“At least we haven’t seen any of the spiders,” said Rhiannon through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. “They scared me.”
In fact, no one had reported seeing any signs of life since stepping ashore. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be something out there in the alien jungle lying just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence of the compound.
“Ah, you don’t want to worry about a few spiders,” said Parsons, “I’ll keep you safe, cariad.” He placed a friendly arm around the girl’s shoulder and squeezed her gently to him.
“Do you think there’s anything out there?” Captain Constantine asked Emily. “Any of those creatures you saw when you were traveling still exist?”
Emily’s hand fluttered subconsciously to her shoulder where the creature that had attacked her in the forest outside Valhalla had left her scarred.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t see any of the trees that made the dust, so I think the spider aliens have probably served their purpose. But the other monsters? Who knows? They could be out there right now for all I know.” The word “monsters” sounded so childish in her present company, but that was what they had been. Scary fucking monsters and the sooner everyone realized it the safer she would feel.
MacAlister nodded his understanding. “We’ve got a tight guard on the compound. You can rest easy tonight.”
The conversation faltered for a moment, a silence slipping in between them until MacAlister announced, “Okay, who wants a refill of their cuppa?” He pointed at his half-empty mug of tea.
Emily nodded and handed her own empty mug to him. Tea, she decided, was beginning to grow on her.
The screams started just after sunset.
At first Emily thought it was Thor dreaming, whining as he relived some personal nightmare, but when the wailing grew louder and the sound of panicked human voices joined it, a sudden jolt of adrenaline cleared her sleep-addled brain and she was awake.
“What is it?” Rhiannon’s voice, tremulous and low, whispered from beneath the sheets of her cot.
The wailing came again before Emily could answer; a strange mixture of high-pitched screeching with a deep intertwined staccato bass thrum that sounded like a badly out-of-tune cello. Emily looked down at Thor at the side of her cot; he was awake, his ears up and eyes wide open, head cocked to one side. He seemed more curious than perturbed, unlike the voices yelling back and forth to each other beyond their door.
“I don’t know,” Emily answered when the wailing died away again, “but I’m going to go find out. You stay here and look out for Thor. I’ll be right back.” Emily grabbed her pistol from under her pillow and headed toward the door.
The wailing call rose again. This time it sounded much louder and closer, rattling the glass in the windows. Emily did an about-face and headed back to where she had left the Mossberg shotgun leaning against the wall. She checked it quickly and walked back to the door.
“Stay put,” she told Thor as he rose to follow her, but he instantly sat back down at her command. She slipped through the door and into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind her. Several bleary-eyed sailors were pulling on shirts and firing questions at each other. Flashlight beams cut through the darkness, turning the faces of the sailors into ghoulish masks. No one had any answers but each of them held a weapon in his hand as they moved from their rooms and headed toward the stairwell. She followed behind them, pushing her way through the group, down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
A three-quarter moon punctured a cloudless sky dappled with stars. The moon’s ghostly light was bright enough for Emily to make out a collection of human shapes gathered just outside the entranceway.
“Emily, you should stay inside,” said MacAlister when he spotted her exiting the building, the light from his flashlight illuminating her and the other sailors behind her. He glanced disapprovingly at the shotgun in her hand and the Glock pistol strapped to her hip. “Do you sleep with that under your pillow?”
She ignored him. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s making that sound?”
“We don’t know exactly what—” He stopped, cut off halfway through his sentence as another wail split the still night air. It was so much louder out here.
Emily felt a cold shiver run down her spine at the memory of the creature on the floor above her apartment back in Manhattan. “You need to be really, really careful,” she said to MacAlister. “We don’t have any idea what we’re dealing with here, but I can guarantee whatever is making that noise won’t be friendly.”
“You, Collins,” MacAlister said pointing at a sailor behind Emily. “Get up on that roof and tell me what you see.” He tossed a walkie-talkie and a pair of night-vision goggles to the sailor, who ran to the building he had indicated. “The rest of you, follow me.”
Emily slipped in beside MacAlister as he led them in the direction they thought the cry was coming from. The night air was chilly and Emily could feel gooseflesh rising on her skin beneath her thin T-shirt. Flashlights cut through the blackness of the night like searchlights, but as they reached the western perimeter fence MacAlister hissed an order: “Lights off.” Instantly all were extinguished. The group fell silent and waited for their eyes to acclimate to the darkness.
From the radio in MacAlister’s hand came the voice of the sentry he had ordered to the rooftop. “There’s movement northwest of my location, sir. I can’t make out what it is but there’s definitely something out there.” The voice was a low, calm whisper.
Emily stared in the direction the guard had said he saw something, her eyes trying to penetrate through the darkness. She tried to picture the area beyond the wire fence from when she had first come ashore: a gentle hill that gradually rose toward the sky, covered in thick alien plants that towered twenty feet or more into the air, perfect cover. She could hear the forest of swaying plants soughing and rustling in the breeze just a few yards beyond where she and the others now silently crouched, weapons at the ready. Her eyes searched the blackness again… nothing… wait! Something was moving in the darkness. What was that?
Halfway up the hill Emily could see multiple points of light weaving through the tall plants. The lights rose and dropped, up and down, tiny pinpricks of intense luminescence about the size of one of those laser pointers people loved to tease their pet cats with. There were hundreds of them, glowing orange then green then red, flowing silently between the stalks and stems of the plants.
“What the fuck is that?” someone whispered over Emily’s shoulder.
“Quiet,” MacAlister whispered, his eyes focused on the lights as they moved from right to left across their field of vision.
The lights continued to undulate, burning so brightly that Emily could make out their glow even when they were obscured by the thick leaves of the plants they moved behind. They stopped abruptly, and the wailing again echoed through the night. The moment the cry faded away, the string of lights began to move once again.
Out here, without the walls of the building to baffle the sound, the cry had sounded plaintive, melancholy even, as though whatever creature the voice belonged to knew it was the last of its kind, doomed to wander the earth alone.
Or maybe, she had it all backward, maybe it was just the first of its kind, Emily thought.
A silence-shattering crack exploded from high up and behind where the group was crouched. It was followed immediately by a bright orange flash that left a ghostly outline of its glow on the back of Emily’s eyes. The entire group jumped in unison at the sound of the single rifle shot.