Genesis

by Paul Antony Jones

  “What are you doing? I can feel you breathing on me,” Rhiannon said, looking directly at Emily as if she could see her.

  Emily pulled away. “Sorry, I was just reaching for your soda. Here.” She grabbed the almost empty can and placed it in Rhiannon’s hand.

  “Thanks. Can we go now?” The kid obviously wasn’t convinced, Emily thought. She sensed something was wrong. Emily almost told her then, but why worry her when there was nothing that could be done about it? And Emily knew Rhiannon well enough that if she had really wanted to know, then she would not have given up so easily. When the time was right, she would tell her.

  “Sure,” said Emily, sounding as upbeat as she could. She moved the gear stick into drive and pulled away.

  She checked Rhiannon one final time and again was struck by the feeling of utter helplessness. There was nothing she could do for the girl, other than watch her and hope that there were no other changes.

  But that at least was something she could do.

  Emily did not realize she’d grown a lead foot until she swung the truck so sharply to avoid a tree sprouting from the right lane that she startled Rhiannon awake and sent Thor rolling into the side of the rear cabin.

  “Emily? It feels like we’re going really fast,” Rhiannon said, both hands searching for her seat’s armrests and grasping them tightly when she found them.

  “What?” Emily checked the speedometer; it hovered just below fifty-five, much too fast for this uneven road. “Shit!” Her foot found the brake, and she slowed the truck down to a much safer thirty. “Sorry. You okay?” She placed the palm of her right hand against the girl’s forehead. Her temperature seemed normal, perfectly normal if she were being honest.

  “Mhmm,” said Rhiannon, then, “What’s wrong? Why were you driving so fast?” The girl might be blind, but she certainly couldn’t be accused of being unobservant.

  “Nothing,” said Emily, then sighed. “It’s Adam. That pull I told you about, for the last hour or so, it’s gotten stronger. It’s all I can do not to floor the accelerator.”

  “Do you think that means we’re getting closer?” Rhiannon said, sitting up straighter.

  “Yes.” Emily’s answer was as definitive as if Rhiannon had asked her to say the first word that came to her mind. She didn’t even have to think about it. “It’s almost physical,” she continued, “like someone’s grabbing hold of my clothes and pulling me, guiding me. I think we’re really close now.”

  “Where are we?” Rhiannon asked.

  Emily had no idea. She had seen no road signs during almost the entire journey, all victims of the great storm that had followed behind the red rain, she assumed. Beyond the cabin the scenery remained more or less the same as it had for the last however-many-hundred kilometers or so, but in the distance, near the northeastern horizon, Emily could see the black silhouette of a Titan tree forest curving away. There seemed to be more plant life around this area too. For the majority of the journey the vegetation had sprouted from between cracks in the road put there by lack of maintenance and weather. But here—wherever “here” was—the red tendrils had made their own holes, forcing their way through the blacktop. The tree she had swerved to avoid a few minutes earlier was a prime example. The level, almost turf-like fields of red weed on either side of the road they had started their journey with had now become more irregular and much, much taller, the occasional larger plant or red bush also putting in an appearance. It all meant one thing: somewhere close by, there had been an abundance of extra biological material, maybe a city or large town, probably near the forest of Titan trees she had spotted.

  “I don’t know where we are,” Emily admitted. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re probably still in New Mexico, but we could be in Texas for all I know.”

  “Do you see anything at all?”

  The rainstorm had moved on, leaving behind just a few large gray clouds to guard the sky and obscure the midafternoon sun. The land on all sides of the truck was pretty much laid out for the next twenty kilometers or so, and, apart from the cluster of Titans in the distance, the only thing that stood out was the absolute nothingness of this flat, empty land.

  “Nothing,” Emily said. “There are some trees, but that’s about it.” Her eyes kept creeping over to the silhouette of the copse of Titans, pulled there as though her peripheral vision sensed movement, but when she looked directly at it there was nothing but the solid shadowy outline of the densely packed forest.

  She slowed the truck down to a crawl so she could get a good look at it without risking colliding with something in the road. The sun finally freed itself from the grasp of the clouds, lighting up the landscape.

  “What’s going on? Why are we stopping?” Rhiannon said, sitting upright in her seat like a gopher sensing danger as Emily leaned hard on the truck’s brakes.

  “There’s something . . . hold on . . .” Emily exhaled the next word in a long breath, “Wow!”

  “What?” Rhiannon insisted.

  Emily had been mistaken; freed from shadow she could see the distant silhouette was not a forest after all. It was a Caretaker ship.

  And it was huge.

  The truck sprayed a wave of gravel as it slid to a halt on the side of the freeway.

  “I’ll just be outside for a second,” Emily assured Rhiannon, laying a hand on the girl’s knee, never taking her eyes from the Caretaker ship. She was outside before Rhiannon could reply. The clean, warm air should have been refreshing after so many hours cooped up inside the cramped cab of the truck, but Emily did not notice it. What she did notice was how bright the sun was, straining her eyes until a deep furrow appeared between her eyebrows. Sunglasses had been the last thing on her mind when fleeing Point Loma, but right now she kind of wished they had made the list. Her hand made a decent enough shade, but a pair of Ray-Bans would have done the trick a lot better right about now.

  The Caretaker ship was maybe three kilometers away, Emily estimated. She had thought the structure was shadowed, but as her eyes slowly became accustomed to the brightness she could see it was actually ebony black and convex. It was difficult to judge the exact size of the ship from this distance, the space between here and there filled with tall vegetation, but it was big, really, really big . . . and obviously not man-made. There were what looked like tubes or roots sprouting off its sides, but it was almost impossible to pick out any real detail at this distance.

  This was where they were keeping Adam. She knew it, could feel it with an intensity that felt like electricity in her gut. And if she had needed more proof that this was the destination she had been drawn to, each time she turned to face the ship she felt the constant pull increase like short, sharp tugs against every molecule she was made of.

  Shhhhssshuck! The sound of the truck window dropping brought Emily’s attention back to Rhiannon.

  “What can you see?” Rhiannon said. Thor’s head poked out from between the front seats, his eyes bright with the possibility of an excursion. “Is it there?”

  Emily looked back at the ship and described what she saw.

  “You’re going to have to leave me here,” Rhiannon said when Emily was finished.

  “Yes,” said Emily. She stepped in close to Rhiannon’s open window and placed her hand on the girl’s arm. “But I will be back. I promise.” Emily checked her watch; it was just after midday. She had a good six or so hours of daylight if she left soon. She couldn’t make out any sign of a road leading out to the ship ahead of them; it was basically in the middle of nowhere. She could try and drive the truck to it, but if it had been raining even half as hard here as it had during their trip, then the ground would be waterlogged and muddy. It wasn’t worth the risk of getting their only means of transportation stranded. But that would mean leaving the truck, and Rhiannon, here alone. Not an option she was happy with, but she saw no other way around it.

  “I can’t take you with me. But I’m going to leave Thor here with you, so you don’t have to worry, okay?”
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  Rhiannon nodded. There was no mention of the fact that if Emily did not come back, then Rhiannon was as good as dead. Locked in her permanent darkness, the probability was that she would not survive the night if Emily did not make it back to the truck. Emily pushed the thought aside. She was coming back, and she was going to get them all home.

  “Bring him back,” Rhiannon said. Emily felt her love for this kid, this young woman, grow.

  “I will. I promise.” Emily leaned in through the door window, took Rhiannon’s right hand in her own, and guided it to the water bottle and a couple of protein bars she had pulled from her bag. “And your pistol is here,” she said, moving her hand to the butt of the PPQ she had placed on the seat between Rhiannon’s knees.

  Emily moved over to the driver’s side. “Thor! Here,” she said, tapping the driver’s seat. The dog hopped over and sat quite happily in the seat.

  “And Thor is right here,” Emily said. Thor licked the girl’s hand as Emily guided it to his head. “He’ll be here to keep you safe, okay?”

  Again, Rhiannon nodded, biting her bottom lip.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Emily had already taken two steps toward the ship, but she still heard Rhiannon whisper, “Don’t be long.”

  Emily stepped off the road and into the field of red weeds. She hadn’t walked more than twenty paces before she knew she had made the right decision not to bring the truck; the ground was muddy—not as bad as they had encountered back at the depot, but the mud still sucked at her boots, slurping wetly with each step she took.

  The day was beautiful now. The few clouds had moved almost to the horizon, the sun warm against her back as she trudged across the open plain toward the Caretaker ship. It could have been a nice leisurely walk on a Sunday afternoon if weren’t for the incongruous slash of silver arcing from the horizon, the Caretakers’ ring, tattooed across her world’s sky. She barely had to move her head to spot the glowing arc of this anomaly that now circled the Earth, shining almost as brightly as it did against the backdrop of the sky at night.

  Ahead of Emily, the silent black outline of the Caretaker ship waited. And somewhere inside it was her son. She knew that for a fact now; it was an unflinching certainty, confirmed by the magnetic tingle that grew with each new step she made toward it.

  Answers! She needed answers to all of . . . this. And that ship was where she was going to find them.

  The red vegetation came up to her waist. She pushed through it as though it were corn, her hands trailing at her side. There was no sound other than the dry rasp of the plants moving against her clothing.

  A kilometer closer and the truly monumental size of the ship or structure—she was unsure which of them this thing actually was—had become apparent. It sat in a circular crater, the walls of which were maybe fifteen meters high and rose sharply. From where Emily stood, it looked as though the crater surrounded the craft quite snugly. The part of the ship visible above the crater was also circular, with a domed top similar to an inverted saucer. Whatever material made up the outer skin of this machine, it was abyss-black and nonreflective. It seemed to absorb the light of the sun, sucking it into itself so that even the air around it seemed dimmer, darker somehow. The closer Emily got to it, the more she felt as though she were staring into the deepest, emptiest region of space, as though the Caretakers had taken whatever material made up a black hole and then forged it into this craft.

  The tubes she had seen from the road resolved themselves into huge black tendrils that looped over the lip of the crater, pushing deep into the soil out to about twenty meters around the circumference of the crater. They looked like giant worms intertwined around each other, similar to the roots of the Titan trees but extending much farther out and far less biological in their appearance.

  A light sweat had begun to form on Emily’s brow. She stopped and wiped it away with a dirt-stained hand. The urge, the constant pull toward Adam, was now a drumbeat that resonated through every cell; it was not a bad thing, pleasant even, and the closer she got to the craft the more the sensation became satisfying like a scratched itch. Standing here, with the sun shining warmly over her body and the odd, yet not unpleasant, smell of the plants and wet soil filling her senses, was . . . comforting. Almost hypnotic in how it lulled her senses.

  Almost a full kilometer separated her from the craft. The Caretakers undoubtedly knew exactly where she was, had likely tracked her journey this entire time. She already knew they could simply pluck her from the air when they wanted to. They probably expected her to sit and wait for them to bring her to them, but fuck that. She highly doubted that they would simply allow her to walk up to their craft, knock on their front door, and demand her son back. So, she decided, that was exactly what she was going to do.

  The Caretakers had summoned her here for a reason. They had kidnapped Adam. They had somehow hijacked the psychic connection between her and her son, compelling her to come here. They had a plan. They wanted something from her.

  Well, she wanted something from them too, and fuck them if they thought she was going to simply stand here and wait for them to come and pluck her up.

  She strode toward the crater surrounding the ship.

  The sides of the crater turned out to be steeper than Emily had thought—almost sheer, in fact. She circled around the base, looking for the easiest route up through the tangles of tendrils that roamed over its embankment. When she finally found what looked like a good spot for entry, Emily took hold of one of the smaller tendrils and, using it like a rope, began to climb hand over hand, her feet slipping in the loose dirt of the crater’s side. It took her five minutes to reach the top. Sweaty and dirt-stained, she swung herself up onto the lip of the crater.

  “Ho-lee shit!” she exclaimed, looking out at the craft. It was mind-bendingly huge. You could probably fit six football fields on top of it and still have space to spare.

  It sat at the center of the crater. This crater was far more compact than the long, scarlike rut caused by the crashed ship in Las Vegas. It was as though this machine had burrowed straight down into the ground.

  The visible part of the ship was at least five, maybe even seven, stories high. It was hard to tell exactly because of the chaotic mesh of tendrils that crisscrossed each other like the roots of some giant plant. They varied in size, some as thin as her pinky finger, the largest over a meter and a half in diameter.

  The roof—truth was, it could have been the base for all she could tell—of the craft was convex, curving slightly from the highest point at the center down to the edge. The edges were sharply defined lines, about ten of them. Whatever the material was that made up the outer skin, it certainly was not any kind of metal she was familiar with.

  There was a gap all around between the farthest edges of the ship and the crater. From what she could see, it extended down the side of the ship before the sunlight could not penetrate any further, leaving a space of about a half meter. More tendrils extended out through that space before disappearing into the wall of the crater. The roof area seemed clear of sprouting tendrils, other than around the edge where she now stood. The exposed surface was pitted with dimples every few meters. Emily saw pools of liquid reflecting in the afternoon sunlight within them. She leaned out across the gap and scooped a handful from the nearest pool in the ship’s flesh, brought it to her nose, and sniffed it, then touched it to her lips. It was water. Nice and clean too. She drank what was in her hand, then scooped another into her mouth before using the water from the next dimple to clean away the grime and dirt from her hands and face.

  The shape of the ship struck a chord in Emily’s memory: it looked like a nerve cell, the myriad tendrils thrusting deep into the ground like the dendrites that transmitted impulses to the cell.

  Emily began walking along the edge of the crater. The ridge was quite loose and the dirt tumbled away down both sides as she walked, so she leaned one hand against the roof of the ship for balance. She skirted around the edge o
f the pit, looking for some kind of an entrance but found nothing obvious. At this rate it was going to take her forever to get all the way around.

  “Okay then,” she said to no one in particular, then leaped across the gap and onto the roof of the ship. At least this way she wouldn’t have to worry about falling off the edge of the crater.

  Emily began to search for an entrance, looking for any kind of anomaly on the surface. The gradient of the roof was so gradual that she could see quite a bit of the ship, but it was still going to take more time than she was willing to spend to search its great expanse. She worked her way carefully up to the apex of the ship’s roof. From there she looked down, turning in place until she had prescribed a full circle. Still no sign of an entrance. She had wasted the good part of an hour before she was certain there was no way she was getting inside through the roof.

  She was just going to have to go down into the gap between the ship and the crater and find a way in from there.

  Emily jogged back across the roof to the crater. The gap between the edge of the craft and the rim of the crater was too tight for her to squeeze through. She knelt down near the edge of the roof and began scooping dirt away with her hands, tossing it back down the slope. The dirt was not that hard, and it had been a long time since she had received anything even vaguely resembling a manicure, so she wasn’t particularly upset when she broke two nails within the first couple of minutes.

  When she finally scooped out a big enough space for her to safely slip through, she pulled out her flashlight and shined the light down into the darkness below. The space seemed to widen as it got deeper, as though the sides of the crater went straight down, while the body of the Caretaker ship tapered away, so the farther down she went, the more room there was to maneuver. Tendrils extended out from the body of the ship, crisscrossing each other in a wild tangle within the gap, but there looked to be enough room for her to squeeze through. She would use them like rungs on a ladder, she decided.