Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  “The last few years, rates have been reported as high as one in every hundred births,” she said.

  Bowen stared at her, and, briefly, Emily saw him falter. The math was unavoidable. “There are five hundred and twenty million people in Canada and the U.S.,” he said.

  “We don’t know if all of them will turn! High-functioning autists probably don’t have enough of the necessary neurological differences. There are so many variables. I could be totally off base.”

  “If you’re right, we might be up against five million enemy combatants,” Bowen said like a man on the brink.

  Emily raised both hands to stop him. “What if it’s only ten percent? Either way, a lot of them will be babies or children. You don’t have to assume we’re dealing with millions of adults.”

  “Sir, I can move a sniper team to a window,” another officer said. “We’ve rigged some armor. It could be enough for our men to crawl—”

  “Don’t!” Emily shouted. “We don’t know enough yet.”

  “Try it,” Bowen said to his officer.

  “Colonel, please. We need to capture them.”

  Bowen relented. “If your shooter can get into position, his orders are to shoot to wound,” he told his officer before he glanced back at Emily. “Tell me what they’re doing.”

  P.J.’s head movements were identical to what she’d seen earlier today. His companions mimicked his bobbing and swaying. An explanation was on the tip of her tongue, but she was too stunned to sort cleanly through her thoughts. Then she remembered the anthropology papers she’d read as part of her work with her collaborator at Yale.

  The genetic shift she’d unearthed in her statistical models… What if those trends weren’t the degeneration of Homo sapiens at all, but the resurgence of variations that had been successful in a different age? If the human race was evolving in response to changes in the sun, they could be resurrecting an earlier set of forms and instincts that had served them well in prehistory.

  “Those men are singing,” she said. “It’s another language. An old language.”

  “My team is in place,” the officer told Bowen.

  There was no time. The soldiers were ready to fire. Could she stop them from killing P.J.?

  “I think they’re Neanderthals,” she said.

  LOS ANGELES

  Wait,” the boy said, listening more to himself than to the noisy, burning darkness. He trusted the quiet responses within himself as much as his eyes and ears. For him, inside and out were nearly identical, creating an equilibrium that he would never question or try to explain.

  It served him especially well in this chaos.

  The sky was a mess of black clouds and blowing ash. The wind reeked of strange smells, and the earth was equally confusing. The wreckage was static compared to the roiling sky, but the buildings and cars were more alarming because of their permanence, seemingly larger than the wind overhead.

  The boy stood motionless for several breaths, measuring the city and the sounds of hurt men and women fleeing him. He was reassured by his pack’s formation. Eight hunters. One circle.

  He led them into an open patch beside a truck. None of them understood the vehicle, how it was made or what it was for, but no one questioned him. In many ways the men were extensions of the boy, bound to him as certainly as his own hands and feet—and by moving sideways, they concealed themselves from the Guard sniper no human being could have possibly detected inside the hospital more than two hundred yards away.

  Emily sighed, her tension breaking as P.J. disappeared from their cameras. “I’ve lost visual,” the officer said, pointing at a WHOLE FOODS delivery truck on his screen.

  Now they can’t shoot him, Emily thought, but she felt a new spike of adrenaline when another Guardsman said, “Sir, unless that truck’s full of something a lot heavier than groceries, our man can fire through it.”

  “No. Stand down,” Bowen said. “Miss Flint? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “They’re singing.”

  “What?”

  “Play it back. Watch how they communicate. They’re singing.” At least, they’re trying to sing, she thought. Waking up in our world must be a thousand times more shocking for them than it is for us.

  Bowen gestured to a Guardsman. “Can you play it back on another computer without losing the live feed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bowen turned to Emily. “Explain.”

  She wished she’d found Chase. He would have supported her. Fighting the stew of anxiety and foreboding in her heart, she said, “There have been excellent studies comparing Neanderthal physiology with other primates. Their larynx was positioned at the top of the throat, higher than ours, more like what we see in monkeys and apes today.”

  “They’re not cavemen. They’re regular people,” an officer said.

  “Look at them!” Emily pointed at a laptop where an eight-second clip was followed by a twelve-second clip. Both short videos played over and over in a loop, showing P.J. hoot and a man’s reply. “I know they’re in modern human bodies, but they’re practically choking when they talk. They don’t have the right throats for it.”

  “Do we have any directional mikes?” Bowen asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Apes can’t make the same variety of sounds we can,” Emily insisted. “Neither could Neanderthals. You see them in movies as big fat stupid monsters, but we’ve proven they had language and culture. Most of what they said was very basic in any case. They didn’t need phone numbers or ATM codes. Happy. Sad. Excited. Scared. That was enough for them. Some anthropologists believe Neanderthals might have been intensely emotional, so they didn’t use words like we do. They hummed and sang instead.”

  Bowen frowned at her, his voice trailing off as he glanced back at the video. “They do look like they’re… No. He’s right. I don’t believe you.”

  “Then what else are they doing?” Emily asked. Her tone was challenging. “P.J.’s group hasn’t had time to develop or relearn a language, but they’re communicating. That’s why they’re ahead of us out there.”

  “Follow me,” the boy said before he left the truck. His voice held a sharp, unfeminine pitch that carried over the noise of the city.

  The others in the pack used the same lilting tone when they spoke, warning each other as they shifted north through the debris and abandoned cars. “Watch out,” one man sang, sidestepping a fallen bumper. Another man repeated the sound. “Watch out,” he sang, avoiding a body sprawled in the darkness.

  The boy was drawn by the lights inside the hospital. To him, the structure resembled a cliff face made of unknown materials. He did not comprehend steel or glass, but he followed his restlessness toward the building, curious and mistrustful.

  He perceived danger in this place. He also saw opportunity. That was why his pack stayed on the move. Their roaming was more than the impulse of nomad hunters. The boy understood that mere instants ago, many people had gathered in this place—most of them enemies—but his pack was not only exploring the land to find water and food. Their high voices were also a signal to their own kind.

  As they swept through the wreckage, a stooped shape emerged from the blowing dark. Nothing needed to be said. By the man’s posture, by the very fact that he’d approached the group, the boy knew this man belonged to him.

  Emily’s skin crawled as she watched P.J. She strained to comprehend, but he was so alien. Goose bumps rose on her forearms and the back of her neck.

  “I have them on Camera Three,” the Guardsman said.

  “Damn it,” Bowen said. “They found another one.”

  “Most of the differences between us were cosmetic,” Emily said. “There are only three hundred proteins that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals don’t share—three hundred out of billions. There was interbreeding. The best evidence we have today is that we were separate species, but we come from a common ancestor. We were cousins.”

  “So they’re inside us,” Bowen said.
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  “Some of us. Yes. Mainly people of European and Middle Eastern descent.”

  “One of them looks Hispanic to me,” an officer said.

  “We’ve been interbreeding, too. Do you realize how many generations have come and gone since the Neanderthals disappeared? It’s been thirty thousand years.”

  “Then we won’t be able to assess who’s who without your blood samples,” Bowen said.

  Emily heard his self-doubt. Worse, he obviously thought her lab work would be too cumbersome to help him defend the building. “I’ll come up with something we can use in the field,” she said. “You don’t—”

  “They’re killing him!” the officer said.

  On the screen, two of P.J.’s followers stepped forward and clubbed the new man.

  They crushed his skull with two overhand blows. He fell. They hit him again and again and again. Then it was finished.

  “Follow me,” the boy sang without looking back.

  He’d taken longer than he might have in testing the newcomer because, uncomfortably, his pack was an even number. He had a compulsion toward threes. He didn’t know why, but his instinct was to organize his people in trios. With eight of them, this was impossible, so he’d nearly allowed the newcomer to join the pack. But the newcomer had been a half-man. His voice had been wrong, his posture, his expression.

  The boy knew who was one of them and who was not. No one looked like they should, yet correct behavior was ingrained into everything they did. Voice and visual cues superseded physical appearance.

  The blood on their weapons was not entirely from their enemies. The boy had also rejected two other half-breeds. One had been female and even more valuable because of her gender, but he could not accept impurity. He would always attack.

  He moved toward the hospital.

  Emily shivered with horror and grief as the Guardsman asked, “Why did they kill him? He was singing, too.”

  “He wasn’t right enough,” she said. “I told you. They’re hybrids. Not all of them will have the same neurological makeup.”

  “That’s good news for us,” the Guardsman said. “They’ll fight each other along with everyone else.”

  Something snapped inside her. “You son of a bitch. Those are people out there just like you and me. What if someone in your family is—”

  “Take them out,” Bowen told the officer with the handset to the sniper team.

  “No!” Emily said. “There has to be another way.”

  “As far as I can see, we’re at war,” Bowen said.

  “We can talk to them.” She hated that her tone was pleading, conflicted, helpless, while Bowen’s was flat and certain.

  “You can’t go out there,” Bowen said.

  “Maybe we can,” Emily said. “Your armor—”

  “It’s a two-man box that weighs three hundred pounds,” Bowen said. “No one’s carrying it outside. We can barely move it to the window.”

  At the same time, the officer reacted to a voice on his handset. “This is Kingsnake Eight Five,” he said.

  Is he relaying the command to shoot? Emily thought with fresh panic. “I can cure them!” she said.

  “Wait,” Bowen told his officer.

  “I might even be able to make us immune to the effect so we can think outside, but I need them. We need data. There’s no way I can tailor my gene therapies without them.”

  Someone spoke again on the officer’s handset, and the officer looked at Bowen. “What are your orders, sir?”

  “They’re coming toward us because they’re curious,” Emily said. “What if your sniper uses a flashlight? Even better, we can turn the lights on and off at one of the exits. They might come inside to investigate. Then we grab them. If you shoot them now, even to wound, they’ll just bleed to death out there and the ones who get away will remember what you did!”

  “Goddamn it,” Bowen said. “Hold your fire.”

  On the laptop screen, P.J.’s group stalked closer alongside the barricade of cars, only visible through the gaps. Would they venture inside? As soon as they were protected from the effect, they should turn into their normal selves again. If so, she would have her nephew back, but how far did he need to come into the hospital before he woke up?

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’m not doing this because he’s your family,” Bowen said. “Major, let’s get a team on the lights at the entrance on the south wing. Try to signal those men outside.” He turned to another officer. “Do what we can to identify them.”

  “I’m on it, sir.” The major picked up a phone as the other officer’s screen filled with still shots isolated from the video file, low-res close-ups of individual faces.

  Emily’s gaze was riveted to the live feeds as waves of light began to flash at the end of the hospital’s short, southern wing, casting shadows across the vehicles sitting neatly in the parking lot and the sturdier line of the barricades.

  The light caught P.J.’s group in a space between two cars. They ducked out of sight. For a moment, Emily scanned the laptop screens, wondering where they’d gone. Then she saw them moving again, skirting east along the barricades.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, P.J.”

  The boy stayed in front as they crept east through the glare and shadows. Each man held an arm up to protect his face. Walking into the yellow light was like finding the sun on the ground. It was menacing and bizarre, and the boy shielded the men with his own body wherever possible. He did this in the truest sense of self-sacrifice, without ego, only pride in his kind.

  Then he checked himself. The light defied understanding, but the winking was deliberate. The pattern he saw in the busy on-off-on was man-made.

  Was it a trap? Would the light hurt?

  “Wait,” he sang, leading his pack into a shallow concrete drain between two sections of the parking lot. “Down.” Hidden in this small crease, they knelt together beneath the wind, the ash, and the city’s overwhelming heights.

  Emily spun on Bowen. “Stop!” she said. “Don’t flash the lights anymore. Just leave them on.”

  “You heard her,” Bowen said.

  One of his Guardsmen lifted his handset as Emily said, “We’re overdoing it. They’re more sensitive than we are, and they’re already disoriented by our world.”

  “You…” Bowen frowned. “You say that like they’re from somewhere else.”

  “That’s right.” Distracted by the video feed, Emily prayed for her nephew to start moving closer again. Don’t go, she thought. Then her gaze left the video for the still shots, and what little hope she’d held onto gave way to sorrow.

  If anything, the change in P.J. had increased. His face was an expressionless mask except for his eyes. His eyes were deep, baleful gems that leapt with purpose. If he felt lonely—if his group had any sense of being outnumbered—it didn’t show.

  He looked pitiless, even serene.

  “A species wouldn’t adapt to anything as a natural part of their environment unless it was constant,” Emily said. Her voice was hushed. “Our two races must have diverged during a period of off-and-on flares. The Neanderthals rose to prominence during the effect, whereas Homo sapiens evolved for normal conditions.”

  “You mean the sun has always been doing this,” Bowen said.

  If modern man had unknowingly reacted to subtle changes in solar activity, that would explain the increase in autistic children during the past decades. The Neanderthal had risen again within them as if welcoming the acceleration of the solar wind.

  It was the worst possible news. What if the effect continued for years?

  “But it will stop,” Emily said. “It’s because the flares stopped that the Neanderthals died off. They’re a niche species. They’re made for the world when it’s like this. The extra brain mass and overconnectivity… I remember a study in 2011 that showed incredibly similar activity in autists’ brains. Between their frontal and temporal regions, there were only eight genes that differed greatly. But
in everyone else, more than five hundred genes showed differing levels.”

  “That’s how they know each other,” Bowen said.

  Emily nodded. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve tapped into some sort of ancestral memory. They may be less individual we are.”

  She studied her nephew’s face again.

  “I’m not sure how much of P.J. is left in there,” she said.

  His name was Nim. The pack identified the boy by this low hum because it was the intonation he used the most himself. Nnnnnnnn mh. Each of them had their own sound.

  Unfortunately, nothing else was familiar. They were eight men out of place and time, and the boy hesitated, which was unlike him. Too many of his reflexes had no correlation with his surroundings, so he interrogated the pack as he’d done repeatedly tonight.

  “Nim,” he sang, conveying his own health and certainty.

  “En,” a man answered, Hnnn.

  “Nim,” he sang.

  “Han,” the next man hummed, Hnnnh.

  The base personalities of the pack were with him as always. They were rooted in each other and their ancient drives. For their kind, self-awareness consisted mostly of verifying a shared mental state. The Neanderthal brain was built wholly upon hypermnesia and intuition, reinforcing these tools in each generation until even their psyches were fixed. Nim was their decision maker. The others supported him. It was a simple model that had made them an efficient, dominant species for tens of thousands of years.

  Nim wasn’t surprised to live again. His thoughts were too rudimentary to gnaw at himself with such abstractions, although he was dismayed by his puny size. He’d been a child before, but never with such spindly arms and legs.

  His subconscious had pushed his body for every available shred of strength, tearing ligaments in his thigh, distending the muscles in his arm. Pain was less important than stamina when the pack was in danger.