Interrupt (31 page)

“Hurry,” he said.

Julie saluted. He returned it. Her face was somber now, and he missed the elfin light in her eyes.

She ran west with the Guard lieutenant. Drew went east with Emily. Within seconds, they dodged a line of soldiers relaying jugs of liquid detergent from a laundry room. That must have been all they had left on this floor to douse the flames. Then he passed four Guardsmen gasping for breath as a medic cut away a female soldier’s charred pant legs. She squirmed and groaned.

Emily shouted at him. “The Neanderthals came here twice! They might come again.”

Drew didn’t answer.

“If there’s any chance of reaching them, it’s through me. I’m his aunt. I know him. P.J. might recognize me if we can talk.”

Drew stopped her to avoid a squad rushing in the opposite direction with armfuls of wet towels. The sight filled him with horror and respect. They had nothing better to wrap themselves in before approaching the flames, but Bowen’s soldiers were a long way from giving up.

He was harsher with Emily than he intended. “You’re not my only objective,” he said. “We can’t stay here.”

“We have to! P.J.’s our best bet to understand what’s happening. I can bring up his medical records if you can access local data banks. The rest of those men are John Does.”

“Why do you need his records?”

“Identifying a biomarker is just the first step. I can develop gene therapies that will cure them, but I need more positive controls. My sister paid for newborn screening. That means we have P.J.’s genotype.”

“You don’t sound like you’re sure about this Neanderthal stuff.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Yes. We have video nationwide.”

“Then you know how they breathe and sing.”

Drew reached the stairwell where he would meet Walsh. Blocking the way to the ground level were two desks and four soldiers. They were yelling at a horde of refugees on the stairs.

Emily extended one hand as if to grab Drew’s arm, then held back.
She’s afraid of me,
he realized. But that didn’t stop her.

Beneath the yelling, her voice was firm. “In early
Homo sapiens,
the larynx gradually dropped into the throat to allow for extra air intake for short-burst running. Neanderthals never made that adaptation. For them, surviving the cold was more important. That’s why their bodies were shorter and thicker than ours. That’s why they’re breathing funny.”

“It’s eighty degrees outside.”

“In periglacial Europe, wind chill might have put daytime temperatures at fifteen degrees Fahrenheit
in summer.
That’s why they
developed larger noses and larger sinus cavities. They inhale slowly to warm the air, then blow it out fast to make room for the next slow breath. It doesn’t matter now that they’re in a temperate climate. The behavior is hardwired.”

“I’ve seen them run.”

“The people outside aren’t true Neanderthals, and that’s not my point. Neanderthals could run. They probably just weren’t as fast as us. Everything is give and take. They sang because they couldn’t talk because they didn’t need language because they’re less individual than we are.”

Drew blinked at her logic, trying to keep up. He’d heard Bowen’s broadcasts of her theories. “You think they use ancestral memory,” he said.

“Yes. Even more important than the cold was the geomagnetic pulse.
Homo sapiens
developed an elastic skull and huge frontal lobes, but at the cost of weak spots at our temples. The Neanderthals had much heavier bone in their foreheads and comparatively tiny frontal lobes—anything to preserve their brain core. They’re more efficient than we are. We have more imagination.”

Emily shrugged, and Drew liked her for her ability to skim through eons of growth and transformation in so few words.

“There was interbreeding,” she said. “The Neanderthals are still inside us today, and I can prove it if you don’t waste this chance.”

The tenacity in her blue eyes was compelling. So was the fact that she wasn’t a stuck-up egghead whose main goal was to save herself. She didn’t even want to leave.

Drew understood what it was like to predict trouble before anyone else saw it. ROMEO had disregarded his initial warnings, too, and he didn’t know enough about her field to argue.

Could he be wrong for the right reasons?

Drew had no doubt the Chinese were using an EMP weapon. Solar activity created diffuse “noise” on a wide spectrum. No one would confuse man-made systems with this noise. Even if most of the havoc had
been caused by flares, the unusual pulses he’d detected above the South China Sea were artificial. The only question was how many EMP weapons China had deployed and if they had anything to do with the change in the sun, which seemed unlikely. Even DIA analysts had considered that a stretch.

Emily must have noticed the change in him because she hurried to say more. “Forkhead box binding protein two plays into a host of physiological attributes like wider chests and altered vocal abilities with increased range in tone. Who does that remind you of?”

“Cavemen. Singing.”

“There will be overexpressions of FOXP2 in the men I’ve tested. I expect the same for keratin, SELEN BP1, the list goes on and on, but I need a larger sample base to verify my biomarker and I need known subjects.”

“Why?”

“Positive controls. Listen to me. My sister paid for newborn screening, which means we already have P.J.’s genotype. In his case, a lot of the work was done years ago. That will save me days of work and
weeks
of computer time.”

Drew had said he wasn’t paid to think, but, ultimately, that latitude was inherent in every ROMEO mission. He was trained—authorized—to change his mind if the circumstances warranted it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take a squad to find your nephew.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“What?” He nearly laughed, and she saw it.

Her blue eyes sparked with anger and determination. “I can handle myself,” she said. “I walked through fifteen blocks of burning city to get here.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“We can fly after him.”

“No. I’m tight on fuel. Even if we located him, it’s unlikely we’d find room to land. We’ll go on foot. It’s too dangerous.”

She didn’t back off, which he admired.

“Most of the Neanderthals out there are dead,” she said. “The rest are badly hurt. You have guns. They have clubs. You need me.”

“Why?”

“How else can you get close to him?”

“We could shoot him.”

“You…” She visibly choked with new anger. “He’s an eight-year-old boy!”

“He led an assault on an entrenched position held by hundreds of trained soldiers, and he nearly won. But you’re right. He’s down to a few men, most of them wounded. I’ll trap them, Tase them, then bring ’em back. It’s high risk. You’re not coming.”

“What will a Taser do to a child?”

“He’ll survive.”

“You need me. I’m the only way to catch P.J. from a distance. He might recognize me. I can distract him. I’ll have the best chance of telling you where he’s gone and how he thinks. It’s a big city. How else will you find him?”

Drew studied her face, her certainty, her intelligence. He weighed her claims and her life against the millions of casualties outside.

What if Emily was the key to this whole thing?

Drew nodded and said, “All right. Come with me.”

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

T
hose people outside might be able to help,” Marcus said in the silence of the electronics room. “I know some of them. Maybe they can be… trained.”

The dim room was stifling and hot. It stank. Marcus had stripped down to his pants, walking the concrete floor in his bare feet, but there was no airflow and the buckets they’d used for toilets were overripe. Outside, the wind had quieted as the morning sun lifted into the sky, leaving a thick, muggy heat. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

“I see Kym again,” he said, standing awkwardly on a wire rack loaded with processors. The metal cut into his foot. That didn’t cause him to step off of the rack. He held himself steady against the pain, bending his neck to keep one eye at his spy hole.

The shafts he’d drilled through the reinforced walls were ill-placed. All five were against the ceiling, where he’d hoped these tiny openings would be shielded by the overhang in the structure’s roof. He was afraid of allowing the phenomenon through the walls—afraid of losing himself.

“They don’t look like they treat her differently,” he said. “I mean because of her eyes or skin color.”

The short Laotian girl seemed to be Chuck’s lover, playing a game very much like tag with him. They ran through the endless dishes of the array. Chuck caught her, released her, and caught her again, never quite kissing Kym yet nuzzling her ears and neck as she laughed and pressed her round body against him, flashing her white teeth.

Her voice sounded like music. She used no words, only laughter and teasing.

They were both shirtless, and Kym’s pants were undone, as if she found it too complicated to use the buckle sewn into the elastic waistband of her green calf-length pants. She wore no underwear. Marcus had seen too much of her when they darted close to the station. He was chagrined to find himself looking at all, but there was a sweet, unfettered sexuality in Kym’s movements he’d never seen before. Maybe he was more cognizant of her physical quality because he’d slept with Rebecca Drayer so recently. Kym’s every step was a dance. She seemed happy, almost intoxicated by her freedom.

Both of them were careless. Chuck’s shoulders were burnt red. Kym was brown-skinned and black-haired, well-suited for the sun whenever it blazed through the unsteady cloud cover… and yet her chin was bruised and her back had been abraded, leaving dots of blood and new scabs.

There were also two men watching from the hillside beyond the white dishes. Marcus couldn’t see their faces.

Was one of them Steve? Were they Rebecca’s soldiers?

More important, he wondered if those men were guarding Kym and Chuck from harm or waiting for their own chance with her. What if they were rivals for the girl?

Kym might not have been given any more choice in the matter than Rebecca. Marcus couldn’t guess if Kym had paired herself with Chuck
because anyone else would be even more unbearable. She might be pretending her attraction.

She might have forgotten resisting him.

As far as Marcus could tell, the people outside lacked all but the most fluid self-consciousness. They lived in the moment.

What kind of society would emerge among men and women who possessed only shreds of memory? It would be tribal at best, and Marcus believed Rebecca and Kym were the only females in hiking distance, although Chuck’s presence opened this assumption to question.

During the first interrupt, Chuck’s car must have stalled before he’d driven Roell more than forty or fifty miles from the array. Then he’d walked back. Maybe other people were climbing into the mountains—people like Roell.

“I’m going to shout at them again,” Marcus said. He leaned back from his spy hole and breathed slowly, making sure he had enough oxygen. The last time he’d started to yell, he hadn’t been able to stop. He’d yelled and yelled until he nearly fainted in the heat. Without the AC units, the electronics room was a Dutch oven absorbing the sunlight, and he needed to ration the barrel of fuel for the generator.

I have snacks and candy,
he thought.
Maybe I can push something through a hole and they can bring me water. Maybe, in time, they can do more sophisticated work.

They could help me with the array.

“Kym!” he yelled against the tiny hole. “Kymberly Vang! Chuck! Hey, Chuck!”

They’d frozen in their game. Kym held one forearm across her breasts. Was that modesty or a more basic instinct to protect herself? So help him, she looked like a doe or a purebred horse or a gazelle, compact and graceful.

He called to her like he would coax a dog or a horse. “Kymmie Kymmie Kymmie! Kymmie!”

It was an effort to keep his tone light, but she smiled at his cajoling. She was curious.

Chuck didn’t like her response. He took her arm and pulled her back.