Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take a squad to find your nephew.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “What?” He nearly laughed, and she saw it.

  Her blue eyes sparked with anger and determination. “I can handle myself,” she said. “I walked through fifteen blocks of burning city to get here.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “We can fly after him.”

  “No. I’m tight on fuel. Even if we located him, it’s unlikely we’d find room to land. We’ll go on foot. It’s too dangerous.”

  She didn’t back off, which he admired.

  “Most of the Neanderthals out there are dead,” she said. “The rest are badly hurt. You have guns. They have clubs. You need me.”

  “Why?”

  “How else can you get close to him?”

  “We could shoot him.”

  “You…” She visibly choked with new anger. “He’s an eight-year-old boy!”

  “He led an assault on an entrenched position held by hundreds of trained soldiers, and he nearly won. But you’re right. He’s down to a few men, most of them wounded. I’ll trap them, Tase them, then bring ’em back. It’s high risk. You’re not coming.”

  “What will a Taser do to a child?”

  “He’ll survive.”

  “You need me. I’m the only way to catch P.J. from a distance. He might recognize me. I can distract him. I’ll have the best chance of telling you where he’s gone and how he thinks. It’s a big city. How else will you find him?”

  Drew studied her face, her certainty, her intelligence. He weighed her claims and her life against the millions of casualties outside.

  What if Emily was the key to this whole thing?

  Drew nodded and said, “All right. Come with me.”

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  Those people outside might be able to help,” Marcus said in the silence of the electronics room. “I know some of them. Maybe they can be… trained.”

  The dim room was stifling and hot. It stank. Marcus had stripped down to his pants, walking the concrete floor in his bare feet, but there was no airflow and the buckets they’d used for toilets were overripe. Outside, the wind had quieted as the morning sun lifted into the sky, leaving a thick, muggy heat. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

  “I see Kym again,” he said, standing awkwardly on a wire rack loaded with processors. The metal cut into his foot. That didn’t cause him to step off of the rack. He held himself steady against the pain, bending his neck to keep one eye at his spy hole.

  The shafts he’d drilled through the reinforced walls were ill-placed. All five were against the ceiling, where he’d hoped these tiny openings would be shielded by the overhang in the structure’s roof. He was afraid of allowing the phenomenon through the walls—afraid of losing himself.

  “They don’t look like they treat her differently,” he said. “I mean because of her eyes or skin color.”

  The short Laotian girl seemed to be Chuck’s lover, playing a game very much like tag with him. They ran through the endless dishes of the array. Chuck caught her, released her, and caught her again, never quite kissing Kym yet nuzzling her ears and neck as she laughed and pressed her round body against him, flashing her white teeth.

  Her voice sounded like music. She used no words, only laughter and teasing.

  They were both shirtless, and Kym’s pants were undone, as if she found it too complicated to use the buckle sewn into the elastic waistband of her green calf-length pants. She wore no underwear. Marcus had seen too much of her when they darted close to the station. He was chagrined to find himself looking at all, but there was a sweet, unfettered sexuality in Kym’s movements he’d never seen before. Maybe he was more cognizant of her physical quality because he’d slept with Rebecca Drayer so recently. Kym’s every step was a dance. She seemed happy, almost intoxicated by her freedom.

  Both of them were careless. Chuck’s shoulders were burnt red. Kym was brown-skinned and black-haired, well-suited for the sun whenever it blazed through the unsteady cloud cover… and yet her chin was bruised and her back had been abraded, leaving dots of blood and new scabs.

  There were also two men watching from the hillside beyond the white dishes. Marcus couldn’t see their faces.

  Was one of them Steve? Were they Rebecca’s soldiers?

  More important, he wondered if those men were guarding Kym and Chuck from harm or waiting for their own chance with her. What if they were rivals for the girl?

  Kym might not have been given any more choice in the matter than Rebecca. Marcus couldn’t guess if Kym had paired herself with Chuck because anyone else would be even more unbearable. She might be pretending her attraction.

  She might have forgotten resisting him.

  As far as Marcus could tell, the people outside lacked all but the most fluid self-consciousness. They lived in the moment.

  What kind of society would emerge among men and women who possessed only shreds of memory? It would be tribal at best, and Marcus believed Rebecca and Kym were the only females in hiking distance, although Chuck’s presence opened this assumption to question.

  During the first interrupt, Chuck’s car must have stalled before he’d driven Roell more than forty or fifty miles from the array. Then he’d walked back. Maybe other people were climbing into the mountains—people like Roell.

  “I’m going to shout at them again,” Marcus said. He leaned back from his spy hole and breathed slowly, making sure he had enough oxygen. The last time he’d started to yell, he hadn’t been able to stop. He’d yelled and yelled until he nearly fainted in the heat. Without the AC units, the electronics room was a Dutch oven absorbing the sunlight, and he needed to ration the barrel of fuel for the generator.

  I have snacks and candy, he thought. Maybe I can push something through a hole and they can bring me water. Maybe, in time, they can do more sophisticated work.

  They could help me with the array.

  “Kym!” he yelled against the tiny hole. “Kymberly Vang! Chuck! Hey, Chuck!”

  They’d frozen in their game. Kym held one forearm across her breasts. Was that modesty or a more basic instinct to protect herself? So help him, she looked like a doe or a purebred horse or a gazelle, compact and graceful.

  He called to her like he would coax a dog or a horse. “Kymmie Kymmie Kymmie! Kymmie!”

  It was an effort to keep his tone light, but she smiled at his cajoling. She was curious.

  Chuck didn’t like her response. He took her arm and pulled her back.

  “No! Wait!” Marcus’s voice sharpened. “Wait!”

  Issuing a command was the wrong thing to do. Kym’s smile faltered. Then she turned and retreated into the array with Chuck.

  Marcus scrambled to another spy hole, clattering sideways along the wire rack. He’d drilled three holes in the room’s south-facing wall and two more on the west side.

  “Kym! I’m sorry! I—” His voice skipped again, lurching from his terror to a false cheer so pathetic it wouldn’t have fooled a baby. “I have food! I have yummy treats! If you… Kym!? Kym!”

  He couldn’t see them. They’d gone east, and the north and east walls of the electronics room faced into the station, which left him blind in those directions.

  Why had they come here to begin with? Were they hunting in the squirrel-riddled field or did they remember the array as an important place in their lives?

  The men on the hillside were gone, too, either leaving as a group or pursuing Chuck and Kym. Marcus watched impotently. At last, he stepped down from the rack into the gleam of a single flashlight lying on the floor. A watch waited beside it with a notepad and three pens and a red bottle of Gatorade.

  “Kym smiled,” he said hopefully.

  Silence.

  “They’ll be back,” he said, but there was no one else to hear him. He was talking to himself.

  Rebecca Drayer had disappeared from the room before sunrise.

  LOS ANGELES<
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  As the day grew hotter, the wind increased. Warm currents raked the city. Spotted with rain, the gales whistled against power lines and storefronts. Endless garbage tumbled through the ash—plastic wrappers, plastic bags, paper trash. Nothing else moved. The fires and the fighting had cleared the streets of animals and primitives. Every species had fled from the burns and from the gunshots at Silver Lake. Now there were only buildings, scattered cars, and ash.

  Six figures ran east with the storm.

  As they jogged through the cars, they kept their heads up, listening to the wind. Behind them, the hospital remained a dull source of yelling and noise. Ahead, Los Angeles was quiet except for the sudden cacophony of barking dogs. The sound erupted north of their position.

  “Down,” their leader said.

  They knelt between a blue Toyota and the beige stucco wall of a men’s fashion outlet, weapons ready. In the middle of the group, Emily watched Drew—their leader—assessing him.

  She was reminded of P.J.’s wary movements when P.J. first approached Silver Lake. Los Angeles was no longer home to any of them. Emily believed even the soldiers felt small and impermanent against this vacant concrete landscape, so, like the Neanderthals, they stayed close to each other—three members of the Navy team—two Guardsmen—and Emily. She was their nucleus. They protected her on all sides, and, joining her in the center of their formation, Staff Sergeant Patrick had attached himself to her hip as her personal bodyguard.

  This was combat. Before she stepped outside with Drew’s team, Emily had thought she understood the difference between war and the fifteen blocks she’d survived on her own. Then she’d confronted the three wounded men and the twisted bodies P.J. had left behind in the parking lot.

  When they landed, Drew and Julie hadn’t bothered to check for casualties, much less to administer aid. Emily had insisted on hauling the wounded men into the hospital, but Drew and Julie had come for her, solely for her, and they would kill or abandon anyone who interfered.

  She envied their clarity and toughness, their ability to let go. She was loyal to a fault. First she hadn’t been able to abandon her ideals or her plan to design a prenatal vaccine despite Laura and Ray. Now she’d half-fabricated reasons to go after P.J., gambling with her life, and, worse, the selfless heroes who’d accompanied her.

  The barking faded.

  “Sst,” Drew hissed, signaling Julie and a Guard corporal. He pointed north. The jitters in Emily’s hands and chest increased as she prepared to follow them.

  The soldiers looked so confident. Their faces were hidden by goggles or visors, but their body language was assertive. Were they all faking? Maybe that was the real trick of bravery, not wanting to be the first to complain.

  I promised him I can do this, she thought, glancing at the other woman in the group.

  Julie repeated Drew’s hand signals and added another, swiping her finger above a map she’d folded into a square. He nodded. Then the squad rose together. The only sounds were a faint clack as the Guardsman repositioned his weapon and the scuffing of Julie’s map as she tucked it against her own gun.

  They advanced into the city.

  Emily’s right hand tugged at the rings on her left hand. She had so many good memories of Chase. She needed him now.

  Abruptly, Drew gestured for everyone to kneel again.

  Oh God, Emily thought. He approached a station wagon by himself, then quickly waved the group forward. As she passed, Emily saw two bodies behind the car, but they were old bodies, layered in ash, and had no obvious wounds.

  At least one of P.J.’s companions was seriously hurt. Someone had left a blood trail. A few splotches were large enough for Emily to find herself. Mostly there were dime-sized drops obscured by the soot and light rain. Except when she stepped on one by chance, Emily didn’t know how Drew was tracking the dark spots.

  The two-story retail shops ended where Temple Street met Glendale Boulevard. Across the intersection, on the south side, were the first narrow homes of a residential neighborhood. It looked like a hopeless maze—small yards, fences, detached garages. On the other corner, where Glendale went north, a large green park stretched for two hundred yards until its trees and paths met a thirty-foot embankment supporting the high, flat line of Highway 101. Glendale ran beneath the highway. Shadows gathered among the cement pillars.

  Drew led them toward the park, pausing twice to study the underpass or the nearest trees, a stand of sycamores with one scratchy palm tree reaching above them.

  The light rain briefly turned to showers. The moisture worked like glue in the ash. Emily was glad for the skin of her leather jacket. Colonel Bowen had found some boots for her, but her pants had turned wet and black as soon as they left Silver Lake. Four blocks later, she was coated in grime.

  She felt slow and bulky. Drew had outfitted her with M-string, a flight helmet, and a bulletproof vest. None of the gear weighed much, but it left her swaddled in layers. The back of her helmet rubbed against the vest, impeding her movements exactly when she wanted to be able to look eighteen ways at once. She wanted to be able to run.

  “Sst,” Drew hissed again, waving the corporal in close to him. Trailing the squad, the Guard lieutenant also adjusted his position, sweeping leftward behind Patrick.

  The blood trail was obvious on the gray concrete surrounding the playground. Red spatters led into the grass and more sycamore trees, but Drew angled away from the trail. They were almost at the restrooms, a cube-shaped building with three doors. MEN. WOMEN. THIS DOOR TO REMAIN LOCKED.

  Drew paced steadily around the corner at a distance of twenty feet. He held his carbine high and tight. Emily supposed that was to minimize the weapon’s length, making it harder for anyone to jump out and slap it away.

  “Clear,” he said.

  They walked past a red-and-white jungle gym mounted in an oval sand pit. Four swings creaked in the wind. Did she hear voices? Emily was nearly delirious with sleep deprivation. The warm, soggy weather also had her flustered. Her skin itched inside the heat of her jacket, but her feet and hands were cold, confusing her body with hot chills like a fever.

  How much radiation were they taking outside? Would the solar flares make everyone sick? As part of her research into the chimpanzee genome, Emily knew atomic tests during the Cold War had been the first to prove it wasn’t only lower primates who were more immune to radiation than human beings. Compared to men, every other species on Earth had reduced cancer rates.

  Animals evolved for the pulse, too, she thought.

  She missed Drew’s next signal. Patrick grabbed her arm and pulled her down, banging her knee. It frightened her. She wasn’t sure why they’d gone on alert. Each soldier faced in a different direction, maintaining their assignments, so she looked at Drew. He was studying the trees again.

  “There’s too much blood,” the corporal whispered. “I can’t believe this guy’s still on his feet.”

  Drew shook his head. He didn’t want to talk, so Emily debated with herself. Maybe they’re carrying whoever’s hurt, she worried. Or maybe two or three of them are bleeding. If we hurt them more…

  Drew and the Guard lieutenant were equipped with Tasers. Whether or not 50,000 volts would kill an eight-year-old boy was open to question, but Emily didn’t want them to subdue P.J. by shooting him with their carbines. Her job now was to act as a lure. She needed to bait or delay P.J. She hoped to attract him by singing. She needed to remember to breathe like him, too, and to hold her body in a crouch. Posture and sound were everything to his kind.

  “Heads up,” Julie said.

  A man stood on the highway above the park. He was mostly concealed by dry brush and the edge of a sound wall, standing where the cinder block ended. His torn shirt flapped in the wind. He held a club with his left hand.

  “Nobody moves,” Drew said. “Not yet. On my mark, we run for the embankment.”

  “I don’t like it,” Julie said. “They have the high ground and we’ll get hung up on that fence.”


  Six feet of chain link separated the park from the base of the embankment. Emily knew she could climb it, but they would be slow going over while P.J.’s group was well-positioned to stab or club them.

  The man on the highway seemed to share her thoughts. He stepped out from the sound wall into the open, raising his arms on both sides. To Emily, he looked like a scarecrow or a vulture. He looked like death.

  Patrick wasn’t impressed. “Hah,” Patrick grunted, laughing at the man’s display.

  Then the man turned and hooted. The rest of P.J.’s group were obviously hidden somewhere behind him. Emily should have been relieved, but this was the first time she’d seen them break their trios. One man alone was a change, and she felt a new, ominous thread of misgiving.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” she said.

  Drew glanced at her with irritation. “We’re here because of you,” he whispered. “You said we need prisoners.”

  “We do.”

  Drew turned to his men and pointed. “Let’s take him,” he said.

  Nim looked up from the carcasses of four dogs when En’s song reached him. Then he smelled their enemy. The Dead Men were permeated with the odors of cordite, soap, fuel, and gun oil—all things unidentifiable to Nim, but unique to the Dead Men—which was why he’d fled east with the wind. If he was pursued, he wanted as much notice as possible. His pack had only turned north to hunt the dogs.

  Sating their thirst and hunger had been a challenge. Water was scarce. Nor were there large animals to follow to drinking holes or a herd’s favorite grazing areas.

  The park had helped Nim in two ways. He’d first seen the dogs gobbling at the trash from an overturned garbage can. The dogs had run, but the few bits of stale lunchmeat and popcorn left on the ground went into his men’s bellies. Next they’d ripped up dozens of handfuls of grass, gaining quick energy from the thin, damp, sugary roots before following the dogs into the underpass. Nim had an innate phobia of closed-in or subterranean spaces, but the highway was only eight lanes wide. He could see the other side.