Interrupt (51 page)

Emily’s hand reached through her bars. Her left hand. Without rings. She couldn’t see Drew in the next cell—a cinder-block wall separated them—although if they both leaned against the wall, they could talk without being overheard. They could also touch fingertips by stretching their arms into the corridor.

“I wish we’d made love,” she said.

“Stop.” But his tone was interested, so her voice grew slow and erotic.

“I remember both times we kissed,” she said.

“There were three times,” he said.

“Once while we were outside?”

“I should have.” His fingers tried to curl around hers and Emily laughed, straining to reach him. She was beyond feeling self-conscious or embarrassed. They’d forgotten those hurdles by the third day.

Emily and Drew had been transferred south from Bunker Seven Four during an interval that lasted nineteen hours, maybe longer, aboard a single-engine Cessna that was not armored against EMP weapons or the pulse. They’d listened closely as the pilot radioed twice for updated forecasts.

Most of the other inmates had arrived during the same calm. Then two days had passed before another, smaller group was escorted into the jail block. Those men said they’d been moved during a four-hour interval.

Since then, they’d had no information. The guards who brought two small meals a day were indifferent to the prisoners’ questions. It didn’t help that too many of them shouted for more food. Even Emily had lost her self-control on the fifth day, pacing against her bars and banging on the steel, demanding water, before she realized she’d cost herself dearly by breaking into a sweat.

She was so thirsty.

More insidious than her physical needs was their fear that America was at war. If the Chinese satellites continued to probe through U.S. and NATO strongholds, crippling their silos, burning their aircraft… At some point America’s generals would realize they’d acted too late. Like a wounded dog, their ability to fight might be limited to one last all-or-nothing nuclear launch.

No one in the prison could say how much time they had left, so Emily had told Drew about her temptation to develop gene therapies that would turn everyone Neanderthal. He’d told her about the intervals, the predictions from the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field, and his blind spot. He’d admitted that he blamed himself for Julie’s death.

Maybe talking was easier because they couldn’t see each other, like confession, although the other prisoners had hooted or jeered when they started holding hands.

Emily shared her cell with two women, an Army lieutenant who’d stolen food for the primitives outside her shelter and a geologist who’d murdered a man who raped her. They were jealous of Emily for having a friend nearby, yet watching her with Drew had helped the three of them form their own supportive relationship. Maybe they would have helped each other simply because they were the only females in the jail block.

Every cell across the corridor held five or six men. So did the rest of the cells on Emily’s side. Fortunately, Drew wasn’t the only federal agent or soldier in lockup. He’d organized fifty-five prisoners by calling down the corridor, establishing rank and reforming squads among the disgraced men.

Emily wasn’t surprised it had worked. Most of them weren’t criminals. They were people who’d made mistakes like she had, often for the right reasons.

Listening to their different stories, she’d been struck by one similarity. All of them were high-value prisoners. They either had education like the geologist or military training like the lieutenant. There were no ordinary fools among them.

Drew’s leadership was exactly what everybody wanted except in one defiant cell across from Emily. Those stupid bastards liked to yell. They’d begun a campaign of cursing, spitting, and exposing themselves. They were animals. Emily and her cellmates had to hold up a blanket as a screen whenever one of them used the toilet, which was a nasty, waterless, lidless steel bowl. The three of them also tended to gather in the right rear corner of their cell, where those men were unable to see them.

It was the left front corner where Emily could reach Drew. As she toyed with Drew’s hand, one of the bastards shouted, “Hey, babe! Over here! Hey, I got something for ya!”

She was done crying or acknowledging them in any way. Even flipping him off was a waste of time. What she cared about was Drew. “Did I really forget a kiss?” she asked. “Our first time was inside the blast door when you grabbed me.”

“Who grabbed who,” he said easily.

“Then we did it again before we left the bunker,” she said, smiling at her choice of words. Teasing him was the best she had to offer. She could barely stand it herself—eight days of talking—only talking—but at least her fantasies took her away from this place.

He’d fallen silent in the cacophony of voices.

“Hey?” she asked.

“You, uh, you’re missing our best kiss,” he said. “Inside the Osprey. I think I got to second base.” His tone was light, but she heard the concern beneath it.

“Tell me,” she said.

“We’re just torturing ourselves.”

“No. Tell me.”

As long as they lived, fragmented memories would be a problem for anyone who’d gone outside without M-string. Two of the men imprisoned with Drew and the geologist in Emily’s cell were dealing with their own confusion, sometimes extensive. Emily had held the other woman at night when she woke with nightmares.

In the geologist’s case, it might be therapeutic to wipe the slate clean. Was that possible? Walking her outside would affect her short-term memory, which was how her assailant had intended to get away with his crime, but she’d retained too many impressions and now the act of knifing him was ingrained in her mind. She would never forget unless the soldiers sent her outside forever.

What if that’s what they decide to do with all of us?
Emily thought.

In their first few days behind bars, she and Drew had whispered about their fate. He’d also made the observation that everyone in the jail block was either a scientist or a soldier of one kind or another.

If U.S. Command was holding run-of-the-mill thieves and killers, those people were being kept somewhere else or, more likely, they’d been banished. Or executed.

Emily suspected the experts and warriors gathered in this jail block were closer to banishment than she wanted to believe. They’d only seen four different guards. Their rations were one step above starvation. Nobody had come to fix the plugged toilet in the cell at the end of the corridor, and two-thirds of the lights were off.

To her, it looked like U.S. Command had consolidated their high-profile troublemakers for final evaluations. They wouldn’t waste food or electricity on people they decided they didn’t need.

And if the bombs fell, it seemed unlikely that anyone would bother with fifty-five prisoners. This jail was more than death row. It could become their tomb.

Drew let go of her hand. “Listen,” he said.

The noise level rose as the men by the entrance started shouting. Emily heard the locks
clunk
and then the familiar whine of the door hinges.

“Attention on deck!” Drew yelled.

He stood up and Emily matched him, rethreading her arm through the bars. Beside her, the lieutenant and the geologist moved to the front of their cell.

Three soldiers strode into the corridor, not the prison guards but new soldiers. Accompanying them was a man in a blue business suit. Under one arm, incongruously, he held a wide-brimmed jungle hat. His face glistened with sunburn.

Sunburn!
Emily thought. That meant the clouds were gone unless he was a pilot. He looked like a bureaucrat.

He held a clipboard in addition to his hat. He stopped in front of Drew’s cell with his three soldiers. “Haldane,” he said. “Front and center.”

“What is it, sir?” Drew asked.

Emily groped helplessly for his hand and couldn’t find it. “Drew!” she said.

The man glanced at her. “You’re Flint,” he said. “Step back. Haldane, there’s no need for you to fight.”

“No, sir.”

She heard Drew speak to his cellmates. Then the soldiers let him into the corridor.

“Wait,” she said, drinking in the sight of him. Drew was pale, but he’d regained the use of his dislocated elbow and he looked good with a dark scruff of beard.

The sunburned man walked toward her. “You, too,” he said. “You’re both coming with me.”

“What?”

“The pulse stopped three days ago. Our best projections are that the flares are done until the next solar max, maybe longer. Maybe a lot longer.”

“What about China, sir?” Drew said. “Are we at war?”

“Not yet,” the man said, increasing his volume. The prisoners had started hollering again. He waved his clipboard with a mix of weariness and excitement. “Shut up! Shut up and I’ll tell you! Almost everyone here will be paroled as soon as we can process your records, but I promise you, this is your last chance. Martial law is in effect, and we are shooting criminals and looters!”

“These are good people, sir,” Drew said. “I can vouch for most of them.”

“We’ll see.” The man unlocked Emily’s door, gesturing for her cellmates to move back. She took an instant to hug the geologist and the lieutenant.

We made it,
she thought.
It’s over.

Then she was in Drew’s arms. She pretended to be deaf to the catcalls up and down the jail block, but in her heart, the noise felt like a celebration.

LOS ANGELES

S
tanding at a fence in the afternoon rain, Emily rolled up her jacket sleeve to display the
DIA, C-004,
and
E-3
tattoos on her forearm. A Marine sergeant rubbed his thumb on each mark. Then he nodded. “Okay.”

The Marines at the fence lifted the gate to the secure area inside Camp Ninety—a dense, hodgepodge collection of tents and aluminum sheds.

Emily entered the maze of homes.

Not many people were outside. Earlier today, the sun had broken through the clouds for an hour, but the drizzle must have sent them back under cover.

A young man stood in the muddy path with his eyes closed. Despite the rain, he only wore a T-shirt and jeans. Emily wondered if she should ask him to get out of the cold. Then a voice piped behind her. “Hi!”

Framed by the open flap of a red tent, a ten-year-old girl stared at Emily’s feet.

“Hello,” Emily said.

“Hi! Hi!”

The noise brought an adult from the next shelter, a pup tent he’d enlarged with two canvas tarps. “Dr. Flint,” he said. “I told you we need more to eat. We need blankets. You can’t keep us here if you don’t—”

“You can leave any time, Mr. Womack,” Emily said roughly.

She’d changed. In another life, she might have haggled with him. Instead, she adjusted her sleeve with a conspicuous tug before she walked away, leaving her forearm exposed as a sign of rank.

Southern California hadn’t recovered enough of its industry to bother with print shops. Rumor said the government was issuing photo IDs in Denver and Flagstaff. Here on the coast, they had a thousand more pressing needs. The military had instituted a system of tattoos, using U.S. Treasury ink to thwart the explosion of forgeries.

Some people bitched about it, of course, comparing the marks to those forced on Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, which was absurd. Mostly the complainers were people who resented the fact that they hadn’t been given top ratings.

Emily’s tattoos were ugly as hell. They also permitted her inside the labs, the Marine barracks, and the cafeteria. The fenced area inside Camp Ninety had its own soup kitchen, but hot tea and soup were about the extent of their menu. Yesterday, they’d had powdered eggs. Otherwise, the inhabitants ate uncooked food from cans—and they were the lucky ones.

Five weeks after the last sporadic pulse, twenty-six fenced camps existed in California. The majority were in the southern part of the state where a few Navy and Marine Corps bases had weathered the disaster with losses as small as 40 percent. As fighting units, the naval and Marine forces had been devastated—but as peacekeepers, they were the best available option until civilian police forces could be reassembled.