Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis

by Paul Antony Jones

  But over the last twenty minutes Emily had noticed a distinct change in the scenery and her anxiety had begun to fade. The dense jungle was thinning. And as the kilometers rolled by, she began to spot more and more clearings within the alien trees, until the land finally opened up and the forest became a rarity, limited to clumps scattered here and there across the landscape. The topography of the land had changed too; it was flat, an unbroken plain. There was still the ever-present red vegetation, but this stuff seemed far smaller than the dense jungle they had left behind them. It was almost uniform in feature, like looking down on a field of corn or a plush red carpet.

  “Hey, look, I can see a road,” Rhiannon said, pointing down to her left.

  Emily banked slightly left, dipping the nose of the chopper until she could see what Rhiannon saw. And yes, there below them, cutting a swath through the red plain like a scar across the landscape was the unmistakable gray of a freeway. It ran west to east, and here and there Emily could see the shape of a jackknifed tractor-trailer or a car.

  She allowed the aircraft to continue its natural left turn until it was over the freeway, banked right, then began following the road east.

  Emily descended until they were about twenty meters above the freeway. Every minute ate up another couple of kilometers, and she was determined to wring every last centimeter out of the Black Hawk’s dwindling fuel. That would mean leaving it until the very last second to land, a risk she felt she had to take. But at this height, Emily felt confident she could get them down fast when the time came. But this low to the ground, the sensation of speed was . . . alarming, to say the least. Her palms began to sweat. She resisted the urge to constantly adjust her grip on the cyclic stick. From the corner of her eye she saw Rhiannon’s hands nervously searching for armrests that weren’t there. She ended up stiffly grabbing both her knees instead.

  Beyond the cockpit, the road stretched onward in an almost straight line to the horizon. Save for a few distant hills and even more distant mountains, there was nothing but featureless red plain on either side of the road. But beyond the hills, creeping toward them like a monster from some ancient B movie, Emily saw the unmistakable outline of storm clouds, gray and threatening against the backdrop of the sky. The storm collected along the eastern horizon in one large angry mass of swirling grays and blacks, hanging over the freeway like a beast. Thunderheads if ever she’d seen them. That was not good, and there was no way to tell which direction it was moving.

  “Look,” said Rhiannon. Emily’s eyes followed where she was pointing and she could see a small black shape on the westbound side of the freeway, about fifteen kilometers or so away. It was the first and only building they had seen since leaving Point Loma. Apart from that there was no sign of anything that looked out of place, nothing that she could point at and say “There, that’s where they’re keeping my son.”

  An alarm suddenly filled the cockpit with its repetitive whoop-whoop, demanding her attention.

  “What’s that?” Rhiannon asked, her head snapping to look at the control panel.

  “Low fuel warning,” Emily said. Emily explained what she thought had happened to the fuel supply, that they were now out of it and would have to set the helicopter down.

  “You mean we’ll have to walk? Again!”

  “’Fraid so,” said Emily, trying not to laugh but failing despite the rising tension she felt as she guided the helicopter down. “At least until we can find a vehicle.”

  “But how far?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily answered honestly. “I can’t tell.”

  Rhiannon went silent.

  Emily was tempted to push her luck for just a bit further, but she had the distinct feeling that her supply of that particular resource was pretty much linked directly to her supply of fuel, which meant she was almost out of both. The safest thing to do was to land the bird now.

  She slowed her airspeed and allowed the Black Hawk to descend slowly.

  A scattering of aluminum shells that had once been cars littered the westbound side of the freeway, scorch marks and melted tarmacadam from what must have been a pretty intense fire still visible around the derelict vehicles. Not safe to land there, so she aimed for the eastbound side of the freeway so she could get a clear view of the terrain ahead, her eyes peeled for any obstacles like overhead power cables or telephone lines that she might have missed.

  “This will have to do,” she said to herself.

  She brought the Black Hawk to a hovering stop and dropped the final fifteen meters onto the eastbound center lane. The wheels bumped on the blacktop, and then the helo settled back onto its suspension.

  Emily killed the engines. Silence quickly settled over them.

  She peeled off her helmet, then helped Rhiannon with hers. Clambering out of the cockpit, Emily took a second to stretch her cramped legs and arms. It felt good to be back on the ground again. She gave a quick scan of the area she had chosen for their landing pad; it was a slightly undulating plain that reached out in all directions to the horizon, covered in a knee-high red plant that reminded her of the bull rushes that grew around some of the ponds back home. The reeds swayed back and forth in a gentle breeze, rustling like sand through a sieve.

  A couple of kilometers to the northeast, a copse of alien trees stood silhouetted against the sky, a sky now painted with thick strokes of the gray clouds she had seen minutes earlier.

  Emily unlatched the side door and beckoned Thor out. He leaped down and sniffed the ground inquisitively before peeing long and hard against the rear landing gear.

  “This looks so different from California,” said Rhiannon, joining Emily at the front of the Black Hawk, her hair a bird’s nest of tangles from the helmet.

  “I think the amount of plants and trees in an area reflects the environment, just like it did before the red rain came,” Emily said, pulling first her backpack and then Rhiannon’s from within the Black Hawk’s hold. “And I think the amount of . . . biological material available in each location also has a lot to do with what developed there after the rain.”

  “You mean people, don’t you.”

  Emily nodded. “And animals and plants. It all contributed. I think we’re probably somewhere in eastern Arizona, and that’s mostly desert. The cities are pretty spread out, so there was probably far less material for the red rain to transform.” She fastened the belt buckle to secure the backpack and checked that there was nothing else in the helicopter that they might need.

  The air was cool, made colder again by the gusts of wind that blew across them, and Emily grew even colder when she looked at the storm that now lay directly ahead of them. It was distant but growing. They had two choices: stay with the helo and ride out the storm or press on toward the building they had spotted from the air and hope that they got there before the storm did. Rhiannon looked at the thunderstorm but said nothing. Instead she opened the flap on her backpack and pulled out a thick waterproof jacket and put it on. Emily did the same.

  “Think we can outrun it?” Rhiannon said.

  “Of course. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

  From the air, the freeway had looked like a flat, straight line cutting across the desert, but as Emily, Rhiannon, and Thor trudged their way east, they found the road at ground level cracked and broken from years of negligence and harsh weather. Large chunks of blacktop had broken away across the freeway’s surface, cracked open by the same alien plants that covered the plains, pushing their way up through the openings and fissures. A light haze of what must be pollen floated above the top of the plants. It swirled and meandered through the air in clouds and streams.

  Emily shifted her backpack to a more comfortable position. It was actually quite peaceful, walking wordlessly along this fractured road, Thor trotting out in front of them, nose to the ground, sniffing at the unfamiliar scents. The companions had reached a kind of walking rhythm that was almost tantric: one step after the other, the only sound their footfalls and breathing, a gentle rh
ythmic beat. The cool air was a welcome change from the almost constantly sunny days they had experienced throughout their years in California.

  There were surprisingly few vehicles on the road. They had passed a couple of cars abandoned on a gravel easement that ran alongside the freeway, their doors left open as if the previous owners had simply pulled over, flung open the door, and run away, which perhaps was exactly what they had done. There was no sign of a body or even the shell of one of the alien spiders in any of the vehicles, but it would most likely have disintegrated long ago. They also passed the burned-out wreckage of a big rig, the blackened ribs of the trailer exposed like the old bones of some whale that had found itself dropped from the sky, the main cab nowhere in sight.

  But ahead of them, the thunder clouds Emily had spotted earlier had grown closer, the storm clawing its way across the dome of sky almost directly over their heads, and joined now by the unmistakable haze of rain falling beneath it. A single flash of lightning burst silently through the body of the storm. Emily began counting out loud, “One one thousand. Two one thousand.”

  Rhiannon looked at her oddly. What on Earth are you doing now? the look said.

  As if in answer, a peal of thunder rolled over them just as Emily reached a count of seven.

  “It’s a good way to figure out how far away the storm is,” Emily explained. “Sound travels about a kilometer every three seconds, so that lightning struck about two and a half kilometers away from us. Which means the storm is moving our way fast.” She was beginning to regret leaving the relative safety of the helicopter, but she estimated they were closer to the building than they were to the Black Hawk now. They would just have to keep on walking and hope that the rain held off long enough for them to reach it.

  As if the storm were determined to prove her wrong on every count today, the first drops of rain started to hit the road ahead of them, fat drops splattering across the ground with audible thwacks, like a rolled-up newspaper slapped against a hand.

  “Oh great,” said Rhiannon, pulling the hood of her jacket over her head. Emily did the same and tilted her head down as a bitingly cold gust of wind drove the rain almost horizontally into her face. Within minutes, despite their jackets, the wind had helped the rain find its way through their jackets’ sleeves and hoods, and both women were uncomfortably wet.

  Shit! This was a mistake.

  To reinforce her thought, a vicious slash of lightning flashed to the ground on their left flank, followed almost instantly by a crack of thunder that sounded like a bomb detonating, rattling Emily’s fillings. Rhiannon and Emily screeched, and poor Thor, drenched and bedraggled, gave a yelp and ran to Emily’s feet, shaking in fear.

  “It’s okay,” Emily said, trying to overcome the thunderous drumming of the rain against the ground. “Come on, boy,” she encouraged the malamute, who seemed rooted to the spot. The rain was a problem, but worse still was their exposed position. They were quite literally the tallest things for kilometers, which meant they made a perfect target for a lightning strike. They had no choice but to push on and hope that they either found some shelter or that the rain would ease up, but it was hard not to flinch every time lightning ripped across the sky.

  She could pray, she supposed, but to what god? She had given up believing in any kind of benevolent being long before the red rain arrived, and the systematic destruction of humanity had put the final nail in that particular superstition’s coffin for her (along with 99.9 percent of the rest of the world). Had to hand it to the Caretakers, they did not discriminate when it came to race, creed, or religion. They were willing to fuck up anybody’s life, no matter their denomination or belief.

  “We have to keep going,” Emily yelled to Rhiannon. The rain was hitting the ground so hard it had created a mist of particles that hung in the air around their feet; that and a combination of the impenetrable cloud and driving rain had severely reduced the visibility down to maybe twenty meters. “Follow me.” Emily abruptly shifted direction, heading toward the center median. She hopped over the center barrier, helped Rhiannon do the same, and then encouraged Thor to jump over.

  “What are we doing?” Rhiannon asked; the rain against the metal of the guardrail sounded like ball bearings bouncing off glass.

  “We need to find that building we saw from the air. The visibility is so bad, if we stay on that side of the freeway, we might walk right by it.”

  The rain was now a constant hammering against their bodies. And when the wind blew up, it beat directly against their exposed faces, stinging their skin and eyes.

  The wind kicked up again as they trudged east, and this time it did not die down. Emily was frozen, and she was sure Rhiannon was faring no better. She tried to block the worst of the wind’s force, but it seemed to be coming from all directions, staggering them each time it shifted direction. And the rain showed no sign of easing up either; if anything, it was growing even worse, battering them as the wind buffeted and knocked them about like a cat playing with a mouse. It was as if the God that Emily had so roundly denied had decided to finally put in an appearance, Old Testament style, and was going out of His way to say “And where do you think you are going, mortal?”

  For the next hour or more, they fought against the wind and the lashing rain, Emily leading the way, trying to do her best to shield both Rhiannon and Thor from the main force of the storm. This had been a major mistake, she had decided many kilometers back, but now she thought she might have to recategorize it as a potentially fatal one.

  There was no sign of the building. For all she knew they could have walked right past it already. About a kilometer back, they had passed the shell of a car, but it had been wrecked beyond recognition and offered no hope of shelter. There wasn’t even a bush or a tree for them to shelter beneath. Emily could feel the continually dropping temperature beginning to creep into her bones through the thin layers of her Windbreaker. If they did not find some way out of this weather soon there was no question in her mind that they would die of exposure. Each step was now a labor, water having long ago permeated her boots and soaked into her socks. Every muscle ached, and she could not feel her lips. When she blindly led the group off the side of the road, Emily realized that it had grown so dark that she had actually lost her sense of direction. She managed to fumble her flashlight from her backpack and turned it on, illuminating the road ahead of them. She washed it over her companions: Thor looked as bedraggled as could be expected but seemed resolved to just put one paw in front of the other. He gave a slow wag of his tail in acknowledgment of his mistress’s attention. Rhiannon’s face was a pale moon in the artificial glow of the flashlight’s LED bulbs. She looked as though she had been dropped in the deep end of the ocean, but there was still a determined sparkle in her eyes, and she smiled weakly. Emily managed her own wan smile in return; it was supposed to say Don’t worry, but felt more like It’ll all be over soon. Just lie down and go to sleep.

  A second beam of light joined Emily’s as Rhiannon fished her own flashlight from her pack, cutting through the wet, murky darkness as they continued on their way.

  Once the torrential downpour had begun, the gullies alongside the road had quickly turned into streams and then rivers, carrying streamers of mud and dislodged flora back in the direction they had already come. A half-inch layer of water lay over the road surface too, dancing with the splash of each new raindrop.

  All sense of time had evaporated. Emily was reduced to focusing on putting one soggy foot in front of the other, occasionally checking behind her to make sure that she had not lost her two companions. The only change marking the passage of time was the occasional flash of lightning and rumble of thunder. So it could have been a minute or it could have been an hour before Emily’s foot-down/foot-up plod was broken by a tug at her jacket’s elbow. She turned to see Rhiannon thrusting her flashlight forward like it were a dagger.

  “There!” Rhiannon yelled.

  Emily followed the beam of the girl’s flashlight. It i
lluminated the shadow-shrouded fascia of a storefront, the paint flaking away from the clapboards.

  “Let’s go,” Emily yelled back as the three half-drowned companions staggered as quickly as they could toward the building.

  A boom of thunder rocked the travelers as they reached the building’s entrance.

  The building rattled like dice in a can.

  Debris, fire-blackened pieces of wood—some the size of Emily’s arm, others merely splinters—lay scattered over the ground in front of the entrance, as though an explosion had ripped through the structure. Putting aside the fact that the building had seen its last human over two years ago, the place was in surprisingly good shape. But as Emily played the beam of her flashlight to the right she saw a gaping hole and charred timbers in the center of the building. There had definitely been an explosion of some kind, judging by the ragged hole ripped in the fascia. That would account for the debris field they were walking through, but the fire must have been short-lived, because the rest of the structure on either side of the devastation looked to be in relatively good condition.