Genesis (22 page)

Thor started to bark frantically from behind her, shocking Emily from her trance and severing the connection. She shook her head as though that would dispel the filaments of disorientation she still felt floating within her mind.

Focus, Goddamn it
.

Rhiannon’s back was to the truck, and the pulley system was set back against the interior wall; Rhiannon would not be able to see the approaching danger until it was too late. Emily flashed the truck’s headlights and hit the horn hard.

As soon as she had done it, she knew it had been the wrong thing to do. A ripple, slightly brighter than the main white light, passed through the onrushing wave, and Emily thought she saw the wave accelerate, shifting ever so slightly toward the bay where she, Rhiannon, and Thor waited like trapped rabbits.

It was a split-second decision, but in her mind the thought process seemed to stretch on for an eternity: Should she just chance it, bundle Rhiannon into the truck, and make a run for it and hope that she could outrun the wave? She calculated the risks and probabilities—beyond the beautiful shimmering light was nothing but the darkness; the wave was moving with lightning speed; her ability to avoid any obstacles in the road—and came to the conclusion that there was no way they would make it. The light wave was moving far too fast for her to be able to guarantee she could safely navigate them out from this place.

So that left only one option.

Rhiannon had stopped pulling the chain, the door raised to her chest height, and was now looking back at the truck, the quizzical look on her face silently asking Emily,
What?

Emily threw open the truck door and rushed to Rhiannon’s side.

A hum, like a high-tension power line throbbing with energy, was beginning to fill the air ahead of the wave, barely audible over the deep rumble of the truck’s engine but growing louder with every second.

“What are you doing?” said Rhiannon. Emily ignored her, snatched the chain from her hands, and shouldered the girl aside. As quickly as she could she pulled on the chain and the door began to gradually drop back toward the floor. As the crack between door and floor became smaller so the intensity of both the sizzling sound and the luminosity increased, until the inside of the vehicle bay sounded like fat sizzling on a red-hot skillet, and the shadows had all been forced to the room’s corners.

Rhiannon noticed it now too. “What is that? What’s going on?”

Something white and glowing brightly zipped through the shrinking gap between the floor and flew up toward the ceiling, then another and another followed it.

“Emily, what are those?” Rhiannon screamed, but Emily ignored her and continued to drop the door the final few inches, her hands slick with sweat, slipping on the chains. Another blur of white incandescence zipped under the space—C
ome on, come on—
until, finally, with a metallic clunk, the door met the concrete.

The crack of a pistol being fired deafened Emily for a second. Instinctively she ducked and turned to see Rhiannon, her pistol drawn and aimed into the air over Emily’s shoulder. The girl’s face was a mask of concentration, her eyes slits, both arms extended the way Emily had taught her, as she tracked something through the air. Emily turned in the direction the girl was aiming in time to see a white and glowing flash of light diving toward her. She scuttled back, rattling the roll-up door as she collided with it, then gasped as Rhiannon’s pistol barked twice in quick succession, and the glow exploded into tiny splotches of liquid light that cascaded through the air like miniature fireworks, fading to nothing before they even hit the ground.

A ragged shape hit the concrete near Rhiannon’s feet with a wet
splat!

It was about as big as Emily’s hand, a corpse-gray body that was almost translucent. What might have been an abdomen until Rhiannon’s nine-millimeter slug ripped through it was now nothing but a ragged, torn bag leaking a still-glowing viscous liquid onto the concrete. A pair of red wings—feathered, Emily thought at first, but on closer inspection, she saw that the wings were covered in what looked more like long, fine scales—sprouted from the joint that connected the torso to the abdomen. A hundred or more limp black tendrils that might have been legs hung from the body. They still twitched spasmodically, but any chance of further examination disappeared as Rhiannon brought her boot down hard on the creature’s body, turning it into a pool of goo.

“Ugh! I think I’m going to be sick,” Rhiannon said as she lifted her heel and regarded the mess on her sole.

Thor had somehow hopped from the storage area of the truck, across the backseat, and into the front cab. He now sat in the front passenger seat, his paws on the dashboard, barking furiously, spittle streaking the windshield. Emily looked up in time to see five more of the glowing creatures zipping around the roof space between the support beams and girders. Their abdomens seemed dim by comparison to the brightness she had seen approaching, and they appeared disoriented, uncoordinated even, nothing like the elegantly organized mass of creatures she had experienced in her dream. Perhaps being separated from the main group broke the intense connection she had experienced when she dreamed among them?

A loud metallic clang made both women jump. Something had just hit the sheet metal siding of the building. Hard.

As Emily searched for where the sound had come from, she heard another and then another bang as more of the creatures hit the outside of the building. Dimples were beginning to form in the walls where the light bugs were barreling into it.

“Come on,” Emily yelled. She grabbed Rhiannon’s hand and dragged her toward the car, threw open the passenger side, and let Thor down. She was about to head to the back to retrieve their packs when one of the panes of glass above the farthest bay door exploded inward, raining glass down onto the concrete. A stream of light flowed in through the broken window space and twirled around the ceiling, absorbing the five stragglers who had made it inside first, their abdomens now glowing as brightly as those of their kin. A second and third pane shattered almost simultaneously, the sound of breaking glass smothered beneath the hissing of the wings of thousands of the creatures flooding into the vehicle bay and the constant barrage of bodies hitting the sides of the building with a sound like hard-bounced tennis balls.

Emily did not wait to see how many more creatures would make it inside. She stretched across the center console and switched off the engine, pocketing the keys. If her dream was accurate—and there was no reason to doubt it wasn’t, not now—then she knew there were millions, maybe even tens of millions of these creatures out there, like a swarm of starving locusts, and all that kept them separated from the swarm were the walls of the building.

Rhiannon stood silently mesmerized by the light show swirling through the metal rafters above her head. Thor barked crazily, scooting back on his hind legs with every yelp. They had to get out of here now, before these things gathered themselves and realized that lunch was just a few meters below them.

Leaping from the truck, Emily grabbed Rhiannon by the shoulder and pushed her toward the door leading back to the staff room. She tried to yell “run,” but her voice was drowned beneath the cacophony of thrumming and buzzing. Thor seemed to bark silently at the creatures, and she had to grab him by the collar and force him toward the door too.

They sprinted through the semidarkness, ghost-lit by the creatures’ bioluminescence that turned the two humans and Thor into a weird stop-motion shadow.

A ball of light streaked past Emily’s face like a bullet, its wings thrumming.

“Faster!” Emily yelled, not sure if Rhiannon could even hear her over the cacophony of sound.

Rhiannon reached the door first and flung it open, stopped, and held it ajar as Thor ran past her into the corridor. Emily’s eyes met Rhiannon’s and in that weird strobing flash between darkness and light she saw her face transformed into a mask of horror, her eyes glowing white with the reflected light of the swarm Emily knew was behind her. She felt the air change as the pressure wave of so many creatures moving as one washed over her. A part of Emily wanted to turn around and look—it was so tempting to just stop and see this astonishing thing that no human had ever witnessed before. Instead, she dove into the corridor headfirst. Thor yelped and leaped over his mistress as she slid across the polished floor, colliding with a wall. She managed to look up just in time to see Rhiannon pull the door into place, her muscles tensing as she grasped the door handle and leaned her body weight backward.

The thud of hundreds of the light bugs hitting the walls and door sounded like a mob of angry men smashing at them with baseball bats. Thank God the door closed inward, or they would have been overwhelmed in seconds, but there was no way to tell how long it was going to stand up to this kind of violence. A faint glow emanated from around the edges of the door, seeping in through the cracks.

“Emily!” Rhiannon cried. “What are we going to do?”

Emily’s mind raced. The memory of the dream and the knowledge of just how massive the swarm actually was—it was petrifying. No way they could make a run for it; they would be overwhelmed before they even made it a few hundred feet from the building. And where would they go? Apart from the ghostly glow of the swarm, it was pitch black beyond the building. They would stumble around in the darkness, and the second they flipped on a flashlight the creatures would zero in on them, Emily thought, remembering how the swarm had converged on the light of Rhiannon’s flashlight in her dream, and that had been from many kilometers away. The vehicle bay was already overrun with the creatures, making it impossible for them to make it to the truck. They needed some way to distract these little horrors away from the building, something that would hold the swarm’s attention for long enough that the three travelers could get to the truck and make their escape.

Light, that was the key, but from where?

“Emily?” Rhiannon yelled, her knuckles white against the doorknob as she tried to maintain her grip. “What do we do?”

“Hold on,” she snapped. The light bugs had stopped throwing themselves at the door—which, Emily thought, disconcertingly suggested a coordinated intelligence or, at least, a sense of self-preservation—but her voice was still only barely audible above the cacophony of thrumming wings that filled the vehicle bay.

“I need to think.” What they needed was a lighthouse. But where would you find a lighthouse in the desert?

Perhaps if they managed to put themselves far away from this section of the building, out of range of whatever senses these little bastards possessed, it might buy enough time that the creatures would give up and move on, or at least give her time to formulate an escape plan.

“On the count of three, I want you to let go and run as fast as you can back to the middle office in the corridor, okay?”

Rhiannon nodded. Emily could see beads of sweat glinting on the girl’s forehead.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

Emily waited for Rhiannon to pass her, stole a glance at the door to make sure it wasn’t going to explode and let the creatures through, then took off after the teenager, Thor at their heels. They burst through into the waiting area where they had intended to spend the night, and, as soon as they were all through, Emily again set the chair against the doorknob. Through the windows, the light from the swarm lit up the entire perimeter of the building, almost as far back as the freeway. The swarm seemed to have focused its attention on the bay door, the glow of the mass throbbing like a heartbeat, elongating and shortening the shadows within the room. A lightning bolt zipped past the window, describing a perfect parabolic arc across the night and leaving a residual afterglow on Emily’s eyes.

“Get to the office,” Emily hissed when she saw Rhiannon had stopped. Three seconds later and Emily was following behind her.

They sprinted down the corridor toward the back exit, then cut
right into the first office. Beyond the window there was only darkness. The creatures had not made it to the rear of the building—not
yet anyway.

“What
are
those things?” Rhiannon demanded.

“How the hell should I know?”

“You’re the one who said that they were coming, remember?”

“I . . . I don’t know what they are, some kind of alien locust, but I know they’re connected. Goddamn it, everything is fucking connected in this world. It’s like everything talks to everything else. But these things, they communicate and they hunt together. They’re like a giant shoal of land piranha.”

“So, how do we stop them?”

“They’re attracted to light, I think. When you turned on your flashlight to wake me, they saw that and headed right for it. So we need to create a distraction to draw them away from here to buy enough time for us to get to the truck and get the hell out of here.”

“How are we going to do that?” Rhiannon asked, her voice despondent.

“Do you still have the flares you found in the minivan?”