Revelations (11 page)

“You could lend a paw too,” she told Thor. The dog had taken up residence in the shade of the building, panting heavily. This warm weather was not going to be comfortable for the Alaskan malamute. His thick coat was not conducive to this kind of temperature. She would have to track down an electric trimmer or a pair of shears and give him a haircut at some point. Emily emptied half of her water into a plastic bowl and set it in front of the dog. He lapped at it eagerly then sat back down in the shade.

By the time night fell at the end of their first day at Point Loma, the crew had managed to put a fair dent in the overgrown area out front of the building and also cleared several of the surrounding buildings of the insidious creeping vines. The same success could not be said of Parsons’s attempt at getting the base’s emergency generator up and running though.

“The damn thing is just too gunked up with that red crap,” Parsons told the group as they gathered in the reception area that evening. They had turned the area into a makeshift refectory, handing out hot meals cooked on the sub and then taxied back to the hungry crew at the base. “It’s going to take another four or five hours to disassemble and clean it out and then a couple more to put the bugger back together again.”

Rhiannon had helped take food out to the sentries posted around the base on rooftops. Now she stepped through the door and Emily saw her eyes brighten at the sight of the sub’s Engineer. Emily had felt concerned enough at Parsons’s attention to Rhiannon that she had taken MacAlister aside and expressed her concerns.

“Parsons had a wife and daughter back home in the Rhondda,” Mac had explained. “His girl would have been about Rhiannon’s age. Lovely little thing, she was. I think Rhia reminds him of her.”

Rhiannon grabbed a sandwich from the counter and sat down next to the Engineer. “Hi!” she said.

“Well, if it isn’t the prettiest girl in the whole wide world,” said Parsons cheerily.

Rhiannon blushed at the gentle compliment, but Emily could see that the girl was taking some pleasure in the fatherly attention the man lavished on her and she smiled at the kid.

Jacob had been given a room on the ground floor that allowed him some freedom to move around. He’d spent what little of the day had been left after his drinking spree working with a loaned sailor unpacking and putting together the radio equipment he had brought with him. A large dipole radio antenna had been fixed to the roof of the building. They’d have radio communications again as soon as the power was up. For the first time since Emily had known Jacob he was smiling freely. The man had lost some of the tension and seemed to have relaxed considerably since coming ashore. He was sitting across from her now listening to the conversation as it unfolded, apparently suffering no major hangover.

The discussion around the table focused mainly on the plants they had spent the day clearing from the compound. There were at least twenty varieties within the confines of the compound alone, someone remarked. None of them recognizable as indigenous Earth species. Jacob had examined specimens they had collected from some of the creeping vines and plants. One in particular was proving to be a particular hazard: There was an abundance of squat plants that grew close to the ground, sprouting broad drooping leaves which measured just over two feet in length. The leaves were razor sharp along the edges and a few unlucky crew members had already suffered deep cuts and lacerations when they had tried to pull them out or unsuspectingly stepped close to one hidden by taller plants.

“If I hadn’t seen all this with my own eyes, I would never have believed any of it,” MacAlister said. “I mean, it’s just so damn…out of this world.”

“At least we haven’t seen any of the spiders,” said Rhiannon through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. “They scared me.”

In fact, no one had reported seeing any signs of life since stepping ashore. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be something out there in the alien jungle lying just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence of the compound.

“Ah, you don’t want to worry about a few spiders,” said Parsons, “I’ll keep you safe,
cariad
.” He placed a friendly arm around the girl’s shoulder and squeezed her gently to him.

“Do
you
think there’s
anything
out there?” Captain Constantine asked Emily. “Any of those creatures you saw when you were traveling still exist?”

Emily’s hand fluttered subconsciously to her shoulder where the creature that had attacked her in the forest outside Valhalla had left her scarred.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t see any of the trees that made the dust, so I think the spider aliens have probably served their purpose. But the other monsters? Who knows? They could be out there right now for all I know.” The word “monsters” sounded so childish in her present company, but that was what they had been. Scary fucking monsters and the sooner everyone realized it the safer she would feel.

MacAlister nodded his understanding. “We’ve got a tight guard on the compound. You can rest easy tonight.”

The conversation faltered for a moment, a silence slipping in between them until MacAlister announced, “Okay, who wants a refill of their cuppa?” He pointed at his half-empty mug of tea.

Emily nodded and handed her own empty mug to him. Tea, she decided, was beginning to grow on her.

The screams started just after sunset.

At first Emily thought it was Thor dreaming, whining as he relived some personal nightmare, but when the wailing grew louder and the sound of panicked human voices joined it, a sudden jolt of adrenaline cleared her sleep-addled brain and she was awake.

“What is it?” Rhiannon’s voice, tremulous and low, whispered from beneath the sheets of her cot.

The wailing came again before Emily could answer; a strange mixture of high-pitched screeching with a deep intertwined staccato bass thrum that sounded like a badly out-of-tune cello. Emily looked down at Thor at the side of her cot; he was awake, his ears up and eyes wide open, head cocked to one side. He seemed more curious than perturbed, unlike the voices yelling back and forth to each other beyond their door.

“I don’t know,” Emily answered when the wailing died away again, “but I’m going to go find out. You stay here and look out for Thor. I’ll be right back.” Emily grabbed her pistol from under her pillow and headed toward the door.

The wailing call rose again. This time it sounded much louder and closer, rattling the glass in the windows. Emily did an about-face and headed back to where she had left the Mossberg shotgun leaning against the wall. She checked it quickly and walked back to the door.

“Stay put,” she told Thor as he rose to follow her, but he instantly sat back down at her command. She slipped through the door and into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind her. Several bleary-eyed sailors were pulling on shirts and firing questions at each other. Flashlight beams cut through the darkness, turning the faces of the sailors into ghoulish masks. No one had any answers but each of them held a weapon in his hand as they moved from their rooms and headed toward the stairwell. She followed behind them, pushing her way through the group, down the stairs and out into the courtyard.

A three-quarter moon punctured a cloudless sky dappled with stars. The moon’s ghostly light was bright enough for Emily to make out a collection of human shapes gathered just outside the entranceway.

“Emily, you should stay inside,” said MacAlister when he spotted her exiting the building, the light from his flashlight illuminating her and the other sailors behind her. He glanced disapprovingly at the shotgun in her hand and the Glock pistol strapped to her hip. “Do you sleep with that under your pillow?”

She ignored him. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s making that sound?”

“We don’t know exactly what—” He stopped, cut off halfway through his sentence as another wail split the still night air. It was so much louder out here.

Emily felt a cold shiver run down her spine at the memory of the creature on the floor above her apartment back in Manhattan. “You need to be really, really careful,” she said to MacAlister. “We don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with here, but I can guarantee whatever is making that noise won’t be friendly.”

“You, Collins,” MacAlister said pointing at a sailor behind Emily. “Get up on that roof and tell me what you see.” He tossed a walkie-talkie and a pair of night-vision goggles to the sailor, who ran to the building he had indicated. “The rest of you, follow me.”

Emily slipped in beside MacAlister as he led them in the direction they thought the cry was coming from. The night air was chilly and Emily could feel gooseflesh rising on her skin beneath her thin T-shirt. Flashlights cut through the blackness of the night like searchlights, but as they reached the western perimeter fence MacAlister hissed an order: “Lights off.” Instantly all were extinguished. The group fell silent and waited for their eyes to acclimate to the darkness.

From the radio in MacAlister’s hand came the voice of the sentry he had ordered to the rooftop. “There’s movement northwest of my location, sir. I can’t make out what it is but there’s definitely something out there.” The voice was a low, calm whisper.

Emily stared in the direction the guard had said he saw something, her eyes trying to penetrate through the darkness. She tried to picture the area beyond the wire fence from when she had first come ashore: a gentle hill that gradually rose toward the sky, covered in thick alien plants that towered twenty feet or more into the air, perfect cover. She could hear the forest of swaying plants soughing and rustling in the breeze just a few yards beyond where she and the others now silently crouched, weapons at the ready. Her eyes searched the blackness again…nothing…wait! Something
was
moving in the darkness. What
was
that?

Halfway up the hill Emily could see multiple points of light weaving through the tall plants. The lights rose and dropped, up and down, tiny pinpricks of intense luminescence about the size of one of those laser pointers people loved to tease their pet cats with. There were hundreds of them, glowing orange then green then red, flowing silently between the stalks and stems of the plants.

“What the fuck is that?” someone whispered over Emily’s shoulder.

“Quiet,” MacAlister whispered, his eyes focused on the lights as they moved from right to left across their field of vision.

The lights continued to undulate, burning so brightly that Emily could make out their glow even when they were obscured by the thick leaves of the plants they moved behind. They stopped abruptly, and the wailing again echoed through the night. The moment the cry faded away, the string of lights began to move once again.

Out here, without the walls of the building to baffle the sound, the cry had sounded plaintive, melancholy even, as though whatever creature the voice belonged to knew it was the last of its kind, doomed to wander the earth alone.

Or maybe, she had it all backward, maybe it was just the
first
of its kind, Emily thought.

A silence-shattering
crack
exploded from high up and behind where the group was crouched. It was followed immediately by a bright orange flash that left a ghostly outline of its glow on the back of Emily’s eyes. The entire group jumped in unison at the sound of the single rifle shot.

“Who’s firing? Cease fire! Cease fire!” MacAlister yelled into the radio just as a second shot from the same location shattered the silence. “Collins, cease fire.”

Emily saw the lights freeze, then almost faster than her eyes could follow, the cloud of lights coalesced into a single stream and swarmed toward the rooftop where the shots had been fired from. The lights flowed over the fence and Emily caught the faint shadowed outline of something sinuous and dark flowing through the air with them. Three more shots followed in quick succession as the lights landed on the flat roof of the building where MacAlister had sent his man. A silence-filled moment stretched out for seconds as the lights ebbed and flowed then they surged forward in a wave of brilliance, quick as a striking cobra. The night was punctured by an unmistakable scream of agony, shrill and screeching. Then silence descended again as the man’s shriek was abruptly cut short.

The lights twisted and turned in a vicious twirling storm right where Emily judged the rifle fire had come from, the afterimage of the muzzle flashes still glowing in her eyes.

And then the lights reversed their trajectory and flowed back over the fence and into the forest. Emily watched as they streamed up the side of the hill. Abruptly, they blinked out of existence.

“Oh, fuck!” said someone in the dark beside her. “Fuck me sideways. What the fuck
was
that?”

No one answered him.

The group was up on its feet almost as a single entity, racing toward the building where the screams had come from, and Emily found herself swept along with them.

Emily almost screamed when she felt a hand grab hers in the darkness. “Stick by me.” The sound of MacAlister’s voice was an anchor in the chaos.