Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  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.

  Only the Neanderthals were thriving. They were better at scavenging edible roots and bark. They also hunted more successfully.

  If the Neanderthals were going to hike the distance to Canada and stay there, Drew was inclined to let them. Living in separate worlds seemed like the only solution, because in several areas, the Neanderthals had made a campaign of killing every primitive they could find. U.S. Command thought they might focus on American bunkers next. The enemy appeared to be moving north, but several trios had returned to the Sacramento Valley either as guides or observers.

  These envoys joined the tribes still finding their way through the floods. Drew had identified six envoys himself and, in theater briefs, had been given descriptions of nine more in the area. All were young males.

  They were the hardiest scouts. There was no question they carried messages such as I can show you where we crossed the river or We found shelter here. What if they were also firming up intel like There are Homo sapiens in that mountain? Organized war might not be far off, which was another development Drew had been ordered to keep from Emily and everyone else who didn’t wear a uniform. The civilians inside Bunker Seven Four thought they had it bad. He’d heard their complaints. But the reality was much more bleak.

  “Fire on my command,” he whispered.

  The scouts were almost on top of his position. Rain swirled between them.

  At the last moment, the Neanderthals angled east, detouring around the deadfall. The crown of the giant oak tree had shattered over an area of sixty feet, covering the ground with branches and heavier sections of trunk.

  “Nnnnnnmh,” one of the scouts sang. Maybe the deadfall looked impassable. Drew thought they’d seen him.

  Then they were gone. Macaulay exhaled and Orion ducked his muzzle into Macaulay’s ribs and armpit, avoiding Macaulay’s M4, yet sharing the man’s relief.

  Drew aimed his scope through the trees to the east, making sure the scouts weren’t doubling back. Finally, he stole another glance at the riverbank. The main pack had left the stand of cottonwoods. A sagging fence barely slowed them. In front was a man who must have been their dominant Nim. At his side was a young black man, tall and well-muscled with four distinctive scabs on his cheek where he appeared to have been clawed by a human hand.

  Drew had seen the young man twice before with other groups. “They have an envoy,” he whispered.

  Macaulay nodded as he rubbed his gun hand in Orion’s fur and watched the trees, making no move to bring out his notepad. Macaulay was done. He didn’t want more information. It wouldn’t have meant as much to him in any case because he had no personal connection with the tribe.

  The envoy was Roell Wolsinger.

  Drew had to let Roell go. Watching him was fascinating. As the tribe walked with the blowing rain, they maintained a circular formation in order to protect their women, their injured, and their oldest. The wind was unable to breach the line of hunters on the outside. Even the rain must have been less for those in the middle.

  No one seemed to question their place in the circle. If healthy, the men took the outside positions. If hurt, they moved inside and stayed inside until they healed or until there was a need. When the tribe was threatened, or when they sent hunters to find food, even the injured and the old stepped up, replenishing each gap in the ring.

  During the first days of the pulse, the Neanderthals had weeded out any hybrids who misunderstood this fluid dance. Position, hierarchy, response, and reset were ingrained in their best people. Now the tribe was silent. They were as pure as they could be in modern bodies.

  “Let’s get back to our team.” Drew slung his pack, grimacing at the weight. He was exhausted, but there was no help for it. The forty-pound rucksack held rations, clean water, ammunition, blood collection kits, and chemical cold packs to keep any samples cool.

  Drew let Macaulay and Orion take the lead as they slogged from one oak tree to another. The ground was sturdier above the roots. The trail they’d left pinged back and forth from tree to tree, providing cover and traction.

  Ten minutes later they rejoined their team, an unconventional mix of three Air Force commandos, one Army Ranger, Bugle, and Patrick. Drew traded fist jabs with Bugle as the other men rubbed Orion’s neck for luck.

  Bugle had a cold. His eyes and long nose were red with irritation. “What’s the scoop?” he asked.

  “Good news, bad news,” Drew said. “We found a place where the tribes are crossing the river, so this area will be good hunting. The bad news is there’s thirty of ’em over the hill right now, circling east. Their scouts might have seen us.”

  “We have news, too, sir,” Patrick said, pointing southward. His arm had healed and his cast was gone. “There’s another tribe behind us about three klicks out. Northbound. I think they’ll miss us.”

  “How many?”

  “Fifty.”

  “We’ll evade,” Drew said, pulling his map from his pocket. “Let’s boogey off this hill and sit down on the next one in case the first tribe comes looking for us. We’ll wait out both groups. If the second tribe comes close enough, we can write more stats for the math guys.”

  Bugle laughed.

  “Commander?” Macaulay said. “You don’t think they’re boxing us on purpose, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sometimes it seemed like the enemy was capable of long-distance communication, one group attracting another from miles away. If Emily was right, it was because they all thought the same, so they made the same decisions as they fended their way through the landscape.

  The rain increased as Drew’s team angled across the slope, riding the weight of their packs. Going down was harder than hiking up. In his wet socks, Drew’s feet had blistered and half-healed and blistered again and rubbed raw. Bruises covered his elbows and knees. Each of them walked with his own suffering. Small pain was unimportant. They topped the next hill in five minutes and organized a perimeter.

  Drew carried his rifle to the east side, where a clear patch in the oaks and buckeyes allowed him to gaze out at the rolling terrain.

  Brown creeks. Brown ponds. Brown trees. Brown earth. There was no sign of either tribe. That made him nervous.

  “Sst! Bugle,” he hissed.

  His friend ambled through the rain like an overgrown spider, both arms extended to let the water run from his shoulders and neck. “They were past the ridgeline,” Bugle said.

  “What if Macaulay’s right? We’ve seen them do too much spooky voodoo.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Fifty Neanderthals are probably two or three tribes that merged together. Maybe one of them is that group we hit last week. Either way, if they join the tribe that just came across the river, the whole pack will probably know we’re here.”

  Bugle nodded. “Emily would say bet on it.”

  Drew didn’t want to talk about her. Bugle had been hot for Emily since the beginning, chatting her up, cracking his jokes. Drew couldn’t compete with Bugle’s noise. Did she like Bugle? She definitely laughed with him. The dude was a ray of light. He was also Drew’s best friend, and Drew felt bad for entertaining his own thoughts about her.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and hit another interval,” Bugle said. “That guy Elledge swore it’ll happen again.”

  “Maybe.”

  The
greatest secret they’d kept from the civilians was that the pulse had stopped three times in the past eleven days. The first interval lasted eight minutes. The third lasted twenty-six, but so far the second break had been the granddaddy of them all. It lasted seven and a half hours.

  The sun was sputtering.

  Would it stop altogether?

  Some of the astrophysicists said the intervals could mean an end to the flares that caused the pulse, and yet U.S. Command decided this information was strictly need-to-know. General Strickland had censored the data from the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field to keep any sign of the intervals from Marcus and other consultants because he was concerned that the civilians in the bunker would demand to be let outside.

  There was never going to be anything they could do about the sun except wait. A few geeks had talked about sending rocketfuls of nanotech into the photosphere and reconfiguring its composition. Other jarheads wanted to launch hundreds of nukes at the sun. They thought a few thousand megatons could disrupt the flares, but the nanobot guys admitted they were years from being able to design anything like what they’d proposed, and the jarheads didn’t realize how goddamned careful they needed to be with their arsenal.

  With each break in the pulse, as soon as they were able to bring their remaining systems online, the U.S. went from DEFCON 2 to maximum alert, watching for Chinese missile launches. In the South China Sea, the America and its strike group prepared to repel enemy planes or destroyers.

  The diplomats had initiated attempts to meet via radio or satellite, but China’s government and military appeared even more damaged than their U.S. counterparts. Communications were sporadic. Their chain of command had fractured. Neither side had much left except its network of bunkers and silos, and the personnel inside those holes were trained for war, equipped for war, and ready for it.

  When the pulse stopped, what the Chinese saw was the Western world on full alert. They responded. Then U.S. forces escalated in kind. It was a reflex scenario. The deadly seesaw of early warning and targeting systems was like an out-of-whack Rube Goldberg machine designed to bang away at itself until it erupted in nuclear fire.

  That’s who we are, Drew thought, shifting in the cold. Twenty minutes had passed without any sign of the Neanderthals, but he was patient.

  He brooded.

  Nobody could argue that the Neanderthals weren’t better suited for the pulse than the primitives—the millions of poor, stupid, inarticulate Homo sapiens who’d been caught outside without M-string. But in some ways, the Neanderthals were also better than thinking men like himself.

  The Neanderthals didn’t bother themselves with self-induced conflicts like power grabs or arguments of any kind. As far as anyone could tell, they had no politics or religion. Unlike primitive Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals weren’t interested in race, either. They identified each other in more profound ways. Most of them were white, but Roell was hardly the only minority Drew had seen. Drew believed they would be supremely peaceful if left alone.

  He worried that by stalking the enemy, teams like his own were attracting attention to themselves. That would be a very human predicament, monkeying with a situation for the sheer sake of monkeying with it when the best thing might have been to keep their distance.

  One benefit of the intervals was that the Neanderthal armies had been slower to form. Each break disrupted the enemy, scattering their tribes when they regained their normal personalities.

  During the longest interval, American strongholds had been forced to hide from or repel their own people. Bunker Seven Four was too remote to have been swarmed by refugees. Only a few survivors reached their fences and were driven away, and yet the awful, bloody, recurring equation of condemning a majority to save a few had hardened Drew’s resolve.

  Outside, he was pitiless. Inside, the warmth he fought to protect meant everything. He’d warned himself that he didn’t need the complication of a relationship with a civilian, but he thought about Emily constantly.

  Her fiancé was dead. Julie was dead. All of them could die any day if the sun went supernova or in Chinese or Neanderthal attacks.

  How long was it right to wait?

  And… what if she learned about the decisions he’d been forced to make? Emily was a good person. She wouldn’t approve.

  Seven hours between interrupts could have been enough time for Drew to lead the survivors to shelter and treat their wounded. Operatives like himself could be rescuing people every day. Instead, he danced with the enemy. During the longest interval, his team had gathered more blood and hair samples than in the past three weeks combined. For her. He did it for her.

  Movement, Drew thought. He straightened behind his rifle, bringing the scope back to his left.

  Nine hundred yards east, three scouts had emerged from a seam in the rolling grassland. They hurried north through the rain. Minutes later, their tribe appeared behind them.

  Nothing else moved on the brown earth but brown water. Then another, smaller tribe jogged from a gully. Roell’s tribe. They were headed straight for the larger group.

  “Bugle,” Drew whispered.

  His friend had been catnapping but woke in an instant. “What do we got?” Bugle asked.

  The leader of the larger group was a kid. Skinny and blond, the boy looked like he was crippled. One arm hung at his side. Drew nearly dropped his rifle. “Oh fuck.”

  “They coming at us?”

  “No. Look at the front of the larger group.”

  Bugle lifted his M4, which was also mounted with an SSDS scope. “I see ’em. So what?”

  The boy must have been critically wounded. Was it possible that he’d stood up again, recovered, and walked all the way from Los Angeles? Drew knew the answer was yes. He’d confronted the Neanderthal super endurance again and again, and yet he clenched his hands on his rifle as if trying to pull himself away from what he was witnessing.

  “P.J. is alive,” he said.

  BUNKER SEVEN FOUR

  Drew looked for Emily as he limped into the tunnel without his pack, jacket, helmet, or vest, carrying his rifle and a waterproof satchel. The electric lights were comforting. So were the sounds of his men’s boots on clean, dry concrete. Unfortunately, leaving the ready room had been complicated. Their debriefing officer had been less interested in their reports than in advising them of the developments inside the bunker.

  I can’t believe it, Drew thought.

  At least eight civilians had plotted to take control of Seven Four and push the soldiers outside. Interrogations were under way. The debriefing officer hadn’t told Drew all of the conspirators’ names, but two of them had acquired handguns. Several more had hidden knives or metal bars among their belongings.

  As his team shifted through the Humvees parked near the tunnel entrance, Drew nodded to a pair of Air Force sentries. Then he reached a forklift and the first stacks of pallets and crates. Beyond these fat blocks of supplies, the civilian living quarters formed three open rooms.

  Shadows stretched over the uneven ceiling. Some were cast by the bumps in the rock. Most were the distorted shapes of the supplies. From deep in the tunnel, human sounds reached through the gap between the ceiling and the crates. Drew heard tense voices and a scraping metal-on-concrete noise like someone dragging a cot against the floor.

  Two more Air Force sentries stood at the mouth of the walkway that led down the tunnel. They’d barred five civilians from intercepting Drew, making room for a Navy captain to speak to Drew instead.

  “Commander Haldane!” one of the civilians called, a geneticist he’d met in Emily’s lab. “Sir? They said you had the blood and hair samples.”

  “We want to get the purple caps under refrigeration before the RNA degrades any further,” another man said.

  Drew ignored them and saluted the Navy captain. Word had obviously spread that he’d returned, but he didn’t see Emily, which made him antsy. What if she’s one of the people in lockup? he thought.

  “Good afternoo
n, Commander,” the captain said.

  “Sir.”

  “I need a few minutes. The rest of your team is dismissed until sixteen hundred. Then you’ll rotate into the guard shift. We’re stretched thin, so make sure you get chow and hot showers. They also have a tub ready for your K-9.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Macaulay said, extending his hand to Orion.

  All of them smelled like sweat and mud. Orion’s damp, matted fur exuded a dog stink that wasn’t unpleasant to live with, but the odor must have been staggering to the bunker personnel—and Drew’s team had been ordered inside the complex, where they’d be in closer quarters than in the tunnel.

  The military and civilian populations of Bunker Seven Four were under total quarantine from each other. If Drew was going to find Emily, the walk into the complex was his best chance unless he volunteered to stand watch immediately. That would seem odd after a five-day mission outside.

  “Give the eggheads our samples,” Drew told Bugle, handing him the satchel as one of the scientists called, “Are there notes describing each sample donor?”

  “No,” Drew said. “I’ve got a lot of shorthand, but I can make sense of it for you as soon as I sit down and eat.”

  “Excellent,” the scientist said. “We’re in Lab One.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Drew said. He hoped he’d find Emily in the trailers, of course. That was why he hadn’t given them his notes.

  The tunnel echoed with footsteps and voices as Bugle and the rest of his team left. The scientists hurried after them.

  “Walk with me,” the Navy captain said.

  “Yes, sir.” Drew followed the captain through the irregular stacks of crates, boxes, plastic-wrapped pallets, and the loose items on top like sewing machines, lawn mowers, garden hoses, lamps, and coffee tables. When his scavenging crews hadn’t been able to find food or fuel, they’d taken everything else the aircraft could carry. Someday they might need motors or furniture—the furniture could serve as firewood.