Revelations (13 page)

“What?” Emily demanded. Rhiannon said nothing, and turned to watch the show, giggling like a five-year-old.

“You’re an evil munchkin,” said Emily as she gave Rhiannon a gentle bump with her hip that sent the girl stumbling slightly, and brought more cackling laughter from her.

Emily and Rhiannon began walking toward MacAlister. The fire raged behind him, crackling flames dancing like dervishes against the gradually darkening sky, elongating Mac’s shadow to three times its normal length.

Something fell out of the fire, about halfway along the break. At first, Emily though it was a burning tree trunk that had toppled to the ground. An ear-piercing screech shattered the evening air, removing all doubt that, whatever this was, it was alive, and it was
truly pissed. The thing leaped and rolled in the dirt, trying to extinguish the hungry flames licking the majority of its huge body. It rolled and tumbled for a second more and then it began to run.

Straight at MacAlister’s back.

In the few seconds before the burning creature reached MacAlister, Emily’s mind registered several things: The creature was easily ten feet long, although it was hard to tell exactly as it writhed and rolled so violently. It had four muscular legs that drove it across the ground like a lizard, but the thick body—
a
t least, the parts that were not already a blackened, burned goo—was covered in a red fur that extended from the base of the tail all along its body to the head. The head was long and narrow, like a crocodile’s, but as the creature ran it let out another scream of pain, its jaws opening from right to left instead of up and down. There were teeth in that mouth, large, serrated teeth that Emily saw briefly before the jaws snapped together in agony. Its eyes were huge, raised on a broad skull and wide open, fixed on the back of MacAlister, who was still oblivious to the rapidly advancing creature as it pounded across the space between them.

Emily saw the sailors scattered around the edge of the fire line react as they spotted the creature, some dropped to a knee and
raised their weapons to their shoulders, while others just began to fire from their standing position. The air was suddenly full of the sound of thunder as the weapons, set to fully automatic, unleashed a hail of bullets in the direction of the creature bearing down on MacAlister…

…who instinctively ducked and turned at the sound of the gunfire, just as the flaming thing barreled past him, its burning body sideswiping MacAlister and sending him flying toward the wall of flames. Emily saw him hit the ground hard, roll once as he tried to push himself to his feet before collapsing. The gunfire stopped momentarily when the creature careened into the Scotsman, and Emily felt her breath freeze in her chest; then it was gone, passing MacAlister’s motionless body, more concerned with outrunning the fire that clung to its skin than the puny human that it could have undoubtedly devoured in a second if it had been so inclined.

“Shit!” she yelled, but in her mind she was yelling at MacAlister,
Get up! Get up, goddammit!

It looks like a dragon
, she thought as she watched one huge foot come down close to the unconscious man’s head.

The gunfire began again as soon as the thing was clear of MacAlister and Emily saw chunks of skin pop from the creature as the sailors’ weapons finally found their mark. The barrage of gunfire and the effects of the flames began to take their toll on the creature and it slowed to a virtual crawl. That gave the sailors time to readjust their position, advancing on the creature as it continued to drag itself, one huge clawed foot laboriously after the other, over the still-smoking ground.

It’s heading to the ocean
, Emily realized. The creature, undoubtedly mortally wounded now, was trying to extinguish the fire with water. It was intelligent then, clever enough to know what fire was and what water would do for its pain.

The advancing soldiers emptied clip after clip into the creature’s heaving body, until, finally, it stopped, shuddered once along its entire body, and lay still.

The shooting died away.

Emily was running then. Sprinting toward the prostrate MacAlister. As she drew closer, she could see his jacket was smoldering slightly, a thin spiral of smoke also rose from a patch of singed hair. She skidded to a halt beside him and heaved him over onto his back. His eyes were closed and a trickle of blood ran from his nostrils down over his cheek. There was a nasty burn on the left side of his forehead where the flaming creature had struck him; the skin was already blistering there. She dropped her ear to his lips: He was breathing. Thank God!

Rhiannon reached them, Thor pulling her along like the sled dog he was, his leash stretched to its limit. The other sailors seemed to be more interested in ensuring the creature was dead, most of them were advancing on it, the barrels of their weapons not straying from the motionless body. A couple of other men seemed frozen in place, unsure of what they should be doing or what they had just seen.

“Grab his arm,” Emily yelled at Rhiannon, struggling to be heard over the roar of the advancing flames, her eyes checking the fire line as it continued to rage and devour the jungle just twenty feet or so away. She could feel the heat beginning to singe the small hairs on her arms as she grabbed MacAlister’s left wrist. Rhiannon did the same with his right hand and they tried to lift him but he was just too heavy.

“Pull, don’t try to lift,” Emily yelled.

The two women dug their heels into the soft ground and began to tug the unconscious soldier back toward the fence line. He weighed a freaking ton, but inch by precious inch they dragged him away from the flames of the fire.

A pair of arms seemed to appear from nowhere, reaching past her, grabbing MacAlister by the collar of his combat jacket. Another pair of hands reached over her own and grabbed the front of the jacket as another sailor ran past them and lifted MacAlister’s legs off the ground.

Suddenly Emily was stumbling backward as Mac’s weight was lifted from her. Then she was running alongside the sailors as they carried his unconscious body back to the safety of the encampment and the waiting medic.

She felt a childlike fear grip her, irrational and overwhelming. But wasn’t that what fear was, at its essence? A direct conduit to the inner child, through all the armor and fortifications that we build as adults. Fear always managed to find that quivering child hiding in the center of every human, surrounded by darkness and cowering in the slowly dimming light of an exhausted candle.

As they ran for the gate they passed the smoldering body of the thing that had leapt from the fire. Flames still flickered along its flank. She could smell burning meat and the astringent reek of singed fur. It stank to high heavens and beyond. The creature lay on its side, its body twisted, huge jaws hanging wide open, a pink tongue, bleeding from where it had bitten itself in terror and agony, hanging from between razor teeth. One large round eye stared sightlessly toward the smoke-filled sky. The body was riddled with bullet holes.

They dragged MacAlister through the gates and straight to the waiting medic.

“Is he going to be alright?” Rhiannon asked, as she pushed herself close to Emily.

“Hard to tell at the moment,” said Amar, as he ran his fingers around the cut on MacAlister’s head, trying to gauge how deep the laceration was. He pressed harder and the soldier’s eyes fluttered open, flicking first to Amar, then to Emily and Rhiannon, then back to the Amar.

“Do you make a habit of taking advantage of unconscious men?” MacAlister asked, his eyes on Emily again, his voice croaky, as though he had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Or is this what counts as a first date where you come from?” he added as he struggled to sit up.

“Why don’t you just lay there a while so I can get a better look at you?” Amar insisted.

“Not going to happen. I’m fine.”

With help from Emily and Rhiannon, MacAlister climbed to his feet. He wobbled for a second, leaning hard on Emily, and his arm slipped around her shoulder as his own hand found its way to her waist.

“You could have a concussion or a fractured skull for all I know,” Amar continued, his exasperation obvious.

“I’ve taken worse knocks from your grandmother,” MacAlister retorted. “Now, would someone like to tell me what the hell just happened?”

She had miscalculated.

Both the captain and MacAlister insisted that they were as much to blame, but it had been Emily’s idea to set the fire and she bore the responsibility completely for it getting out of hand. Her miscalculation had been in the ill-founded belief that the new plant life would react the same as the old; that if it wasn’t dry, it would not burn. They had been wrong.
She
had been wrong.

The alien vegetation seemed particularly susceptible to fire, far more so than any Earth fauna that Emily had ever encountered before the red rain had come. What had started out as an attempt at a small controlled burn had escalated quickly into a ravaging conflagration as the fire MacAlister set ignited acre upon acre of the alien jungle around the camp. It devoured the vegetation like some ravenous monster. A huge tower of smoke rose from the fire, rolling into the air and blocking out the sun through the rest of the evening and into the next day.

The fire burned for almost twelve hours before it finally died away, stopped by a natural firebreak of rocky terrain that choked off the ravaging fire-beast’s food.

Now, what should have been a bright morning was instead a dreary gray, smoke obscuring everything that was not within ten feet of the survivors as they looked out from behind the relative safety of Building One’s windows.

“Everyone stays inside until the smoke clears,” Captain Constantine ordered. “The last thing we want is any of you getting lost out there and overcome by the fumes.”

So they sat and they waited.

Throughout the previous night a flickering orange wall of indistinct flames had been visible through the pall of smoke as the gluttonous fire ate its way through the jungle. But as Emily waited in the corridor with Rhiannon and several sailors, she could see nothing but smoke now. The fire was either out or it had moved far enough away that it was no longer a threat to the camp and its new occupants.

A sea breeze kicked up just before noon, wafting between the buildings of Camp Loma, probing the smoke and pushing it farther west, slowly emptying the courtyards as it spread the choking smoke away from the camp. The stench of burned vegetation mixed with the distinctive aroma of the sea remained though.

There had been a few touch-and-go moments during the night when embers carried by hot air from the fire gushed into the compound, but these had been ruthlessly tracked down by teams of sailors and, according to MacAlister, they had suffered nothing worse than a few singed roof tiles.

It was easy to spot those who had been outside on fire watch; their smoke-dirtied raccoon faces filed through the corridor as they returned to the building, eyes watering, coughing and hacking as their shipmates took them aside and led them to water stations.

Everywhere she looked, Emily saw nothing but zombies: bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived zombies. But as the hours ticked by the smoke thinned and eventually cleared and by mid-afternoon, the Point Loma survivors made their way cautiously outside again.

A thin layer of ash covered every exposed surface; it powdered beneath their feet as they stepped out into the courtyard in front of Building One.

“Good God,” Emily said, standing in the gray shadow of the sun as it tried to force its way through the residual layer of smoke that still floated high in the afternoon sky. “We’ve only been here for a day and we’re already back to our old ways.”

“What do you mean?” Rhiannon asked.

“Nothing,” she replied, but she couldn’t shake the notion that the column of smoke rising into the atmosphere was a stark reminder of humanity’s impact on the planet, a footprint, she supposed, of her civilization, of humanity’s time spent at the top of the food chain. But by the same token, she delighted in seeing the blackened stalks and charred husks of the alien plant life that had spread across this land, or the iron ore–red soot that blew through the camp on the hot thermals of the fire. She felt a strange delight when she saw the burnt-down trunks of incinerated trees jutting from the still-smoking ground outside the fence like skeletal fingers.

There wasn’t much left of the dragon—as everyone had now come to call the creature they had shot the previous day—left for them to examine. The out-of-control fire had caught up with it, roasting it to nothing more than a black lump of charcoal, save for the lower part of one leg and some skin on its underbelly.

“Is this the thing that grabbed Collins?” asked the captain, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth to keep out the residual smoke and the stink of burned flesh.

“No way to tell,” said MacAlister. He had a bandage wrapped around the gash on his head, Vaseline spread over the burn—concessions to the medic who had finally persuaded the Scotsman to let him assess his wounds, with some encouragement from Emily and a liberal dose of chiding from Rhiannon—and had been deemed fit for duty.

“What we saw was nothing more than lights, this hardly seems to fit the description. But then, who can tell what this thing is exactly? I’d bet my last paycheck it wasn’t roaming the woods before the rain came.” He poked the carcass with a charred stick. The flesh cracked and flaked away.

“Yuck!” said Rhiannon, wrinkling her nose at the smell that flooded out of the gash.

“Well I guess this puts to rest any qualms we may have had about whether you were being entirely truthful with us, Emily,” Captain Constantine said. “MacAlister, let’s get a couple of men to drag this thing off. We don’t want it stinking the place up; who knows what it might attract.”

The fire had created an open stretch of blackened wasteland that stretched out in a horseshoe curve to at least a half mile of space around the compound. It looked like a scene from some catastrophe movie.

The ground was still too hot to examine closely, but where there had once been a jungle there was now nothing more than blackened skeletons jutting up from a carpet of powdery ash. Smoke still rose from the ground, like tiny genies searching across the bleak landscape. Oddly, there was still the occasional plant or bush left more or less untouched by the fire. Somehow they had survived with little more than a few singed branches or burned leaves.

It was an echo of Emily’s own strange story of survival.

Given the circumstances of the past month or so, she had had little time to ponder the reasons as to just how or why she, amongst the billions on this planet, had somehow survived the red rain. But maybe she was alive for exactly the same reason these plants were still standing alone in this field of devastation—just blind luck. Right place at the wrong time.

“Well your idea certainly did the trick alright,” said MacAlister, sidling up to her shoulder and gazing out over the devastated stretch of land that now surrounded the base.

“It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

“
Pfft!
It got the job done and we’re all still here in one piece. That’s a win in my book any day of the week.”

“How are you feeling?” Emily asked without turning around, but she could sense the closeness of him, his breath brushing against her face as he spoke.

“I’m good. I’m good. Just this bump on my head and few bruises. Nothing a few days of light duty won’t fix. Listen, I wanted to say thank you for what you did, pulling me away from the fire like that,” he said, his voice a low whisper.

Emily turned to look at him, their faces just inches apart. “It was nothing,” she said, her eyes fixed on his.

“No, it was definitely something, Emily. It was most definitely something. Look, I was thinking, wondering really, if—”

The sentence was broken by the sudden appearance of three sailors at their side. “Sergeant MacAlister. Captain Constantine told us to report to you for cleanup duty.”

Emily smiled at MacAlister’s obvious embarrassment. He smiled back when he saw her eyes still on him.

“Perfect timing as always, gentlemen,” he scolded the sailor.

“Sir?” the sailor replied, oblivious to the connection he had just neatly severed.

“Don’t call me ‘Sir,’ I work for a living. Oh, never mind. Emily, thank you again. Maybe we’ll get a chance to chat later?”

“Maybe,” Emily replied, then turned and walked back toward the camp.

The first anyone knew the power had finally been restored to the encampment was when the security lights around the perimeter fence crackled into life just before sunset. When the gantry lights mounted around the concrete concourse in front of Building One flickered on too, dusk was suddenly turned back into day. Light flooded the grounds and the still-smoldering area around the fence line. A loud cheer erupted from the sailors who were still working at clearing the vegetation from inside the fence line.

Somewhere, in one of the office buildings not too far from where Emily stood, an electric guitar began to play faintly, a ghostly yet unmistakable voice eventually joined the guitar, floating across the encampment. Even though she couldn’t hear the words she recognized the voice and the song: the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter.” Kind of apt, in a freaky, déjà vu-ey kind of a way, she thought.

When Parsons walked out of the building housing the generator, wiping oil and grease from his hands with an equally dirty rag, he was greeted with more cheers and a round of applause from his gathered shipmates.

“Well done, Parsons,” the captain told him, slapping the man on the back. “And perfect timing too.”

“Thank you, sir,” the engineer replied, a huge grin cracking his usually stern features. “We’ve taken stock of the camp’s at-hand diesel supply, and I estimate we have a good four to five weeks left, if we’re judicious with the demand we put on it. We could stretch it out another week
maybe
, if we only run the security lights for a few hours at night. We’ll need to locate more diesel pronto though.”

“Security is our main concern right now,” the captain said. “I don’t want to lose anyone else. So, no, the lights stay on all night, for now at least. Once we’re dug in here a little more securely, we’ll locate another supply at the earliest opportunity. There have to be other fuel dumps or civilian establishments we can commandeer more supplies from around here.”

With the camp generator up and running again, Emily found herself once again donning her chef’s apron. After raiding the sub’s still adequately stocked cold-storage locker the smell of steak began to filter to the crew as their workday finally came to an end. The aroma of roasting meat was awfully close to the smell of the creature that had been caught in the fire, but Emily’s stomach quickly overrode any objections her brain may have had, as she and Rhiannon joined the rest of the men of
HMS Vengeance
in the newly opened camp cafeteria.

Thor made the rounds from table to table, fixing each person who made the mistake of meeting his stare with starved puppy-dog eyes that would have surely gained him an Oscar, had he been human. Finally Emily had to order him to her side.

“I don’t need you stinking the bedroom up all night,” she scolded the dog, who settled on the floor between her and Rhiannon with a sigh, apparently content with his plunder.

The air around the room was lighthearted. Tired eyes brightened as several bottles of wine, found in one of the camp’s officer’s quarters during a scavenging mission by some of the men, were opened and dispensed, with the captain’s permission. The sound of laughter and the hum of banter soon filled the room. The group, already tightknit, had grown even closer over the past few days of hard work clearing the weed from the compound, and Emily was glad to feel the warm glow of acceptance into the group.

Toward the end of the meal, Constantine stood and, as though he were presiding over a wedding ceremony, tapped the side of his wine glass until the room fell silent.

He cleared his throat then spoke. “We’ve come a long way, you and I. And we’ve lost some fine companions and shipmates along the way.” He paused as he collected himself, gulping down a lump that had risen to his throat. “But we’ve also found new friends, and we have made a new start. So, I’d like you all to raise your glasses and toast with me our fallen comrades and our new friends. May God have mercy on us all.”

The sound of scraping chairs rattled through the room as the group stood, echoing the captain’s words with glasses raised high above their heads, before downing the remainder of their contents.