Genesis

by Paul Antony Jones

  Emily took one last deep breath and forced herself away from the door, turning back toward her own bedroom just as Rhiannon reappeared in the doorway.

  “Have you checked the rest of the apartment?” she asked, her voice high pitched and, Emily noted, both of her hands shaking.

  “No, not yet. Come on, let’s look together.”

  Their second-floor apartment was small, just two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. There really was nowhere for her child to hide, even if he had managed to somehow climb over or through the bars of his crib. The front door was still locked and bolted from the inside and all windows were secure . . . except for her bedroom window, Emily suddenly realized.

  “Oh no! No, no, no,” she cried and rushed back to her room, Rhiannon on her heels.

  The sill of the window reached Emily’s waist, a difficult but not impossible height for a determined child to maybe pull himself up to and then topple out of. Emily tried to steel herself for the worst as she leaned over the window ledge, gulping in cold air, and looked down: two stories below a concrete path ran along the side of the apartment building; beyond that was a single-lane access road, and beyond that a red-grass verge. Emily released the breath she had been holding. There was no sign of Adam, no pool of drying blood either. He had not gone through the window, which meant he had to be in the apartment somewhere . . . or someone had come in and taken him. But there was no possibility that could have happened. Even if somehow an intruder had managed to get inside without waking Emily or Rhiannon, there was just no way in hell they could have gotten past Thor. He had been asleep in the space between her bed and Adam’s cot. He would have torn them to shreds before Emily could have even grabbed her gun to finish the job.

  As inconceivable as Emily thought it to be, there seemed to be only one totally illogical yet ultimately realistic answer: the dream, her dream, was not a dream. Something had taken her child—something not human.

  Emily’s hand slowly rose to cover her mouth as the first sob erupted from her. Her heart thumped uncontrollably and erratically against her breast, and her legs would no longer consent to hold her up. Her head seemed to be floating away from her body as she felt herself topple backward into the bedroom wall and slide slowly down until she hit the floor.

  By the time Rhiannon noticed and rushed to her side, Emily was an unconscious heap on the floor.

  Emily sat slumped on the edge of her bed, staring at Adam’s empty crib.

  “Ms. Baxter . . . Emily. I need your help.” The male voice was followed by a couple of finger snaps that dragged Emily’s attention to the man standing over her. It wasn’t clear to Emily if the camp provost had shown up minutes or hours after Rhiannon had summoned him via her personal radio. Not that it mattered, anyway; she knew there was nothing he could do to help.

  Adam was gone.

  Eric Fisher was a man about as vanilla as anyone could describe: medium height, medium build, medium looks, but he more than made up for his middle-of-the-roadness with a dedication to his job that was unsurpassed by any other member of the survivors’ encampment. Emily had always thought of him as just a little too serious, just a little too much in the moment for her liking, but she suspected this was his way of dealing with the events that had led all of them to this base on the coast of what had once been California. If she were assessing the man for one of her news articles, then she would have privately classified him as being someone who threw himself at his work as a distraction from the terrible history that lay in all of their pasts.

  Fisher arrived a few months earlier on the USS Michigan, where he had acted as the submarine’s master-at-arms. A former Chicago cop, he had joined the navy not long after the 2001 World Trade Center attack. Now he officiated over the Point Loma survivors, enforcing the common laws they had set. Everyone simply called him “Sheriff.” The designation fit him well.

  “Emily? Emily . . . can you look at me?” His voice was calm and unemotional. Flat.

  Emily raised her eyes from her knees and looked up into Fisher’s face, a professional smile creasing his lips. “That’s it. That’s good.” He reached out and took her hand in his own, squeezed it gently.

  Behind Fisher, Emily could see several other men and women who she recognized vaguely as they passed by her bedroom door. Fisher’s deputies. They milled around her apartment, moving back and forth through the rooms, talking on their walkie-talkies.

  Rhiannon stood in the doorway, still in her pajamas, talking to one of the female deputies who was busy scribbling into a notebook. The girl had obviously been crying, her eyes puffy and red. Emily wanted to comfort her, but her limbs refused to move her from the bed. She felt as though she were a guest in her own body.

  No, she would just sit here for a second or so and wait until she woke up from this obvious nightmare.

  “Emily, I need you to tell me what happened. Can you do that for me?”

  She looked up again and somehow managed to speak. “They took him,” she said.

  “Who? Who took Adam, Emily?”

  “The Caretakers. They came here and they took him.”

  Despite the haze of loss that occupied the space where her mind used to be, Emily could still recognize the look of incredulity as it crossed Fisher’s face. It was there for a second before being replaced once again by his professional game face.

  “You mean the aliens you talked about, right? They came and they abducted Adam. Is that right, Emily?”

  She nodded.

  “But how did they get inside the apartment, Emily? The doors are all locked and there’s no sign of forced entry. My people have checked everywhere.”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said, her voice a low whisper, conspiratorial. “I don’t know how they did it, but I saw them take him. They made sure I saw them take him.”

  “But if you saw them taking Adam, why didn’t you try and stop them? You have a gun, don’t you?”

  “I saw it happening in a dream,” she said, and even as she spoke the words she knew they were the wrong ones to say, that this man would simply not understand. But that was okay. It did not matter what they thought. She knew the truth.

  Fisher stood up. “A dream? You were asleep when this happened?”

  Emily nodded again.

  Fisher exhaled a long sigh. “Okay, Emily. Well, my people are talking with Rhiannon, and I’ve got teams sweeping the compound. So, if he’s here then we’ll find him, okay?”

  “You won’t find him,” Emily said. “I know you won’t.”

  Fisher regarded Emily for a few moments, his expression noncommittal.

  “We’ll see,” he said eventually, and walked out of the room.

  Two men stepped into view as Fisher arrived at the doorway. Fisher said something to them Emily could not hear and they both nodded. One, a large blond man with a permanent scowl, stepped inside her room and leaned against the wall; the other positioned himself outside the room.

  Before Fisher could leave, Emily saw the unmistakable profile of Sylvia Valentine step into view. She took him by the elbow and he turned to talk to her. Their exchange of words was too low for Emily to hear what was being discussed, but it was obvious from Valentine’s occasional glance in her direction that Fisher was talking about her, probably relaying the conversation they had just had. Valentine nodded every few seconds, and when Fisher was done, she laid a hand on his shoulder and he turned and walked away.

  Valentine lingered in the doorway of Emily’s bedroom for a few moments, looking at her with those cold, emotionless eyes. Emily held her gaze with equal ferocity. A few seconds passed, then Valentine leaned in close and whispered something to the blond man standing in her room before she turned and headed toward the apartment’s exit, but not before Emily saw a sly smile cross the woman’s lips.

  The camp doctor showed up about ten minutes later. Wallace Hubbard was a big man. He sported a full beard, completely gray, and had always reminded Emily of the captain of the ill-fated Titanic.

&nbs
p; “Here, I want you to take these,” he said, pressing two pills into Emily’s right hand and a glass of water into the other.

  Obediently she swallowed both pills in one gulp.

  “Sedatives, they’ll help you sleep.” He rattled a brown prescription bottle. “Take another round this evening to get you through the night. They’re long past their expiration date, but they should still work okay. If you don’t need them, don’t take them. Medical resources are finite these days. I’m going to come back later and check on you, but right now I want you to get some rest.”

  “I don’t need to sleep,” Emily said. “I need to get out of here and help them look for my son.” Her legs felt leaden, but she tried to stand anyway.

  Hubbard pressed her gently back down onto the bed. “Rhiannon, can you come here, please?” he called over his shoulder. “Everyone else, please leave the bedroom.” The blond man who had been standing around the room—suspiciously like he was making sure she stayed where she was supposed to, rather than watching over her, Emily’s fogged mind suggested—grudgingly left as Rhiannon stepped into the bedroom.

  “Close the door, please,” Hubbard told Rhiannon as the blond man joined the other guard in the corridor, both glowering back into the room.

  Hubbard pulled back the sheets to the bed and lifted Emily’s legs under them and gently pushed her back until her head touched the pillow, pulling the sheets up to her chin as though he were tucking a child into bed.

  “Rhiannon,” he said, “I want you to stay here with Emily. If you need anything, you can contact me via the emergency channel on the radio. Can you do that?”

  Emily saw Rhiannon nod, her mind already slowing as the pills kicked in, forcing her toward sleep.

  “Make sure she rests, okay?” The doctor smiled once at her and then left, closing the door behind him.

  The last thing Emily saw before a wave of sleep pulled her under was Rhiannon’s worried face watching her from beside the bed.

  Confusion.

  That was the only feeling Emily’s mind could discriminate from the mass of sensory input playing through her head. It felt as though a billion different thoughts were elbowing each other to be heard, an infinite number of synapses firing within her mind at once, pummeling her, clamoring over each other for attention that she simply was not wired to provide. Images flashed across the screen of her mind, faster than she could process them, an impossible blur of superimposed pictures one on top of the other.

  This must be what it feels like to experience time all at once, she thought, not even sure she understood what the thought meant.

  Every sensation possible played through her body at the same time: vertigo, love, indifference, repulsion, desire, death, fear, and some that she simply did not recognize, alien yet familiar in their strangeness. The feelings went on and on and on, burning through her body. Occasionally an image possessed enough power that it lingered long enough for her mind to register it: a strange, alien landscape, twin suns burning red in a purple sky; clouds, yellow and sulfurous floating below her; what could only be cities, but not the work of human hands; a blue world of mostly water seen from space, an archipelago of tiny islands cutting across it like a crescent moon. Millions of images flashed in front of her eyes every second, each one just a glimpse, a memory of some unknown mind, forgotten the instant they had been seen in the constant rush of new information, more information, information flooding through her as though she were at the very center of all existence.

  A thread appeared; it began as a tiny blue dot, glowing within the mass of searing red confusion, then expanded and rose up through the chaos like a snake, elongating and moving, extending outward, a lifeline of coherence within chaos. The line began to expand outward and she focused on it, everything else fading to a blur around it.

  Emily urged herself toward it, pushing through memories that were not hers, through times that could have been before or to come, the only sense of normalcy the steady pulse of the blue line.

  She reached out with a hand, a paw, a claw, a twig, a cloud of light, for the oh, so beautiful blue line, inching over the infinite space that separated her from it . . . and touched it.

  Abruptly, the cascade of metaexperience ceased, replaced by an infinitely loud silence. Pure white stretched outward all around her as a serenity unlike anything she had ever experienced descended over her. A sense of clarity and . . . love, unadulterated and redolent, as though she had somehow tapped into the very source of that purest of emotions. As overwhelming as the flood of experience had been for her, this single pure emotion destroyed her completely, disassembled her atom by atom, before reassembling her into a new form.

  And when her reconstruction was finished she was left with a single thought that filled her mind, woven throughout her essence with that single blue thread: Mommy.

  Emily sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

  Her muscles ached as though they had all been used at once, her skin was covered in a cold sheen of sweat, and she felt a spreading warm wetness between her legs. I wet the bed? She tried to pull back the covers, but her arms ached so badly it took several attempts to actually achieve that simple task, and when she tried to raise her head it felt like gravity had quadrupled. When she was finally upright she could see that she had indeed wet the bed; her bladder had simply let go. Thoughts still burned in her mind, but they were fading now, and the confusion she felt was beginning to subside as her neural processes returned to her control.

  She looked around the room with rheumy eyes.

  It was dark, the window blinds closed, but a thin line of sunlight peeked in through the gaps around the edges, illuminating the room enough that she could make out shapes of furniture.

  She needed help.

  “Rhiannon,” Emily croaked, through lips dry and cracked. Nothing. “Rhiannon?” She managed to swivel her head around the room, her eyes grown accustomed to the gloom now, and she could see that Rhiannon was not there.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting as her faculties gradually returned to her. A slow-burning headache throbbed in her forehead, tributaries of pain arcing up over her skull to the back of her neck. But through the pain, like the long, slow beat of an oncoming locomotive, Emily felt something . . . something new within the miasma of confusion. Something . . . odd. Something . . . ? She could not quite identify the feeling, but it felt like . . . a tug. Like the unseen force when two magnets of opposite polarity were placed close together. It was small but as distinct as a laser beam. It pulled at her, pinging across her consciousness like a homing beacon.

  In the darkness of her bedroom, Adam’s empty cot just feet away, its bars casting shadows across the vacant interior, Emily examined what she was experiencing. That tiny dot of attraction, like a voice she almost recognized calling her name over a great, empty distance. When she allowed her mind to focus on that tiny pulse, she felt a thrill, like a friendly face recognized in a sea of strangers, of a connection to something meaningful. To something that was precious.

  Someone was calling to her, she knew it. Summoning her.

  Emily felt something open in her mind, a switch flip. And in that moment, as the connection was fully established, she understood: Adam was alive! She knew it with every cell within her body. Her child was alive, and he was calling her to him.

  Adrenaline rushed through her body, obliterating the pain, washing away the weariness from her limbs, replacing it with an energy the likes of which she had never felt before. She had to get up. Had to shake off this malaise and tell someone, anyone, what she had seen, what she knew was the truth.

  “Rhiannon!” she called again, this time with more force as her voice returned to her.

  The door opened and Rhiannon appeared, freezing in the doorway, a look of disgust and confusion jostling for position with her face.

  Emily ignored the fact that she looked like shit, and, if she smelled half as bad as she thought she did, she couldn’t blame the kid for wrinkling her nose up at he
r.

  “Help me up,” she said.

  Rhiannon collected herself and was at Emily’s bedside in three steps, and, bless her, only glanced once at the stained bedsheets before offering Emily her hands and easing her up onto unsteady legs.

  “I need to get cleaned up,” Emily told her. “Can you help me?”

  “Lean on me,” said Rhiannon.

  Emily swung an arm around Rhiannon’s shoulder, both women almost toppling over as Emily’s legs, still weak from the lingering effects of the medication, staggered for a moment before Rhiannon caught her balance.

  “Just get me to the bathroom,” Emily said.

  Dutifully, Rhiannon supported Emily out of the room and across the corridor to the bathroom.

  The two guards Fisher had posted to her apartment were sitting in Emily’s living room, the fat one asleep on the couch, the blond one sitting in Mac’s favorite armchair, his feet up on the coffee table, reading an old magazine. At the sight of Emily and Rhiannon staggering out of the bedroom, the blond tapped his sleeping partner hard on the head with the magazine. They watched Emily and Rhiannon silently as they limped across to the bathroom. Neither offered to help.

  Thor had been asleep in the corridor outside Emily’s room. He raised himself to a sitting position and wagged his tail fiercely.

  “They haven’t left. They told me Fisher told them to stay here for our protection,” said Rhiannon, shooting the two men an unhappy look. “But all they’ve done is sit on their asses and eat all of our day’s rations.”

  The two men disturbed Emily. The fat one looked stupid and bored, but there was something about the blond one that set her senses tingling. Something about the way he watched them, particularly Rhiannon, a half smile, cruel, not kind at all, parting one side of his lips. And then there was the way he had interacted with Valentine. They were obviously on close terms, and Emily could not see why she would bother with someone obviously so far down the food chain.