Interrupt (22 page)

A body lay in the street. More garbage. Glass. Three stragglers knelt together among the cars, praying. Then a woman lurched out from behind a truck. “Have you seen my daughter?” she cried. “My daughter! Paige Lundgren! She’s twelve years old, brown hair, I think she wore a pink shirt today!”

Emily’s mouth worked, but the woman was already moving toward someone else in the dark.

“Oh God,” Emily said.

Michelle agreed with a sympathetic noise. “Do you have kids?” she asked.

“Fiancé. You?”

“Divorced. I hope that bastard is—” Michelle broke off and said, “The fires look like they’re east of us.”

They’d reached an intersection where the four-story buildings dropped away to smaller shops, parking lots, and a Jiffy Lube. Beyond a line of trees, Emily glimpsed orange flames and heavy smoke.

“The wind is definitely moving that way,” Michelle said. “The fire must have crossed in front of us. You’re thinking we stay on Union until we get to West 3rd or Beverly?”

“Wherever there’s a way through,” Emily said, switching on her flashlight. The organized groups were gone. Even the stragglers seemed to have dwindled.

They made better time with the light until they found out why everyone had disappeared. First there were cars with blistered paint. Next they saw one that had exploded, throwing its doors. Farther on, the vehicles were blackened hulks. Emily didn’t want to enter the debris, but the buildings on either side were impassable wreckage. The air reeked of scorched rubber and plastic.

“Maybe we should go back,” Michelle said.

“Shh.” Emily cocked her head, listening to the murmur of a lone, repetitive voice.

“Annie?” the hidden man said. “Annie? Annie?”

“We could catch up with those groups,” Michelle said as Emily held up one hand to stop her.

“We need to see who’s over there,” she said.

Michelle protested. “No! Listen to him.”

“Annie?” the man said. “Annie?”

Emily had accepted that finding P.J. and his kind would be next to impossible. They’d disappeared into the crowds of other survivors now that everyone was awake, but if she was right, all of them would exhibit severe forms of ASD. She’d been looking for anyone who fit that description, no matter if everyone was half-insane with trauma. They were all acting strangely. But it might be the loners she wanted.

“Help me,” she said.

She couldn’t sneak up on him. Their footsteps crunched in the street. Michelle kicked a small object that banged away in the dark. Emily jumped, and yet the bodiless voice didn’t change.

“Annie? Annie?”

They had good reason to avoid him. What if there was another event? It had been half an hour since Emily left DNAllied. Throughout the day, there had never been a quiet period longer than ten minutes. If the effect was going to return, it was overdue…

And if he was like P.J., if he turned violent at the same time Emily and Michelle lost their intelligence, they would be easy targets.

LOS ANGELES

E
mily walked closer to the hidden man, feeling Michelle tremble beside her. He looked like the boogeyman, a short, distorted shape behind a four-door sedan. Its blue paint gleamed in the halo of her flashlight.

His voice was raw and monotone. “Annie? Annie?”

He sat slumped with his legs sprawled out before him, one foot rocking back and forth. His sneakers fit well. He hadn’t found these shoes. They belonged to him. Did that mean he’d been inside until the effect stopped or was he like P.J.?

Emily shoved her light at him as she moved around the car, needing to see his face.

A young man in his twenties squinted at her with a mouthful of blood. His forehead was also smashed. Then his eyes rolled like a startled horse, and he leaned away from her. To him,
she
was the boogeyman. Behind her light, her head must have looked inhumanly thick.

“Wait!” Emily ripped at her chin strap. “Wait.”

She knelt to his level and set her helmet on the street. The young man kept his face averted even as his gaze darted almost at random, stealing glances at Emily with his peripheral vision. He held an open cell phone, a pink phone that didn’t look like it belonged to a man.

His fidgeting and the way he avoided her eyes were typical of autists, but Emily needed more than that to make a diagnosis. He was obviously afraid. He was hurt.

“My name is Emily and this is Michelle,” she said.

His voice was too loud. “Can you help me find Annie?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Michelle whispered behind her.

Taking the young man with them would be a monumental complication. Could he walk? The two of them might barely be able to carry his weight, but Emily wanted people to help P.J., so she would help this young man.

She gave the flashlight to Michelle. Then she dabbed at the young man’s face with the cuff of her jacket sleeve, covering her scheme with this kindness. “Are you all right?” she asked. “What happened to your face?”

“I need to find Annie.”

Each of her collection kits held thirty VacuCaps, slender, sterile, two-inch vacuum tubes capped with butterfly needles. They were “purple caps” and contained an anti-coagulant called EDTA, which would prevent the blood from clotting.

Emily took one and removed its plastic sheath. She jabbed the needle into the inside of his elbow. The tube instantly drew itself full and she withdrew it from his arm.

“Ouch,” he said.

Emily discarded the butterfly needle, then replaced the self-sealing VacuCap in her kit. Ideally she would refrigerate the blood in order to slow the degradation of its ribonucleic acids. RNA was fragile. If the
proteins she wanted to sequence were destroyed, this sample would be useless. But she could only move so fast.

She helped the young man to his feet. “Let’s find Annie,” she said, relieved that he could walk. “Don’t touch the cars. Are you listening to me? Don’t touch the cars.”

Before they left, Emily glanced down at her helmet. She wanted to put it on, but hiding in her armor might damage her fragile rapport with him. She doubted the helmet would stop the effect in any case, although it might protect its wearer in combat.

“Michelle?” she asked. “Do you want the helmet?”

“Yes.”

They led him back to the intersection of Union and Beverly, where they turned west. If this fire had swept east, they might be able to navigate around the burn… but two blocks later, they were met with ruins again.

“We could spend all night backtracking. I think we need to go through,” Emily said, pointing north up Burlington Avenue.

Michelle was resigned. “All right.”

Despite her lab glasses, the ash stung Emily’s eyes and made her cough. Exploded cars were a larger problem. A chrome talon slashed Emily’s thigh and she cried out. Moments later, the wind filled with the smell of cooked meat. “Don’t look,” Emily said, shepherding the young man around six or seven bodies.

Three buildings had fallen into the street, dropping huge, charred dunes of brick and drywall across the motionless traffic. Emily cut both hands scrambling up a loose hill, then hurt her back pulling at the young man. Were these cars also electrified? Most had sagged on melted tires, bringing their frames into contact with the road, and Michelle wasn’t hurt when she slipped and banged against one.

The young man slowed them down. He was difficult. “My phone should be in my right front pocket,” he said. “This phone isn’t mine. My phone should be in my right front pocket.”

Emily’s impatience with him made her think of Laura and P.J. Then she felt wistful and sad. Exhaustion threatened to stop her. She wanted to sit and rest.

They staggered out of the debris at Court Street, a neighborhood of low-income apartments and student housing. The fire hadn’t jumped to the next buildings here. They had only the cars to contend with. There were no refugees, although they heard dogs barking and distant gunfire.

The gradual rise in the street leveled out. Beyond a series of duplex apartments, the sky glowed. Emily’s chest swelled with emotion when she realized the light was too steady and white to be a fire. The hospital had electricity. The emergency station was real.

“We’re almost there!” she said with a wild grin at Michelle and the young man. But as they rounded a family restaurant where Chase liked to get BBQ, her elation gave way to hopelessness.

Silver Lake formed a stout, two-tiered L with the long wing reaching seven stories. The shorter wing was five stories high. The hospital cradled its main entrance and its largest parking lots on its south side within the crook of the L. Smaller outcroppings grew from the west end, including a third-story helicopter pad.

Yesterday, the structure had been faced in mirrored glass. Tonight, the middle of its pristine surface was bashed apart. Had a rescue chopper missed the pad? Several windows on the lower floors were also cracked or destroyed. They looked as if they’d been shot out.

The hospital had become a fortress. Its parking lots were ringed with barriers, soldiers, and thousands of people. Somewhere a bullhorn shouted above the noise.

Emily turned off her flashlight. She did it to hide them from the other refugees, but losing its light was demoralizing.

“We’ll never get in,” Michelle said. “We should’ve stayed in the parking garage.”

“They’ll let me in and I need him if I’m going to run more tests,” Emily said. “We’ll say you’re his sister, my sister, whatever they need to hear.”

The hour they’d spent together felt like a lifetime. Michelle represented the only stability Emily had seen since stepping outside, and Michelle had proved heady and loyal.

“Please don’t leave me,” Emily said.

The three of them walked toward the riot. Emily kept one hand on the young man’s arm. She held her flashlight like a club.

Michelle gasped as four men charged toward them. But the men ran past. More shadows sat on the sidewalk. Other people had broken into the nearest buildings, invading offices and a sandwich shop. Were they making camp or searching for supplies?

“They’re turning everyone back,” a woman said.

Emily didn’t answer. Most of the crowds appeared to have formed at the southern face of the hospital where the big red
EMERGENCY
sign stood above the ER. Elsewhere, the mob was thinner. Emily led her companions toward the west side. She knew the doctors and nursing staff had private parking and a private entrance behind the lower, three-story addition on the west end beneath the helicopter pad.

The soldiers had used existing fence lines wherever possible. The rest of the barricades consisted of commuter cars, vehicles that men could roll or push from the parking lot after shooting out the tires and allowing the frames to come in contact with the ground. Some of the cars were upside down. The barricades were staggered with gaps, but gunshot bodies sprawled in most of the holes where refugees had attempted to run through and were killed—and the dead refugees made effective barriers of another sort for the soldiers waiting on the other side.

The crowds would have been an excellent place to gather blood samples. Many people were barefoot or wore mismatched shoes. There
were plenty of others in normal footwear, but wearing shoes wasn’t enough of a clue. She would need to look at them, talk to them, and there was no time.

The young man fought Emily as they pressed into the mob, and she lied to him. “Annie’s here!” she said. “She’s here!”

Floodlights glared on the far side of the barrier, glinting in the blood and reflecting through fractured windshields. The soldiers standing in the light wore helmets and black vests over their camouflage uniforms. More interesting, Emily noticed two soldiers with ropes tied to their waists. They also held their rifles in a funny way with the shoulder straps looped around their forearms.

They’re expecting another event,
she thought.
Then someone inside will drag them back into the hospital.

On the west side, a gate had been left between the overturned cars, although there were no less than fifteen soldiers in this space. All of them were roped. One man, an officer, was attempting to converse with the screaming survivors. People waved money at him—a cross—photographs—but he let no one through.