Genesis (28 page)

Read Genesis Online

Authors: Paul Antony Jones

BOOK: Genesis
8.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Emily managed to hold her breath for a little over a minute.

If the smell outside had been bad, inside the belly of the tendril was much, much worse.

When she finally sucked in a breath of the fetid air within the tube it instantly burned the back of her throat and mouth, turning
them to sandpaper as the saliva dried up. She gagged, trying to resist
the urge to vomit. Her eyes had teared up again almost the instant
she crawled inside the gutted tendril, giving her sight a hazy distor
tion, as she elbow-crawled her way along the slime-covered floor.

Her eyes throbbed as she tried to blink back the constant stream of tears. The urge to wipe them was almost too much to resist, but her hands were coated in the same burning excretion, and getting that shit in her eyes directly would probably end up blinding her too. So she did her best to ignore the discomfort as she slid onward through the alien muck.

Her entrance into the shaft of the tendril had been close to the outer wall of the Caretaker craft. She estimated she had been crawling now for a good five minutes through this stinking mess—her watch was covered in the crap too, obscuring the dial—so she knew she must be well past the outer wall. She had no idea where this conduit would lead her, but she knew it must have some importance to the Caretakers, so it must go
somewhere.

She just had to keep crawling.

There was no sign of anything even vaguely resembling an outlet
or a valve or, preferably, some kind of a hatch. Just meter after meter
of this shiny-sided tube leading farther into the guts of the craft.

Her flashlight illuminated the way ahead, but all she could see was more of the same red-tinged wall. It was like being on the inside of an artery.

Well, if she had her way, she would follow this thing all the way to whatever dark heart it was connected to and split the bastard wide open.

Elbow knee elbow. Elbow knee elbow. That was all that mattered. Move forward. The sides of the tendril were just a few centimeters from her face. A mucouslike substance covered every surface, oozing out of small pocks, scattered like pores along its surface. It was sticky and pretty fucking disgusting. The discharge slid down the walls and formed a pool of goop at the base of the tube.

A gradual warmth spread through Emily’s hands and the knees of her jeans. The liquid she was sloshing through was getting warmer. She looked down at the puddle of red goo beneath her fingers, except it wasn’t just a puddle anymore, and, where a few minutes earlier she had been able to clearly see her fingers, now the goo had risen to just above her wrists. And now that she was paying attention, the amount of the goo oozing out of the walls was increasing, quite quickly in fact. In the few seconds since she had noticed it, the level had risen another centimeter.

“Oh, that’s just wonderful.” Her voice sounded raspy, squelched within the narrow, wet confines of the tendril’s insides, and she instantly regretted speaking as she inhaled more of the crappy air into her lungs.

Emily began moving faster, shuffling as quickly as she could, acutely aware of the rising level of the fluid. By the time she had travelled another ten meters, the goo was almost at her elbow. The tube was filling up again . . . fast. It made sense that the damage she had done to gain access to this tendril would not simply be ignored; it would be repaired, of course. Apparently, those repairs had now been made, and the tube was replacing the goo and gas she had let out when she had cut her way inside. There was no way to know how full the tube would become. It could be just a couple of inches or it could fill completely; either way, it was going to force her to do something about her predicament.

Emily shined the flashlight back down the way she had come; it was too far for her to go back, and, besides, if her entrance had already been sealed and repaired, retreating would be pointless. The light illuminated nothing but the red walls of the tube ahead of her. Looked like she was screwed whichever way she chose to go.

That left only one other way out, then. She unsheathed her knife again. Blade facing down, she plunged it into the flesh of the tendril in front of her and began slicing. She wasn’t interested in making it neat this time; she just needed a way out, something she could squeeze her ass through.

It was a much easier job to cut this incision without having to work at such an odd angle. She simply grasped the handle of the knife with both hands and pulled backward, sawing as she went, tearing a slit in the floor of the tube that was beginning to feel more and more like a sarcophagus with every passing second. As if it were aware of her butchery, the tube began to fill with the goo even faster. Emily stopped for a second as she noticed the first few centimeters of the slit she was cutting begin to seal over.

“Oh, come onnnnn.” Emily pushed hard onto the hilt of the knife and pulled with all of her rapidly waning strength, tearing the blade through the floor.

It was probably her weight that did it, she decided, in that last split second as a sound like a T-shirt being torn apart filled the tube. The next instant she was falling, hands flailing for purchase but finding none on the wet lips of the split as she slipped through the tear, carried out in a waterfall of stinking liquid. She landed ass first with a teeth-crunching
“Ugh!”
of expelled air, swallowed a mouthful of the goo that clogged her throat, bounced, slid, and rolled to a stop against what could only be another wall.

Coughing and spluttering, Emily rolled onto all fours, and promptly puked up the crap she had swallowed during her fall. She knelt there, panting for twenty long seconds.

Open your eyes,
she commanded herself.

She couldn’t see a damn thing. Both eyes were thick with the gunk from the tube and still watering from the noxious air she had had to breathe. There was still more of the crap in her mouth; she spat it out in a long dribble, wiping her lips with her equally disgusting goo-encrusted jacket.

Damn, her eyes burned. She used her fingers to try to scoop the ooze from them, but all that did was smear it across her eyelids. Blindly, she pulled her undershirt from beneath her jacket and used that to clean the remainder away.

When her eyes finally began to stop burning she opened them again and looked around her new surroundings.

She was in a corridor with fleshy-looking gray walls, ribbed like a corrugated pipe, the ribs set at three-meter intervals, which only added to the illusion of being inside a living, breathing body. The majority of the corridor was curved like a tube too, but a flat walkway ran along the base.

The tendril she had used to get inside the ship ran along the ceil
ing. The cut she had fallen through still dripped the occasional teardrop of goo, but the wound was already knitting itself back together.

The flashlight had spun from her fingers when she fell the meter and
a half to the corridor floor. It lay nearby, its light shining up the wall.

God, her butt hurt, and the wound on her head had started to throb again.

But she was finally inside. She had made it.

Emily picked up her flashlight from where it had fallen and realized she did not actually need it. The corridor was filled with a dim light, although she could not say from where exactly the light emanated. As the black external skin of the Caretaker ship had seemed to suck in the sunlight, so the very air within this corridor seemed to emit it.

This place smelled . . .
off
. Sweet, sickly, biological. She was surprised she could actually still smell anything at all after the stench she had endured in the tendril; this might just as well have been honey. Of course, the smell could actually be her. She hadn’t had a change of clothes in how many days? And after crawling through that disgusting crap . . . She shuddered at the thought.

There was no sign of the Caretakers, not yet, anyway, but the same distant thrum of power she had heard outside the ship now reverberated up through the soles of her boots. If there was power then where were the Caretakers?
Someone
had to be taking care of her son, after all. Still, there wasn’t much about any of this that made sense to her. She had just cut her way into this ship. Effectively, she was an invader, so whatever systems ran the ship must have notified whomever was in control about the damage she had caused getting in. That meant there was no way the Caretakers would be unaware of her presence. Where was her welcoming committee?

“Hello, you bastards. I’m here,” she yelled. “Now take me to my Goddamn son.”

She looked around in anticipation of one of the gangly Caretakers appearing, but she remained alone in the corridor. What kind of a game were they playing with her? Did they expect her to find them herself?

The fall had deposited her just before the elbow of a gently curving corridor. On this side of the corner Emily could see that the passageway ran back toward the exterior wall of the ship. It was pointless going that way. She dipped her head around the corner; the corridor continued inward toward the center of the ship. That seemed like the logical direction to take; the chances of her son being near the outer skin seemed unlikely. She started walking, following the corridor for a few minutes until it terminated at a ramp that curled up into an opening in the ceiling and down to what was, presumably, another level. Obviously a staircase of some kind. She wondered why the Caretakers would need something as simple as stairs to move about their ship when they could teleport at will. Maybe it just used a lot of energy to do something like that? Maybe their teleportation was not accurate enough to move confidently between levels? Who knew? Either way, she had to make a decision on which direction she should take.

Up or down?

Jesus! How was she supposed to figure this out? Guess? The ship was massive, and she was somewhere on the middle level along the outer edge. It could take days, weeks even, wandering around the inside of this place, and she still might not find Adam. It seemed so ridiculously illogical that she could be guided all this distance so accurately, only to spend her time blindly searching for him once she got inside. There
had
to be another way.

Emily thought back over everything that had happened since Adam had disappeared: the dreams that had not been dreams and that connection to
something
much, much larger had always seemed to be there, in the back of her mind. There had been the constant, inexorable, magnetic pull of her child’s energy. And then, when she had first started to climb down into the pit she had touched that tendril and her mind had instantly transferred to those other creatures. All of these events added up to something that she had not seen, had not had the time to consider deeply enough—something that involved her child, the firstborn on this alien Earth. In her mind, she saw his red speckled eyes reflecting the red flecks of her own.

And she understood.

Tentatively, Emily reached out and laid the flat of her hand against the corridor wall . . . and gasped.

She was everywhere. Swirling through a red galaxy of connections, instinctively knowing that each dot—some infinitesimally tiny, some massive, the rest every shade in between—represented a life somewhere on her planet. Every dot was connected to the next, an incredible biological weave, the complexity of which should have been overwhelmingly complex, yet it made perfect sense within this context. And with a flat realization devoid of any emotion, Emily understood that she was as much a part of this tapestry as every other life force that glowed within the lines of its warp and weft.

And there was clarity for her, the falling away of boundaries. From the moment she had been abducted and awakened on the alien ship outside Las Vegas all those years ago, she had ceased to be Emily Baxter. The woman who had awoken within that ship was different, irreversibly altered, inextricably connected to this bioweave, and she hadn’t even realized it until this very moment. The red motes in her eyes were a tattoo of her assimilation. Her key to belonging.

Other books

Some Enchanted Waltz by Lily Silver
So Shall I Reap by Kathy-Lynn Cross
Love Comes Calling by Siri Mitchell
Preserving Hope by Alex Albrinck
Nighthawk & The Return of Luke McGuire by Rachel Lee, Justine Davis
Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers