Revelations (12 page)

They followed the sailors into the building and up the stairs. On the top floor, the group slowed and raised their weapons, covering the corridor and the access door leading out to the flat roof beyond. The door was ajar, creaking eerily as it moved back and forth in the breeze.

“Collins?” MacAlister called out as he moved forward, placing the flat of his hand against the door. There was no answer. MacAlister pushed the door slowly open, then stepped out onto the roof, his rifle raised to his shoulder as he swept the barrel back and forth across the deserted rooftop. The other sailors followed quickly behind him, fanning out across the roof, providing cover for every potential angle of attack.

Emily allowed them a few seconds to position themselves then followed behind the last sailor, her Mossberg at the ready.

“Collins?” Emily heard MacAlister yell out again, then, “What the…? Oh, Jesus!” A flashlight flicked on, illuminating MacAlister’s standard issue boots.

He was standing in a wide pool of blood.

They found no sign of the sentry’s body or any of his equipment. And judging by the amount of blood that had pooled on the roof, Emily did not think there was much chance of locating Collins alive, either. Apparently MacAlister shared her grim reasoning. Flashlights illuminated the darkness of the roof they stood on as sailors shone their lights over the sides of the building and down onto the ground surrounding it, searching for any clue as to where their comrade had disappeared.

“I want everyone off this roof right now and back to the main building immediately,” MacAlister said once he was sure Collins wasn’t lying injured nearby. Emily could hear the restraint it took not to yell the command. “And switch those damn lights off. We’re too exposed up here.”

“But sir, what about…Collins?” a voice from the darkness asked.

“He’s gone and there’s nothing we can do for him. Right now we need to get back to the main building and make sure it’s secure. If there are any more of those things out here I don’t want them getting access to it. We’ll organize a search party for Collins in the morning.”

“But, sir—”

“No buts. We don’t have nearly enough light; we have no idea what that thing was, and no way of tracking it. No, we get off this roof now,” MacAlister commanded.

Emily followed the shadows and sound of scuffing boots back to the exit door and down to the ground floor. The group jogged quickly across the open ground and back to the safety of their building.

“Everyone in?” MacAlister asked the guard standing just inside the exit doors.

“You’re the last, sir.”

“Good. I don’t want you to move from this position until I send someone to relieve you, am I understood?”

The sailor nodded, his head bobbing nervously.

“And if you see
anything
at all out there I want to know about it immediately. You do
not
engage it. You come and get me or the skipper. Got it?”

Another nod from the sailor.

MacAlister positioned a pair of guards at the door to each floor, then told everyone else to head back to bed. “There’s nothing you can do, and it’s going to be another long day tomorrow. We’re going to need to organize a search party to try and find Collins so I need you all alert and ready.”

When Emily quietly opened the door to her room, Rhiannon was still awake, her worried face illuminated in the glow of a battery-powered LED lamp. Thor was sitting on the cot next to her, his tail thumped loudly as Emily stepped into the room.

“Is everything alright?”

Emily sat next to Rhiannon, stroking Thor’s head. “Everything is just fine,” she lied. “Just a false alarm.”

“I heard gunshots.”

“It was just a mistake, nothing to worry about. Now, come on. It’s late and I don’t know about you, but I need my beauty sleep.”

Rhiannon seemed to accept the lie and, before Emily had even removed her clothes for bed, she heard the girl’s breathing change to a slow, steady rhythm as sleep overcame her.

Emily switched off the lamp and climbed between the sheets. She lay staring into the darkness, running the strange event she had witnessed earlier over in her mind again.

Those lights had seemed to be linked together, almost as if they were part of the same creature, or at least, operating as a single entity.

This world, this truly
new
world, was waking up, she thought. Humanity’s crown had been stripped from its head and they had been cast out into the red wilderness as naked and vulnerable as every other creature that now walked this planet. More so, in all probability, because none of them had any idea what the rules for this new world were, and those rules had most assuredly changed…

…and every soul under the roof of this building was as vulnerable as the next.

Early the following morning the whirling mist between Point Loma and the rest of the world had turned into a deep, impenetrable fog. It hung in the air, sucking in all the light from the rising sun, turning the world a depressing gray.

Captain Constantine and his men were already up and assembled when Emily joined them in the refectory. He had split the remaining crew not tasked with guarding the compound into two search parties. One led by him, the other by MacAlister. Emily could tell from the looks on the men’s faces that they held out little hope of finding their missing comrade. Everyone present on the roof last night who had witnessed the attack had also seen how much of Collins’s blood had been left behind after the man was plucked into the darkness. There was little doubt as to his fate. If the man had still been alive last night, there was no way he was going to have survived for more than a few minutes before he bled out. Constantine was just going through the motions for his men’s sake.

“Good morning, Emily,” MacAlister greeted her when he saw her coming through the door. His eyes were bloodshot, dark rings of puffy flesh below them. He did not seem his normal nonchalant self. Understandable, after all, he had lost one of his men on his watch, and she was sure he was taking it very personally.

“Hi,” she replied. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

MacAlister shook his head. “We’re going to push into the area where we think Collins was taken. The captain and his group are going to reconnoiter the buildings on our side of the fence. Probably best if you stay here in camp.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea, going out there?”

“We have a missing man. We have to at least try and bring his body back…assuming we can find it.”

“Okay, let’s get a move on,” the captain said, leading the way through the door. “Team A with me. Team B, fall in behind Sergeant MacAlister.”

Emily followed MacAlister and his men as far as the gate on the west side of the camp. The fog was already burning off, she noted, as she stopped at the security-fence line, lacing her fingers through the links of the chain.

MacAlister took his men and moved off around the perimeter, heading in the direction of where they had seen the wave of lights disappear the previous night. Overnight, the red jungle had taken on a new menacing overtone. Not that it had changed in any way, of course, it was just that now they all knew
something
lurked in that thick mess of leaves and vines, roots and trunks. Something new to this planet.

MacAlister and his team edged their way cautiously through the thick fronds and plants of the jungle’s perimeter just beyond the security fence, using the barrels of their automatic rifles to push back the leaves. In seconds they had disappeared from her view, with only the occasional movement of one of the tall fronds to mark where they were heading.

Emily felt a pang of worry stab at her gut. What if that thing was waiting for them in there? What if it knew they were coming? She was surprised at just how concerned she was for the Scotsman. She had not realized until now how attached she had grown to him. Her affection for the man was all the more surprising considering the circumstances of their predicament. With the human race on the brink of extinction, affairs of the heart were still as distracting as they had ever been. Life had been
so
much easier before the end of the world, she decided.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous
, she thought.
What am I going to do? Stand here all day pining?
No, there had to be something she could turn her hands to while they were out looking for signs of their fallen comrade. She needed to keep occupied, to keep moving. Idle hands are the devil’s tools and all that.

Reluctantly, she released her hold on the fence and headed back to Building One.

Emily occupied her mind by helping the remaining sailors chop through the plants still covering the space between Building One and the surrounding offices. They had managed to remove a good-size swath of the weeds between them when there was a yell from the sentry stationed at the main gate.

Emily looked up and saw MacAlister and his men stepping back into the base. She let out a long sigh of relief at sight of him and then mentally kicked herself for allowing him to get under her skin so damn easily.
Sneaky bastard
, she thought. She had always been a sucker for a man in a uniform, and when you threw in the accent…well, she guessed she could be forgiven for caring.

Emily dropped her machete and began walking over to meet them.

“No sign of Collins,” MacAlister was telling Captain Constantine as she drew closer to them. “The vegetation is so dense in there it might just as well be the jungles of Borneo. We could have walked right by him and never known it.”

“We are going to need to push that forest back if we want to maintain any kind of security around the perimeter,” the captain said, his hand methodically stroking his beard as he spoke. “Suggestions?”

“It’s going to take forever to chop that stuff down, it’s just far too dense and I wouldn’t be able to guarantee anyone’s safety while they were beyond the fence. Hell, I can’t even guarantee their safety this side of the wire, but I don’t see we have much in the way of a choice. I’ll start organizing teams once we’re done with clearing inside the perimeter.”

“Why don’t we just burn it?” Emily suggested.

“If we had access to flamethrowers, or some napalm even, that might work but we don’t carry anything like that onboard the sub,” said MacAlister.

“But there’s a fuel depot on the other side of the compound,” said Emily, pointing to the aboveground fuel tank she had recognized when they’d first arrived. “Couldn’t we just siphon it off and burn the vegetation line back?”

Both men looked in the direction she was pointing.

“It’s risky,” said the captain. “Keeping it under control is going to be difficult. All it’s going to take is a stray ember on one of these roofs and we could have a major problem on our hand. And fuel is going to be at a premium from this point onward, who knows if we’ll find more anytime soon.”

“If we put bodies on every roof we should be able to cover any risk of fire, so long as we choose the right time,” Emily explained. “And there’s a pretty consistent breeze coming in off the ocean that should push the fire and smoke away from us…probably.”

MacAlister and the captain stared wordlessly at each other as they silently thought over Emily’s suggestion.

“What do you think?” Constantine asked MacAlister.

“It’d have the added advantage of potentially driving back anything…” MacAlister paused as he searched for the right word “…
undesirable
that’s shacked up in there too, skipper. It could certainly take care of two problems.

“The vegetation isn’t dry,” he continued, “so that should go a long way to helping keep the chance of the fire spreading down to a manageable level. If we concentrate on small areas at a time, and have a crew ready to catch it before it spreads, we should be okay.” He shrugged and nodded, “Yeah. I think it could work.”

Captain Constantine considered the options. His hand was stroking his beard again in what had become an obvious tell of concentration to Emily.

“Alright, I’m convinced. Let’s give it a shot, shall we?”

“Good thinking, Emily,” said MacAlister as they walked across the newly cleared area of the camp. He smiled and gave her elbow a light squeeze.

Emily felt herself flush bright red. “Goddamn it,” she muttered under her breath, but enjoyed the warm tingle she felt anyway.

Two crews, most of them bare-chested and soaked in sweat by what had become an afternoon that hit the high seventies, cut a six-foot-deep firebreak around the edge of the west fence. One crew chopped away at the stubborn trunks and branches, another made sure the debris was moved clear of the slowly forming firebreak.

Emily helped cart off the debris and stacked it in piles along the beach. Rhiannon busied herself bringing water to the men.

The gap between the fence and the new edge of the jungle would give them enough space to keep the fire from leaping to any of the closer buildings. Captain Constantine ordered sailors onto each roof with at least two handheld fire extinguishers apiece that they collected from the buildings. Two “floating” pairs of sailors would be on standby, ready to mop up any stray fires that might flare-up around the camp.

If the worst happened, and the fire managed to get a toehold within the camp, they were all under orders to retreat to the beach and the safety of the sea.

When the break was completed all personnel not in MacAlister’s “pyromaniacs”—his name for the three-man team that would be setting the fires—were to retreat to a safe distance. They moved to the seashore where they could still have a decent view of MacAlister and his men as they set the fire.

MacAlister laid a line of gas from the start of the break then twenty feet out along the edge. As he walked back he doused the foliage and leaves with a second jerrican of gasoline. He emptied the last drops from the last jerrican and tossed it away, checked the wind direction one final time—it was good, blowing northwest, away from the camp—then lit a makeshift torch made from a broken broom handle wrapped with gas-soaked rags. MacAlister ducked as the flames from the torch flared dangerously close to his face. He held the burning torch at arm’s length for a few moments to ensure it was completely lit, then took two steps closer to the jungle and tossed it into the gas-soaked vegetation.

There was a bright flare and the front of the jungle bloomed with orange flames that sped along the path of the accelerant laid by MacAlister, who was quickly backing away from the conflagration. The flames leaped from plant to plant, and curling tongues of orange fire crept up thick trunks, consuming leaves and branches.

In seconds, what had been a lush, impenetrable jungle became a maelstrom of flames that leaped ten feet above the highest point of the canopy. A thick cloud of red-tinged smoke rose from the fire and then whirled into a funnel that began reaching toward the heavens, twisting and roiling as it was driven higher into the air by the hot air beneath it.

Minutes passed and a line of smoking, blackened stalks that sprouted from the bare ground for about six feet back from the firebreak formed as the fire devoured the vegetation. Emily caught a whiff of the pungent smoke as it floated across the distance to her. It reeked of a chemical causticity so unlike normal burning vegetation that Emily couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the odor was. It reminded her of the smell of disinfectant that seemed to permeate every inch of any hospital she had ever spent time in. Whatever these plants used to draw their energy from the sun, it was not chlorophyll.

MacAlister was jogging back toward the gate, a wet cloth pressed to his mouth, his back to the fire now as it pushed away from him. His eyes caught Emily, Rhiannon, and Thor watching him, and he raised his right hand to give her a thumbs-up that turned into a wave.

Despite her best inner intentions, Emily found herself smiling and waving back. She glanced at Rhiannon and saw the little girl staring up at her, a huge grin on her face.