Interrupt (34 page)

One of the men at the front of the new group raised his voice in answer, a wordless sound. Something about it seemed very familiar. What was it? But her pulse roared through her body like the wind. She was almost deaf with adrenaline and other questions—

Where were the Neanderthal women? In hiding? ASD affected four boys for every girl. Emily wondered faintly if these hybrids were exclusively male. If so, it could be another clue to saving them.

Meanwhile, the lieutenant and corporal hustled to rejoin Drew. In silence, the Neanderthals watched from a hundred yards away. They eased into the street, leaving the home on the corner. Each step was subtle, almost unseen. Their progress had the gliding quality of a nightmare.

“I’ll carry Julie,” Drew said, lifting up his right hand. Emily realized at least one finger was broken. The implication was he couldn’t use a gun, so he’d let the others protect the team.

From the embankment, Patrick said, “Sir, do you want me on that side of the fence or are you coming over?”

Drew shifted his pistol to his left hand. “We’ll run through the underpass,” he said. “Lieutenant, you take point. Sergeant, Corporal, you’re our tail. Fire only on my order. If they don’t chase us, leave them alone.”

Patrick’s boots clattered on the fence. Then he landed beside Emily, rousing her. Suddenly she fumbled through her pocket for a blood kit. Drew bent to hoist Julie over his shoulder as Emily darted past him, jabbing a VacuCap into the dark-haired man’s arm.

“What are you doing?” Drew asked.

“Give me a second.”

“Move!” Drew began to leave with his burden.

Following him, the Guard corporal picked up Julie’s M4 and then Drew’s, slinging both weapons over his shoulder. Patrick caught Emily’s arm and hauled her away from the dark-haired man. They stepped over P.J.

“Take the boy, too,” she said. “Please. He doesn’t weigh anything. You’re so big. I can’t—”

Their gathering speed triggered something in the Neanderthal pack. The nine men burst into a run. “Fire,” Drew said as the Guard lieutenant yelled from in front, “Watch it!”

Emily saw more Neanderthals ahead of them.

Guns blazed on all sides, overriding her mind, overriding any concern for P.J.’s body. She screamed and screamed as Patrick dragged her into the underpass, where their weapons hammered and echoed.

“Clear! We’re clear!” the lieutenant yelled, leading them from the south end of the tunnel.

Three men sprawled in the street. Emily barely noticed. Her panic was so total, her consciousness spread so thinly beneath her hysteria, she
retained few details of their escape. Gun smoke. Gunfire. One ray of naked sunlight.

There was also the leader’s high song amplified by the underpass. It was the same sound he’d made before.

More important, his voice dwindled behind them as they charged down Glendale Boulevard. Emily looked back before she turned onto Temple Street. The corporal was the farthest behind, skipping backward with his M16 at his hip. No one followed.

“They stopped!” she shouted. “They gave up!”

Drew growled at her from beneath Julie’s corpse. “They might be trying to flank us,” he said. “That’s twice they’ve caught us in a pincer.”

Emily’s head rang with the leader’s voice as she dodged through the cars and ash. She remembered how P.J. and the others had identified themselves at DNAllied. Every man had made his own sound—and yet P.J. had used this same drawn-out syllable.
Nnnnnnnmh.
What did it mean?

“I have movement on our right,” Patrick said, holding his M4 sideways. At first Emily thought he was covering the two-story windows above them. Then, beyond the rooftops, she saw a running shape on the highway.

“They’re following us,” Drew said.

“We’re almost there!” she said. “You don’t have to—”

Another voice called from her left. Three men stood at the corner of a small restaurant. Their leader sang to a fourth man farther up the street. Eerily, he also used the same formless word as P.J.

“Nnnnnnmmh!” he cried.

“Hnn!” the fourth man answered.

“Fuck, they’re coming out of the woodwork,” the lieutenant said. He took one knee beside an Audi, leveling his M4.

Drew ran past him. “Keep moving! Don’t stop!”

Emily’s thoughts felt like a meteor shower.
It’s the noise of the guns,
she realized. That was why the Neanderthals kept coming. The fight at
the hospital had attracted every group in the vicinity, and now they were paying the price.

At least that was what she told herself. Her most insidious fear was she’d been more accurate than she’d known while arguing with Colonel Bowen.

How many people had turned? One in a thousand? More?

“Here,” the leader sang. He was a tall man, six foot four, with gray hair, brown pants, brown loafers and a blood-stained length of pipe.

His name was Nim.

Two of his three men were Han. The last was En. They were accustomed to having many of the same people. The Neanderthals had just six base personalities, three male, three female, although some incarnations were more outspoken than the rest, allowing for a hierarchy even when a tribe held many Nims.

Their trios were an adaptation to a time when their species’ numbers had grown precariously small. They paired two husbands with each wife in the same manner that they hunted—always in threes—an eternal, instinctive effort to break loose of their limited diversity.

“Now,” he called, rushing into the street. The Dead Men were caught in a pocket among the cars. Nim did not understand the vehicles, which looked like metal boulders and burned at the touch, but he liked the traps created by the cars’ haphazard arrangement.

His hunters swarmed the enemy. Somehow the Dead Men knocked them back in a deafening roar of fire and hail. Nim twisted as pain skewered his middle. He fell, his club banging on the street.

His last thought was that the Dead Men’s weapons were too strong for his group, but killing one Nim was like killing ants.

There would always be more of him.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

T
he room had become too small for Marcus’s fear. There was nowhere to go except deeper into himself, sitting on two blankets he’d folded on the floor.

His notepad was rumpled and marked with grungy fingerprints because he’d fussed with it dozens of times, first recording everything he knew about the flares, then adding personal information. Like a man in the grip of schizophrenia, Marcus had also written a short list of instructions to himself.

The electronics room was not entirely safe from the pulse. The most intense spikes penetrated its walls. After he’d regained his senses the first time, the door was open and Rebecca was missing. He’d screamed for her, but he hadn’t run outside.

What if he had only seconds before this lull in the geomagnetic flux was over?

He’d shut the door, then wedged paperclips into the lock and stacked most of his supplies against the door, hoping to prevent himself from leaving if he suffered another blackout.

That decision was its own danger. If the pulse intensified again and remained at a high level, if he lacked the intelligence to pry open the lock, he would die in this room. But what was the alternative?

“You can’t leave,” Marcus said in the dark, suffocating quiet.

The notepad was his anchor. It was his last testament. He set it on his lap and studied the words he’d drawn and redrawn in ballpoint until the letters were dense black scars.

1) DON’T GIVE UP. WAIT.

2) YOU CAN STILL HELP ROELL.

3) READ PAGES 5 AND 8.

His handwriting was jagged on the pages inside. He hadn’t been sure there would be time to complete this record. Once started, he’d also found he had more to say than he expected, drowning in nostalgia and pain.

He longed for things that had never been—a better relationship with his son—more time together—another chance. Why had work seemed so important while Roell was growing up without him? Nothing mattered more than family, yet he’d let the boy slip away, obsessed with the stars and other marvels he could never touch instead of the small miracle of his son’s life.

Yesterday he’d wasted his best opportunity to find Roell, choosing to stay here instead. How much of that decision had been cowardice?

The truth wouldn’t have hurt so badly if his choice amounted to something, but Marcus had not been able to bring the array online. Too many of the processors and signal converters had fried when the pulse came through the room. He had a toolbox and screwdrivers, even a power drill, but not the spare modules he needed to repair the electronics. That equipment was in the assembly shed across the field, and he wouldn’t know if any of the extra modules had survived the pulse until he ran over there and checked.

If he lived, if he ever spoke to anyone again, he would never admit his first thought. He’d considered taking apart everything in the room—the processors, the shelves, everything. He could strip the ruined hardware for copper and steel, bolting another thin layer of armor to the ceiling. It might preserve him. But for what? His juice and soda wouldn’t last two days. His food wouldn’t last a week.

Even if he coaxed Kym and Chuck to the wall, he couldn’t push candy or chips through his spy holes. They couldn’t read or use words anymore. He had no way to pantomime
Bring me water
that they could see, and a hole large enough to show his face would probably allow the pulse inside.

1) DON’T GIVE UP. WAIT.

He needed to drink as little as possible without becoming so weak he couldn’t run. If there was another lull, he could sprint outside and refill his bottles. Then he would rush to the assembly shed and gather what he needed. His notepad was crammed with checklists.

If he could bring the array online again, he might be able to analyze the sun’s activity. He might even predict the course of the storm. Imagine if he could tell the world when it would be safe to find their families! A radio or a cell phone might work if the pulse stopped. More soldiers would come. So he didn’t sleep. He didn’t dare rest his eyes. His body was sluggish with fatigue poisons that caffeine and sugar couldn’t wash away, but if he closed his eyes, he was afraid he’d sleep for hours and miss any hint that Kym and the others had turned normal again. They would yell or cry or there might be footsteps inside the station if he could only wait.

Despite everything he’d told Rebecca, Marcus had hoped the first interrupts were the peak of the solar max. With luck, the flares would stop again for years or lifetimes. He would be insane to hope for anything else.

“You’re not insane,” Marcus said. But there were more sinister thoughts inside him now than the prospect of starving to death in this lonely cage.

After Rebecca’s team had commandeered the station, he’d never had a moment to open the files he’d received from NOAA. Today he’d examined their data closely before his Mac burned out.

Why are you reading about ice caps and lava beds?
Kym had asked.

“Because solar flares leave nitrates in the ice, and cooling lava records some properties of Earth’s magnetic field,” Marcus said. He was barely aware that his conversation was one-sided. “There are sample cores from Antarctica dating back four hundred thousand years. The ocean beds are even older. Some of the lava fields under the Atlantic show fifty million years of magnetic shifts.”

He looked down at his empty left hand, remembering the feel of Rebecca’s fingers interlocked with his own when they first ventured outside.
I don’t understand,
she’d protested.

“The pulse isn’t going to stop,” he said.

Marcus was not a fatalist. He had always been pragmatic, making the most of observable data, but there was no way to fight the sun. What if Rebecca had sensed his despair, shared it, and realized what might happen between them if they were trapped in this room forever? Starvation. Madness.

Could that be why she’d run outside?

For decades, NOAA’s Paleoclimatology Program and the National Snow and Ice Data Center had gathered information from ice scientists and biologists everywhere in the world. Many of the contributing studies were focused on global warming or marine habitats. Others were more interested in the ancient pollens, dust, and insects preserved by glaciers and polar ice.