Revelations (17 page)

Emily spotted large patches of the same creeping red lichen that seemed to have covered most open ground growing on the walls and floors of the building they now stood in. It wasn’t as prevalent inside, but the ubiquitous red carpet seemed to be independent of the larger body of jungle vegetation that grew just feet away.

Emily had been right about the place being offices. They were standing in a reception area with a set of stairs that climbed up to the second floor, and corridors running north and south.

They moved silently through the lower corridors of the building, checking room after room. The majority of the office’s windows had survived the storm intact, apart from the occasional crack or missing pane. Oddly though, the offices looked to have been picked over already. Desk drawers hung open, their contents spilled on the floor, security lockers too. The glass front of a vending machine at the end of the corridor they stood on had been smashed and emptied of its contents.

At the sight of the broken vending machine, MacAlister put a finger to his lips and then beckoned Emily and Rusty to him. “I think we may have stumbled on some survivors here,” he said in a hushed voice.

“Couldn’t this have happened before the storm, during the panic after the red rain?” Emily asked, her own voice barely a whisper.

MacAlister shook his head. “I don’t think so. This is all too methodical. Either way, it’s best if we continue with caution, okay?”

“We should get out of here,” said Rusty, his voice hushed, nervous.

Emily shook her head. “No, if there’s someone else alive in here we need to find them and help them. We’re going to need all the warm bodies we can get.” MacAlister nodded his agreement. Rusty did not seem happy with the decision but he was outranked and outvoted.

They took the stairs up to the next floor. MacAlister led the way, his weapon raised and covering the landing, Rusty followed at the rear covering their six, and Emily stayed in the center, her Mossberg in hand. On the second floor landing, they moved down the left corridor, MacAlister quietly sweeping each room as they went, while Emily and the young sailor monitored the corridor.

When they reached the third room, MacAlister hissed quietly to Emily to come and join him. She glanced in the room. The desk that had occupied it was gone and the filing cabinets and other furniture had been pushed to one end of the room to make way for three adult-size sleeping bags. An assortment of military clothing, mostly fatigues, hung from a makeshift clothes rack in one corner, and a propane stove sat on a table beneath the window. Under the table were several boxes of MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. There was also an assortment of candy, probably from the ransacked machine on the first floor.

“Looks like we definitely have company,” said MacAlister.

They left the room as it was and continued moving farther down the corridor. MacAlister’s flashlight played over the wall.

Something on the wall ahead of them reflected the light back at them; it glinted and scintillated like cat’s eyes on a highway. MacAlister moved the light back over the wall again and Emily recognized the same beautiful sapphire-like glow of the substance she had seen when they first explored Point Loma after the fire. They had found it on the walls of one of the buildings near the harbor. While the lichen and jungle flora seemed to be almost everywhere, this oddly reflective substance seemed to prefer flat surfaces like walls. The refracted light from the beam of Mac’s flashlight made a beautiful, oily mixture of color over the floor.

“Move your light over the far wall,” Emily asked MacAlister.

The opposite wall was covered in the same sapphire-like crust too, and as he ran the light along the walls, they could see it extended about ten feet farther down along each surface of the wall and up onto the ceiling too. It looked almost like a cave entrance, or a grotto.

“What is it?” asked Rusty.

“I have no idea,” whispered Emily, “but we saw it on some of the buildings when we were reconnoitering the day after we arrived, remember? It looks too hard to be a plant.” She remembered how the alien dust had eventually become inert, turning to crystal once its job had been completed back in her apartment in Manhattan. “Maybe it’s just some kind of residue left over from the storm?” she offered.

Rusty reached out a hand to touch the crust.

“Will you never learn?” MacAlister slapped his hand away before he could touch it. Rusty was living up to his name doubly so now, his face flushed almost as red as his hair. “Come on,” said MacAlister, “let’s check the last stretch of the rooms, then we’re out of here.”

They doubled back to the landing then crossed to the second corridor. The first room was clear, but in the second they found more of the sapphire growth. It was plastered over one wall and all around the window, completely covering the sill and one pane of glass. In the natural sunlight it was even more beautiful. The blue rays sparkled and painted the room like a laser show.

In the third room they found the survivors.

Emily gave a gasp of surprise and horror as she peeked her head into the room. There were three bodies lying on the floor. Actually, not bodies, they were little more than brown-stained skeletons, the flesh stripped from the bone.

The room looked like a medical-student prank, as though the three skeletons had been purposefully placed there for maximum effect. The skeletons were fully clothed, two in Marine fatigues and the third in a skirt and blouse. The white cotton of the blouse was stained with blood. A pistol and a submachine gun lay near the two deceased Marines.

MacAlister said nothing, his eyes taking in the scene with the dispassionate professionalism of a soldier who knew he was looking at something he had not been trained for.

“Fuck me!” Rusty exclaimed as he stepped into the room. “Would you look at that?” He stepped closer to the bodies, peering with morbid curiosity at the remains.

Emily noticed more of the sapphire growth on the wall around the window. The growth extended out across the floor to the foot of one of the dead Marines.

“What do you think killed them?” said Rusty as he took another step closer, dropping to one knee to get a closer look at the skeleton of the deceased woman.

A shimmer passed over the surface of the sapphire growth on the wall.

At first Emily thought it was maybe the light from MacAlister’s flashlight that he had forgotten to switch off, but in the split second it took for her to process the thought she knew that she was wrong, and she knew that it was already too late.

“Rusty! Get back!” she yelled.

The sailor started to turn in her direction, a look of confusion on his face that instantly turned to horror as the sapphire growth on the wall began to break apart and cascade down the wall and flow across the floor toward him.

Beetles. Hundreds of tiny beetles, their hexagon-shaped shells, glittering like cascading jewels, swept across the floor and onto Rusty’s boot then swarmed up the legs of his combat fatigues.

There was just enough time for Emily to register a multitude of tiny black feet beneath the shell of each beetle—
like a centipede
, she thought—before Rusty realized something was terribly wrong.

He looked down at his leg and screamed, a high-pitched yelp of horror, girlish in its shrillness. He swatted furiously at the bodies of the creatures as they swarmed up the material of his trousers, knocking a few off while he backpedaled away from the stream of iridescent creatures, but not nearly enough to change the direction of his fate.

They were on him in a heartbeat, skittering over his chest, climbing over his face and hands as he tried to bat them away. The beetles instantly headed toward the soft parts of the sailor’s body. He managed another brief scream but that was choked off to a wet gurgle as the beetles flooded into his mouth and began burrowing down his throat and through his cheeks.

Instinctively Emily started forward to help the sailor, but she felt herself grabbed roughly around the waist and hoisted into the air as MacAlister set her down in the corridor.

“Run!” he yelled as she caught a final glimpse of Rusty, one arm outstretched, reaching toward her, his body already invisible beneath the cloud of beetles as he fell forward, knocking some of the creatures off only for them to bounce to a stop and scuttle back to their dinner.

“Run!” MacAlister yelled again, but this time Emily was already moving.

Emily and MacAlister sprinted down the corridor toward the landing, just as a second stream of the beetles flooded from the door of the room they had passed earlier. They spread like spilled water across the floor, wall, and ceiling. Emily ducked her head and leaped over them, racing toward the stairway.

“Fuck!” The sound of MacAlister’s curse brought her to a skidding stop and she turned. “Don’t fucking stop, run,” he yelled as he swiped at several of the beetles that had managed to land on his shoulder and were now rushing toward his neck. He knocked them away and ran past her, grabbing at Emily’s hand and missing.

On his back she could see more of the beetles, at least five, as they scrambled over the cloth of his combat jacket and headed toward his head. She flashed a look back over her own shoulder, the main wave of the beetles were still rushing in their direction, the sound of their tiny feet against the wall and ceiling like crushed dry leaves.

Shit!

MacAlister skidded to a stop and turned toward her. “Emily, come—” The words turned into a yell of pain as one of the beetles made it to his ear and began to chew on the lobe. His hand smacked it away, sending a spray of blood with it, as he started again in the direction of the staircase and their only chance of escape.

More scuttled over his shoulder, biting at his face and neck. He yelled in pain, cursing at the things, spinning and wheeling as he tried to fight them off and keep ahead of the others.

Emily chanced another look back just in time to skip ahead of the overflowing frontline of beetles as they gushed across the landing floor. She sprinted to catch up with MacAlister then stopped and grabbed something from the wall just as MacAlister reached the stairs, his hands covering his head as he tried to protect his eyes and throat from the tiny nipping jaws. She could see beetles on his hands, burrowing into the flesh, sending thick streams of blood over his wrists. God, if one of those managed to get to an artery, could she even hope to stem the flow?

Then MacAlister slipped, his foot missing the second step. He stumbled forward, flinging a hand out to try to steady himself, sending the bugs on his hand flying away and over the stair’s handrail. He fell, tumbling and rolling down to the middle landing of the stairs where his head hit one of the metal upright supports of the handrail. He lay still.

Emily yanked the pin from the red fire extinguisher she had just pulled from the wall, and in one swift movement depressed the handle and swung around, aiming the nozzle at the beetles hell-bent on making her their next meal. It was a risk, she knew, quite possibly a stupid one, but she also knew that if she didn’t slow the rush of these things there would be no way she would be able to reach MacAlister and get them both out of here alive. And there was no way on God’s good green earth…actually, scratch
that
thought, but the sentiment remained the same: There was no fucking way she was leaving without MacAlister.

A cloud of white powder gushed from the cone of the fire extinguisher, smothering the frontline of onrushing creatures three feet deep. Whether they reacted to the fire retardant, the propellant, or some pheromone-communicated threat alert, Emily didn’t know, but the effect was instantaneous. A concavity appeared in the ocean of onrushing beetles as they sprang back or tried to move around the spray.

Emily moved the nozzle back and forth across the creatures while she continued to backpedal toward the stairs, filling the corridor with the white mist of the extinguisher, pushing the beetles back the way they had come like tiny vampires facing a cross-waving Jesuit. A couple of the beetles made it through the fog and she viciously ground her heel down on each of them in turn. They made a satisfying pop as she crushed them beneath her boot.

The wave stalled, the beetles milling and climbing over each other in a confused mass of glimmering carapaces, flashes of black underbelly and furiously jiggling legs waving beneath each carapace. She had managed to buy herself and MacAlister a few precious seconds. Now she needed to make the most of it before the little bastards changed their collective hive-mind. Emily threw the almost-empty extinguisher at the disorderly mass of bugs and ran to the stairs, bouncing quickly down the steps.

When she reached MacAlister he was conscious at least and sluggishly trying to dislodge the remaining bugs crawling on his chest. He plucked them one after the other from his tunic, and smashed their twitching bodies into a gooey pulp on the step beneath his clenched fist. His face was covered in blood, but his eyes met hers as she took the steps two-by-two down to the landing. Emily leaped the final few steps and grabbed one of the bugs the soldier had missed.

“Ouch!” The thing sank its teeth into the soft flesh of her palm. “You little fuck!” She smashed her hand down onto the handrail, crushing the creature into extinction. She rubbed the goo that was left onto her pants.

“You look like shit,” she said to the soldier. This elicited a burst of grumbling laughter from MacAlister. “Can you walk?” she continued, not waiting for an answer, as she slipped her hand under his armpits and helped him to his feet. He was still disoriented, swaying as his hand searched for the guardrail. She moved an arm around his back and he wordlessly threw his arm around her shoulder, allowing her to support some of his weight.

“I think I might have broken my ankle,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Come on, we need to get moving,” she said. The sound of a hundred thousand tiny legs, like sandpaper on wood, had begun again. She had mere moments before those things would figure out where they were and be on them.

Emily and MacAlister limped together down the last section of stairs to the ground floor, just as the beetles cascaded over the top step of the staircase and flowed toward them in a tumbling waterfall of shimmering hues of blue, and quickly began to close the gap between them.