Emily laid a reassuring hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “We’re going to do what we’ve always done: continue to survive.” It was the best reply she could come up with under the current circumstance.
Jacob stared up from his chair at her with watery eyes. “How? Can you tell me that, Emily? We have a limited amount of food and nowhere to go. So, how? How do we make it, exactly?” His voice held no malice, she knew, but Jesus, she expected a little more backbone from the man who had dragged her ass out here in the first place.
“We have allies now,” she said, looking at MacAlister. “We have the Vengeance and her crew. And once they get the sub fixed we have a way off this island.” She tried to sound as positive as she could.
Jacob laughed, an ironic grating snicker. “Well that’s just wonderful, but where do we go? You heard the commander, nothing out there is the same anymore.”
“Anywhere,” she said. “We go anywhere. Because if we stay here, then we’ve given up and the one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I never give up. Never.” She paused and sucked warm air deep into her lungs, calming her nerves. “Look, we are all there is right now, but the chances have to be good that there are other survivors out there, other submarines, maybe ships, bunkers. People are like roaches, we have a way of surviving even the worst of situations. We will find a way to survive this.”
“And that about sums us up, doesn’t it: bugs. We’ve been on the receiving end of a fucking galactic pest control effort and we’re the survivors.” Jacob paused in his diatribe for a moment, closing his eyes tightly, a vein pulsing periodically in his temple. He sucked in a deep breath of air before he began talking again, this time there was less of a panicked edge to his voice. “Jesus! I’m sorry, Emily.” He forced a bleak smile as he tried to pull himself together. “I’m just so sorry for all this. Truly.”
“We’ll find a way,” Emily said gently, laying what she hoped was a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “Commander?”
“Yes, Emily? Is everything okay down there?”
Now there was a question. Everything was far from fine, but compared to the crew of the ISS, trapped in that tin can circling the world, the survivors encamped here on the Stockton Islands were just peachy-keen, thank you very much.
“We’re fine, Commander, just ironing out some problems is all.” An idea had begun to form in the back of Emily’s mind, hell, she might even classify it as a plan. “Tell me, Commander, apart from the obvious changes to the landscape that you can see, is there anything else you can tell us? Do you still see cities? Any other sign of human life?”
There was a delay before the commander replied. “It’s hard to be exact, but we see some cities along the coasts of most countries that appear to be somewhat unaffected by whatever this red… stuff… is. But it’s really rather difficult to be sure from up here. We haven’t seen any distinguishable signs of any human activity though. If there is anyone else alive down there, they’re keeping quiet about it.”
“Okay, okay. That’s good.”
Everyone else in the room looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Good?” said MacAlister. “By what stretch of the imagination can that possibly be classified as ‘good’?”
“Bear with me on this: Look, every alien life-form I encountered—from the spiders right through to the trees they constructed—seemed to me to be a small piece of a much bigger… machine, or…” she hesitated, looking for the right word to describe the sense of what she had seen, “or a part of a plan, yes, part of a plan. I mean, think about the progression we saw: The rain created the spider aliens, they made the trees, the trees made the dust, and the dust created the storm. Now that the storm is done, doesn’t that mean that whatever-the-hell plan was being implemented is probably done too? Ding! Ding! Ding! The timer on the stove is going off, because everything down here is cooked to perfection. I mean, that makes sense right? Tell me if I’m wrong?”
“It makes a strange kind of sense, I suppose,” said Jacob. “When you described your experiences to me there seemed to be a very definite progression of effects. Even the creatures that attacked you in the woods outside Valhalla could have been there protecting or maybe tending to the things growing in the white orbs. And the alien that attacked you and Rhiannon’s family—” Jacob paused and glanced at Rhiannon, measuring his words carefully, “—from the way you described the creature, it seemed very purposeful in its actions. It obviously had some kind of rudimentary intelligence, at least enough to be able to mimic the speech patterns of its prey—I mean, Rhiannon’s father. The fact that it didn’t just kill Simon outright, instead using him as a lure for the children and you, does suggest that it was following some kind of program or plan. Yes, I think you might be on to something, Emily.”
She hadn’t given that much thought to the motivation behind the takeover of the planet, and truth be told, there could be any number of reasons for the actions of the alien that had killed Simon and Benjamin, starting with it was just downright fucking evil, but Jacob’s theory of its motivation seemed as possible as any other. After all, every alien she had encountered had seemed… single-minded in its actions, designed for a very specific, even obvious, task.
“So, if the storm has truly ended and whatever changes it was designed to make have run their course, then the world should at least be safe again, right?” she said with a little more hope in her voice than she actually felt.
“Define ‘safe,’” said MacAlister. “Just because the aliens you encountered may have executed their programmed plan, doesn’t mean they aren’t still out there, either in their original form or maybe they’ve changed again. Or that there isn’t still another stage yet to come.”
Emily shook her head at that. “No, it’s over. Everything about this event has been so efficient, so incredibly neat, so precise in its execution. Whatever is behind this, its plan has succeeded. I can feel it.”
Jacob considered her words for a time. “If you’re right, then maybe we can start over again. Assuming the commander is correct and at least the coastal cities are free of this red ‘stuff,’ then there must be years’ worth of food and supplies left in some of those cities. All we have to do is find it. Who knows? Maybe we can find an island, preferably one that’s a little warmer than this one, and settle down. If there are other survivors out there, we can find them, and with enough determination and the right men… and women,” he added quickly, “we can start all over again.”
It was a beautiful dream, the idea of a second chance for humanity, a chance to get it right this time, but was it a plausible plan? The only way to find out would be to try, but they were painfully short of options: stay on this island and last as long as the food did or travel with the Vengeance and see what was waiting out there.
But what that really boiled down to was a simple choice: give up or forge ahead.
It was all starting to make sense to Emily, but as she said her farewells to the commander and headed back to her room, there were still far too many unanswered questions eluding her. But she needed two answered most of alclass="underline" Why? Why had all of this happened? And if all the events had been part of a plan, then whose plan was it?
CHAPTER 6
Commander Fiona Mulligan tried to quash her growing excitement, she had to remain professional after all, but damn it, the news that there were other survivors, and a submarine crew of all things, was just so wonderful.