“It’s all going to be okay,” she told Rhiannon as rain dripped off the bridge of her nose. And strangely, she believed her words to be true.
The four lanes of the freeway—two heading east and two west—stretched out ahead of the companions for about two hundred meters before the rain, low clouds, and mist swallowed it. They had decided to walk along the eastbound lanes, near the center median. “If we hit any trouble, we can at least get the guardrails between us and it,” Emily said. She did not need to elaborate on what the “it” might be. Both women knew the world held unknown terrors.
Since leaving the shelter earlier that morning, the only other building they had seen was the skeleton of a burned-out gas station, its blackened remains sticking out of the ground like a picked-clean carcass.
They had walked for kilometer after kilometer, and more than once, her feet aching from the constant step after step, Emily had wished for the trusty bicycle she had started her journey with.
For the last hour or so Emily had felt the incline of the road rising slightly in the back of her calf muscles. The drizzle had gradually grown heavier and now fell in a constant sheet of light, almost misty rain, nothing like the downpour they had experienced last night, thank God, but still dishearteningly uncomfortable enough to dampen the companions’ spirits, all while limiting their visibility to under thirty meters.
Up until the world ended, the I-40 had been a major artery of the US supply chain, filled with trucks moving goods from east to west and back again. You could travel from California on the West Coast to North Carolina and never leave it. Tens of thousands of vehicles a day passed along the freeway, the third longest in the United States. And that fact was what made it seem so strangely deserted. Of the few vehicles they had seen, most had been mere rust-covered carcasses, fossils of another time. And there had been so few of them, at least along the stretch of clear road that they had been travelling.
Maybe that was why the road was so clear, Emily thought, putting one foot in front of the other. Perhaps the majority of vehicles had made it to a city or to their homes, took one of the numerous spurs off to who knew where. Maybe.
“Can I ask you a question?” Rhiannon said a little while later.
“Shoot!”
“Why didn’t the Caretakers just come and explain things to us? You know, rather than just destroy everything.”
The question caught Emily off guard. Rhiannon had been quiet, contemplative even, for most of the journey since leaving their sanctuary that morning. Their conversations had been limited to whether she wanted to stop for water or a bathroom break. Emily was sure the kid was wading through the murk of what had happened over the past few days, but she was a different girl than the one she had found living with her brother and father so many years ago now. She was tougher, harder. If Rhiannon wanted help wrestling with the demons Emily was under no illusion the girl had, she would ask Emily for her help when she was good and ready.
“That’s a good question,” Emily said, buying herself some time to think about it.
The Caretakers. Emily had often thought about her experience with the aliens that had wrecked the world, trying to reason out just what their motivations were. They had told her that they were constructs of an even older race, tasked with ensuring that life, rare though it might be, thrived wherever they found it. When they did find it, they were the judge, jury, and executioner of any species that did not meet their level of worthiness. Humans, the Caretaker that had taken on the role of Jacob had explained to her, had all but guaranteed that life on Earth was close to being annihilated. They had stepped in and ensured, in the most brutal manner imaginable, that the planet would get a second chance.
“I guess they thought that if we were too dumb to not be able to see what was right in front of our eyes, then we probably weren’t going to take their word for it either?” she said finally.
Rhiannon cocked her head inquisitively. “What do you mean?”
“We had years, decades and decades, to see what we were doing to the planet,” Emily said, almost absentmindedly, “and I think that we had the chance to think, really think, about every barrel of oil we used, every doctor who overprescribed an antibiotic, every species we drove into extinction so we could make a profit, and every weak-kneed politician in the pocket of some big business more than happy to tell us what we wanted to hear rather than what we needed to hear, but we didn’t. If we had really thought about it, we would have realized that all we were doing was driving another nail into our collective coffin. I think that if it had just been us humans that were threatened with extinction, then maybe the Caretakers would have just moved right along, but it wasn’t, was it? We had become a threat to the entirety of life on this planet.” Emily paused for a moment, her mind the clearest it had ever been. “So we did this to ourselves; well, you didn’t, but my generation and everyone who came before us. We could have done . . . something to change it . . . something to make a difference. If we’d just had a couple more generations . . .”
Emily was astonished at the vehemence she heard in her own voice; a vein of bitterness ran through her that she had been totally unaware of, a begrudging acceptance of the logic that had been presented to her as reason by the Caretakers, and she was mad at them and the rest of humanity because they were right, Goddamn them, they were right in their justification. But that had not given the Caretakers the right to do what they did, not by a long shot. It had been the humans’ problem to solve, and Emily was sure, deep down, that they could have succeeded. She had had faith in humanity; she just had not seen it back when she could have done something about it.
Rhiannon thought about what Emily had said for thirty paces. “But doesn’t it seem, I don’t know, like, really, really wasteful? I mean, why would the Caretakers want to change all life?”
“It never made any sense to me,” said Emily, “but then they’re not people. On my best day I had problems understanding the human race, so I’m not sure that I’d have much of a chance trying to comprehend the thought process of an alien race.”
It was another full minute before Rhiannon spoke again. “You said they told you they’ve been doing this for, like, forever, right? So that means there are more aliens out there. More species like us, or kinda like us. If this was a movie, we’d all get together and kick their asses.”
“If this was a movie,” said Emily, with a smile, “we would have won already.”
Rhiannon laughed too. Not a bitter laugh but an honest chuckle at the thought.
“But what they’re saying, though, is that sometimes it’s okay to take life if it means more life will be saved, right?”
Emily suddenly realized what the discussion was really about. Rhiannon was rationalizing her own trauma. She was trying to grasp any meaning that might provide a life preserver for her innocence, to justify what she had had to do to the guard to get Emily out of that cell. And who was she to deny that rationale to her?
“Yes,” said Emily, smiling at her companion, “I think that’s exactly what they meant.”
“What is that?” Rhiannon said, stopping suddenly and pointing off to the right side of the road.
The travelers were approaching a low concrete bridge over a wide but shallow arroyo that ran perpendicular to the freeway. The rain had not stopped its constant dreary drizzle, and a steady stream of brown water, just a few inches deep, Emily estimated, ran through the wash beneath the bridge, broken apart by four-meter-high concrete piers that acted as both support and breakwater. The space between the piers was clogged with debris and mud, leaving only a half meter or so gap at the top. The runoff had created a pool that was a meter or so deep already.
Emily stopped, shrugging her backpack into a more comfortable position while she tried to see what Rhiannon was pointing at through the strained light. She followed the stream from the bridge uphill toward the south. A few kilometers away, she saw the outline of a mountain; the range’s upper half was gradually being devoured by bla
ck-and-gray clouds, and the occasional flash of lightning showed it was in the grip of yet another powerful storm.
“It’s pretty far away,” Emily said after a few seconds.
The storm was centered directly over the range. The slope of the mountains looked like it was taking a hammering, barely visible behind diaphanous sheets of rain. There wasn’t much of a breeze, and the clouds looked to barely be moving—plus, the storm was far enough away that Emily was confident it wouldn’t be heading in their direction anytime soon. A distant peal of thunder, barely audible, finally reached Emily’s ears.
“I don’t think it’s anything we need to worry about,” she concluded.
“No,” said Rhiannon, “not the storm . . . that!” She jerked her hand again in the direction of the base of the mountain, and this time Emily saw what she was pointing at: a brown wave twenty, maybe thirty, meters across was sweeping down the scar of the arroyo from the base of the mountains. The water had already overflowed the narrow walls of the gully and was flooding outward. A few scattered smaller trees lay in its path, and, as Emily watched, the wave reached the first of them and it disappeared.
“What the . . . ah crap. We need to move . . . now!”
“What is it?” Rhiannon insisted.
“Flash flood,” Emily said. It was heading down the arroyo toward them. And it was moving fast. “It’s only going to take a couple of minutes for it to get here.”
It was easily two hundred meters to the other side of the bridge, she judged.
“Come on,” Emily said, nudging Rhiannon’s elbow into motion. “We need to get across the bridge as fast as we can.” She jogged out onto the bridge, stealing glances at the oncoming wall of water every couple of seconds.
They had made it as far as the midpoint when the leading wave rounded a bend in the arroyo about a quarter of a kilometer upstream. The wave barreled into the corner, splashing ten meters up into the air, raining down mud, water, and pieces of debris, before the main body of the flood caught up and began surging toward them.
“Keep your eyes on the ground,” Emily yelled to Rhiannon, who kept slowing to look at the approaching water. Emily also slowed for a second to try and gauge the speed of the wall of water rushing at them. The corner had sucked away some of its power, but the river of ugly brown water continued to thunder their way. At that second, she saw another wave of muddy water thunder up over the bend and obliterate what was left of the corner, smashing away huge chunks of mud, sending them spinning into the air like meteors, and cutting a new channel directly through to the last section of the gully leading to the bridge.
Emily finally understood just how much danger they were in: that water was going to hit the bridge and have nowhere to go but up and over.
“Run! Run, faster!” Emily yelled as she took off after Rhiannon and Thor. The water was speeding toward them now, its thunderous roar filling the air, the surge powerful enough that it would sweep right over the bridge and take them with it, she was sure.
Rhiannon picked up her pace, sprinting at full speed for the opposite side of the bridge, easily outrunning Emily’s older, tired legs and heavier backpack. Emily saw the girl’s head flick to the right, and even over the growing din of the oncoming water she heard the girl yell out in fear, before she turned back, found an extra well of speed, and started to pull away from Emily even faster.
Thor had taken up a position in the space separating the two women, and Emily could tell he was holding back to stay close to her.
“Go, Thor, go to Rhiannon,” she yelled, but her voice was drowned out by the thundering approach of the flood. From the corner of her eye, Emily saw the swell of water barreling toward the bridge, clumps of mud and foam bubbling in the frothing wave. She focused on Rhiannon’s back, willing her onward as she forced her own feet to just keep moving, hoping that she did not trip.
Rhiannon had pulled ahead by a good ten meters when the wall of water finally reached them, smacking into the debris-clogged runoff below their feet. A five-meter-tall wave of mountain-cold water exploded over the side of the bridge with a hiss like sizzling bacon and rained down onto the road. Emily gasped as the dirty freezing water hit her, blinding her momentarily before she wiped it from her eyes. Within seconds, coffee-colored water tipped with white foam gushed between the gaps of the safety barrier running along the side of the bridge, spreading out over the road as though someone had turned on a thousand fire hoses at once.
Ahead of her she saw Rhiannon through a haze of water, her feet already splashing through several centimeters of water. But she was okay; there were only a few meters between the girl and the safety of the opposite side of the bridge.
The main body of water was still below the top of the bridge, Emily could hear it thundering against the concrete siding, hissing and spitting. The debris caught between the stanchions was acting as a dam, and the water, with no way to escape, was being forced up and over the edge of the bridge. All along the safety barrier was what looked like a stationary wave of raging, bubbling mud. The overflowing water was spreading tens of thousands of gallons out over the bridge every second. The road was completely awash, water already reaching to Emily’s ankles.
Thor stopped, standing several meters away from Rhiannon, the water up to his knees, looking back toward Emily. His tail wagged slowly; he wasn’t sure if this was a game or not. Emily began to yell at the dog to move, but her words were drowned out by an even louder roar. She thought she caught the sound of Rhiannon screaming “Look out!” and glanced to the right in time to see a boulder of clay as big as a VW Beetle pushed along by a second surge of raging water crash into the side of the bridge ahead of her. The boulder exploded on impact, smashing part of the bridge away with it and sending smaller pieces of concrete and metal and mud through the air to splash all around her like shrapnel. Now the right lane of the bridge looked as though a giant had taken a bite out of it. This new entrance and the force of the extra water was all that was needed for the flood to fully breach the top of the bridge, sending a wave of powerful sludge across the road. It bubbled up through the new hole like a geyser and reached Emily, hitting her just below the knees. She almost buckled but managed to steady herself as it washed against her. Before it had been like walking through a stream, but now Emily was wading across a fast-flowing river.
Thor! Where is Thor? Emily’s head pivoted left, then right. The malamute had been following behind Rhiannon until the wave hit, but he had vanished, carried away by the force of the flood. She scanned the frothing lake that had been a bridge just a minute earlier, looking for her dog.
There! There he is. Emily could see his body pinned against the beam of the metal guardrail separating the central median of the east- and westbound lanes. The guardrail was acting in much the same way as the debris below the bridge had, slowing the spread of the water and creating a wall of angry bubbling water. Thor was caught by it, and Emily could see his body buffeted and pummeled as he tried to keep his head above the rushing water, his paws frantically trying to find purchase where there was none.
Emily started to move in his direction just as another surge of water pushed over the edge of the bridge, hitting her calves. She stumbled and fell to one knee, a hand dropping into the frighteningly cold mountain water. The wave covered the distance between her and Thor in a second, and she watched in horror as the malamute disappeared beneath the muddy water.
No, no, no!
Emily pushed herself up onto unsteady feet, fighting the pull and push of the sucking water, and started toward where she had last seen Thor. She wasn’t going to make it to him in time. She could see him bobbing up and then back under the water. A dirty-looking gray scum of froth collecting on the surface made it even harder to spot him.
Rhiannon had made it to the opposite side and was standing on dry land, bent at the waist, panting from the exertion as the water rushed by her toes.
“Rhiannon!” Emily yelled as loud as she could, not sure she would be heard over the
cacophonous roar of the river as she continued to try to cover the distance between her and Thor.
The girl looked up, her face contorted with fear and exhaustion.
Emily stabbed her left hand to where Thor had disappeared under another wave, just as his head broke the surface again.
Rhiannon turned in the direction Emily pointed. The second her eyes found Thor and she realized what was happening, Rhiannon sprinted toward him along the edge of the river. When she was parallel to his position she splashed back into the water, using the guardrail as a support, hurdling with exaggerated steps through the twelve meters of water that separated her and the struggling malamute.
The water was just below Emily’s butt now as she zagged toward Rhiannon and the malamute, but the weight of her pack and her fight against the constant pressure of the water had sucked the strength right out of her.
Rhiannon reached Thor and grabbed his collar just as he was dragged under again. She pulled the dog to the surface and started edging her way back toward dry land, one hand grabbing at the submerged guardrail, the other towing Thor behind her like a dinghy. Seconds later they were both back on dry land and Thor was shaking himself dry while smothering Rhiannon with licks, before he sat then lay down on all fours, obviously exhausted. Rhiannon, her face pale with exhaustion, was starting to head back into the water as she saw Emily struggling toward her.
Genesis Page 13
