by Jeff Carlson
After three days above the endless devastation, she felt closer to these elite fighters than she had any right to expect. They ate together, slept together, used the ridiculous port-a-toilet together—and meanwhile Julie’s corpse lay in back. Any one of them could be next.
I have to keep doing my best, Emily thought, glancing at the filthy, beaten loafers they’d taken off Marcus. Bugle was tending to the man’s feet, outfitting him with new socks and an enormous pair of boots.
Especially with the oversized boots, Marcus looked harmless. He was in his forties and heavy in the stomach, and yet Emily was afraid for her men.
“I should go with you,” she said.
“No,” Drew said. “Stay inside.”
“You need all the hands you can get.” She was mystified by his careful tone. Was he distancing himself from her? She touched his arm. “Let me help.”
For a moment, he seemed to consider it.
“I can carry boxes or keep a lookout,” she said, but reminding him of the hazards outside increased his caution.
“You’re staying,” he said.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
Marcus breathed slowly as he followed the soldiers from the plane into daylight. The wet, swirling wind smelled far better than inside, which reeked of dirty people, guns, and jet fuel.
The array was beautiful. Marcus glanced over the white dishes, but the allure he felt was a mute whisper compared to the pride he’d once cherished. In order to use the array, he would need to return to his prison in the electronics room, so much like the cramped, stinking plane.
That was what they wanted.
That was why they’d saved him.
Drew said, “Dr. Wolsinger? Do you need help, sir?”
“I’m all right.” Marcus was gruff. Had they seen him looking past the dishes to the scrub-and rock-covered mountainsides?
He realized Bugle and Drew were also watching the landscape, either watching for more people to save or anticipating an attack. Very little of their attention seemed to be on him, which was good, because he didn’t think he’d concealed his pain.
A big soldier with a rifle pushed through the exit from the lounge. “They were set up in the back rooms, sir,” he said to Drew. “There are some cots and duffel bags.”
“Excellent. Stay here with Lieutenant Buegeleisen.” Drew escorted Marcus up the ramp, leaving his men to guard the plane.
As they passed through the door, the air felt hushed. The wind continued to slide past the shattered windows, but it barely stirred the dust or garbage inside.
The familiar walls could have been from a dream. Marcus felt strange. This was more than déjà vu, the perception that he’d previously experienced this exact moment. The French also had a term called presque vu, “almost seen,” the feeling of being on the verge of a premonition or great insight. The uncanny sense of it hummed through his thoughts.
“Wolsinger?” Drew said. “Excuse me, Dr. Wolsinger.”
Marcus shook himself. “What?”
“I asked if you have any spare clothes. You’ll feel better if you’re clean.”
“Yes.” He clomped down the hall in his new boots. They were loose, and banged against the gauze pad on his ankle, but his body felt more attuned to the doorway to the office where he’d made love to Rebecca.
He went to it and looked inside.
Rebecca.
His relationship with her transcended any conventional norms. Outside, in the sun, their attachment to each other had been heightened by the competition for her within the tribe. At the same time, Marcus didn’t think he’d resented his tribesmen for challenging him for her. It was okay to share. They were family. They’d had no concept of existing without their group.
Standing in the hall, Marcus rubbed his forehead before Drew grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?” Drew said.
“I—My head aches.”
“You need rest.” Drew pulled Marcus’s hand away from the M-string. “I promise you can sleep after we’re through here, but we need to finish what we came for. Where’s your stuff? This is an office.”
“Okay. I know.” Marcus turned and crossed the hall, entering another door.
The room where he’d bunked before the interrupts was also a pigpen. The cot was overturned and his bags had been dumped out, the clothes strewn on the floor.
Marcus knelt. He found a shirt. There were shoes.
His memories of each unique individual in his tribe were the basis of his recurring presque vu. He could feel them if he tried.
“Sir, you need to hurry,” Drew said. “Can I help you with something? What about your boots?”
“I’m okay.” Marcus formed each word ponderously. For an instant, he closed his eyes and was far away. But he returned to himself with new urgency.
He fumbled into a clean pair of pants, then the shoes. Then he stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.
As they walked to the control room, Marcus gathered every bit of courage he’d built inside himself. He was only able to enter the electronics room by keeping his eyes on the floor.
“You want these,” he said, pointing at a rack of IBM 5150 servers. Each was about the size of a desktop computer turned on its side. There were a dozen of them. “My laptop’s over there. I don’t know if anything is functional. The pulse came through this room more than once.”
Drew looked at the supplies, the blankets, and the generator. “You tried to hold out in here,” he said.
Marcus ignored the desolate feeling in his chest. “We’d better grab my notes, too,” he said, finding the notepad on the floor. Some of those pages were extremely personal, but he wanted the government to have his summaries, for all the good it did them.
“Thanks, Doc,” Drew said, relaxing for the first time. He reached for the notepad, but Marcus thumbed through its pages and said, “Let me make sure nothing’s missing.”
Drew led him back outside. Marcus walked down the ramp, tasting the wind again.
“Lieutenant,” Drew said, “take Dr. Wolsinger inside the plane. Sergeant, I need help with some gear.”
“Yes, sir.”
The big sergeant went past Marcus. Bugle approached him and said, “Come with me, sir.”
Marcus pretended not to hear, watching Drew, who took the sergeant inside. Then he showed Bugle the notepad. “This is important,” he said before he dropped it.
Bugle bent to grab the pages. Marcus shoved him, then turned and ran as Bugle fell.
“Wolsinger! Stop!”
His shoes pounded on the damp earth, his blood thumping with exhilaration. Behind him, he heard the station door bang open and Drew’s disgusted voice. “Get him.”
They wouldn’t shoot, would they? Marcus reached the first dishes. He dodged into the metal forest. They were young, but he knew the array better than anyone. He hoped they would give up if they couldn’t find him immediately.
“Wolsinger!” Bugle shouted.
Another soldier called from Marcus’s left and he heard more voices behind him. He increased his speed. He barely felt his ankle. He didn’t notice his own heaving lungs. There was one thought in him, and one thought only.
Roell.
The superconsciousness he’d tapped beneath his waking mind felt like a puzzle whose pieces had stretched and melted. Few of its parts fit well, but those that touched each other were undeniable. He’d been with his son. They had been happy, which was more than he’d ever expected, and he didn’t believe the soldiers would look for Roell. They might not come back at all. Even if they did, it might be days or weeks later, and by then Roell could have walked for miles.
“Here!” a man yelled.
Marcus saw him through the dishes, a soldier in camouflage, his head rounded by a combat helmet. Goggles hid his eyes. Marcus gasped. His sight blurred with the memory of another faceless demon. He could almost hear the whup whup whup of the plane, but the thundering sound was his own heart.
Suddenly the dishes seemed to be in his way. T
hey 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.
Part Two
FALL
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
BUNKER SEVEN FOUR
Emily’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.