Interrupt Read online

  They’re expecting another event, she thought. Then someone inside will drag them back into the hospital.

  On the west side, a gate had been left between the overturned cars, although there were no less than fifteen soldiers in this space. All of them were roped. One man, an officer, was attempting to converse with the screaming survivors. People waved money at him—a cross—photographs—but he let no one through.

  “Okay, stay close!” Emily yelled to Michelle, shouldering past an old man and then a fat woman with blood speckled across her blouse. Emily wanted to bring them, too. But she looked away. “I’m a doctor!” she yelled. “I’m a doctor!”

  It got her to the front, although the young man lagged behind. She almost lost her grip on him as people jostled and banged against her.

  She showed her blood collection kit to the officer. “My name is Emily Flint and I work in the labs!” she yelled. “You can check with Chase Coughlin or Bonnie Watkins or Marvin, um, Marvin Castillo!” she said, rattling off every name she could remember from Chase’s coworkers. “Bonnie is the head of surgery! I do blood work for her and I need to get inside!”

  “I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor!” another man began to shout.

  “I need ID!” the officer yelled at Emily.

  “I don’t have it! I lost everything! I found these kits in an ambulance and I’ve been testing as many survivors as I can! I know why some people kill others during the events! There have been attacks here, too, right!?”

  Emily held the officer’s gaze as his eyes widened in surprise. She was getting better at lying, using her face as well as her words.

  “Okay, you’re in!” the officer shouted.

  “I need this patient and my lab assistant to complete my tests!” she yelled, yanking at the young man. He broke free, scaring her, until Michelle shoved him to the front.

  The officer waved them toward one of his soldiers. “Sanchez, find out where these people need to go!”

  “Thank you,” Emily said, but the officer didn’t notice.

  “Get back!” he shouted at the mob. “Go! Find shelter! There’s no more room! Find shelter!”

  She didn’t envy his job, nor could she do anything for him or the other soldiers except feel respect. They’d kept the hospital safe when it might have been submerged in turmoil, but this responsibility was a harsh one.

  Sanchez untied himself and led them into the building. Was he a sergeant? Emily didn’t know what the stripes on his shoulder meant.

  They hurried into a corridor where the soldiers’ ropes trailed inside. The corridor was empty and the lights were on emergency power. Less than one in three bulbs was illuminated.

  “Sir, do you have a radio?” Emily asked. “Where’s your boss?”

  “Colonel Bowen is on Level Two, ma’am,” Sanchez said. “I don’t know about communications.”

  Emily realized the corridor was deserted because it was too close to the outside. The ropes trailed in bunches to a pair of offices on either side. Both doors were open, showing eight soldiers drinking or eating from canteens or plastic pouches of food. They would drag their buddies inside if there was another event.

  How many refugees had been allowed in? The hospital was the size of seven football fields stacked on top of each other, but the top floors might not be proof against the effect, and the outer rooms surely weren’t, either, especially where the glass been destroyed.

  In another fifty feet, Sanchez rounded a corner into a mass of yelling people. Emily heard the crowd and braced herself, making sure she didn’t lose Michelle or the young man.

  Protected by grown-ups, thirty children sat on the floor, some bleeding, others with burnt hands or faces where they’d contacted fences or cars. Every side room boiled with overworked medics and the repulsive stench of human guts, urine, and smoke.

  The four of them pushed through the mayhem in fits and starts until Sanchez reached a stairwell. Refugees filled the steps, too, sitting on the right-hand side. Most of them appeared to be okay until Emily realized they couldn’t see, not because they’d been injured, but because they’d lost their glasses or contacts. The stairwell was a blind ward.

  “Is there water?” one man asked as Emily hurried by. Others prayed over an open Bible. She heard crying and bickering.

  Sanchez led Emily, Michelle, and the young man to a second-floor hallway. Most of the wounded lining the hall wore uniforms—police, firefighter, Army. It wasn’t as loud. There was more discipline. The second floor was where their stronghold began. Emily felt encouraged.

  Sanchez crossed into the main bulk of the hospital and delivered them to a command center in the administrative offices. The cubicles were adorned with personal items like family photos and plants, but the desktop computers were off. Uniformed men and women centered around a few Dell laptops and a vast note board they’d rigged above their computers, jamming pencils and two combat knives into the drywall to hold their lists and sketches. Emily recognized an L-shaped drawing of Silver Lake’s exterior with a bumpy oval inked around it to show the barricades.

  Sanchez approached an officer near the front of the room. “Corporal Sanchez from the west entrance, sir,” he said. “This woman is a doctor. She knows something.”

  The officer was in his thirties like Chase and had thick brown hair. He nodded to Sanchez. He was on the phone—a regular phone—and Emily felt a fresh burst of energy at the sight. Where was he calling? Was this Colonel Bowen?

  Emily combed both hands through her hair, wanting to make herself presentable. She needed to be taken seriously even if she was filthy with ash and sweat.

  “Bring them back,” the officer told the phone. “If the roof won’t hold… Right. Close all the doors you can and bring those men down to the fifth floor.”

  Emily’s excitement faded. He was talking to other people in the hospital, not a military base or Sacramento or Washington, D.C. His phone was a closed circuit inside the building.

  He hung up. “I’m Captain Walsh,” he said.

  They brought me to a second-in-command, Emily thought. She couldn’t let him dismiss her. “I’m a geneticist with DNAllied, and I think I can tell you why some people turn violent during the events,” she said. “I can tell you who to watch for.”

  Walsh’s gaze shifted to Michelle and the young man. “Who?” he asked.

  “It’s complicated.” Emily resisted glancing at the young man herself. Suddenly she was afraid they’d start shooting anyone who was handicapped. Had the situation gone that far? Yes, she thought, recalling the bloody corpses among the barricades.

  She needed to be very, very careful what she told them.

  “My data is untested, but this building has state-of-the-art labs in the oncology wing and specialists who can consult with me,” she said. “In the meantime, we need to get a warning out.”

  “Who are we looking for?”

  “I have a genetic profile, but it’s just a theory. I’ve been working with next to nothing. Do you have a radio?”

  “The sat links are intermittent,” Walsh said. “We’re getting more data than we send out, but if we put it on a loop, enough will get through for other people to string the message together.”

  “How long will that take? We need help!”

  “Don’t count on it,” Walsh said. “There are no helicopters, no trucks, and very little armor. If you have information that can protect us, tell me now.”

  Emily hesitated.

  “Help isn’t coming,” Walsh said.

  SOUTH CHINA SEA

  Drew’s thoughts bled out of a nightmare and coalesced around the medic leaning over him. An IV line reached up from Drew’s forearm. Beyond the medic, Drew had a blurred impression of a concave metal ceiling lined with struts and wiring. His eyes felt like they were full of sand, but this was a familiar place. He was inside a C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane. The deck vibrated beneath his back, bumping in heavy turbulence.

  He tried to sit up. “Did we launch?”


  The medic held him down. “Welcome back to the living. How’s your head?”

  “Did we launch our nukes?”

  “No. The fight’s over for now. Six of their ships are down and two of ours, the Collinson and the McCray.”

  “Where’s my partner?”

  “I don’t know. Just rest.”

  “My eyes hurt.” Drew’s face was blistered and swollen.

  The medic examined him quickly, flashing a penlight over his eyes. “Looks like superficial keratitis,” he said. “You were in the water for three hours and in and out of the pulse the whole time.”

  Superficial, Drew thought, grasping at that first word. He knew guys in the docks who’d developed welders’ keratitis, permanently impairing their vision with corneal burns.

  “You’ll heal in a day or two,” the medic said. “Just rest. We’re forty minutes from Japan and activating all agents.”

  He’s with ROMEO, Drew realized, peering left and right after the medic had gone. He heard people talking, but everything was lumps and shadows, which terrified him. He would never fly again if he couldn’t see.

  He remembered an enemy destroyer striking the McCray. After that, nothing. There was no way to land a C-17 on a carrier, which meant he’d been brought to shore and loaded aboard in Vietnam. Somehow they’d fished him out of the ocean. The EMP must have let up. Chopper crews had put their lives on the line to save him and others.

  It was intolerable to be helpless. Drew pushed himself onto his elbows, blinking furiously.

  The fuselage was two hundred feet long, a bare tube crowded to capacity. On his right, people began to sit up as the medic walked among them, his hands moving from a pouch on his hip to their IV lines—if they had a line—or to their arms if not. He was injecting them with disposable hypodermics. But not everyone was waking up.

  The Marine on Drew’s left lay motionless, although his eyes were open. Most of his chest was swaddled in bandages. Drew said, “You okay? If you want, I can shout for…”

  He’s dead, Drew realized.

  Nearby, another Marine sat on the deck, recovering. Drew spoke to him urgently. “Are you okay?”

  “Got a fuckin’ headache and a broken arm, but that’s better than most guys,” the Marine said. “You?”

  “Day at the beach.”

  “Yeah.” The Marine laughed, sharing Drew’s need to make any sort of conversation in this flying morgue.

  “All right, listen up!” a woman hollered at the front of the plane. “Listen up! This is a DIA flight with every agent we thought we could pull. Come here. We’re short on time. Most of you have been doped to the gills because we don’t have the personnel to deal with wounded.”

  “Nice,” the Marine said.

  Drew pulled the IV shunt from his arm, freeing himself even as he glanced at the dead man beside him.

  They’d been stacked in the plane like cordwood, optimizing flight time by leaving the wounded in deep, healing comas. Had bad reactions killed some of their own people? Drew was sure the knock-out and wake-up drugs weren’t FDA approved, but this sort of treatment was exactly what they’d signed up for.

  He braced himself to stand in the turbulence. The Marine rose, too. They moved forward with twenty others. A limping man nearly fell when the deck dropped abruptly. Drew and the Marine caught him. Then a smaller disturbance caused people to sidestep or move back.

  Even with the grit in his eyes, Drew recognized Julie Christensen’s lithe movements. Joy was an unusual emotion for him. Most of his life, he’d been too serious—too alone—but he didn’t need to figure out what to say. Julie kissed him right in front of everyone.

  “Whoa,” the Marine said.

  Behind him, a louder voice said, “Yeah, that’s our super secret handshake.”

  Drew turned from Julie’s heat. “Bugle!” he said, feeling a different joy. His friend’s height was easy to spot in the crowd. Drew concealed the fact that he could barely see, holding out one hand as he kept his other arm around Julie’s waist.

  Bugle clasped his hand and leaned in for a chest bump, playing it cool. “Dude, you look like shit.”

  Drew didn’t let him go. Especially after so much death, it seemed important to express the bond he felt. “I didn’t think I’d find either of you,” he said, noting that Bugle’s face wasn’t red or burnt. Why not? Had Bugle kept his flight helmet on during their time in the water?

  Julie’s hazel eyes danced, taking in Drew’s blisters as she lifted one hand to caress his cheek. She paused, then set her fingers on his chest.

  Drew was aware of other people staring. “This is nuts,” he whispered. “We barely know each other.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve read your file, too.”

  Then you know my sister died on her bike when a guy blew through a stop sign, he thought. Because I was too busy to drive her. His reflex was to pull back, protecting that old wound, but something in Julie’s expression stopped him. Was it forgiveness? He squeezed her again and said, “You—”

  “Move it!” the officer called. “Let’s move!”

  They walked with Bugle and the Marine to the front of the plane, where thirty operatives had sat or knelt to make room for others to stand behind them. Drew couldn’t make out the officer’s insignia, although he assumed she was Air Force.

  “Eight hours ago,” she said, “Earth’s magnetic field was struck by X-class solar flares. The result was a sustained worldwide EMP. Recently the pulse has been intermittent, but we don’t know enough yet to make predictions. It might stop altogether. It might not. We’re pulling back. Communications are shot, but we’ve managed to convey to the Chinese that we’re in retreat.”

  Julie noticed Drew squinting. She turned to him silently and he shook his head.

  The officer had set a laptop on her stand. Drew could see that much. The orange-and-brown blurs on its screen might have been China’s shoreline.

  “The America and its strike group are hunkering down,” she said. “For the most part, they’re reporting they’re safe inside their ships. Even better, our subs are one hundred percent operational.”

  Drew glanced at the fuselage as Bugle muttered under his breath, “Oh, shit.”

  Most of these operatives weren’t aviators, so maybe they didn’t know. The America was built to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear near miss, its vitals shielded within tons of steel, but aircraft were constructed of lightweight aluminum.

  If the EMP came back, they would fall like a rock.

  “Most of you are alive because we received early reports that the Chinese were testing a pulse weapon in theater,” the officer said. “Based on those warnings, yesterday we brought in four specialized aircraft and other gear. That’s lucky for you because the pulse hasn’t stopped. It’s still happening. This C-17 is one of the very few aircraft in flight anywhere in the world, but the decision was made that you’re worth the investment. We need you back home.”

  Then we’re safe from the EMP, Drew thought, extending his hand to Bugle for a fist jab. They deserved to celebrate. Without their data, ROMEO wouldn’t have sent these planes, so in a sense they’d saved themselves.

  The officer began a slideshow of images. Drew eased closer to her, leaving Julie. He needed to follow this briefing if he was going to have any value, but he was clumsy. He stepped on a Marine who was sitting down, then bumped another man as the officer displayed MRI and CT scans of several human brains—or the same brain in different states.

  “The pulse is having an extreme cognitive effect on anyone caught in the open. According to our doctors, the first indications are temporal lobe seizures,” the officer said, touching her own temple. “This is where the skull is its thinnest. From there, the seizures spread.”

  “Sit down,” an Air Force captain hissed at Drew.

  Behind him, Julie also moved into the crowd. She caught his arm and murmured, “What’s wrong?”

  Drew took her hand, drawing her attention from his fa
ce. “I’m fine,” he said.

  If he told her how badly his vision was affected, would she report him? The medic had said his eyesight would improve. He couldn’t chance being downgraded from flight ready.

  “The seizures are very similar to epileptic activity,” the officer said. “Reasoning, prioritizing, short-term memory, all of these areas of the brain shut down. There’s a dramatic personality shift.”

  She brought up a video of a blank-faced man, a policeman, shambling across a city street jammed with vehicles. Shoes off, hat off, he fumbled stupidly with an open car door in his way. He only needed to pull it shut, but he pushed and pushed until finally he clambered over the door onto the hood of the car.

  No one in the plane spoke, sharing one another’s horror and disbelief.

  “Our losses may be bigger than in every war we’ve fought combined,” the officer said. “Our forces in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Japan… Seventy percent are AWOL, wounded, or dead. Stateside, our casualties are in the millions.”

  Drew could barely imagine that sudden combat that must have erupted among those who were still conscious. In Vietnam, the Marines would be fighting their allies for the old tunnels of the Vietcong and for the modern steel-and-concrete buildings in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang. In Afghanistan, NATO forces would have made frontal assaults on the caves of the Taliban, not only to clear every stronghold of insurgents, but to occupy those rocky holes themselves. Elsewhere, American soldiers must have run for the urban areas of Seoul, Tokyo, and Baghdad, struggling for room in those cities’ lower levels and basements.

  “We’ve lost fifty billion dollars in civilian satellites,” the officer said. “Telecom, weather, science, it’s all gone. Most of our military net survived the first few hours, but now we’re down to our RADIUS series. Even those are vulnerable except when they’re in protect mode, so we’re rationing our eyes and ears. Radio is out. Landlines are out. We’re bringing you home because you’re trained to operate on your own—forever, if necessary—with no resources except what you find yourselves.”