Revelations (23 page)

“Hold on, Em,” Mac yelled, his voice echoing through the empty corridors and floors below her. “We’ve got you.”

Emily concentrated on controlling her breathing as she swung like a plumb bob at the end of its line.
Just breathe
,
she told herself
. Slow, deep breaths
. Her eyes searched the exposed space around her, looking for anything she could use to hold her weight, to give the two men above her some help.

She had come to a stop just below the ceiling that had, moments before, been the floor that had broken her fall. She saw that the floor of this corridor was almost completely disintegrated, collapsed along with thirty feet or so of wall, exposing the rooms beyond and the ones below that. A lichen-like mold covered most of the remaining walls and the ceiling above her. The mold was a dark-brownish color, covered in small tubular fronds, similar to those of a sea anemone. The fronds undulated back and forth, swaying as though driven by a breeze, and as the creaking rope swung her back and forth, she saw a piece of the remaining wall crumble and fall in a cascade of mortar and red.

“Oh, shit!” she exhaled as what she had thought was lichen suddenly and inexplicably began to inch its way in the direction of the newly exposed wound in the wall.

As the men two floors above her began to slowly raise her back up to safety, a single thought occupied Emily’s mind: The destruction to the building wasn’t because of bad workmanship or poor material, it was being slowly but surely being devoured by the plant life that was growing around it.

MacAlister grabbed Emily under the arms and heaved her over the lip, dragging her away from the crevasse. When he let her go they were both lying next to each other on the carpet, panting hard, almost face to face, and she peered into his eyes for a second, analyzing the emotion she saw in them.

Thor’s wet tongue on her cheek broke the moment.

“I love you too,” she said, then quickly added, “Thor.”

MacAlister stood and held out his hand to her, hefting her to her feet.

“That’s one less ‘I owe you,’” he said. “But don’t think this means you’re getting out of dinner with me.”

They edged their way carefully along the corridor toward the stairs, their backs against the wall with enough distance between them that if one fell, the others would at least have a chance to react. They might just as well have been walking across a glacier, at any time a crevasse could open up and swallow one of them…or all of them. But they reached the landing of the stairwell with little more than a few worrying moments brought on by sagging floors and the occasional loud crack beneath their feet. Feeling secure in the shelter of the stairwell Emily began to explain what she had seen while she was dangling so precariously from the rope.

“It makes no sense,” said Reilly when she was done telling them about the strange building-eating mold she had seen while she was, quite literally this time, at the end of her rope.

“The one thing I know for certain about these aliens is that they are super-efficient, they waste
nothing
. If the lichen I saw really was eating the concrete and the drywall, then I would say it’s a safe bet that it was
designed
to do just that.”

They had already passed beyond the level that had been blocked on the opposite side of the building. The rest of this stairwell seemed to be intact, but as they dropped level after level they began to see pockmarks in the wall again where the lichen had begun to eat its way through.

“Well, at least it only seems interested in devouring the building rather than us. That’s a refreshing change,” said MacAlister. He pushed open a door onto the corridor with the barrel of his rifle and stuck his head through to check out the damage for himself.

“Jesus, that’s a hell of a mess. This place isn’t going to be standing for very much longer. If that shit keeps eating through the walls, it won’t be long before it hits a support wall. All it’s going to take is for one of those to give way and the whole thing is going to come down like a house of cards. We need to get this job done and get the hell out of here.”

The stairs terminated at the ground-floor casino level next to a bank of closed elevators. Row upon row of slot machines lined the floor of the room beyond, deactivated robots standing sentry over gold that no one was ever coming back for. The only light other than their flashlights came from a set of smoked-glass doors at the opposite end of the huge gaming room and they threaded their way through the dead machines toward it.

“Would you look at that?” MacAlister said, his voice filled with awe as they approached the exit. Through the doors the group could see the red-covered floor of the alien jungle. Before them lay a primal spectrum of red hues laid bare by bright shafts of light that had managed to cut their way through the thick foliage of the forest’s canopy far overhead. Everything else was blanketed by deep shadows and ominous-looking silhouettes of what Emily imagined were the huge trunks of trees. The result was a surreal palette of color that was completely disorienting to their eyes, as though they found themselves at the bottom of an ocean.

“Where’s the fucking Mad Hatter?” said Reilly.

Thick roots and branches had pushed open or shattered several of the glass exits, allowing runners and vines to creep inside the entrance of the casino, across the floor, and along the walls.

“You’re not kidding,” said MacAlister, “but we’re not here to sightsee. Are you both ready?”

Emily nodded and repositioned the shotgun.

MacAlister and Reilly readied their weapons and stepped closer to the exit, covering each other as they advanced. Emily unslung her Mossberg from her shoulder.

“Everyone remember where we parked,” MacAlister quipped and gave the door handle a tug. It rattled open far enough for him to kick away the creepers winding up the pane and through the door handle and slip through, followed quickly by Reilly and Emily.

“Jesus, why is it so quiet?” Reilly asked, his voice so low you would have thought he was in a library instead of standing on the edge of a sprawling alien world.

He was right, though; it was eerily quiet out here. What sound there was came from the rustle of the canopy a hundred or more feet above their heads and the scrape of stiff vines against the side of the Tacoma as the vibration travelled down their stems.

Emily was glad it wasn’t just her that found the silence of the jungle more disturbing than the actual presence of the alien plants themselves. It was as though the three humans had walked out onto a movie set or a theatre stage, the actors and audience not yet arrived.
Or maybe we are the actors in this particular movie?
Emily thought.

The air was thick and wet, and Emily felt her lungs complain as she sucked the heavy air in. The exterior walls of the Tacoma
,
those that she could see through the thick tangle of vegetation that clung to its walls, were dimpled with huge pits, the bigger brothers of the holes they had seen inside. It looked as though direct exposure to the exterior environment either sped up the process of deterioration or there was a more potent agent at work out here.

The forest in Valhalla she had travelled through on her way to Alaska had been something to behold, and she had barely managed to make it out of there with her life, but it paled into insignificance compared to the space she now stood within.

Looking up, she could see the boughs of giant trees intermingling in the canopy, twisting into tight bundles and knots, then exploding outward to form a latticework of chaotic branches that blocked all but the smallest amount of light from reaching the ground. It looked so different from below than when they had flown over it in the Black Hawk. From down here, she could see the same mesh of broad, overlapping leaves that gave the roof of this forest an almost skin-like texture, but below it the intricate tangle of branches, ropelike vines, and hanging creepers ran across the surface like veins, fastened to the main lattice of thicker branches. Below that was level upon level of twisted limbs running from one corkscrew tree trunk to the next. The floor was littered with the twisted roots of trees and a thick, red carpet of lichen as well as an ever-growing layer of detritus falling from the limbs above that carpeted what had once been road and sidewalk.

Down here, it smelled even more dank, musty, and moldy, like a laundry basket full of soiled clothing.

MacAlister pulled his compass from his pocket and took another bearing. “Our target came down just on the other side of McCarran Airport. We’re going to get as close as we safely can to the landing point and lay up there while we recon the area and see what we can see. Once we’ve got an idea of what we’re dealing with, we are out of here. So, consider this a friendly reminder that this little excursion is
strictly
a recon trip. Once we get the intel back to Point Loma we’ll figure out what we intend to do next. No heroics. Am I understood?” As he spoke he adjusted the backpack he carried to a more comfortable position on his shoulders.

Emily nodded. Reilly just shrugged.

“It’s a five-mile hike through this jungle. We don’t know what might be waiting for us, and I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to end up as lunch for some beastie. So, we keep it tight and we keep it quiet. If you see anything, I want to know about it. Do
not
engage unless I give you the go ahead. You both understand?”

They did.

“Alright, let’s get a move on then. Time’s a-wastin’.”

MacAlister positioned himself at the front of the group and took a final bearing from his compass. Reilly dropped back behind Emily and Thor.

Then they were off, moving in the same direction the UAV had taken along the Strip.

Unlike the majority of the towns Emily had travelled through on her way to Alaska, it looked as though very few people had actually made it out of Las Vegas. The main drag was choked with vehicles, tail-to-nose lines of car after car, with the occasional truck or Metro bus thrown in for good measure. It was a total state of disarray; carnage might describe it best if it wasn’t for the absence of bodies.

It was a snapshot of a moment in time, frozen along this street for eternity. It marked the end of humanity, a final chapter to a story that was now lost forever to time. Each vehicle they passed was both a tomb and a metal monument, a eulogy written in plastic and chrome and aluminum, with no one left to observe or mourn the occupants’ passing.

It stood to reason, when Emily thought about it, that there would be so many cars clogging the streets considering how most of the town’s residents would have been temporary, vacationers trapped here in the middle of the desert with no way to get home, the only way out by vehicle or through the airport. This city’s final moments would have been of panic and absolute terror. She shuddered to think what it must have been like in the casinos as desperate vacationers sought some way to escape the catastrophe falling toward them like a tidal wave. It must have been terrible. Truly, truly terrible.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas
, Emily thought as she passed a light-green Ford, three perfectly round holes drilled through the windshield and side windows. Well that slogan sure as hell turned out to be truer than most people ever expected it would.

Sidewalks were all but impassable, between the vehicles that had careened into storefronts and the thick knots of roots forcing their way through splintered and cracked concrete. Add to that the accumulation of fallen debris from crumbling buildings littering the street, and the ever-present danger that part of the hotels and casinos lining either side of them might collapse on top of the travelers at any moment, and it was safer to simply walk in the road.

And anywhere there was still an exposed stretch of road or shop façade or section of sidewalk that had not yet succumbed to the creeping red invader, the same pockmarked deterioration devouring the innards of the Tacoma could be seen. The town was dissolving bit by bit around them, being picked apart like a turkey carcass dropped near a nest of ants.

Almost two miles later and Emily began to feel the effects of the almost constant up and down and over as they negotiated their way around the labyrinth of abandoned vehicles. It was like climbing rather than walking, that and the fact that she was soaked through with perspiration from the humidity. She had to resist constantly reaching to pull her clammy shirt from her chest, the jacket was already off and tied around her waist. And God! Her underarms itched like a mother too.

No conversation passed among the group. Only the occasional grunt of exertion as they negotiated yet another obstacle broke the monotonous silence.

Ahead of them, a large swath of the forest had been swept aside, crushed and broken by the collapse of an entire hotel, its name lost forever in the rubble, as it had swept down into the street like an avalanche. Emily wanted to climb over it, but MacAlister diverted them around instead.

“Can’t risk the chance that there might be hidden pockets that might collapse under our feet,” he said.

The deeper they moved into this jungle, the more Emily had the feeling that they were walking through a living, breathing organism rather than a simple collection of plants and trees. To her there was an almost physical sense that the twists and knots of vines and branches, and the seemingly never-ending rows of triple-trunked trees, were aware of them all as they sweated their way forward. It was a spooky yet strangely unthreatening sense of trespassing.

Eventually, MacAlister stopped ahead. “Let’s take a twenty-minute breather,” he said, his face wet with perspiration, his jacket, underarms, and back stained a deep black.

Reilly didn’t need to be told twice; he dropped his backpack and sat down, his eyes almost instantly closed, and, if Emily wasn’t mistaken, he was asleep in almost a minute.

“Does he suffer from narcolepsy or something?” Emily said, nodding at Reilly, as she joined the two men against the side of a Buick that had found its final resting place buried engine-deep into the driver’s side of a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Mac gave a good-hearted laugh. “No, in the navy you learn pretty quickly to grab as much sleep as you can whenever the opportunity presents itself.”

Emily emptied water into a bowl she took from her backpack and held it while Thor lapped thirstily from it, then swallowed down a couple of gulps of the lukewarm water from the canteen herself.

“This place is creepy as hell,” she said when she was done, wiping away the excess water from her lips.

“Oh, I don’t know,” MacAlister replied. “I’ve seen worse. At least nobody’s shooting at us.”

“You’ve seen a lot of action?”

“I’ve seen my share, more than my share, maybe.”

“Have you ever shot anyone?” She mentally kicked herself as soon as the words had left her lips.

MacAlister looked up at Emily. “That’s kind of a personal question for someone you barely know, don’t you think?”

“Sorry, can’t help it, I’m a journalist. Okay, how about, has anyone ever shot you?”

MacAlister laughed, more from exasperation than mirth. “No,” he said, adjusting his backpack so he could lean back against it comfortably. “But I was blown up once.”

“Really?” Emily said, her voice incredulous.

“Yup, I’ll tell you about it sometime. In fact, not only was I blown up, I was also technically dead for a whole eight minutes.”

“No way? You’re shitting me, right?”

“I am most certainly not. I saw the whole white light and everything.”

Emily said nothing this time, but her expression said go on.

Mac gave another long sigh of exasperation but the smile on his face spoke otherwise. “I was involved in an operation in…well, let’s just say, overseas. It went pear-shaped at one point and we were engaged by a much larger enemy force. While we were waiting for the helo at the extraction point, the vehicle I was taking cover behind was hit by an RPG, and I was blown up with the truck.
Boom
!
” He used his hands to illustrate the blast.

When he started talking again his voice became quiet, almost wistful.

“I don’t remember anything about the explosion, but I do remember standing in a very long tunnel with a white light at the opposite end. I couldn’t walk but I kind of floated toward the light, there were figures in the light that I know I recognized, knew exactly who they were, but now there’s just a faint memory of recognition and I have no idea who I think I saw. Anyway, while all this was going on, my mates grabbed me and brought me back. They kept me alive long enough for the helo to pick us up and get me to a field hospital in Germany. Next thing I remember, I was back home and laid up in hospital. Since then, I’ve tried to keep an open mind about death and what comes next.”

“I would imagine that kind of an experience could change your outlook on life pretty quickly,” she said gently.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” MacAlister recited.

“Now you’re quoting Shakespeare? There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Mr. MacAlister.”

“My guys chose not to leave me behind that day. I left them all behind the day the red rain came. I’m really not sure how I’m supposed to handle that.”

A sudden wave of snoring rattled from Reilly’s slack-jawed mouth, interrupting them.

“Get some rest, we’ll be out of here again before you know it,” MacAlister said, and closed his eyes.