Interrupt (28 page)

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Pray with me,” the old woman said.

“I—”
It can’t hurt,
Emily thought.

Could praying actually help? Some monks and holy men were able to reach such states of self-possession, they slowed their own hearts or went days without food. What if that level of concentration could somehow guard them against the effect? Praying might be a natural attempt to focus their minds.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” Emily said as the old woman joined her in the Lord’s Prayer, which had been imprinted upon Emily years ago in Sunday school. “I shall not want.”

The ritual calmed her pain.

Then she remembered another of the Bible’s ancient myths.
The tower of Babel,
she thought. The legend told of a race of men struck down from above, left senseless and unable to communicate with each other. Had that been an isolated event? How long did it last?

Before she left, Emily reached for Chase’s hand again. She wanted to keep his class ring.

I’ll wear it with my engagement ring, always.

She took off her own ring, slid his larger band on her finger, then replaced hers. She wanted to kiss him goodbye, but she couldn’t look at his bludgeoned skull.

I love you,
she thought.

Emily went to the lists of known dead before searching for food. The emptiness inside her went beyond hunger. It seemed more important to write his name. Chase deserved their respect, and she was furious that he’d been dumped in the waiting room like garbage.

The third-floor nurses’ station was one of the many places she knew inside Silver Lake. Typically she met Chase at restaurants or didn’t see him until he came home, but a handful of times, she’d surprised him while he was on shift. Thanksgiving. Valentine’s Day. Chase worked
many holidays, and Emily enjoyed rewarding him with fun things like flowers, two slices of pumpkin pie, or a peek inside her blouse. Once they’d made out in a stairwell.

Her memories faded as she blundered through a knot of police and medical staff.

“Watch it!” a cop said.

The third floor was being used for post-op recovery. At five in the morning, it was also a safe place for off-duty soldiers and cops to rest. The voices around her were low and tight except for one man shouting in a private room.

Everywhere, people slept in the halls.

At the nurses’ station, seven men and women filled a space meant for four. Two of them had functioning laptops. The rest were sorting handwritten notes, struggling to organize a deluge of new charts.

They glanced up as Emily stopped by the three clipboards pinned to the wall. One man seemed to recognize her. He reached for his phone. Emily ignored them. She was certain she was a mess, red-eyed and disheveled. Her outsides matched her soul.

First P.J., now Chase. What if Laura was gone, too?

The clipboards held the truth. Dozens of names had been scrawled on the white sheets with stark, irrefutable power. Adding his name would be like carving his tombstone. It might be the only testament Chase received.

Where would they bury him? Beneath the trees in the parking lot? Even if the flares stopped, no one had time to dig more than a few mass graves.

Emily took one breath and then another. Somehow she closed her hand on the magic marker tied to the first clipboard. She removed the cap. It was blue. Most of the handwriting on these pages was a well-practiced cursive, small and neat. She wrote his name in large block letters as masculine as possible.

Chase, Michael Coughlin, M.D.

“Miss Flint!” someone yelled. “Miss Flint!”

Mrs. Coughlin,
she thought. But it would never be.

The yelling man was Captain Walsh. He’d brought two soldiers as an escort.

“Here,” Emily called.

Walsh jogged through the crowded hallway. “Colonel Bowen needs you in the command center,” he said. His men roused the sleeping cops and Guardsmen. The noise level increased as everyone grabbed their weapons.

“What’s wrong?” Emily asked.

“They’re back,” Walsh said.

“Is it the same group? My nephew?”

“We’re not sure yet. There are more of them.”

“That’s probably where they’ve been all night—looking for each other. How many?”

“Almost thirty.”

Emily hurried after Walsh into the milling soldiers. She glanced back at the clipboards, torn between her heartbreak and her sense of duty until she discerned something in Walsh’s stone face. He wanted to hide something from the men around them.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

“Most of them have torches. They’re flanking us on the east and south,” Walsh said, lowering his voice, but in his words, Emily heard the old woman’s prophecy.

The world will end in fire.

LOS ANGELES

O
n the second floor of the hospital’s west end, Emily rushed into the command center with Walsh. She felt like a burning car that had crashed and bounced and—in seconds—might crash again.

Bowen stood at the bank of laptop screens with his officers and Guardsmen. “We’re sitting ducks,” he said.

In the gray dawn, beyond the parking lot and barricades to the southeast, their cameras showed running groups of three and six. Fire gleamed in every man’s hand, leaving yellow-white trails where their torches were too bright for the laptop displays.

“The Neanderthals waited for sunrise,” Bowen said.

Emily glanced at his bunching fists. “Can we try our lights again?” she asked.

“No. They’re too close.”

“Then why did you bring me here?”
I can’t watch this,
she thought, and yet her gaze remained on the computer screens.

She hadn’t spotted P.J., although the resolution of the video feeds
had improved. Their cameras were no longer on night vision. Bowen’s recon teams were sighting through binoculars or using the cameras’ own zoom power.

Her watch read 5:41.

The streets were black with ash and shadows. Even the men were smudges except for their firebrands. They shifted through the wreckage, circling, hiding, then creeping forward again. They’d almost reached the barricades.

“I don’t want to kill anyone, but my first responsibility is to defend this stronghold,” Bowen said. “Give me a reason to tell my sniper teams to stand down.”

“If we try our lights—”

“Drawing them into the building would be insane. They’re here to burn us.”

“They might come close enough to talk!”

Bowen shook his head. “I was told your lab work is going well. Is that true?”

“Yes.” Emily said anything she could think of. “I’m sure we’ll see overexpressions of keratin and FOXP2. That’s enough for a biomarker. We can use it for roughshod blood tests and the first steps of a new gene therapy.”

“But we’ll have to inject each man, is that right? You can’t fix one person and have him spread it like a cold?”

“No. I’d insert tailored genes into a retrovirus, which would need to be individually delivered in a tiny amount of blood plasma with a hypodermic. Then the genes will make functional—”

He pointed at the video feeds. “Can you stop those men?”

“With what?”

“The virus you just talked about. A nerve toxin. Anything.”

Emily swallowed hard, wondering if she had the courage to pick up a gun herself. What if the fighting came to that? “I don’t know how
to make bioweapons,” she said. “Even if I did, we’d need more time and—”

“Get her out of here,” Bowen said, gesturing at Walsh. Then he turned to another officer. “Snipers ready.”

She couldn’t protect P.J. anymore. Bowen needed to do anything necessary to stop the Neanderthals before they incinerated Silver Lake or drove everyone out of the hospital.

Walsh took her arm, but he was halfhearted in pulling her away. Maybe he’d expected more from her, too.

“Tell the engineers to move back,” Bowen said.

“Sir, our claymores are off-line in sectors three, four, and eight,” an officer said.

Somehow the soldiers had placed anti-personnel mines outside the building as a final line of defense. Emily could see the explosives marked in the sketches posted on the wall. Most lined the barricades to the south, but the sketches showed others at the back entrances on Silver Lake’s north and west sides. Unfortunately, some of the mines had failed.

“I want squad weapons at every entrance,” Bowen said. “Order grenades as a last resort. We don’t want to bring this place down on ourselves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fire.”

It was a simple word. It knocked Emily’s breath away.

She heard muffled gunshots from the front of the hospital. Then the sound was lost as the refugees on the ground floor screamed.

On the computer screens, outside, a dozen men jerked back like puppets. One fell in a puff of red mist, his torch igniting his hair. But he wasn’t dead. He thrashed and bucked.

Emily resisted the urge to cram her hand against her mouth.

Too much was happening too fast.

Was this really P.J.’s group? They’d last seen him near midnight. He shouldn’t have needed six hours to bring torches from the city. Why would he come back at all? They were imprisoned in this building while he could travel at will. Fighting them was pointless, which meant the men outside might be a completely different group.

Maybe he’s safe,
Emily prayed.

In the parking lot near the south entrance, Nim staggered as something bit through his shoulder. It shook embers from his torch onto his arm, but he didn’t stop. He redirected his momentum, lowering his arm and the torch’s weight to send himself sideways and back. The barricades were a few feet behind him.

“Down!” he sang, calling to his survivors.

He saw three men retreat and take cover. Finally he knelt, peering into the open.

Inside the barricades, the hospital’s main parking lot was lined with cars, but too much of the asphalt field was exposed. In it, eight men lay bleeding. Above, sunlight played through the hectic clouds.

One of the injured was Han. Encrusted in ash, Han squirmed on his elbows as if to find Nim. Blood ran in obscene puddles from his back.

Only luck had saved Nim when death took so many others, yet the killing force wasn’t imperceptible. It had direction. It had originated from points to his north and east along the building’s face.

The killing force also had sound. Seconds after most of his hunters were leveled by the first volley, Nim’s eyes and ears had also detected four near misses where dust leapt from the ground or unseen objects slammed into the cars. In the pattern, he’d glimpsed safe zones where the Dead Men could not reach.

Perhaps those zones were changing?

He hadn’t anticipated their magic where he’d been hit, so he
waited, reevaluating every clue. He sang. “Nnnnnnnn mh!” he cried, finding his hunters.

“Hnnn!” En answered, then a second man, and a third.

Other survivors joined their song as Nim inspected his shoulder. The gash was no worse than other cuts and bruises he’d sustained as they pushed through the city, so he dismissed the pain. Who else was alive? Where were they?

Listening to them, Nim perfected the map in his head, swiftly calculating sixty-two positions—twelve able-bodied hunters, nineteen wounded or killed, and thirty-one reports of near misses. He saw how the dead meshed with the living. There were interlocking lanes of danger and safety.

He called new orders to his survivors, sending each man into a safe zone for their assault.

“What are they waiting for?” Emily shouted, but no one heard her in the torrent of voices.

The soldiers’ discipline was unraveling. None of them had slept. Now their shouting grew wild. Bowen didn’t notice Emily when she pressed in close beside him.

On their screens, behind the barricades at the southeast, human shapes and torches were briefly visible—a shoulder, two heads, a running man—and yet they went unharmed by Bowen’s snipers. That was why the soldiers were yelling at each other.

“If we can see someone, we should be able to get a weapon on him!” Bowen argued with an officer, who said, “Sir, our cameras are farther out than our shooters. We don’t have anyone directly above the south entrance.”