The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  When he cracked his eyelids again, he saw things with a bit more clarity. Ana, he thought. A pang of guilt hit him for thinking of her first. Tania, he corrected himself. She’d saved him. She’d come after Gabriel with a pipe and given him his chance. “Tania!”

  “Here!” A weak voice, somewhere to his right. A cough followed the words, and for a split second he wondered if the Elevator’s aura had failed as well.

  He stumbled in the direction of her voice, calling her name one more time. The fog had all but vanished, and he finally saw her, hunkered down just inside the climber car. The climber itself, an eight-pronged scaffold built to lift cargo to orbit, had come down with only one car attached, the one Tania rode. The other arms of the vehicle were empty, and three were now badly bent.

  The personnel car itself was tilted to one side and bore a long scrape across its surface.

  Skyler came to the door. Tania reached out for him and he took her hand.

  “The towers,” he said sharply. “Tell me how you feel. Headache? Strange thoughts?”

  “My God,” she whispered, “your face.”

  “That handsome, eh?” he sputtered more than said. She was okay. Despite the towers’ abrupt departure, the aura provided by the Elevator still held.

  Tania laughed in relief, a pained sound. Tears were on her cheeks.

  “Are you okay? Can you walk?” he asked her. More people were behind her, crowded within the dark space. “We should survey the camp.”

  Tania grimaced and shook her head. “Twisted my ankle, I think, when he tried to grab me. What’s happening, Skyler? Did we lose them all?”

  “I don’t know yet. Most, I think. Some colonists were surely left outside the aura. Stay here. I’ll come back.”

  “Don’t go—”

  “I have to,” he said, too stern. Tania nodded, a grave look on her face.

  He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and walked away to survey the camp.

  Belém, Brazil

  6.MAY.2283

  SKYLER CUPPED HIS hands over his mouth and roared, “Everyone to the Elevator! Now!”

  He made his way south, where most of the towers had been, and where part of the colony extended past the aura provided by the Elevator. The survivors he passed, though dazed or injured, seemed free of the disease. At least, then, the Elevator still provided protection.

  Ahead someone screamed. Others cried out in alarm. Skyler began to sprint, ignoring every ache and injury on his body.

  When he rounded a half-fallen tent the tower yard came into view. Skyler froze in his tracks. “Oh hell,” he whispered.

  Well over one hundred towers had been there before, the rest employed along Water Road and Mercy Road.

  Now he counted only twelve. They stood in a tight bunch, like some kind of tribute to Stonehenge. “Spread the towers out!” he shouted.

  A number of colonists were in the area, but none of them heeded his order. They were all focused on something off to Skyler’s left. He glanced that way and saw a colonist near the river. A man he thought, though it was too dark to tell for sure. The person staggered in erratic directions, hands clasped over his ears, moaning from abject torment.

  Skyler had seen this many times before, most recently with Karl on that first trip down to Belém. He went to raise his rifle, only to realize he’d neglected to pick it up. And the knife—he’d left the knife buried in Gabriel’s neck.

  As the man near the river screamed in sheer agony, Skyler turned and searched the partially collapsed tent nearby. He found no weapon but did find a thick, polished walking stick made of hard wood. Good enough, he decided, and grabbed it.

  Skyler strode toward the infected man with calm resolve. He knew it was too late for the poor bastard. Already the man acted more like a creature than a person. He still wailed from the pain between his ears, but he crouched now, and in his few fleeting moments of near-human clarity his eyes remained wild.

  “Everyone get to the Elevator,” Skyler said as he passed a few colonists standing slack-jawed nearby. “Or look away, at least. You don’t want to see this.”

  Skyler walked right up to the subhuman, wound up, and swung. The walking stick hit the creature full in the face in a sickening, meaty thud. The sound of the impact was wet and marked with the crunch of bone and broken teeth. Skyler knew better than to pull punches when it came to subs, so he’d swung as hard as his aching limbs would allow. Hard enough, it turned out, to lift the man from his feet and send him sprawling into the water of the river, limp as a rag doll.

  The current tugged at the body, gradually pulling it in until the corpse floated away from shore.

  Somewhere behind Skyler one of the colonists broke into sobs. Someone who’d known the man, Skyler guessed. He threw the walking stick on the ground at his feet and stared numbly at the rippling water. Nothing could be done about it now.

  The colonists behind him took the hint, finally, and backed off to a safe distance from the Elevator base, no longer trusting the few remaining towers. Skyler wandered back toward the center of camp, listening and looking for more subhumans. He found none, and for that he felt an immense relief.

  An hour passed and he still hadn’t pieced together exactly what had happened. Every person he spoke with, those who weren’t tending to the wounded or in some state of shock, told only bits of the story, often conflicting with what others said.

  Of his immunes, Vanessa found him first. Skyler’s knees buckled at the sight of her, partly from simple relief and partly because it gave him hope that Gabriel’s henchman had lied and more were alive. Vanessa had one forearm wrapped in gauze. Her account of the battle, seen from afar, filled in the most blanks.

  The plan called for their diversion to happen first, in hopes it would draw away some of the enemy when the attack started, but they found their path through the city fraught with blockages and arrived late. When she and Wilson heard the raft explode, they rushed their attempt to crash the APC a few hundred meters outside camp. It missed the intended building and continued on down a Belém street for five blocks before smashing into a one-room home. The two of them spent the next ten minutes just reversing the damn thing, and by then Camp Exodus was in chaos.

  Wilson had argued they should just hide and wait out the fighting. But Vanessa shamed him into action, and together they set the vehicle on a collision course with the camp itself, jumped out, and watched it go. “Stupid and reckless, I realize now,” she said, her head down.

  Skyler assured her the action might have saved the whole enterprise.

  When the vehicle crashed into one of Gabriel’s idle trucks, Wilson and Vanessa were already racing toward the camp, intent on joining the fight as best they could. Then the enemy’s rocket had knifed across camp, missed the diversionary APC, and slammed into an alien tower.

  The pair had watched the rest from a distance, baffled and awestruck. They heard the deep groan from the towers and saw the blanket of fog that enveloped the camp in less than ten seconds. Vanessa swore the fog seemed to come out of the air itself, but Skyler knew the towers had somehow created it. A defense mechanism, maybe, after one was “attacked.”

  “Where’s Wilson now?” Skyler asked her.

  Her lip quivered. “He’s gone, Skyler. One of those towers hit him and just kept going. He went underneath. I’ve never … It was …” She covered her mouth and nose with both hands, her voice muffled when she spoke. “He deserved better.”

  Unsure what else to do, Skyler embraced her and let her sob against his chest. “Maybe you should lie down,” he said, feeling helpless. Wilson he’d known for only a few days. A nice enough fellow, and an immune for all that meant. Skyler had seen the way the Canadian looked at Vanessa, but he’d also seen how she’d pointedly ignored the attention. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, assuming she was doing just that.

  Her sobs dwindled until she suddenly pulled away and wiped her face with one sleeve. “This isn’t like me,” she said. “I need to do something use
ful. I’m going to help with the wounded.” Without another word she walked away.

  Skyler had turned, intending to join her, when he spotted Ana a few dozen meters away. The girl stumbled toward them, her shoulders slumped and feet dragging. Smears of dried blood marred her face and neck.

  Ana’s gaze was on the ground in front of her, but every few steps she would glance up, as if gauging Skyler’s temper. He waited, frozen in place by the sight of her exhausted, wounded form.

  She stopped a few meters from him and started to say something. Her knees buckled, and Skyler closed the distance between them in two steps, catching her before she fell. Her arms wrapped around him and she began to sob.

  “It’s okay now,” he whispered. “They’re gone.”

  Between sharply drawn breaths she said, “I lost sight of you in the shadows, and moved. But I still couldn’t see you, and then the raft blew up and I just panicked. I ran.…”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Skyler told her. “You did good.”

  “I ran,” she repeated. “I fled.”

  He held her tight, and when the sobs began to fade he checked her for wounds.

  “The blood is someone else’s,” she said.

  A short distance away Skyler spotted a cot tipped onto its side. He led Ana to it, righted the portable bed, and eased her down to a seat. When he offered her his canteen, she took a mouthful, swished, and then spat the liquid onto the ground beside her. Then she poured some water on her hand and began to wipe the blood from her face. Her effort only smeared the gore.

  Skyler knelt before her, took out a fresh white handkerchief from a pocket on his pant leg, and eased her hand down. Ana closed her eyes and sat motionless as he cleaned blood, sweat, and tears from her cheeks and brow.

  “My face,” she said, “feels like yours looks.”

  It hurt to laugh, but he laughed anyway. “Now we’re twins, eh?”

  He heard footsteps behind him.

  “Skyler, when you have a moment?” Karl’s voice. The man sounded so haggard Skyler almost didn’t recognize it.

  Ana opened her eyes and gave Skyler a nod. “I’m just going to sit here a while,” she whispered. “Then I’ll find Davi and the others.”

  He brushed a stray strand of auburn hair from her face, offered the best smile he could, and went to Karl.

  The man had two black eyes, and the rest of his face hid under a mess of bruises, cuts, and scrapes. “You look like hell,” Skyler said as they embraced like soldiers.

  “I always do. And anyway, speak for yourself,” the man replied. He sounded as if his mouth were full of marbles. “Tania wants you at the climber, so we can start to sort out this mess.”

  “Later,” Skyler said. “There’s injured, dead. People missing.”

  Karl took the rejection in stride. “All but twelve towers are gone,” he said. “Looks like even those deployed as roads moved out.”

  “Already with the bloody towers? Secure the colony, treat the wounded. Fuck the towers, we’ll find them later.”

  The battered man held up his hands in surrender. “Calm down. Everyone’s pitching in. We need to think about what happens at dawn.”

  “What happens at dawn?”

  “The camp just got a lot smaller, Skyler, and our plans for water and medical access are shot. We need a new strategy.”

  Skyler had plenty of opinions but decided to wait until Tania was with them. He swept his arm toward the climber and followed Karl to the center of Camp Exodus in silence.

  With the air now clear, the full extent of the devastation became apparent. The exodus of aura towers had moved through the camp with total abandon, leaving trails of broken tents, overturned supplies, and broken bodies. They had pushed vehicles and heavy steel cargo containers aside like they were toys.

  Skyler asked Karl to halt near a cargo container flipped on its side. The gruff man waited as Skyler shimmied his way onto the roof, or what had become the roof.

  From the top, he could see beyond the crowded camp.

  Four paths stretched out from the aura’s edge. Paths of devastation. The towers seemed to have moved off in tight formations, and in the distance Skyler could still see two of the groups working their way through Belém. One, lit in emerald green, moved north by northwest. The other ran northeast. The towers in that group shimmered with a milky purple light.

  Both demolished every structure they came in contact with, instead of just stalling as a tower pushed by human hands would do. Belém consisted largely of shanty hovels built from plywood and laminate, and these fell before the towers as if they’d been made from playing cards and toothpicks.

  The emerald group looked to be on a path that would take it through downtown, and Skyler wondered if the skyscrapers there would provide enough resistance to halt the alien objects’ progress.

  He turned toward the east. The remaining two groups were hidden by the rainforest. He saw their trails—swaths where no trees now stood. Yet even with such destruction in their wake, the forest had consumed them from view. The only hint was the glow they emitted, which lit the trees from beneath.

  One moved east, colored with a yellow so brilliant it looked like sunlight.

  The last went northeast. The scar it left through the forest left little doubt in his mind where it had gone. Even from here, he could see the cloud that perpetually clung to an area of the forest past the reservoir. The cloud now glowed red.

  “Karl,” Skyler said.

  The man looked up at him. “Yeah?”

  “Bring Tania and the others here instead. There’s something they need to see.”

  By the time Tania reached the container upon which Skyler stood, a ladder had been found and placed against the giant metal box. She took the steps slowly while Karl held the base of it.

  When she reached the top, Skyler offered her a hand and helped her off the ladder.

  He was filthy, bruised, and smelled of dirt and sweat.

  “Thanks,” she said, brushing dust from her hands.

  Karl joined them a moment later. Tania had urged him to seek out one of the few doctors in camp, but he’d just shaken his head. He looked like he had one foot in the grave already, his face bruised so. “I can’t decide which of you looks worse,” Tania said.

  “Skyler,” Karl said.

  “Karl,” Skyler said at the same time. “Where’s Zane? Tim?”

  “I left them in orbit,” she replied. “In case this was all some trap.”

  Skyler regarded her for a moment. “That was smart.”

  She doubted anything she’d done recently could be called smart. Brushing aside the compliment, she looked out across the camp. Colonists already worked to re-stake the tents, and toward the river she saw a group of twenty or so people all huddled together, their arms stretched in unison as they pushed a cargo container onto its side. The sight of teamwork gave her a sudden pang of hope, until she saw the body that lay beneath the metal structure. Man or woman she couldn’t tell; the body had been crushed and pressed halfway into the mud. Tania covered her mouth with one hand and forced herself not to turn away.

  At least, not until Skyler nudged her. He pointed north, and for the first time she set her attention beyond the camp’s perimeter.

  Trails of devastation marked the paths the aura towers followed. As she watched, one group moved through the slums of Belém, half-hidden by night and the dust thrown into the air as buildings collapsed in its wake. The towers there rippled with murky purple light.

  “They started moving the instant that RPG hit one,” Skyler said.

  “Four groups,” Karl noted. “Why four? And why didn’t they all go?”

  “And where will they stop?” Tania added. “At least they’ll be easy to track.”

  Skyler gestured east. “Those two groups crossed water already, so that answers one question. It would seem they don’t sink.”

  “Oh hell,” Karl said. “That means—”

  “When they hit the Pará, or even the ocean
, they may just keep going.”

  The words left both men silent. Tania looked at each path in turn, trying to form a hypothesis as to where the towers might be traveling, and why. Four groups, each at least forty towers in number, gone without any concern or care for what lay in their path. Was the movement some kind of programmed self-preservation? The fog and noise some kind of defense mechanism? One gets attacked and the rest instantly scatter to the four winds, in groups, on different paths?

  She wondered if they would stop somewhere, or just keep going, eventually circumnavigating the globe and returning right back here. That didn’t make much sense to her, but when it came to the Builders nothing seemed to make sense.

  “Well,” Karl said for everyone’s benefit. “Who wants to talk first?”

  Tania decided to take the opening. “I will. For what it’s worth, four days ago we sent an aircraft down to try to secure the camp. Or at least help us figure out why we’d lost contact.”

  “What aircraft?”

  She told them of the plane, and the fighters aboard it. “They never made it here,” she whispered. For the moment she thought it best to leave out the price she’d paid for it, and for the air and water she’d acquired from Russell Blackfield.

  “Gabriel’s people must have spotted them, and set up an ambush,” Karl said.

  “Maybe,” Skyler said. “Maybe not. Tania, where did they land?”

  “On Water Road, about a kilometer from camp.”

  Skyler glanced in that direction, his eyes two narrow slits, his bloodied face grim and full of disapproval.

  “We had no other options,” Tania said, “and no information. After that failure, our only choice was to listen to Gabriel’s demands.”