“Thor,” she called out again as she sprinted the fifty feet or so after him. This time it seemed to do the trick. The dog stopped, staring straight ahead, his tail down between his hindquarters, motionless, as though he knew he had done something wrong.
Emily picked her way past the bushes and tree limbs, then rushed to the dog’s side. They were both panting heavily, the humidity robbing the air of oxygen. Sweat stung her eyes and she wiped it away with the back of her arm.
“Jesus, dog. What the hell is wrong with you? You about gave me a fucking heart attack.” She threw a protective arm around his neck, grasping his collar tightly. Thor didn’t seem to hear her, barely registering she was even there; instead, he continued to stare into the distance.
Another growl rumbled up from deep within his chest.
Emily’s eyes slowly followed the direction Thor was staring. Despite the heat of the jungle, her breath chilled in her lungs at what she saw.
In a clearing ahead was a sight unlike anything she had seen before: three entities, humanoid looking, tall, with long, slender yet muscular limbs. They stood about eight feet in height, their oval, featureless heads swaying back and forth as they moved with balletic adroitness around the clearing on long, articulated lower appendages. Emily hesitated to call them legs, because the only resemblance they bore to a human limb was the elongated shape. Each “leg” seemed able to flex at any point along its length, even though she could see no sign of a joint, and where a human foot should be was a half-globe-shaped hoof that looked like an upturned dish. Each creature held an object in its right hand: a cube. Although holding was perhaps the wrong word; guided would be more accurate as the cube appeared to float about an inch above the outstretched palm of each triple-fingered hand, glowing with a faint green luminescence. Occasionally one of the three slender digits of the hand manipulating the cube would twitch, just the tiniest of flexes, and the box would change color, pulsing brightly before dimming again. They wore no clothes and appeared completely sexless. The creatures’ skin had an almost metallic sheen to it, as though they had all been stamped from a single block of aluminum. Each looked identical to the other.
They moved with such grace, their long limbs shifting in smooth unison as they strode across the clearing, pushing the glowing cubes before them, or perhaps being guided by them? When the cubes stopped the creatures became completely motionless. So still were they Emily could have mistaken them for the petrified victims of Medusa if it were not for the occasional minute finger movement as they manipulated the cube-device floating before them.
They’re not even breathing, Emily thought, watching the nearest being go about its work, not two hundred feet from where she and Thor crouched. It stopped momentarily, moving the cube up to a low overhanging branch of a ruby-red tree.
The cube throbbed, contracting in on itself and then expanding in a weird hall-of-mirrors distortion as it seemed to shrink then expand. Just for a second, in the weird prismatic bowl of light the cube had become, Emily thought she saw somewhere else, another place reflected out of that shimmering box of light. It was a fleeting glimpse into some place manufactured, certainly not the jungle that she knew lay beyond the alien-cube’s operator.
The cube suddenly contracted back to its normal shape with a bright flash of orange and an audible snap. Emily felt a stabbing pain just above her eyebrows, as though she had been staring at a computer screen for far too long.
When she looked again, the branch the humanoid had been examining had vanished, leaving a black cauterized nub near the trunk.
The strange elegant alien moved again, stepping lightly through the few trees that lay between it and Emily’s hiding place, the box’s glow casting strange light and long shadows over the ground.
Thor let out another low growl as it moved closer to them, seemingly oblivious to their presence behind the bush.
“Shush!” Emily whispered, her lips level with Thor’s ear as she cradled the dog to her. She could feel his muscles tense, taut with potential energy beneath his thick, gray fur.
A sudden crashing sound behind them made Emily swirl around, her heart in her mouth, just in time to see Reilly trip and almost fall as he stumbled over a tree’s root.
“Fuck!” he yelled, but managed to recover his balance.
Emily hissed at him to be quiet, but when she turned back to the clearing all three creatures had stopped what they were doing, their bald, eyeless heads swiveled intently in her direction.
Then, as one, they began striding over the ground toward her.
“Oh, shit!” Emily yelled, unconsciously scuttling backward as the aliens—and Emily had no illusions that that was what they were, not created on this world, but from some other distant place—moved in that elegant, flowing gait toward her hiding place. As she moved backward, her grip on Thor’s collar loosened momentarily and he was gone again, launching himself toward the silver figures with a snarl, drool flying from his lips as he raced at the three aliens.
“No, Thor. Stop!” Emily yelled, fear in her voice now. “Please stop.”
She was in a waking nightmare, and she knew there was nothing she could do other than watch as her dog ate up the ground between her and these three humanoid intruders.
All three aliens stopped as they registered the dog rushing toward them. One of them raised its cube and, just as Thor launched himself at the nearest creature, it flashed red.
Thor yelped once and went limp.
Emily let out a strangled shriek of horror as she watched Thor’s limp body crash to the ground at the feet of the creature.
“No!” she screamed in a voice an equal mix of anguish, fear, and rage. She leaped from her hiding place behind the bush and unshouldered her shotgun, quickly leveling it at the nearest alien as she stalked toward it. Her first shot disintegrated the low-hanging branches of a tree to the creature’s right, her aim affected by the blur of tears that had suddenly filled her vision. She wiped one hand across her eyes and took aim at the alien again. The second shot caught it at the waistline, severing it in two. The top half toppled backward, the cube in its hand glowed brightly and stayed suspended in the air for a second, then turned to black and fell to the floor next to the twitching torso. The legs of the creature crumpled and collapsed next to the motionless body of Thor.
“Emily!” MacAlister’s roar of concern was a distant whisper even though she knew he must be yelling. “For Christ’s sake get back here,” he called after her as she walked past the bifurcated body of the fallen alien.
She ignored him and racked another shell into the shotgun. Moving quickly now across the open ground toward the two remaining aliens, she raised the Mossberg to her shoulder again and sighted down the barrel at the next nearest creature just as it turned toward her, the cube in its outstretched palm pulsing rapidly.
“I’m going to kill all you fucks,” she yelled, hot tears of rage spilling over her cheeks. “You’re going back to whatever hellhole you came from. You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?” Her finger caressed the trigger of the shotgun just as the alien’s cube seemed to explode brilliantly.
A numbing buzz surrounded her. It ran across the surface of her skin like static electricity and filled the inside of her head with a momentary flash of blinding light that pulsed through every synapse, penetrated every memory she had, filled each molecule of her being. Abruptly, she was disconnected from her body. It was as though a switch had been thrown, freezing all communication between her brain and her nervous system.
The only way Emily knew she was falling was because her eyes were still her own: She saw the red grass rushing up to meet her, and in the final second before she hit the ground, she saw Mac’s distraught face as he rushed from the edge of the clearing toward her.
Then everything went white.
Emily found herself suspended in a place between sleep and wakefulness, enveloped by a warm light that
had no color, yet seemed to contain every shade and hue imaginable. It might be that place, she dreamed, that humanity had defined as the ever-so-thin line between life and death; limbo, if you pleased. Or perhaps it was the sanctuary which, as a child, defined the limits between life and dreams, and that as an adult, had seemed lost to her forever. No matter where she was, it was peaceful, quiet; she was finally at rest. The non-light tingled against her skin, its silk-like texture holding her securely in place, not against her will, but because she willed it to embrace her. It brushed against her skin, warming her like the first sigh of a mother’s breath against her newborn’s body.
Emily tried to remember everything that had come before this moment, but all she found was a blank slate; there was nothing but the now, and she reveled in the knowledge that she was an anomaly, brand new, an incongruity overlooked by the universe, both newborn and eternal, yet somehow, still an irreplaceable facet of a vast mechanism, comforted by her own anonymity, her own individualism, her own uniqueness.
Time passed, and after what seemed like a quiet eternity of serenity, from the nothingness a red spot began to form in the vast and narrow limits of her mindscape. Tiny at first, it quickly spread through the non-light like a drop of ink in water, pushing outward as it grew, pulling in everything that surrounded it.
Emily watched as if from a distance, with no hint of fear, only wonder and fascination.
More tiny dots of color, each unique as she, appeared, quickly spreading out across the canvas, merging and bonding with each other until a sudden rush of experience soaked her, drenching her in memory.
She sensed herself exhale a gasp of astonishment…followed quickly by pain as the tide of reality washed her ashore, and…
…Emily sat up, instantly regretting the move as every nerve in her body seemed to send a simultaneous signal to her brain, a flood of information and experience that overwhelmed her, setting every synapse on fire. She slumped back down again, and a low moan escaped her as she was overwhelmed by disorientation. When it finally eased, she rolled gently over onto her left side, fighting against the urge to vomit, dragging in deep gulps of air. Slowly, the spinning began to subside, and her senses and nerves began to return to normal. Still, her skin tingled with static electricity strong enough it made her want to scratch every inch of it.
She forced her eyelids to open. Slowly! Slowly! Unsure of how they might handle any sudden light.
She tried to remember everything that had happened in the past few…? How long had it been? Hours? Days? She had no idea how much time had passed, or how she had gotten here; she had a hazy vaguely recalled memory of…an open field, beings that had no right to exist on Earth…and Thor!
Her eyes snapped fully open.
She was naked. She could feel a rapidly cooling liquid or membrane coating her skin and she suddenly felt chilled as it began to evaporate off her body. Ignoring the pain and disorientation she pushed herself back upright.
“Thor?” she called out, her voice a weak croak. Her vision swam for a few seconds with even this simple effort. A blur of swirling colors played in front of her eyes, gradually organizing themselves into shapes, which in turn coalesced into objects as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of her locale: curved walls, a ceiling of nothing but black above her still-whirling head, the hard shelf she sat upon, its surface smooth, slightly warm beneath the palms of her hands.
She was in some kind of a room, her senses told her. It was poorly lit but not dark, and, as her eyes were gradually adjusting to the twilight, she noticed she was not alone.
Three figures stood at the dimly lit edge of the room, hidden within the penumbra of shadow.
Thank God. “Mac? Is that you?”
Emily blinked a couple of times as she tried to focus on what lay at the boundary of her sight as the three silhouettes finally resolved from the darkness around them. She stifled a scream of confusion and fear at what stood before her.
Two of the figures were the same elegant aliens she had seen in the field. They stood unmoving, their blank oval faces staring—if that was the right word, they had no eyes after all—directly at her. But it was the third figure, flanked by the two aliens as though they were his guardians, their shadows cast across the shorter shape, that caused her heart to pound. There was something disturbingly familiar about the outline.
The middle figure took two steps forward into the light.
An abrupt intake of breath from Emily marked her recognition, then a name shattered the silence of the room: “Jacob?” she asked.
She stared hard at the figure, unsure of whether what she was seeing was true or a trick played on her by the shadows.
It was Jacob, free of his wheelchair, his legs apparently now fully functional as he took another step closer to Emily.
“Hello Emily,” he said, his voice slurring slightly, as though he was still getting used to forming words with his mouth and tongue. “It is so very good to see you again.”
Emily pushed herself across the shelf she sat on until she felt a wall at her back, her eyes darting around the room, searching for any way out of it and finding nothing. The walls were seamless with no apparent exit.
“You have nothing to fear from us, Emily. We are not here to harm you,” Jacob said, a hand extended out in front of him, encouraging her to stop her nervous shuffling.
Us? We? Her heart skipped a beat when she thought back to the creature that had tried to take her and Simon’s family in Stuyvesant. It had taken Simon and eventually Ben, turning the child into some thing that she had later killed, but not before the creature had used Simon, transforming him into a puppet to lure the children and Emily to it.
“What…what the fuck are you?” Emily asked, her eyes shifting constantly from Jacob to the two sentinels standing motionless behind him, then back to Jacob again. She could see no connection between the two silent creatures and Jacob, no black tentacles that would mean he was under their control. But that did not mean that he was not their thrall in some other way.
“Our creators gave us no name, but over the millennia, other species have named us. You may think of us as the Caretakers. It is the most appropriate, I believe.”
“I know you’re not Jacob, so, what are you?” she insisted.
“You are correct and incorrect,” Jacob said, his eyes drifting down to his own legs, legs that had been useless when Emily had last seen him. “We are here to ensure the transition of the planet takes place as it has been designed. I am Jacob, perfect in every single way, minus his infirmities, but I am also a part of the others you see here and those of us stationed around this planet. And we are all connected to the change occurring here.”
Emily felt rage begin to surge up from deep inside her, sublimating the confusion she felt listening to this thing try to explain itself.
“You are the ones responsible for everything that happened, aren’t you? You’re the ones that…” she could barely control herself at this point, the anger erupting from every cell of her body “…you are the ones that killed us. You destroyed our planet. Our civilizations, my family, my friends, my parents. You murdered us by the billions!” The last sentence was coated with such venom and hatred she half expected that the three creatures standing in front of her would disintegrate from its vehemence. But, of course, they did not. Instead, they remained as immutable as they had since she woke here.
Jacob seemed to ponder her accusation before answering.
“I understand your confusion, Emily, but we did not destroy this planet, we saved it. That is our task. The preservation of life. We have repurposed almost every biological entity on this planet to become more efficient, to ensure survival, to ensure growth. Nothing has been wasted.”
“Re-fucking-purposed? What the fuck do you mean ‘repurposed’? You took everything that I had that was precious to me and destroyed it, turned them into monsters. Monsters! Jesus Christ, I
killed a little boy because of you fuckers. I murdered a boy.” She was on her feet now, closing the gap between Jacob, spittle flying from her mouth as the words, emotional gunshots each of them, exploded from within her.
Something warm and wet trickled through her fingers. Looking down at her clenched fists she saw a rivulet of blood leaking from between her fingers, nails dug deep into the heel of her palm.
“We are…aware of your emotional pain, Emily, but the end was near for our, your, species. Within a span of several hundred years, you would have been reduced to a statistically insignificant number. Your survival viability was…negligible.”
“Then why not just leave us to wipe ourselves out?” she yelled into Jacob’s face, all fear of him gone now. God damn them all to hell. “Why the fuck would you want to come in and destroy us now? Why not just let us do it to ourselves?”
Jacob returned her gaze unflinchingly, either unaware or uncaring of the rage that was directed at him.
He continued, his voice still soft, still low, as if he was talking to a child, “Because your species would not have been the only one to have become extinct. More than ninety-eight percent of this planet’s species would also have been lost along with you. Given the high probability that the remaining two percent would also become extinct within a thousand years, we decided to act while there was still sufficient biological material available to ensure success.”
“So what?” she yelled, her voice cracking from the strain. “So fucking what if we destroyed this world? It was our world to destroy, you fucks.”
“This was never your world, Emily Baxter,” Jacob interrupted, the first real hint of emotion entering his voice as he leaned in closer to her. “That was a delusion your species created to ensure its continued pillaging and self-destructive actions. If you could see what I see, Emily, if you had the knowledge that we have, you would understand. You would know that life in this universe is so very, very rare, so fragile. When we find a world like this one, we observe it in the hope that its occupants might correct their course. Inevitably, they do not. That is when we initiate our program. While there are still enough biological resources available to reverse the downward spiral.”
Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3) Page 23
