The rest of the way back to the apartment was spent in complete silence, and Emily was quite happy with that. While she felt no remorse for the death of Curtis, the death of the second guard had been a tragic accident. Either way, humanity was now two deaths closer to the point of extinction, and the knowledge that she had tipped the scales further toward their annihilation was even more terrifying, even if humanity was better off without Curtis. Of course the other problem was that the second guard would be expected to make regular check-ins with the watch commander in the northeast security tower. When the dead guard failed to respond to his radio calls, the rest of the security team would be alerted and sent out to investigate. It wouldn’t be long before they found the body. They might think it was an accident, but if they also found Curtis’s body in Emily’s cell . . . well, then Point Loma would be on lockdown faster than a stripe-assed donkey. If Emily’s plan was going to succeed, they had to get out of here right now.
And then of course there was Rhiannon. No way Emily could leave her behind now. It wouldn’t take Fisher long to figure out that Emily had help getting out of jail, and once he put two and two together, Rhiannon would be right at the top of the list of suspects. She was going to have to come with her.
The apartment building was a big black shadow. Emily, Rhiannon, and Thor eased into the foyer and silently climbed the stairs to the apartment, creeping through their front door.
Thor went straight to his water bowl and started lapping loudly.
“Your backpack is on your bed,” Rhiannon said.
“Listen,” said Emily, pausing at the door to her room, “I know I told you that you would have to stay behind, but that was before everyone lost their minds. I need you to grab some things as quickly as you can; you and Thor are coming with me.”
“I know,” said Rhiannon with a sad smile and disappeared into her own room.
Emily turned on her bedroom light, then, realizing that her window blinds were still up, she quickly dropped them and pulled across the curtains.
Sure enough, her backpack and the clothes she had been in the middle of packing lay exactly where she had left them; in the commotion following Emily’s arrest Fisher had not thought to search her apartment. Why would he? She doubted the possibility of her making any kind of an escape would have even crossed his mind, which just went to show how much they were inclined to underestimating both her and the situation.
Rhiannon had been busy, apparently, because the MREs Emily had been about to grab when Fisher and his goons arrived were stacked next to her clothes on the bed.
And what was this? Her .45 also lay on the bed. Emily had a vague memory of the last time she had seen the pistol, skittering down the hallway.
“I found it in my bedroom,” said Rhiannon, standing in the doorway.
Emily thanked her, then noticed the fully packed backpack sitting at Rhiannon’s feet. She could not have had time to get ready so quickly.
“Well, you look prepared,” she said.
“There was no way I was going to stay behind. Even if you hadn’t been arrested, I would have snuck on board, whether you wanted me with you or not. Mac always says it never hurts to always be prepared.” Rhiannon’s voice had an air of finality to it, and Emily was reminded again that she should not underestimate the resourcefulness of the kid—young woman, she corrected herself. Or her dedication. Both were apparently quite formidable.
Emily quickly finished packing her clothes and supplies into her backpack. She fastened the watch Mac had given her to her wrist, pulled a Bowie knife and its scabbard from the bedside cabinet, and secured it just above her right ankle.
After a final check of the room Emily slung the backpack over one shoulder. She didn’t bother fastening it; it’d be faster to stow that way, and every second was going to count.
“Let’s go, Thor,” she said as both women walked as quietly as they could to the front door.
As Emily closed the door to the apartment, she wondered if they would live to see it again.
In the darkness of the apartment corridor, Emily checked the time. The luminescent dial of her watch showed a little after 5:20 a.m. From the floor above came the unmistakable sound of creaking floorboards as someone walked across them. The day shift was stirring, and that meant they were quickly running out of time.
“We need to move faster,” Emily said.
They jogged down the stairs and headed through the foyer, pausing to check that the coast was clear, then Emily, Thor, and Rhiannon slipped out of the apartment building and began to make their way toward the helicopter landing pad on the northwest side of the camp.
A faint line of white was already creasing the eastern horizon. Dawn was only an hour away at most and more of the camp would be beginning to stir soon. They had to hustle if they wanted to get to the helipad undetected.
Emily picked up the pace, slowing only when they reached the top of the path leading up to the landing pad.
“Unfasten those,” Emily said, pointing to two of the four tie-downs securing the tarp that covered the helicopter.
They pulled the tarp off, bundled it up, and tossed it away.
In the slowly growing light of the fast-approaching morning, the Black Hawk looked like a huge black beetle.
“Toss your backpack inside,” Emily said as she slid the side door open. She shrugged her own pack off and threw it in next to Rhiannon’s. “Thor, up,” she told the malamute, tapping the interior floor. The dog obeyed and she slid the door back into place when he was safely inside.
“You next,” Emily said to Rhiannon, opening the copilot’s door. Rhiannon pulled herself up into the seat. Emily quickly fastened the girl’s safety harness, then placed a helmet that was far too large for Rhiannon on her head. “You’ll have to make do,” she told the girl as she connected the helmet’s chin strap in place. “Once we’re airborne this will be the only way we can communicate.” She gave Rhiannon a reassuring smile, closed the door, and jogged around to the pilot’s door. Pulling herself up into the seat, Emily closed the door behind her, then donned her own helmet.
The start-up procedure including preflight checks would normally take a good five minutes, but there was no way she was going to have that kind of time. Once the engine started up the entire camp would know exactly what was happening and where to find them. It would take about three minutes to get the rotors up to speed and get them off the ground. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out there was only one person who would be able to steal the helicopter. If she screwed anything up, or luck wasn’t with them, there would be just enough time for Valentine to alert Fisher and have him here and pulling them out of the helicopter. If that happened then it was all over.
Emily disengaged the gust lock for the rotors and quickly went through the helicopter’s start-up sequence. She held her breath as she fired up the engines.
The two massive engines rumbled to life and almost immediately she saw a light come on in one of the apartment buildings. Then another and another followed. It wasn’t hard for her to imagine the radio conversations that were now surely happening.
She engaged the rotors and glanced upward through the glass canopy to check them. They were moving painfully slowly, but they were moving, gradually gaining speed. It was going to take about another minute or so before she could safely lift off.
The seconds seemed to stretch out. Emily had to force herself to run through the basic interior checks: Fuel was good, the tank almost entirely full. Oil pressure and engine temperature were all nominal.
She glanced down toward the camp.
Shit! Shit! Shit! A set of headlights was bouncing rapidly through the street toward the hill to their right, one of Fisher’s security Humvees.
“Come on. Come on,” she urged, as if her words would somehow encourage the rotors to spin faster.
“Emily?” Rhiannon’s nervous voice came over the helmet’s internal speakers. She had seen the oncoming Humvee too.
“It’s all okay
,” Emily repeated, not sure if she was trying to reassure Rhiannon or herself. “Almost there.”
The Humvee skidded to a halt about twenty meters away from the now rapidly rotating blades of the helicopter. The doors flew open and five figures exploded from inside, automatic rifles unslung and aimed at the canopy of the Black Hawk.
Valentine was the last to exit, unfolding from the back of the Hummer like a praying mantis, her face livid with anger.
Emily engaged the throttle hard and felt the Black Hawk lurch into the air. Too Goddamn late, she thought and smiled as the ground dropped quickly away.
The sound of something smacking into the fuselage snapped her attention back to the ground. Muzzle flashes sparkled and flashed in the morning half-light. The fuckers were shooting at them. Emily eased the throttle toward maximum and felt the Black Hawk respond accordingly, but not before several more rounds slammed into the fuselage. Then the only sound was of Rhiannon’s panting breath over the comms.
“Are you hit?” Emily asked, fearing the worst. “Are you hit?”
“No,” said Rhiannon after a long pause.
“Check on Thor.”
Rhiannon unfastened her safety harness and twisted in her seat to look back into the rear passenger compartment.
“He’s fine,” she said as she buckled herself back up.
Emily let out a long sigh she felt she had been holding in since Rhiannon had first busted her out of the brig.
As she relaxed she felt the tingling attraction of her son’s pull return, drawing her toward the northeast like a homing beacon. The nose of the Black Hawk was off course by about twenty degrees, and as she swung the helicopter, she felt the small hairs on her skin stand erect as the attraction shifted accordingly across her body.
“Too weird,” she said.
“What?” said Rhiannon.
“Nothing. Why don’t you get some rest for an hour? It’s going to be a long flight.”
“I’m okay,” Rhiannon replied, but ten minutes later Emily heard the soft sound of Rhiannon’s breathing in her headphones.
The Black Hawk sped eastward, the grumble of the engines softened into melody by Rhiannon’s light rhythmic snore as she lay curled up into an almost fetal position in the copilot’s seat.
Emily estimated they were somewhere near the Arizona border. About a half hour earlier she had spotted what could only have been the Salton Sea in the distance, a huge forest of Titans sprouted up around its border.
The sun was almost above the horizon now, and in the early morning light the arc of Earth’s new ring glinted and sparkled like a halo against the dark blue of the morning sky, majestic and heart-stoppingly beautiful. It had doubled in size since the last time she had seen it, and even as Emily marveled at its beauty, she still could not fathom what its purpose might be. It simply should not be there. It seemed like such an irrational thing to do, to expend so much energy to create something that served no purpose, at least to her mere Earth-born mind. Saturn had rings, and she had a vague memory that there might have been another planet within the solar system that had rings too. So why would the Caretakers go to so much trouble to create something that was, as far as she knew, a pretty common naturally occurring feature? The Caretakers were nothing if not inscrutable, but still . . . this seemed pointless.
The Black Hawk had drifted off course slightly as her mind considered the problem of the ring, and she instinctively piloted the helicopter’s attitude back to better match her internal compass.
As she looked back, the first rays of morning sun hit the accretion ring, creating a light show that rivaled the aurora borealis. Waves of rainbow light played like fire across the canopy of the red forest as it rushed by beneath them, giving it the appearance of a vast ocean.
How did planetary rings get made, anyway? Wasn’t it something to do with leftover material from when the planet was first formed? Or something like that. And would a planet that supported life also have a naturally occurring ring?
No idea, she told herself, but it sure did make for a beautiful sunrise.
This felt good. Like feeding a hunger, the urgent pull Emily felt across her skin had turned into a pleasurable tingle almost the second the helo had lifted off and she had begun directing it toward the source of the signal she was sure she was being directed to follow. With each passing kilometer, the intensity with which she felt the draw grew, as did the certainty that she was doing the right thing, that she was being called by and was answering her son. How did she know? Emily had absolutely no idea—it just, well, it felt right. And now she was fully committed. There was no way she was going to be able to go back, not now that Valentine had played her hand.
While it was easy to imagine Valentine giving the order to have her killed, she could not believe that Fisher would allow his men to open fire on her and Rhiannon. Fisher knew she was the only pilot qualified to fly the Black Hawk, and he knew that she would have no other choice but to come back to Point Loma at some point. Why would he risk shooting them down? Why kill her and Rhiannon? Emily had already decided Valentine was insane, but Fisher? He had never struck her as the type to react so violently. Perhaps he had lost control of his men?
Below the Black Hawk the red jungle zipped by. From this height, the canopy of the jungle looked almost cratered, the irregular span of the giant trees and tangled branches and limbs bound together to make a blood-red ocean. With the light show from the ring, the craters and dips looked like swells and waves washing across its surface. It looked almost serene, beautiful, even.
Emily’s eyes kept up a periodic scan from outside the cockpit down to her instrument panel and as her eyes checked the fuel gauge she felt her heart skip a beat. She was 100 percent certain the tank had been close to full when they left Point Loma, but now it read just over the halfway mark. They had been in the air for a little over an hour, and taking a fairly leisurely pace, so there was no way it should be that low. Fuel pressure seemed okay, so unless she had simply misread the gauge or there was some kind of a fault with it, then there was really only one possibility: one of Valentine’s goons had scored a lucky shot on a fuel line, and they were leaking fuel, slowly, but enough that it was going to impact the helo’s range.
The possibilities of what could happen ran through Emily’s mind: If the fuel came into contact with a hot engine part they could simply explode, right? Or maybe she had been watching too many movies. Did that happen in real life? She quickly decided that if it hadn’t happened yet, she wasn’t going to worry about it right now. Option two: she still had enough fuel left to turn back to Point Loma. But that would, at best, result in her being taken prisoner, but more probably, judging by the actions of Valentine, she would be tried in a kangaroo court and executed before the end of the day. And they had probably found the bodies of the two guards by now, she reminded herself. And what about Rhiannon and Thor? There was no way Valentine would let Rhiannon live and tell Mac and the crew of the HMS Vengeance what had happened when they finally returned. No, they would all meet with some kind of unfortunate accident. And it would also mean that Adam would be left in the hands of the Caretakers, and there was no way in Hell that she was going to let that happen.
So there was really only one choice at this stage, wasn’t there: push on and hope the fuel lasted long enough to get them where they were going . . . wherever that might be.
Just over a quarter of the Black Hawk’s fuel remained in its tank. That translated into about an hour’s worth of flight, Emily estimated, if they were lucky. A slow-burning anxiety had begun in the pit of her stomach at the realization that, unless Adam was close by, they were not going to make it by air. While she was certain that the call of her child was a very real thing, there was no frame of reference that she could use to judge just how close she was to his location. It wasn’t like there was some kind of a counter in her head that told her how far away he was, just this continual need to keep moving east. Adam could be just a few kilometers farther on, or somewhere ba
ck in New York. An even worse scenario, one she had not considered until now, suddenly reared up: What if he wasn’t even on this continent? She knew the Caretakers had the ability to instantly transport themselves from one location to another—they had done it to her, after all—but over what kind of distance, she had no clue. What if he was in Europe: Spain or Britain or . . . or Russia? How would she reach him then?
Jesus! She felt sick at the very thought of it even being a possibility. No, she was going to have to simply rely on her belief that her son was still in the United States. Something about the pull just felt like he was close by, almost as though she could sense him in another room. She was just going to have to trust that sense.
As soon as Emily realized their fuel supply was shot, she had started to actively look for a place to put the Black Hawk down safely, but since fleeing Point Loma, the scenery had remained the same rolling canopy of the great red alien forest.
Rhiannon had slept for most of the journey and Emily had seen no reason to wake her until now; but now an extra pair of eyes might literally be the difference between life and death. They were both actively scanning the landscape for somewhere, anywhere, they could land.
Even after all of the years she had spent living in this reimagined world, the utter transformation of the American landscape—a land that once had held great tracts of homes, cities, businesses, and industries, and upward of three hundred million people—was still stupefying to Emily. Although she lived with the encroachment of the jungle on a daily basis at Point Loma, it was only from up here that she could truly appreciate just how complete the assimilation was. Apart from the occasional building that for some reason the rampaging alien vegetation had overlooked, there was no longer much to indicate that there had ever been a dominant race present on this planet. Here and there she might recognize the outline of a tower behind its mask of red foliage, maybe a signpost in a small clearing, a crumbling ruin, or a brief glimpse of road that disappeared as quickly as it came. If she had been flying to a specific location she would have been shit out of luck because, if it weren’t for the occasional mountain range to break up the monotony, there would have been little to use as a visual gauge to show they were making any kind of headway. And if it hadn’t been for the constant caress she felt pulling her onward, Emily knew she would have had no real idea where they were. If she had to make a guess, she would put them somewhere on the eastern side of Arizona, heading toward New Mexico, but there was no way to be absolutely certain.
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 9
