Interrupt (27 page)

He looked pitiless, even serene.

“A species wouldn’t adapt to anything as a natural part of their environment unless it was constant,” Emily said. Her voice was hushed. “Our two races must have diverged during a period of off-and-on flares. The Neanderthals rose to prominence during the effect, whereas
Homo sapiens
evolved for normal conditions.”

“You mean the sun has always been doing this,” Bowen said.

If modern man had unknowingly reacted to subtle changes in solar
activity, that would explain the increase in autistic children during the past decades. The Neanderthal had risen again within them as if welcoming the acceleration of the solar wind.

It was the worst possible news. What if the effect continued for years?

“But it will stop,” Emily said. “It’s because the flares stopped that the Neanderthals died off. They’re a niche species. They’re made for the world when it’s like this. The extra brain mass and overconnectivity… I remember a study in 2011 that showed incredibly similar activity in autists’ brains. Between their frontal and temporal regions, there were only eight genes that differed greatly. But in everyone else, more than five hundred genes showed differing levels.”

“That’s how they know each other,” Bowen said.

Emily nodded. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve tapped into some sort of ancestral memory. They may be less individual we are.”

She studied her nephew’s face again.

“I’m not sure how much of P.J. is left in there,” she said.

His name was Nim. The pack identified the boy by this low hum because it was the intonation he used the most himself.
Nnnnnnnn mh.
Each of them had their own sound.

Unfortunately, nothing else was familiar. They were eight men out of place and time, and the boy hesitated, which was unlike him. Too many of his reflexes had no correlation with his surroundings, so he interrogated the pack as he’d done repeatedly tonight.

“Nim,” he sang, conveying his own health and certainty.

“En,” a man answered,
Hnnn.

“Nim,” he sang.

“Han,” the next man hummed,
Hnnnh.

The base personalities of the pack were with him as always. They were rooted in each other and their ancient drives. For their kind,
self-awareness consisted mostly of verifying a shared mental state. The Neanderthal brain was built wholly upon hypermnesia and intuition, reinforcing these tools in each generation until even their psyches were fixed. Nim was their decision maker. The others supported him. It was a simple model that had made them an efficient, dominant species for tens of thousands of years.

Nim wasn’t surprised to live again. His thoughts were too rudimentary to gnaw at himself with such abstractions, although he was dismayed by his puny size. He’d been a child before, but never with such spindly arms and legs.

His subconscious had pushed his body for every available shred of strength, tearing ligaments in his thigh, distending the muscles in his arm. Pain was less important than stamina when the pack was in danger.

Nim could not understand the lights, which were steady now, but he’d gleaned the truth that this magic was man-made. Therefore the Dead Men were near. He remembered them like he remembered every element of his biosphere. The congested city could not have been less like the desolate terrain of the Ice Age, yet Nim was limited to one response.

This is our land,
he thought, not in discrete words but in stabs of emotion. It was as if his own blood spoke to him.

He lifted his hand to the swirling ash. Black flakes touched his palm. He looked from the hospital to the orange glow on the horizon farther east. Then he gestured twice, once in the direction of the flames, once at Silver Lake.

“Burn,” he sang.

The pack rose and fled into the night to retrieve torches from the distant inferno.

LOS ANGELES

D
awn lit Silver Lake. Sunlight intruded through windows and hallways, coloring the interior. On the ground floor on the main building’s north side, Emily walked toward Waiting Room 1 in a daze. She didn’t want to go inside Room 1, but she didn’t feel as if she had any choice. There was nowhere left to go.

An old woman stood by the door like a minister or a ghoul.

Good morning,
Emily thought, intending to greet her with a useless pleasantry until the old woman said, “He promised the world will end in fire! The rainbow is His sign it won’t be flood again.”

Emily stared at her. “I know the Bible,” she said.

“Fire!” The old woman was at least seventy, rail-thin and gray, yet dressed elegantly in a sapphire-colored suit. “Look at the sky! You’ll see Ezekiel’s wheels and fires exactly like the rainbow. Fire, not flood, that was His promise.”

“Leave me alone.”

The longest day of Emily’s life had stretched into morning. It was 4:57 a.m. She felt groggy and strained. She was excited, too, because her
lab work had gone well. She’d finally caught a break. Colonel Bowen couldn’t send his men outside to collect blood samples, but during the previous calm they’d taken six prisoners—six men who’d been found among the injured refugees with bloody hands and wounds of their own.

The men looked like they’d been fighting. Also, five of the six wouldn’t answer questions or make eye contact. A quick-thinking sergeant had brought them inside to prevent more attacks. Then the men were forgotten until rumors spread among the soldiers during P.J.’s feint at the hospital.

Emily’s sample base had been sitting under her nose all along. Statistically, six men were insignificant. She needed hundreds more, but the soldiers had given her something to work with in addition to the young man she’d found with Michelle.

Isolating their white blood cells in a centrifuge had been a matter of minutes. Next she’d run those samples through an Illumina sequencer for light RNA seq tests, a meticulous job that took hours. Then she’d loaded her results into Silver Lake’s computers and walked away to let the data process.

She needed sleep, but she couldn’t rest. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t leave. So she’d come to the hospital’s prep area like someone under a spell.

Waiting Room 1 was a windowless space where families could sit while their loved ones were in surgery. The walls were hung with soft paintings of flowers and mountains and black-and-red posters detailing legal support for the uninsured, although most of the tables and chairs had been thrown into a pile to clear the floor.

Thirty or more bodies lined the carpet. A few appeared to be sleeping. The rest were bent or contorted, a jumble of white eyes and teeth and gnarled hands.

“All of our sins, our pride and arrogance,” the old woman said. “The Lord has shown us what happens to the righteous and the unrighteous alike. This day has come and He will judge us.”

“You think God is doing this to us?”

“It’s the end of times.”

“Then why don’t you go outside!” Emily snarled at her. “If this is what God wants, why don’t you go out there?”

The woman smiled sadly. “It’s not me you’re angry with,” she said.

Embarrassment propelled Emily through the door. The old woman wasn’t to blame for the carnage. She was trying to be loving and good, but Emily felt like she would implode if she didn’t yell at someone.

Why are they keeping them in here?
she wondered.
As evidence?
She’d been told the hospital’s morgue—the refrigerated morgue—had been crammed with food taken from the building’s cafes and vendor carts, but tossing corpses into the waiting room wasn’t much better than leaving them where they fell. Bodies couldn’t be kept at room temperature.

“I forgive you,” the woman said behind her. “Jesus can, too.”

My mom must be thinking the same thing,
Emily thought.

Her mother’s faith had grown more severe after P.J. was born. Sometimes Emily felt like her devotion was a way to avoid the hardest questions. For Jana Flint, the morals of every situation were carved in stone. She didn’t try to look for solutions. She said P.J. had been born with ASD to teach them patience and grace, the implication being that his condition was also meant to punish Laura, or all of them, which Emily believed was cruel nonsense.

In the past few years, Laura and Emily had let their weak modern faith slip away almost completely. Laura was too busy with P.J. to go to service except at Christmas, and Emily was more interested in her work.

What if that had been an incredible blunder? She’d been so absorbed with her accomplishments and Chase and now…

Now…

More bodies had been stowed in the lounge than she’d realized. To her untrained eye, it was difficult to sort out the damage done to these
people. Some of it looked accidental like burns and crashes. Others appeared to have been intentionally hurt. Emily saw blunt trauma wounds and a horrible gash on a woman’s back.

She reached the end of the room without finding Chase. She turned to hurry out, making a ragged sound like laughter.

Then she froze. Chase had been so badly beaten she’d walked past him. Maybe she’d fooled herself, ignoring clues like his blue scrubs; his nice hands; his size.

Emily went lightheaded with sorrow and denial.
They didn’t know,
she thought.
They said they didn’t have him on the list and I was so sure.

She had to sit down.

Gasping, crying, she reached for his cold hand. He’d been here all along. In her mind, he’d been alive, lost somewhere in the pandemonium inside the hospital—but in reality, he’d probably died before she left DNAllied. Shouldn’t she have felt something?

Sometimes she despised her own genius. She’d let herself become preoccupied with new data and theories while her man lay dead in this stinking room.

We’re supposed to get married,
she thought.
We’ll buy a house. We’ll have a boy and a girl. They’ll go to school. We’ll work and save our money and do well and love each other. We’ll vacation in Hawaii and Europe.

We’re supposed to grow old together.

She wanted to think he’d been killed saving other people. He was thick-chested and strong, and the hospital was like his home. He would have defended it.

“There, there,” the old woman said from somewhere far away. Emily became aware of her again as she crouched at Emily’s side. “He’s gone to a better place,” the old woman said. “There, there. He’s in the Lord’s arms.”

Emily sobbed. “I d-don’t… I…”

“Let’s pray. We can pray for them all.”

I don’t believe there’s a big white man in the sky who’s going to welcome anyone home,
she thought, savage with grief.

In her bitterness, she recalled a historic Catholic church her family had visited on the East Coast when she was a teenager. Set in tile more than fifty feet across had been the face of a Christ as blond as Emily and with eyes even more blue, an implausible appearance for a Jewish carpenter born on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Depictions such as this were an easy argument that gods were made in man’s image, not vice versa. Emily and Laura had secretly discussed the subject many times before family dinners or Church events with their mom, and yet now it struck her—

Some people believed in evolution, others in the guiding hand of a Creator.

What if they were both right?

Emily reeled at the implications, because the solar flares were a reminder that life on Earth had been shaped by a force much greater than the planet itself.

Men had indulged in sun worship for millennia before Christianity absorbed those old faiths, transforming their rites and symbols to fit the new religion. The yellow disk of the sun became halos. Celebrations of the spring equinox and winter solstice turned into Easter and Christmas. For anyone who’d studied history, it was clear that man’s attempts to explain his existence had evolved through the ages… but what if primitive sun worship had been based on something real and accessible? Then they’d forgotten. They’d revised the story.

And now our violent and jealous God has returned,
she thought, weeping over Chase’s bloody corpse.

“Don’t fret,” the old woman said. “Don’t fret. He’s with the Lord. You can be, too. Your salvation is in the Lord.”