Genesis

by Paul Antony Jones

  Rhiannon noticed it now too. “What is that? What’s going on?”

  Something white and glowing brightly zipped through the shrinking gap between the floor and flew up toward the ceiling, then another and another followed it.

  “Emily, what are those?” Rhiannon screamed, but Emily ignored her and continued to drop the door the final few inches, her hands slick with sweat, slipping on the chains. Another blur of white incandescence zipped under the space—Come on, come on—until, finally, with a metallic clunk, the door met the concrete.

  The crack of a pistol being fired deafened Emily for a second. Instinctively she ducked and turned to see Rhiannon, her pistol drawn and aimed into the air over Emily’s shoulder. The girl’s face was a mask of concentration, her eyes slits, both arms extended the way Emily had taught her, as she tracked something through the air. Emily turned in the direction the girl was aiming in time to see a white and glowing flash of light diving toward her. She scuttled back, rattling the roll-up door as she collided with it, then gasped as Rhiannon’s pistol barked twice in quick succession, and the glow exploded into tiny splotches of liquid light that cascaded through the air like miniature fireworks, fading to nothing before they even hit the ground.

  A ragged shape hit the concrete near Rhiannon’s feet with a wet splat!

  It was about as big as Emily’s hand, a corpse-gray body that was almost translucent. What might have been an abdomen until Rhiannon’s nine-millimeter slug ripped through it was now nothing but a ragged, torn bag leaking a still-glowing viscous liquid onto the concrete. A pair of red wings—feathered, Emily thought at first, but on closer inspection, she saw that the wings were covered in what looked more like long, fine scales—sprouted from the joint that connected the torso to the abdomen. A hundred or more limp black tendrils that might have been legs hung from the body. They still twitched spasmodically, but any chance of further examination disappeared as Rhiannon brought her boot down hard on the creature’s body, turning it into a pool of goo.

  “Ugh! I think I’m going to be sick,” Rhiannon said as she lifted her heel and regarded the mess on her sole.

  Thor had somehow hopped from the storage area of the truck, across the backseat, and into the front cab. He now sat in the front passenger seat, his paws on the dashboard, barking furiously, spittle streaking the windshield. Emily looked up in time to see five more of the glowing creatures zipping around the roof space between the support beams and girders. Their abdomens seemed dim by comparison to the brightness she had seen approaching, and they appeared disoriented, uncoordinated even, nothing like the elegantly organized mass of creatures she had experienced in her dream. Perhaps being separated from the main group broke the intense connection she had experienced when she dreamed among them?

  A loud metallic clang made both women jump. Something had just hit the sheet metal siding of the building. Hard.

  As Emily searched for where the sound had come from, she heard another and then another bang as more of the creatures hit the outside of the building. Dimples were beginning to form in the walls where the light bugs were barreling into it.

  “Come on,” Emily yelled. She grabbed Rhiannon’s hand and dragged her toward the car, threw open the passenger side, and let Thor down. She was about to head to the back to retrieve their packs when one of the panes of glass above the farthest bay door exploded inward, raining glass down onto the concrete. A stream of light flowed in through the broken window space and twirled around the ceiling, absorbing the five stragglers who had made it inside first, their abdomens now glowing as brightly as those of their kin. A second and third pane shattered almost simultaneously, the sound of breaking glass smothered beneath the hissing of the wings of thousands of the creatures flooding into the vehicle bay and the constant barrage of bodies hitting the sides of the building with a sound like hard-bounced tennis balls.

  Emily did not wait to see how many more creatures would make it inside. She stretched across the center console and switched off the engine, pocketing the keys. If her dream was accurate—and there was no reason to doubt it wasn’t, not now—then she knew there were millions, maybe even tens of millions of these creatures out there, like a swarm of starving locusts, and all that kept them separated from the swarm were the walls of the building.

  Rhiannon stood silently mesmerized by the light show swirling through the metal rafters above her head. Thor barked crazily, scooting back on his hind legs with every yelp. They had to get out of here now, before these things gathered themselves and realized that lunch was just a few meters below them.

  Leaping from the truck, Emily grabbed Rhiannon by the shoulder and pushed her toward the door leading back to the staff room. She tried to yell “run,” but her voice was drowned beneath the cacophony of thrumming and buzzing. Thor seemed to bark silently at the creatures, and she had to grab him by the collar and force him toward the door too.

  They sprinted through the semidarkness, ghost-lit by the creatures’ bioluminescence that turned the two humans and Thor into a weird stop-motion shadow.

  A ball of light streaked past Emily’s face like a bullet, its wings thrumming.

  “Faster!” Emily yelled, not sure if Rhiannon could even hear her over the cacophony of sound.

  Rhiannon reached the door first and flung it open, stopped, and held it ajar as Thor ran past her into the corridor. Emily’s eyes met Rhiannon’s and in that weird strobing flash between darkness and light she saw her face transformed into a mask of horror, her eyes glowing white with the reflected light of the swarm Emily knew was behind her. She felt the air change as the pressure wave of so many creatures moving as one washed over her. A part of Emily wanted to turn around and look—it was so tempting to just stop and see this astonishing thing that no human had ever witnessed before. Instead, she dove into the corridor headfirst. Thor yelped and leaped over his mistress as she slid across the polished floor, colliding with a wall. She managed to look up just in time to see Rhiannon pull the door into place, her muscles tensing as she grasped the door handle and leaned her body weight backward.

  The thud of hundreds of the light bugs hitting the walls and door sounded like a mob of angry men smashing at them with baseball bats. Thank God the door closed inward, or they would have been overwhelmed in seconds, but there was no way to tell how long it was going to stand up to this kind of violence. A faint glow emanated from around the edges of the door, seeping in through the cracks.

  “Emily!” Rhiannon cried. “What are we going to do?”

  Emily’s mind raced. The memory of the dream and the knowledge of just how massive the swarm actually was—it was petrifying. No way they could make a run for it; they would be overwhelmed before they even made it a few hundred feet from the building. And where would they go? Apart from the ghostly glow of the swarm, it was pitch black beyond the building. They would stumble around in the darkness, and the second they flipped on a flashlight the creatures would zero in on them, Emily thought, remembering how the swarm had converged on the light of Rhiannon’s flashlight in her dream, and that had been from many kilometers away. The vehicle bay was already overrun with the creatures, making it impossible for them to make it to the truck. They needed some way to distract these little horrors away from the building, something that would hold the swarm’s attention for long enough that the three travelers could get to the truck and make their escape.

  Light, that was the key, but from where?

  “Emily?” Rhiannon yelled, her knuckles white against the doorknob as she tried to maintain her grip. “What do we do?”

  “Hold on,” she snapped. The light bugs had stopped throwing themselves at the door—which, Emily thought, disconcertingly suggested a coordinated intelligence or, at least, a sense of self-preservation—but her voice was still only barely audible above the cacophony of thrumming wings that filled the vehicle bay.

  “I need to think.” What they needed was a lighthouse. But where would you find a lighthouse in the desert?
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  Perhaps if they managed to put themselves far away from this section of the building, out of range of whatever senses these little bastards possessed, it might buy enough time that the creatures would give up and move on, or at least give her time to formulate an escape plan.

  “On the count of three, I want you to let go and run as fast as you can back to the middle office in the corridor, okay?”

  Rhiannon nodded. Emily could see beads of sweat glinting on the girl’s forehead.

  “One . . . two . . . three!”

  Emily waited for Rhiannon to pass her, stole a glance at the door to make sure it wasn’t going to explode and let the creatures through, then took off after the teenager, Thor at their heels. They burst through into the waiting area where they had intended to spend the night, and, as soon as they were all through, Emily again set the chair against the doorknob. Through the windows, the light from the swarm lit up the entire perimeter of the building, almost as far back as the freeway. The swarm seemed to have focused its attention on the bay door, the glow of the mass throbbing like a heartbeat, elongating and shortening the shadows within the room. A lightning bolt zipped past the window, describing a perfect parabolic arc across the night and leaving a residual afterglow on Emily’s eyes.

  “Get to the office,” Emily hissed when she saw Rhiannon had stopped. Three seconds later and Emily was following behind her.

  They sprinted down the corridor toward the back exit, then cut right into the first office. Beyond the window there was only darkness. The creatures had not made it to the rear of the building—not yet anyway.

  “What are those things?” Rhiannon demanded.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You’re the one who said that they were coming, remember?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what they are, some kind of alien locust, but I know they’re connected. Goddamn it, everything is fucking connected in this world. It’s like everything talks to everything else. But these things, they communicate and they hunt together. They’re like a giant shoal of land piranha.”

  “So, how do we stop them?”

  “They’re attracted to light, I think. When you turned on your flashlight to wake me, they saw that and headed right for it. So we need to create a distraction to draw them away from here to buy enough time for us to get to the truck and get the hell out of here.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Rhiannon asked, her voice despondent.

  “Do you still have the flares you found in the minivan?”

  Rhiannon rooted through her backpack and pulled out the two emergency flare sticks.

  “Give them to me,” Emily said, taking the two red cardboard tubes. She ran her fingers over them, inspecting each as best she could in the dim light. Hopefully they had not gotten wet to the point they would be useless. There was no way to be 100 percent sure; she was just going to have to hope they would work when the time came. She didn’t think the flares alone would be big enough or bright enough to distract the swarm. It was going to take something much bigger than that.

  Goddamn it, she was missing something. She searched her memory . . . something she had seen back on the road, just before they had spotted the building.

  “That’s it,” she said, suddenly remembering.

  “What are you going to do?” Rhiannon asked, her voice nervous now.

  “I want you to stay here with Thor—”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “—and close the door behind me when I leave. When the swarm leaves, I want you to run to the truck”—Emily pressed the truck keys into Rhiannon’s hands and closed the girl’s fingers around them—“then I want you to take it, and, if it’s safe to do so, I want you to wait five minutes for me. Don’t turn on the lights until you have to go, okay? If I’m not back in five minutes, I want you to drive away from here. Wait until it’s light, and then I want you to head back to Point Loma, okay?”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “When you get back to Point Loma,” Emily continued, she didn’t want to say “if you get back,” but she knew the chances of the girl making it all the way back to California were slim at best, “then I want you to tell Valentine that I killed the guard when you were visiting me and that I kidnapped you, okay? You tell them anything you have to to stay alive. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble, but when Mac comes back, I want you to tell him everything, do you understand?”

  Even in the dim light of the office, Emily could see the fear in the girl’s eyes.

  “Emily! What are you going to do?” Rhiannon said.

  “Do you understand?” Emily insisted, and, when Rhiannon nodded, Emily continued, “Five minutes. You wait five minutes, that’s all.”

  And with that, Emily headed for the back exit.

  “Jesus! What the fuck am I thinking?” Emily whispered to herself as she eased the rear exit of the building open just enough to be able to squeeze out into the night.

  A halo of white light danced like the aurora borealis above the roof of the building. Pressing herself against the door, Emily prayed to whatever god might still be willing to listen to her that the swarm would not spot her; although, thankfully, they seemed preoccupied with assaulting the front of the building. She edged herself as tightly against the outer wall as possible and slinked as quietly as she could toward the western corner of the building.

  The otherworldly glow of the swarm made shadows jump and leap across the parking lot, a constant distraction in Emily’s peripheral vision. For what she had planned, she was going to have to reverse her route back up toward the hill and the jam of trucks they had passed on the way here. In her mind, she tried to replay the terrain they had crossed when they had first arrived—not that it really mattered, because first she was going to have to cut back diagonally away from the building and head deeper into the desert if she wanted to guarantee that she would not be spotted. She needed the darkness, but no matter which route she took there was going to be a stretch of ground where she would be vulnerable to being sensed by the swarm.

  The air was filled with the thrum of wings, like tiny chainsaws. The sound of the swarm resonated and echoed across the desert, fading and growing like a sea of sound. It was actually quite beautiful, Emily thought, terrifying but entrancing.

  She sucked in three quick breaths, aimed for the nearest, darkest shadow she could see, and on the third breath, began sprinting away from the building.

  “Don’t fall. Don’t fall,” she repeated under her breath as she ran, her eyes fixed on the darkness, but her brain fascinated by the length of her shadow as it extended in and out with each swell of the swarm.

  And then she was flying. Her mind registered the impact of her toes on the raised concrete curb surrounding the parking lot a split second before she hit the ground, the wind knocked from her lungs as effectively as if she had received a boot to the stomach. She lay facedown, feeling the silky softness of the alien grass against her hands, the wet splatter of mud across her face as she panted for each painful lungful of breath.

  A second passed. Then another second and a third, delineated only by the thumping of her heart and the thrumming of the light bugs. She opened her eyes and could see nothing; she had fallen into the arms of darkness, and it embraced her willingly. Emily allowed herself a few more seconds to regain her breath, then sluggishly rolled over until she was facing back toward the depot.

  The swarm looked gaseous, like a living white cloud of light pulsating around the silhouette of the building. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like the northern lights rendered into flesh and given wings. If she had been a God-fearing woman, it would have been easy to believe these were angels . . . but she had seen what they really were, had ridden with them across the darkened plain, sensed their desire, felt their hunger. She knew their intentions. These were no angels.

  She had to get moving.

  “Shit!” Emily hissed as her hand flew to the pocket where she had stashed t
he two flares. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She could only feel the outline of one of them. She pushed her hand into the pocket and confirmed the worst: one of the flares must have fallen out when she took her spill. She rolled onto her side and began blindly feeling around for the missing flare. Could she could risk turning on her flashlight briefly? Absolutely not, she decided instantly. That brief flash of light would be like a sonar ping to the swarm, and they would be on her in a moment. She would just have to keep trying to find it with the light they cast.

  Minutes later, she resigned herself to the futility of wasting any more time looking. The flare was lost, but she still had the one. It was just going to have to suffice. She pushed herself to her feet, reoriented herself to where she thought her destination would be, and took a step.

  She felt something beneath her foot give.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?” She knelt down and moved her hand to beneath her foot and felt the outline of the missing flare. Her boot had pushed it deep into a pool of muddy water, and, even as she wrapped her fingers around the cylinder, she already knew it was pointless; the hard cardboard wrapper was soaked through already, and her fingers pushed through into the interior of its rotten guts. She flung the remains away into the night, trying to resist the urge to scream her frustration. There was nothing to be done about it now. She was just going to have to make do with what she had. Besides, the chances of success were small, she knew that already. But if her plan did not succeed, she was going to try and make a big enough distraction that at least Rhiannon and Thor would be able to escape. It would give them a chance at survival, even if it was only a minimal one at best.

  Emily headed deeper into the darkness, walking as quickly as she felt safe to. She began counting off in her head—one one thousand, two one thousand—a trick Mac had taught her to gauge her distance. When she thought she had reached a half-kilometer distance from the depot, she stopped and reoriented herself, using the light of the swarm to judge her position.