Interrupt (42 page)

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

S
hh, boy,” Drew said, scratching the ruff of Orion’s neck. The golden retriever crouched between Drew and another man on a hillside above the Feather River, which had overflowed, creating a broad, muddy current dotted with tall cottonwood trees. Incongruously, the top of a
SPEED LIMIT 35 MPH
sign also rose from the water. A road lay beneath the flood.

Across the valley, dozens of homes sat in the river, but those shapes were difficult to see through the gray drizzle of the rain.

Drew kept his 17x SSDS sniper’s scope aimed upstream, watching the people in the mist with his good eye. Four hundred yards away, a Neanderthal tribe bunched together among more cottonwoods and walnut trees. “I count thirty,” he whispered.

“Shit.”

“Don’t move. We’ll let them go first.”

“Shit. Oh shit.” The man on the other side of Orion scribbled on his waterproof pad, then tucked it away and shouldered his M4.

The three of them lay on their bellies, the two men and the dog. Drew had steadied his 7.62mm M40A5 sniper’s rifle on a broken oak branch with one hand in order to sink his other fingers into Orion’s fur.

He was careful not to tug at the custom-fit mesh sleeve on the retriever’s skull. Like both men, Orion wore M-string. His trainer said he’d removed it once under controlled circumstances. Orion had turned feral, snapping at his trainer and the other observers. If he hadn’t been leashed, he would have run. Like cats and horses, dogs were smart enough to lose something in the pulse. Higher mammals such as apes and elephants were surely affected, too.

In his right mind, Orion enjoyed contact. So did Drew. Golden retrievers were sweet dogs and eager to please. Drew took as much comfort in Orion’s loyalty and warmth as in the canine’s heightened senses, which reached much farther than Drew’s ears and nose. Orion was like a living radar unit even in the storm.

Sleet pattered through the willow brush and the tangle of the uprooted tree he’d chosen for their hiding place. The icy rain drummed on his helmet and soaked through his jacket collar and his pants, drawing away his body heat everywhere except his scalp and his torso, which was wrapped in the firm, clammy bulk of a Kevlar vest. His boots were wet. His gloves were wet. His fatigues and long johns and underwear were wet.

He knew he shouldn’t love it out here, but he did. The freedom he possessed on each mission came with many risks, and yet the desolation held undeniable beauty.

Rain slashed at the slow-moving water. The wind whipped through the trees. There was a timeless Zen quality to the landscape, in part because the clouds reduced the light to a constant heavy gloom except at dawn and sunset. Every day felt identical.

It was the enemy that was changing.

Something’s not right,
Drew thought, moving his scope from the Neanderthal group to the river.

The trees and brush submerged in the flood were snarled with natural debris and garbage—plastic bags, bottles, cans, and more eye-catching things like a toy robot and a blue sofa cushion. Much nearer, several cars had lodged themselves in the shallows, adding steel-and-glass boulders to the mess.

But in places, the junk looked like it had been stacked or fitted together, creating handholds for anyone trying to cross the river. Why would the Neanderthals bother to construct something so permanent unless more of them had come through here or were on their way?

“I think other tribes have crossed here before,” Drew whispered. “The water must be shallower than it looks, and check out the bank. There are too many footprints in the mud.”

“Shit.”

“How close could someone get behind us before Orion smelled him?”

“In this wind? A hundred feet. Closer. Oh shit.”

Orion’s handler, Bob Macaulay, had been a civilian trainer attached to a sheriff’s unit before the pulse. He was brave and willing, but wholly out of his element.

As a pair, Macaulay and Orion were certified in wilderness, avalanche, and urban search and rescue. Now they ran combat ops with Drew. Their shattered nation had been reduced to using every available resource to evaluate and track the Neanderthals. Sometimes they also engaged the enemy, harassing scouts or entire tribes away from valuable sites. Operatives like Drew were also collecting blood and hair samples, not only to develop vaccines or cures but also for bioweapons specifically designed to incapacitate or kill the Neanderthals.

He hadn’t told Emily about the weapon programs, some of which were under way in Bunker Seven Four directly alongside her own research. There was a lot he hadn’t told her. She would despise him for
taking any part in genocide even if it wasn’t his decision. He was under orders. In any case, those programs were classified, which meant instead of arguing with her, he could enjoy her smile each time he went back inside.

Emily was dependable, sensible, and brilliant, not as hard as Julie, yet equally tough. She was unselfish.

The influence of her example had made Drew a better leader. He glanced past Orion at Macaulay, wanting to encourage him. Macaulay’s skin was pale beneath his helmet, especially in contrast to his red beard, although most of his lack of color was due to his Irish heritage and a month without sun. Macaulay’s eyes were steady, if frightened.

Drew nodded in approval. He’d tried to drill it into all of his men that they were no longer lions. They were mice. They had aircraft and firepower, body armor, binoculars—and they would be overwhelmed in a toe-to-toe fight.

They were the minority now. Just today, including this new group, Drew had spotted half as many Neanderthals as the total population of Bunker Seven Four. The maps in his breast pocket were scrawled with circles and arrows projecting the locations of twelve known tribes.

The enemy was on the move, heading east and north. Despite the weather, the Neanderthals were hiking into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. Aerial surveillance indicated that some of them had gone deep into the mountains. Apparently they’d mobilized across the continent. No one was certain what they were doing, but their migration kept them in constant contact with the ROMEO and Army squads outside. The platoon of Special Forces at the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field had been brushed aside twice, surviving only because they fell back. The array would have been lost if the Neanderthals had any interest in destroying it. Instead, the enemy merely passed through.

Marcus said the Neanderthals were drawn north because modern-day America was too warm even with the rain. Their instincts were geared toward colder climates.

Independently, Emily had pointed out the geographic similarities between California and Europe. The oceans were to the west, the wind came inland, and there were mountains visible in the east. This place was a lot like the Neanderthals’ ancestral home. Maybe they were more fixated on the West Coast because of it. Drew had never seen anything like this dogged human tide. Nothing stopped them—not the flooding; not the dense wreckage on the highways; not the hundreds of thousands of primitive
Homo sapiens
in their paths.

More and more, they also looked the part. Their hair was long and knotted. The men wore beards. They’d found canvas and leather in the abandoned towns, fashioning rough vests, kilts, and leggings. Their weapons were bone and rock.

“Okay, the tribe’s getting up,” Drew whispered. “Scouts first. If I say so, run.”

“You think they saw us?”

“No. But if they circle into these trees, they might. Leave your pack. Weapons only.”

Macaulay looked at Orion. His first priority was his dog. The two of them were like brothers. The golden retriever’s fur was lighter than Macaulay’s red-brown hair, but not by much. Consciously or not, Drew supposed their similar coloring was why Macaulay had picked Orion as a pup.

I’m sorry,
Drew added silently, watching six of the Neanderthals trudge in their direction, then split in half. One threesome angled away. The other trio came straight at them, probably to gain a vantage point on the hilltop.

Drew had been too aggressive in sneaking closer when Orion detected a human scent. He owed it to Julie. If he didn’t succeed, her sacrifice was a waste. That was why he’d overcommitted. He’d hoped Orion had found a lone trio of hunters far from their tribe, so he’d left the rest of his eight-man team on the other side of the hill in order to minimize noise and movement, crawling after Orion through the oak
and brush. Both Drew and Macaulay carried Tasers for subduing the enemy at close range. They could have handled three hunters. A tribe was too much.

What could he do? He had no way to call in air support. They’d left the Osprey at Beale AFB to conserve fuel and wear and tear, hiking the seventeen miles to the river, and radios didn’t work in the pulse.

There also wasn’t as much cover as he would have liked. At this elevation, a few hundred feet above sea level, the environment was in jeopardy. Week after week of rain and near-freezing nights had confused the oaks and cottonwoods. Their leaves had browned, then ripped away in the storms. Then the heaviest trees pulled loose from the sodden earth as the hillsides crumbled and slid.

The mud should have been an equalizer, also slowing the Neanderthals, but Drew knew how tireless they could be. More unsettling, he’d also heard of several cases in which Neanderthals had been identified as handicapped people who’d risen from their wheelchairs or other medical assists. Something in the brain was making them stronger. They were rewired for incredible endurance.

Drew guessed he had two minutes before the scouts either discovered his position or went past.

Two minutes was an eternity. He settled even more fully into the mud, growing still. If he couldn’t gather hair and blood for DNA, his next objective was to record individual details. Across the world, mathematicians were running stats in every effort to help the geneticists and mission planners.

“I see two women in the group,” he whispered. “They’ve also got an old guy about fifty.”

Macaulay squirmed behind his M4. “I don’t have my pad out,” he hissed.

“Just help me remember.” Females were rare. So were adults older than forty, like Marcus. “One of the women has Down’s features. I think she—”

Macaulay began to rise. “They’re too close!”

“Shhh.” Drew scrunched his fingers in Orion’s fur again as if doing so might calm Macaulay. The dog had started to growl inside his chest, reacting to his partner’s fear as the nearest scouts reached the base of the slope.

This game of hide-and-seek would have been different in the mountains, where evergreens were adapted to winter temperatures. Snow levels were fluctuating between four and six thousand feet elevation at night. When the seasons changed to autumn and winter, it would come lower. Much lower.

What would these valleys look like in two hundred years? Marcus said the pine forests would expand as deciduous species like walnut, oak, and cottonwood retreated all the way to the ocean, persisting only in the warmest regions along the coast.

There were Christians inside the bunker who called the deluge another Great Flood. Marcus said flood myths appeared in most cultures around the world. A few were stories of natural disasters like Atlantis, which some geologists attributed to the Thera volcanic explosion and tsunamis in the Mediterranean in 1600 B.C. or the catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea four thousand years earlier. More common were accounts of divine punishment visited upon mankind by various gods, such as the Biblical and Quranic accounts of Noah’s ark or the much older Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. Places as diverse as Fiji, Iceland, South America, North America, and Asia all had legends in which only the righteous survived or in which human beings first arose from primeval waters that had cleansed the planet.

Drew thought that sounded a lot like people who’d woken up after a period of flares. Seismic and volcanic activity caused by the pulse, in tandem with rapid climate change, must have slammed Earth again and again—and it wasn’t only plant life that was fading.

He’d seen flocks of birds clinging weakly to rooftops and trees. Others lay dead by the hundreds like wet leaves made of feathers and claws.

A few birds would survive and adapt. They’d done it before. They would do it again. Drew was a long way from giving up. Like men, animals were tenacious. Some of the reptiles would hibernate out of season, trying to outlast the rain, and he rejoiced each time he spotted a dripping wet coyote or mud-faced raccoons. Countless rodents lay drowned in the fields or jammed like driftwood on the riverbanks with larger creatures like cattle and human beings.

The primitive
Homo sapiens
were starving. They were sick. Drew estimated the death toll in the tens of thousands. No one could keep fires burning in the rain, and the drowned animals were rotting and contaminated.

The worst part was they were surrounded by homes and supermarkets, but they didn’t understand cans or boxes or bags. In the first few days, they’d devoured the fresh produce and bread. Then they began to go hungry or ate raw meat or grass or leaves, which wasn’t enough. Again and again Drew had seen the primitives huddling together like birds—thirty of them on a farmhouse porch, ten of them on the lee side of a ridge—listless and weak, dully waiting for a break in the downpour.