Genesis (19 page)

There could be more of those creatures in there, but Emily’s gut told her there wasn’t, that these two were a couple. Mates, she was certain of it.

The drizzle still fell. The limp bodies of the two dead creatures only added to the depressing aura that seemed to have taken over their lives for the past couple of days. Maybe there was something useful in the two suitcases she had spotted in the back of the minivan. That would be nice.

“Sure,” Emily said finally, “let’s go take a look.”

They followed the path they had created during their escape back to the minivan, a little more cautiously this time, but there was no sign that they were anything other than alone out here now.

Emily tried the back passenger door, but it was locked too. She headed to the rear of the minivan; it had a lift-up tailgate. Emily pulled halfheartedly on the door handle, knowing it, too, would be locked, but, to her surprise, she heard the click of the latch disengaging, and the door lifted up with barely more than a squeak. A musty smell, like old books, wafted out, and Emily turned her head away for a second.

In the storage compartment were the two leather suitcases she had seen earlier, a folded baby stroller, and an electric icebox. Red fungus grew around the edge of the icebox where the lid met the body. It was pretty much a forgone conclusion of what would be inside, but she felt the need to check anyway. Emily picked the box up and set it down. Opening the lid, she was surprised to see a six-pack of bottled water, pint size. Whatever food had been in there was long gone, but the water was a great find.

Rhiannon leaned in and pulled the smaller of the two cases out and popped the locks. She emptied the contents onto the ground and sifted through them; it was full of kids’ clothing, diapers, and a bag of kids’ toiletries.

The second case was locked. Emily pulled the knife from her ankle sheath and forced the cheap locks with that satisfying
thunk, thunk
sound only suitcases seemed capable of making. She flipped the lid open.

Winner!

It held a set of his-and-hers clothes—
Husband and wife? Boyfriend and girlfriend?
she wondered momentarily—enough for a couple of days away by the look of it. It wasn’t hard to imagine the owners of the clothing on their way to visit family or maybe spend a couple of days with their children. Or maybe they had just decided to try and outrun the red rain and had died out here in the middle of nowhere. But at least they all died together, Emily thought, as she rummaged through the rest of the suitcase, which contained a couple of books: a romance and a well-thumbed copy of
The Stand
. She handed both books to Rhiannon, who glanced at them and put them into her backpack. “We can use them for a fire if we have to,” she said. Emily nodded her approval, not sure reading Stephen King’s book would be such a good idea, given their current predicament.

“This is more like it,” she said, smiling at Rhiannon as she fished three pairs of women’s jeans from the case. She held one against her waist. Too big, but then everything was these days; she had probably lost twenty pounds or more since this all began. But if she turned up the cuffs, they would work. She stripped off her soaked jeans and tossed them away, slipped into the new pair, and made a few adjustments until they fit her well enough that she could move freely. “Oh my God, these feel good,” she said as she felt the cool, dry weave of the denim against her legs. There were socks too, and underwear—oh God, clean panties! Emily emptied out the kids’ clothing from the first case and began packing everything useful into it.

Rhiannon fished a small roadside emergency bag from a side compartment, unzipped it, and pulled out a first-aid kit, which she promptly stowed in her backpack. “Are these dynamite?” she asked, holding up two red sticks that did bear a passing resemblance to the explosive.

Emily smiled. “Emergency flares,” she said.

“Cool!” said Rhiannon, and stuffed them in her backpack too.

“Where’s Thor?” Rhiannon asked, suddenly aware the malamute had vanished.

Emily looked around as if she expected him to be at her feet, but he was nowhere to be seen. A quick survey around the perimeter of the vehicle didn’t turn him up either.

“Shit!” she said when she was sure the malamute wasn’t just peeing on something, then, “Thor!”

There was silence for several long heartbeats, then Thor’s bark came to them from off to their right; it was urgent, demanding.

“Thor,” Emily yelled, “come here, now.”

Again Thor barked that same almost playful but demanding bark.

“Leave the stuff here,” Emily said. “Let’s go see what he’s gotten into now.”

“Thor?” Emily called as she and Rhiannon pushed through the foliage in the direction of his excited barking.

Laced throughout the alien grass were what were obviously paths the two creatures they had encountered used on a regular basis, judging by how well-worn they were. Emily and Rhiannon followed one now toward the sound of Thor’s insistent bark.

“There he is,” said Rhiannon, then, “Whoa!”

The malamute was at the end of the path. He waited outside a—what? Emily couldn’t call it a nest; it was too large, too intricately woven from the surrounding blades of grass. It was more like a work of art, big enough to have easily accommodated the two animals they had just killed with room to spare.

It was a den—yes, that was the right word. And Thor was sitting outside it, near a curved opening close to the ground that was probably the entrance.

“Thor, come over here,” Emily said, suddenly aware that the den was easily big enough to accommodate more of the creatures. She drew her pistol in anticipation of another attack from within.

Thor ignored her command, instead dropping to his front paws, his butt in the air, and firing bark after bark at the opening.

Emily approached cautiously.

“Get over here, Thor,” Emily insisted. This time the dog obeyed, meandering over to greet the two girls, no sign that he felt threatened. Emily took him by his collar to make sure he couldn’t change his mind and run off again. It wasn’t like him to disobey a command.

“Jesus, be careful,” said Emily as Rhiannon stepped up close to the den and knelt down near the opening.

A faint but familiar
rhill-tik-tik-tik-tikkkkkk
rose out of the den.

“Emily, come look at this.”

Emily ordered Thor to sit, then joined Rhiannon at the opening.

“What am I . . . oh!”

Inside the den, toward the back wall, Emily saw three small bodies, slightly larger than her open hand, moving together, tangled almost into a ball.

“Babies,” said Rhiannon. “Oh my God!” She turned and gave Emily a look of horror. “I killed their parents. Oh my God.”

Emily was momentarily lost for words. “You had no other choice,” she said eventually. Obviously the two creatures Rhiannon had killed were simply protecting their offspring and their territory. If Thor had not been so aggressive, they probably would have stayed in the long grass until the humans had left the area. But that would have meant they would have had to give up the clothes and other supplies they found.

“But what are they going to do now? How will they survive?”

“It’s a hard, harsh world, kiddo,” Emily said, reluctantly rising to her feet. “And you’re doing about as well as anyone could be expected to.”

She offered her hand to Rhiannon and pulled her to her feet too.

“Daylight’s burning. We need to get moving.”

The travelers had passed only the occasional vehicle since touching down on the I-40. Most had been nothing more than wrecks, destroyed by either the passage of time or the great storm that had spread across the world. All save the minivan had been useless to them.

The freeway had seemed strangely deserted.

Over the last kilometer that had begun to change. The number of vehicles strewn across the highway gradually increased as what had been empty lanes began to fill with stalled vehicles. By the time they had travelled another two kilometers they were looking at three lanes of eastbound vehicles, mostly big rigs, nose to tail in every lane, as though they had all rolled to a stop together. The jam stretched ahead of them, before disappearing into the mist and drizzle.

The great storm had swept through and, seemingly at random, rocked some of the big rigs over onto their sides. As the companions cautiously made their way between the abandoned vehicles, they saw that the sheer density of the trucks had kept most of them right where their drivers had stopped them. But time and the weather had not been so kind to these relics, stripping the paint from the cabs and flaying the canvas and metal from the freight containers until they looked like row upon row of skeletons, strips of still-attached canvas flapping in the breeze like dead skin.

Still, some had managed to survive relatively intact.

“Do you think any of them still work?” Rhiannon asked as they walked up alongside a rig that still looked to be in good condition.

“Doubtful,” said Emily as she climbed up onto the footplate of the cab and tried to look inside. A thin layer of red moss spun a frosty web across the window. Emily wiped it away with her sleeve. “And even if we found one we could get to start, there’d be no way to maneuver it out of this snarl-up. These things are packed tighter than sardines in a can.” She tried the cab door, but it was locked.

Seeing nothing of use within, Emily climbed down and took a second to think. It was still raining, the sky was gray, and night was edging closer. With the heavy cloud cover, it was going to get dark much earlier. Emily estimated they had maybe an hour and a half of light left before it was too dark to travel safely. She stepped away from the convoy of dead trucks to the side of the road. The misty rain limited the distance she could see ahead, but there was no indication of the three-lane tailback of trucks ending anytime soon.

“We’ll keep going until we get to the last truck or it gets so dark we can’t carry on,” Emily said. “Then we’ll pick one to spend the night in so we can get out of this rain. That okay?”

Rhiannon nodded and walked on.

The trucks smelled. It was a new smell, made up of the scent of
slowly decomposing wood, and metal, and gradually decaying plas
tic, sprinkled with a dash of whatever the trucks had been hauling, all bound together by the musky scent of the wet red vegetation.

As they continued on, Emily found unbidden memories, spontaneously activated by the web of scents popping back into her mind as they trudged onward through the vehicular graveyard. Here the plastic memory of splashing in a kiddy paddling pool in Mom and Dad’s backyard when she was no more than four or five, a puppy, long since dead and gone—Rex, his name was Rex—running and yelping along the pool’s perimeter, barking excitedly as she splashed and laughed. The vague recollection of her parents standing watchfully over her, shadows in her memory but always there for her. Here the unmistakable smell of wet pine, walks through the forest with her first serious boyfriend and secret meetings under the stars.

Her mind was tired, and she wished the memories would simply fade back into whatever part of her brain had been hiding them. The sense of melancholy these memories brought with them, of times she remembered so fondly, were now not only discolored by time but stained with the blood of an entire planet. It created a frisson of sadness and anger so intense it felt as though the emotions were alive within Emily, hollowing out a space for itself in her chest.

Emily looked at her companions. Rhiannon was such a dichotomy, surely as much a unique product of this world as her own son was. This tough young girl who should have been on the cusp of womanhood, excited by the prospect of dating, graduating high school, experiencing the heartbreak of first love, the joy of stepping out into a life that she could make and call her own. A husband. Kids. Grandkids. And a life well lived. What were the chances she would ever get to experience any of those things? Was she condemned to live under the boot heel of the Caretakers? Or, perhaps even worse, would she have to live in a world where people like Valentine still dictated how she would shape her life? Not if Emily had any say in the matter.

And Thor. Poor, bedraggled, loyal Thor, walking between the two women, eyes fixed ahead as always, ears up, his gray-and-white coat glistening with raindrops. The last of his kind, Emily was sure. Blissfully unaware of the fact, sure of only one thing, his love for his family. Emily knew she could not have asked for a more loyal companion. She had no idea what she had done to command the loyalty of such friends, and part of her also knew that she did not deserve it, but she was glad of it anyway. Because, even out here, in this barren alien world, she knew she was as rich as anyone left on this Earth.

The lines of vehicles creaked and moaned like condemned souls as the companions picked their way through them. For the first kilometer or so, the trucks and occasional car and even a Greyhound bus—a perfectly round hole drilled through almost every window—had all obviously been brought to a controlled stop by their now long-dead drivers. But that had changed over the past couple of minutes as the orderly procession of decaying vehicles had edged up the incline of the hill the travelers found themselves climbing. The farther up they walked, the more it became obvious that
these
vehicles had not stopped in time to avoid slamming into the truck ahead of them. It began as just minor fender benders, but a couple had obviously hit at some speed, despite the incline of the hill.

Visibility began to decrease the higher up they went, the low cloud covering the road with a mist of cold droplets, limiting their view to just a few meters. By the time they reached the summit, Rhiannon and Emily were holding hands to make sure they would not be separated.

The descent down was even more chaotic. The vehicles had become a tangled mess of crushed cabs and jackknifed trailers. They had to carefully pick their way through the carnage or risk a broken ankle or sliced foot.

“At least we can see where we’re going now,” said Rhiannon, about halfway down the opposite side of the hill, her face covered in a thin sheen of water left there by the thinning mist. Apparently, the heaviest cloud had been located on the western side of the hills, and their visibility was improving with every meter they took down now.

Ahead of them, a gas tanker had managed to skid to a stop, its shiny aluminum tanker-trailer jackknifed across all three lanes of traffic, blocking the road beyond, the cab twisted awkwardly like its neck had been broken. Emily and Rhiannon clambered under the trailer . . . and straight into a scene of utter carnage.

Directly ahead of the tanker were four partially destroyed vehicles, still recognizable for the trucks they once were, but after them the road was like a scene from a war movie. The freeway was littered with debris and the blackened scorch marks of what had obviously been an enormous inferno, a fire that had burned with such intensity it had boiled away the top layers of the freeway and even melted the guardrail along the central divide. What was left of the road was covered in the grime-encrusted remains of vehicles, none of them intact, all barely recognizable. The pieces were so scattered, and there were so many of them, it was impossible to tell how many vehicles they had originally belonged to. Even the open ground to the right of the eastbound lanes still bore the blackened shadow of the fire, the soil so devastated that the alien vegetation had not been able to take root there all these years later.

“Damn!” hissed Emily.

“Creepier than an uninvited clown at a kid’s birthday party,” Rhiannon said nervously, repeating one of Parsons’ favorite idioms. She was right, though—the torn, smashed, burned vehicle parts were . . . well, scary looking. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to picture some gigantic alien beast stampeding through the trucks, tearing them apart simply for the fun of it, leaving their chrome-and-fiberglass carcasses to rot in the New Mexico desert. And, of course, in this strange new version of the world, that might just have been what had happened.

The truth, though, was probably much simpler, Emily was sure. As they reached the final quarter kilometer, the devastation was total; trailers and trucks had plowed into each other, merging together until it was almost impossible to tell one devastated vehicle from another. There had been a fire or an explosion or maybe both. It had consumed everything, reducing the big rigs down to little more than their chassis. Pools of rubber littered the ground, tires melted by the heat of the inferno that had ripped through here. Again Emily’s imagination was more than eager to reconstruct the possible scenario that had led up to the devastation: an agitated driver wanting to get home had overestimated his luck and boom, catastrophe had rained down on him and everyone else for a half kilometer back who hadn’t been able to stop in time. The tailback that had ensued, the one they had been following for the past five kilometers, had condemned everyone behind them to die in the cab of their vehicle or out in the desert if they had tried to make a run for it. Either way the end result would have been the same.

“Oh my God,” said Rhiannon, stopping suddenly and pointing past the destruction. “Emily, look at that!”

Emily followed Rhiannon’s excited pointing, following the line of the road as it dipped through the mess of burned-out vehicles, leveling off and then unerringly continuing east. But about a half kilometer after the road flattened off again, it curved through another set of smaller hills, the height of which Emily could not tell as their summit was hidden behind a misty veil of rain. And there, nestled in between the two hills Emily saw a squat, white building.

Emily felt a smile spread across her face. The first genuine smile she could remember since before Mac had left.

The building was boxlike with a flat roof and guttering running along the edges to drain pipes in each corner. Emily could see three windows along the freeway-facing wall. She could not be certain, but the windows looked to be intact.

“Thank God,” said Rhiannon.

Emily’s smile grew broader. The idea of having somewhere dry to spend the night was akin to offering a steak dinner to a starving man. The clouds above their heads had lost their silver-gray edge and were now becoming black; night was approaching fast. If the building was as undamaged as it looked from here, it would be a perfect place to spend the night.

“Come on,” said Emily, almost laughing with exhilaration. “I’ll race you.”

They had taken only a few steps when Rhiannon let out another gasp of surprise and froze.

“Oh!” Emily said softly as she stopped too.

Behind the windows of the building, the unmistakable glow of man-made light now shined.