“I had no choice,” she said, more for herself than for Jacob.
“I know,” he said. “It’s the past. You have to focus on the future now. You have to survive.”
When she clicked the Off button half an hour later, she felt somewhat more at ease with what she had done. But as she walked slowly back to the Durango, she wondered whether that acceptance would come with a price that she was willing to pay.
They passed through Saginaw (population 51,230, and the home of the Saginaw Sting), Saint Ignace (population 2,435, with the best view of the Mackinac Bridge, this side of the US border), and tiny Rudyard (population 1,315, named after the English poet and writer, Rudyard Kipling).
By the time they crossed over the US–Canadian border for the third and final time, the towns and villages along their route had become smaller, sparser, but no less empty than every other place they had driven through. They spent nights in hotels, homes, offices, and the back of the Durango. In Prince George they stopped for the night at what had been a railway museum, sleeping in the relative luxury of a refurbished coach car.
Gradually, with each new day and every mile farther north they traveled, Emily and Rhiannon began to feel the temperature outside the air-conditioned SUV drop, and the alien forests that had become so prevalent begin to grow thinner and sparser, a final indication that Jacob’s theory was correct. And yet, despite the slowing of the alien incursion, they saw no one and nothing to indicate that anywhere north of the border between the two countries had suffered any less of a tragedy than the rest of the continent, or the world.
The space between towns and cities began to grow larger the farther north they traveled.
And they saw not one other soul.
For the majority of the journey, Emily and Rhiannon had sat in relative silence, each numbed by their own despair, a sharp splinter of pain buried deep in each of their hearts.
When they reached Calgary, Emily pulled the SUV to a halt in front of what had once been a store of some kind but was now just a burned-out ruin of blackened beams and melted glass; the soot-strewn interior was littered with the unidentifiable skeletons of what could have once been furniture.
Emily climbed from the driver’s seat into the back next to Rhiannon, staring at the young girl, who seemed to be patently avoiding her gaze.
Emily paused as she collected herself; she wanted to get the words in the right order before she spoke them, so Rhia understood exactly what it was that she was saying. So there could be no mistake in her intent, because she knew she would only get one shot at this speech, so it had to be right.
“I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t save your dad. And I’m so very sorry that I could not save Ben. If I could have traded places with them, I would have. But I promise you, Rhiannon, that I will never let harm come to you. I promise that I will always be there to help you, and that I will never leave you. We’re all each other has now. We are each other’s family, and we have to protect each other from now on.”
Emily wasn’t sure what she was expecting as a reply, but what she got was something as uncomplicated and yet as confusing as this girl on the waning edge of childhood.
“I know,” Rhiannon said softly, her lips parted in a sad slight smile as she finally lifted her eyes to Emily. “I know it wasn’t your fault, but it doesn’t stop me from being mad at you. Even though I don’t want to be. Is that stupid?”
Emily choked back a sudden flow of emotion that threatened to overwhelm her ability to even talk. “No, sweetie, no. It’s very normal,” was the best she could manage.
“I just wish…I wish you hadn’t found us. I wish you had just kept riding. Sorry, but I do. ’Cause then Daddy and Ben would still be alive and we’d all still be together.” Rhiannon’s hand crept across the space between them, grasping Emily’s. “But I know that won’t happen, and I know you’re sorry, so I just want to be safe.”
Emily squeezed Rhiannon’s hand in return, leaned in, and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I do, too,” she replied. “I do, too.”
They took advantage of the unscheduled stop and allowed Thor out to stretch his legs. Ten minutes later, as Emily climbed into the driver’s seat, she heard the front passenger door open, then Rhiannon pulled herself up into the leather seat and fastened her seat belt into place.
Emily turned and smiled at her. Neither said a word; none were needed, so Emily just slipped the Dodge into gear and drove.
ALASKA
“It’s snowing,” said Rhiannon.
“What?”
“It’s. Snowing.”
Emily looked up from the road and saw fat flakes of white drifting slowly down from the sky. She had been driving for so long on this particular stretch of the Alaska Highway, mile after mile after dreary mile, that her mind had switched to autopilot and she hadn’t even noticed the blanket of gray clouds as they had moved in from the northeast.
According to the digital thermometer display, the temperature outside was thirty-two degrees. The temperature had dropped more than fifteen degrees over the past three days.
“Where are we?” Emily asked.
Rhiannon picked up the road atlas from the floor and thumbed it open to a dog-eared page. She traced their route with a finger, holding the book open and angled toward Emily so she could glance at it. “I don’t think it’s very far now. We just passed a sign for Eielson Air Force Base.”
Fairbanks was about another twenty miles or so farther northwest from the military base; another twenty minutes or so drive, Emily estimated.
The road they were driving was what passed for a two-lane highway but amounted to little more than two lanes of concrete with a median of brown grass between them. On either side of the road was an expanse of the equally dead grass. The grass terminated at a seemingly never-ending line of what she thought were silver birch trees. Whatever they were, their skinny trunks and naked branches became ridiculously monotonous after the first twenty miles or so.
When she had spoken with Jacob the previous night, he had told her to make sure her first stop was at a cold-weather outfitters.
“You need to find winter clothing. It’ll hit below zero before you know it, and I can guarantee you won’t want to be caught outside in any of your regular clothes,” he had told her. He’d given her directions to the store he used, and Emily had promised him they would head straight there as soon as they made it into Fairbanks.
Temperatures this far north could vary wildly. At this time of year, daytime temperature might reach thirty or even forty degrees, and at night, you would be lucky if the thermometer stayed above minus fifteen. “The right clothing is the difference between life and a very painful death,” Jacob had warned them.
They had stopped the previous night in a small town, weirdly named Tok. Setting out the following morning, it had struck Emily how normal the routine had become for her and Rhiannon. After their talk back in Calgary, all signs of the petulant little girl she had first encountered had completely disappeared as Rhia slipped willingly into the role of navigator.
And Emily had surprised herself at just how easily she had come to rely on Rhiannon. She had never given children a second thought in her life; there had never been enough time to even think about them or a man that she was willing to settle down with or who would be willing to put up with her. She loved the little girl, she realized. If she ever had a child of her own, she would hope that she turned out like Rhia.
“Watch out!” yelled Rhiannon, suddenly bracing her arm against the dashboard.
Emily’s attention had been lost in thought again, her eyes off the road, so she had failed to see the debris of the downed airplane splashed across the lane ahead of them. She hit the brakes and brought the Dodge to a screeching halt.
The wreckage looked to be of some kind of fighter plane, probably from the air base. It had crashed nose first into the north-bound lane, leaving a crater gouged out of the earth that stretched across all four lanes. Str
angely, the nose of the plane was still intact, severed just behind the cockpit, which was missing its canopy and pilot’s seat. The pilot had probably ejected when he felt the oncoming effects of the red rain, Emily surmised. Lot of good that had done him.
The rest of the plane was nothing but blackened bits and pieces scattered across the ground.
“Sorry,” said Emily, turning to Rhiannon. “I guess I’m just tired.” Who knew sitting down for hours on end could be so exhausting?
Emily glanced up at the rearview mirror and put the SUV into reverse, backing up about twenty feet, then drove off the road and onto the field, steering around the wreckage of the downed aircraft.
Up ahead, on the right side of the road, Emily could see what looked like a line of adobe-colored blocks. She accelerated the Dodge back up to speed. The blocks quickly resolved into buildings and military aircraft hangars. A six-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the air base.
Emily slowed the SUV to a crawl as she eased past the main entrance. The guard post was deserted, but the metal security gate was down, blocking the entrance to the military buildings beyond it. She could make out vehicles parked uniformly off in the distance, and what looked like several commercial-size gray aircraft parked on one of the runways.
The crumpled skeleton of a helicopter, its tail snapped from its fuselage pointing skyward, sat alone in an open field. It was missing one of its rotor blades, and those that remained hung limply toward the ground.
There was no sign of life. No movement except for the flakes of snow that had now begun to settle on the grass and concrete of the road in front of them.
“Do you think the soldiers are alive in there?” Rhiannon asked.
Emily stared at the silent base. She had hoped that maybe, just maybe, the military had figured out how to survive the blood rain. If anyone could have, it would have been them. But that hadn’t been the case. Everyone here was dead.
“No,” she said with a final glance at the base. She drove on.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected from the town of Fairbanks. Maybe a small town full of single-wide trailers and strip joints. That was the impression she had always had of these ends-of-the-world kind of places; a backward whistle-stop of a place, in the middle of nowhere, populated by fat bearded men in plaid shirts and aging whores. Instead, as she finally pulled into the town, she found herself in a community that would have looked at home in any Midwest state. Pleasant-looking, well-kept homes, their lawns dead and brown now that no one was alive to maintain them, bland apartment buildings, a theater, a smattering of gas stations and car dealerships. The tiny houses were never going to appear on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, but then again, nothing was.
Emily got the impression that even before everybody had died, this town had been, for the most part, quiet.
Slowly maneuvering through the empty streets, she turned right onto Second Avenue and immediately stomped on the brake. Ahead of her, in a plot of land that had once been a children’s playground, a cluster of alien trees sprouted from the ground. She had failed to notice them earlier because they were hidden by a phalanx of spruce trees lining the park’s border. There was something different about these invaders, something that was unlike the usual uniform, almost cookie-cutter versions that had become a daily sight since leaving Manhattan.
These were stunted and irregular. The usual black sheen that coated the bark was missing, and she could see gray splotches scattered across their trunks. Where their cousins south of Fairbanks stretched skyward for hundreds of feet, these barely reached the height of the crossbar of the playground’s swing set. They should have been towering over them by now.
Emily pulled the Durango to the curb and rolled down her window. A cold breeze stung her face, and she exhaled sharply, sending a pale cloud of vapor out into the atmosphere to mix with the vehicle’s exhaust fumes and the flakes of snow that still fell from the leaden sky. The air felt crisp and clean, knife-sharp against the back of her throat.
“Stay here,” she told Rhiannon to the whine of the window whirring back up. “I’ll be right back.”
Rhiannon just nodded her head. Thor shifted uneasily in the back, but Emily commanded him to stay.
Standing on the sidewalk, Emily shivered as a gust of wind sliced through her thin shirt, straight to her spine. She was going to have to find that cold-weather clothing store, soon. Already, a half inch of snow had settled on the low hedge at the front of the playground, and the pavement was quickly becoming slippery underfoot.
She was going to have to make this quick.
Following the path into the park, Emily walked past the set of swings, their rusty chains squeaking loudly in the breeze, and headed toward the group of scrawny-looking alien trees.
Emily froze—an appropriate term, she supposed, given how goddamn cold it was. In front of her, scattered around the base of the nearest trees like fallen leaves, were at least twenty of the spider-aliens, their ugly-ass heads staring straight at her.
Emily didn’t dare move. A day-long minute ticked by in her head as she stared at the creatures. Like the stunted alien trees behind them, there was something not quite right with them. In every encounter she’d had with the spider-things they had always been the alien equivalent of a hyperactive kid; always on the move, never still. In fact, she thought, the only one she had ever seen not moving had been long dead, impaled by the iron bars of a fence back in New York.
Dead! These things were dead…probably.
She took a tentative step forward. No movement from them. Then another step. Still no reaction. Emboldened, she took another step closer and another until she was standing next to the closest motionless alien. She prodded it with the tip of her sneaker. It didn’t move, frozen solid to the concrete playground. It was the same for the rest of them, all deader than dead, their carapaces hard and unyielding she found as she stomped down hard on one with her heel.
It was almost as if they had been flash-frozen, she thought. Caught out in the open when the temperature had dropped. More proof that Jacob had been right about the temperature all along.
Sure that they posed no threat to her, Emily turned her attention back to the deformed alien trees. They looked half-finished. Instead of the geometric keenness of the top edges that had defined the trees she had seen being built, these were irregular. Pieces were missing, and here and there were gaps, long seams that stretched up the tree like cracks. She squeezed two fingers into the gap. Her fingers slipped in all the way to the second knuckle. The gray splotches she had seen were in reality half-formed pieces of the tree; when she touched one, it cracked, sending a large section down into the interior of the trunk.
The red rain had accomplished its mission, killing everyone in the town, but the growth of the trees had been stopped in its tracks. It looked as though they had been completely unable to deal with the cold. Judging by the lack of growth of the trees and the dead aliens scattered around the base of the trees, she would not be surprised if she found thousands of the aliens, or maybe even their precursor pupae stages, scattered throughout the houses in the town. She would have to remember that when they looked for a place to spend the night.
She gave one of the dead spider-aliens a swift kick to the face, breaking off the thing’s frozen tentacles with a satisfying clink that sounded like shattered icicles.
“That’s for everyone in this town,” she said and walked back to the warmth of the SUV.
“What took you so long?” asked Rhiannon as Emily closed the door of the Durango and turned the heater up as high as it would go.
“Nothing. I just needed to check out the trees,” she replied as she felt the heat chase the frigidness from her fingers. Emily didn’t see any point in scaring Rhiannon with the news of the dead aliens.
“So, what are we supposed to do now?”
“How about I take us clothes shopping?” she answered.
The strip mall parking lot still held two cars. The
ir owners, presumably, had not heeded the warnings about the effects of the red rain and had perished while shopping. I guess there are worse ways to go, Emily thought as she pulled the Dodge to a stop out front of the store Jacob had directed her to.
Large red letters over the entrance to the building read FRONTIER OUTFITTERS, and below that in smaller letters: HUNTING. FISHING. CAMPING. APPAREL.
Emily grabbed the shotgun and her flashlight and stepped outside. She left the engine running not just for security, but also because it was so damn cold that the idea of waiting for the car to warm up again was not a pleasant thought.
“Stay here for a second while I check around,” she told Rhiannon. “Thor, come on.” The dog leaped from the backseat to the driver’s, then down onto the concrete. He stretched and followed Emily as she headed to the store’s entrance.
The door creaked open, and Emily pushed it open farther with the barrel of the Mossberg. She stepped inside and scanned the interior with the flashlight while Thor ran around checking every nook and cranny. There were no windows in the building, so the interior was lit only by the meager light that made it through the panes of the glass double doors.
Thor trotted back to her side after a minute, giving no indication they were anything but alone in the store. Emily leaned around the door and beckoned to Rhiannon to join her.
“Bring your flashlight,” she yelled to the girl as she exited the SUV.
Inside the store, row upon row of shelves were stacked with heavy-duty boots, camping equipment, dry goods, and fishing gear. Clothing racks held cold-weather jackets and trousers, thick wool sweaters, even thicker scarves, gloves, and balaclavas. Everything the modern outdoorsman would ever need to survive in this unforgiving climate and more.
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