Exodus

CHAPTER TWO

The next afternoon Emily found herself in the rustic town of Stockport. It had taken her almost that long to shake off the encounter at the store. Thoughts of the creatures had even invaded her sleep when she had finally pulled over for the night.

Until she had stumbled into their lair, she hadn’t seen any sign of the spider-aliens for days, and to come across so many of them concentrated in one location was a disconcerting new development in an already surreal week. The more she thought about it, the more it was as if they had been congregating in the store, like troops awaiting fresh orders. Maybe that was exactly what was happening; maybe they were waiting to be given new directions by whatever was orchestrating this strange overthrow of her world.

If that was true, then it would mean that there was some kind of intelligence behind the annihilation of life on earth. And that thought was even more frightening than the idea that she might stumble on more of the creatures.

It was just more strangeness for her to think about.

And she still didn’t know why she had survived the red rain when it had first fallen. Or if there were other survivors. Once she made it to the islands, she would have to convince Jacob’s group it should be their primary goal to locate and rescue as many survivors as they could. Quite how that particular feat was to be accomplished was another thing altogether.

All that day, Emily had been keeping her eye on a huge bank of billowing clouds close to the horizon. It looked as though it was still many miles away, but it was hard to get a clear view of it as she traveled along the narrow, tree-lined streets of Stockport. The storm clouds were preceded by an honor guard of red sky that swept from a coral pink behind her to a deep crimson where the sky mated with the storm. There was not an inch of blue left up there.

It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight.

The red sky had become a permanent fixture. Emily guessed it was a result of the dust she had seen the alien forests releasing into the air. It didn’t take much of a stretch of her imagination to draw a disturbing conclusion: the red rain had killed off the indigenous species of the earth, humanity included, then used their bodies to create their own life-forms. Those in turn had created the alien forest and whatever those creatures were that had attacked her, and the trees were now spreading the red dust across the world. Whatever plant life the dust touched began the transformation process, as it was turned to the invaders’ own needs. It would not be long, Emily estimated, before what little was left of earthborn life was totally subsumed and replaced.

And then there was whatever she had seen growing in the forest. Just thinking about the strange orbs hanging from the tree in the forest gave her the creeping heebie-jeebies. She had no idea why. There was just something about them that seemed…wrong. They were all smaller parts of a much larger, much more complicated conundrum, and she didn’t have the first clue as to what it meant.

Rounding a corner, Emily came to an abrupt stop.

Thor stopped beside her, panting heavily as he looked up at her. Ahead, the road was blocked.

Stretching out into the distance before them was a river of vehicles of all descriptions. They filled both lanes, even overflowing onto the grass border on either side of the road, pushing up against tree trunks and fences. Most were crushed against its neighbor, bumper-to-bumper, but here and there she saw an SUV, compact, or truck that stood on its own. All the cars Emily looked into as she wheeled her bike between the snaking alleys of metal were empty, their doors either ajar or one of the telltale perfectly round holes testifying to the occupant’s fate.

That, in and of itself, was disturbing enough, but the award for weirdest experience of the day definitely went to the three-quarter-finished alien tree sprouting up from the tarmacadam of the road, its roots burrowing deep into the blacktop. Beyond the first tree, several hundred feet or so farther along the road, Emily could see the outline of another, and, beyond that, another and another.

The occupants of the vehicles had not had to travel very far to complete their part of the alien agenda, it seemed.

Emily stood below the first tree, straining her neck to look up at the black trunk. Halfway up, fracturing the almost perfect symmetry of the shiny black surface, Emily could see the back end of a silver Buick jutting out at an odd angle. She walked around the base of the tree, climbing over the thick roots that had burrowed into the road’s surface, uprooting concrete and tilting cars as though they were nothing. On the other side, farther up the tree, Emily saw another car—this time it was just the front headlight of some indistinguishable make—embedded in the trunk. Unconcerned by the sea of vehicles, their newly transformed owners had simply built straight through them.

It was, Emily had to admit, an amazing feat of bioengineering. In fact, the whole subjugation of planet Earth had been an astonishingly successful process, as much as she did not want to admit it, and it hinted at an intelligence so far ahead of humanity’s that it was godlike in its brutal, ruthless efficiency.

Shading her eyes from the glare, Emily scanned the road. If she had been in a car, she would have had to turn around and find some secondary road that hopefully wasn’t as choked. It was one advantage the bike had over a car; obstructions like this meant she only had to walk until she found a clear route through the mess. It wasn’t much of an advantage, though, and again she wished she had taken driving lessons. A nice, safe BMW or Mercedes looked more and more attractive with every aching muscle that reminded her she still had a very, very long way to go.

Still, she consoled herself, a car was one thing. Solving how and where she would find gasoline for it was another thing altogether. She’d figure it all out when she could. The important thing right now was to get past this roadblock and continue on her way.

A concrete footpath ran parallel to the road, a line of trees separating it from the crush of vehicles. The path had not been resurfaced in years. It was a lot rougher to ride on than the blacktop. But, while uncomfortable for her long-suffering butt, it was better than pushing the bike through the lanes of empty cars.

Emily stumbled across the downed airliner two miles farther along the route.

It had come back to earth in the center of the town, smashing through houses and demolishing everything for several hundred feet. Burned-out shells of homes lay on either side of the deep furrow gouged out of the earth. The blackened skeletons of trees, unaffected by the original crash but destroyed, she assumed, by the subsequent fire, extended off in all directions and had helped spread the blaze away from the crash site. The pungent odor of jet fuel still lingered in the air, mixing with the smell of burned wood and…something else…something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The debris field stretched for at least a mile; scattered wreckage was strewn across the road and what was left of rooftops. In the street in front of Emily lay the cowling of one of the airliner’s engines. The actual engine was nowhere to be seen, though. Not far from the disemboweled cowling, Emily saw the first body. At least, she assumed it was a body. She had heard the phrase burned beyond recognition, and, looking at the black lump of charcoal, she understood exactly what it meant.

“Thor. Sit and stay,” she told the malamute, afraid he might step on some small piece of debris or broken glass while she approached the body. There was no way to distinguish whether it had been a man or a woman as the burns extended over every inch of it. The body was curled almost into a fetal position; the arms and hands looked like claws, twisted up to the blackened chest, the legs pulled almost up to the chin. White teeth gleamed incongruously from behind fleshless charcoal lips. The body smelled of overcooked meat, like a roast that had been left too long in the oven.

“Interesting,” she said, surprising herself with how simple it was for the reporter within her to still so easily disengage from what should have been a horribly disturbing sight. She glanced up from the corpse; in the wreckage of a destroyed car—it was impossible to distinguish the make or model—another body sat on the frame and springs of what had once been the driver’s seat. The body’s skeletal hands gripped what was left of the steering wheel. Again, the corpse was unrecognizable, but, she noted, it was still there. It had not been consumed by the red dust.

Did that mean the red rain needed live flesh to consume and use to create the creatures so intent on changing her world? Emily could not say. Maybe it had been the fire that destroyed the red rain infection? It was impossible to discern, but it was certainly interesting. Whatever the reason, it was good to know that the rain could be stopped. It might be too late for most of the earth’s inhabitants, but who knew what the future held? Especially when it was measured by the yardstick of the past ten days or so.

There was no way she was going to risk taking the bike or Thor through the crash site. So she reversed direction and headed back to the previous cross street, then rode at a right angle away from the debris field for a mile or so. When she was sure she was clear of the debris, Emily turned north again and began heading back toward her original destination, trying to ignore the smell of burned meat that still lingered in her nostrils.

But, rising up above the roofs and trees, the storm that had seemed so far away just a short while ago had gained on the two travelers. The huge anvil-shaped mass of cloud now seemed to tower over Emily, a wall of red jutting high into the stratosphere, threatening to collapse on them at any moment. It extended from the eastern horizon to the far west, consuming the sky like some ancient angry dragon.

There was an electricity in the air that set the tiny hairs on the back of her head alive. A sense of dread began to beat like a drum in the pit of Emily’s stomach, a dull syncopated rhythm that twisted her belly into tight knots.

She looked down at Thor keeping pace with her. The fine fur of his coat was standing almost erect.

“Come on,” she called out to the dog as her legs began pumping the bike’s pedals.

They reached the town of Stuyvesant before the storm finally caught up with them.

A flash of livid white lightning, followed almost instantly by a horrendous crash of thunder, made Emily leap six inches off her saddle and sent Thor scurrying sideways as the blast exploded almost directly overhead.

“Shit!” she yelled as the first heavy drops of red-tinted rain—eerily reminiscent of the blood rain that had ended the world—began to fall, splattering loudly on the pavement.

She had badly misjudged the storm’s approach, and now they were caught out in the open.

They needed to find cover, and they needed to find it right now.

To Emily’s left was a field surrounded by a few trees that would be no use as cover, but off to her right, a gravel driveway wound up a steep hill. She could just make out the roof of a house on the opposite side of the hill.

“Come on,” she called to Thor.

Emily raced up the gravel road toward the crest of the hill, her legs pumping hard at the pedals as Thor sprinted ahead of her, understanding exactly where they were heading and apparently just as eager to get to shelter.

As she reached the crest of the hill, the gravel road turned into a concrete parking area leading up to a three-car garage. On the side of the garage was a weatherworn door, its paint peeling from the surrounding frame, and Emily rode directly for it. She jumped from her bike and rattled the door handle: it was locked. Racing back around to the garage entrance, she tried each of the roll-up garage doors in turn. The second one complained and squeaked, but after a quick tug on the handle, it started to grate and rattle along its tracks until there was a large enough space for her to slip the bike through and duck under.

Inside, there was just enough daylight for Emily to make out the shadowy outline of a silver Dodge Durango SUV parked in one of the bays. The other two bays were empty. A workbench sat off to one side, and Peg-Boards filled with tools and boxes lined two of the walls. Whoever had lived here had been an incredibly organized neat freak.

A door led from the garage into the main part of the house. Emily leaned her bike against the workbench and tried it. It swung open easily, and Emily and Thor both stepped inside. Thor’s nose instantly went to the ground as he disappeared along the hallway and into the main area of the house while Emily waited patiently in the corridor. This was a routine they’d automatically fallen into since they had found each other: Thor would quickly explore the house and then come back and let her know if the coast was clear. At least that was what she thought he was doing, as they hadn’t come across anything threatening in any of the other homes they’d spent time in.

A set of car keys, presumably for the Durango in the garage, hung from a hook fastened to the corridor wall on the opposite side of the door.

Another huge crash of thunder pounded Emily’s eardrums. She heard Thor give a frightened yelp somewhere farther into the house, then the patter of his claws on tile before he skidded into the corridor and sprinted to join her. “It’s okay, baby. I’ll protect you from the nasty thunder,” she cooed to the frightened dog as she stroked him gently behind his ears.

She stripped off the backpack and leaned it against the door to keep it open, then backtracked to the metal roll-up garage door, pulling it shut behind her. There was a dead bolt halfway up the door, and she threw that into place just to be on the safe side. With the area secured to her satisfaction, she picked up her backpack and moved off down the corridor into the main house. Rather than racing ahead as he usually would, Thor stayed pinned to Emily’s side, his ears flat against his head and his tail down almost between his legs.

Her hand found its way to the strap of the Mossberg, and she slipped the shotgun into her hands. It would be easy to blame Thor’s uneasiness on the almost constant crash of the storm, but after her encounter at the store, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t because he sensed something in the house.

Emily didn’t think it was anything to worry about, just the storm that was frightening him rather than any sense of a threat within the house, but her hand found its way to the strap of the Mossberg slung across her shoulder anyway.

The corridor led from the garage into a tiled mudroom, which in turn opened into a kitchen adjacent to a dining area. She moved quickly from room to room, shotgun poised and ready as she swept each new area for any possible threat. The dining room was adjacent to a large living room. A large potbellied stove sat in one corner, its chimney pipe disappearing into the rafters. One wall of the living room was nothing but windows stretching up to dark wooden beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, a good eighteen feet above her head. A set of sliding glass doors led out onto a beautiful wooden balcony.

“Wow!” said Emily as she stared out at the view beyond the wall of windows, all thoughts she might not be alone forgotten.

The house she had broken into was perched on the opposite side of the hill she had just ridden up. She was on the top floor and, as she looked down, she could see the second and third stories of the house below her, each one following the natural line and declination of the hill as it swept down into a valley filled with trees, several hundred feet below. She thought she saw the glint of a pond or a stream from within the green of the woods, but she couldn’t be sure.

The view was breathtaking.

The hill the house was built on extended off to the east and west before curving north to form a horseshoe-shaped valley. Across the gap between her side of the valley—about a quarter mile or so, she approximated—Emily could see two more homes nestled in the trees. The larger of the two buildings was at almost the same height as this one, but the second, smaller one was close to the floor of the valley.

On either side of the valley, Emily could see the angry clouds of the storm eating away at the remaining sky as it moved quickly toward the opposite horizon. And yet, oddly, the sky above her little valley remained curiously clear. She could see the occasional flash of lightning deep within the clouds, and the area beyond the hill was obscured by a pinkish curtain of rain, yet on this side of the valley not a drop seemed to be falling.

“Weird,” she whispered.

But then, what wasn’t these days?

Another crack of thunder broke Emily from her reverie, and she suddenly realized just how deathly quiet it was in the house. Surely she should have heard the hammer of the rain on the slate roof of the house; there was no attic space above her head, after all, just the rough beams running through the open space where it would have been. She was sure the storm had been just seconds behind her when she had crested the hill. She glanced back out through the windows. The sky was overcast, but there was still no sign of the storm over the valley, and the trees remained as still as stone giants.

The sky outside her window lit up momentarily, but Emily could not see the lightning bolt. She did, however, hear the thunder that rolled in a second later; the pressure wave rattled the glass in the windows and sent poor Thor to his belly as he tried to wrap himself even tighter around her legs.

This dog was a tangle of contradictions, she was quickly learning. Here was this incredibly valiant animal that had pulled her, quite literally, from the jaws of death reduced to a quivering puppy as the thunderstorm raged on the far side of the house.

“Well, I guess we know what your Kryptonite is now, don’t we, Superdog?” Thor apparently didn’t see the funny side as he whined and continued to push himself against her legs.

“Come on. We might as well make the most of it. Let’s eat.”

Each evening since leaving Manhattan, Emily had placed a call to Jacob using the satellite phone she had picked up from the offices of the newspaper where she had worked. Ostensibly it was a nightly routine that Jacob insisted on so he knew she was safe, but Emily thought it was equal part Jacob’s way of helping ensure she remained connected to reality. It would be so very easy to lose sight of her goals out here, alone except for Thor and Jacob’s distant, but always welcome, voice.

The hiss of static filled her ear as she waited for him to pick up her call. The past few days had seen a slow degeneration of the quality of each call she made. Whether that was down to technical problems with the now unmonitored satellite or the red storm’s interference, she could not say. It was worrisome either way.

“Hello, Emily.” Jacob’s voice sounded distant as it ebbed in and out.

Emily quickly filled him in on her day and the disconcertingly violent storm that had forced her to hole up for the night. “What’s weird, though, is that the storm didn’t seem to touch this valley,” she explained.

Usually Jacob would find her revelation too fascinating to resist and offer some kind of a theory. So, when he didn’t offer up his usual attempt at an explanation for the weather phenomenon, Emily asked him if everything was okay.

He paused for a second before answering. “No. Things here have been getting a little…strained,” he admitted. “The shock of what happened has worn off, and we’re beginning to feel the pressure. I…we all left wives and families behind, and I think I held out a little hope that maybe there would be more survivors. Knowing that they are all dead, well, let’s just say it’s taking its toll.”

It would have been easy for Emily to offer up some kind of false hope to Jacob, but that would have been all it was. Instead, she simply said, “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, Em,” he replied. “I can handle it. After all, we are all the family we have left now.”

“So, I’m thinking about trying my hand at a little grand theft auto,” she said, changing the subject.

“What?”

“I’m thinking of stealing a car.” She laughed. “Of course, I’m going to have to learn to drive it first.”

“That’s a great idea,” Jacob replied, his voice becoming all but inaudible above a sudden whoosh of static. “Make sure you choose something simple and automatic. It needs to be automatic.”

“It scares the living crap out of me, to be honest, but it’s going to take forever by bike, and I’ll probably freeze to death before I make it even halfway to you. And after my little encounter yesterday, I think I’ll feel safer with four wheels beneath me rather than two.”

“I have every confidence in your ability, Em. Just make sure you find some kind of open area to practice in before you hit the open road, okay?”

She promised she would take her time.

By the end of the conversation, Jacob’s mood had improved.

“Ride carefully,” he reiterated. “I need you here in one piece.”

Emily felt a cloud descend over her after she hung up. She had not given that much thought to Jacob’s plan. What would it be like to be stuck up there in that unforgiving land of perpetual winter? In fact, had either of them really thought through this plan of theirs? Were they supposed to spend the rest of their lives sequestered away in that research station?

The more Emily thought about it, the more she wondered if it was such a great idea to pin all her hopes on reaching the Stocktons. At some point she was going to have to talk with Jacob about his plan for what would happen once she got there.

But that was something she would deal with on another day.

The windows lining the far wall of the living room showed nothing but darkness now. Night had arrived as she’d talked to Jacob on the phone.

Emily caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirrorlike surface of the glass. She stood and walked over to the windows to take a better look. Her clothes were not too bad, a little sweat stained and a bit grubby, but it was her hair and lack of makeup that really hit home. She had bags under her eyes and her blonde hair was scraggly and knotted. Half-healed scratches from her flight and fight through the forest stood out starkly against her pale skin.

“You look like shit,” she told her mirror image. She surely could not deny it.