Revelations (22 page)

“I’m going with or without your ‘permission,’” she continued. “I have to know what that thing is, what kind of threat it poses to us. Jesus! It’s not about my safety, or my pigheadedness. This is about our survival, the future of our species, of which there are very fucking few of us left. If we’re going to be able to fight these invaders, then I
have
to know everything!”

MacAlister continued to insist Emily was going nowhere. She wasn’t sure whether to be angry or flattered at MacAlister’s determination that she remain behind, but it didn’t really matter either way, she
was
going, he just did not realize it yet.

“Look,” Emily continued, taking some of the edge and attitude out of her voice, “I’ve survived a trek across this country that would make Lewis and Clark think twice. I’ve already proved myself. You
need
me, not the other way around.”

MacAlister regarded her with those cool green eyes, his face betraying nothing. “Okay,” he said eventually, “but you have to keep up. We won’t slow down our pace for you. We’re out of here in five minutes. Be ready or stay here.”

MacAlister pulled a compass from the breast pocket of his combat jacket and took a bearing on their position. “We’re going to head for the trench south of the crater. That’s a good five-mile hike as the crow flies, but it should get us close enough to the crater that we can get some optics on it and see what’s what. Normally, I could travel five miles in an hour or so, but we have no idea what it’s going to be like on the ground down there, but if Emily’s prior experiences hold true for Las Vegas, then it’s going to be a bit of a slog, so we’ll pace ourselves, but I want to get to our rendezvous point by early afternoon. That’ll give us enough time to assess the situation and still have enough of the day left for us to make it back here again. I do not want to spend a night out there. Burris! You’ll be staying with the helo. Drop anything that sticks its head up here that isn’t us. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the young sailor replied, obviously nervous about being left alone.

“You sure you don’t want to stay here?” MacAlister asked Emily as they waited at the roof access while Reilly collected his gear.

She turned to face him. “I’m sure,” she said, trying to keep the offense she still felt from her voice. “Besides, if I’m not with you, who’s going to rescue your Scottish ass the next time you get into trouble?”

MacAlister let out a deep guffaw of laughter. “You are so right. One question though: Who the hell are Lewis and Clark?”

She couldn’t help herself and smiled back. Something passed between them right there on the roof of the hotel. She felt the energy flow between them like water, warm and comfortable. Now the only question was whether they would stay alive long enough to act on those feelings.

Emily felt a disquieting sense of déjà vu shiver through her as she stood in the dim stairwell of the casino. Memories of her flight through her apartment complex in the first days of the end flashed through her mind. They disappeared as the beam from MacAlister’s high-intensity flashlight illuminated the cramped landing as though it were day.

“Something wrong?” MacAlister asked when he saw her hesitate on the first step as Reilly handed him his backpack and he slipped it over his shoulders.

“Just some memories I’d rather forget. Nothing I can’t handle,” she said and shrugged her own backpack of supplies, including a digital camera rig MacAlister had supplied her, onto her shoulders. She checked her shotgun, then double-checked she still had the extra ammo she had stashed in the pockets of the light jacket she was wearing. She had more than enough to ruin any
thing’s
day. Still, the echoing clang of the door to the roof swinging shut made her heart skip a beat as it echoed down the empty stairwell like the first toll of a funeral bell.

Nothing to worry about
, she told herself, and took a deep breath. She had Thor, MacAlister, and Reilly with her. They should be more than capable of handling anything that tried to screw with them. And she had been through much worse all on her own, so she would be damned if she was going to lose it here. But still a vague shadow of unease hovered over her heart.

The first two levels of the stairwell were bare, unpainted concrete, the floor number of each new level stenciled in large, bright fluorescent spray-paint over the doorway leading off the stairs. It was a fair bet that no hotel guest or tourist was ever supposed to see these areas, they were probably just for the maintenance and hotel staff, hence the lack of even a coat of paint. Their boots scuffed the uncarpeted steps as they made their way cautiously downward.

A second security door, easily opened by a crash bar on their side, marked the transition from utilitarian to Vegas kitsch, the naked gray concrete walls and floors suddenly replaced with a nice, if slightly worn, carpet and peach-painted walls.

“Hold the door open,” MacAlister told Reilly as he shined his flashlight through the doorway toward the opposite end of the corridor. A table with a vase full of fake flowers rested against the wall on the next landing down. MacAlister grabbed it, tipped out the plastic roses, and placed it between the doorjamb and the door to keep it open.

Even with the thick layer of carpet beneath their feet, their footfalls still echoed ominously through the stairwell as they descended through floor after floor.

The lower they got, the more cloying the air became and Emily found herself intermittently having to wipe a combination of perspiration and humidity from her forehead with the arm of her jacket before it dripped into her eyes. She could feel the slick dampness of sweat under each arm and along the small of her back.

“Where the hell is all this moisture coming from?” she whispered.

“It’s like a tropical rainforest out there,” said MacAlister after they had descended past the eighth floor. “Most of the moisture must be coming from…
hold it
!” His arm shot out to block Emily’s progress.

Ahead of them, the stairwell had disappeared, leaving only a ragged lip of ripped carpet and empty black space.

“Careful,” said MacAlister as Emily moved closer to the edge, shining her own puny flashlight down into the darkness. It barely penetrated.

“Let me borrow your light,” she said to the Scotsman. MacAlister’s more powerful flashlight illuminated a gaping hole that dropped down the remaining eight levels to the ground floor of the casino. She could see a pile of concrete, debris, and the glint of scattered and crushed slot machines far below. Thick red vines and creepers twisted through the rubble.

“What the hell would cause that kind of a collapse?” Reilly asked.

Emily swung the flashlight down to one ruined floor then the next. The concrete-and-steel rebar that jutted out from each shattered level looked odd to her. There were none of the sharp edges or points Emily would have expected to see if the collapse had been caused by stress, instead, the edges of the exposed floors below her looked worn, rounded even, as though it had been eroded away by water or friction over a significant period of time. She shined the light up the walls; there was no sign of any water damage on the walls or staining on the carpets.

“Look at that,” Emily said to MacAlister, pointing to the exposed face of the level beneath them as he stepped in close to her, his hand holding onto the metal banister attached to the wall for support. “That doesn’t look right to me.”

MacAlister took the flashlight from Emily’s hand and focused it on the next level down, slowly running the beam along the broken concrete edge of the floor and then up the supporting wall to their level. The wall was pockmarked with tiny dimples. Each dimple had some kind of powdery residue in it.

“It looks pitted,” he said finally. “Almost as though it’s been worn away by rain or some kind of attrition. Maybe it’s a result of the storm? Internal stresses? There could have been a water pipe running along this floor that burst, maybe?”

“Maybe, but there’s no sign of water damage,” said Emily. “And I doubt that even if a water pipe had broken above us that it could have done this kind of damage this quickly, could it?”

MacAlister moved the light over to illuminate the wall next to where they stood. It too was dimpled and pitted. The holes were roughly circular, less than a half inch wide and about the same depth. They reminded Emily of bullet holes.

MacAlister probed one of them with a gloved finger, disturbing a fine powder the same gray color as the concrete. The wall flaked away under the pressure of his probing fingers, crumbling to dust. He pressed harder and a ragged slab of the wall a foot high and two feet wide slipped away and fell to the carpet, disintegrating and scattering like sugar across his boots when it hit the floor.

“Shit!” MacAlister spat. All three of them took an involuntary step away from the edge of the precipice. “It’s like it’s just crumbling away.” There was nothing left of the slab of wall that had fallen other than the powder.

“Could just be a bad concrete mix,” Reilly suggested. “I doubt there were many building codes when they built this place back in the sixties or seventies. Could just be cheap material.”

“Whatever the reason,” MacAlister continued, wiping his hand on his trousers, “there’s no way we’re getting across that hole. We’ll have to find another way down.”

The trio doubled back up to the landing on the ninth floor and slipped through the door into the main hallway. A corridor of rooms, some with the telltale sign that their occupants had transformed and escaped through the locked doors, extended out in front of them.

MacAlister shined his light down the corridor, illuminating an
EXIT
sign at the far end.

“Let’s give that one a try,” said Mac.

They began walking toward the other stairwell, their shadows leaping and dancing along the walls like gibbering demons.

“Well this brings back memories,” said Emily quietly.

“Of what?” asked MacAlister.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Over dinner?”

Emily laughed, “God, you’re persistent. Sure, over dinner.”

“So, it’s a date then?”

“Don’t push your lu—” Emily felt the floor move beneath her feet. For a second she thought she was okay, that it was just something loose, but then she felt the floor shift and crumble, and she fell into darkness.

Emily’s head was filled with darkness and noise.

She heard Thor’s panicked bark and MacAlister yell a curse. She saw his hands reaching for her as the floor beneath her crumbled beneath her weight. Her hands flailed for MacAlister’s outstretched hand but all she found was empty air as she dropped through the floor and into the blackness below. She exhaled a shocked half yell of surprise, half scream as she fell, her arms and legs windmilling in a vain but gallant attempt to fly.

She landed with a jarring thump on the level below, her legs crumpling to the floor, quickly followed by her ass as she inelegantly flopped to the ground with a gusty
oomph
, the air knocked from her lungs.

For a moment, she lay there, stunned, disoriented, and shaken, spitting dust and bits of concrete from her mouth, but thankful she was still alive. She had only fallen about ten feet through the ceiling and onto the next level, her descent slowed enough by the crumbling floor to not have gained too much momentum.

Carefully, she began to feel her way around, her hands automatically moving in the darkness to where she sensed the wall should be. She felt the warmth of the wall beneath her fingers…then it too crumbled under the pressure of her hand and she felt the wall disintegrate. Disoriented in the darkness, she fell sideways, following her hand as it pushed through the plasterboard of the wall like it was wet paper and, she guessed, into the room that must lie beyond it. She coughed twice in rapid succession as she inhaled the dust, then hacked it up and spat onto the floor.

A pool of light from above appeared like a spotlight on the floor near her, quickly moving to illuminate her and the surroundings.

“Em, can you hear me? Are you hurt?” MacAlister yelled.

“No, I’m okay, I think,” she spluttered as she spat more of the dust from her mouth and brushed remnants of the ceiling from her chest and shoulder. It had been a short, abrupt fall that could have been much, much worse. If she had dropped awkwardly or the ceiling-slash-floor had not slowed her fall, she could have easily broken an ankle or an arm, and then she would have been screwed. They would have had no other option than to return her to the helicopter and go on without her, or even abandoned the mission completely.

Slowly, she withdrew her arm from the hole it had made in the wall. In the light of Mac’s flashlight she could see the same pockmarks scattered across it. Her arm brushed gently against the hole as she extracted herself, sending a cascade of fine gray dust to the floor. The drywall was completely desiccated.

Her arm now free, Emily tried to stand up, carefully monitoring herself for any injury that might be lurking beneath the rush of adrenaline that still had her heart beating like a drumline.

The floor shifted beneath her again and she froze.

“Shit!” she murmured as she felt the carpet sag. “This whole fucking place is crumbling around us,” she yelled to MacAlister. His face was faintly visible next to the white flare of his flashlight, peering through the ragged hole in the ceiling. “I don’t think I can move without risking another collapse.” As she spoke the floor dropped another inch and she let out a squeak of fear.

“Hold on,” MacAlister called down, his voice calm enough to worry her.

“Not like I can go anywhere, is it?”

MacAlister’s face disappeared from the hole; it came back a few seconds later and Emily could just make out something in his hands through the dazzling light. “Here,” he called out, “I’m lowering a rope down to you.”

The floor shifted again beneath her as Emily reached out to take the length of Paracord as it dropped down from above. MacAlister had tied the end into a large loop with a slipknot. She was going to have to sit up to get it over her head and shoulders, and as she carefully repositioned herself, the floor buckled beneath her butt again, and Emily felt something give. Part of the floor to her right dropped away, tumbling to the level below. Emily glanced down through the newly formed hole. Illuminated by Mac’s light she could see that the next floor down was also gone and maybe even the one below that. It was as though the building was dissolving, from the ground on up. If she fell now it would be at least a three-story fall…and that would be it. Game over.

Slowly she slipped one arm through the loop of rope, then her second arm. Only then did she let out a sigh of relief.

“Okay, I’m—” The floor beneath her gave a loud crack and she felt herself falling again. Her scream became an
Oomph!
as the loop of Paracord pulled taut around her chest and jerked her to a halt, leaving her dangling over the three-story drop. Above her she heard Thor’s frantic barks echoing down to her, mixed with grunts of exertion from Mac and Reilly as they strained to hold her.