The trip across the inlet was rough, the water choppy with rolling swells that rocked the boat up and down. Emily felt her stomach roll with every unexpected rise and fall of the boat, and after a few minutes she began to feel a little queasy.
The rough water didn’t seem to bother the sailors who all seemed relaxed, almost nonchalant.
“Just fix your eyes on one of the rivets,” MacAlister said, his voice struggling to be heard over the roar of the engine and whoosh of spray as the boat cut through the waves. “It’ll help with the nausea.”
She took his advice, fixing her gaze on the head of a rivet bolted into the bottom of the boat. By the time she realized it was just a clever distraction to take her mind off the trip, the boat was only a few hundred yards off the beach of Coronado Island.
MacAlister gave a quick raise of his eyebrows and smiled as she looked up from the floor.
“Clever,” she said. “Thanks.”
“I aim to please.”
Emily wasn’t sure whether that was just an innocent reply or whether he was flirting with her…again.
The boat’s pilot began to ease off the throttle as they approached the shale beach. As the nose of the dinghy cut through the pebbles and the boat came to a shuddering halt, the sailors leaped to the shore, their weapons at the ready but not raised. For some unknown reason, the alien vegetation had not managed to take as strong a hold on this extreme western side of the island, the ground and expanse of concrete and asphalt that stretched out in all directions was free from all but the occasional plant. In the distance, Emily could see a large building, its curved roof and huge doors made it instantly recognizable as an aircraft hangar. Several other smaller buildings—offices, perhaps?—were in stationary orbit around it. The hangar was the only building that appeared to have made it through the storm more or less undamaged. But beyond the cluster of buildings was an all too familiar wall of red, bisecting the island across the middle.
Several fighter planes, or what was left of them, at least, lay broken and twisted on the concrete parkway in front of the hangar. They looked as if some cruel child had reached down and snapped their backs. The two helicopters Emily had spotted when she first landed looked as though they were still in one piece. One was obviously canted to the right, though, the left side of its bottom fuselage resting against the runway. But the other helo was still upright, riding on three wheels, its four rotor blades hanging limply like wet black hair.
MacAlister raised his binoculars to his eyes and glassed the buildings then tracked across to the helos. “That’s where we need to be, lads,” he said. “Let’s get a move on.” At his command the group began to jog cautiously toward the hangar, their weapons raised to their shoulders and sweeping the scenery as they approached the building.
The team reached the nearest building and proceeded along the western edge in single file, Emily in the middle, the sailors covering angles with their weapons.
This close Emily could see the damage to the buildings was mostly cosmetic: Large chunks of stucco had been ripped from the fascia and windows had been blown out, the broken glass crunching under their booted feet. Sheets of paper, the contents of some filing cabinet, blew through the space between the buildings before collecting like snow in a drift against the wall of the hangar.
When they came to the farthest corner of the building, MacAlister flicked a quick hand signal and the two leading sailors sprinted across the open space between buildings. “Let’s go,” he whispered when the men had reached the cover of the next building and the rest of the team sprinted to join them. They continued the same leapfrogging maneuver from building to building until they were as close to the two helicopters as they could get.
Emily watched MacAlister closely, his eyes scanning the buildings and the aircraft, looking for any movement, anything out of the ordinary. When he caught her watching him, he smiled, “Ready?”
She nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said. They dashed across the concrete to the two helos, coming to a standstill next to the fuselage of the first helicopter. It was huge, far bigger than Emily had thought it would be, but then the closest she’d ever been to a helicopter was on TV.
“It’s a Black Hawk,” MacAlister said, running the flat of his hand over the machine’s nose. “Haven’t flown one of these since Iraq.”
The machine was badly damaged; a support strut for one of the two front landing wheels had snapped, tipping the Black Hawk to the ground. Two of the blades of the tail rotor, the one that would stabilize the craft in flight, had been bent, as though something heavy had hit them. The side door of the helicopter must have either been left open or blown open by the storm, because the interior was a wreck of debris and rain damage. It was useless.
“Well, I don’t think this is going to be much use to us,” Parsons said, patting the side of the machine like it was a dead horse. “Let’s take a look at the other one.”
They walked around the front of the damaged aircraft and over to the second helicopter. This one looked to be in much better condition; it was upright, the door hatches for both the passenger area and pilot’s cabin were closed, and as far as Emily could tell, everything that was supposed to be there was where it should be.
“This looks promising,” said Parsons as a rare smile bordering almost on adoration lit up his face. He skirted around the edge of the helicopter, checked underneath it, and then moved his attention to the twin General Electric T700 turboshaft engines sitting just below the main rotor on the roof of the Black Hawk. The smile faded from his face.
“Bastard!” he spat. “The damn things are full of that red shit. ’Scuse my French.”
Emily followed the others around to the front of the helicopter to get a better look. Sure enough, the air intakes of the engines were spilling over with bunches of red veins, reed-thin stalks that had grown or were blown throughout the engine housing, clogging the intake.
“What do you need?” asked MacAlister.
“I need a metric fucking ton of weed killer, is what I need. Spray these bastards all the fucking way back to where they fucking came from.” The Welshman was red in the face. “Sorry. ’Scuse my language again, Miss.”
“No fucking problem,” said Emily, which brought a sudden and incongruous burst of laughter from everyone on the asphalt.
Parsons reached for the handle of the hatch to the passenger area of the helo. He pulled hard and the door popped out and slid backward along the fuselage, revealing a spotless interior.
“I have to give it to you Yanks,” Parsons said as he climbed first onto the lip of the bulkhead, then eased himself up into a standing position, his body inside the helo and his head outside. “You certainly know how to build a flying machine.” With one hand holding the upper lip of the frame for support, he reached up with his free hand and began to rip out clumps of the red vegetation. The severed ends oozed red goo that dripped onto Parsons’s chest and down the front of his tunic.
Emily felt an automatic revulsion at the sight of the red fluid, memories of the red rain flooding back into her mind. She didn’t think whatever was running through the plants was anywhere near as deadly as that first fall of red rain, but still, she wouldn’t want any of that stuff on her. It either didn’t cross Parsons’s mind or he could not have cared any less; he dug in and continued to pull handfuls of the weeds out and toss them on the ground beneath the helicopter.
“Alrighty tighty,” he said after a few more clumps of red splattered on the ground. “Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s still going to take me a couple of hours to clean this bugger out before we can even think about giving her a test drive. I’ll be able to give you a better idea of where we are then.”
“Anything we can do to help?” Emily asked.
“Unless you feel like keeping me company, you can make yourself scarce for a while.”
Emil
y turned to MacAlister. “How about we check out the buildings over there? See if there’s anything worth scavenging?”
“Sounds like an idea. Better than standing here and working on our suntans, at least. Rusty! You’re with us. Come on lad.”
The young sailor had settled himself against one of the helicopter’s landing wheels. He pulled himself to his feet, grabbed his rifle, and joined MacAlister and Emily.
“Just scream if you need us,” said MacAlister as they walked off toward the nearest group of buildings.
Emily saw a hand rise from behind the cowling, a single index finger extended.
Jesus, Emily thought good-heartedly, these guys should have their own damn comedy show.
The buildings near the hangar rose three stories high and looked as though they had probably been used for administrative purposes. The parking lot at the front of the building was still filled with cars, a clear indication that most of the base staff had apparently remained at their posts when the rain hit. That fact made Emily oddly proud and afraid at the same time.
The approaching jungle had not yet managed to completely consume the buildings, but it lay just a matter of a few feet away, and leafy runners had already extended out in front of the main wall of vegetation, creeping over the concrete pavements.
The entrance of the nearest building was covered in the same ropelike vines Emily had spent the first few days clearing from the buildings on Point Loma. MacAlister pulled enough of the vines away from the door to clear an entrance, then pushed the door carefully open.
“Wait here, please, Emily,” he said. He was no longer the wisecracking sailor she had begun to grow so infuriatingly attached to; now he was all soldier, his rifle pulled to his shoulder as he edged his way inside the building. He swept the muzzle from left to right, checking corners and nooks and crannies, the flashlight on the barrel of his weapon illuminating even the darkest spaces. Then he disappeared around a corner and Emily felt a sudden sense of nervousness as she lost sight of him.
A few minutes later, he reappeared and walked back to the door.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, holding the door open and gesturing Emily and Rusty inside with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Let’s go see what we can steal.”
Emily spotted large patches of the same creeping red lichen that seemed to have covered most open ground growing on the walls and floors of the building they now stood in. It wasn’t as prevalent inside, but the ubiquitous red carpet seemed to be independent of the larger body of jungle vegetation that grew just feet away.
Emily had been right about the place being offices. They were standing in a reception area with a set of stairs that climbed up to the second floor, and corridors running north and south.
They moved silently through the lower corridors of the building, checking room after room. The majority of the office’s windows had survived the storm intact, apart from the occasional crack or missing pane. Oddly though, the offices looked to have been picked over already. Desk drawers hung open, their contents spilled on the floor, security lockers too. The glass front of a vending machine at the end of the corridor they stood on had been smashed and emptied of its contents.
At the sight of the broken vending machine, MacAlister put a finger to his lips and then beckoned Emily and Rusty to him. “I think we may have stumbled on some survivors here,” he said in a hushed voice.
“Couldn’t this have happened before the storm, during the panic after the red rain?” Emily asked, her own voice barely a whisper.
MacAlister shook his head. “I don’t think so. This is all too methodical. Either way, it’s best if we continue with caution, okay?”
“We should get out of here,” said Rusty, his voice hushed, nervous.
Emily shook her head. “No, if there’s someone else alive in here we need to find them and help them. We’re going to need all the warm bodies we can get.” MacAlister nodded his agreement. Rusty did not seem happy with the decision but he was outranked and outvoted.
They took the stairs up to the next floor. MacAlister led the way, his weapon raised and covering the landing, Rusty followed at the rear covering their six, and Emily stayed in the center, her Mossberg in hand. On the second floor landing, they moved down the left corridor, MacAlister quietly sweeping each room as they went, while Emily and the young sailor monitored the corridor.
When they reached the third room, MacAlister hissed quietly to Emily to come and join him. She glanced in the room. The desk that had occupied it was gone and the filing cabinets and other furniture had been pushed to one end of the room to make way for three adult-size sleeping bags. An assortment of military clothing, mostly fatigues, hung from a makeshift clothes rack in one corner, and a propane stove sat on a table beneath the window. Under the table were several boxes of MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. There was also an assortment of candy, probably from the ransacked machine on the first floor.
“Looks like we definitely have company,” said MacAlister.
They left the room as it was and continued moving farther down the corridor. MacAlister’s flashlight played over the wall.
Something on the wall ahead of them reflected the light back at them; it glinted and scintillated like cat’s eyes on a highway. MacAlister moved the light back over the wall again and Emily recognized the same beautiful sapphire-like glow of the substance she had seen when they first explored Point Loma after the fire. They had found it on the walls of one of the buildings near the harbor. While the lichen and jungle flora seemed to be almost everywhere, this oddly reflective substance seemed to prefer flat surfaces like walls. The refracted light from the beam of Mac’s flashlight made a beautiful, oily mixture of color over the floor.
“Move your light over the far wall,” Emily asked MacAlister.
The opposite wall was covered in the same sapphire-like crust too, and as he ran the light along the walls, they could see it extended about ten feet farther down along each surface of the wall and up onto the ceiling too. It looked almost like a cave entrance, or a grotto.
“What is it?” asked Rusty.
“I have no idea,” whispered Emily, “but we saw it on some of the buildings when we were reconnoitering the day after we arrived, remember? It looks too hard to be a plant.” She remembered how the alien dust had eventually become inert, turning to crystal once its job had been completed back in her apartment in Manhattan. “Maybe it’s just some kind of residue left over from the storm?” she offered.
Rusty reached out a hand to touch the crust.
“Will you never learn?” MacAlister slapped his hand away before he could touch it. Rusty was living up to his name doubly so now, his face flushed almost as red as his hair. “Come on,” said MacAlister, “let’s check the last stretch of the rooms, then we’re out of here.”
They doubled back to the landing then crossed to the second corridor. The first room was clear, but in the second they found more of the sapphire growth. It was plastered over one wall and all around the window, completely covering the sill and one pane of glass. In the natural sunlight it was even more beautiful. The blue rays sparkled and painted the room like a laser show.
In the third room they found the survivors.
Emily gave a gasp of surprise and horror as she peeked her head into the room. There were three bodies lying on the floor. Actually, not bodies, they were little more than brown-stained skeletons, the flesh stripped from the bone.
The room looked like a medical-student prank, as though the three skeletons had been purposefully placed there for maximum effect. The skeletons were fully clothed, two in Marine fatigues and the third in a skirt and blouse. The white cotton of the blouse was stained with blood. A pistol and a submachine gun lay near the two deceased Marines.
MacAlister said nothing, his eyes taking in the scene with the dispassionate professionalism of a soldier who knew he was looking at so
mething he had not been trained for.
“Fuck me!” Rusty exclaimed as he stepped into the room. “Would you look at that?” He stepped closer to the bodies, peering with morbid curiosity at the remains.
Emily noticed more of the sapphire growth on the wall around the window. The growth extended out across the floor to the foot of one of the dead Marines.
“What do you think killed them?” said Rusty as he took another step closer, dropping to one knee to get a closer look at the skeleton of the deceased woman.
A shimmer passed over the surface of the sapphire growth on the wall.
At first Emily thought it was maybe the light from MacAlister’s flashlight that he had forgotten to switch off, but in the split second it took for her to process the thought she knew that she was wrong, and she knew that it was already too late.
“Rusty! Get back!” she yelled.
The sailor started to turn in her direction, a look of confusion on his face that instantly turned to horror as the sapphire growth on the wall began to break apart and cascade down the wall and flow across the floor toward him.
Beetles. Hundreds of tiny beetles, their hexagon-shaped shells, glittering like cascading jewels, swept across the floor and onto Rusty’s boot then swarmed up the legs of his combat fatigues.
There was just enough time for Emily to register a multitude of tiny black feet beneath the shell of each beetle—like a centipede, she thought—before Rusty realized something was terribly wrong.
He looked down at his leg and screamed, a high-pitched yelp of horror, girlish in its shrillness. He swatted furiously at the bodies of the creatures as they swarmed up the material of his trousers, knocking a few off while he backpedaled away from the stream of iridescent creatures, but not nearly enough to change the direction of his fate.
They were on him in a heartbeat, skittering over his chest, climbing over his face and hands as he tried to bat them away. The beetles instantly headed toward the soft parts of the sailor’s body. He managed another brief scream but that was choked off to a wet gurgle as the beetles flooded into his mouth and began burrowing down his throat and through his cheeks.
Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3) Page 14
