This had the stink of Valentine’s manipulation all over it. Of course, there was no way she would bring forward an item like this herself. Instead she would get one of her minions to put it out there, thereby maintaining her distance until she was able to judge whether the plebs approved or not before jumping on board.
This woman put the “fuck” into poli-fucking-tician.
“. . . so what we . . . what I am proposing, is that we create several small groups of military and science personnel. Each unit—I call them Pathfinders—will be tasked with exploring the remains of cities and towns in an attempt to locate stores of food and potentially to identify areas untouched by the invasive species.”
“And what about the Caretakers?” someone shouted from the back of the room. It was followed by a smattering of giggles from the crowd. Emily twisted in her seat to try to see who had spoken, but all she saw was a few condescending grins and dismissive glances.
“I’d like to answer that, if I may,” said Valentine. She stood and looked out across the sea of faces staring back at her. “We have only the word of a couple of sailors who admit that they saw ‘something’ and a woman who claims that she had some kind of communication with”—Valentine paused dramatically and Emily half expected the woman to make air quotes; instead, she coated the next word with a heavy tone of sarcasm usually reserved exclusively for the tinfoil hat brigade—“aliens . . . who told her we all needed to stay in our cozy reservation.” Her tone changed to a patronizing sweetness and Emily found herself again bristling as Valentine continued. “None of us are arguing that a cataclysmic event overtook our world; we have only to look beyond the borders of our camp. But the suggestion that it was aliens?” She let the last word hang in the air, long enough for another well-timed smile of concern. “We have all suffered losses, and we have all experienced untold grief, and most of us have managed to overcome those painful memories and move on, while the impact on others may have been greater, the emotional damage deeper . . . more damaging.”
Did that bitch just call me crazy? Emily thought. Seriously? She almost laughed out loud. Oh yeah, that would look great. The crazy lady giggling in the center row. They’ll lock me up in a second.
Mac’s hand tightened on her knee. Easy now, it said.
Valentine continued, closing her argument, “Well, I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I for one think we need to do a little checking for ourselves. But, of course, that is entirely up to our esteemed council members.”
“I should have fucking shot her when I had the chance,” Emily mumbled a little too loudly, smiling innocently when Mac turned to give her a wide-eyed “use your inner voice” stare.
Valentine continued, her chin tilting upward slightly as though she were personally witnessing the second coming: “Now I know that our very bravest and finest are leaving soon to travel to Svalbard, but I suggest that when they return we organize the expeditionary force of our most trusted citizens to travel into the interior of the red jungle and confirm whether these”—Valentine paused again, as if she was having difficulty finding the right words—“whether these ghost stories are real . . . or not.”
Emily stood up.
“Oh shit!” said Mac, quietly.
“And you’ll be the first to volunteer, I suppose?” yelled Emily, sounding way too calm for anyone who knew her.
All heads turned to look at her.
“Mizz Baxter. I think that you—”
Emily talked right over her. “Oh, and you’d better come up with a plan on how to replace whoever it is you’re going to send off on your little expedition, because I can tell you that those”—she did make air quotes—“aliens you are so fucking skeptical of will turn them into mincemeat, or worse.”
“Mizz Baxter, there’s really no need for such language. I am merely drawing attention to the fact that you are the only one to claim to have seen what you allege to have seen. No one besides you and the three men with you has witnessed these—what did you name them?—oh yes, these ‘Caretakers’ you say abducted you. And let’s be honest, I’m sure most people here find it rather unbelievable that if these so-called aliens actually exist that they would choose you to pass on their warning. I’m sure you can understand our skepticism.”
Our skepticism? At what point had it become the general consensus that she was a liar? Emily had to give Valentine her due; she was damn good at deflecting and co-opting. Every word she had spoken was delivered with not an ounce of animosity; instead, it had the tone of a patient mother reasoning with an unruly child.
This woman was really starting to piss her off now.
Emily retorted, “That’s because while you were snuggled up all safe and warm in Antarctica, we were here. We were the ones who fought and who saw what the red rain did, what it changed. I mean, I know you were a politician, but, Jesus Christ, you can’t be so stupid as to imagine that everything that happened was something other than alien? Can you?”
“Oh, I can think of several other possibilities, the least of which would involve some intergalactic species whose sole job is to roam around the galaxies looking for worlds to destroy. If these Caretakers really exist, then where are they? Why has nobody else but you seen them? I know that your husband and the two other sailors saw something, but it was just you that they chose to speak to, right? So we only have your word for it.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” said Emily.
The room was silent.
“Oh no, no, not at all. I’m merely suggesting that you are at best mistaken and, at worst, deluded. I’m quite sure that you all encountered some kind of a phenomenon while you were out there, but you offer no proof. I mean, you say you were a reporter and yet you don’t even bring back a single photograph . . . So I think it would be quite foolish of us to take the word of a girl as if it were gospel.” Valentine terminated her words with the biggest condescending smile Emily could have imagined.
The thing was, she was right, of course. Why would anyone take her word for any of it? In fact, Emily knew there were more than a handful of people who had quietly expressed a similar opinion, but Mac’s status within the community, the fact that he stood beside her on everything she had relayed to the survivors, lent enough gravitas to her story that it had kept the original group swayed in her favor. But that had all changed now, the pendulum of power was swinging away from the original group of survivors as the newcomers integrated into the community. They had no attachment to Emily, had seen none of the things she had seen, experienced none of the nightmares her little group of survivors had. They were just going to have to find out the hard way, but she would be damned if she was going to be complicit in helping to send men and women to a certain death.
Emily looked for some cutting remark to launch at Valentine in her defense. “Fuck you!” she said eventually, and walked out.
“Emily! Wait,” Mac yelled, jogging to catch up with her. “Hang on a second.” He took her elbow and slowed her to a full stop. “You alright?”
Emily took a deep breath and exhaled. “Fuck! There’s something about that woman that just pisses me off.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I met people like her every day before the rain. They try to obfuscate their own agenda by couching it to look like it’s for the greater good. Jesus, Mac. I thought we’d left all that bullshit behind us. She gets right under my skin.”
Mac squeezed her shoulder. “She’s just a politician, doing politician things, Em.”
Emily shook her head vehemently. “No, that woman has something else up her sleeve. And besides, it’s people like her that got us all into this mess in the first fucking place with their ‘fuck everyone else’s opinion, you’ll do it my way’ attitude.” She took another deep breath, trying to calm the anger she heard in her voice. “She’s making a power play, Mac. And we’re standing in her way.”
Mac gave Emily a look that bordered on concern, then placed both of his hands gently on his wife’s shoulders. “I think you’re imagining t
hings, sweetheart. You’ve got a lot on your plate, and I think that’s probably got more to do with how you’re feeling than Valentine having some nefarious plan to take over the world.” He pulled her to his chest and planted a kiss on the top of her head, then eased her back out to arm’s length again and, in a pretty rotten imitation of Valentine’s southern drawl, he said, “I love you, Mizz Baxter.”
Emily couldn’t help herself—she smiled even as she landed a punch on Mac’s bicep. “Bastard,” she said, trying not to laugh, then leaped into his arms, throwing her legs around his waist. “Take me to the beach, sailor. We only have a couple of days before you leave me. We’d better make the most of it.”
“Nice to know some things never change,” said Emily, shaking the sand out of her bra an hour later. “A little help here, please.” She nodded for Mac to fasten the clip between her shoulders. When he was done she lay back against the warm dune and stared straight up at the darkening sky, all thoughts of the council meeting gone from her head. Mac pulled his shirt and pants back on and stretched out next to her.
With no light from the now-extinct metropolises of Southern California to pollute the oncoming darkness, the evening sky was already a pincushion of stars, the Milky Way a brushstroke of white across the sky.
Something twinkled like glitter far, far up and Emily squinted to try to make it out better, her mind still pleasantly distracted by their eager lovemaking.
In the time since their arrival at Point Loma, Emily had occasionally seen the sky lit by the light of a dying satellite as its orbit slowly decayed and gravity dragged it back to Earth. There were plenty still up there, Emily knew, carving their way through the darkness, but what she saw now was something quite different; it looked like sunlight flashing faintly off thousands of tiny pieces of broken mirror.
“Do you see that?” she asked Mac, lying next to her, his eyes closed, his breathing low.
“What?” he said without opening his eyes.
She nudged him gently in the ribs with her elbow. “Look!” When she was sure he was paying attention, she pointed with her index finger at the scintillations.
“I don’t see . . . Oh!” Mac sat upright. “What the hell is that?”
Emily propped herself up on both elbows. As the evening sky shifted gradually toward night it revealed more and more of the tiny, shimmering dots of light as, over the next few minutes, the growing darkness exposed a parabolic spiderweb-thin line of tiny gleaming lights arcing across the California evening sky like a vapor trail. It curved from the distant northeast to the opposite side of the horizon where the Pacific Ocean met the sky.
“I don’t think it’s a satellite,” Emily said. “The debris usually burns up in a few seconds. This looks more like sunlight reflecting off of something . . . thousands of ‘somethings’ way up there.”
Mac stood up, as if the extra six feet or so might give him a clearer view of this new phenomenon. “I don’t think it’s even inside the atmosphere; maybe it’s in a low Earth orbit, but that doesn’t make much sense.”
“What?”
“If it was in a low Earth orbit then it would decay rapidly and fall out of the sky, unless it was powered somehow. Has it moved since you noticed it?”
Emily shook her head.
“So that means it’s in some kind of geostationary orbit. But what the hell is it doing up there?”
Emily found it mildly amusing that neither of them had to ask who was responsible for whatever this new light show was. It went without saying that this was the handiwork of the Caretakers. Darkness had almost swallowed all that remained of the day, and the beach was now nothing but a strange mix of shadows.
“We need to get back before it gets too dark,” Mac said after a few more minutes of sky gazing. Emily continued to stare up at the laser-beam-thin parabolic arc of twinkling lights slicing across the sky.
“It’s beautiful, like someone cracked the heavens open,” she whispered.
“Em? Rhiannon’s going to be expecting us. We need to get back, love.”
She plucked her blouse from the dune, shook out the remaining sand, and quickly buttoned it around her shoulders. “Think we should tell anyone about it?”
Mac shook his head. “Not yet. No reason to worry people needlessly. Anyway, it’ll probably turn out to be nothing. Besides, what can we do about it anyway?”
The two lovers walked hand in hand along the beach back toward Point Loma, both occasionally glancing up at the newest addition to Earth’s night sky. Both wondering what this new sign so high above them meant for the survivors down here on the ground.
The following morning Valentine lay in wait for Emily and Mac outside the entrance to what had once been Point Loma’s reception building but which now served as the main administrative council building. All of the councilors had an office inside.
“I trust everything is in order for your trip,” Valentine said with not even a pretense of a hello.
“Well good morning to you too,” said Emily. Then, because she was still feeling kind of pissy, added with a fake smile, “Sylvia.” She felt Mac tap her foot with the toe of his boot, and tried not to let her satisfaction show when she saw Valentine’s cheek twitch at the obvious barb.
Valentine fixed Emily with what she assumed was supposed to be a withering stare. “And good morning to you, Mizz Baxter. I trust you are feeling better after your little . . . outburst last night?” Without waiting for a reply, Valentine swung her attention back to Mac. The conversation carried on for several minutes, Valentine obviously ignoring Emily as they discussed the logistics of his upcoming expedition.
For her part, Emily stood silently by, a fake smile fixed to her face. She would be the good little girl and not speak until spoken to, she decided. There was no need to stir the pot and make things difficult or embarrassing for Mac, as tempting as it might be.
When the conversation finally wound down several minutes later, Valentine bid Mac good-bye and gave Emily another of her stares before smiling condescendingly and stalking off toward her office within the administration building.
“I think she has a thing for you, honey,” Emily said as they walked back toward their apartment.
“You know you really shouldn’t try so hard to antagonize her, love,” Mac said, taking Emily’s hand in his. “She’s getting a lot of people behind her very quickly, and you don’t want her to come back and bite you on the bum.”
Emily looked disgusted at the idea. “Yeah, well, it’s her particular brand of populism that I have a problem with. It should have gone extinct with the rest of humanity.” She paused for a second, then added, “Besides, there’s only one person who’s going to be biting my bum around here.” She gave Mac a playful nudge, and he made a grab for her. Emily squealed and started to run toward the door of their apartment, closely followed by Mac, his arms outstretched zombielike.
“Come here, ya wee monster, you,” he cackled and chased after her.
She let him catch her at the front door. He wrapped his arm around her waist, turned her around, and pulled her close to him. “I love you, Emily.”
“I love you too,” she said.
Emily’s little group waited on the dock, watching Mac as he and his crew helped load the last few supply containers onto the deck of the HMS Vengeance. An invisible black cloud hung over her head, despite the beautiful day. In her arms, Emily cradled a sleeping Adam while Rhiannon stood at her side, a look of utter despair on the young girl’s face. A sizable crowd had gathered behind Mac’s family to bid the crew good-bye, but Emily felt more alone in that moment than she had since leaving New York.
“Bloody hell! You look like a bulldog chewing a wasp,” Mac said to Rhiannon, when he finally climbed the steps from the dock to join them. He pulled her close and planted a kiss on the top of the girl’s head, then slipped in next to Emily, easing Adam from her arms.
“I don’t want you to go,” said Rhiannon, her voice full of sulk and sadness. Emily almost chimed in that sh
e was with Rhiannon 110 percent, but she knew it would only serve to make Mac’s leaving even harder on him. He knew her thoughts, knew exactly how she felt. They had gone over it endlessly in bed the night before, and the same conclusion had been reached: there was no one else with Mac’s level of experience, and there was too much at stake for every survivor if he did not go. Still, Emily felt as though she was about to explode at any second at the thought of his imminent departure.
“I’ll be back before you know it, kiddo,” Mac told Rhiannon, cupping one tear-dampened cheek in a big hand. “Don’t worry about me. Besides, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy looking after this little one and his mum for me.”
A shrill blast from the Vengeance’s klaxon shattered the air.
“Take care of them,” Mac said to Rhiannon and, after planting a soft kiss on his son’s forehead, handed him to the girl. He turned to Emily and took her into his arms. “I’m doing this for you,” he said. “Not for the others. For you, for my family.”
Emily hugged him as hard as she could, pressing her face into his neck, drawing in his scent, and binding it to her memory. “I love you,” she whispered into his ear. “Come back to me.”
“Always,” Mac promised. He held her for a few more heartbeats, then pulled away, turned, and strode toward the gangplank. He waved once before he climbed down into the belly of the submarine, pulling the watertight hatch closed behind him, and then he was gone.
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 3
