He could hear all sorts of tweeting and cawing all around him, but he couldn’t see anything shy of his hands swatting the thick vegetation from his face. Slowly, he began to see the faint twinkling of the shimmering lake through the gaps in the brush, taunting him like flecks of gold in a streambed to a prospector. Those gaps grew larger, the flashing blue surface of the lake brighter until he was sure that with the next sweep of his arms he would burst through the cover and emerge onto the bank, but he stopped suddenly and tilted his head to the lake.
“What are we supposed to do from here?” a voice whispered.
Phoenix held his breath so as not to betray his presence.
“We find our way to Salt Lake,” a beautiful soft voice responded. To Phoenix, the voice was more familiar than his own and his heart jumped in his chest.
“That’s great, but how do you propose doing that?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t expect to get this far riding whatever those things were.”
Phoenix inched closer, biting his lip to bar exhalation and carefully drawing his hands apart to create a gap in the reeds.
The lake stretched out ahead of him, all the way to the end of the horizon. The lightning flashed from the surface in an awe-inspiring display of pyrotechnics. They were sitting on the bank with their backs to him, their bare feet dangling in water that he could clearly see wasn’t black, but perfectly transparent like glass. It was the bottom of the lake that was covered with smooth black pebbles the color of charcoal.
He didn’t recognize the one on the left with the shorter hair, trying to skip the round stones off of the smooth water only to have them sploosh into the depths, but the one on the right…he’d been trying to rehearse her shape since the first time he saw her in his dreams.
“I’m scared,” the figure on the left said quietly.
“Me too,” the girl said and draped her arm over the male’s shoulder.
Phoenix took a step back in surprise, the reeds crunching underfoot.
The girl turned to face him, jerking her arm back to her side.
“Who’s there?” she nearly shrieked.
There was a moment of hesitation where Phoenix wasn’t sure if he should turn and sprint back in the direction he had come from or not, but he knew there had to be higher forces at work if he were to find the girl of his dreams in the middle of nowhere.
“I’m sorry,” Phoenix said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat as he stepped out into the open. Both the boy and the girl retreated from him, splashing into the lake up to their knees. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Where did you come from?” the boy barked, stretching his left arm in front of the girl and dragging her back behind his body.
Phoenix stepped to the right to see around the guy, who took another step so that he was directly in the way.
“I came from over there,” he said, unable to mask the tremor. Was it fear? Excitement? “The horses needed a break. I think the others did too.”
“The others?”
Phoenix saw a pair of piercing blue eyes peer over the boy’s shoulder from behind, her blond hair shimmering against the electric flaring. He wanted nothing more than to see her face.
“The men who rescued me from The Swarm.”
“There are other people with you?” the girl asked. “I…we…we didn’t think that anyone else had survived.”
“They’re soldiers. They let me wear some of their clothes.”
The other boy sniggered and clapped his hand over his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that, you know, they don’t fit very well at all. What happened to your own clothes?”
“I didn’t have any,” Phoenix said. There was a part of him that wanted to cry. Who was this boy keeping him from the girl from his dreams and why was he laughing at him?
“Never mind him,” the girl said, stepping out from behind the boy and shoving his arm back down to his side when he tried to bar her passage with it. “I’m Melissa Stringer. My friends call me Missy. This is my brother Mare. That’s his real name.”
“I’m Phoenix,” he said, unable to hide the enormous sigh of relief.
He couldn’t take his eyes from her face for fear it would disappear like so many times before. If he could have drawn features on a star worthy of its beauty, hers would have been the face he used. When she offered a smile, it seemed as though the entire world lit up.
“Phoenix,” she said. He never imagined he would have heard his name spoken by her tongue. “That’s a pretty name. I’ll bet your parents were hippies, weren’t they?”
“I never knew my parents.”
“Oh,” she said, stepping out of the lake and back onto the bank. She turned back to her brother. “Are you coming or what?”
“Do you think it’s safe? I mean, can we trust this guy?”
“He doesn’t appear to be one of those black lizard men—”
“The Swarm,” Phoenix interrupted.
“Okay. He doesn’t look like one of The Swarm.” She looked to Phoenix for his approval, which he gave with a smile and a nod. “And he hasn’t tried to kill us yet… I think that’s a pretty good start, don’t you?”
Mare looked angrily at her, sloshing through the lake and onto the bank.
“You think this is funny, huh? I don’t see anything remotely amusing about this entire situation. We’re standing on the bank of a lake in God knows where after having ridden here on the backs of some freakishly mutated cows. Our father turned into a monster and tried to kill us. We have nowhere to go. No family. No nothing. What in the world could you possibly find funny?”
Tears glistened on her eyes, forcing her to turn away, swiping at them with the back of her hands.
“Would you rather we were dead like everyone else?” she whispered.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. The last thing in the world he had wanted to do was hurt her feelings on top of everything else. “God, no. I just don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”
He set his right hand gently on her shoulder and she turned into it to embrace him.
“I know, little brother, but if we give up hope we’ve got nothing.”
Phoenix felt as though he were intruding on something intimately private. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this. The genuine feelings and love between these two people made his chest ache.
“Phoenix,” a distant voice called.
The two broke their embrace, startled, and then turned again to him.
“Come with me,” Phoenix said, tears pouring in lines down his own cheeks. And with that he whirled and disappeared into the reeds. He felt her hand grab onto the back of his shirt so that he wouldn’t lose her. The sensation of her flesh in such close proximity to his skin was electric. Pushing on, he followed the path he had forged through the foliage until he walked right out into the field before he even knew he was close.
“There you are,” Adam said. “I was starting to think that you might have gotten lost or some—”
The words died as another shape emerged like an apparition behind Phoenix. His gaze shot quickly to his backpack and his gun, but it was fifteen feet away and they were already upon them—
A slender girl, surely no older than Phoenix himself stepped into the golden grass behind him, followed by another boy who looked roughly the same age.
“These are the men who saved me,” Phoenix said, gesturing to them. The boy and girl stepped around to Phoenix’s left and stared at them.
“Hi,” was all Adam could think to say. After having gone so long without seeing another living soul, he had begun questioning whether or not there was anyone else at all.
The newcomers looked from one soldier to the next, their eyes skittish as though they were about to bolt, before the boy finally spoke.
“Did we win?” he asked.
Adam looked back over his shoulder to Norman, who simply shrugged.
“What do y
ou mean?” Adam asked, puzzled.
“The war. Did we win the war?”
Adam dropped his stare to his feet, kicking free of a tangle of grass that felt as though it had grown over the top of his boot.
“No,” he said. He couldn’t even bring himself to look the kid in the face when he spoke. “No one won.”
“No!” Peckham shouted, leaping to his feet. He pointed straight at the girl in the middle.
“It’s okay,” Norman said, walking quickly over to his commanding officer and looking him right in the eyes. “They’re just kids, Peck.”
“No!” Peckham shouted again, locking eyes with the medic. His irises flamed with his returned faculties. “Look!”
Peckham grabbed Norman by either side of the face and roughly turned him to face just to the left of the lake in time to see a flock of birds rise as one from the field with a screech. Lines were torn through the weeds like water behind the passage of a shark’s fin, tatters of ripped grass and clods of dirt thrown behind. There had to be twenty parallel tracks ripping straight through the field toward them.
“They found us!” Phoenix screamed.
One of the cattle bleated and then belched through its torn air bladder, a spray of blood flying into the air as the enormous thing’s body was jerked down into the grass. The warm blood landed like steaming rain on the golden grass.
More cattle brayed and stampeded away from their fallen kin, moving at an unnaturally fast pace given their size.
“Go!” Norman shouted, shoving Peckham toward the horses, now standing motionless with their sharp ears pointed straight up, mouths frozen in the midst of chewing.
“Come with me,” Phoenix said, taking Missy by the hand and leading her as fast as he could through the tall grass. As soon as his steed saw his intent, the stallion knelt before Phoenix and allowed him to clamber right up onto its back. Straddling the beast, Phoenix reached back for Missy.
“What about Mare?” she wailed.
Phoenix looked past her and nodded.
Missy spun and saw her brother tugging himself onto the back of one of the other horses behind a soldier. He wrapped his arms around the man’s midsection as though he were simply piggybacking on a motorcycle and looked right at her. His mouth opened and his face grew red as he shouted something, but she couldn’t hear a word over the frightened whinnies of the horses and the awful frenzied mooing.
She turned back to Phoenix and snatched his hand, letting him pull her as she threw her right leg up over the horse’s back and tried to balance herself, reaching around Phoenix and clasping her hands against his stomach.
The horse’s wings extended from beneath her legs and arose in two great arches. She screamed at the prospect of what she could only assume was coming next and buried her face in the boy’s back.
Bolting upright, the stallion galloped forward, raising its wings straight up in the air, and then brought them quickly down with a whoosh of air that nearly knocked them from its back. The next thing she knew her stomach was falling and she could feel the rapid climb in altitude.
“Where are we going?” she screamed, unable to bring herself to open her eyes.
Phoenix turned as well as he could, his cheek resting against her forehead.
“More man tears,” he said.
Missy opened her eyes and looked at him, stunned.
“It was your voice,” she said, trying to see his face. Until that moment she realized that she hadn’t truly looked at the boy who had just saved her life.
The clouds settled about their ears, the horse’s belly reflecting back up at them from the lake below. Behind, the other animals fell into formation in a flying diamond design.
None of them looked back down to see the black shapes converge on the spot where they had been only a heartbeat prior.
VI
East of Elko, Nevada
JILL DRAINED THE LAST OF A CAN OF DIET PEPSI WHILE SHE TURNED THE DIAL slowly through the static listening for even the faintest hint of the most distant voice. It was all dead air. No matter how loud she pumped the volume and placed her ear as close to the speaker as humanly possible, she couldn’t discern anything from the roaring crackle of nothingness.
“It’s an old truck,” Evelyn said. “Not the most modern stereo either, I’m afraid.”
Her weary red eyes scanned the length of the headlights, watching for the first hint of a car stalled in their way. Thus far the traffic on I-80 eastbound had been fortuitously light, allowing her to keep the speed right around forty miles an hour with sufficient notice to slalom through the dead cars in the lanes or crashed onto the shoulders. She could only imagine that it would be much more difficult the closer they got to the next major city, which she assumed would get them as far as Salt Lake City, so they needed to take advantage of the open road while they had it.
It was all she could do to keep from looking in the rear view mirror. Ray looked pathetic the way he stared blankly off to the north side of the road. Every now and then his shoulders would hitch with the throngs of a new wave of tears, but he was otherwise completely devoid of affectation. He was simply a shadow against the darkness flying past. Darren tried every so often to place a consolatory hand on his friend’s shoulder only to have it shrugged off, leaving him to back up against the cab with his head resting against the window, staring back at the road as it fell away from them in the red glare from the taillights.
April leaned against Jill’s left shoulder from the middle seat, mewling occasionally as the real world permeated her defenses, which were only equipped to allow her to watch the road in front of them while letting the candy bars melt in her mouth without even tasting them. Every now and then she thought for a moment that she heard her mother’s voice calling to her from the static only to have it dissipate into the grumbling noise.
“How did you survive?” Jill asked, turning down the sound as she’d repeatedly combed slowly through both AM and FM without the slightest audible sound to distinguish stations.
“I was preparing to replant my kelp when I saw the first of the mosquitoes coming under the door. I hid in the aquarium I was preparing to fill. My dad… My dad died in his sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” Jill whispered.
“So am I,” Evelyn sniffed, quickly wiping the blooming tears from her eyes and trying to force the thought from her mind. “How about you? How did you guys manage to survive?”
“Jill’s psychic,” April said, tucking her right arm beneath Jill’s left. “She knew what was going to happen.”
Evelyn tore her eyes from the road and looked to Jill, who rolled down her window just a crack to get some airflow.
“I have…dreams,” Jill said, her eyes growing distant as they met with the horizon. They were slowly winding through foothills, the road cut straight through so that the trench walls beside them rose and fell while the highway stayed relatively flat. “Only I’m not sleeping. Premonitions.”
“What did you see?”
The headlights flickered once as though counteracting a surge of power. Evelyn looked quickly to the road, relaxing only slightly as the lights stayed on.
“I saw…I saw so much death. My sorority sisters…they were dead and bleeding and there were all sorts of insects crawling all over them.” Her voice deteriorated to a whimper. She tried to steady it with a stuttering inhalation, blowing it out in jerks. “I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but somehow I knew…I just knew that we had to hide somewhere where we could be completely sealed off. They had a hot tub, and we hid in there, but Rick…”
Her voice trailed off to nothingness.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Evelyn whispered, as much to reassure herself as Jill. “I’ve gone over it a million times and I can’t think of a single thing I could have done differently, shy of not climbing under the tank.”
The silence spoke what they were all thinking.
“What’s that?” April whispered, sitting up and pointing straight throu
gh the windshield.
There was a flash of light from the distant horizon glowing brighter and brighter before fading back into the darkness.
Another. Closer this time. From the opposite side of the road. The headlights of one of the wrecked vehicles on the shoulder glowed brighter and brighter, pointing off into the sage, while those of the other car in the tangle pointed straight at them, the twin lights building in intensity until they were like twin suns. They fell quickly into darkness as though flipped off by a switch.
“I don’t know…” Evelyn said, her voice trailing off. Her truck’s headlights grew brighter and brighter, turning night to day around them. The lights in the dashboard became much more intense and the radio screeched static, raising the volume of its own accord. With a pop, all of the lights snapped off and the radio died, leaving them barreling through complete blackness, marred only by the occasional flare of purple flame across the sky.
Grinding her teeth, Evelyn stomped her foot on the brake. She heard the boys in back slam up against the metal behind her as the rear tires fishtailed for traction.
April screamed and Jill brought her feet up against the dashboard, pulling the seatbelt as tight across her chest as she could.
They sat there in the middle of the pink highway, miles and miles from nowhere, in the nearly absolute pitch black.
“You’ve got to be kidding me?” Evelyn shouted, pounding her fists on the wheel. “Come on!”
She revved the engine, hoping by some slim chance that would bring back the lights, but there was still nothing.
There was a knock from the window behind her. She reached back, her hand trembling heavily, and slid the window open.
“What’s going on?” Darren called in. “Is everyone all right?”
Evelyn screamed in frustration.
“I think so,” Jill said, taking April’s hand and giving it a squeeze. “How ’bout back there?”
“A little warning would have been nice.”
The Fall Page 37
