The Caretaker did not move, did not even flinch at the bark of her voice.
Emily moved the knife back to her dominant hand, extending her arm out until the tip of the knife pressed against the creature’s throat. Maybe the threat of death would motivate it into action? The Caretaker remained perfectly still.
She pushed gently . . .
. . . and screamed in surprise. It was like pushing the knife into a deeply burned log; the blade sank all the way up to the hilt and then the knuckles of her fist. The Caretaker’s body cracked and a moment later collapsed like a condemned building, crumbling into a gray mound on the floor at Emily’s feet. It was nothing more than ash.
“You have got to be shitting me,” Emily said, trying hard to maintain a semblance of composure. The knife and the hand that held it were covered in a gray dusty residue that she wiped away on her jacket. “You have got to be fucking shitting me,” she repeated in utter disbelief.
Were they all like this? All of them equally as desiccated? She moved from alien body to alien body, carefully pushing the knife into each of the remaining Caretakers’ chests. By the time she was done with the last of them, there were thirty piles of ash lying on the floor.
Emily stood back and surveyed the room, unsure. Something incredible had happened. Something . . . inexplicable. But what, exactly? The Caretakers, these seemingly unstoppable creatures that had destroyed her world in a day had in turn now been destroyed. These ones, at least.
Emily stared down at the last pile of dust at her feet. That smell of expelled energy she had picked up when she first entered the room made sense now. The Caretakers’ bodies had somehow been incinerated where they stood. She leaned in and checked the weird board each body had been propped against. No scorch marks, no signs to indicate a fire or instantaneous combustion. But the question of who, and why, and, most importantly, what could be capable of accomplishing something like this escaped her. What could overpower these omnipotent creatures so swiftly and absolutely that they had not even had the time to react before they were reduced to dust?
Perhaps she had been wrong all along. Perhaps there was a God watching over the sad remnants of humanity after all, because that was the only entity she could think of that could have moved so swiftly and completely to defeat these aliens.
And that idea scared her more than the Caretakers.
Emily’s thoughts were in free fall as she exited the room of dead Caretakers. The implications of this were, well, just overwhelming, and confusing, and, quite frankly, terrifying.
She supposed it was possible that what she had just experienced was some kind of medical bay, or maybe even a mausoleum, but that seemed unlikely. From what she understood from the conversation she had had with the Caretaker she’d encountered in Las Vegas, these aliens were tools of a much higher, much older race—sentient, yes, but still effectively machines programmed to carry out a very specific job. And they were just as capable of transforming themselves as they were of transforming an entire planet. They were cold, calculating biological machines, with almost no understanding of human emotion. Emily did not think they were any more capable of caring for their brethren than they were for the billions of human lives they had destroyed, and she was certain they would not honor their dead . . . if they even died in the sense that humans did. Emily shuddered. Humans had been pretty good at screwing themselves over, but the Caretakers . . . they were a whole new level of cold-bloodedness.
She had to find Adam and get both of them out of this place. Throughout the entire journey, right up until the first Caretaker had crumbled to dust, Emily had never really doubted that it was her son who was guiding her, calling her. But after what she had just seen back there in that room, she was not so sure. She felt a sharp splinter of doubt lodge in her chest.
Was it too much of a stretch of her imagination to think that whatever had managed to stop the Caretakers in this ship so completely could, under the disguise of her son, just as easily manipulate her to come here? But what would that achieve? And why her? Surely whatever was capable of doing this could just as easily have abducted her when it took Adam. Hell, judging by what had happened to the Caretakers, whatever “it” was could have killed every last living human being left in Point Loma without breaking a sweat. There were just too many threads at this point, and none of them seemed in any way connected. It made no logical sense, which meant that there was some other force at play here that she was not able to see . . . not yet, anyway.
The new alcove led into another corridor that looked exactly the same as the others.
She could still feel that constant ping from Adam. It grew stronger with every step she took, in fact, but Emily moved with caution now. It was all very well following her instinct, but if she were being manipulated . . . she let the thought go unanswered because the answers she felt swirling around in the shadows were just unacceptable to her.
A little farther along, the corridor ended at a T-junction.
Ping! She felt a tug to her left as she approached it.
Rounding the left corner, Emily almost stumbled over the prone body of another Caretaker. It was on its knees, slumped forward as if it had simply collapsed on the spot, one spindly arm reaching out and propping the body against the wall. Its pose reminded Emily of an exhausted marathon runner. She reached out and tapped the thing’s chest with the tip of her toe and watched the torso crumble away, leaving only the midsection and legs intact, like a biological exhibit at some weird intergalactic sideshow. She could see the remains of organs she did not recognize within the exposed torso, all turned to cinders.
Emily stepped gingerly over the Caretaker and carried on down the corridor.
The ping had become a beat, thrumming through her limbs. A sense of anticipation, not the good kind, had begun to take hold of Emily as she grew nearer to the source. A half hour ago she would have expected herself to be running at this point, but now, with what she had just witnessed, she was actively resisting the urge to sprint, and it hurt. She faced the very real possibility that her son was not even alive, and with that possibility came the probability she was not going to make it out of here alive either. And hanging over everything was the unnerving sensation that she had been manipulated, played all along.
So no way was she going to run into any trap that might be waiting to spring shut on her.
The pulsing throb running through Emily was now almost tangible. She was surrounded by a sea of energy, and every two seconds a wave of it would crash over her, urging her forward, staggering her with its intensity. Despite her conviction that she was not going to run, she found herself walking faster, unable to resist, her mouth hanging open as her breathing increased, her heart pounding in anticipation and fear. The contradictory energies at play like tidal forces eroded her will, forcing her to do their bidding.
But still she resisted.
“Too much,” Emily breathed, “too much.” She staggered forward. Ahead of her, in what had only a second ago been nothing but a blank wall, an opening appeared, the material of the wall peeling back like skin to reveal a room full of shadows.
There! In there.
From within the room, Emily sensed the source of whatever energy compelled her forward, dragging her toward the opening. This close, its pull was irresistible. She was no longer in control of her limbs. She was a marionette, whoever held her strings forcing her forward. She was Dorothy, standing before Oz the Great and Powerful.
Emily almost fell through the doorway, her eyes blinded by sweat from her forehead as she staggered inside . . . and then her body was hers again. The pull that had been a compulsion since Adam had been taken was suddenly gone. She slipped to her knees, what little energy she had left sucked out of her. Her lips were dry, her throat parched. She lay still, limp now that those marionette strings had been severed, allowing her muscles a few moments to recover.
A minute slipped by.
Emily’s breathing slowed, the cogs within her mind began to turn a
gain, pushing back the fog of confusion and exhaustion that had filled her. Gradually, she rose to her feet and looked around.
She stood in a large room. The same odd there-but-not-there lighting filled it, but in here it appeared dimmer. Some unlit spots allowed shadows to take up residence, as though whatever energy the light drew its power from was running low or was overloaded.
Along the nearby wall Emily saw black extrusions, irregularly shaped bumps, each about the size of her fist pushing out, the random shape of the bumps at painful opposition to the smooth, flawless design of the rest of the craft. The light was too sporadic for her to be able to see much farther than a couple of meters around her, so she took a few steps deeper inside.
As though waiting for her, a trio of blindingly bright lights snapped silently on from somewhere high above, the three beams directed down like spotlights, illuminating a refrigerator-size cylinder suspended upright in the center of the room. It was made of some kind of clear material and filled with a liquid that looked disconcertingly like blood. Emily could see no wires attached to it; it just hung there, the red liquid churning slowly within.
Emily took a step toward the object, her head moving left and right, scanning the room for any suggestion that she was not alone. She tilted her head sideways and looked under the container’s base; there were no apparent connections that she could see. It just floated in midair like a levitating magician’s assistant. The red-hued liquid within swirled and roiled, folding in and out within itself.
She stepped closer, her heart surprisingly still.
There was something else in the container, a darker shape, but the liquid was too thick and the light too strained for her to be able to make it out clearly.
Another step, then another, until she stood less than a meter from it.
The shadow within the glass resolved into a silhouette, cruciform in shape, suspended at the center of the liquid-filled cylinder. Perhaps the material that made up the cylinder was responsible or the liquid within it; either way, the shape and detail of whatever was at its center was grossly distorted.
After a final step, Emily stood at the cylinder, a gap of about half a meter between the floor and its base. She leaned in closer, her hands lying flat against the curiously warm transparency of the container. The liquid thinned for a moment, and, to her horror, Emily realized she was looking at the body of a child, a human child, its legs fully extended, ankle touching ankle, the arms pointing straight out from its sides. The face was blurred but recognizable . . . her child.
Adam! Her son was suspended in that container like some prized specimen.
Emily screeched and staggered backward, her hand flying to her face to stifle the scream of horror before it could escape.
“Adam!” she said through the mesh of her fingers, her son’s name shattering in her mouth. “Adam!” she yelled, starting forward again, slapping the flats of her hands against the container’s wall. Her eyes were fixed on the shadow of her son slowly rotating within the glass cylinder, but her peripheral vision caught movement from within the deeper shadows of the room.
Emily turned her head in time to see the slender arm of a Caretaker reaching from the darkness for her.
Emily screamed, leaping out of range of the alien’s grasping hand. In one fluid motion she drew her .45 from its holster, the anger within her raging like she had never felt before. She was suddenly and completely on fire.
The Caretaker took several juddering steps out of the shadows toward the center of the room. It was unsteady on its feet, shaky, as though it were unsure of its movements.
Emily took two steps toward the Caretaker until she was less than a meter from it, brought her arm up, and pointed the .45 straight at its head. “What the fuck have you done to my son?” she demanded, her voice barely able to make it past the rage that had seized control of her throat.
The Caretaker stopped. It teetered for a moment as though it were a drunk, then threw one long, spindly gray arm out and landed a multifingered hand on Emily’s shoulder.
Emily gasped. Too slow and tired to react in time, she flinched but stood her ground. In her mind, she played out what it would feel like to kill this fuck, and the pleasure she felt shudder through her at the thought of it was . . . well, it was close to orgasmic. She was so near to pulling the trigger, the possibility of seeing this thing’s head explode was almost too much to resist . . .
. . . almost . . .
But she needed it to help her release her son from whatever fucked-up experiment they were conducting on him. And she needed answers. Lots of answers.
The alien’s hand was incredibly light against her shoulder, and she heard it crunch dryly like autumn leaves as the Caretaker leaned its weight against her. Even though its head hung down as though it were exhausted, it was still at least thirty centimeters taller than Emily. And its skin was hot, not warm, but uncomfortably hot, like standing a little too close to a campfire.
Instead of blowing the Caretaker away, she shrugged the hand from her shoulder.
The alien staggered, its legs no longer able to support its weight. The alien’s legs snapped midpoint with an audible crack, dropping it to the equivalent of where its knees should be. Now the Caretaker was face to face with Emily, the blank orb of its head centimeters from her own. Emily leaped backward as features—a pair of black eyes and a lipless slit of a mouth—emerged from the gray flesh in a weird reverse melting. She could see her own face reflected back in the shiny surface of those orbs, her anger written like words across her features.
Fuck it! She would figure this out by herself. This thing was dead. She brought the pistol back up and placed the muzzle against the Caretaker’s forehead.
And it was in those newly formed eyes that she registered her own shock when the creature croaked a single word . . .
“Mom-me.”
Emily staggered back.
Stunned, she let the pistol drop to her thigh.
“What did you say?” she demanded. When the creature kneeling before her did not respond, she took another step forward and yelled the question into its face, spittle flying from her mouth. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“Mom-meee,” the Caretaker mouthed, the slit that passed for a mouth barely moving. That single word, so small and yet so powerful.
Emily felt her heart twist behind her ribs. Memories of Rhiannon’s father, Simon Keller, came flooding back to her. She remembered the creature that had manipulated him like a puppet and had tried to use the children’s love for him to lure them to it—and how it had succeeded, costing the life of Simon’s son, Ben. The Caretaker she had encountered in their Las Vegas ship had attempted to pass that thing off as having some kind of place within the new ecosystem they had created here on Earth, and now this Caretaker was trying to do the same thing to save its own worthless skin, apparently.
Emily’s anger flared again at the idea. “You son of a bitch!” She raised the pistol above her head, poised to bring it down across the creature’s skull.
A glimmer, like evening heat on a road, moved across the Caretaker’s body, and Emily’s hand froze midstrike. The alien was gone, and in its place stood Nathan—beautiful, long-dead Nathan, the man she had loved until he had died so horribly in her apartment the day the red rain had fallen. The man she had thought she would spend the rest of her life with. Or, at least, Emily’s overclocked mind quickly decided, a perfect facsimile of what had once been the man she had loved so deeply. Her pistol hand dropped limply to her side. She took a step backward and sat down hard, her hands wrapped around her knees. The first tears began to roll down her face.
“What are you trying to do to me?” she sobbed. “Are you trying to drive me insane? Is that it? Is that what you want? Tell me, Goddamn it.”
Nathan sat up and regarded her for a moment with those same blue eyes that had once looked at her with such warmth but now seemed cold, as lifeless as a photograph.
“Mommy,” the facsimile said, in a v
oice that certainly did not belong with Nathan’s body. “I have missed you.” The hint of a smile creased his mouth. “You must listen to me. I have so much that I need to tell you, and there is little time left with this body.”
Emily looked up, hot tears washing over her cheeks now. “Don’t you dare call me that. I’m not your mother. Tell me what you’ve done with my boy,” she spat.
The thing that was Nathan watched her for a few seconds, his chest rising and falling as rapidly as if he had just jogged up a flight of stairs, adding to the illusion that he was actually alive. When he spoke again, the voice was Nathan’s, and it was with the same calmness he would reserve for telling her something he knew was going to upset her.
“Emily, I know that what I am about to tell you will seem strange and hard to believe, but it is the truth. I’ve chosen this visage, as we know that you had feelings for this man. Our name is Tellus and we are . . . I am your son.”
Emily giggled. Oh, good God, the utter ridiculousness of it all. She laughed loudly. This was just, well, it was just . . .
Nathan raised his hand, not in a demand but a request for silence. “I know that it seems impossible, even repulsive, to you, but, please, let me tell you our story, then you will understand.” He did not wait for her permission. “When I . . . when your son, Adam, was born, we, the ones you call the Caretakers, became aware of his presence within the connections and nodes of the life we created on this planet. All life is a part of that network, and together, those combined intelligences made up the I . . . the We. As your son grew, so we became aware of his connections to us. And with each connection he made, so we became more intrigued by him. In all the time since our creation by the First Ones, all the planets and races we have reconstituted to create new life, never have we encountered an entity such as Adam.” Nathan pushed himself up until he was resting on his knees; the effort seemed to exhaust him, and he took a few moments to catch his breath. “When he began to share his connections with you while you slept, we became too intrigued not to act, and we decided to bring him here, to this ship, for further examination.”
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 25