Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3)

by Jones, Paul Antony

  The fire burned for almost twelve hours before it finally died away, stopped by a natural firebreak of rocky terrain that choked off the ravaging fire-beast’s food.

  Now, what should have been a bright morning was instead a dreary gray, smoke obscuring everything that was not within ten feet of the survivors as they looked out from behind the relative safety of Building One’s windows.

  “Everyone stays inside until the smoke clears,” Captain Constantine ordered. “The last thing we want is any of you getting lost out there and overcome by the fumes.”

  So they sat and they waited.

  Throughout the previous night a flickering orange wall of indistinct flames had been visible through the pall of smoke as the gluttonous fire ate its way through the jungle. But as Emily waited in the corridor with Rhiannon and several sailors, she could see nothing but smoke now. The fire was either out or it had moved far enough away that it was no longer a threat to the camp and its new occupants.

  A sea breeze kicked up just before noon, wafting between the buildings of Camp Loma, probing the smoke and pushing it farther west, slowly emptying the courtyards as it spread the choking smoke away from the camp. The stench of burned vegetation mixed with the distinctive aroma of the sea remained though.

  There had been a few touch-and-go moments during the night when embers carried by hot air from the fire gushed into the compound, but these had been ruthlessly tracked down by teams of sailors and, according to MacAlister, they had suffered nothing worse than a few singed roof tiles.

  It was easy to spot those who had been outside on fire watch; their smoke-dirtied raccoon faces filed through the corridor as they returned to the building, eyes watering, coughing and hacking as their shipmates took them aside and led them to water stations.

  Everywhere she looked, Emily saw nothing but zombies: bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived zombies. But as the hours ticked by the smoke thinned and eventually cleared and by mid-afternoon, the Point Loma survivors made their way cautiously outside again.

  A thin layer of ash covered every exposed surface; it powdered beneath their feet as they stepped out into the courtyard in front of Building One.

  “Good God,” Emily said, standing in the gray shadow of the sun as it tried to force its way through the residual layer of smoke that still floated high in the afternoon sky. “We’ve only been here for a day and we’re already back to our old ways.”

  “What do you mean?” Rhiannon asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied, but she couldn’t shake the notion that the column of smoke rising into the atmosphere was a stark reminder of humanity’s impact on the planet, a footprint, she supposed, of her civilization, of humanity’s time spent at the top of the food chain. But by the same token, she delighted in seeing the blackened stalks and charred husks of the alien plant life that had spread across this land, or the iron ore–red soot that blew through the camp on the hot thermals of the fire. She felt a strange delight when she saw the burnt-down trunks of incinerated trees jutting from the still-smoking ground outside the fence like skeletal fingers.

  There wasn’t much left of the dragon—as everyone had now come to call the creature they had shot the previous day—left for them to examine. The out-of-control fire had caught up with it, roasting it to nothing more than a black lump of charcoal, save for the lower part of one leg and some skin on its underbelly.

  “Is this the thing that grabbed Collins?” asked the captain, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth to keep out the residual smoke and the stink of burned flesh.

  “No way to tell,” said MacAlister. He had a bandage wrapped around the gash on his head, Vaseline spread over the burn—concessions to the medic who had finally persuaded the Scotsman to let him assess his wounds, with some encouragement from Emily and a liberal dose of chiding from Rhiannon—and had been deemed fit for duty.

  “What we saw was nothing more than lights, this hardly seems to fit the description. But then, who can tell what this thing is exactly? I’d bet my last paycheck it wasn’t roaming the woods before the rain came.” He poked the carcass with a charred stick. The flesh cracked and flaked away.

  “Yuck!” said Rhiannon, wrinkling her nose at the smell that flooded out of the gash.

  “Well I guess this puts to rest any qualms we may have had about whether you were being entirely truthful with us, Emily,” Captain Constantine said. “MacAlister, let’s get a couple of men to drag this thing off. We don’t want it stinking the place up; who knows what it might attract.”

  The fire had created an open stretch of blackened wasteland that stretched out in a horseshoe curve to at least a half mile of space around the compound. It looked like a scene from some catastrophe movie.

  The ground was still too hot to examine closely, but where there had once been a jungle there was now nothing more than blackened skeletons jutting up from a carpet of powdery ash. Smoke still rose from the ground, like tiny genies searching across the bleak landscape. Oddly, there was still the occasional plant or bush left more or less untouched by the fire. Somehow they had survived with little more than a few singed branches or burned leaves.

  It was an echo of Emily’s own strange story of survival.

  Given the circumstances of the past month or so, she had had little time to ponder the reasons as to just how or why she, amongst the billions on this planet, had somehow survived the red rain. But maybe she was alive for exactly the same reason these plants were still standing alone in this field of devastation—just blind luck. Right place at the wrong time.

  “Well your idea certainly did the trick alright,” said MacAlister, sidling up to her shoulder and gazing out over the devastated stretch of land that now surrounded the base.

  “It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

  “Pfft! It got the job done and we’re all still here in one piece. That’s a win in my book any day of the week.”

  “How are you feeling?” Emily asked without turning around, but she could sense the closeness of him, his breath brushing against her face as he spoke.

  “I’m good. I’m good. Just this bump on my head and few bruises. Nothing a few days of light duty won’t fix. Listen, I wanted to say thank you for what you did, pulling me away from the fire like that,” he said, his voice a low whisper.

  Emily turned to look at him, their faces just inches apart. “It was nothing,” she said, her eyes fixed on his.

  “No, it was definitely something, Emily. It was most definitely something. Look, I was thinking, wondering really, if—”

  The sentence was broken by the sudden appearance of three sailors at their side. “Sergeant MacAlister. Captain Constantine told us to report to you for cleanup duty.”

  Emily smiled at MacAlister’s obvious embarrassment. He smiled back when he saw her eyes still on him.

  “Perfect timing as always, gentlemen,” he scolded the sailor.

  “Sir?” the sailor replied, oblivious to the connection he had just neatly severed.

  “Don’t call me ‘Sir,’ I work for a living. Oh, never mind. Emily, thank you again. Maybe we’ll get a chance to chat later?”

  “Maybe,” Emily replied, then turned and walked back toward the camp.

  The first anyone knew the power had finally been restored to the encampment was when the security lights around the perimeter fence crackled into life just before sunset. When the gantry lights mounted around the concrete concourse in front of Building One flickered on too, dusk was suddenly turned back into day. Light flooded the grounds and the still-smoldering area around the fence line. A loud cheer erupted from the sailors who were still working at clearing the vegetation from inside the fence line.

  Somewhere, in one of the office buildings not too far from where Emily stood, an electric guitar began to play faintly, a ghostly yet unmistakable voice eventually joined the guitar, floating across the encampment. Even t
hough she couldn’t hear the words she recognized the voice and the song: the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter.” Kind of apt, in a freaky, déjà vu-ey kind of a way, she thought.

  When Parsons walked out of the building housing the generator, wiping oil and grease from his hands with an equally dirty rag, he was greeted with more cheers and a round of applause from his gathered shipmates.

  “Well done, Parsons,” the captain told him, slapping the man on the back. “And perfect timing too.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the engineer replied, a huge grin cracking his usually stern features. “We’ve taken stock of the camp’s at-hand diesel supply, and I estimate we have a good four to five weeks left, if we’re judicious with the demand we put on it. We could stretch it out another week maybe, if we only run the security lights for a few hours at night. We’ll need to locate more diesel pronto though.”

  “Security is our main concern right now,” the captain said. “I don’t want to lose anyone else. So, no, the lights stay on all night, for now at least. Once we’re dug in here a little more securely, we’ll locate another supply at the earliest opportunity. There have to be other fuel dumps or civilian establishments we can commandeer more supplies from around here.”

  With the camp generator up and running again, Emily found herself once again donning her chef’s apron. After raiding the sub’s still adequately stocked cold-storage locker the smell of steak began to filter to the crew as their workday finally came to an end. The aroma of roasting meat was awfully close to the smell of the creature that had been caught in the fire, but Emily’s stomach quickly overrode any objections her brain may have had, as she and Rhiannon joined the rest of the men of HMS Vengeance in the newly opened camp cafeteria.

  Thor made the rounds from table to table, fixing each person who made the mistake of meeting his stare with starved puppy-dog eyes that would have surely gained him an Oscar, had he been human. Finally Emily had to order him to her side.

  “I don’t need you stinking the bedroom up all night,” she scolded the dog, who settled on the floor between her and Rhiannon with a sigh, apparently content with his plunder.

  The air around the room was lighthearted. Tired eyes brightened as several bottles of wine, found in one of the camp’s officer’s quarters during a scavenging mission by some of the men, were opened and dispensed, with the captain’s permission. The sound of laughter and the hum of banter soon filled the room. The group, already tightknit, had grown even closer over the past few days of hard work clearing the weed from the compound, and Emily was glad to feel the warm glow of acceptance into the group.

  Toward the end of the meal, Constantine stood and, as though he were presiding over a wedding ceremony, tapped the side of his wine glass until the room fell silent.

  He cleared his throat then spoke. “We’ve come a long way, you and I. And we’ve lost some fine companions and shipmates along the way.” He paused as he collected himself, gulping down a lump that had risen to his throat. “But we’ve also found new friends, and we have made a new start. So, I’d like you all to raise your glasses and toast with me our fallen comrades and our new friends. May God have mercy on us all.”

  The sound of scraping chairs rattled through the room as the group stood, echoing the captain’s words with glasses raised high above their heads, before downing the remainder of their contents.

  “To fallen comrades,” Emily whispered, and tried to keep the ghosts of her life from her mind.

  The next morning, the fire-ravaged ground beyond the compound was still too hot to get too close to. While the majority of the smoke had been carried away by the Pacific breeze, the ground was still giving off thin plumes of gray smoke that stank to high heavens and stung the eyes of any at the camp unwary enough to venture outside the security fence.

  Captain Constantine and MacAlister stalked the perimeter just clear of the choking smoke. The scowl on Constantine’s face conveyed his annoyance. He’d planned for a small expeditionary group to reconnoiter the damage to the jungle and their surrounding area, but that was now going to have to wait until the ground cooled to a safe enough level. So the day was spent chopping and digging and sawing the remainder of the alien vegetation still growing between the buildings of the compound.

  The stumps of the creeping vine that Emily had found so impossible to budge from the soil around Building One proved the hardest of all to clear. Less than twenty-four hours after Emily had chopped the clinging vine down, there were already signs of regrowth on the root bulb. Tiny feelers, three inches in length, were sprouting from it, inching their way up the wall of Building One.

  When the first stump finally came free after several hours of hacking away at it with a pickax and shovels by three of the burlier sailors, it became clear as to why it had proved so difficult. The root system was almost as extensive as the sucking vines that had crawled up the exterior walls of the building. The thick, dark roots were lined with rows of barbs that clung to the soil like hooks, forcing each root to be dug out one by one to be sure it was completely gone.

  Everything in this new world seemed tough, with an almost preternatural desire to live, expand, grow; desires that were matched by an innate ability to achieve those goals.

  By the end of the day as the sun began to set, the compound and the space between the buildings was clear of all but a few of the more stubborn plants. Even with the leather gloves she had filched from one of the sailors, Emily’s hands were blistered. But she did not mind; these past few days of physical exercise had reawakened something within her, and she found herself reveling in the purity of the simple task of manual labor. A definite sense of camaraderie had grown between the survivors, and Emily was happy to be a part of it.

  Rhiannon, on the other hand, was not as enthusiastic about the brutal working conditions the California climate and salty air created. She had promoted herself to supplying the crews with water and food throughout the day, although she did stop by occasionally to check on Emily and carry a few of the branches and leaves she had cut down to one of the several growing piles of decaying vegetation that sat waiting for disposal near the exit of the camp.

  “Emily!” a voice called to her, and she dropped her pickax to the ground, wiped the sweat from her forehead, and looked toward the source of whoever was calling her. It was Mac, standing in the open doorway of the main building and waving to her. “Come on in,” he yelled again, “we have someone who wants to talk to you.”

  MacAlister escorted Emily inside the building and down the corridor to the makeshift radio room that had been set up on the ground floor of the building. The two of them squeezed in beside Jacob, Captain Constantine, and Parsons, making the room stuffy with their body heat.

  Jacob sat at the desk, a pair of headphones over his ears, fine-tuning the portable radio. “Stand by, please, Commander,” he spoke into the microphone, then switched the radio over to its loudspeaker mode. “Okay, you’re good to go,” he continued, placing the headphones on the desk next to the radio and grinning at Emily as he pushed his chair back from the desk.

  Onboard the ISS, Commander Fiona Mulligan pulled the microphone from the wall of the observation module and switched on the speaker. Through the observation port she could see the coast of Chile creeping closer as the station followed its orbit northeast.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?” she asked.

  Miles below, in the confines of the small room, Mulligan’s voice sounded extra loud and clear.

  “We’re receiving you perfectly, Commander,” said Emily, finding it hard to keep the emotion she felt for her stranded friend out of her voice. “It’s so very good to hear your voice again. We were a little concerned about you there for a while.” She found herself returning Jacob’s grin, in spite of herself.

  The commander smiled although she knew no one could see her. For a while, after their radio communications had gone down, both she and her crew h
ad begun to wonder if maybe they might have lost contact permanently with the group of survivors from the Stockton Islands, or worse, maybe something had happened to them as they travelled to their new location. So it came as a relief when Jacob had finally managed to contact the station half an hour earlier. But it was especially good to hear Emily’s voice again.

  “Thank you for your concern, Emily, and sorry for the scare, but the inevitable breakdown we were worried about now seems to be taking place. We lost several of the relay satellites we use to communicate when we’re out of normal radio range while you were travelling to your new home, and the red storm seems to have created some kind of residual electrical interference too. So, I’m afraid our contact with you is going to be a little unpredictable from this point onward. The sat-phone networks all seem to be down now, so we’ll be using our amateur radio rig from here on out and that will mean we will only be in range a few hours each day from this point onward, I’m afraid.”

  “May I?” the captain asked Emily, nodding to the microphone.

  “Sure,” she said, “go ahead.”

  “Commander, this is Captain Constantine. It’s a pleasure to speak with you again. I want to thank you personally for everything you have done for me and my crew.”

  “Likewise, and you are more than welcome, Captain,” came the static-riddled reply from the station.

  “I know Jacob has filled you in on some of the events that have transpired since we arrived here at Point Loma, but I believe we have everything under control now. So I think it’s time we turn the focus on you and your crew: Can you give us any information relevant to your reentry and how best we should go about the recovery efforts once you join us back here on Earth?”

  The commander and the captain exchanged information about location, trajectories, and possible emergency scenarios over the next thirty minutes.