Interrupt (14 page)

LOS ANGELES

P
ain stopped Emily in the congested street. She’d cut her toes on broken glass.

I’m barefoot,
she realized.

The road was littered with empty shoes. Everyone had taken off their heels, shoes, sandals, and boots. Why? It was an unnerving sight—the abandoned shoes scattered in the street where people had been.

Almost as disturbing, Emily could smell cinnamon and her grandmother’s favorite perfume, which was impossible. Nanna had been dead for years. How could she smell her perfume?

The sky bled with strange light.

“My leg!” someone shrieked among the cars ahead of her. “My leg! My leg!” It was a man, but agony had ratcheted his voice into a high, brittle keen.

Oh God,
Emily thought, looking for him in the milling crowd. Was he pinned?

Then she heard a more horrendous sound behind her: the deafening roar of an airplane. All around her, people screamed as the gray bulk of a passenger jet slashed overhead. It looked like it was upside down.

The plane disappeared beyond the elevated line of the interstate where the freeway formed an overpass above West 6th. Beyond the freeway, cyclones of fire and smoke billowed above the city. Emily saw chunks of debris. She thought she saw seats and people. Metal. Dust. A second later, the earth trembled.

Nearly lost in the noise, Emily heard a creak of metal as a green SUV teetered on the guardrail of the freeway overpass. Smoke rose from the freeway, too, where the traffic formed brutal pileups. Beyond the guardrail, Emily saw the rooftops of dozens of vehicles—a truck’s gaping windshield—a man waving his arms—and the undercarriage or wheels of two cars that had flipped.

I was doing seventy up there,
she thought with dull shock.
I was doing seventy before I reached my exit and stopped.

Somebody was inside the teetering SUV—a woman in a business suit. She scrabbled back from the windshield, shoving at the driver door.

The SUV plummeted thirty feet with the woman inside.

Emily felt as if her heart dropped at the same time. She almost sat down, unable to breathe.

“My leg!” the man yelled.

She couldn’t help them both.

The man was closer.

Forcing air into her chest, Emily turned to pick her way through the vehicles. She stopped again as her gaze turned west. Two threads of smoke curled from the cityscape. Laura lived in that direction. Emily was frantic with silent prayers and disbelief.

Please, God. Please.

A teenage girl grabbed her arm and shouted, “Help me! My dad! Please help!”

To Emily, the girl’s voice felt like her own thoughts. She followed her into the cars. The girl wore a short skirt and knee socks and ran with a funny limp because she had one leather boot on, just one, like she hadn’t been able to pull it off when everyone else removed their shoes.

The asphalt felt warm against Emily’s skin and she thought,
I don’t get it. Our shoes? What could—

They didn’t run far. The girl led Emily to a dark-haired man in his fifties who slumped over the wheel of an Acura TL. He was dead or unconscious. A stroke? One of his eyes was a crimson egg, bulging and bloodshot. The pupil didn’t react even when Emily’s shadow crossed his face, but she decided to administer CPR.

“Let’s get him out of the car!” she said, gesturing for the girl to help her with the man’s weight. They dropped him on the road. He was still wearing his shoes.

He didn’t have time to take them off,
Emily thought as she checked his airways, then bent to put her mouth over his open lips. First, she said, “Try the engine.”

She blew into the man’s mouth and straightened up to press her palms against his heart. One, two, three, four. Chase could have done better. Was he okay? Chase should be at work. Silver Lake was closer than Laura’s house, but the road was blocked with stalls, and Emily couldn’t carry this man to the hospital.

“It won’t start!” the girl shouted. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen. Emily wanted to check the key herself, but she tried to breathe life into the girl’s father again and—

She blacked out.

When she woke up, she was cowering with two women and four men against the brick face of an office complex, looking at the street through a few trees and a short ornamental brick wall. All of them were coughing, filthy, and scratched.

Smoke and dust obscured most of the street. Above, through the haze, the sky burned with red light. Everyone flinched as a swarm of birds darted alongside the building and then vanished.

Emily smelled her grandmother’s perfume again. It seemed stronger than the smoke, and she realized her brain was generating false signals. She was also unsettled by her vertigo, a sense that the ground was sliding beneath her even though both she and it were motionless. Her balance was shot. Her head ached.

Another truth went through her like a knife. The seven of them had huddled together like family, the men stretching out their arms, not to corral the women, but to shield them. Like the teenage girl, who was gone, these people were strangers to Emily, and yet there was real intimacy in their postures.

“Where… ?” someone said.

They came from every walk of life. One man wore rough jeans and a work shirt—maybe a landscaper. Another wore gym clothes. The other two wore business shirts and slacks, no jackets. Emily and another woman fit the same white-collar description.

They were hiding from a second plane crash. As the wind opened a pocket in the haze, Emily saw a huge tailfin jutting through the demolished ruins of several buildings down the street, fires licking at the debris.

How many planes had been above LAX and Burbank when the sky lit up? Dozens? More?

What if they’d all gone down?

“Let me go!” one of the women screamed, reacting even more strongly than Emily. This woman’s blouse was open, the shoulder yanked off. Was that why she panicked?

The woman fought out of the group as two men pulled back, bewildered and chagrined. Emily believed they had good intentions.

“We’ve got to get off the street!” Emily yelled.

“My family—” a man said as the other woman shouted, “Josh! Josh!” She ran into the sea of cars, recognizing someone. The man also sprinted away and Emily was left with three survivors.

Some aspects of the street looked completely normal—the Taco Bell beside an auto shop, a UPS store, more office buildings—but the fires and the standstill traffic had turned the city into another world. The screaming was the worst. The human sounds of despair rose and fell but never ended.

There was another body sprawled in the street. The man wasn’t visibly hurt. He wasn’t bloody or burned, but he lay with his arm hooked beneath him in an unnatural position, and his eyes looked like empty white glass.

Something was killing people besides car crashes and fires.

My head,
Emily thought. What if some of them were hemorrhaging or experiencing fatal seizures?

She wasn’t going to wait to find out. “I work down the street!” she yelled. “It’s a new building. Earthquake proof. I can get us inside.”

“Where are we?” the landscaper asked.

“The corner of West 6th and Valencia. I work here.”

They responded to her certainty. “Show us,” a businessmen said.

Laura’s house was only a few miles past DNAllied, but it might as well have been a hundred. Emily couldn’t imagine wading through forty blocks of smoke and cars, and Laura’s house was a two-story ranch home made of wood. It wasn’t anyplace to take shelter.

“This way,” Emily said.

Two of the survivors went with her, not the third. Emily looked back.

“This way!” she shouted.

A pistol shot cracked somewhere in the smoke. Then the buildings echoed with the chatter of an automatic weapon.

“Oh shit!” The landscaper fled into vehicles, leaving Emily and the businessman.

Three young black men burst from the haze. They wore red bandannas on their arms or foreheads. Gangbangers. One of them swung a boxy little gun. Another carried a revolver.

Emily had no time to hide. Two of the gangbangers ran past, but the one who’d zigzagged closest to her slowed down and lingered, grinning even as his friends yelled at him. “Forget it, Trey!”

He was in his twenties. He had great teeth, straight and bright. Striding toward her, he said, “Hey there, swee—”

Emily rammed her bare foot into his groin and dropped him. Karate lessons. As he slumped to his knees, fighting to stay up, Emily wrapped her small hands into a single fist and threw her weight into his jaw, snapping it. She felt his bones crack as pain lanced through her forearm.

He let go of his revolver. He flopped down as the weapon clattered on the asphalt. Emily hesitated, eyeing it, but she’d have to get too close to grab it.

He pushed himself up, groaning through a bloody drool of spit.

Emily turned and ran.

She was alone.

In the smoke, Emily passed two cops warily chasing the gangbangers. One policeman had his arm in a combat sling.

Why were they fighting? There was nothing to loot from the business district except computers and a little money. The young men hadn’t carried anything except their weapons. Emily supposed they’d been driving through, then left their car with their guns and ran into the policemen.

Should I go with the cops?
she thought. She’d taken first aid classes at Chase’s insistence, but the cops probably had better training. And she was afraid.

At the intersection of West 6th and Union Drive, she turned north. DNAllied was set back from the street by twenty feet of grass, and, in front, by its fenced parking lot. Emily had once described the architecture to a friend as post-post-post-postmodern. It didn’t fit with the
four-story office buildings on either side. It wouldn’t fit anywhere. Faced with concrete ribs and black glass, DNAllied was a single-story structure arranged like a hexagon around a central courtyard.

Emily hurried to a side door and saw people inside the tinted glass. She wasn’t sure who. Then she reached the door. It was locked. She didn’t have her pass card. Her purse must have been in her car, so she punched her code into the electronic lock instead. It didn’t work. She pounded on the glass.

The noise drew attention from inside, where her boss, Ray, was shouting at two men. They turned and walked to the door.

All three of them were wearing shoes.

Are they arguing about whether or not to help me?
Emily thought as Ray grabbed one man’s arm. The guy shrugged him off. Emily recognized him as Dale Upton from IT, someone she knew and liked, but Dale wasn’t fighting with Ray about who to let in. Ray was trying to stop him from leaving.

Dale opened the door and ran out, barely glancing at Emily.

“Wait!” she yelled, but she couldn’t bring herself to go after him. She pushed inside as Dale’s friend ran, too.

Had the building protected them? The structure was made of concrete and its windows were energy-efficient, double-pane, UV-proof glass. With the lights out, even this entry hall was gloomy despite the beige tile floor.

Ray pulled the door shut behind her and locked it. “Was there a bomb?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Emily said, her voice accelerating. “It happened at least twice and there were planes falling down and the sky—The sky is
red—
”

They hugged each other, the middle-aged man and the young woman who’d never been anything more to each other than coworkers. Worse, they’d been adversaries, but now Emily was glad for Ray’s girth.
He was solid and reassuring. She breathed in his deodorant with her cheek pressed against his chest.

Outside, someone thudded into a car with a hollow
bang.
Emily and Ray jumped.

It was happening again. Emily could see at least twenty people in the street, maybe thirty as the smoke shifted. All of them staggered drunkenly. No matter whether they’d been running or limping or carrying an injured friend, everyone seemed like they’d been hammered by an invisible force.

It only lasted a second. Then the people outside changed again. They looked up, regaining their equilibrium, beginning to move once more, but now there was a distinct change in their actions.

“Look,” Emily said. “Ray? Look.”

“I—I don’t…” he stammered.

Her skin crawled with revulsion and stress. “Move away from the window,” she said, leading him back a few steps. Every muscle in her body had tightened, ready to run, and yet she felt hypnotized by the street outside. Unable to look away, Emily and Ray bumped against a potted plant and stopped, clutching each other. Fortunately, they were concealed by the dark glass.

The people outside lacked focus. Before, everyone had moved with urgency. Now Emily was reminded of a school of fish or the agitated birds she’d seen. Walking slowly at first, then gathering momentum, the people outside banded together into knots of four or five, gazing inward at each other. They seemed more interested in following each other than in looking around.

Some of them dropped the objects they were holding—a briefcase, a jacket, a fabric med kit from a car.