Interrupt Read online

  Emily resisted the urge to cram her hand against her mouth.

  Too much was happening too fast.

  Was this really P.J.’s group? They’d last seen him near midnight. He shouldn’t have needed six hours to bring torches from the city. Why would he come back at all? They were imprisoned in this building while he could travel at will. Fighting them was pointless, which meant the men outside might be a completely different group.

  Maybe he’s safe, Emily prayed.

  In the parking lot near the south entrance, Nim staggered as something bit through his shoulder. It shook embers from his torch onto his arm, but he didn’t stop. He redirected his momentum, lowering his arm and the torch’s weight to send himself sideways and back. The barricades were a few feet behind him.

  “Down!” he sang, calling to his survivors.

  He saw three men retreat and take cover. Finally he knelt, peering into the open.

  Inside the barricades, the hospital’s main parking lot was lined with cars, but too much of the asphalt field was exposed. In it, eight men lay bleeding. Above, sunlight played through the hectic clouds.

  One of the injured was Han. Encrusted in ash, Han squirmed on his elbows as if to find Nim. Blood ran in obscene puddles from his back.

  Only luck had saved Nim when death took so many others, yet the killing force wasn’t imperceptible. It had direction. It had originated from points to his north and east along the building’s face.

  The killing force also had sound. Seconds after most of his hunters were leveled by the first volley, Nim’s eyes and ears had also detected four near misses where dust leapt from the ground or unseen objects slammed into the cars. In the pattern, he’d glimpsed safe zones where the Dead Men could not reach.

  Perhaps those zones were changing?

  He hadn’t anticipated their magic where he’d been hit, so he waited, reevaluating every clue. He sang. “Nnnnnnnn mh!” he cried, finding his hunters.

  “Hnnn!” En answered, then a second man, and a third.

  Other survivors joined their song as Nim inspected his shoulder. The gash was no worse than other cuts and bruises he’d sustained as they pushed through the city, so he dismissed the pain. Who else was alive? Where were they?

  Listening to them, Nim perfected the map in his head, swiftly calculating sixty-two positions—twelve able-bodied hunters, nineteen wounded or killed, and thirty-one reports of near misses. He saw how the dead meshed with the living. There were interlocking lanes of danger and safety.

  He called new orders to his survivors, sending each man into a safe zone for their assault.

  “What are they waiting for?” Emily shouted, but no one heard her in the torrent of voices.

  The soldiers’ discipline was unraveling. None of them had slept. Now their shouting grew wild. Bowen didn’t notice Emily when she pressed in close beside him.

  On their screens, behind the barricades at the southeast, human shapes and torches were briefly visible—a shoulder, two heads, a running man—and yet they went unharmed by Bowen’s snipers. That was why the soldiers were yelling at each other.

  “If we can see someone, we should be able to get a weapon on him!” Bowen argued with an officer, who said, “Sir, our cameras are farther out than our shooters. We don’t have anyone directly above the south entrance.”

  “Move them up.”

  “Most of the armor is immobile, sir. We only had two welding sets. We’re using scrap where we couldn’t rig boxes, but those shields aren’t something our guys can carry. The shooters above us on the west end and the ground-floor units along the face of the building are locked in place. They don’t have good angles at the south entrance.”

  “Goddammit!” Bowen yelled, jabbing his finger at the screens. “Get some rifles on those men!”

  For an instant, Emily heard one soldier talking on his handset. “Copy that.” He turned to Bowen and said, “Team Ten lost their shooter, sir. We’re moving another…” Then he saw Bowen’s expression and his own face went pale.

  It was a bad moment. The chill on Emily’s skin sank through her bones as she understood what everyone else in the command center had already realized.

  We don’t have enough guns in position to keep them back.

  Another soldier’s handset muttered, and the pocket of silence collapsed. They returned to their tasks.

  “Use the lights again,” Emily said. Daylight was growing fast in the video feeds, but she couldn’t think of anything else. “They didn’t like the lights. It might slow them down.”

  “Try it,” Bowen said to one of his men.

  “We should make more noise, too,” Emily said. “If we get five hundred people banging on the walls or the floor…”

  Bowen looked her up and down. Maybe he was swayed by her presence of mind. “Do you have a line to our security details downstairs?” he asked another Guardsman. “Give the order. I want everyone yelling. Each man on the ground floor will use his sidearm to fire one clip into the floor, but spread out their shots. Make ’em last.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The strain was more than Emily could bear. She fidgeted with the hem of her filthy blouse and rocked on her feet like a child. How soon until the Neanderthals attacked?

  Outside, Nim’s song continued. Their voices were graceful and clean, unlike the wind, the ash, or the bent corpses of their friends.

  Sprawled in the open, Han had quit moving. He’d bled out, but losing him did not spark impatience or reckless hate in Nim. Dead was dead. Only the living were useful, and Nim felt a very different passion now.

  He was learning.

  It was his single-mindedness that had led his pack into the slaughter. To preserve the rest, he needed to do better. He needed to grow. For hours, Nim had fought a second war within himself, an internal struggle to circumvent his ancient drives. Self-examination was alien to him, but his limitations had become obvious even before his tribe was decimated.

  The night had passed because Nim got lost, not because he’d waited for sunrise, not because he’d deviated from his search for fire to find others of their kind. Because he got lost.

  The hypermnesia that was his greatest strength was also a handicap in the city. Los Angeles was nothing like the terrain for which he was hardwired, eons before the planet changed along with its climate. At his ancestors’ pinnacle, glaciers covered most of Europe. Even the regions that had been free of the ice, near the oceans, were affected by the cold. Rain was unknown. The sky tended to be frigid and gray. Consequently, there had been no forests, only sweeping, open plains.

  Nim’s reflex was to get beneath the wind. To him, any breeze was a threat that stole moisture from their bodies. Overexposure could mean dehydration and weakness.

  Hiding from it now was pointless. The storms rushing over California were thick with water vapor from the Pacific. Nim could taste the wind’s damp salt and heat, and yet during the night he’d sheltered his pack again and again without questioning this impulse. His decision to hide had also stemmed from a need to recover from sensory overload.

  In the Stone Age, Europe’s ecology had been unspeakably basic. No trees meant no birds. The cold meant few insects. Their world had contained only grazing animals such as horse and reindeer, a few hibernating rodents such as voles and mice, and meat eaters like cave lions, hyenas, bears, and men.

  Foremost among his talents was the ability to scour the emptiness for any detail. The cold preserved spoor for years. The plains of the Ice Age had been marred by tens of thousands of hoofprints, dung, bits of fur, and old bones, each of which he could separate at a glance.

  The cityscape was more complex. The human population alone was stunning, as were the birds, dogs, cats, vermin, and bugs. The endless geometry of buildings saturated his eyes. Memorizing this labyrinth would not have been beyond Nim, but the gale winds that flooded the streets—combined with so much life and wreckage—had left him baffled.

  Survival demanded more.

  Crou
ched behind the barricades, Nim pushed deeper into himself, sorting through his preset responses for a newer, more flexible mode of thinking. Part of him was still Laura’s son Peter Joshua, a phantom interlaid with Nim’s base personality. The modern human brain was a murmur that he could hear like a deaf man concentrating on the bass vibrations of an orchestra.

  His other persona was an unexpected resource. Hints of imagination gave Nim the ability to divide his pack into more valuable, less valuable components, although he arranged them in trios again without realizing it.

  The less valuable men would go first. The more valuable would follow. Sacrificing a few to improve the majority’s survival rate was a small jump for a species that placed the whole before the individual, but including himself among those who would wait was a spectacular innovation. Nim had always led the pack. Now he chose not to risk himself, breaking with a fundamental instinct.

  He rose on the balls of his feet, balancing his club and his torch in either hand. The wind gusted like knives through his hair. “Go,” he sang.

  His hunters charged the building.

  “They’re rushing the south entrance!” a soldier yelled. Five video feeds showed only cars and city streets. But in two of the computer screens, enemy shapes sprinted through the barricades.

  They were bunched in threes again. Why threes?

  Emily didn’t know if Bowen’s snipers fired on the men outside. None of the fleeting shapes were hit, and gunshots drummed through the floor beneath her, masking any shots overhead. Then the men vanished from the computer screens. They were inside the cameras’ ranges.

  “Spotter puts them at forty yards,” an officer said. “Thirty. Fifteen.”

  “Claymores,” Bowen said.

  Explosions ripped through the din, painting one computer screen with fire and smoke. The blasts also silenced the noise on the ground floor, where the soldiers and refugees were much closer to the mines. Emily pictured them ducking for cover.

  “Spotter reports two men still coming,” the officer said as another Guardsman called, “A dozen of our mines misfired, sir!”

  “Colonel, there are more combatants on the perimeter!” a soldier yelled. This time, six of the video feeds showed motionless scenery—but on one screen, a second wave of Neanderthals ran through the barricades.

  Many of them went toward the south entrance. Others diverted toward the larger doors in the center part of Silver Lake, charging the main entrance beneath the big red EMERGENCY sign.

  “They were testing us,” Bowen said. His voice held equal parts fury and quiet awe. “They made us show our defenses before committing their reserves.”

  Oh no, Emily thought, identifying P.J. among the charge. He carried a torch like all of them.

  “Can you bring the rest of those claymores online?” Bowen asked his Guardsmen.

  “I’m trying, sir.”

  Bowen looked at Emily. “What will happen if our men shoot through the glass? The effect will come inside, won’t it?”

  “I don’t think the glass is holding it back,” she said. “We’re shielded in here by all the steel and concrete. If your soldiers get too close to the windows, you’ll lose them whether they shoot or not.”

  Bowen turned to his officers with handsets. “Tell them to do it,” he said.

  “You can’t!” Emily embarrassed herself by protesting. Sending the Guardsmen to the windows, sacrificing them to protect everyone else inside Silver Lake, was like chopping off a man’s hands and feet to save his body. Bowen had no choice.

  Machine guns stuttered beneath her. Some were near. Some were far. What each position had in common was that every gun stopped within seconds. Soldiers were giving up their minds to fire those few shots. They must have run from the depths of the hospital to scan the landscaping or the parking lot outside, shooting even as they succumbed to the effect. Then where did they go? Had there been enough time or rope to provide them with tethers?

  A man said, “Spotter reports two kills for Team One, sir!”

  The conflict in Emily was hideous. She hoped P.J. wasn’t among the dead, but did she have any right? The best thing might be if he was wounded and brought inside—if he could survive a bullet—if the hospital was ever safe again.

  Alarms vibrated through the never-ending noise.

  “Sir, we have smoke inside the main doors and the ER,” an officer said as another man called, “We’re on fire at the south entrance! I have a sergeant on the ground floor reporting enemy combatants inside, but most of his platoon is disabled and he can’t engage or we’ll lose him, too! He can only hear them!”

  “Does he have grenades?” Bowen asked.

  “Yes, sir! He threw them, sir!”

  “Back him up with anyone we have available. Center our defenses on the middle part of the building. Is the sprinkler system on?”

  “Sir! Yes, sir! I have reports of sprinklers activated across the ground floor!” the soldier said as another officer said, “Colonel, there are torches inside the main doors. Parts of the ER and the central lobby are on fire.”

  Despite their guns, despite superior numbers, they were losing. Emily guessed the same fight was repeating itself all over the world. Normal men were trapped inside or underground while the Neanderthals were free to burn or bury them, and the realization that struck her now felt evil.

  P.J. might be better off outside, she thought.

  Greasy black smoke rolled through the open door, spilling across the ceiling. Someone shouted before the sprinklers overhead burst like a squall of rain, drenching everyone and their paper maps and laptops. One computer shorted out. Its screen went dark. The soldiers yanked at their equipment in a tangle of wires, shoving their laptops beneath their desks.

  Walsh charged the door. That alone would have been a selfless act, but he drew his pistol as he ran into the hall, shutting the door with his back to it. Emily heard him yelling on the other side.

  Bowen shouted through the hissing sprinklers. “I want this water in buckets or any containers we can find! Move as much as possible above the fire! Be ready to shoot through the floor! Maybe we can coordinate with our men on the ground.”

  Wet and cold, Emily tried to help the soldiers sort cables in the downpour. A few of the video feeds were up again.

  Outside, suddenly, she saw three people sprinting away. They ran south, dashing through one screen and then another. “Look!” she said. Were those soldiers who’d been lost to the pulse? Or were the Neanderthals retreating?

  Seconds later, the crackle of the guns blended into a louder, heavy drumbeat. A rhythmic whup whup whup whup slapped at the sky.

  “Spotters report a chopper inbound, sir!” a man yelled as another said, “Check that. It’s an Osprey.”

  “I have no ident!” the first man yelled.

  “It’s ours,” Bowen said, lifting his fist in triumph. “Thank God. It has to be ours.”

  Nim fled. The thing in the sky was too loud, too big, too unlike anything he understood. He wasn’t sure if it was alive or a natural event like an avalanche.

  “Follow me,” he sang.

  It hammered out of the north as he broke off his assault, calling for the hunters who’d run inside. Only two emerged. That left him with six men, and all of them were hurt.

  As the thing in the sky swung closer, it scattered the pack. Two of his men ran into a danger zone. “Wait!” Nim called. They couldn’t hear him. The vibrations were immense, and Nim glanced over his shoulder to see if death would strike.

  Smoke twisted from the building in four places, concealing his hunters. All of them had thrown their torches into the Dead Men’s caves. Maybe it would be enough. If the Dead Men burned, the battle was over.

  If not, Nim would be back.

  LOS ANGELES

  In the cockpit, approaching the southern face of the hospital, Drew didn’t see the men running beneath his aircraft until it was too late. His attention was on the wind and the few clear areas in the parking lot.


  Tnk. A bullet punched through the fuselage somewhere behind them and Bugle yelled, “We’re taking fire!”

  “What—”

  People on the hospital’s west end were shooting at the men outside. Drew had descended between them within eighty feet of the building, sending up great whirls of ash and smoke. He didn’t think he was the target, but there wasn’t enough fuel to abort, so he ignored the guns.

  Lowering into the dark mess took all of his concentration. The V-22 Osprey was a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft just a few years off the drawing board. Equipped with heavy positional rotors on its snub wings, the Osprey’s sixty-foot body was nothing like a fixed-wing fighter, and Drew had barely clocked fifty hours in test flights. If the wind tipped him into the building… If he hit a tree or a car…

  “Kingsnake Eight Five, this is Romeo Nine!” Bugle yelled on the radio. “Kingsnake Eight Five, do you copy?”

  “They can’t hear you,” Julie said on their ICS. She was in back.

  Bugle sat beside Drew in the co-pilot’s seat and flipped his middle finger at the hospital. “Quit shooting, motherfucker!” Bugle yelled as the radio answered through pops of static: “—manding officer Colonel Bowen. Say again?”

  The gunfire had stopped. Bugle was only mouthing off because there wasn’t anything better for him to do.

  They were almost on the ground. Then a glittering hail struck the asphalt in front of them. Drew jerked the aircraft up and away. Glass peeled from the hospital in shards and larger panes, which was why he hadn’t landed closer. He couldn’t afford to get hit. Even if the Osprey wasn’t seriously damaged, rents in its protective coating could leave its electronics vulnerable to the EMP. They’d need to patch the bullet hole. There were no aircraft left to replace this one.

  The Osprey’s tires jolted into the ground before Drew anticipated contact. The hard landing made someone shout in back. “Great,” Drew said, trying to hide his tension—but it showed in his next words. “Ask them about Dr. Flint.”