“Babies,” said Rhiannon. “Oh my God!” She turned and gave Emily a look of horror. “I killed their parents. Oh my God.”
Emily was momentarily lost for words. “You had no other choice,” she said eventually. Obviously the two creatures Rhiannon had killed were simply protecting their offspring and their territory. If Thor had not been so aggressive, they probably would have stayed in the long grass until the humans had left the area. But that would have meant they would have had to give up the clothes and other supplies they found.
“But what are they going to do now? How will they survive?”
“It’s a hard, harsh world, kiddo,” Emily said, reluctantly rising to her feet. “And you’re doing about as well as anyone could be expected to.”
She offered her hand to Rhiannon and pulled her to her feet too.
“Daylight’s burning. We need to get moving.”
The travelers had passed only the occasional vehicle since touching down on the I-40. Most had been nothing more than wrecks, destroyed by either the passage of time or the great storm that had spread across the world. All save the minivan had been useless to them.
The freeway had seemed strangely deserted.
Over the last kilometer that had begun to change. The number of vehicles strewn across the highway gradually increased as what had been empty lanes began to fill with stalled vehicles. By the time they had travelled another two kilometers they were looking at three lanes of eastbound vehicles, mostly big rigs, nose to tail in every lane, as though they had all rolled to a stop together. The jam stretched ahead of them, before disappearing into the mist and drizzle.
The great storm had swept through and, seemingly at random, rocked some of the big rigs over onto their sides. As the companions cautiously made their way between the abandoned vehicles, they saw that the sheer density of the trucks had kept most of them right where their drivers had stopped them. But time and the weather had not been so kind to these relics, stripping the paint from the cabs and flaying the canvas and metal from the freight containers until they looked like row upon row of skeletons, strips of still-attached canvas flapping in the breeze like dead skin.
Still, some had managed to survive relatively intact.
“Do you think any of them still work?” Rhiannon asked as they walked up alongside a rig that still looked to be in good condition.
“Doubtful,” said Emily as she climbed up onto the footplate of the cab and tried to look inside. A thin layer of red moss spun a frosty web across the window. Emily wiped it away with her sleeve. “And even if we found one we could get to start, there’d be no way to maneuver it out of this snarl-up. These things are packed tighter than sardines in a can.” She tried the cab door, but it was locked.
Seeing nothing of use within, Emily climbed down and took a second to think. It was still raining, the sky was gray, and night was edging closer. With the heavy cloud cover, it was going to get dark much earlier. Emily estimated they had maybe an hour and a half of light left before it was too dark to travel safely. She stepped away from the convoy of dead trucks to the side of the road. The misty rain limited the distance she could see ahead, but there was no indication of the three-lane tailback of trucks ending anytime soon.
“We’ll keep going until we get to the last truck or it gets so dark we can’t carry on,” Emily said. “Then we’ll pick one to spend the night in so we can get out of this rain. That okay?”
Rhiannon nodded and walked on.
The trucks smelled. It was a new smell, made up of the scent of slowly decomposing wood, and metal, and gradually decaying plastic, sprinkled with a dash of whatever the trucks had been hauling, all bound together by the musky scent of the wet red vegetation.
As they continued on, Emily found unbidden memories, spontaneously activated by the web of scents popping back into her mind as they trudged onward through the vehicular graveyard. Here the plastic memory of splashing in a kiddy paddling pool in Mom and Dad’s backyard when she was no more than four or five, a puppy, long since dead and gone—Rex, his name was Rex—running and yelping along the pool’s perimeter, barking excitedly as she splashed and laughed. The vague recollection of her parents standing watchfully over her, shadows in her memory but always there for her. Here the unmistakable smell of wet pine, walks through the forest with her first serious boyfriend and secret meetings under the stars.
Her mind was tired, and she wished the memories would simply fade back into whatever part of her brain had been hiding them. The sense of melancholy these memories brought with them, of times she remembered so fondly, were now not only discolored by time but stained with the blood of an entire planet. It created a frisson of sadness and anger so intense it felt as though the emotions were alive within Emily, hollowing out a space for itself in her chest.
Emily looked at her companions. Rhiannon was such a dichotomy, surely as much a unique product of this world as her own son was. This tough young girl who should have been on the cusp of womanhood, excited by the prospect of dating, graduating high school, experiencing the heartbreak of first love, the joy of stepping out into a life that she could make and call her own. A husband. Kids. Grandkids. And a life well lived. What were the chances she would ever get to experience any of those things? Was she condemned to live under the boot heel of the Caretakers? Or, perhaps even worse, would she have to live in a world where people like Valentine still dictated how she would shape her life? Not if Emily had any say in the matter.
And Thor. Poor, bedraggled, loyal Thor, walking between the two women, eyes fixed ahead as always, ears up, his gray-and-white coat glistening with raindrops. The last of his kind, Emily was sure. Blissfully unaware of the fact, sure of only one thing, his love for his family. Emily knew she could not have asked for a more loyal companion. She had no idea what she had done to command the loyalty of such friends, and part of her also knew that she did not deserve it, but she was glad of it anyway. Because, even out here, in this barren alien world, she knew she was as rich as anyone left on this Earth.
The lines of vehicles creaked and moaned like condemned souls as the companions picked their way through them. For the first kilometer or so, the trucks and occasional car and even a Greyhound bus—a perfectly round hole drilled through almost every window—had all obviously been brought to a controlled stop by their now long-dead drivers. But that had changed over the past couple of minutes as the orderly procession of decaying vehicles had edged up the incline of the hill the travelers found themselves climbing. The farther up they walked, the more it became obvious that these vehicles had not stopped in time to avoid slamming into the truck ahead of them. It began as just minor fender benders, but a couple had obviously hit at some speed, despite the incline of the hill.
Visibility began to decrease the higher up they went, the low cloud covering the road with a mist of cold droplets, limiting their view to just a few meters. By the time they reached the summit, Rhiannon and Emily were holding hands to make sure they would not be separated.
The descent down was even more chaotic. The vehicles had become a tangled mess of crushed cabs and jackknifed trailers. They had to carefully pick their way through the carnage or risk a broken ankle or sliced foot.
“At least we can see where we’re going now,” said Rhiannon, about halfway down the opposite side of the hill, her face covered in a thin sheen of water left there by the thinning mist. Apparently, the heaviest cloud had been located on the western side of the hills, and their visibility was improving with every meter they took down now.
Ahead of them, a gas tanker had managed to skid to a stop, its shiny aluminum tanker-trailer jackknifed across all three lanes of traffic, blocking the road beyond, the cab twisted awkwardly like its neck had been broken. Emily and Rhiannon clambered under the trailer . . . and straight into a scene of utter carnage.
Directly ahead of the tanker were four partially destroyed vehicles, still recognizable for the trucks they once were, but after them the road was lik
e a scene from a war movie. The freeway was littered with debris and the blackened scorch marks of what had obviously been an enormous inferno, a fire that had burned with such intensity it had boiled away the top layers of the freeway and even melted the guardrail along the central divide. What was left of the road was covered in the grime-encrusted remains of vehicles, none of them intact, all barely recognizable. The pieces were so scattered, and there were so many of them, it was impossible to tell how many vehicles they had originally belonged to. Even the open ground to the right of the eastbound lanes still bore the blackened shadow of the fire, the soil so devastated that the alien vegetation had not been able to take root there all these years later.
“Damn!” hissed Emily.
“Creepier than an uninvited clown at a kid’s birthday party,” Rhiannon said nervously, repeating one of Parsons’ favorite idioms. She was right, though—the torn, smashed, burned vehicle parts were . . . well, scary looking. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to picture some gigantic alien beast stampeding through the trucks, tearing them apart simply for the fun of it, leaving their chrome-and-fiberglass carcasses to rot in the New Mexico desert. And, of course, in this strange new version of the world, that might just have been what had happened.
The truth, though, was probably much simpler, Emily was sure. As they reached the final quarter kilometer, the devastation was total; trailers and trucks had plowed into each other, merging together until it was almost impossible to tell one devastated vehicle from another. There had been a fire or an explosion or maybe both. It had consumed everything, reducing the big rigs down to little more than their chassis. Pools of rubber littered the ground, tires melted by the heat of the inferno that had ripped through here. Again Emily’s imagination was more than eager to reconstruct the possible scenario that had led up to the devastation: an agitated driver wanting to get home had overestimated his luck and boom, catastrophe had rained down on him and everyone else for a half kilometer back who hadn’t been able to stop in time. The tailback that had ensued, the one they had been following for the past five kilometers, had condemned everyone behind them to die in the cab of their vehicle or out in the desert if they had tried to make a run for it. Either way the end result would have been the same.
“Oh my God,” said Rhiannon, stopping suddenly and pointing past the destruction. “Emily, look at that!”
Emily followed Rhiannon’s excited pointing, following the line of the road as it dipped through the mess of burned-out vehicles, leveling off and then unerringly continuing east. But about a half kilometer after the road flattened off again, it curved through another set of smaller hills, the height of which Emily could not tell as their summit was hidden behind a misty veil of rain. And there, nestled in between the two hills Emily saw a squat, white building.
Emily felt a smile spread across her face. The first genuine smile she could remember since before Mac had left.
The building was boxlike with a flat roof and guttering running along the edges to drain pipes in each corner. Emily could see three windows along the freeway-facing wall. She could not be certain, but the windows looked to be intact.
“Thank God,” said Rhiannon.
Emily’s smile grew broader. The idea of having somewhere dry to spend the night was akin to offering a steak dinner to a starving man. The clouds above their heads had lost their silver-gray edge and were now becoming black; night was approaching fast. If the building was as undamaged as it looked from here, it would be a perfect place to spend the night.
“Come on,” said Emily, almost laughing with exhilaration. “I’ll race you.”
They had taken only a few steps when Rhiannon let out another gasp of surprise and froze.
“Oh!” Emily said softly as she stopped too.
Behind the windows of the building, the unmistakable glow of man-made light now shined.
“Do you think it’s people?” Rhiannon said, her voice full of excitement.
Emily stared at the windows. There was no way the orange glow leaking from them could be mistaken for anything other than the illumination from a lightbulb. And that meant two things: there had to be power to the building and someone had to turn on the lights. Both of which were, well, stunning in their implications.
“It is people,” Rhiannon insisted. “It has to be.”
“Let’s go and find out,” said Emily, “but we have to be careful. This could be anything.”
Rhiannon nodded and began to follow Emily across the road toward the safety barrier at the side of the freeway. The devastation of the crash, fire, and, by the looks of the debris pattern, subsequent explosion had flung parts of the vehicles everywhere, but the concentration of broken machines was still mainly on the freeway. If they wanted to avoid it they would need to get off the road for a while.
“Rhiannon, slow down,” said Emily as the girl began to move at almost a jog. She stopped and turned around to look at Emily, her face brighter than Emily had seen in a very long time.
“But—”
“No buts,” Emily interrupted. “We have to be careful.”
Grudgingly, Rhiannon slowed.
Seventy meters away, Emily brought them to a stop.
“Get out your pistol,” Emily ordered.
“But what if they’re friendly?”
“If they are, then they’ll understand why we had to be cautious, but if they’re not, then I don’t want any misunderstandings.” Emily had already pulled her .45 from its holster and ratcheted a round into the chamber. She waited for Rhiannon to pull her own pistol and ready it.
Thoughts cascaded through Emily’s mind, and a twinge of excitement, countered by an equal part of anxiety, set her heart racing. The possibility that others had survived the red rain and the megastorm that followed had vanished from her mind within the first week. Obviously there had been survivors, but they had been safely tucked away in submarines or at either end of the Earth’s poles; she had given no thought to there still being life left on land since then. And out here, in the middle of the desert? How the hell had they managed to make it for so long? And where were they getting their power from? If they had lights, then they must have a power source. Maybe a generator? That was possible, she supposed, but where would they get the gas to power it for all these years? And generators were loud; this close to the building, she would have heard it running by now. Maybe there was still a power plant operational? If that were true, then it meant someone had to be keeping it running, and if someone was willing to maintain a power plant, then they had to be producing power for more than just a building in the middle of nowhere. Which meant that there might be more survivors, maybe even a town or a city. Her heart began to swell with the possibility. Maybe she had been wrong and Valentine had been right all along. Maybe.
“I can’t see a surveillance camera or a lookout,” Emily said, straining her eyes against the pale light of the dying day, “but that doesn’t mean that whoever is in there isn’t keeping an eye out. We’ll get off the road and approach it from the blind side.”
The west side of the building was just a large wall with no windows.
“Come on,” Emily said, “let’s move.” They left the road and cut across the open plain in the direction of the building . . . and instantly regretted doing so. With so little red vegetation here to bind the dirt together, the constant rain had turned the ground to a thick, heavy mud. It sucked at their already-sodden feet and slowed them to a clumsy, lurching, slurping plod. Only Thor seemed to have little problem navigating the ground, but then he had four-wheel drive.
It took them twenty minutes of slowly picking their way through the mud to travel the remaining distance to the building. Emily’s feet ached worse now than they had during the entire journey, thanks to the heavy coating of wet clay that clung to both of her boots. Her calves burned from the effort of pulling one foot after the other from the quagmire.
“Well this wasn’t your best idea,” said Rhiannon, a little to
o sarcastically for Emily’s liking.
“Hush!” Emily hissed back. She scanned the building. From what she could see at this obtuse angle it looked remarkably intact. It was quite large, not a home, she thought, but maybe some kind of office building? Bisecting their position and the side of the building was a concrete driveway that led in from the freeway along the side of the building to a parking lot at the back. Two rusting cars still sat in the lot, but even from where they crouched Emily could see that the vehicles were weather worn, their tires flat as proverbial pancakes and the glass of their windshields scattered around the ground.
Nothing moved. There was no indication of life from within the building.
“Stay put,” said Emily, turning to face Rhiannon.
“But . . .”
“No buts, I need you to wait here with Thor. If whoever is in there isn’t friendly, I might need you to bust me out again, okay?”
Rhiannon did not look happy with the order. “Okay,” she grumbled.
“Good girl. Keep your head down, alright, and only come in if I call you, understood?”
Rhiannon nodded.
“Thor, stay,” Emily commanded and pulled her .45 from the holster, checked it again, and reholstered it. She looked left and right for any signs of movement, then slowly began to make her way to the concrete road leading to the parking lot just a few meters away.
Mud clung to her boots like concrete, slowing her movement to an exaggerated spacewalk as she hobbled across the road and leaned against the side of the building. She took a few moments to use the wall of the building to gently and as quietly as she could scrape the majority of the mud from her shoes. The damn stuff was like glue. When she was done, she followed the wall toward the back section of the building, bobbed her head around the corner, saw nothing, and cut left, edging toward the nearest window. When she reached it, Emily crouched down and slowly leaned in until she could see into the room within.
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 16
