Revelations (26 page)

It continued to follow the base of the mountain then suddenly cut right and began to head south, moving out into the deeper jungle that had taken root and flourished in what had once been the open desert of Clark County bordering California. It picked its way almost daintily through the trees and thickets of the jungle; Emily could not see one tree uprooted, not one indication of any kind of disturbance or damage to the new vegetation. She was reminded of her father when she was a kid: he a keen gardener, she watching as he carefully maneuvered between the rows of cantaloupes, and tomatoes, and strawberries, and other vegetables, always wary of stepping on one of his prized plants. Yes, that was exactly it, there was a carefulness to the giant machine that seemed so out of place with its size and latent power.

As the machine grew distant, so the sound of its pounding mechanical legs faded only to be suddenly replaced by a louder, much more chaotic sound. The noise was coming from somewhere behind them, Emily realized. She turned just in time to see a stretch of the mountain above them crack and break.

Then, almost in slow motion, a massive slab of the mountain began to slide toward them.

“Run!” MacAlister shouted. Scrambling to his feet he sprinted across the ledge, his feet sliding on the loose gravel, and leaped off the side, landing roughly in the scrabble next to where Reilly and Thor had been waiting. But as Emily landed next to the Scotsman a second later, she could see Reilly already hightailing it away from the outcropping, dragging a reluctant, panicked Thor behind him. The malamute strained at the leash until finally, Reilly dropped it and continued on without him. Thor instantly began to run back toward Emily.

“Head for the forest,” MacAlister yelled through panting breaths, his voice almost lost in the rumbling clatter of the avalanche of rock behind them.

It was impossible to run directly down the side of the mountain, it was littered with too many large boulders to trip over, too many chuckholes to slide a foot into and snap an ankle. The only way to maneuver with any safety or certainty was with a sideways lope, like a deranged crab.

MacAlister was just six feet ahead of her, Reilly was already halfway to the border of the jungle. Thor was leaping forward then back again, barking loudly not at but toward Emily and the source of the thunderous roar that sounded as though it was just feet behind her.

She chanced a quick glimpse over her right shoulder and in that fleeting moment she saw what looked to her like a wave of rocks and boulders flowing across the ground toward her, not more than fifty feet away. The shingle and rocks in front of the tsunami of shattered mountain bounced and shook as it flowed like water down the slope, sending up a plume of gray dust that billowed into a cloud, blotting out the sky. Tiny splinters of crushed and shattered rock flew through the air ahead of the wave, smacking against the back of her jeans and jacket. An inch-long piece sliced across her cheek but her panicked mind did not even register the pain.

Thor’s rapid barking, barely audible over the roar as he sprinted ahead of her, his paws acting like a four-wheel drive on the treacherous terrain, drew her attention back to what she should be concentrating on: running for her life! She turned back just in time to see MacAlister throwing his hands out to his side as his foot slipped off a rock, he twisted to try to regain his balance but then fell and tumbled twice. She managed to leap over his rolling body, narrowly missing his head with her foot.

“I’m okay,” he yelled as she flicked her head in his direction. He was already back on his feet and running dangerously fast to make up the lost ground.

“Mac! Look out!” she yelled as a rough boulder, shaped like a soccer ball and about six times the size, broke free of the main wave of rock, speeding through the air toward MacAlister. Instinctively, he ducked, just as the boulder flew past him, bounced off the scree a few feet ahead of them, then careened crazily down the remaining slope, crushing a row of freshly sprung saplings in the half-naked approach to the jungle, before stopping between the blood-red roots of an alien tree.

MacAlister, his eyes wide with fear, grabbed Emily’s hand in his own as his longer legs ate up the distance between them.

“I can’t make it!” she pleaded, even as she forced her legs to move faster, her breath a steamy hiss between the slit of her lips. MacAlister ignored her, his only response was to squeeze her hand even tighter.

But then they were on flat ground and able to sprint full bore for the safety of the jungle, Thor leading the way ahead of them. The giant trunks, thick chaotic tangles of roots, and walls of brush had never looked inviting until now, the jungle their only hope of escaping the rushing avalanche that seemed so intent on burying them here forever.

Shards of rock began to smack into the ground around them like meteorites, impacting with the sound of shattered china.

Mac hissed in pain as he grabbed at his left elbow, a bloody stain already forming around the torn jacket where a dagger of flying rock had hit. “Just keep running,” he yelled as he dodged around the stump of a tree. “Don’t look back.”

The roar of the rock enveloped them entirely now, and ahead of them, Emily could see the fronds and leaves of the trees at the leading edge of the jungle vibrating and shaking. Reilly, with a hundred-foot lead, was already at the edge of the jungle. He looked back at them and Emily saw his eyes go wide before he climbed over a knot of black roots and disappeared past the tree line.

Emily’s breath was coming in short, rapid bursts, her lungs fighting to suck in air even as they inhaled the choking dust pushed ahead of the falling debris. The ground seemed to pitch and heave as the pressure wave from the millions of tons of rock following behind them raced ahead of the slide.

The blue sky vanished, replaced by the red hues of the jungle canopy before Emily even realized she had made it to the jungle’s edge. She leaped over a root, letting go of MacAlister’s hand so she could keep her balance. Thor landed beside her, ducking under another root and heading deeper into the forest, his leash trailing behind him.
Oh, God, if that got caught on a root or a branch!
She pushed the thought aside and managed three more strides before the sound of snapping branches and splintering tree limbs added to the roar of thunderous rock.

MacAlister dodged to the left, then vaulted over a root that was as thick as his body. Emily propelled herself over the same root, landed awkwardly as she tried to avoid a second limb obscured by the first, and succeeded only in tumbling headlong to the ground. She scrambled to her feet just as a wall of white dust enveloped her. Half-blinded she staggered forward, her hands thrown out ahead of her trying to feel her way, choking and coughing as the dust stung her eyes and filled her nostrils.

The rumbling of crashing rock and splintering trees grew; it seemed to come from all sides now as she staggered through the white fog of pulverized rock, unsure even whether she was still moving in the same direction or whether she was running back the way she had come from.

She stumbled forward.

Ahead of her, a shape materialized out of the white curtain that had descended over her; it was MacAlister. He was lying on the ground ahead and staring up at her. She could see his chest rising and falling in rapid succession. From somewhere she found a reserve of energy, enough to sprint to his side. She grabbed his outstretched hand and began to pull him.

“Get up, Mac,” she yelled. “Get up.” He didn’t move. She could see his lips moving but the words made no sense to her. She yelled again, tugging harder, “Get up…
please
!
” she pleaded.

Again his lips moved, but this time she heard him over the buzzing pounding in her head and the plug of dust and dirt that had clogged almost every orifice of her face, including her ears.

“It’s okay,” he yelled. “You’re safe. You can stop now.”

Emily relaxed her grip on Mac’s hand, although she did not let go completely, and turned around to look back in the direction of the mountain. The dust still wafted through the spaces between the trunks and vines and branches, but it was already beginning to settle like a drift of snow over the ground. Through her watering eyes she could see a few splintered tree boles, but the rockslide had stopped, slowed to a final halt by the jungle.

Emily sank to the ground next to MacAlister, coughing up and then spitting out the dust that peppered her tongue, lips, and throat.

MacAlister, his face as pale and coated as she was sure her own looked, reached out and wiped dust from around her eyes, knocking bits of gravel from her hair.

Before she could convince herself not to, she leaned in and kissed the Scotsman full on the lips. He tasted of concrete, and after a moment of shock he kissed her back, his hand cradling the back of her neck.

They broke away as a rustling from a bush nearby drew their attention. MacAlister began reaching for his rifle but stopped when Thor emerged, his coat a lot grayer than usual thanks to the coating of dust covering it. “Come here, you little bastard,” Emily said, holding her hands out to embrace the malamute, who willingly accepted his mistress’s affection.

A sudden twinge of panic overcame Emily and she grabbed for the camera around her neck. If she had lost the only evidence of the alien craft then their journey would have been for nothing. But it was still there, dangling against her chest.

MacAlister struggled to his feet. Blood streaked the right side of his face and his elbow, and his knuckles were skinned raw, his gloves in tatters.

“Hello?” Reilly’s voice echoed through the trees.

“Over here,” Mac yelled in reply and a few moments later Reilly appeared from behind the trunk of the tree they stood next to.

“Shit, are you two okay?” he asked.

Emily’s eyes met MacAlister’s and she felt a smile rise unbidden to her lips. “Yes,” she replied, “we’re just fine.”

MacAlister returned her smile with one of his own, “Come on, let’s go home.”

Despite their cuts and bruises, and having been almost buried alive by a couple million tons of rock, they made surprisingly good time on their journey back to the helo waiting for them at the Tacoma,
buoyed in part by the knowledge that they had successfully completed their mission. It was a strange positivity, when Emily thought about it, but finally knowing beyond a certainty of a doubt what it was they were dealing with, that Jacob had been correct in most, if not all, of his wild theories, was a relief much like the relief she had heard some people experienced when they finally knew with utter certainty that they had cancer.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” MacAlister asked Emily for the fourth or fifth time since they had begun the long slog back to the hotel.

“I’m fine. Just a few bumps and grazes. How about you?”

He lifted the elbow that had been hit by the shard of rock up to try to examine it, but it was too awkward an angle for him to see. “How’s it look?”

Emily stepped over a twisted root and leaned in to inspect the bloodstained slash that ran along the elbow of Mac’s combat jacket. “The bleeding has stopped, so I doubt there’s any chance of you bleeding to death just yet,” she joked.

Thor gave a sudden deep growl, his hackles rising in response to some unseen threat ahead. He stopped mid-step and Emily froze too, causing Reilly to almost walk into her.

“Mac!” Emily called out, as low as she could. The Scotsman, midway through straddling a fallen streetlight, turned and raised his eyebrows questioningly at her.

She stabbed a finger at Thor. The dog was frozen in place at her side, the flews of his muzzle pulled back to reveal his teeth as his head swiveled from side to side as if he was trying to identify the location of what it was that was disturbing him.

MacAlister jumped down and stalked back to them, his head scanning from side to side, his finger pressed against his rifle’s trigger guard.

“What’s going on?” he whispered.

“Don’t know. Thor just started acting squirrelly all of a sudden.”

Reilly chimed in, “Come on, it’s just a dog. He probably smells something dead or needs to take a piss. Let’s get going.”

“Listen,” Emily said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice, “this dog has saved my life on more than one occasion. I’ve learned to trust him. If he thinks there’s something to be worried about out here, then you should be real fucking worried too.”

MacAlister’s eyes had not stopped moving the entire time Emily talked. They scanned the depths of the jungle, constantly alert for any movement, any sign of a threat. “Okay, let’s keep it as close and quiet as we can, we’re too exposed here anyway,” he said. “We need to find somewhere we can lay up for a while, until Thor here tells us otherwise.” He gave the dog a good-natured rub behind the ears.

The group began moving again, toward what had probably been some kind of store before the rain, but now looked like the entrance to a cave, covered in low-hanging vines and partly obscured by the trunk of a huge tree that had pushed its way up through the sidewalk in front of it.

Thor slunk along beside Emily, panting rapidly, his nose moving back and forth in the air as he again caught a scent only he could smell, his mood becoming increasingly jittery and nervous. Emily fastened the leash back onto his collar and held it loosely in her hand. They were almost at the entrance to the store when Thor gave a deep growl followed by three sharp barks and lunged at something in the foliage of the jungle. The suddenness of the movement pulled the leash from around Emily’s wrist with a whipcrack as the dog sprinted off into the jungle, his barks resonating through the tightly packed trees.

“Thor!” Emily yelled after the quickly disappearing dog, but he kept on running. She stood transfixed for a second, unsure of what she should do. “Shit!” she sighed, then took off after her dog.

She could hear the boots of MacAlister and Reilly pounding after her. They didn’t call out to her, and she became painfully aware that if there was anything threatening nearby, she had almost certainly alerted it to their presence. But she did not care, something had spooked Thor so badly that he was either running toward it or from it, she had no idea which it was, but there was no way she was going to leave her dog behind.

“Thor!” She yelled again, as she scrambled over a protruding explosion of roots, just in time to see the rear end of the malamute wind his way around the trunk of a particularly huge tree, leaping over the roots as though they did not exist. Emily had to slow and carefully maneuver over them. When she was on the other side she saw Thor disappearing around a bright purple bush with dark-red, gelatinous berries that hung like grapes in bunches.

“Thor,” she called out again as she sprinted the fifty feet or so after him. This time it seemed to do the trick. The dog stopped, staring straight ahead, his tail down between his hindquarters, motionless, as though he knew he had done something wrong.

Emily picked her way past the bushes and tree limbs, then rushed to the dog’s side. They were both panting heavily, the humidity robbing the air of oxygen. Sweat stung her eyes and she wiped it away with the back of her arm.

“Jesus, dog. What the hell is wrong with you? You about gave me a fucking heart attack.” She threw a protective arm around his neck, grasping his collar tightly. Thor didn’t seem to hear her, barely registering she was even there; instead, he continued to stare into the distance.

Another growl rumbled up from deep within his chest.

Emily’s eyes slowly followed the direction Thor was staring. Despite the heat of the jungle, her breath chilled in her lungs at what she saw.

In a clearing ahead was a sight unlike anything she had seen before: three entities, humanoid looking, tall, with long, slender yet muscular limbs. They stood about eight feet in height, their oval, featureless heads swaying back and forth as they moved with balletic adroitness around the clearing on long, articulated lower appendages. Emily hesitated to call them legs, because the only resemblance they bore to a human limb was the elongated shape. Each “leg” seemed able to flex at any point along its length, even though she could see no sign of a joint, and where a human foot should be was a half-globe-shaped hoof that looked like an upturned dish. Each creature held an object in its right hand: a cube. Although holding was perhaps the wrong word; guided would be more accurate as the cube appeared to float about an inch above the outstretched palm of each triple-fingered hand, glowing with a faint green luminescence. Occasionally one of the three slender digits of the hand manipulating the cube would twitch, just the tiniest of flexes, and the box would change color, pulsing brightly before dimming again. They wore no clothes and appeared completely sexless. The creatures’ skin had an almost metallic sheen to it, as though they had all been stamped from a single block of aluminum. Each looked identical to the other.

They moved with such grace, their long limbs shifting in smooth unison as they strode across the clearing, pushing the glowing cubes before them, or perhaps being guided by them? When the cubes stopped the creatures became completely motionless. So still were they Emily could have mistaken them for the petrified victims of Medusa if it were not for the occasional minute finger movement as they manipulated the cube-device floating before them.

They’re not even breathing
, Emily thought, watching the nearest being go about its work, not two hundred feet from where she and Thor crouched. It stopped momentarily, moving the cube up to a low overhanging branch of a ruby-red tree.

The cube throbbed, contracting in on itself and then expanding in a weird hall-of-mirrors distortion as it seemed to shrink then expand. Just for a second, in the weird prismatic bowl of light the cube had become, Emily thought she saw somewhere else, another place reflected out of that shimmering box of light. It was a fleeting glimpse into some place manufactured, certainly not the jungle that she knew lay beyond the alien-cube’s operator.

The cube suddenly contracted back to its normal shape with a bright flash of orange and an audible snap. Emily felt a stabbing pain just above her eyebrows, as though she had been staring at a computer screen for far too long.

When she looked again, the branch the humanoid had been examining had vanished, leaving a black cauterized nub near the trunk.

The strange elegant alien moved again, stepping lightly through the few trees that lay between it and Emily’s hiding place, the box’s glow casting strange light and long shadows over the ground.

Thor let out another low growl as it moved closer to them, seemingly oblivious to their presence behind the bush.

“Shush!” Emily whispered, her lips level with Thor’s ear as she cradled the dog to her. She could feel his muscles tense, taut with potential energy beneath his thick, gray fur.

A sudden crashing sound behind them made Emily swirl around, her heart in her mouth, just in time to see Reilly trip and almost fall as he stumbled over a tree’s root.

“Fuck!” he yelled, but managed to recover his balance.

Emily hissed at him to be quiet, but when she turned back to the clearing all three creatures had stopped what they were doing, their bald, eyeless heads swiveled intently in her direction.

Then, as one, they began striding over the ground toward her.

“Oh, shit!” Emily yelled, unconsciously scuttling backward as the aliens—and Emily had no illusions that that was what they were, not created on this world, but from some other distant place—moved in that elegant, flowing gait toward her hiding place. As she moved backward, her grip on Thor’s collar loosened momentarily and he was gone again, launching himself toward the silver figures with a snarl, drool flying from his lips as he raced at the three aliens.

“No, Thor. Stop!” Emily yelled, fear in her voice now. “Please stop.”

She was in a waking nightmare, and she knew there was nothing she could do other than watch as her dog ate up the ground between her and these three humanoid intruders.

All three aliens stopped as they registered the dog rushing toward them. One of them raised its cube and, just as Thor launched himself at the nearest creature, it flashed red.

Thor yelped once and went limp.

Emily let out a strangled shriek of horror as she watched Thor’s limp body crash to the ground at the feet of the creature.

“No!” she screamed in a voice an equal mix of anguish, fear, and rage. She leaped from her hiding place behind the bush and unshouldered her shotgun, quickly leveling it at the nearest alien as she stalked toward it. Her first shot disintegrated the low-hanging branches of a tree to the creature’s right, her aim affected by the blur of tears that had suddenly filled her vision. She wiped one hand across her eyes and took aim at the alien again. The second shot caught it at the waistline, severing it in two. The top half toppled backward, the cube in its hand glowed brightly and stayed suspended in the air for a second, then turned to black and fell to the floor next to the twitching torso. The legs of the creature crumpled and collapsed next to the motionless body of Thor.

“Emily!” MacAlister’s roar of concern was a distant whisper even though she knew he must be yelling. “For Christ’s sake get back here,” he called after her as she walked past the bifurcated body of the fallen alien.

She ignored him and racked another shell into the shotgun. Moving quickly now across the open ground toward the two remaining aliens, she raised the Mossberg to her shoulder again and sighted down the barrel at the next nearest creature just as it turned toward her, the cube in its outstretched palm pulsing rapidly.

“I’m going to kill all you fucks,” she yelled, hot tears of rage spilling over her cheeks. “You’re going back to whatever hellhole you came from. You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?” Her finger caressed the trigger of the shotgun just as the alien’s cube seemed to explode brilliantly.

A numbing buzz surrounded her. It ran across the surface of her skin like static electricity and filled the inside of her head with a momentary flash of blinding light that pulsed through every synapse, penetrated every memory she had, filled each molecule of her being. Abruptly, she was disconnected from her body. It was as though a switch had been thrown, freezing all communication between her brain and her nervous system.