by Jeff Carlson
Nim could not understand the lights, which were steady now, but he’d gleaned the truth that this magic was man-made. Therefore the Dead Men were near. He remembered them like he remembered every element of his biosphere. The congested city could not have been less like the desolate terrain of the Ice Age, yet Nim was limited to one response.
This is our land, he thought, not in discrete words but in stabs of emotion. It was as if his own blood spoke to him.
He lifted his hand to the swirling ash. Black flakes touched his palm. He looked from the hospital to the orange glow on the horizon farther east. Then he gestured twice, once in the direction of the flames, once at Silver Lake.
“Burn,” he sang.
The pack rose and fled into the night to retrieve torches from the distant inferno.
LOS ANGELES
Dawn lit Silver Lake. Sunlight intruded through windows and hallways, coloring the interior. On the ground floor on the main building’s north side, Emily walked toward Waiting Room 1 in a daze. She didn’t want to go inside Room 1, but she didn’t feel as if she had any choice. There was nowhere left to go.
An old woman stood by the door like a minister or a ghoul.
Good morning, Emily thought, intending to greet her with a useless pleasantry until the old woman said, “He promised the world will end in fire! The rainbow is His sign it won’t be flood again.”
Emily stared at her. “I know the Bible,” she said.
“Fire!” The old woman was at least seventy, rail-thin and gray, yet dressed elegantly in a sapphire-colored suit. “Look at the sky! You’ll see Ezekiel’s wheels and fires exactly like the rainbow. Fire, not flood, that was His promise.”
“Leave me alone.”
The longest day of Emily’s life had stretched into morning. It was 4:57 a.m. She felt groggy and strained. She was excited, too, because her lab work had gone well. She’d finally caught a break. Colonel Bowen couldn’t send his men outside to collect blood samples, but during the previous calm they’d taken six prisoners—six men who’d been found among the injured refugees with bloody hands and wounds of their own.
The men looked like they’d been fighting. Also, five of the six wouldn’t answer questions or make eye contact. A quick-thinking sergeant had brought them inside to prevent more attacks. Then the men were forgotten until rumors spread among the soldiers during P.J.’s feint at the hospital.
Emily’s sample base had been sitting under her nose all along. Statistically, six men were insignificant. She needed hundreds more, but the soldiers had given her something to work with in addition to the young man she’d found with Michelle.
Isolating their white blood cells in a centrifuge had been a matter of minutes. Next she’d run those samples through an Illumina sequencer for light RNA seq tests, a meticulous job that took hours. Then she’d loaded her results into Silver Lake’s computers and walked away to let the data process.
She needed sleep, but she couldn’t rest. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t leave. So she’d come to the hospital’s prep area like someone under a spell.
Waiting Room 1 was a windowless space where families could sit while their loved ones were in surgery. The walls were hung with soft paintings of flowers and mountains and black-and-red posters detailing legal support for the uninsured, although most of the tables and chairs had been thrown into a pile to clear the floor.
Thirty or more bodies lined the carpet. A few appeared to be sleeping. The rest were bent or contorted, a jumble of white eyes and teeth and gnarled hands.
“All of our sins, our pride and arrogance,” the old woman said. “The Lord has shown us what happens to the righteous and the unrighteous alike. This day has come and He will judge us.”
“You think God is doing this to us?”
“It’s the end of times.”
“Then why don’t you go outside!” Emily snarled at her. “If this is what God wants, why don’t you go out there?”
The woman smiled sadly. “It’s not me you’re angry with,” she said.
Embarrassment propelled Emily through the door. The old woman wasn’t to blame for the carnage. She was trying to be loving and good, but Emily felt like she would implode if she didn’t yell at someone.
Why are they keeping them in here? she wondered. As evidence? She’d been told the hospital’s morgue—the refrigerated morgue—had been crammed with food taken from the building’s cafes and vendor carts, but tossing corpses into the waiting room wasn’t much better than leaving them where they fell. Bodies couldn’t be kept at room temperature.
“I forgive you,” the woman said behind her. “Jesus can, too.”
My mom must be thinking the same thing, Emily thought.
Her mother’s faith had grown more severe after P.J. was born. Sometimes Emily felt like her devotion was a way to avoid the hardest questions. For Jana Flint, the morals of every situation were carved in stone. She didn’t try to look for solutions. She said P.J. had been born with ASD to teach them patience and grace, the implication being that his condition was also meant to punish Laura, or all of them, which Emily believed was cruel nonsense.
In the past few years, Laura and Emily had let their weak modern faith slip away almost completely. Laura was too busy with P.J. to go to service except at Christmas, and Emily was more interested in her work.
What if that had been an incredible blunder? She’d been so absorbed with her accomplishments and Chase and now…
Now…
More bodies had been stowed in the lounge than she’d realized. To her untrained eye, it was difficult to sort out the damage done to these people. Some of it looked accidental like burns and crashes. Others appeared to have been intentionally hurt. Emily saw blunt trauma wounds and a horrible gash on a woman’s back.
She reached the end of the room without finding Chase. She turned to hurry out, making a ragged sound like laughter.
Then she froze. Chase had been so badly beaten she’d walked past him. Maybe she’d fooled herself, ignoring clues like his blue scrubs; his nice hands; his size.
Emily went lightheaded with sorrow and denial. They didn’t know, she thought. They said they didn’t have him on the list and I was so sure.
She had to sit down.
Gasping, crying, she reached for his cold hand. He’d been here all along. In her mind, he’d been alive, lost somewhere in the pandemonium inside the hospital—but in reality, he’d probably died before she left DNAllied. Shouldn’t she have felt something?
Sometimes she despised her own genius. She’d let herself become preoccupied with new data and theories while her man lay dead in this stinking room.
We’re supposed to get married, she thought. We’ll buy a house. We’ll have a boy and a girl. They’ll go to school. We’ll work and save our money and do well and love each other. We’ll vacation in Hawaii and Europe.
We’re supposed to grow old together.
She wanted to think he’d been killed saving other people. He was thick-chested and strong, and the hospital was like his home. He would have defended it.
“There, there,” the old woman said from somewhere far away. Emily became aware of her again as she crouched at Emily’s side. “He’s gone to a better place,” the old woman said. “There, there. He’s in the Lord’s arms.”
Emily sobbed. “I d-don’t… I…”
“Let’s pray. We can pray for them all.”
I don’t believe there’s a big white man in the sky who’s going to welcome anyone home, she thought, savage with grief.
In her bitterness, she recalled a historic Catholic church her family had visited on the East Coast when she was a teenager. Set in tile more than fifty feet across had been the face of a Christ as blond as Emily and with eyes even more blue, an implausible appearance for a Jewish carpenter born on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Depictions such as this were an easy argument that gods were made in man’s image, not vice versa. Emily and Laura had secretly discussed th
e subject many times before family dinners or Church events with their mom, and yet now it struck her—
Some people believed in evolution, others in the guiding hand of a Creator.
What if they were both right?
Emily reeled at the implications, because the solar flares were a reminder that life on Earth had been shaped by a force much greater than the planet itself.
Men had indulged in sun worship for millennia before Christianity absorbed those old faiths, transforming their rites and symbols to fit the new religion. The yellow disk of the sun became halos. Celebrations of the spring equinox and winter solstice turned into Easter and Christmas. For anyone who’d studied history, it was clear that man’s attempts to explain his existence had evolved through the ages… but what if primitive sun worship had been based on something real and accessible? Then they’d forgotten. They’d revised the story.
And now our violent and jealous God has returned, she thought, weeping over Chase’s bloody corpse.
“Don’t fret,” the old woman said. “Don’t fret. He’s with the Lord. You can be, too. Your salvation is in the Lord.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Pray with me,” the old woman said.
“I—” It can’t hurt, Emily thought.
Could praying actually help? Some monks and holy men were able to reach such states of self-possession, they slowed their own hearts or went days without food. What if that level of concentration could somehow guard them against the effect? Praying might be a natural attempt to focus their minds.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Emily said as the old woman joined her in the Lord’s Prayer, which had been imprinted upon Emily years ago in Sunday school. “I shall not want.”
The ritual calmed her pain.
Then she remembered another of the Bible’s ancient myths. The tower of Babel, she thought. The legend told of a race of men struck down from above, left senseless and unable to communicate with each other. Had that been an isolated event? How long did it last?
Before she left, Emily reached for Chase’s hand again. She wanted to keep his class ring.
I’ll wear it with my engagement ring, always.
She took off her own ring, slid his larger band on her finger, then replaced hers. She wanted to kiss him goodbye, but she couldn’t look at his bludgeoned skull.
I love you, she thought.
Emily went to the lists of known dead before searching for food. The emptiness inside her went beyond hunger. It seemed more important to write his name. Chase deserved their respect, and she was furious that he’d been dumped in the waiting room like garbage.
The third-floor nurses’ station was one of the many places she knew inside Silver Lake. Typically she met Chase at restaurants or didn’t see him until he came home, but a handful of times, she’d surprised him while he was on shift. Thanksgiving. Valentine’s Day. Chase worked many holidays, and Emily enjoyed rewarding him with fun things like flowers, two slices of pumpkin pie, or a peek inside her blouse. Once they’d made out in a stairwell.
Her memories faded as she blundered through a knot of police and medical staff.
“Watch it!” a cop said.
The third floor was being used for post-op recovery. At five in the morning, it was also a safe place for off-duty soldiers and cops to rest. The voices around her were low and tight except for one man shouting in a private room.
Everywhere, people slept in the halls.
At the nurses’ station, seven men and women filled a space meant for four. Two of them had functioning laptops. The rest were sorting handwritten notes, struggling to organize a deluge of new charts.
They glanced up as Emily stopped by the three clipboards pinned to the wall. One man seemed to recognize her. He reached for his phone. Emily ignored them. She was certain she was a mess, red-eyed and disheveled. Her outsides matched her soul.
First P.J., now Chase. What if Laura was gone, too?
The clipboards held the truth. Dozens of names had been scrawled on the white sheets with stark, irrefutable power. Adding his name would be like carving his tombstone. It might be the only testament Chase received.
Where would they bury him? Beneath the trees in the parking lot? Even if the flares stopped, no one had time to dig more than a few mass graves.
Emily took one breath and then another. Somehow she closed her hand on the magic marker tied to the first clipboard. She removed the cap. It was blue. Most of the handwriting on these pages was a well-practiced cursive, small and neat. She wrote his name in large block letters as masculine as possible.
Chase, Michael Coughlin, M.D.
“Miss Flint!” someone yelled. “Miss Flint!”
Mrs. Coughlin, she thought. But it would never be.
The yelling man was Captain Walsh. He’d brought two soldiers as an escort.
“Here,” Emily called.
Walsh jogged through the crowded hallway. “Colonel Bowen needs you in the command center,” he said. His men roused the sleeping cops and Guardsmen. The noise level increased as everyone grabbed their weapons.
“What’s wrong?” Emily asked.
“They’re back,” Walsh said.
“Is it the same group? My nephew?”
“We’re not sure yet. There are more of them.”
“That’s probably where they’ve been all night—looking for each other. How many?”
“Almost thirty.”
Emily hurried after Walsh into the milling soldiers. She glanced back at the clipboards, torn between her heartbreak and her sense of duty until she discerned something in Walsh’s stone face. He wanted to hide something from the men around them.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
“Most of them have torches. They’re flanking us on the east and south,” Walsh said, lowering his voice, but in his words, Emily heard the old woman’s prophecy.
The world will end in fire.
LOS ANGELES
On the second floor of the hospital’s west end, Emily rushed into the command center with Walsh. She felt like a burning car that had crashed and bounced and—in seconds—might crash again.
Bowen stood at the bank of laptop screens with his officers and Guardsmen. “We’re sitting ducks,” he said.
In the gray dawn, beyond the parking lot and barricades to the southeast, their cameras showed running groups of three and six. Fire gleamed in every man’s hand, leaving yellow-white trails where their torches were too bright for the laptop displays.
“The Neanderthals waited for sunrise,” Bowen said.
Emily glanced at his bunching fists. “Can we try our lights again?” she asked.
“No. They’re too close.”
“Then why did you bring me here?” I can’t watch this, she thought, and yet her gaze remained on the computer screens.
She hadn’t spotted P.J., although the resolution of the video feeds had improved. Their cameras were no longer on night vision. Bowen’s recon teams were sighting through binoculars or using the cameras’ own zoom power.
Her watch read 5:41.
The streets were black with ash and shadows. Even the men were smudges except for their firebrands. They shifted through the wreckage, circling, hiding, then creeping forward again. They’d almost reached the barricades.
“I don’t want to kill anyone, but my first responsibility is to defend this stronghold,” Bowen said. “Give me a reason to tell my sniper teams to stand down.”
“If we try our lights—”
“Drawing them into the building would be insane. They’re here to burn us.”
“They might come close enough to talk!”
Bowen shook his head. “I was told your lab work is going well. Is that true?”
“Yes.” Emily said anything she could think of. “I’m sure we’ll see overexpressions of keratin and FOXP2. That’s enough for a biomarker. We can use it for roughshod blood tests and the first steps of a new gene therapy.”
“But
we’ll have to inject each man, is that right? You can’t fix one person and have him spread it like a cold?”
“No. I’d insert tailored genes into a retrovirus, which would need to be individually delivered in a tiny amount of blood plasma with a hypodermic. Then the genes will make functional—”
He pointed at the video feeds. “Can you stop those men?”
“With what?”
“The virus you just talked about. A nerve toxin. Anything.”
Emily swallowed hard, wondering if she had the courage to pick up a gun herself. What if the fighting came to that? “I don’t know how to make bioweapons,” she said. “Even if I did, we’d need more time and—”
“Get her out of here,” Bowen said, gesturing at Walsh. Then he turned to another officer. “Snipers ready.”
She couldn’t protect P.J. anymore. Bowen needed to do anything necessary to stop the Neanderthals before they incinerated Silver Lake or drove everyone out of the hospital.
Walsh took her arm, but he was halfhearted in pulling her away. Maybe he’d expected more from her, too.
“Tell the engineers to move back,” Bowen said.
“Sir, our claymores are off-line in sectors three, four, and eight,” an officer said.
Somehow the soldiers had placed anti-personnel mines outside the building as a final line of defense. Emily could see the explosives marked in the sketches posted on the wall. Most lined the barricades to the south, but the sketches showed others at the back entrances on Silver Lake’s north and west sides. Unfortunately, some of the mines had failed.
“I want squad weapons at every entrance,” Bowen said. “Order grenades as a last resort. We don’t want to bring this place down on ourselves.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire.”
It was a simple word. It knocked Emily’s breath away.
She heard muffled gunshots from the front of the hospital. Then the sound was lost as the refugees on the ground floor screamed.
On the computer screens, outside, a dozen men jerked back like puppets. One fell in a puff of red mist, his torch igniting his hair. But he wasn’t dead. He thrashed and bucked.
