Interrupt Read online

  But are there enough of us? Drew wondered. Four planeloads of black ops and Special Forces weren’t enough to accomplish more than a few missions across North America.

  “We need to outlast this crisis,” the officer said. “The Chinese threat hasn’t gone away.”

  “Ma’am?” the Marine said. “If they can’t see, either, now’s the perfect time to launch against their command and control.”

  “That’s nuts,” Julie objected. “If we’re experiencing electronics failures, our targeting systems might go, too. We couldn’t be positive where our missiles would land.”

  “The nukes are hardened against—”

  “We might not even get a full launch, just enough to make the Chinese counterstrike! You need to think about—”

  “Enough,” the officer said as the small crowd rustled and muttered. It was the first hint of disharmony among the tightly disciplined ROMEO agents.

  Drew didn’t doubt that in other places, the people with the launch codes were having the same argument. He understood the Marine’s aggression. Everyone had lost good friends and squad mates, and their families were in danger back home.

  “We haven’t ruled out the possibility that the solar activity is man-made,” the officer said, “which means China’s satellites and radar systems may have been ready to survive the pulse. If so, we’re at a huge disadvantage.”

  “You think they started the flares?” a woman asked.

  “China has put billions of dollars into their exotic weapons programs. They definitely have the launch capacity to send a package into the sun. Look at this.”

  The officer brought up a new window packed with file names, then initiated it. Her laptop rolled through dozens of still shots of different men in a strikingly similar pose, hunched forward, their arms lifted away from their bodies with a fence post, a pipe, an axe, a bat. All of them were American by the look of them—men in jeans or slacks or shorts—a Cleveland Browns jersey—and their poise was completely unlike the confused policeman in the video.

  “There are ongoing reports of attacks among the survivors,” the officer said. “It’s happening in every city, every state. We’re losing lives and resources to our own people.”

  “They’re all white,” Drew said for Julie’s benefit, demonstrating that he could see.

  The officer glanced at him. “Almost,” she said. “Early data suggests they’re either Caucasian or mixed Caucasian descent. The majority of these attacks are happening in North America, Europe, and Australia.”

  “How do we know that if our sats are down?” Julie asked.

  “We’re still in contact with our allies and with China. Enough information is getting out. The incidence of these attacks is four hundred times less among Asian, African, and Hispanic populations.”

  “Then we’re missing some key data or it’s not the EMP that’s causing it,” the Air Force captain said. “There are no racial differences in the human brain.”

  “You’re not the first to say that,” the officer said. “It’s possible the Chinese are underreporting their own issues, or there may be a trigger we haven’t identified yet. Something they put in our water. Something in our food.”

  Drew grimaced. Historically, the People’s Republic had worked very hard to regulate the outside world’s perception of their nation. For decades, they’d claimed there were no homosexuals in China, no famine, no political dissent. But if they were experiencing the same attacks now, and hiding it, they were setting themselves up for all-out conflict with the United States. Too many people had died.

  “We’re trying to capture some of the assailants,” the officer said. “Unfortunately, there are complications. Our cities are on fire. We have a limited number of air assets. We’re also treating these men as biohazards in case there’s a chemical or biological contagion at work.”

  “What about facial recognition programs?” Julie asked.

  “We’ve run our imagery and fingerprints in the few cases any were recovered,” the officer said. “No luck there, which means they’re not criminals or known terrorists—or military or law enforcement. The only hit was from a civil database in Michigan. One man was printed for a part-time job in child welfare, but that’s not much to go on.”

  The plane rattled again and she raised her voice.

  “All we know is these attacks are persistent and organized, and they’re not happening on Chinese soil. We think it’s a weapon.”

  Then we’re at war, Drew thought.

  LOS ANGELES

  In the hospital’s makeshift command center, Emily paced from side to side in a tiny space between two desks. She wanted to project conviction and expertise, but her body betrayed her.

  Two doctors stood with Colonel Bowen. Pulling these men from their duties had taken more than an hour, giving Emily too much time to worry, because Captain Walsh insisted she wait here with Michelle and the young man. “It’s not safe,” Walsh said. Outside, there had been more gunfire, and raised voices constantly passed through the hall. They were barely in control of the hospital.

  Emily had been reduced to asking every paramedic or nurse she saw about Chase. She kept thinking he would walk through the door. Waiting for him was torture, but first she needed to convince these men to give her every resource available.

  “We need a larger sample base!” she said, holding up her collection kit.

  One of the doctors was a dark, harried man in his forties. “I don’t see the point,” he said, looking at Emily with impatience, even scorn. “Let me get back to work.”

  “Stop,” Bowen said before the doctor could leave.

  National Guard Colonel John Bowen was a tall, hefty man in his sixties. The only chink in his resolve was his flexing hands. His fists kneaded constantly at his sides, for which Emily forgave him.

  Bowen said, “You think the difference in the people outside is genetic?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” the doctor said.

  “It does! The repetitive or restricted behaviors that characterize ASD become an advantage during the effect. I’ve seen it myself. They’re more coherent, more focused than everyone else.”

  “Even if that’s true, there’s no way to take samples during the flares,” the doctor said.

  “We’ll do it now,” Emily said.

  “You can’t test your theory for the same reason. It’s a catch-22. Everyone is either safe in here or they’re lunatics if they’re outside.”

  “We have some capacity to monitor the grounds outside,” Bowen said, gesturing across the busy room.

  In a corner, three Guardsmen had slung rifles from their shoulders, doubling as security as they worked at their laptops. Beside them, Michelle waited with the young man, who sat with his head down, picking incessantly at the back of his left hand.

  Bowen said, “If we have to, we can send the boy out and watch him.”

  “No!” Emily said.

  “Miss Flint,” Bowen said. “You’re right. We need to understand what’s happening, and he’s what we have available.”

  So we saved him just to turn him into a guinea pig, she thought with fresh guilt.

  “I don’t have time for this,” the doctor said. “Right now most of our lab techs are matching donor types and trying to keep up with the demand for blood, and they’re doing it in hallways and bathrooms. It would be wrong to make them—”

  “Listen to me,” Emily said. “ASD affects some of the most central parts of the brain in ways we still don’t understand, the cerebrum, the amygdala. It also creates local overconnectivity in the cerebral cortex. Brain weight, volume, and head circumference all tend to be greater in autists.”

  “That’s a huge generalization,” the doctor objected.

  “An excess of neurons might allow them to maintain some function where we don’t,” Emily said. “The effect causes us to lose our higher thinking. Adults with ASD already have weak connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the bra
in, which could mean they’re ready for it. By our standards, they don’t associate well. There are abnormalities in their orientation to stimuli, novelty detection, language and face processing, working memory… The list goes on and on.”

  The second doctor frowned. “She’s right that autistic individuals tend to use different portions of the brain, not just for motor function but for the default network.”

  “What does that mean?” Bowen asked.

  “The default network is the large-scale brain network involved in social and emotional processing,” Emily said. “It’s unusually diffuse in adults with ASD, and yet they have intact connectivity of the task-positive network. There’s an imbalance toward goal-directed thinking and sustained attention, which plays into compulsive and ritualistic behaviors.”

  She pointed at the young man, who continued to pick at his hand even though the skin was irritated and pink. The parallel between the young man’s self-stimulation and Colonel Bowen’s fists was intriguing. In normal people, such fidgeting was called a nervous tic, whereas in autists, it was deemed a sign of their condition. But the two behaviors were closely related.

  “Autists also tend to lack empathy for others,” she said. “They’re unable to internalize what other people are feeling.”

  “You think that’s why they attack us?” Bowen asked.

  “In their altered state, yes. A study in 2007 reported nearly two-thirds of children with ASD exhibiting tantrums and one third had a history of aggression, especially in those with language impairment. They were frustrated. Alienated.”

  All three men were watching her closely now, and Emily used their attention to center herself. She stopped pacing.

  “What if they’ve always been impaired because they were trying to use both aspects of their minds?” she asked. “Compared to us, they’re overequipped. They have the unique, autistic regions of their brains in addition to the more normal sections, which shut off during the events. Then they’re more focused than ever. The confusion they’ve always felt is gone.”

  “Too much of what she’s saying fits,” the second doctor said, but Emily glanced away to hide her uncertainty.

  This is it, she thought. This is where they’ll really resist what I have to say. And maybe they’re right. We don’t have a lot of evidence yet.

  “For twenty years there’s been a spike in children born with autistic spectrum disorders,” she said.

  The first doctor shook his head. “That’s debatable.”

  “The increase is seven hundred percent.”

  “If you were a physician, you’d know that most of this so-called epidemic is easy to explain. Awareness and detection have both improved. We’ve broadened our criteria for diagnosis. Parents are also taking advantage of social programs for autism, which is where all the money is these days. No one is retarded anymore.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’ve been in medicine my whole life and seen things change. Everyone is autistic now because families have learned to play the game with government handouts.”

  “Broadened criteria accounts for twenty percent of the spike at most,” Emily said, but she saw no point in arguing with this idiot. Colonel Bowen was who she needed to convince, so she turned and held Bowen’s gaze. “What if the increase was a reaction to our environment?” she asked. “I’m not talking about MMR vaccines or flame retardants in baby blankets. I mean what if autism is an evolutionary response to solar activity?”

  “That’s absurd,” the doctor said.

  “There are any number of animals who use or respond to Earth’s geomagnetic field. Birds and insects. Deer. Cows. Crocodiles. Dolphins. We like to ignore it, but the fact is human beings are just animals, too. Our brain tissue is suffused with magnetic crystals, especially in critical regions like the cerebellum and cerebral cortex. Biomagnetism is how bees and fish navigate so accurately. Birds use it to migrate. But no one’s ever explained why people have magnets in their heads.”

  “The amount of magnetite in the human brain is infinitesimal,” the doctor said.

  “That could be part of why people change! If we’re subjected to overwhelming magnetic fields—”

  Bowen ended the debate. “I want as many lab personnel on this as possible,” he told the first doctor.

  “Right now we’re saving lives,” the doctor said. “You can’t expect us to let people die.”

  “We’ll start with anyone who matches your profile,” Bowen told Emily. Then he turned to the doctor. “You probably have an hour before my squads come back inside. Get as much done as you can with the wounded, but prep your labs. I want this done fast. Is that understood?”

  “Colonel, we can’t—”

  “Is that understood?”

  Emily tried to appeal to both doctors with a separate request, letting all of her love and dread show in her face. “Have you seen Chase Coughlin? He’s an attending. He should have been on shift today.”

  “I don’t know,” the first doctor said as he left the command center.

  Emily started after him. “I should help in the labs,” she said to Bowen, afraid that her real intent was transparent. She wanted to set up her blood work, but first she planned to look for Chase.

  “Wait!” a soldier yelled. At the same time, all of them stopped and looked up as if responding to a larger voice. Emily felt like she was using a new sense, a sixth sense, to perceive an invisible change in her world.

  Then it was obvious. Static etched its way across the computer screens as the lights flickered. Outside the hospital, silence fell. The distant noise of the crowds vanished.

  Below, a new, louder sound rose from the ground floor as panic spread through the refugees inside.

  “Lock the building down!” Bowen shouted. “Lock it down! Put reinforcements at every stairwell and make sure the hospital staff has protection! We might need extra men downstairs!”

  “Our radios are out!” another Guardsman yelled.

  Emily retreated to Michelle’s side and clutched her friend, watching the door with wide eyes. Were some of the survivors inside also changing? Not every room would be proof against the effect. And if a few men turned violent, how long before the place was torn apart?

  Bowen swept the room, finding Emily. “I need you,” he said.

  She stepped forward.

  Bowen led her to the bank of laptops manned by three of his men. His fists flexed and bunched. “Will it stop?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The laptops had recovered from the first surge of the effect and were clear now. Six of the screens showed grainy green-and-white video. Four were close shots of the parking lot or the barricades. Two were longer views of the city. Emily recognized the streets south and east of Silver Lake. A seventh camera merely showed the distorted yellow glare of a floodlight.

  The other lights either shut off automatically or burned out in the effect, she realized. Their cameras were using night vision.

  The people outside were primitives. They banded together in eddies and clusters, sorting themselves. Here and there, loners or twosomes separated from the mob. It was like watching sand blown by the wind. There was an eerie grace in how they drifted and found each other.

  The groups began to reach critical mass. Some of them challenged each other, hollering and shoving, but their displays of aggression did not seem to escalate—not until there was a flurry of motion at one point beyond the barricades south of the hospital. People began to run.

  Emily pointed. “We need to move this camera!”

  The Guardsman manning the laptop looked at Colonel Bowen, who nodded. “Number four doesn’t have much range,” the Guardsman said, his shoulder bumping Emily as he lifted a handset. “Remote Four, this is Bravo. You still there?” He turned to Emily. “Where are you trying to look?”

  “To your left. Up. Zoom south past those cars.”

  “We’re going to lose a lot of resolution.”

  “Enhance it,” Bowen s
aid.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Our software’s doing everything it can.”

  The screen shifted with unbearable slowness, drawing out the tension in Emily’s veins. Earlier, listening to Bowen’s soldiers, she’d learned how the cameras worked. It was useless to mount electronics outside. Nor could they post men at the windows with binoculars or rifle scopes. The hospital’s exterior wasn’t proof against the effect. Instead, Bowen’s engineers had rigged a series of mirrors in seven places. In each case, the outermost mirror could be shifted only slightly, with wires, to provide the cameras inside with new angles. Otherwise they were blind.

  “Holy shit,” the Guardsman said as the image finally lifted enough to see what had scattered the primitives.

  Eight men stalked north toward the hospital. They carried clubs and shared a distinct, confident bearing. In fact, Emily recognized the slight figure leading the group. P.J. “I see him!” she said. “The boy in front.”

  We’ve crossed paths twice now, she thought. Is that because he’s constantly on the move? The first time, at DNAllied, he might have been drawn up my street by the billboard. What is he looking for?

  Now, it seemed, the hospital lights and the crowds had attracted him.

  “That’s my nephew,” she said. “He lives near here.” The idea clicked as she said it out loud. “This is his home ground.”

  “Your nephew,” Bowen said.

  “Yes. He’s autistic. He’s the first one I saw acting differently.”

  Bowen cursed, leaning all of his weight very close to Emily when she tried to avoid his eyes. His voice was rigid with anger. “What else haven’t you told us?” he said.

  “I didn’t think it mattered.”

  “How many people are autistic in North America?”

  “Uh.” Emily despised herself for answering.

  She didn’t want to make P.J. the bad guy, but she’d already crossed that line, and Bowen was right to ask. There must be small bands like P.J.’s everywhere in the world, like an army that rose up and disappeared again with each event.