Revelations (24 page)

An hour’s walk brought them to the edge of the destruction.

The lush red jungle stopped abruptly, and Emily and her companions found themselves standing in the devastated area near the initial impact site of the object. The tall trees and sweeping branches were suddenly replaced by a carpet of severed trunks, their ends cauterized by the intense heat of the object from space. Everything else in the area was incinerated to a gray dust that lay all around them, creating tiny smoke signals beneath Emily’s feet as she and the others maneuvered through the gravestone-high stumps.

One after the other, MacAlister, Emily and Thor, then Reilly picked their way out of the forest’s demarcation line and onto the scar of furrowed ground the object had created as it burned through the atmosphere and crashed into the Nevada desert. Each instinctively raised their hands to shade their eyes against the sudden transition from the gloomy interior of the red jungle to the bright luminescence of the Nevada afternoon, brutally reminded again that this was a desert.

Emily fumbled for her sunglasses, her sweat-drenched clothing already beginning to dry under the pounding sun, rubbing uncomfortably against her chafed skin.

“Damn that’s bright,” said MacAlister, reaching for his own sunglasses and sliding them over his eyes.

Reilly stepped up beside MacAlister and Emily, a baseball cap had magically appeared on his head along with his own sunglasses. “Jesus! Would you look at that,” he said.

The images the UAV had relayed back to the computer screen on the roof of the Tacoma had not done the destruction the justice it deserved. It looked to Emily as though a giant hand had reached out of the sky and scooped out a furrow through the desert landscape, leaving a huge tidal wave of dirt and detritus frozen in the second before it crashed ashore. On this side of the trench, the berm was perhaps thirty-plus feet high, tall enough that it would be impossible to see the other side without climbing up the steep bank of debris and poof dirt. Random pieces of the old world poked out of the wall of dirt: Broken shingles lay everywhere; a sheet of plasterboard waved in the breeze halfway up the wall of dirt; a power socket, the electrical wires still trailing from it and its broken serrated edges an indicator of the violence with which it had been ripped from the home that had surrounded it.

A crushed and crumpled minivan, its door hanging limply from a single hinge, lay at the base of the dirt wall, the breeze pushing the driver’s side door back and forth with an unsettling metallic squeak. Dead alien trees and plants were strewn throughout, their stems and limbs already desiccated to a mummified-skin brown by the dry heat of the desert. A street sign, ripped free of its pole and bent almost into the shape of a boomerang, lay at Emily’s feet. She kicked it over and scraped off the dirt with the tip of her shoe, it read:
HUMMINGBIRD
.

From the fish-eye aerial view of the UAV the trench had looked to be plumb-bob straight, but standing this close to it, Emily could see there was a very slight curve to it. The deforested edge of the jungle mirrored the curve until the trench wall and forest seemed to merge into one at the horizon.

But the new jungle, insidious and indefatigable in its growth, had already started to reclaim the ground lost to the huge cut that had been slashed through it. Tufts of new growth had begun to appear like spots of blood between the remains of the first wave of dead plants, tiny red shoots pushing their bulbous heads through the gray dust. As Emily’s eyes finally acclimated to the glare she spotted the pinpricks of red all over the wall of the trench, completing the image of a blood-splattered murder scene. Which was ironic really, Emily thought, as the whole planet was the largest murder scene in the universe.

“Come on,” Emily said, a narrow but sharp anger at the seemingly unstoppable growth of the alien plants that had materialized from nowhere clutching at her chest. She kicked at one of the tiny shoots, splitting the bulb from the rest of the plant with a satisfying splat and gush of liquid that brought a smile to her face. She crushed the remaining shoot under the heel of her shoe.

As the two men looked on, Emily began to climb the embankment toward the summit, Thor scrambling up alongside her while MacAlister and Reilly looked wordlessly at each other, then began to climb too.

Emily used a branch protruding from the dirt wall to pull herself up the final few feet to the crest of the ridge, her breath relegated to short panting gasps of the hot, dusty air. She stopped mid-inhalation when she gazed down into the valley of the gouged-out ravine she now stood above. While the wave of dirt thrown up from the impact was all of thirty feet high on the side she had just climbed up, the drop down to the apex of the
V
-shaped ravine below was closer to one hundred or more. The brown clay strata lay bare and turned light pink by the unfaltering attention of the sun, a knife wound sliced deep into the flesh of the earth.

“Jesus!” said MacAlister as he pulled himself up next to Emily and looked over the devastated landscape. Up here the breeze, which had been barely noticeable on the ground, had turned into a gusty, hot wind that periodically pulled splattered dirt and dust over the three humans as they stood on the thin curve of ground looking down into the trench. Emily found herself spitting the crap from her tongue every time she opened her mouth to speak.

MacAlister’s navigation had successfully directed them to just north of the midpoint of the trench. It stretched out toward the northwest and the hills where the object had finally come to rest, and to the southeast where the trench eventually tapered away to nothing, disappearing into the welcoming red foliage of the jungle as though it had never existed.

On the other side of the pit from where they stood, the remains of the housing division teetered precariously, the bank of dirt thrown up high enough to bury a lot of the houses on the estate, but here and there, the fleshless skeletons of homes appeared from within the dirt wall like ancient Egyptian tombs.

“While I enjoy a bit of sightseeing as much as the next man, we better get going if we intend to make it back to the chopper before dark,” MacAlister said after a minute of staring at the devastation. The wind was kicking up foot-high tornados of dust that skittered across the surface of the cut, the only movement on this barren, lifeless ridge. There was barely enough room at the top of the berm for one person to walk safely, so they resumed their Indian-file line as they moved out northeast in the direction of the mountains and whatever it was that lay in the crater.

It was only a matter of minutes before Emily found herself wishing she was back in the jungle; the sun was pitiless. It had to be one hundred degrees and the exposed parts of her body were already beginning to tingle and flush pink. She undid the jacket she had tied around her waist and threw it on. It would give her some protection, at least. This was no place for an East Coast girl who spent the majority of her time under cloudy skies and in darkened rooms where the most UV exposure she would get would be from the glow of her computer laptop’s display.

“We’ll lose too much time picking our way along the base of this thing,” MacAlister said, as if reading her thoughts. He had pulled the scrim-net scarf he wore around his neck up to cover his mouth from the dust kicked up by the wind. “But we shouldn’t have to go too much farther to get a decent view of the target with these.” He tapped the binocular case hanging over one shoulder.

“God, I hope not,” said Reilly. “This sun is frying me from the outside in.”

“Quit moaning,” MacAlister shot back over his shoulder, his attention already focused on carefully picking his way along the debris-strewn peak.

Although a fall down either side of the berm would not spell certain death—the slope down to both the valley and the jungle was just too gradual for that—there was more than enough chance of hitting something that could break a bone or cave in a skull on the way down.
It’s not the fall that kills you
, Emily thought, remembering one of her father’s favorite aphorisms,
it’s the sudden stop at the end
. Or in this case, the snapped branches, huge boulders, and millions of other pieces of detritus that lay scattered over the slow curve of the trench on either side of them. They continued on in silence, the narrow shoulder at the top of the berm more or less free of the debris. The earth that had been pushed up here had dried to form an almost natural pathway.

The ghosts of the homes that had haunted their every step finally faded away, exorcised as they reached the edge of the development, obscured somewhere on the opposite side of the furrow in the surrounding red jungle.

The farther along they walked, the deeper the gulley to their right grew, a result, Emily assumed, of the object finally colliding with the earth and dissipating the energy it carried with it out into the surrounding ground. The deeper the ravine became the more nervous Emily became that a sudden gust of wind would knock them from their precarious path and send one, or all of them, tumbling down the litter-strewn sides.

She was so focused on placing one foot carefully in front of the other while keeping a tight hold of Thor’s leash that she only realized MacAlister had stopped when she walked head first into his back. MacAlister didn’t seem to notice. His broad shoulders obscured the way ahead but Reilly spotted what MacAlister had seen and he deftly sidestepped around Emily and then in front of MacAlister. He dropped to one knee and unslung his rifle from his shoulder in a single motion, training the barrel ahead of them.

Emily took a step sideways and looked past MacAlister’s right shoulder.

About a mile distant of their position, the opposite wall of the ravine sloped suddenly away, dropping down to ground level then curving sharply to the right before it rose skyward for two or maybe even three hundred feet.

It was the crater. They had found it.

From this angle, only a slice of the enormous depression was visible, but it was more than enough for them to know they were now just a stone’s throw from their target.

MacAlister pulled the binoculars from the case and glassed the distant sliver.

“What do you see?” Reilly asked. His voice had a nervous edge to it.

“Hard to tell. There’s an awful lot of shadow from the mountain and the lip of the crater.” MacAlister continued to scan the area, then replaced the binoculars into their case. “We’re not going to see anything from here. The angle is too tight,” he said, never taking his eyes off the distant crater.

“So we have to get closer?”

“No, not closer, that’s too risky,” said Emily to Reilly. She had already guessed MacAlister’s plan. “We need to cross over the culvert and get up to the mountain next to the crater. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to see down into the pit without getting any closer.”

MacAlister nodded. “If we continue this way, we’ll be close enough to kiss whatever is in there. No way can we take that chance. Emily’s right, the only way we’re going to be able to get a clear idea of what’s in there is if we get above it. Getting up the side of that mountain is our best option.”

Reilly did not look convinced. “Can’t we just go back and climb in the helo and get some pictures from the air?”

“Can’t risk it. You saw what happened to the UAV. This is the safest choice. You two can stay right here; I can do this on my own.”

“No,” said Emily. “We’re coming with you.”

“Jesus!” said Reilly with a huff, knowing he had no choice in the matter. “I thought I joined the navy, not the infantry.” He swung his pack over his shoulder and started to climb down the slope toward the valley floor.

MacAlister smiled and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Emily: You sure about this?

“Come on, let’s get this over with.” She peeked over the edge and picked what looked like the safest route down to the wide rugged bottom of the valley floor. Then she and Thor followed Reilly down the side of the wall, MacAlister close behind.