand to push away the muzzle of a shotgun.
But they hadn’t let her go. Just shunted her upward in their own command structure until she and the crates of still-chilled LJL 4789 had ended up here, in this rural community hospital, which had been hastily converted into a frontline aid station.
Since then, she’d been stuck here, helping Dr. Merian Glazer and his forcibly drafted hospital staff fight the outbreak. No one knew exactly how or why the Flower had gained a foothold here, and the Centers for Disease Control was no more welcome behind the Covenanter lines than any other federal agency. But, fortunately, the insurgents at least realized the disease had to be contained. Especially since radiation effects had weakened the people in the northern half of the area where they held sway, making them susceptible to any opportunistic infection.
Now, as she let herself into the operating room, Glazer was bent over the operating table. A sweet reek of ether and alcohol filled the air. The generator hammered in the basement; the lights flickered. A muffled boom vibrated the air. Not far away: a missile from an HS drone, artillery? They knew very little down here about how that battle was going. Only that the enemy wore black uniforms and seemed to have unlimited ammunition.
But the locals knew the terrain, and guerrilla fighters with scoped rifles and hunting camouflage were apparently taking a deadly toll.
“Lenson.” The head nurse jerked her head toward a cabinet. “We saved you some breakfast. Feeling any hungrier today?”
Nan hugged herself, shivering, wishing she did. Food was scarce. But the very thought of eating was nauseating. “It’s sourdough, fresh baked, from that flour they captured. Rayfield sent it over special,” the nurse urged, her eyes still on the open chest cavity on the table.
Marshal Dallas Rayfield was the Covenanter leader. The provisional president, he called himself. Nan sighed. “I’ll try.” She opened the cabinet, but closed it again as the yeasty reek hit her nostrils.
The head nurse patted her back. “Are you really going out today? You look terrible.”
“She has to,” Glazer said over one shoulder, suturing by feel as the lights flickered off, then on again. “There’s nobody else, and the flu’s still spreading.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Yeah, I’m going,” Nan said flatly. “Release me another five hundred doses, please, Doctor.”
Glazer cocked his head. “You sign. Use my name. I’m wrist deep.”
She faked his signature, in huge loopy letters, and took the chit downstairs.
OUTSIDE, she tucked the packet into the saddlebag of a bullet-scarred Harley—yes, one of the Berzerkers’ machines—and threw a leg over. Hit the start button, and was rewarded by a hearty bellow.
Fuel was scarce, but a chit from Rayfield allowed her one gallon a day of home-brewed alcohol, eked out with raw gas from the single fracking-fed refinery in Covenanter territory. And a bike had another advantage, or so she hoped: the black drones that crossed the sky might be unwilling to expend an expensive missile on two-wheelers. At least they’d held off so far. But the black flyers kept coming over, so often that the rebel children included their threatening geometry in their scrawled drawings. A cross, with propellers. A black quincunx, hovering, omnipresent, ominous, ruling the blue now alongside the sun and moon in the crayoned pictures.
Her cooler contained five hundred doses of L packed in ice. She’d mapped out a distribution schedule and tried to hit three towns a day. Other than her supply, the rebels had no vaccines, though Patriot Radio said they were available in government-controlled areas. Whether that was true, she had no idea. Anyway, she needed to keep a continuous patrol going, skirting the steadily expanding radius of infection, treating those in the early stages and urging their quarantine until the danger was past. Fortunately the antiviral she’d rescued from the wrecked factory hadn’t lost its potency. When she could administer it in time, the initial fever held for about forty-eight hours, then dropped. Further symptoms, the deadly ones, didn’t seem to develop.
A heavyset, fiftyish white woman threw a thick blue-jeaned leg over another bike and started her engine too. Floral Puckett rode shotgun with Nan on her rounds. Literally. Puckett carried a twelve-gauge sleeved in the scabbard of her own motorcycle. Whether to protect her, or to prevent her escape, wasn’t quite clear.
The highway stretched empty to the horizon. They were headed for a small town to the south, near the border. Nan kept a wary eye on the cloudy sky. Government drones would strike rebel convoys, occasionally individual vehicles, but so far they’d not bothered the two riders.
The main fighting was raging farther east. Optimistic bulletins over local radio said the rebels were winning. Nan had her doubts, but kept them to herself. The Covenant Council dealt mercilessly with naysayers and suspected government sympathizers. She didn’t know a lot about the fighting, or about the Covenant, or about the Council. Mostly the Covenanters talked about freedom from government itself, which of course made it difficult to persuade them it was vital to take public health measures. What she received, fuel and food and security escort, was grudgingly given. But every kid she saved was a kid saved, after all.
She was telling herself that again when Puckett hit the horn. When she glanced back, the other rider jabbed a gloved finger at the sky.
Just below the clouds, a black shape slanted down. For a moment Nan thought: drone. Every muscle tensed and she nearly swerved off the road. But then she saw it wasn’t a drone after all.
It was even more dangerous.
The huge swollen-bellied aircraft, painted dead black, was a dark angel descending. Its steady swoop was accompanied by the faint, obviously muffled whine of idling jet engines.
She searched for a turnoff, a concealing copse, a viaduct, even. But the highway that stretched ahead was empty, flat, coverless. She glanced at Puckett, who’d faced forward again. Pretending, probably, to ignore the cameras that were even now zooming in on them. The craft was close enough now that Nan could make out the guns pointed from turrets beneath its belly.
Whoever was behind that camera guided those weapons. Or maybe there wasn’t a person there at all. No human heart with mercy or forbearance, but instead a program: a cold mechanical intelligence, sorting them against threat profiles with the speed of digital thought; evaluating; categorizing; deciding. Two riders. Hostile, friendly, nonthreat, ignore …
Kill.
Sweat broke under Nan’s jacket despite the cooling wind of her passage. She relaxed her death grip on the throttle to slow, then reconsidered and sped up again, to sixty. A steady mile a minute. When she glanced back again Puckett was a few yards behind. No; her partner was dropping back, edging slowly away. Maybe a good idea. Spreading out, so it would require two bursts of whatever those turrets carried to take them out. Nan sped up even more and the highway between them widened.
She stole another glance up. The black aircraft was pacing them. The gunship was much larger than she’d thought at first. So huge it seemed to float, nearly motionless, from her perspective, though all three vehicles were rushing along the highway. An angel of death with lifted sword. Coldly eyeing them. Trying to decide.
Fire, or refrain?
Destroy, or let them go?
She tried to master her breathing. Then reached back, into the saddlebags. Felt around, as the bike wobbled. Her fingertips brushed a square shape, yielding, but with harder objects within. Nearly twisting her shoulder out of its socket, she hauled the box free. Held it out, at arm’s length, so that it dangled by its strap, twisting in the blast of the wind.
Her medical kit. With the red cross on a white background.
When she glanced back Puckett’s face had gone pale. She was mouthing words, but nothing Nan could make out over the howl of engines, the now-oh-so-clearly audible whine of the black plane’s jets.
She glanced up again, and caught a gunflash. No … light sparkling off a lens. Which was apparently focused on her.
For several seemingly eternal seconds they rode locked together, observer and observed. Her arm tired and she had to lower the med pack. She hesitated, then tucked it behind her, to brace her back with. Her bangs whipped her forehead in the wind as she wondered with each heartbeat if it would be her last.
The black plane canted slightly, and banked off to one side. The turreted lens tracked away from them. With a surge of power, a renewed thunder of engines, it rose again.
Climbed.
Shrank.
Vanished, once more, into the low clouds.
Nan slumped in her seat. She eased her breath out, and returned her attention to the road. She pressed shaky thighs into the soft cushioned saddle, and tried to relax shoulders that felt like tightened wires. Suddenly she was nauseated all over again, though whether from fear or from the radiation exposure, who could tell. She craned over the side, turning her head away from the blasting wind, and tried at least to keep what she vomited off her pants.
THEY were headed for a town down south, near the Tennessee border. Reports of any kind were scarce, but someone had called in a new outbreak of what sounded like Flower. She had basic first aid stuff and reusable syringes in the med kit. Puckett, who’d been an EMT before the war, was up to speed when it came to treating and stabilizing most traumas, though she didn’t seem confident about infectious disease.
When they pulled in, the main street of Lime Bluff looked deserted. A few nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century brick storefronts lined it, a block or two of shops, most with rain-warped particleboard nailed over the windows. Zooming around her to take the lead, Puckett steered them onto a side street, to a brick-and-aluminum one-story clinic building. AID STATION had been clumsily painted over a still-visible PLANNED PARENTHOOD sign. Two men in green-and-beige turkey-hunting camouflage, the Covenant patch prominent on their billed caps, stood guard outside. Puckett yelled, “Meds are here,” and after a moment’s hesitation the guards waved them to a loading zone.
Puckett handed Nan a face mask, then tied her own on. Snapped on green nitrile gloves. Nan gloved herself just as carefully. They had to recycle items one usually disposed of, soaking needles and scalpels in a weak bleach solution, but the supply of gloves, masks, and bleach was growing short.
Inside, one back room had been taped off with plastic into a rough isolation unit. Nan nodded approvingly. The single nurse back there wore blue scrubs and a face shield. Nan gave him the first injection, though he said, “I don’t feel sick yet.” The patients seemed mostly to be teenagers. “We had two older folks, but they died,” the nurse, Logan, added, rubbing his arm as he led them down a narrow aisle between what looked like folding camping cots. “This is Twila. She was the first one they brought in.”
The girl was restrained in the bunk with gay red-and-white poly rope. Nan bent over her for a quick exam. Twila stank of diarrhea. She was gasping for breath, cheeks purpling, with white blotches. Bloodshot eyes fixed on the nurse, then rolled away in panic as the teen struggled to suck in air. “One-hundred-and-three-degrees fever, pulse 93, blood pressure 170 over 120,” Logan said. “She’s in hypertensive crisis, I think. I treated her with intravenous saline for hydration. Gave her Cipro, too.”
“Antibiotics aren’t going to help. Save those for injuries, wounds, and secondary pneumonia,” she told him. Across the bed, Puckett was unwrapping a disposable airway. They had no respirators, of course.
Nan bent to the girl. “Twila, can you hear me? Blink twice if you can.”
The teenager stiffened, gasped for breath, then seemed to relax. She blinked with both eyes. Once. Twice.
“Good, she doesn’t seem confused,” Nan noted. “Just scared. Any seizures?”
“No, Doctor.”
Nan didn’t correct his honorific. She broke the ampule and filled the needle. Puckett lifted a sleeve, patted for a vein, and swabbed the site with alcohol. Nan double-checked the needle for air, then slid it in. She drew the girl’s sleeve back down and patted her shoulder. “You’ll start to feel better pretty soon, Twila. Give it a couple of hours. Rest, and let the medicine work.” Please God let it be still potent … but she’d kept it refrigerated; the antiviral should still be good.
Working swiftly, but with a reassuring word to each patient, they went from cot to cot. One of the men lay limp and unresponsive. She debated saving the dose for someone not as far gone, but finally injected him, too.
When she looked up from the last patient an older fellow with a close-cropped white Vandyke was watching from the door. He nodded when he caught her glance, and turned away.
Puckett came up. “About ready to head back, Floral?” Nan asked.
“I don’t think we’re going back,” the heavyset woman said. “At least not tonight.”
Nan frowned. “Sorry … what?”
Puckett lowered her voice. “There’s somethin’ going on. A ‘push,’ they’re calling it. The major here wants us with his unit.”
Nan frowned. “Wait, I’m confused. We’re due back. Rayfield shoots people for disobeying orders. I had enough trouble persuading him to let us fight the flu instead of waiting for it to come to us.”
Puckett murmured, “Sure. But we may not have a choice.”
The men who’d been guarding the door sauntered in. They grabbed the male nurse—Logan—Nan, and Puckett, and hustled them out. They thrust them toward a makeshift convoy of battered vans and pickups spray-painted in various conceptions of camouflage. Men and women sat in the beds, weapons propped on their knees. A battered Dodge Ram had a machine gun bolted atop the cab. A hastily welded tripod of unpainted steel pointed it at the sky.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, but was only boosted ungently into a van behind the machine-gun truck, along with Puckett and the nurse. The rear seats had been removed, so they sat on the floor. More Covenanters hurried out of the clinic, carrying cardboard boxes of bandages and boxes of sanitary napkins and throwing them into the van.
“Hey.” The woman driving craned back in her seat, looking down at them. A strawberry blonde in aviator-style sunglasses, freckles nearly invisible under smears of green and black camo paint. In cammies, with the Covenanter cap at a jaunty angle and a white armband stenciled with the Red Cross. She thrust back a hard, not very clean palm. “Tracy.”
“Floral.”
“Um … Nan.” She thought about asking again where they were going, but decided not to seem too curious. These people shot spies, too.
“Logan,” the nurse mumbled.
“Cool, good to meet cha. Which of you’s the doctor?”
“She is.” Puckett pointed to Nan.
Who shook her head. “No, I’m not a medical doctor. Just a biochemist. I worked on developing advanced drugs. Look, we’re here to fight the flu, not—”
“Yeah? A biochemist? Cool.” Tracy pulled armbands from inside her fatigue blouse and forced them into the reluctant hands of all three passengers. Nan’s had suspicious-looking brown spatters on it. “Congratulations, you’re gonna be part of the big push south. Eastern front’s linking up with the RECOs. The Re-Confederates. We manage this linkup, we cut the country in half. But there’s a Blackie force headed this way too. We’re beefing up the flank, in case they try to cut us off. You’re part of my team now, so put those on. We’re not covered by Geneva, but it might could get you better treatment if you’re captured.”
Nan gave up and pinned it on. Maybe the insignia had helped earlier, with the gunship. Who knew.
The convoy groaned and clattered into motion, gradually, like an uncoiling rattler. Raw exhaust from homemade fuel made her cough. Tracy pushed Nan’s scarf back and squinted at her nearly naked pate. “What happened? Dose of rad?”
“I was in Seattle when they nuked it.”
“And you made it out? Jesus God. Hey, you guys hungry? They issued us some sausage. Might’s well eat it now.”
Nan didn’t like the undertone of that last comment, but accepted a thick cut of intestine stuffed with ground meat. It was bland and unspiced, but after so long without protein she tore chunks off, wolfing the pork so greedily one bite stalled halfway and she nearly choked. Puckett pounded her back helpfully and she gulped again, then again, forcing it down her esophagus. The nausea still lingered, but miraculously her stomach didn’t reject the food. Was her appetite finally returning? That would be a good sign.
The convoy rolled between cornfields, then woods. The team on the machine-gun truck ahead of them swung the long barrel back and forth while a lookout searched the sky with binoculars.
“So how’d you get into this?” Nan asked Tracy.
“Into the militia, you mean?” She grinned like a happy kid. “Oh, I was in long before the war. My dad started me off when I was thirteen. He’s a tractor mechanic. I went to musters with him. Got some medical training, and then came the war … I was gonna join the Army, but then I realized we weren’t just fighting the Chinese. We were like superheroes, fighting the whole idea of tyrannical government. I mean, they tried to take our guns away. Nobody I know turned anything in. Then they started seizing crops, paying shit money for them—confiscating our livestock, drafting our kids. We just said, enough.”
Nan had heard the rest working at the hospital: return to the original Constitution, Second Amendment sanctuary, America for Americans, Jefferson and insurrection theory. She couldn’t disagree with some of it. But in the face of a war against a foreign enemy … and now that war was over … she shook her head and ground her teeth into something hard and bitter in the last bite of sausage. She lowered a window and spat the wad of gristle and bone over the side.
The lead vehicles turned off the pavement onto a dirt track paralleling rusty rails. The van lurched and banged over ruts. Dust rolled up, smearing a yellowish paste across the windshield. Tracy hit the wipers and squinted ahead. Horns blared. Brush scraped the side of the truck like fingernails.
After half an hour on the dirt track they came out at an open field. It sloped gently down toward a flat sheet of lake, bounded on the far side by a straight concrete line. A reservoir. A dam. Tracy slowed, letting a gap open between her and the technical. She peered up at the sky. Then floored the accelerator, vaulting the van rocking and jolting across the open field before plunging into the tree cover again at the far side, where the dirt track resumed.
It was late afternoon when the convoy finally turned onto an asphalted road, went another mile, then turned right into woods again. A man on foot gestured them to pull off and park.
Tracy squinted ahead. “Good. They put us beside a stream.” She ratcheted the hand brake, cut the engine, and turned to them. “Looks like we’re here, folks. Grab the supplies. There’s a tent in that soft case. Let’s get it set up. Go fifty yards out from the campsite along the stream and build us a fire. But keep it small, with a bucket of water beside it. They’re gonna have drones out, looking for us.”
BY the time the aid station was ready for business it was almost dusk. The woods were tangled with vines, dark and deep. Huge flies and mosquitoes buzzed, crawled, and bit. The so-called stream was barely a trickle. Nan shuddered when Tracy casually dipped up a tin cupful and drank it down. “Running water, it’s good to go,” she said when she caught Nan’s horrified glance.
“No it isn’t. There’s all kinds of fecals and pathogens in surface water. Vibrios, salmonella, shigella—”
“Been drinking it since I was little. A stomachache now and then? So what.” The battle medic flirted the dregs out of her cup and yelled, “Not here, fuckhead! This is an aid station. At least two hundred yards away.”
Nan didn’t see who the woman was yelling at, until a heap of moss stirred. A human figure stood, shrouded in netting festooned with twigs and leaves. It moved silently off, blending back into the forest.
She walked downstream, looking for some privacy to pee in. The sky showed between the trees ahead. The wind was rising, shaking loose leaves and bits of mistletoe down from the treetops. The temperature was falling. Something bad was on its way. She shivered, hugging herself. Then halted.
A line of men and women were lying or sitting cross-legged, fiddling with reflective tarps, just within the tree line. Some had already spaded fighting holes; others were just starting to dig, grunting and cursing as they battled roots and rocks. Most were older men, but there were women, too, and teenagers. An older officer in baggy utilities walked from position to position, squatting for earnest discussions in low voices. The bearded guy she’d seen back at the hospital. The “major.” Hunting rifles and shotguns lay beside the rebels, with hearing protectors and boxes of what looked like hand-loaded ammo. Some wore bulky vests stitched with squares of bathroom tile. They wore a wild assortment of helmets: old Army lids, motorcycle helmets, those who wore headgear at all; many didn’t.
She edged forward a little more and peered out. An open field dropped away in front of them. A small farmstead lay a half mile distant. The fields were weedy and overgrown. The roof of one of the sheds had fallen in. A victim of the trade wars that had preceded the actual hostilities, she guessed. The sun was setting over her right shoulder. So they were facing south, or southeast. Waiting. For what, she didn’t know.
When she got back another tent was going up not far from theirs. Tracy stood watching, fists propped on hips, scowling. Her nipples showed through her beater tee. As Nan came up she turned her head and spat. “Fucking headquarters pogeys,” she muttered. “They gotta set up right here where we are. Which means we’re gonna get targeted too.”
Nan frowned. “Do you really think we’ll get—what—bombed?”
The medic shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”
A distant rumble turned both their heads; “Thunder,” Tracy concluded at last.
Nan wondered if there was any sausage left. She hesitated, but finally asked. Tracy lifted her eyebrows. “Jeez! That was a day’s ration you scarfed down. Now you want more?”
“I haven’t had much of an appetite lately. The radiation—”
“Well, good that it’s back, I guess. There’s some dried apples in my pack if your tum-tum’s burning a hole.” She waved a hand vaguely toward the tent. “Then, better get some sleep. You never know when you won’t be able to.”
SHE was headed back to the tent when a distant roaring penetrated her consciousness. It echoed among the trees, a rumbling so deep she couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. Not thunder. Not this time, although a distant flash of lightning flickered among the clouds now and then.
Excited voices rose at the command tent. A man came out with a small hand-launched aircraft. He powered it up and pitched it overhand. The drone climbed between the treetops and headed off. Another man squatted, studying a tablet that she guessed controlled it. Others, officers she guessed, gathered around.
She staggered back, blown nearly off her feet by the explosion. The missile, if that was what it was, had streaked downward too fast even to register on her retinas until the blast. When the smoke and airborne pine needles cleared, and clods of dirt stopped falling, Tracy charged out of the medics’ tent. The crater was still smoking, with a bitter, acrid stench. Nan staggered after her, dazed, ears ringing.
Only two of the five or six men who’d been gathered there were left alive, and both were missing legs or arms. Tracy tried to render first aid, but they bled out in minutes.
The growling grew. It echoed off the trees. Tracy shepherded the others out of the aid tent and thrust med packs into their hands. She drew a gun on Logan when he didn’t move fast enough. Urged on by the muzzle of her revolver, they trotted through the darkening woods, which were ominous with a cold, searching wind. Toward the scattered flat cracks of gunshots.
When they reached the front line some of the rebels were firing desultorily, but Nan couldn’t see what they were aiming at. Just down toward the old farm, apparently. Faint lights flickered from that direction, separated by wide margins of darkness. Even fainter blue lights hovered a few hundred feet up, weaving complexly, as if intelligent fireflies were coordinating a spectral dance. Then, all at once, they winked out.
The growling grew closer. A few people got up from their foxholes and trenches and faded back into the woods. They were followed by catcalls and curses from those who stayed. The major shook out a banner, a coiled rattler on a field of red and white, and staked it in front of their positions. “Stand fast!” he yelled. “They’ll shoot rubber bullets, and we’ll shoot real ones. Not one step back!”
The yells and cheers were blotted out by ponderous, incredibly loud words from the dark: a crackling loudspeaker, from down by the farm. “PATRIOTS! WE ARE PATRIOTS TOO. WE DON’T WANT TO FIGHT OUR FELLOW AMERICANS. LEAVE YOUR WEAPONS ON THE GROUND. COME FORWARD WITH YOUR HANDS UP, AND WE WILL PROVIDE FOOD AND MEDICAL CARE.”
A scowling woman with a huge black automatic rifle walked the back of the line, shouting, “They’re lying! They shoot prisoners. Whoever leaves his hole, I shoot. Whoever leaves his hole, I fucking waste.” Some of the insurgents glanced around nervously, fingering their weapons; the older men calmly checked their sights and rearranged their ready ammunition. No one got up, and no one went forward to surrender. But no one else retreated, either.
The minute that passed felt very long.
On some unseen signal, the engines down by the farm gunned again, a renewed growl that swiftly deepened.
Lightning flashed in the gray-lined thunderheads. By the flash, silhouetted against the clouds, Nan caught small objects flitting toward them through the sky. She counted the beats: two thousand, three thousand—
A flash of heat seared her face, like a broiler grate suddenly pressed to her cheeks and forehead. At the same moment a high-pitched, incredibly sharp sound assaulted her ears. Pain stabbed her eyes. She ducked, unable to keep standing, rolling behind a tree and clapping hands over ears.
“Microwaves!” Tracy yelled. Along the line, sticks twanged into the air, snapping the reflective tarps into shape.
Someone yelled, “Fire at will!” and the riflemen opened up all along the line, though Nan still couldn’t see what they were aiming at. She huddled behind the tree, wanting to flee, to escape the heat and incredible drilling whine boring deep into her brain in spite of her firmly clamped hands. But the scowling woman was pointing her rifle directly at her. Nan screamed and held out a shaking hand; the woman shook her head in warning and moved on. Something buzzed through the air and smacked into a tree with a shockingly loud clap.
The pain ray moved on, though the piercing whine kept on. When she looked out again one of the older men was angling a tube. With a hollow thunk, actinic light ignited above the field.
The brilliance illuminated four hulking shadows rolling slowly up from the farm. They approached at a walking pace, deliberately, as if unsure of what they faced, or maybe too unafraid of it to hurry. Between the larger shadows human figures, or something like humans, but with smaller heads, paced along with strangely mechanical rigidity, spaced out so that the entire line was some two hundred yards across.
“Fucking tanks,” Tracy breathed, beside her in the dark. “We’re fucked. We only got one AT gun. From in front of an American Legion post, and hand-loaded the rounds. And what are those things in between them?”
Nan ducked as something new droned overhead. It didn’t sound like the bullets, but was a lower, slower, even more ominous buzzing. As if some winged predator hunted just above the treetops. She sank to a crouch, clutching her med pack to her chest. Wishing she had something to defend herself with. Even Tracy had a pistol.
Then thought: What good would it do?
From off to her right, a terrific crack and boom, a gush of fire. She glanced up to see sparks fly from the lead tank. The violently painful siren-noise cut off instantly. The tank slewed slightly, but steadied again. Lightning flashed, closer now, and a drop of rain plinked onto her cheek, shockingly cold after the heat of the day.
A second flare burst. In its light she saw the riflemen working the bolts on their guns, aiming, firing. Distant clangs showed they were finding their marks, but the tanks and the walking things continued their advance. Tracy was down on one knee, revolver propped on a tree branch, cocking and aiming with careful deliberation.
“THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING,” the loudspeaker intoned. “LEAVE YOUR WEAPONS AND RETREAT FROM YOUR POSITIONS. WE WILL TREAT ANY WHO REMAIN AS INSURGENTS AND TRAITORS.”
The firing slackened. Then, to renewed yelling from the officers and sergeants, resumed, building to a steady roar. Lightning flickered. In its glare one of the black stalking silhouettes faltered, staggered, and toppled heavily to the ground. The defenders cheered. Shrill rebel yells and insulting catcalls rolled along the line. At the same moment, a gust of icy rain descended, rattling the leaves and surrounding the fighters with a mist that glowed in the flarelight.
Suddenly, with a deafening growl, the tanks accelerated. They bounded forward, rocking slightly, long barrels of their guns remaining steady. The leftmost one rotated its turret and with a bluish flash fired. A beam of solid light projected to Nan’s left and was succeeded instantly with a deafening explosion, followed by terrified screams.
The tank itself neither slowed nor stopped. All four advanced rapidly now, rocking over the furrowed field. Through the gusts of cold wind and bursts of scattered icy rain the heavy machines rolled up into the woods. They knocked down trees with shattering cracks, rolling over the hastily dug pits and their occupants and crushing everything under spinning steel. Broken rifles and parts of bodies spewed from under the treads. As one, the machines pivoted—two left, two right—and bulldozed along the firing line, rolling over screaming men and women. Fiery tracers floated off into the woods, searching for fleeing shapes, pinning them, flinging them down like broken puppets. Above the trees something buzzed, and again, sharp reports snapped. Snipers fell from the trees like stunned squirrels, trailing camouflage netting, breaking branches on their way down.
Nan huddled behind the tree, watching a tank chew a flattened path away from her. Then heard a growl behind her, and turned.
The other tank loomed out of the rain, charging toward her. Men and women screamed as it rolled over them, then pivoted, grinding its tracks down into the shallow fighting holes. Trees toppled. Tarps whipped viciously, tangled and then ripped apart beneath the steel tread plates. The tank rolled over the rattlesnake flag and the old man stubbornly clinging to its pole, waving it in front of the oncoming machine until a machine-gun burst cut him down. A teenaged girl ran in from the side, carrying two bottles, each capped with a flaming rag. She hefted one to toss, and the rag fell out. The fluid spilled out and ignited on her arm. Still she ran burning and screaming toward the tank, and smashed the other bottle against its armor before she too disappeared under the treads.
Nan shook off paralyzing horror and bolted, sprinting for the deep woods. Crashes and buzzing echoed from above. The heat ray returned, scorching her back. She panted as she fled, stumbling through underbrush and wait-a-minute vines that snagged her clothes and raked her exposed skin and finally tripped her flat. Bullets stitched a ragged seam just past her.
“SURRENDER AND YOU WILL BE SPARED,” the enormous voice intoned.
When she rolled to her back a dark form stood over her. Huge, but with a small, misshapen head. When lightning flickered she saw it wasn’t human. It pointed a rifle at her. It said, “Where is your wea-pon?”
“I don’t have one. I’m medical. Medic. First aid.”
“Where is your wea-pon?”
“I don’t have one, I said. Don’t you understand? What are you? I’m a medic. Red Cross! A doctor!”
“You self-identify as noncombatant personnel?”
“I do. I do! Yes!”
“No wea-pon detected. Stand up and turn around. Hands behind your back.”
She stood, knees shaking. Something wet sprayed her lower back. When she tried to bring her hands around again they were stuck to her clothing, to each other; she couldn’t move them.
“Turn front,” the audio commanded. She closed her eyes as another spray coated her chest and face. When she opened them, her chest and upper body glowed ghostly green in the night woods. “Walk toward the sirens. Do not attempt escape,” the robot commanded, then wheeled and stalked off, rifle jerkily pointing from bush to bush as it crashed through them.
She staggered back through the woods, which were on fire now here and there, the flames flickering low to the ground, struggling to survive against the pelting rain. Past bodies and chunks of bodies, exposed gristle and tendon and bone, splayed corpses burst like bags of blood where treads had run over them, the shot, the burned, the maimed. Floral Puckett lay facedown, still gripping her shotgun. Nan bent, but with hands bound behind her she couldn’t help, couldn’t even check for a pulse. She didn’t see Tracy or Logan anywhere. She left Puckett behind and staggered out of the trees, out into the furrowed, smoking field. Past more tanks, immobile and hulking, ominous in the rain and lit only by lightning.
To join a line of bedraggled women and teens and old men waiting in front of a tent. Some were sobbing. Others stared blankly ahead, obviously in shock.
Here LED lanterns dangled garish light. Three officers sat at a folding table of white plastic under a dripping tent fly. Two male, one female. They wore black uniforms with silver insignia. Black-uniformed troops in tactical gear stood behind them, rifles at the ready. The line moved slowly, people shuffling forward reluctantly. After a few words, some were led off to the right. Others, to the left, where shots cracked from the darkness.
Finally it was her turn. She faced the judges, but one of the troopers turned her roughly around, grabbed her pinioned hand, and shone a violet light on it.
“Do you speak English?” one of the seated officers said, the youngest one, on the right.
“Of course I speak English,” she blurted, and instantly regretted her tone.
The leftmost officer, the woman, said, “You are a detainee of the Special Action Forces, Department of Homeland Security. What is your name?”
“Nan Lenson, Archipelago. I was taken prisoner by these—”
“Ms. Archipelago. Do you have any identification?”
“No, it was taken from me. And my last name’s Lenson. I worked for Archipelago before I was taken—”
“State your allegiance.”
“United States of America. My father’s a Navy admiral.”
The man in the middle, with graying hair, looked up for the first time. “How did you end up with these people?”
“I told you, I was taken prisoner. They wanted me as a medic. I worked for Archipelago until the nuclear attack. I escaped from Seattle with medications and was distributing them. Trying to fight the Chinese flu. Which is becoming epidemic north of here.”
The younger man said, “Yet we find you down here, fighting in the rebel ranks.”
“No, not fighting. They drafted me as a medic. As I said. See the armband? Red Cross. And we have wounded in the woods. A lot of wounded. Are you going to—”
“Green slime means captured without weapons,” the woman said, cutting her short. “And GSR shows she wasn’t firing.”
“Remanded for further processing,” the older man said, and the others nodded. The woman pointed her to the right.
Slogging through inches of greasy mud toward waiting cattle trucks, Nan struggled with whatever was pinioning her arms, and finally tore them loose. Maybe rain dissolved it. The goo dripped from her sleeves in rubbery strings. At least her hands were free. But the black-uniformed troops lining her path did not look away. Seeing no chance to run, she climbed at last up into the truck.
The rain blasted down harder now, cold and violent, suddenly unrestrained, a freezing deluge pelting the prisoners as they huddled in the bed, which still smelled of cattle and shit and blood, and now fear and ozone. And she huddled there, shivering, hugging herself, looking back toward the woods. Which stood dark, deserted, and now, except for the occasional muffled pop of a distant shot, completely silent.