Exodus

CHAPTER ONE

Emily Baxter had a craving. She wanted a burger…bad.

Not just any burger, either. In the four days since she had escaped from her apartment in Manhattan, she had passed by plenty of abandoned McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and God knew how many other fast-food restaurants. Those were all easily ignorable.

No, what she had a hankering for was a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms, onions, mayo, pickles, and tomatoes; hold the ketchup and mustard. She would add a large order of their fries—Cajun-style, of course—and an extra-large, ice-cold Coke. Emily felt her saliva glands begin to water at the thought of sinking her teeth into that juicy burger.

There had been a Five Guys franchise over on West Thirty-Fourth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment she had left behind in Manhattan. She’d stop by there at least once a month when she had the urge to add an extra couple of inches of cholesterol to her arteries. She was already bored by her diet. Canned beans. Canned soup. Canned fruit. Canned everything. A burger would be the only thing right now that would satisfy her desire for real, honest-to-goodness all-American junk food.

Of course, that wasn’t going to ever happen, seeing as how the world had come to an abrupt, and total, end.

Maybe it was all the extra exercise she was getting? She had thought herself a pretty proficient cyclist before the red rain, but these past few days of constant pedaling had helped prove her wrong. Everything ached. She had no idea how Thor did it, poor thing. The malamute padded uncomplaining alongside her bike.

Only a few days had passed, but the event that had wiped all but a handful of humanity from the face of the earth already seemed distant and vague to her now. The red rain had fallen across the world, seemingly from nowhere. Within hours everyone and everything was dead…well, apart from her, Thor, and a bunch of scientists trapped in a research station in the Stockton Islands on the far north coast of Alaska. That was where she was heading. Alaska.

Guess there’s something to be said for the end of the world, she thought. It had certainly done a world of good for her cardio health. The post-apocalypse diet: guaranteed to trim inches from your waistline, or you’ll die trying. She could have made millions in book sales, if there had been anyone left to sell the book to.

Thor, an Alaskan malamute, had been Emily’s only companion since he had rescued her from an attack by a trio of alien creatures in an equally alien forest just outside Valhalla. In their brief time together, she had often thought he must have received some sort of training, because he responded to many of her commands and was very protective.

“So, what do you say, mutt? You hungry?”

Thor looked up at his mistress and bounced his tail back and forth enthusiastically.

“Okay, then. Let’s find somewhere we can eat.” Emily slowed the bike to a crawl and began looking over the street in front of her. She quickly found the building she was looking for, pulling to a stop outside a small corner convenience store and dismounting. She could feel the burning ache in her calves as she wheeled the bike toward the sidewalk. The military-style backpack strapped to her back had grown lighter as she and Thor consumed the initial stockpile of food she had brought with her. Emily had to admit, losing the bulk of the weight had been a relief, but it was time to replenish her stock.

Pausing for a second, she scanned the street ahead of her; grayscale buildings lined both sides of the empty road. It was the same everywhere she had traveled since leaving Manhattan. No sign of any other living creature except for her and Thor. No birds, no dogs, no cats—not even an insect, as far as she could tell. And no people. She had no idea what that meant for the world, but she knew it couldn’t possibly be good. What would be the effect of the total destruction of most, if not all, of the earth’s indigenous species?

It was no mystery what had happened to life on this little blue planet. It had been annihilated by the red rain, consumed and then reconstituted into the weird alien life-forms she had encountered in the days after everything had died.

As she continued traveling north, Emily had seen more signs of the insidious encroachment of the red forests into the earth’s environment. The second day into her ride, she had noticed small pockets of the towering trees similar to what she had encountered in Central Park scattered here and there along her route, usually near a water source like a lake or a river. She had seen a couple of small clusters of trees growing on sidewalks with their roots spiraling down inlets into sewers, but these had been much smaller, almost scaled-down versions of their bigger brothers. But by day two and three, she had begun to notice larger groups and far more frequently. To her mind, there was an almost exponential growth occurring, although she had seen nothing on the scale of the forest she had traveled through in Valhalla. Not yet, at least.

She had seen little of the spider-aliens other than the occasional distant sighting, but on day three she had found one, or at least the desiccated remains of one, hanging from an iron security fence outside a block of offices. Evidently it had impaled itself on the spikes when it had leaped from the building; she could see the telltale circular escape hole in a window three stories up. She was tempted to take a closer look, but Emily had begun to recognize that her reporter’s nose was more likely to get her into trouble these days. She gave the thing a wide berth and continued on her way.

The only other survivor she had spoken to was Jacob Endersby. He was part of a team of scientists on the remote Stockton Islands, just off the northern shore of Alaska. She still wasn’t convinced that Jacob’s hypothesis—that the farther north she traveled, the colder it would get and the less of a foothold the invading alien life-forms would have—was right, because it sure as hell didn’t seem to be having much of an effect so far. Truth be told, there was little in the way of temperature difference in the hundred or so miles she had already traveled; so maybe it was going to take a much more severe drop before there was any observable decrease.

Emily slipped the backpack from her shoulders. The wounds she had sustained during the attack by the alien creatures in the forest were healing nicely; her shoulder still ached and she felt the occasional spasm of pain if she moved her arm too quickly or spent too long riding her bike.

She knew she would have to find an alternative form of transportation soon. With winter closing in, and the temperature already starting to drop, finding a vehicle that would protect her from the elements was also going to have to be a major consideration in her plan of reaching the Stockton Islands. There were thousands of cars and trucks left at the side of the road or waiting in garages for owners who would never return.

Of course, that meant she would have to learn to drive.

She’d need something easy to handle but large enough that she could stash her bike, supplies, and, of course, Thor. It was also going to have to be robust enough to cope with the bad weather she was sure to hit when she crossed over into Canada. Roads were going to be closed once the winter weather set in, with no one to clear the inevitable snowfalls that would make them all but impassable. She would give it some serious consideration over the next couple of days, she decided.

The pain in her shoulder paled into inconsequence when compared to the soreness she had experienced in the first few days of eight-hour cycling sessions. She now knew the true meaning of the old cowboy phrase saddle sore because her butt chafed like nobody’s business after long hours parked on the saddle of the bike. She learned quickly that she needed to make frequent rest stops or suffer the consequences, that and the liberal application of cream from a tube of Desitin she had picked up from an abandoned pharmacy to her more tender areas.

She had decided to follow the Hudson as far north as she could. Keeping the river to her left gave her a sense of security; it was one direction she didn’t think she’d have to worry about an attack. Staying on the east side of the river also had the added advantage of keeping the half-mile stretch of water between her and what had been, up until only a week or so ago, some of the more populated areas of New York.

That first day, as she and Thor had stood on the hill and looked back at the village where she had spent the previous night slowly succumb to fire, Emily had worried her canine companion wouldn’t be able to keep up with her. But as she rode along the deserted highways and side roads, she had quickly learned how wrong she was about that. Thor was more than capable of matching her pace. In fact, he could go far longer than she could between breaks; a result, she believed, of malamutes having originally been bred as sled dogs. She found herself having to limit herself to a maximum of thirty or so miles a day for herself rather than the dog. Emily guessed that Thor would be able to easily cover twice that distance, if she gave him his head.

Thor wasn’t the problem, though. It had quickly become apparent to Emily that cycling the forty-five hundred miles to reach the Stockton Islands and the group waiting for her there was going to be a next to impossible undertaking. She was utterly exhausted by the end of each day. She had been lucky so far and not had any accidents, although she had come close on a couple of occasions. But she knew her luck wouldn’t hold out forever, and the odds were stacked well and truly against her traveling that kind of distance and not hitting a pothole or letting her attention slip momentarily and ending up lying in some ditch with a broken arm, leg, or worse.

And then, of course, there were the alien creatures she had encountered. Who knew what strangeness was wandering around the world ahead of her? It was like living in some crazy zoo where she was the prey.

Emily glanced down at Thor sitting patiently at her feet, his ears alert, tongue lolling from his mouth as he panted gently in the warmth of the afternoon sun.

“Coming?” she asked the dog, but he seemed quite happy to stay where he was. “All right,” she said after a second. “You guard our things. I’ll be right back out.” She picked up the almost empty backpack from where she had set it down and walked toward the store.

The door was unlocked. Surprisingly, the shelves looked untouched and almost fully stocked, unlike the majority of shops Emily had stopped at on her trip so far. The unmistakable chaos of panic buyers and thieves marked virtually every location she had tried to look for food.

Sunlight cut through the glass window and illuminated the two middle rows of shelves. The rest of the small room was shrouded in shadow. She paused for a moment, listening for any sound of movement that might indicate that she was not alone. Motes of dust floated gently through the shaft of light; just regular dust, not the weird semi-sentient stuff she had witnessed in Manhattan.

As she walked to the nearest aisle, she began running through a mental checklist of the items she would need. Soup and fruit, maybe some cans of meat if she could find it; it would still be good. She’d also need to grab a bag of dog food for Thor. He was running low.

A shadow to Emily’s left shifted. She stopped midstep, her breath catching in her throat. Instinctively, she reached for the Mossberg shotgun she kept strapped around her shoulder, but it wasn’t there.

“Damn it,” she cursed under her breath as she took a step backward. She could have sworn that she had brought it in with her, but she must have left it with the bike.

Emily took another slow step backward and reached behind her as she searched for the exit she knew was just a few feet away. If she could just get to the door, she could alert Thor and make a run for—

The shadow separated from the darkness surrounding it and moved into the dim light.

It was a spider-alien. Its eight articulated scimitar-clawed legs clicked across the tiled floor of the store. As she watched, first another and then two more joined it from the shadows. One climbed over the nearest set of shelving, perching on the top boxes of instant potato, its two eyestalks swaying back and forth as it focused on her.

She took another step backward. As she did so, the leading spider matched her.

A glass jar of preserves smashed against the floor to her right, the sound like a thunderclap in that enclosed space. Emily yelped. Another creature was climbing over the nearest shelf. More of the freaks were emerging from the darkness, edging toward her across the floor.

She counted seven, then eight, then twelve. Her chest felt heavy as the air she had sucked into her lungs seemed to turn into a dense fog.

Emily could hear Thor barking ferociously from the other side of the door and the frantic scrape of his claws against the glass as he tried to get to her. But the door opened outward, so there was no way he was going to be able to reach her.

She took another step back, too afraid to take her eyes from the ruin of monsters advancing on her. It was some kind of a nest; she had stumbled into a rally point where these things collected and waited to move on to become a part of one of those huge alien trees, or who knew what else.

Her encounters in Manhattan, when one of the ugly bastards had fallen into her room and she had almost been run over by another in Central Park, had taught her that the things seemed mostly harmless, unwilling to attack her while they were gripped by whatever deep motivation drove them. But these were reacting differently; they seemed pissed, and by the way the eyestalks flicked and wavered like an agitated cat’s tail, she was pretty sure they weren’t in a mood to share their newfound home with her.

Emily kept moving back, one slow careful step at a time, until, finally, her hand closed around the door handle. Thor was still growling and whining his frustration and anger outside, his paws batting against the door so hard that she was afraid to open it; he might slip in and go straight for the nearest creature. She was sure he could easily dispatch one or two of them, but there were at least twenty stalking her now, and he would surely be overwhelmed if he tried to take them all on.

“Thor,” she hissed, “be quiet, boy.”

At the sound of her voice, the gathered creatures’ serrated lower jaws jittered up and down so fast she could barely see them. They sounded like dry autumn leaves blown over pavement.

Thor’s agitated scratching at the door stopped, and his barking dropped to a low growl.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder; Thor had stepped back a few paces and was now sitting, staring at her, his tail moving back and forth across the flagstone pavement in either agitation or anticipation. But she could not see any new threat behind him.

When she looked back, the creatures had advanced on her again—the walls and ceiling were covered with them, and every featureless black bulbous head and eyestalk was turned and focused squarely on her. As she watched, a barely noticeable ripple of movement flowed through the creatures.

One after another the creatures launched themselves at her.

Spinning around, she pulled the door toward her and slipped through the crack, pulling the door back into place behind her. Black bodies flung themselves against the glass, smacking against it before dropping to the floor. She clung to the handle, leaning back and pulling it against the jamb as wave upon wave of the creatures tried to get to her. The weight of the mass of flailing aliens kept the door closed.

As more and more of the creatures sank to the floor, they began to form a drift of twig-like flailing legs, writhing eyestalks, and chattering jaws that soon became indistinguishable as individual creatures.

At a mental count of three, she let the door handle go and stepped away. For a second she stood and stared at the monsters as they mindlessly tried to reach her.

“Fuck you!” she yelled eventually, then flipped them the bird, grabbed her bike, and hurtled away from the swarm.