Revelations (21 page)

“Clear!” MacAlister yelled after he completed the scouting run across his section of rooftop.

“Clear!” the two sailors echoed back within seconds of each other, lowering their weapons, even as their eyes continued to move, checking the sky and every shadow for any sign of movement.

Emily opened her door and was immediately hit by a wave of desert heat that sucked the moisture from her throat.

“Good God, it’s hot,” she said to Thor as she slid open the passenger compartment door and enticed the malamute down onto the pad. They both stretched, and then quickly joined the three men in the shadow of one of the huge air-conditioning units.

“Alright,” MacAlister said, “let’s get this show on the road. Reilly, unload the UAV. Burris, lend a hand.” Both sailors nodded and moved back to the helicopter and began to unload the case carrying the drone. They hefted it out and moved it onto the landing pad next to the helo and quickly began pulling pieces of the disassembled drone from the foam-protected interior.

“Excuse me for a minute while I make sure those two clowns don’t bugger it up,” MacAlister said and joined his comrades.

Emily moved to the edge of the roof. A brick security wall that came up to just above her midriff ran around the circumference of the Tacoma. She leaned over and looked down almost fifteen stories to where the pavement should have been. Below, she could see nothing but a red sea of creeping vegetation. It filled the space between the Tacoma and every other building. The alien plants had found easy purchase on the white filigree panel decoration fixed below each set of room windows on every floor. The rising tide of jungle had managed to make it to the eighth floor of the Tacoma, obscuring every level below that with its red vines and branches; skinny shoots had already begun their ascent toward the next floor.

A heat shimmer lay over the red canopy of the jungle, the light refraction giving the reaching shoots and vines on the side of the building a disconcerting illusion of movement; at least, Emily
thought
it was an illusion.

The town smelled…dank, wet. It was how she imagined the Amazon rainforest might smell: pungent with humidity and strange, unknown life. All that was missing to complete the picture were the wild screams of monkeys as they flung themselves from branch to branch or the shrill mating calls of birds echoing from deep within the foliage. But there was no sound other than the rustle of leaves and branches as the hot Mojave winds blew between the buildings. That and the occasional cuss word from the men on the pad as they tried to follow the instructions for assembling the UAV.

Emily was already sweating—it must be at least ninety degrees thanks to a cloudless sky and a merciless sun—but the humidity made the air feel thick and slow and Emily found herself sucking in rapid, deep breaths of the hot air. Thor was panting loudly, drool falling from his open jaws, droplets hitting the hot roof around his paws and evaporating before they could form a pool. He had positioned himself in the limited shade offered by the shadow of the security wall. This was not the kind of weather a thick-coated mutt like him was designed for and she made a mental note to make sure she gave him plenty of water while they were here.

A few minutes later MacAlister rejoined Emily at the ledge. He was wearing his combat jacket and trousers, a scrim-net scarf tied around his neck, and a camo baseball cap perched on his head. He cradled his rifle in one arm like a child; in his other hand he held a canteen of water, which he offered to her.

“No thanks,” she said, tapping her own water bottle on her hip.

Mac took a long swallow of the water then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Well, apparently they actually do know what they’re doing. The UAV should be ready to launch in a couple of minutes. Care to join us on the veranda?” He made a sweeping gesture toward the helipad.

“I’m sure I’d love to,” Emily replied in her best Southern belle accent. She was rewarded by one of Mac’s wry smiles as they walked back to join the two seamen.

The UAV did not look like anything Emily had been expecting. She had thought it would resemble a model airplane or maybe a miniature version of the Black Hawk. Instead it was circular, about three feet in diameter, with four electric motor-driven propellers positioned toward the outer edge, supported by an x-frame with a larger central section that housed the battery and the essential electrical systems. It stood on three stubby legs that raised it just over a foot off the bitumen-covered rooftop. Positioned between the legs of the aircraft, fastened by a cradle fixed to the underside of the fuselage, hung a digital video camera.

“It’s a quadcopter,” Reilly said, as if he could sense her confusion. “Much more agile than a plane or a helicopter, more versatile too. And because the motors are electric rather than internal combustion, it’s quiet as fu—. It’s just really quiet. I can sneak this little bugger right up next to
’
em and they won’t even know it’s there. The camera’s fully adjustable, zooms up to times-twenty magnification. Takes video and stills and feeds it all back to this laptop controller.”

Reilly tapped the cover of a modified laptop computer sitting next to the UAV. Most of the keys on the computer were the same as would be found on any regular laptop you could buy from a big-box electronics store, but to the right, where you would usually find a numeric pad, was a small joystick and a set of sliders.

“I control it with the joystick and we can see what it sees on the screen here,” Reilly continued. He ran his hands over the surface of the quadcopter like it was a pet. “Beautiful,” he said.

“Alright Gollum,” said MacAlister, raising his eyebrows. “Why don’t we get your precious up into the wild blue yonder, eh? Think you can do that? I’d like to get home as soon as possible; I could murder a cuppa.”

“Yes, sir,” Reilly replied, picking up the UAV. He leaped from the landing pad and positioned it on an open piece of roof. He made a few adjustments to the machine and jogged back to the laptop. He pressed a key on the laptop and Emily heard the soft purr of the UAV’s engines as they sprang to life. On the screen a fish-eye view of the roof appeared from the machine’s perspective.

“Alright, here we go,” Reilly mumbled, his attention focused entirely on the screen and keyboard as he grasped the joystick between thumb and forefinger and gently eased it back.

The view on the screen changed in unison with the UAV as it leaped upward. It ascended about thirty feet into the air and then darted around the roof with, Emily had to admit, impressive adroitness. The image on the screen changed to an overhead view of the four humans gathered around the laptop, then changed to a blur of red as the machine sped off in the direction of the crash site.

“Batteries are good for forty minutes of flight,” Reilly informed them. “Should be more than enough time to get there and back.” They watched as he guided the drone back up Las Vegas Boulevard, flying just feet above the canopy. On either side the vague outlines of what had maybe once been stores were momentarily visible as the UAV sped past, behind them the rising tide of red edged up the side of the larger casinos and hotels, the high watermark increasing on a daily basis.

“It looks like we’ve been gone a hundred years,” said Burris, his voice echoing the melancholy Emily thought they probably all had felt at some time. She was glad that she was not the only one who had noticed the aged, dilapidated look the town had taken on in such a short period of time. The parts of buildings she could see flashing by on the computer screen looked weatherworn, their fascias dulled and pitted. Bright signs that had once called out to the thousands of visitors who made their way to this Mecca of self-indulgence and excess now hung dirty and dull from their fixtures, extinguished forever, or had vanished altogether.

The scenery changed again as Reilly banked the drone a sharp left and headed out over McCarran Airport, the control tower and tailfins of landed jets poking through the canopy the only way anyone would recognize that an airport had ever been there.

Generations from now, Emily wondered, should their tiny group of humanity manage to survive and thrive and begin to explore this world again, how would this place look to them? This strange new world would be their new normal; her world, the old world that had existed for thousands of years only to disappear in the space of eight hours, would be the alien one to them. A place of legends. It would be a distant racial memory of greatness, passed down from generation to generation, pieces of reality disappearing with every new voice that carried the story onward. She, and the other survivors, would become fable.

“Look,” said MacAlister, pointing a finger at the screen and simultaneously dragging Emily’s thoughts back to the present. “There it is.”

Sure enough, in the distance, a pixelated black form had appeared against the sea of red. The crash site, stark against the backdrop of the mountains rising up behind it.

“Can you make the approach from the south?” MacAlister asked. “I want to follow the path it took.”

“Can do,” Reilly said and banked the drone hard right, heading toward the trench the object had dug out of the ground when it landed/crashed.

The UAV skimmed over the canopy top. It was surprisingly uniform in appearance, as though the plants that formed the jungle grew at a constant set rate. Reilly only had to make the occasional small adjustment to the craft’s flight, dodging to the left or right to avoid the occasional protruding limb or particularly large branch that rose above the canopy cover.

Gradually, the vague line of black pixels coalesced into a berm of debris, dirt, and dead plants that started just a few feet high at its southern end then gradually grew taller as the heavenly body had finally hit the earth, furrowing a
V
-shaped scar in its wake. On either side of the channel her earlier suspicions about the level of damage to the surrounding area were confirmed: Little seemed to have been affected. The housing estate it had first landed in—overrun with the alien vegetation and only discernable by the box-like shapes hidden beneath the vegetation—still stood for the most part. Some of the flora had been blackened by heat and hung limply from scorched trunks, but there really was surprisingly little in the way of heat damage considering whatever the object was had burned with such an intense ferocity, Emily noted.

“Hold it there,” MacAlister ordered suddenly as the quadcopter maneuvered over the start of the channel. The picture wobbled as the UAV pulled up then stabilized again as it hovered in place. “Okay, now rotate it around through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees.” The image on the screen showed an almost untouched landscape beyond the debris field kicked up by the furrow; it was barely a few feet deep at the tail end, but quickly deepened to a good thirty or so feet, by MacAlister’s estimation.

“Alright, let’s go see what we can find at the end of this thing. Take us up there, slow and steady.”

The image on the screen began moving again as the quadcopter advanced along the gully. It was almost perfectly straight, and Emily could begin to make out a shape forming at the distant far end of the trench. It was still nothing more than a dark blob of gray-and-black pixels from this distance, but there was definitely
something
in the crater.

“It’s like
Star Wars
,” said Burris, watching the screen as his compatriot piloted the drone expertly between the canyon walls of debris and shifted earth.

MacAlister stared hard at the kid, an expression of bewilderment on his face. “How the hell did I wind up with such a bunch of bloody nerds on my crew?” he asked, before turning his attention away from the red-faced sailor and back to the screen.

“Slow it down,” MacAlister said as the distant blob began to form into an indistinct shape. “Can you zoom in?” he asked.

“Not without stopping. I’ll lose orientation really fast,” Reilly answered.

“Do it,” Mac said.

The quadcopter slowed to a standstill again, hovering close to the peak of the west side of the berm. Small particles of dust and debris kicked up by the four motors flew past the lens of the camera like bugs. Reilly rotated the camera using the keyboard’s arrow keys until it was centered on the crater at the far end of the canyon, then pressed and held another key. The image blew up to twice then three times its size as the camera zoomed in, but the image remained just a blurry mass of black-and-gray blobs, obscured for the most part by the natural curve of the trench.

“Can’t you make it any clearer?” Emily asked.

“Sorry, this is the best I can do from here. Let me take it up a bit higher.” The screen wobbled and tilted like a ship in a storm as Reilly commanded the UAV to climb higher into the crystal-blue sky. The screen swayed first left then right as the drone was buffeted by a gust of wind that rustled over the sheet of red below it, then leveled again as its gyros automatically corrected for the pitch and yaw.

This new vantage point wasn’t much better, the resolution of the camera simply was not high enough to capture a clear image at this range, but Emily was confident she could see
some
kind of structure in the shadows cast into the pit. Of course, it
could
just be her mind trying to make sense out of unrecognized shapes, but she didn’t think so, she had a distinct sense of complexity, of mass within the blackness.

“Is that some kind of tower?” MacAlister said, pointing with a gloved finger at a dark line that rose out of the main body of black on the screen.

“Impossible to tell. It could just be an artifact of the software,” Reilly said. “Sorry, sir. We have to get closer if we’re going to know for certain.”

MacAlister sighed, thought about it for a second, then said, “Go ahead. But only close enough that we can positively ID whatever is in that crater.”

The camera zoomed out as the UAV began moving forward again, the distant image gradually becoming clearer but still remaining frustratingly indistinguishable.

“Does that look like—
Woah
!” Reilly exclaimed as something zoomed in front of the UAV, filling the lens for a moment, buffeting it enough that the image jerked violently up and to the right. “What the fuck was that?” He placed the aerial vehicle in hover mode an
d panned the camera first right then left, searching the surrounding area for whatever had just dived by the aircraft. Nothing but red ground and blue sky filled the screen.

“Maybe it’s above it?” Emily said.

Reilly panned the camera up toward the twelve-o’clock position.

“Ahh, fuck!” said Reilly. Something was falling toward the UAV, a silhouette dropping out of the sky, using the sun to hide its approach like a World War I fighter plane.

“Move it!” yelled MacAlister, but Reilly was already ahead of him and had shifted the quadcopter to the right into a shallow dive that tilted the distant horizon until it was almost at ninety degrees to the perpendicular. Then the video feed was spinning crazily as the shape collided with the UAV. A set of jaws and a single red eye appeared briefly, the mouth lined with two rows of serrated teeth. It appeared on the screen for a second before disappearing in the twirling blur of images as the machine continued its tumble toward the ground. The final image was of a large, red branch rushing toward them, then the screen went black. Two words appeared in flashing white on the screen:
SIGNAL LOST
.

“Well shit!” said Mac as he stood from his crouch, picked up his rifle, and slung it across his shoulder. “Looks like we’re walking from here, gentlemen.”

“No way, Emily. You are staying put, right here where I know you’re safe,” MacAlister insisted for the umpteenth time since the drone had been knocked out of the sky.

Emily continued to ignore him as she collected her own gear.

“I can always detain you, you know?” he said. “I can have Burris here keep you under close arrest.”

“Thor!” Emily commanded. The big dog was at her side in an instant, his ears up and his eyes on the three men, the tone of his mistress’s voice communicating the rising tension he already sensed. “And I could always have Thor here argue the point with him.” She nodded toward Burris. As if on cue, Thor’s long pink tongue slipped from between his jaws and ran over the length of his muzzle as he licked his chops, a long strand of drool dripping to the floor. Emily thought she saw Burris swallow hard. He
did
throw a nervous glance in Reilly and MacAlister’s direction.