Interrupt (38 page)

Suddenly the dishes seemed to be in his way. They didn’t hide him. They obstructed him. He clipped one with his head and nearly fell, grabbing his temple and staggering on.

“I got him!” another man yelled. “Over here!”

They were cutting him off. Marcus glanced through the white dishes for an opening. A soldier flitted through the array on his right. He heard a second man ahead of him.

He’d hoped to be miles away before he removed his M-string, but his body acted for him. His palm was already set against the fresh bruise above his ear. Now his fingers bunched in the mesh fabric.
I’ll find you,
he thought.

He pulled off the cap.

Drew and Bugle spread out as they followed the corporal’s yell. “Bugshit crazy old man,” Bugle said, and Drew shushed his partner.

“Quiet,” he said.

From the sky, the dishes looked well-spaced, like pegs in simplistic patterns, but at ground level the array was a labyrinth. They could be ambushed too easily, especially because the blind spot in his left eye hadn’t healed. It probably never would.

“Watch your back,” Drew said as they reached a meadow among the dishes. The corporal stood across from them in the open space with
his M16 leveled at Marcus, who crouched facedown in the weeds, propping himself on both hands and one knee. He shuddered and exhaled noisily.

Drew took one hand from his M4 and traded signals with the corporal.
Protect our flank.

The corporal acknowledged. He turned to cover the endless white dishes as Bugle marched forward and bent over Marcus. “All right, fun’s over,” he said.

“Bugle, wait—”

Marcus surged up, driving his shoulder into Bugle’s stomach, clubbing his arm through Bugle’s M4. Bugle didn’t let go of his weapon, but momentum threw him sprawling as Marcus rose over him in a low, hulking crouch.

Marcus’s face was blank of human emotion. “Nnnnnnnnmmh!” he shrieked. Then he slammed his fists into Bugle’s face.

Drew leapt on Marcus seconds later. He’d drawn his Taser. First he needed to separate Bugle from Marcus, so he kicked his boot into the man’s head. This was no longer a middle-aged desk jockey. He was Neanderthal.

He heard a
crack
as Marcus’s cheekbone imploded. Both of them fell away from Bugle, but Drew stayed on his feet.

Marcus thrust himself upright.

Drew fired and the Taser leads leapt into Marcus’s chest.

Convulsing, Marcus stumbled back. Muscles corded in his neck. The voltage must have been excruciating, but he reversed himself, planting one foot forward, then the other, groping for Drew like a man in a storm.

The corporal aimed his M16.

“No!” Drew shouted. He triggered the Taser again, sending a second charge through the leads.

Marcus collapsed.

Emily was right,
Drew thought. Marcus had none of the hallmarks of Neanderthal behavior, but somehow Emily had guessed. He’d been better prepared because of it. She might have saved their lives.

“Holy fuck,” Bugle cursed, mopping at his bloody lip.

“Get up,” Drew said. “Jesus. You couldn’t take care of one civilian?”

Bugle’s eyes widened. The rebuke obviously hurt him more than the violence to his face. It wasn’t fair, but Drew was too frustrated to apologize.

“Let’s go. Grab his M-string.”

Inside the plane, Emily felt a fresh sting of adrenaline when the corporal threw open the side door. She retreated against one of the protective screens. Bugle and Drew wrestled Marcus inside. Bugle’s mouth was swollen, and Marcus’s cheek looked wrong. Part of it was crumpled while the rest of his face had puffed on that side, swallowing his eye.

Marcus jerked and moaned. He was semi-conscious, and yet Emily realized Bugle was treating him roughly. Bugle had Marcus’s legs, which he dropped to the deck. Trying to compensate, Drew knelt, easing Marcus’s head and torso onto his lap.

“Watch it,” Drew barked.

“What happened!?” Emily asked.

Drew was focused on Marcus. “We can get your son,” he said. “I swore we’d find him.”

“You don’t understand,” Marcus groaned. “Put me back.”

Drew stood up and looked at the corporal. “Sedate him,” he said. “Let’s load his gear. I want to move out.”

“Don’t!” Marcus tried to grab Drew’s leg until Bugle pinned his arm against the deck. “Put me back!” he said.

“Crazy bastard took off his M-string,” Bugle told Emily.

She stared at him with a flurry of emotions. Marcus’s effort to
reunite with his son was insane, but it was also courageous. It was suicide. It was a bizarre form of rebirth, bringing back whoever he’d been outside. In a way, she approved—and she definitely couldn’t condone beating a middle-aged man.

“Why did you hurt him?” she asked.

“He turned Neanderthal,” Drew said.

She didn’t want to believe him, but the denial she felt turned to new horror. She trusted Drew. “Neanderthal,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Drew nodded. “Absolutely. He stood like them, sang like them, and he did that to Lieutenant Buegeleisen’s face.”

Emily glanced at Bugle’s mouth. Then her gaze returned to Drew’s brown eyes. She wondered again at his quiet strength. His determination. His ability to perform his job in any circumstances.

The corporal knelt among them with a med kit. He removed a disposable hypodermic as Marcus wormed on the deck.

“Don’t!” Marcus cried.

Bugle secured Marcus’s wrist and biceps as the corporal jabbed the needle into his arm. The effect was swift. Marcus went limp.

“If he turned Neanderthal, all of my working theories are wrong,” Emily said. “He doesn’t have ASD.”

“No.”

“This changes everything,” she said.

FALL

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
BUNKER SEVEN FOUR

E
mily’s shoes rang on the lower deck of the complex, an unnatural sound like a steel drum, which she enjoyed. The complex was well-lit and clean. It felt orderly and permanent. The narrow corridor had white-painted walls, brown-painted floors, and evenly spaced lights mounted in wire cages. The floor hummed from the vibrations of a distant engine. She might have been belowdecks on a submarine or an oil rig.

In her white lab coat, Emily matched the complex nicely. Part of her wanted to stay inside forever. A smaller part felt claustrophobic and tense.

She entered an intersection, then stopped as a man called, “Halt.”

She kept her hands where he could see them. “I have a pass,” she said. She lifted a blue slip of paper. Tucked beneath her other arm were files and printouts. She was sure the uniformed man recognized her—they’d spoken several times—but as a Navy SEAL, he insisted on his protocols.

“Approach,” he said.

Emily strode toward him.

Twenty-six days had passed since Drew and Bugle brought her underground. Bunker Seven Four sat a thousand feet into the side of a mountain fifty miles north of Sacramento near Beale Air Force Base. Budget cuts had closed the base years ago, but it had been mothballed like the bunker, housing a skeleton crew, until the solar flares.

Schematics of the bunker looked like a comma. The long entry tunnel led to a round cavern, which held an eighty-foot-long metal box—the complex—a three-story cube seated on steel coils meant to absorb the nuclear shock waves. Bugle said it was no accident that the inside of the complex resembled a submarine. Like the old NORAD base in Colorado, the Air Force operated Bunker Seven Four, but the Navy had designed and constructed it, maximizing its tiny footprint.

Emily had quickly memorized the interior layout. On the lower deck, the corridors formed a square-cornered 8 with two exits into the cavern on the east wall and one exit into the tunnel on the north. Most of the doors to the rooms inside the complex ran down the central corridor.

“Please tell Commander Haldane I’d like to speak with him,” Emily told the Navy SEAL posted at the barracks door.

“Yes, ma’am.” The SEAL didn’t move.

“Can you do it now, please?”

“No, ma’am.”

Emily cursed to herself. If she asked if Drew had left on another mission, the SEAL would stonewall whether he knew or not. Everything was top secret with these guys. “I’m going to leave a note,” she said, rummaging through her printouts for a corner to tear off. “You put it on his bunk.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The SEAL ignored her flash of impatience. Every day, the discipline among the military personnel grew tighter in response to the discord among the civilian refugees.

Emily supposed it was predictable that the two groups had drawn apart. The bunker was manned by thirty-one soldiers while there were sixty-four refugees. The soldiers felt outnumbered. They treated the civilians like a mess that could be tolerated but should be cleaned up if the mess would just cooperate.

The problem was the soldiers were highly trained like Drew and Bugle, and, even better for their morale, they had jobs around the clock.

Most of the civilians were experts of some kind. They were scientists or engineers or government or religious leaders, but too many of them were spinning their wheels to no purpose, waiting for equipment, waiting for their families, waiting to see the sky. They complained to the soldiers about the food and the cots they shared in shifts. They screamed at each other over slights like who’d kept everyone else awake, snoring or talking, or the unforgivable offense of stealing a clean pair of socks. Two women whose combined IQ must have exceeded three hundred were locked in a caustic dispute about who used too much of the toilet paper they’d been warned would overload the septic tanks.

Emily tried not to be drawn into the bickering. Everyone was frayed and petrified. She did her best to emulate the crew from the Osprey.

Self-discipline was the answer. Emily worked as much as possible. Unfortunately, she wasn’t allowed in her makeshift lab more than two four-hour periods each day. Even then she had to share the room with three geneticists and a toxicologist because the science teams had nowhere else to set up.

Worse, they were given equal time on the computers, which had slowed her data processing to a crawl. She’d tried to tell General Strickland how critical her work could be, but everyone said their work was critical. Strickland had ordered them to work in rotation. The rest of the time, Emily was left scribbling on paper or pacing through the same cramped sections of the bunker, hoping to anticipate her next set of results—hoping for a breakthrough—hoping to run into a familiar face who was also off duty.

For a brief time after she’d reached the bunker, she’d relaxed. Now each day felt like the lowest point in her life. Somehow even the terror she’d experienced aboveground seemed better than Bunker Seven Four’s stale, congested spaces.

The pressure to give General Strickland something he could use was a constant weight. Emily’s shoulders ached with deep-set knots. Her mouth hurt from grinding her teeth in her sleep.

“Here,” she said, folding her scrap of paper before handing it to the SEAL. “Thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Would he read it first? Probably. She had to assume Drew wasn’t the only one who’d see her note, so it was friendly, yet short.
Please find me. Emily.
She had more she needed to say, but not for public consumption.