Jacob had been given a room on the ground floor that allowed him some freedom to move around. He’d spent what little of the day had been left after his drinking spree working with a loaned sailor unpacking and putting together the radio equipment he had brought with him. A large dipole radio antenna had been fixed to the roof of the building. They’d have radio communications again as soon as the power was up. For the first time since Emily had known Jacob he was smiling freely. The man had lost some of the tension and seemed to have relaxed considerably since coming ashore. He was sitting across from her now listening to the conversation as it unfolded, apparently suffering no major hangover.
The discussion around the table focused mainly on the plants they had spent the day clearing from the compound. There were at least twenty varieties within the confines of the compound alone, someone remarked. None of them recognizable as indigenous Earth species. Jacob had examined specimens they had collected from some of the creeping vines and plants. One in particular was proving to be a particular hazard: There was an abundance of squat plants that grew close to the ground, sprouting broad drooping leaves which measured just over two feet in length. The leaves were razor sharp along the edges and a few unlucky crew members had already suffered deep cuts and lacerations when they had tried to pull them out or unsuspectingly stepped close to one hidden by taller plants.
“If I hadn’t seen all this with my own eyes, I would never have believed any of it,” MacAlister said. “I mean, it’s just so damn…out of this world.”
“At least we haven’t seen any of the spiders,” said Rhiannon through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. “They scared me.”
In fact, no one had reported seeing any signs of life since stepping ashore. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be something out there in the alien jungle lying just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence of the compound.
“Ah, you don’t want to worry about a few spiders,” said Parsons, “I’ll keep you safe, cariad.” He placed a friendly arm around the girl’s shoulder and squeezed her gently to him.
“Do you think there’s anything out there?” Captain Constantine asked Emily. “Any of those creatures you saw when you were traveling still exist?”
Emily’s hand fluttered subconsciously to her shoulder where the creature that had attacked her in the forest outside Valhalla had left her scarred.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t see any of the trees that made the dust, so I think the spider aliens have probably served their purpose. But the other monsters? Who knows? They could be out there right now for all I know.” The word “monsters” sounded so childish in her present company, but that was what they had been. Scary fucking monsters and the sooner everyone realized it the safer she would feel.
MacAlister nodded his understanding. “We’ve got a tight guard on the compound. You can rest easy tonight.”
The conversation faltered for a moment, a silence slipping in between them until MacAlister announced, “Okay, who wants a refill of their cuppa?” He pointed at his half-empty mug of tea.
Emily nodded and handed her own empty mug to him. Tea, she decided, was beginning to grow on her.
The screams started just after sunset.
At first Emily thought it was Thor dreaming, whining as he relived some personal nightmare, but when the wailing grew louder and the sound of panicked human voices joined it, a sudden jolt of adrenaline cleared her sleep-addled brain and she was awake.
“What is it?” Rhiannon’s voice, tremulous and low, whispered from beneath the sheets of her cot.
The wailing came again before Emily could answer; a strange mixture of high-pitched screeching with a deep intertwined staccato bass thrum that sounded like a badly out-of-tune cello. Emily looked down at Thor at the side of her cot; he was awake, his ears up and eyes wide open, head cocked to one side. He seemed more curious than perturbed, unlike the voices yelling back and forth to each other beyond their door.
“I don’t know,” Emily answered when the wailing died away again, “but I’m going to go find out. You stay here and look out for Thor. I’ll be right back.” Emily grabbed her pistol from under her pillow and headed toward the door.
The wailing call rose again. This time it sounded much louder and closer, rattling the glass in the windows. Emily did an about-face and headed back to where she had left the Mossberg shotgun leaning against the wall. She checked it quickly and walked back to the door.
“Stay put,” she told Thor as he rose to follow her, but he instantly sat back down at her command. She slipped through the door and into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind her. Several bleary-eyed sailors were pulling on shirts and firing questions at each other. Flashlight beams cut through the darkness, turning the faces of the sailors into ghoulish masks. No one had any answers but each of them held a weapon in his hand as they moved from their rooms and headed toward the stairwell. She followed behind them, pushing her way through the group, down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
A three-quarter moon punctured a cloudless sky dappled with stars. The moon’s ghostly light was bright enough for Emily to make out a collection of human shapes gathered just outside the entranceway.
“Emily, you should stay inside,” said MacAlister when he spotted her exiting the building, the light from his flashlight illuminating her and the other sailors behind her. He glanced disapprovingly at the shotgun in her hand and the Glock pistol strapped to her hip. “Do you sleep with that under your pillow?”
She ignored him. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s making that sound?”
“We don’t know exactly what—” He stopped, cut off halfway through his sentence as another wail split the still night air. It was so much louder out here.
Emily felt a cold shiver run down her spine at the memory of the creature on the floor above her apartment back in Manhattan. “You need to be really, really careful,” she said to MacAlister. “We don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with here, but I can guarantee whatever is making that noise won’t be friendly.”
“You, Collins,” MacAlister said pointing at a sailor behind Emily. “Get up on that roof and tell me what you see.” He tossed a walkie-talkie and a pair of night-vision goggles to the sailor, who ran to the building he had indicated. “The rest of you, follow me.”
Emily slipped in beside MacAlister as he led them in the direction they thought the cry was coming from. The night air was chilly and Emily could feel gooseflesh rising on her skin beneath her thin T-shirt. Flashlights cut through the blackness of the night like searchlights, but as they reached the western perimeter fence MacAlister hissed an order: “Lights off.” Instantly all were extinguished. The group fell silent and waited for their eyes to acclimate to the darkness.
From the radio in MacAlister’s hand came the voice of the sentry he had ordered to the rooftop. “There’s movement northwest of my location, sir. I can’t make out what it is but there’s definitely something out there.” The voice was a low, calm whisper.
Emily stared in the direction the guard had said he saw something, her eyes trying to penetrate through the darkness. She tried to picture the area beyond the wire fence from when she had first come ashore: a gentle hill that gradually rose toward the sky, covered in thick alien plants that towered twenty feet or more into the air, perfect cover. She could hear the forest of swaying plants soughing and rustling in the breeze just a few yards beyond where she and the others now silently crouched, weapons at the ready. Her eyes searched the blackness again…nothing…wait! Something was moving in the darkness. What was that?
Halfway up the hill Emily could see multiple points of light weaving through the tall plants. The lights rose and dropped, up and down, tiny pinpricks of intense luminescence about the size of one of those laser pointers people loved to tease their pet cats with. There were hundreds of them, glowing orange then green then red, flowing s
ilently between the stalks and stems of the plants.
“What the fuck is that?” someone whispered over Emily’s shoulder.
“Quiet,” MacAlister whispered, his eyes focused on the lights as they moved from right to left across their field of vision.
The lights continued to undulate, burning so brightly that Emily could make out their glow even when they were obscured by the thick leaves of the plants they moved behind. They stopped abruptly, and the wailing again echoed through the night. The moment the cry faded away, the string of lights began to move once again.
Out here, without the walls of the building to baffle the sound, the cry had sounded plaintive, melancholy even, as though whatever creature the voice belonged to knew it was the last of its kind, doomed to wander the earth alone.
Or maybe, she had it all backward, maybe it was just the first of its kind, Emily thought.
A silence-shattering crack exploded from high up and behind where the group was crouched. It was followed immediately by a bright orange flash that left a ghostly outline of its glow on the back of Emily’s eyes. The entire group jumped in unison at the sound of the single rifle shot.
“Who’s firing? Cease fire! Cease fire!” MacAlister yelled into the radio just as a second shot from the same location shattered the silence. “Collins, cease fire.”
Emily saw the lights freeze, then almost faster than her eyes could follow, the cloud of lights coalesced into a single stream and swarmed toward the rooftop where the shots had been fired from. The lights flowed over the fence and Emily caught the faint shadowed outline of something sinuous and dark flowing through the air with them. Three more shots followed in quick succession as the lights landed on the flat roof of the building where MacAlister had sent his man. A silence-filled moment stretched out for seconds as the lights ebbed and flowed then they surged forward in a wave of brilliance, quick as a striking cobra. The night was punctured by an unmistakable scream of agony, shrill and screeching. Then silence descended again as the man’s shriek was abruptly cut short.
The lights twisted and turned in a vicious twirling storm right where Emily judged the rifle fire had come from, the afterimage of the muzzle flashes still glowing in her eyes.
And then the lights reversed their trajectory and flowed back over the fence and into the forest. Emily watched as they streamed up the side of the hill. Abruptly, they blinked out of existence.
“Oh, fuck!” said someone in the dark beside her. “Fuck me sideways. What the fuck was that?”
No one answered him.
The group was up on its feet almost as a single entity, racing toward the building where the screams had come from, and Emily found herself swept along with them.
Emily almost screamed when she felt a hand grab hers in the darkness. “Stick by me.” The sound of MacAlister’s voice was an anchor in the chaos.
They followed the sailors into the building and up the stairs. On the top floor, the group slowed and raised their weapons, covering the corridor and the access door leading out to the flat roof beyond. The door was ajar, creaking eerily as it moved back and forth in the breeze.
“Collins?” MacAlister called out as he moved forward, placing the flat of his hand against the door. There was no answer. MacAlister pushed the door slowly open, then stepped out onto the roof, his rifle raised to his shoulder as he swept the barrel back and forth across the deserted rooftop. The other sailors followed quickly behind him, fanning out across the roof, providing cover for every potential angle of attack.
Emily allowed them a few seconds to position themselves then followed behind the last sailor, her Mossberg at the ready.
“Collins?” Emily heard MacAlister yell out again, then, “What the…? Oh, Jesus!” A flashlight flicked on, illuminating MacAlister’s standard issue boots.
He was standing in a wide pool of blood.
They found no sign of the sentry’s body or any of his equipment. And judging by the amount of blood that had pooled on the roof, Emily did not think there was much chance of locating Collins alive, either. Apparently MacAlister shared her grim reasoning. Flashlights illuminated the darkness of the roof they stood on as sailors shone their lights over the sides of the building and down onto the ground surrounding it, searching for any clue as to where their comrade had disappeared.
“I want everyone off this roof right now and back to the main building immediately,” MacAlister said once he was sure Collins wasn’t lying injured nearby. Emily could hear the restraint it took not to yell the command. “And switch those damn lights off. We’re too exposed up here.”
“But sir, what about…Collins?” a voice from the darkness asked.
“He’s gone and there’s nothing we can do for him. Right now we need to get back to the main building and make sure it’s secure. If there are any more of those things out here I don’t want them getting access to it. We’ll organize a search party for Collins in the morning.”
“But, sir—”
“No buts. We don’t have nearly enough light; we have no idea what that thing was, and no way of tracking it. No, we get off this roof now,” MacAlister commanded.
Emily followed the shadows and sound of scuffing boots back to the exit door and down to the ground floor. The group jogged quickly across the open ground and back to the safety of their building.
“Everyone in?” MacAlister asked the guard standing just inside the exit doors.
“You’re the last, sir.”
“Good. I don’t want you to move from this position until I send someone to relieve you, am I understood?”
The sailor nodded, his head bobbing nervously.
“And if you see anything at all out there I want to know about it immediately. You do not engage it. You come and get me or the skipper. Got it?”
Another nod from the sailor.
MacAlister positioned a pair of guards at the door to each floor, then told everyone else to head back to bed. “There’s nothing you can do, and it’s going to be another long day tomorrow. We’re going to need to organize a search party to try and find Collins so I need you all alert and ready.”
When Emily quietly opened the door to her room, Rhiannon was still awake, her worried face illuminated in the glow of a battery-powered LED lamp. Thor was sitting on the cot next to her, his tail thumped loudly as Emily stepped into the room.
“Is everything alright?”
Emily sat next to Rhiannon, stroking Thor’s head. “Everything is just fine,” she lied. “Just a false alarm.”
“I heard gunshots.”
“It was just a mistake, nothing to worry about. Now, come on. It’s late and I don’t know about you, but I need my beauty sleep.”
Rhiannon seemed to accept the lie and, before Emily had even removed her clothes for bed, she heard the girl’s breathing change to a slow, steady rhythm as sleep overcame her.
Emily switched off the lamp and climbed between the sheets. She lay staring into the darkness, running the strange event she had witnessed earlier over in her mind again.
Those lights had seemed to be linked together, almost as if they were part of the same creature, or at least, operating as a single entity.
This world, this truly new world, was waking up, she thought. Humanity’s crown had been stripped from its head and they had been cast out into the red wilderness as naked and vulnerable as every other creature that now walked this planet. More so, in all probability, because none of them had any idea what the rules for this new world were, and those rules had most assuredly changed…
…and every soul under the roof of this building was as vulnerable as the next.
Early the following morning the whirling mist between Point Loma and the rest of the world had turned into a deep, impenetrable fog. It hung in the air, sucking in all the light from the rising sun, turning the world a depressing gray.
; Captain Constantine and his men were already up and assembled when Emily joined them in the refectory. He had split the remaining crew not tasked with guarding the compound into two search parties. One led by him, the other by MacAlister. Emily could tell from the looks on the men’s faces that they held out little hope of finding their missing comrade. Everyone present on the roof last night who had witnessed the attack had also seen how much of Collins’s blood had been left behind after the man was plucked into the darkness. There was little doubt as to his fate. If the man had still been alive last night, there was no way he was going to have survived for more than a few minutes before he bled out. Constantine was just going through the motions for his men’s sake.
“Good morning, Emily,” MacAlister greeted her when he saw her coming through the door. His eyes were bloodshot, dark rings of puffy flesh below them. He did not seem his normal nonchalant self. Understandable, after all, he had lost one of his men on his watch, and she was sure he was taking it very personally.
“Hi,” she replied. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
MacAlister shook his head. “We’re going to push into the area where we think Collins was taken. The captain and his group are going to reconnoiter the buildings on our side of the fence. Probably best if you stay here in camp.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, going out there?”
“We have a missing man. We have to at least try and bring his body back…assuming we can find it.”
“Okay, let’s get a move on,” the captain said, leading the way through the door. “Team A with me. Team B, fall in behind Sergeant MacAlister.”
Emily followed MacAlister and his men as far as the gate on the west side of the camp. The fog was already burning off, she noted, as she stopped at the security-fence line, lacing her fingers through the links of the chain.
Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3) Page 9