The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  “Mark it,” Skyler said as he turned the craft to face land. He glanced at the cap level. “Zero-point-five percent. We need to find a place to charge up; this hovering will burn through that in ten minutes. Somewhere other than Lagoa.”

  The screens in front of Vanessa were configured with maps and the associated tools to manipulate them. She’d become pretty adept at working those views since the aircraft had come into their possession.

  Lagoa had been Skyler’s first destination when they’d reached the island. The small town was only a short distance from their estimated place of landfall.

  From the air, though, it appeared to be dead. Not a single light graced a window or beacon tower there. He had little hope a mini-thor existed in the glorified village, but with dusk rapidly approaching he’d decided to look for the towers’ path first. Lights would be easier to spot after dark, anyway.

  “Ponta Delgada is the largest nearby,” Vanessa said. She tapped a location to the west, just a few kilometers down the beach. Her fingers danced as she zoomed and panned the map. “We could fly along the tower path, to the north side of the island. Ribeira Grande is there. Not as large, but larger than Lagoa.”

  Skyler could see the first city she mentioned out his window. Or rather, the dark silhouette of it against a rapidly dimming sky. “I don’t see any lights in Ponta Delgada.” He didn’t see any purple glow or mysterious clouds, either. The others had probably noticed this, too, and he knew they’d be thinking the same thing he was: The journey might be far from over.

  He felt Vanessa staring at him, waiting for his decision. “North,” he said after a few seconds.

  When the aircraft crested the island’s spine, his heart sank.

  The island was utterly, completely dark.

  And the tower group’s path carved a perfect line through forest and city alike, straight to the north shore until it disappeared over a cliff edge beside the ocean.

  “Our trip is just beginning,” Skyler muttered.

  A scratching sound woke him.

  He turned and propped himself on an elbow. The others still slept, and only the barest hint of light filtered in through the window on the cabin door on La Gaza Ladra’s starboard side.

  His back ached from sleeping on the floor, despite the cushion of a sleeping bag beneath him. Pablo snored softly from his place on the floor at the back of the cabin, while Ana and Vanessa were two unmoving forms in the reclined passenger chairs.

  The scratching noise again. Like dead tree branches scraping against a window on a breezy night. It seemed to be coming from the same door where morning light crept in through the porthole window. He staggered to his feet, stifling a yawn and grinding a fist into the small of his back to chase away the pain there.

  His view out the small round window was southerly, over the same rise they’d flown across the night before. From this low angle, the tower group’s path was easy to spot through the island’s dense foliage. Easier still where it reached the edge of the city, carving an avenue-wide line straight through houses and buildings alike.

  He’d landed on the rooftop pad at a luxury resort in the hope such a high-end place would have paid the extra cost for a mini-thor, or a stake in one at least. But the place was dead, just like the rest of the island, apparently. He’d kept his fears to himself, that they were stuck here, but Skyler had no doubt that by breakfast time this morning one of the others would voice the concern.

  A face appeared outside the window.

  Skyler fell back in surprise, stumbled, and landed on his back.

  The gaunt face in the round window snarled and Skyler saw thin, ragged fingers clawing at the glass, leaving dirty smears behind. The subhuman had wild beady eyes and rotten teeth. Its brown hair hung in matted clumps around a beard full of unidentifiable bits of dirt and food.

  Vanessa stepped between him and the door. In the back of the cabin, Pablo stirred and got to his feet. Ana slept.

  “Stay back,” Vanessa said, her hand on the cabin door’s rotating handle. She gripped it and coiled herself.

  “Wait,” Skyler said. “There might be more.”

  “Get your gun, then.”

  Pablo stepped between them, looking over Vanessa’s shoulder at the anguished face outside the window. He had a pistol in his hand and nodded to the woman. “Open it. Cover your ears,” he said, his voice a dry rasp from sleep.

  Vanessa dug in her feet. “On three. One. Two.” She pulled the handle on the third beat until it was upright and threw her shoulder into the loosened door.

  Skyler watched through Pablo’s legs as the subhuman fell when the door struck it, a motion mirroring Skyler’s own stumble. The animal tried to remain upright by running backward in a kind of controlled fall. Pablo gave Vanessa a half second to crouch and cover her ears before he squeezed off two shots into the creature’s chest. Little eruptions of blood sprang from each side of the sternum, and then the sub toppled over the edge of the roof, gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  The tiny cabin rang in a high-pitched scream. Skyler hadn’t thought to cup his own ears. “Close the door!” he shouted, his own voice sounding a kilometer away.

  Vanessa reached for the handle, then paused. She said something to Pablo and he replied, but Skyler couldn’t hear them. It was like listening to a conversation in an adjacent room through the wall.

  The woman stepped out onto the landing pad and stood very still.

  Pablo moved to the open doorway and waited, frozen in place.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Skyler asked.

  The tall man turned and pressed a finger to his lips. Skyler climbed to his feet. He glanced back at Ana, half-expecting to find her upright with her hands clasped to stinging ears. The girl had turned over and was still sleeping like a babe.

  The bright hum in Skyler’s head began to fade. He listened at the door with Pablo while Vanessa stepped farther from the craft. “What is it?” Skyler asked, careful to keep his voice low. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “That’s just it,” she replied. “Nothing. If the gunshots riled others, they sure are quiet about it. And this one is the first we’ve seen.”

  “Weird,” Pablo said.

  “The population collapsed, maybe,” Vanessa said. “It’s been almost seven years.”

  “We shouldn’t let our guard down, in any case,” Skyler said. The tranquil, dark island had a way of lulling the senses. Until Skyler had seen that twisted face on the other side of the glass, he’d all but forgotten about subhumans.

  I’m getting rusty, he thought.

  Ana stretched and woke only when there was the smell of food. Preservall bacon and imitation eggs, scrambled over a camp stove on the rooftop by Pablo. Vanessa handled coffee while Skyler stood on top of La Gaza Ladra’s fuselage and scanned the city around them with binoculars.

  “Good morning,” Ana said from below him.

  He smiled and waved to her.

  “See anything interesting?” she asked a minute later, a steaming mug in her hand.

  “I do. Can you look up an address on the terminal for me?”

  He rattled off the information as he read it from the side of a long-abandoned utility truck. A logo on the door indicated the local municipal power company, and an address was stenciled below it.

  While she searched for the place, he studied the path of the tower group. A perfect line of collapsed buildings and crushed automobiles ran straight through the beach town. He followed it to the water, adjusting his zoom along the way.

  The path vanished at the edge of a cliff, at a point where it jutted out from the rest of the shore. In the bright morning, Skyler had to squint as dazzling flashes reflected off the dark blue water. At the base of the cliff, a narrow beach made entirely of rock took the brunt of the ocean’s wrath.

  There were shapes on the beach, lying in the surf or draped across the larger rocks. Piles of trash, or maybe sea lions? Skyler zoomed farther and focused.

  His gut clenched. “G
uys,” he said, “I found our missing subhumans.”

  Bodies littered that patch of gravel. Drowned and bloated things once, the subhumans were now so many piles of rancid meat, not even fit for seagulls to pick at. Skyler figured they had tried to congregate around the towers as the group crossed the island, or followed in their wake, blind to the cliff’s edge and the vast ocean the towers plowed into. The beings usually had a good sense for self-preservation—Skyler had even seen them swim on a few occasions—but these must have been so enthralled by the activated towers that they simply fell to the rocks below like lemmings, or perhaps the tide was in and they drowned. Hours or days later they washed up onshore by the dozens. In a weird way Skyler admired the efficiency with which the towers had killed the beings.

  The address he’d spied turned out to be an office complex, full of dead terminals, decaying bodies, and more mold than he’d ever seen. The windows had been left open to the humid air for six years, and lizards scattered when he stepped inside. Nothing useful would be found there, and more to the point there was no power.

  A day passed, then a week, without any more encounters with subhumans. No one spoke of it aloud, but Skyler could see the fear on all their faces of being stuck here. Or rather the acceptance of that possibility. The fear, he thought, might well be his alone. Pablo certainly wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life on a quiet island. Vanessa probably wouldn’t, either. Ana, Skyler thought, would just take whatever cards were dealt her, and in her youth probably would think it would be a good life. He knew she was too restless to be happy somewhere like this, though.

  Each morning Skyler woke two hours before sunrise and set out to search the surrounding neighborhood for a building with power. Three times he found lights, only to discover the source to be isolated, cap-powered installations. Security floods, a child’s night-light, that sort of thing.

  Pablo found a few solar panels on a nearby roof and managed to rig them up to charge La Gaza Ladra. A well-intentioned project he’d undertaken while everyone else had been out searching, and Skyler took care to praise the effort before letting the man know it would take roughly four years to get a full charge from the source. Still, he didn’t disconnect them. If they found nothing else, at least they might get enough of a charge in a few months to be able to fly to one of the other islands in the Azores chain.

  One day Vanessa returned from scouting with a slate computer in hand. “Still has a charge,” she said as she handed it to Skyler.

  “We can’t siphon it into the Magpie,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick. Read it.”

  Intrigued, Skyler glanced at the screen. The island’s daily newspaper was on the display. The article in the center of the page caught his eye. “Council upholds policy against thorium reactors,” read the headline. His heart sank. He scanned the paragraphs below. Talk of mitigating risk to the island’s fragile ecosystem. Sensational and unfounded rants against the possibility of nuclear meltdown.

  “We’re not going to find any power here, are we?” Vanessa asked.

  He sighed, and against his better judgment tapped the option to continue reading. The reporter listed quotes from various islanders about their mistrust of nuclear energy. A holdover, he knew, from fears that began with the earliest forms of the technology, when reactors would fail every few decades, usually due to some act of nature. Once a particularly disgruntled French worker had sabotaged the planet deliberately, leaving an uninhabitable zone in Western Europe that made earlier accidents look like child’s play.

  “We’re going to be here awhile,” Vanessa said. “Aren’t we?”

  Frustration boiled within Skyler. Granted, that old tech was dangerous and irresponsible. But the backlash, if the history books had it right, was beyond ridiculous. A century and a half of willful ignorance toward the best energy source imaginable. The West shot itself in the foot, allowing China to pioneer pebble-bed technology first, then thorium. And finally miniature thorium reactors that could run unsupervised for a thousand years, and power a few modern skyscrapers. While Europe and America struggled to attach a solar panel to every roof and burned every last drop of oil, China and the developing world suddenly had no energy problem to speak of. Then came ultracapacitors, and the ability to store all that power.

  By the time the Darwin Elevator touched down, Europe was still in catch-up mode. America was a distant memory. “North Mexico,” Skyler’s schoolteacher had jokingly called the former superpower. At least Australia hadn’t been so closed-minded.

  Even here in the Azores, just six short years ago, the local population still mistrusted the technology. A good thing Belém hadn’t been so stubborn, he thought as he skimmed the rest of the article. And they had the bloody Amazon to protect. All this place has is a few scraggly hills and a dormant volcano.

  The thought of the volcano brought an image to his mind of the island as viewed from satellite. Gears turned in his head, squeaky things in need of lubrication. He grinned. “Ana?”

  She looked up from the dismantled weapon she’d been cleaning.

  “Can you pull up the nav maps again?”

  Ana frowned. “What are we looking for? We’ve studied the whole island.”

  “Not the island,” Skyler said. “The ocean. We’re looking for giant white propellers. Or …” He racked his mind to recall the methods used to harness such energies. “Long tubes floating in the surf. Wind and wave power collectors.”

  By noon he set out with Ana to the target location, all the way across the island on the western shore. A forty-kilometer hike, one way.

  Wave-power generators had been easy to spot, once they knew to look. Long, dark disjointed lines a kilometer offshore. Tracing a simple, straight path to shore revealed the collection station that transmitted the energy out to the rest of the island.

  At first they’d all planned to go, until Skyler changed his mind. “This plane is our ticket off this island. Leaving her alone makes me nervous.”

  They’d seen no other immunes, but the possibility remained that someone might be out there, watching them, waiting for a chance to escape.

  “Let’s just take the plane over there,” Pablo suggested.

  “Can’t do it,” Skyler said with a frown. “We’ve got enough juice to move her once, if we’re lucky. I’d rather save that for when we’re sure.”

  Skyler offered to stay, but the group collectively decided he was the best person to scout the site. This was no time to fool around, and since the handhelds only had a six- or seven-klick range, there’d be no consultation with the others.

  Naturally, Ana came along.

  She’d been unusually silent after seeing the base of that cliff through his binoculars. She’d seen dead bodies before, they all had, but something about the mass suicide chilled her. Chilled all of them. Maybe it was the manner of death, or the apparent way the towers seemed to power through the crowd with callous indifference. It was easy, Skyler thought, to imagine the subhumans as somehow on the Builders’ side, their creations, after what had happened in the rainforest near the Belém Elevator. But this threw that notion back into the fog of confusion that surrounded everything related to the aliens.

  Skyler fought to keep the image out of his mind, but like a catchy, horrible song, those corpses seemed to reappear every time he tried to forget them.

  “Hey, look,” Ana said. She’d stopped in the street. They weren’t even at the edge of town yet, still a full day’s hike ahead of them.

  From the excitement in her voice, he expected to turn and see a light on somewhere. A power source. All he saw, though, was the dark windows of abandoned stores. Ana moved closer to one window, picked up a chunk of broken asphalt from the road, and threw it into the glass pane.

  The sound of it shattering echoed along the narrow street.

  “What are you—” Skyler started. Then, “Oh …”

  She’d found a bicycle shop. Touristy things, many with signs hanging from their handl
ebars indicating daily rental prices. She crawled inside and, after a minute or so, came out the front door with a rugged mountain bike. She laid it against the outside wall and went back in. A moment later, she emerged with a second bike, larger than the first. A man’s bike. Expensive looking with huge spring shocks and knobby black tires.

  Skyler remained still, listening for any sounds of subhuman presence after the cacophony of breaking glass. He heard nothing, though. After a week he didn’t really expect to. It was as if that one pathetic sub scratching at the door of the ship was the poor, lone survivor. When Skyler looked down the empty street he found it easy to imagine that he and his crew were the last souls on the planet.

  Ana went inside a third time, and when she came out she carried a kit of some kind as well as a tire pump. She tore it open and produced a small white tube, discarding the rest. Kneeling by the bikes, she began to oil their chains.

  They rode in silence. The bikes made the trip much easier, but Skyler insisted they keep a slow pace in case they needed to ditch the transportation in a hurry. Once out of the city, though, that fear diminished. They cruised along an ocean-front road, swerving around derelict cars and the occasional skeleton. Seagulls drifted overhead, calling to one another as they flew in lazy arcs. A perfect, post-apocalyptic day in paradise.

  After an hour riding on the bumpy road, Ana called for a break. A small strip of sand on their right marked a break in the otherwise rocky shoreline, and it had caught her attention.

  They left their bikes on the roadside and she led the way down steep, weed-choked steps to the beach. Without a word she stripped and trod carefully out into the surf, diving under the first wave that threatened to drench her. When she came up she wrung the water from her hair and motioned for Skyler to join her.