Interrupt (15 page)

They congregated in groups strictly divided along racial lines, whites with whites, Hispanics with Hispanics, a black woman alone. There was no mixing. Everyone was shoeless, but that didn’t appear to
be a common denominator. They discriminated against each other by the tones of each other’s skin, the most basic visual cue available.

I was one of them,
Emily realized. Her group had done the same. All of those people had been white, although she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.

Now she felt like she didn’t even know herself, and she might have screamed except for the memory of the woman who’d panicked. Where was that woman now? Outside? Somehow the realization helped Emily control herself.

“I need to find my sister,” she said, her thoughts bubbling with horror for Laura and P.J. and Chase and their friends and parents and—

“Stay inside,” Ray said. “Emily. Listen to me. We need to stay inside.”

“We can’t just stand here. Did you try the phone?” She separated herself from Ray and stepped deeper into the building.

Shadows filled every corner. Several computers were on, fed by batteries. The silent gleam of their monitors added to the surreal, lonely feeling that these offices were a place she’d never been before. Over and over, the computers’ emergency systems went
beep beep beep
from every side.

Her skin prickled with grime, and her bangs were loose, the blond strands dark with soot. The heat had left her thirsty. Her arm ached from hitting the gangbanger. Bruises throbbed in her shins and knees. But the physical pain was good. It felt better than her yammering fear.

The phones were out.

So was the Internet.

Ray’s cell phone got nothing.

Emily found a battery-powered desk radio, but it squealed with static.

“Maybe, um, maybe we can…” Ray said.

Emily lowered the radio’s volume, then left it dialed to the local news station. Would they hear something soon? Anything?

A windstorm rumbled through the street, blowing the haze away in curtains. The wind peppered the glass with grit and trash. A fist-sized
object smacked one window and disappeared again.
Krakrak!
The noise was like something outside trying to get in. Every muscle in her body was clenched in terror.

Then the wind stopped. Rain splattered down.

Just as quickly, the rain quit and a thick fog blew in. It swirled and moaned against the building, speckling the glass with moisture.

Ocean fog in June?
Emily wondered.

Another flock of birds darted past. Two or three hit the glass and fell dead as the rest swished and spun and were gone.

Despite the overcast, despite DNAllied’s insulated glass, the air grew warmer. Emily raked her fingers through her filthy hair and damp scalp. How much hotter must it be outside? Ray’s pink face was dotted with sweat.

“The break room,” she said. “It has a TV. We—”

Four ghosts appeared in the fog.

“Oh God.” Emily ducked behind a desk, waving frantically at Ray. Had the people outside seen them? Her eyes felt as wide as lightbulbs as she peeked around a filing cabinet, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking. What if they’d walked right up to the glass?

The foursome moved abnormally as they went by, taking short, erratic steps more like animals than human beings. Then they were gone.

Emily stood up, wondering how long she and Ray could stay inside by themselves.

In the break room, the TV screen was broadcasting snow. She left it on as they examined the cupboards and the refrigerator for food. Chips. A banana. Two take-out boxes of Italian. The vending machines were loaded with snack bags and Pepsi, but the machines were dead without electricity.

Emily went to the sink and lifted the faucet handle. The water was running. Emily drank until she was nauseous and gestured for Ray to drink, too. “We should fill everything we can find,” she said.

He nodded, but he made no effort to locate a janitor’s bucket or other containers.

She topped off every cup she found in the cupboards, small or big, dirty or clean. Then she pulled the stopper and filled the sink, too.

What if the fires spread?

The rain and the fog could have extinguished the littlest fires started by stovetops or car crashes. The wind would drive the largest burns inland to the east—and so much of the city was concrete and steel. They might be okay.

Emily sat beside Ray and monitored the radio as it squawked and hissed. They couldn’t see the street from the break room, which was a relief at first. It also made her nervous.

What else can we do?

“It’s something in the sky,” she said. “Ray? If it was a biological agent, I’d be infected. It got me while I was outside. Then I would have communicated it to you.”

“Not necessarily,” he said.

“What if we wave and yell at those people? What if they come inside and they’re okay, too?”

“You don’t know what they’ll do.”

“
I
wasn’t dangerous. You saw them. They’re slow. Confused. I think it’s affecting their ability to think.”

Ray shook his head.

“The building protects us,” she said. “There must be other survivors who are okay, people in other buildings or parking garages. We need to find them.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

She wasn’t going to let him stop her. “It’s something in the sky like from a nuclear bomb! You’ve seen those movies, right? Except the effect is still going on. Cars won’t start. There’s no power.”

“Bombs don’t work like that.”

“It started this morning,” she said. “My laptop was scrambled. Then the lights started flickering. The news said there were sunspots. Maybe we can shield ourselves! We need metal. We could make helmets.” Emily got up and paced away from the table, but stopped to protect her toes. At the very least, she needed to look for Band-Aids and a pair of shoes.

“We should wait,” Ray said.

I can’t,
Emily thought.
My family’s out there.
But she could see in his demeanor that he would resist if she tried to make him go outside. He was too cautious, too good at managing risk. It was how Ray dealt with everything. Maybe she could change his mind if she found something that worked.

“I’m going to look around,” she said.

Walking through the building alone, her pulse felt too loud in her neck, as if her heart were in the wrong place. She took one step and then another, touching the skin beneath the collar of her blouse.

You can do this,
she coached herself.
You can.

She reached the front entrance and looked out. There was a shoulder bag lying on the steps by the door. Emily thought she recognized it. She leaned forward to see if—

Her vision filled with white pinpoints.

She threw herself backward, cracking her elbow on the tile floor as she scrabbled away.

In the hall, she stopped, grateful for her sanity. She clung to the floor and sobbed. Maybe she should have known better. The lobby was faced entirely with clear glass, not tinted, and the roof lifted to form an arch above the door. The effect was penetrating that wall. If she’d needed more proof, her brush with the outside was enough. Something in the air or the sky was affecting people’s brains.

Emily stood up, wiping her cheeks. She entered another stretch of cubicles and looked at the desktop computers. If she ripped the plastic off one of the towers, she thought she could bend the steel manifold
inside to form some kind of headgear. Or she could use the metal shelves in the supply room. But how would she cut them?

By habit, she’d walked toward her own office in the southwest part of the building. Along the same wing were more offices with windows to the outside—double-pane windows protected by the ribbed overhang of the roof.

Emily treaded carefully to the last door.

DNAllied was situated partway up a long, mild slope in the terrain. The last office looked out across several blocks of L.A. and West Hollywood.

The fog had lifted in tendrils and veils. The weird lights in the sky seemed to be gone, leaving only the sun. It glared through the mist onto the cityscape. She saw no moving cars, no planes, few people, only the tireless black fingers of smoke rising from six locations.

Her gaze was drawn to a small group about two blocks away—a group of four people walking with direction and purpose. Their postures were different than the light-footed gaits of everyone else. So was the way they’d formed together like a battle line of soldiers. But they weren’t in uniform. They seemed like another random collection of people, one man in a sports coat, another in a purple-and-yellow Lakers jersey.

They wore shoes.

They were multi-racial—three white, one black—the only mixed group she’d seen, although they were exclusively male.

“Ray!” she shouted. “Ray!”

A fifth man emerged from the standstill traffic and approached them. He was also white. He held a split chunk of wood like a club. Emily thought one of the four called to the fifth man. This person was smaller than the rest, a boy. His head undulated on his neck as he conveyed his message.

The fifth man mimicked the boy’s peculiar head movement as he joined them, perhaps hooting one word.

Emily was struck again by the normality of so much of what she saw—the elevated, colorful signs of a Shell station and a Circle K, a restaurant, an apartment complex—but the glass face of another building had been punched in by a delivery truck, and the other survivors on the street shrank from the organized group.

Everyone moved in that flighty way except these five men, which emphasized the willful, almost predatory manner in which they carried themselves.

Behind her glass, Emily raised one hand reluctantly, caught between hope and dread.
Why aren’t they affected, too?
she wondered.
What’s different?

“Ray!” she hollered. “Ray, my God! Come here! Ray!”

Why didn’t he answer? She almost left the window to check on him. Then with a decisive movement, she banged on the glass. But the men outside were down the block. They couldn’t hear.

Emily turned and rummaged through the two desks in the office, looking for a flashlight. She realized she should check the emergency supplies. They performed earthquake drills twice a year. Emily sprinted down the hall, skipping awkwardly to save her toes. She opened a supply closet and rifled through the printer paper and ink cartridges for an orange duffel bag. Then she ran back to the window with a fat halogen light.

The group strode past her building on West 6th Street, continuing east with the wind. Emily smacked the glass again. She flicked her light on and off, on and off.

One man noticed her flashlight from the corner of his eye. He rocked his head in that odd motion, sharing two words with his friends. Two sounds. No more. In unison, they turned to stare at her. Emily froze, unsure if she’d made a mistake.

She saw now that all of them were armed. Each man held a hunk of wood, a long pole, or a tire iron.

The boy was their leader. Lean, light-haired, he stayed in front, his head shifting alertly as the group walked through the cars.

As they moved closer, Emily realized with a chill that some of their clubs were bloodied. Red spatters covered one man’s chest. Another’s cheek was smeared. Who had they been fighting? More gang members?

Emily was still making sense of the gore on their crude weapons when she brought her hand to her mouth, overwhelmed by the most acute shock of all.

The boy in front was her nephew, P.J.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

T
he change in Earth’s magnetic field seemed to be increasing. That was Marcus’s first thought as he shook off the effects of another interrupt. This time he’d lost two hours. His watch was gone, but he was able to judge how long he’d blacked out by the daylight streaming through the window. It was midafternoon.

Marcus put his hand against the wall to steady himself, dripping with sweat. He was in one of the offices. The desk had been overturned and there was paperwork scattered on the floor beside the computer monitor, keyboard, phone, and two couch cushions from the lounge.