by Jeff Carlson
“Help me,” Emily said. “Please.” She didn’t want to hear it anymore. Ray kept saying her family would want her to be safe, but he was only trying to justify his own cowardice.
Emily couldn’t stay. Yes, she hoped to find Laura and Chase, but there was another reason to go. Emily had a theory about what was happening—an unlikely, fantastic theory—and yet the evidence was too compelling.
She was determined to find out.
She double-checked her sneakers, a pair of men’s running shoes stolen from a coworker’s desk. They were too big, so she’d stuffed the toes with extra socks and laced them tight.
She also had a backpack loaded with snacks, water bottles, a first aid kit, a radio, AA batteries, and mace. There was pepper spray in her front pocket, a map of the downtown area in her back pocket, and a heavy flashlight to occupy one hand. She wore clear plastic lab glasses and a leather jacket despite the heat because the roads would be littered with ash and wreckage. She hadn’t forgotten the gangbangers or P.J.’s crowbar, either.
Her jacket pocket also held a blood collection kit. There were more in her backpack. Emily had enough VacuCaps to draw samples from two hundred people.
“I’m leaving,” she said, gesturing at the barricade. Ray didn’t move and she said, “You don’t want anyone to know you’re in here, right? If I have to pull those desks away by myself, it’ll be noisy.”
“Just wait.”
“Ray—”
“What if you don’t come back?”
That’s what he’s really afraid of, Emily thought. She actually smiled, feeling protective of him. It was a welcome emotion compared to her anxiety.
“If I have to come back, I will,” she said. “And if I find help, I’ll send them for you.”
At sundown, everyone would turn normal again. Emily was sure of it. She had to be sure, because if she was wrong, what difference did it make if she was fine when everyone else she knew was gone?
She planned to cross the city during the night. At worst, she’d cover it in stages. If necessary, Emily hoped she could make it from one safe place to another, leapfrogging her way to the hospital and then to Laura’s house even if the journey took two or three nights.
Ray didn’t realize his terror was amplified by his own immobility. The thought of being caught by the effect made Emily shiver, but she would take that gamble in order to help her family. If she could draw her blood samples… If the hospital had emergency power…
Emily believed the military would use Silver Lake as a base if they’d come into the city. Hospitals were priority assets in any disaster. The Army might have working communications, and, equally important, most of Silver Lake’s fourth floor was dedicated to oncology research labs. DNAllied had the equipment she needed—but without electricity, the DNAllied building was useless.
She also wanted Chase. Oh, how she wanted his self-assurance instead of Ray’s stubborn attitude.
She got up and began to haul the furniture from the door. They’d stacked desk chairs on top of the heavier desks. She removed one and nearly dropped another before Ray joined her.
At last, the exit was clear. Emily returned to her backpack and the crude armor she’d devised. She planned to wear a helmet even after the effect had stopped. Maybe it would help. What if she was trapped in the open at sunrise?
The helmet was bulky, but it was her best effort, ripping the guts from two computer towers and keeping two steel panels, banging the corners into shape with a fire extinguisher. Then she’d cinched both parts together with shoelaces. Two fins would rest on her shoulders, although she couldn’t expect them to keep the helmet in place. Velcro ties needed to be wrapped around the outside, one as a chin strap, the next across her forehead. It wasn’t a process she could manage alone.
“Ray?” she asked, holding up the straps.
He joined her on the floor. Emily paused before donning her helmet. She’d avoided sharing her theory because Ray was upset, but he was right about one thing. If she didn’t come back, someone else had to carry on. Ray could preserve her notes in case the Army really did rescue him in a few days.
“I wrote down where I’m going and everything I’ve seen so far,” she said. “Here.” She handed him three folded sheets of paper. Her pack held a duplicate copy along with several flash drives protected inside an Altoids tin. “We also have backups of my statistical models in my office. UCLA’s supercomputer is probably okay, too, if we can reach it.”
“Why would you go there?”
“The data, Ray. Our gene therapies. They’ll need it.”
The two of them waited in the growing dark, flashlights off, laptop off, gazing at the street outside. It had been maddening to be so limited in what she could see or hear—because of that it had taken all day to figure it out.
“They’re cavemen,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re not zombies, they’re cavemen! Look at them. They work together. There’s a social structure. They’re just not very sophisticated.”
Thirty people had set up camp in a gas station down the street, using the mechanics’ bays for shelter. The men had found weapons among the many tools, and the building was surrounded by an open parking lot, which made it easier to guard. There was probably food in the cashier’s office and water in the restrooms, although Emily cringed at the idea of drinking from public toilets. Maybe they’d figured out the sinks.
“I’ve been studying them,” she said. “They’re not stupid, they’re more primitive. They’re literally like primates. I’d give anything to know what’s happening to chimpanzees and the great apes. Are they also acting weird? Are they the same?”
“I don’t…”
“Those survivors remind me of chimps. They don’t talk much, definitely not as much as you’d expect people to argue during the end of the world. Most of their communication seems to be gestures or simple sounds.”
Ray shook his head.
“P.J.’s group was different—more organized,” she said.
“You’re imagining things.”
“You didn’t see him, Ray,” she said, worrying that more imagination was exactly what they needed. Ray’s lack of flexibility wouldn’t accomplish anything except heavier barricades at the doors.
He wanted to ignore the signs. She couldn’t.
All mammals had the same bump of nervous tissue they’d inherited from the reptiles—the brain stem—a primordial glob at the top of the spine. It was the most basic part of them. Eat. Sleep. Reproduce. Fight. Emily believed everyone caught by the effect was limited to the brain stem and the occipital lobes, which processed visual input. They probably retained some function elsewhere throughout the brain, although this activity must be sporadic except in P.J.’s kind. And if some people were cavemen, her nephew was…
Emily could barely admit to herself what she was thinking. She recognized her own inclination to explain any trait as genetic, but she might be one of the few people left with the education to fit the pieces of this puzzle together. How many other biologists, anthropologists, or scholars were still alive, much less protected from the outside?
The primitives’ main objective was food. They foraged through the landscaping for leaves and bark, which seemed inedible, and yet Emily saw them chewing on this greenery as well as the fruit and bread they found in surrounding buildings.
This group was strictly Caucasian. Two other groups had appeared only to retreat after a show of yelling and mock combat, thrashing at the air with their hands.
The streets of L.A. must be overrun with survivors. Dividing themselves into rival packs only created new obstacles, and yet all three groups had assembled themselves along ethnic lines. The first intruders had been Hispanic. The next group had been black. The primitives were racist in the truest sense of the word, using skin colors like uniforms.
They understood fire, too. Two hunters had returned with a bowlful of embers, nursing this heat into flames against the out
side of the garage. They had no concept of the gas pumps or the propane tank nearby. Nor did they care that they were permanently stripping the area of fuel, killing trees for bark and branches, uprooting brush. Late in the afternoon, they’d cooked a dog, piercing hunks of its carcass on metal shafts.
Emily and Ray had also seen two primitives copulating on their knees right in front of everyone else, a man in his thirties and a girl, maybe sixteen.
She was the teenager Emily had tried to help near the freeway. Emily recognized her striped knee socks. Watching them, Emily had flushed with horror, but the girl made a show of laughing as she pushed her rump against the man.
Emily had been relieved when Ray coughed and walked away, leaving her alone at the window. Did he think she was gross for staying to watch? She needed clues. Odds were the girl hadn’t known the man before, so what had set them off? A look? A scent? More than once Emily had felt a glint of attraction for a stranger herself; a tall man on the sidewalk; a nice face in the car beside her at a stoplight. It was just an impulse, easily repressed—but early in her research, Emily had read studies involving specific brain injuries, like in car crashes, when people went through their windshields. Survivors with poor function in their frontal lobes were often disinhibited.
The primitives seemed to lack self-restraint, and yet the girl was underage. Wouldn’t sex hurt? Maybe she’d faked her enthusiasm in order to stay with the group or to avoid a beating.
As a mother, Laura was obsessed with child molesters and perverts, even saving a DOJ map on her computer. Statewide, California had more than eighty-five thousand registered sex offenders. Laura assumed twice as many hadn’t been caught or had yet to act, satisfying themselves in other ways. Even Chase liked soft-core movies with threesomes or other things Emily wouldn’t do herself, and he was educated and clean and decent.
Laura said porno was the biggest industry in the world after food and guns. Viagra made huge money for the same reason. Even after men’s bodies failed, she said, their brains lusted—and Emily knew too much biology to disagree.
Most animals would not breed beyond the limits of their environment. Human beings had responded to other pressures. In the slow, global struggle for dominance, one nation or faith against the rest, larger populations tended to prevail. Natural selection had led to a race of men and women hardwired for sex, but it came with a dark side.
Emily had been able to find mace and pepper spray so readily because the other women in the building, like her, were afraid to walk the short distance from their cars to the office without protection. Now, when the effect stopped, how many girls and women would discover themselves with unknown partners? In some ways, Emily was more afraid of suffering the same fate than of being hurt, which turned her thoughts back to P.J.
“There’s obviously a cognitive difference between normal survivors and P.J.’s minority,” she said. “We’re sure to find a genetic variation.”
Ray shuffled through her notes. It was a dismissive gesture.
“We might be able to cross-reference their blood samples with medical and school records to see if those men are autistic or otherwise mentally handicapped!” she said. “And if we can identify them, we’ll save lives. I don’t mean because we should put them in jail. We know the cure even if we need time to develop it. Our gene therapies might stop his kind from attacking everyone else.”
“It’s dark,” he said suddenly.
“We—” Emily stopped. There was no use pretending anymore. The sun had gone down, but the human shapes in the street hadn’t changed. She peered at her watch. Her slim DKNY digital had quit working before she was safe, but she’d found a wind-up Invicta and clipped it to her wrist.
8:12.
“No,” she said. She’d been fooling herself because the sky remained brighter than it should be, glowing with the auroras.
Disappointment took her breath away. If the effect never ended, if it wasn’t sunlight that caused it but something else… Emily slumped down, defeated and furious, beating her hands on the white tile floor.
An hour later, she stood sleepless at the glass. Only a few of the primitives remained around their fire. The rest had gone inside the garage while these four stood guard.
Ray dozed in a chair behind her. They were both exhausted, but Emily felt like waking him to apologize. More and more, it looked as if the two of them would be forced to endure together. Could she repair their relationship?
“You should help me,” she murmured. “Why can’t you—”
The silhouettes around the fire fell down. One man toppled into the edge of the flames. His hair caught fire. Then everyone stood up again as other people emerged from the gas station, yelling in confusion.
It was 9:24 p.m. Emily put her thumb on an iPhone, typing Laura’s number. There was no signal. She had the radio beside her, too, but it continued to squawk and buzz except for one loud screech of words:
“—shill law. In all cases—”
Martial law, she thought. The voice sounded like the same man as before. Was it a recording? If so, who knew how long the message had played or if there were organized police or soldiers left to monitor the broadcast.
“What’s going on?” Ray asked.
“They’re awake. It stopped.”
The burning man thrashed as another guy fought with him, smothering his clothes, but the yelling was much bigger than thirty voices. The sound carried over the city like a high, moaning wind.
“I’m going out there,” she said.
LOS ANGELES
Emily crept away from DNAllied as men shouted in the night. Their voices were an intimidating sound laced with despair and rage. Gripping her flashlight, which she didn’t dare turn on, Emily looked back at the door. It wasn’t too late to run inside before Ray rebuilt his barricade.
She hid behind a concrete planter as the wind made a muffled noise against her helmet. Each breath tasted like smoke. To the east and north, the fires gave off dull roars like ocean surf. The sky was black with clouds. There were no auroras.
Four shadows ran through the street in front of her, picking their way through the stalled traffic. “Don’t touch them!” a man said. “Don’t touch them!”
What was he yelling about?
Emily stayed behind the planter. Hiding was selfish, but she didn’t want to lead anyone into DNAllied. She had to protect their computers and equipment. Ultimately she’d come outside to meet people, but she felt like a rabbit in a zoo where the cages had been opened. She was small and weak. Too many other survivors would be dangerous.
She ran to a Jetta that had stopped halfway on the sidewalk. She crouched there, then scurried to a minivan and knelt again.
Shoes littered the street—a white shirt—someone’s phone. It took her a moment to realize the minivan was contributing to her fear. When she leaned too close, her hair lifted inside her helmet. She’d felt the same bad energy alongside the Jetta.
Emily stood up. “Oh my God,” she said.
The city block formed a long, high canyon pooled in darkness, but the faint light of the fires reflected from the glass and steel of dozens of vehicles. Thousands more waited beyond them in the night.
Were the cars electrified by the effect? As a computer scientist, Emily knew basic engineering. Electricity traveled easily through water. Human beings were mostly liquid. Her sneakers had rubber soles, but she’d put her knee on the street when she hid beside the minivan. That simple act might have been a death sentence.
Already her resolve was fading as she hesitated in the dark.
It had occurred to Emily that the summer solstice and long hours of daylight might have something to do with the effect. She hoped Earth’s tilt was a factor, because it could mean that only the northern hemisphere was in trouble. Help would arrive faster if people were safe below the equator, but even if Brazil sent an army, they wouldn’t have enough men to stabilize more than a few cities.
You’re on your own, she thought, willing herself f
orward.
The hospital was eleven blocks from DNAllied, practically a straight shot up Union Drive. Emily was going there even if she had to do it ten feet at a time.
She stepped around the minivan and paced toward the next vehicle. The crashed cars had rolled onto the sidewalk here, too, which left only the lawn of an office complex. She climbed through a hedge, then fell hard onto a patch of river rock.
Hidden by the brush, she heard more people behind her. Three shapes appeared in the night. One was sobbing—a woman. The other two seemed to be men. The first growled, “If that guy comes anywhere near us, I’ll kill him!”
His friend’s voice was more panicked. “Did you see what he did?”
“I’ll kill him!”
They slowed in the middle of the street.
Say something, Emily told herself. At some point, she needed to take a chance. She needed allies.
She stood up.
But the trio moved away. They’d only paused to find another opening through the cars. Not quite chasing them, Emily marched twenty feet before she ducked into hiding again, this time against a thin pair of birch trees. Then she ran another fifty feet, stumbling through more empty shoes before she took cover beside a slick yellow Mustang.
She was heading northeast in the direction taken by P.J.’s group. Ahead, she saw a tall billboard advertising a popular kids’ show about living, talking flowers. A huge round outline in the corner was one character’s petals.
Could this giant picture have drawn P.J.’s group up Union Drive? Because they were curious? Five hours had passed since she’d seen them. By now, P.J. could be anywhere, but there would be others like him.
If she found them, would she have the courage to draw the blood samples she needed?
“I think it’s okay,” a man said behind her.
Emily leapt up. She banged her head against the Mustang, then wobbled in pain.
Other voices followed the first, hissing, “It’s a girl—”
“—on her head?”
