Another thought suddenly came to her: What was going to happen to Mac when he arrived back from his mission? There was no way he would believe any of the story that Valentine would spin for him, and that bitch was smart enough to figure that out and plan accordingly. She would have Mac arrested on some equally trumped-up charge, and that would be that. Jesus! Valentine probably had enough of the council in her pocket that she could potentially take the whole crew of the HMS Vengeance. It would all hinge on how many of the survivors were willing to stand with Valentine, but, since she was so capable of spinning the most enticing lies, it might be easier for the survivors to believe them than to see the truth. And while she was on the subject of the “truth,” all Valentine would have to do was make an example of a couple of the ranking officers and crew, and the rest of the camp would, understandably, cave.
“Shit!” she hissed under her breath.
Thor’s head popped up and his brown eyes stared at her through the flames of the fire. He got up and walked over to her and lay down again. Emily reached out and stroked the dog’s head, then down between his eyes, until he lowered his head again.
She was going to have to find some way to contact Mac and let her husband know what had happened, warn him that Valentine might be plotting against him and the crew. How she would do that she had no idea. There was no way for them to get back to Point Loma, no way to reach the submarine while they were radio silent, and no way to know if or when the Vengeance had made it back to California.
Of course, all of that was beside the point if she did not survive finding Adam. But Adam was the key to all of this. If she could locate him and take him back with her, she would have the proof she needed to fight Valentine, or at least cast some doubt on whatever story Valentine concocted. If there was some way to prove that the woman was the conniving murderous bitch Emily knew her to be, then maybe there was a chance.
Jesus!
Emily compartmentalized the negative thoughts. It would do no good to dwell on them right now. There was not a thing she could do about that particular problem, anyway—not right now. She would figure out how she was going to deal with Valentine after she had found Adam.
Emily lay her head back down and stared deep into the flames. She had fought so hard to survive, to ensure that the remnants of humanity had a chance, and had beaten the odds on more than one occasion. After all that, she would be damned if she was going to let another human being be her downfall.
The next morning, the sun was a ghost haunting a leaden gray sky. While the clouds threatened to resume their downpour, the day was so far mercifully free of rain.
Emily shivered as she stepped out onto the wooden deck of their shelter. The morning air was just the wrong side of cool for her, but the mug of coffee she had brewed over the fire warmed her hands and insides. She had slept surprisingly well for the rest of the night. No dreams, thank God. She had left Rhiannon still sleeping in her bag, Thor ever watchful beside her.
The flat featureless landscape stretched off in all directions, giving Emily a clear 360-degree field of view for many kilometers, the open plain broken only by three distant clusters of Titan trees, nothing more than black silhouettes. Patches of early morning mist still lingered on the ground here and there, adding to the feeling of complete isolation. In the washed-out light of this new day, Emily could finally make out the building where they had spent the night. It had been some kind of tourist souvenir store. A sign, perpendicular to the roof, had been cut in half by the explosion that split the building in two, and now it read “Indian Supp.” A rusting soft-drink machine sat just a little farther down the wooden deck from where she stood next to an equally rusted bench. She made a mental note to see if she could open the machine before they left; there might still be some goodies inside.
Emily tested the bench to make sure it would not collapse and sat down. She took a deep swig of coffee and allowed herself to relax.
Since the night she had woken to discover Adam missing—What was it, three days ago now?—Emily’s life had been spiraling out of control. This, she realized, was the first chance in all that time that she had had a second to simply sit, just sit.
She sipped at her coffee and allowed her eyes to wander over the scenery.
The freeway cut across the red skin of the world like a half-healed knife wound, east to west. Large pools of rainwater had collected on the freeway’s surface, the channels running along the side of the freeway full to overflowing; she could hear the rush of water from where she sat. The building they had taken shelter in was on the west side of the freeway. The store’s parking lot, veined with cracks and tufts of plant life, was surprisingly empty of any vehicles. Not a single car or truck. She supposed the building would have offered very little in the way of shelter back when the red rain had fallen. Travelers would have just wanted to get home to their families, and that would have included the staff. She had seen no evidence of the telltale circular holes that would have indicated humans had died here, been transformed into spider aliens, and then cut their way out in search of others like them. She shuddered at the memory of the millions of those same creatures she had witnessed swarming through the streets of Manhattan in the first days after the rain.
Still, something was out of place.
Emily could not put her finger on what it was exactly, but the scenery seemed different somehow, subtly altered just enough to alert her brain that something was not the same; it was like looking at one of those puzzles in a magazine that asks you to spot the difference between two seemingly identical pictures. Until you concentrate, you don’t see the changes, but you know they are there. She stood up and began to slowly turn in place, taking in every detail that she could. While their arrival last night was hurried, to say the least, everything looked just as she remembered; the debris field of wood and broken glass in front of the store and their footprints through the mud-covered ground and then up to the doorway all looked as it should, but still . . . she could not shake this perception of change.
Emily stepped off the porch and walked a few feet across the concrete of the building’s parking lot. Beyond the cracked tarmac, where once there had been green grass, there was now nothing but the ubiquitous red mosslike plant every survivor had long ago substituted the word “grass” for. It carpeted every inch of arable land.
Why was the building even still standing? Where was the voracious building-eating plant-animal they had encountered in Las Vegas—the all-you-can-eat bug, Mac had labeled it—that seemed so intent on reducing every building to dust? It had been just as prevalent in California, reducing the nearby cities and naval base to nothing but holes in the ground. Hell, Point Loma had a daily team dedicated to finding and eradicating any of the hybrid all-you-can-eat they found within the camp. Could it be as simple as localization of the species? Like certain plants or animals that could only be found in specific areas, before the red rain came?
Emily’s pondering was broken by the sound of the door creaking open, followed by the clatter of Thor’s paws across the porch and a not-so-bright “Morning” from Rhiannon.
“How are you feeling?” Emily asked, watching Rhiannon, the blanket thrown around her shoulders like a shawl, descend the steps into the forecourt.
“Okay. Better, I suppose. How about you?”
Emily smiled. “I’m good—a little tired, but okay.”
“So, what do we do now?” Rhiannon asked.
Emily stood. She didn’t even need to close her eyes; all she had to do was turn to the east and she could feel the warm glow of her son, burning like a pulsar, tingling her skin like tiny pinpricks of excitement.
“We head that way.” Emily pointed toward the rising sun. “We just need to stay on the freeway; it’ll get us all the way to the East Coast if we have to go that far.”
Rhiannon looked pensive.
Emily watched her for a second. “What’s on your mind?” she asked, trying to keep her tone as nonchalant as possible.
R
hiannon stopped, staring at her shoe for a moment, biting her lower lip. When she spoke it was almost apologetically. “Are you sure you know where we’re going, Emily?”
Emily was not surprised by the question, but she was surprised by how long it had taken Rhiannon to ask it. It was one thing to tag along out of friendship and love, another altogether to believe in some kind of mystical compass that everyone else thought of as indicating that Emily had bought a first-class ticket on the Crazy Train Express.
“I don’t know exactly where we’re heading,” Emily said, “but I know that we’re closer now than we were before we left Point Loma.”
There was no need for words; Rhiannon’s conflicted expression of befuddlement was question enough: How? How do you know?
“It’s like there’s a thread, a connection, running from me to Adam. I can feel it tugging at me. And when I stop moving, it pulls even stronger, like he’s telling me not to stop, to keep on moving.”
Rhiannon continued to look at her with that same conflicted gaze.
“Look, it’s okay. I’m not crazy . . . something weird is happening, I’ll be the first to admit it, and I know it’s hard for you to accept, but I also know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Adam is waiting for us. If we follow it, it’s going to lead us to where he is.”
“Or it’s a trap,” said Rhiannon. The words fled her mouth as though they had been released from chains.
“Yes, of course, I’ve thought about that. But it’s not a trap; this is something . . . much deeper.” Emily raised a hand to silence Rhiannon’s objections. “Don’t ask me how I know, because I won’t be able to tell you. I just do. You have to trust me. It’s a matter of faith, okay?”
Rhiannon was about to add something else but stopped, and her whole body seemed to relax, whether in resignation or acceptance of her explanation, Emily could not tell.
“Okay,” the girl said finally, “let’s go find him.”
Emily smiled broadly, stepped closer, and threw her arms around Rhiannon.
“Thank you for your trust,” Emily said as Rhiannon returned the hug.
They held the embrace for a minute, two humans just being.
The soda machine on the front stoop proved to be full of nothing but burst cans, the victims of so long an exposure to the elements, but they found a couple of candy bars in one of the lockers in the staff room and ate them as they continued their scavenger hunt around what was left of the remaining building. Emily gave the last half of hers to Rhiannon; the candy was way too sweet for her palate after so much time of no sugar or corn syrup.
“Oh! This will be useful,” said Emily as they rooted through the front of the store, carefully trying to avoid the broken pieces of glass. She held up a tourist map of Arizona and New Mexico, protected by a clear plastic envelope, with only a few blotches of mildew near the corners.
Emily spread it out on the counter and followed the route she thought she had taken from California, guesstimating the distance they had travelled before setting down.
“I think we’re somewhere around here,” she said, poking an area on the map with her finger. If she were right, then they had lucked out and found the remains of the I-40, an interstate route that bisected most of the lower states from California on the West Coast across to the east of the country. They were somewhere in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a major town or city for a good two hundred kilometers . . . assuming her guesstimate was correct, of course.
Emily folded the map up again and placed it in her back pocket.
She checked her watch. It was pushing toward eleven already. “Let’s see if there’s anything else of use in here, and then we need to get going.”
They wandered deeper into the almost cavelike recess of the store, carefully picking their way through the debris of a lost age.
“I think this place must have been owned by one of the Native American tribes,” Emily said when they found themselves standing in a room with the remains of scores of moccasins spilled across the floor, their boxes nothing but gray mulch, and the shoes all but disintegrated from exposure to the elements. Grime-covered statuary of wolves and cougars, bronco-riding cowboys and stalking warriors bearing mute witness to an extinct world, rested on glass shelves covered in splotches of red moss. The sparkle of broken glass glinted across the floor.
“Thor, sit,” Emily commanded before the malamute could wander in and risk getting a paw sliced open. The whole building smelled of rot . . . and something else, something that smelled halfway between bad eggs and vomit.
“What is that?” asked Rhiannon, wrinkling her nose at the stink and switching on her flashlight to illuminate the heavily shadowed room ahead of them. In the far corner, beneath a glassless window, something had made a home from the desiccated shoes; it looked like a grossly oversized wasp’s nest, about four feet tall and two wide, narrowing to a funnel at the top. A large opening halfway up the body of the nest was a pool of darkness.
“It looks like a—”
A pair of oval, luminescent green eyes flickered open in the entrance of the nest.
“Oh . . . shit!” Emily whispered, instinctively placing a protective arm across Rhiannon’s chest.
A second set of eyes opened above the first. Then a third below.
Thor growled quietly and took a step backward.
Emily felt an odd sensation flicker over her; just for a second, she had the sense that she was looking at herself, Rhiannon, and Thor from the corner. It lasted for just a moment, like a subliminal frame in a movie, barely perceivable on a conscious level unless you were looking for it. But in that brief flash she saw herself staring at the corner, her hand still across Rhiannon’s chest, Thor backing away. She sensed a mixture of fear and inquisitiveness at what she was . . . and, was that shock? Yes. There was an afterimage, an emotional imprint, if you like, of surprise.
“Just back up slowly,” she whispered when she had recovered from her own shock. “Thor!” she hissed as the dog took another step forward.
The three companions edged back a few more steps, Emily’s hand on the butt of her .45, before she turned and ushered Rhiannon back toward the room where they had spent the night.
“We slept here with . . . with whatever those things were right next door to us?” Rhiannon said, more a statement of doubt than a question.
“Come on,” Emily said, grabbing the girl’s backpack from the floor and handing it to her before shrugging her own over her shoulders. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
A halfhearted drizzle had begun to fall by the time Emily and Rhiannon stepped outside.
“Oh great,” said Rhiannon, pulling her hood up, the sky a forewarning of the desultory mood she was sure would mark the rest of the day.
“We need to make locating a working vehicle our top priority,” Emily said, pulling the hood of her own jacket up, trying to give both her and Rhiannon a positive task to focus on. “If we have to walk we’re either going to starve to death or die of exposure. We sure as hell don’t need a repeat of last night.” Of course, finding a vehicle out here was so much easier said than done.
A malaise as gray as the sky settled over the travelers and for the next few hours they followed the I-40 east in silence, the only sound the faint squelching of the soles of their shoes and the rustle of their waterproof jackets. Emily felt colder than she had in years; the balmy California weather had spoiled her, apparently. She pulled the hood of her jacket deeper over her head and turned to check on Rhiannon.
“You okay?”
“Cold and tired,” Rhiannon said, trying her best to force a smile despite the constant gray that seemed to hang in the air around them. Even Thor’s usual boundless enthusiasm and energy seemed to have been sucked dry by the dull dreariness of the weather.
“Well, at least it’s not snowing.”
“Yet,” the girl replied without a hint of irony.
They plodded on.
“Cell phones,” Rhiannon said about a kilometer later
.
“What?”
“I really, really miss my cell phone.”
Emily smiled. Of course, she was playing the what-I-miss game.
“I used to text my friends all the time,” Rhiannon continued. “I had a lot of friends, and Dad was always telling me to turn my phone off, but I didn’t.” Rhiannon laughed like the little girl she had been, an innocent giggle of joy at the memory of her family. “At dinner I used to sneak it under the table, and I didn’t even need to see the keyboard, I was that good at texting. Until Ben told Dad about it, because he always wanted to use my phone, and Dad said he wasn’t old enough to have one yet . . . I wish I had let him, now,” she said, her head dipping toward the road, shoulders slumping. “I miss them so much.”
The pain in the girl’s voice stabbed Emily straight through the heart. She had managed to store the memory of what she had done—what she had had to do—to Ben, Rhiannon’s little brother, deep in the darkest corner of her mind, but sometimes the horror of it all, of what she was capable of doing, would surface, percolating up through the cracks of its prison like a poisonous gas, suffocating her mind and soul. This was her penance, her responsibility to Rhiannon and the grief of knowing that she could never share it with her, could never make her understand the horror she felt at having to lie to the girl for the rest of her life. It was her cross to carry.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” Emily reached a reassuring arm around Rhiannon’s shoulders.
What a picture they must make, Emily thought: a pair of the last remaining humans standing on a road in the middle of a rain-soaked alien plain. Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. But the love she felt for the girl she held in her arms was overwhelming. In spite of it all, everything I’ve done, everything I’ve seen, I am still human. I am still capable of love, she told herself.
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 12