“Who’s firing? Cease fire! Cease fire!” MacAlister yelled into the radio just as a second shot from the same location shattered the silence. “Collins, cease fire.”
Emily saw the lights freeze, then almost faster than her eyes could follow, the cloud of lights coalesced into a single stream and swarmed toward the rooftop where the shots had been fired from. The lights flowed over the fence and Emily caught the faint shadowed outline of something sinuous and dark flowing through the air with them. Three more shots followed in quick succession as the lights landed on the flat roof of the building where MacAlister had sent his man. A silence-filled moment stretched out for seconds as the lights ebbed and flowed then they surged forward in a wave of brilliance, quick as a striking cobra. The night was punctured by an unmistakable scream of agony, shrill and screeching. Then silence descended again as the man’s shriek was abruptly cut short.
The lights twisted and turned in a vicious twirling storm right where Emily judged the rifle fire had come from, the afterimage of the muzzle flashes still glowing in her eyes.
And then the lights reversed their trajectory and flowed back over the fence and into the forest. Emily watched as they streamed up the side of the hill. Abruptly, they blinked out of existence.
“Oh, fuck!” said someone in the dark beside her. “Fuck me sideways. What the fuck was that?”
No one answered him.
The group was up on its feet almost as a single entity, racing toward the building where the screams had come from, and Emily found herself swept along with them.
Emily almost screamed when she felt a hand grab hers in the darkness. “Stick by me.” The sound of MacAlister’s voice was an anchor in the chaos.
They followed the sailors into the building and up the stairs. On the top floor, the group slowed and raised their weapons, covering the corridor and the access door leading out to the flat roof beyond. The door was ajar, creaking eerily as it moved back and forth in the breeze.
“Collins?” MacAlister called out as he moved forward, placing the flat of his hand against the door. There was no answer. MacAlister pushed the door slowly open, then stepped out onto the roof, his rifle raised to his shoulder as he swept the barrel back and forth across the deserted rooftop. The other sailors followed quickly behind him, fanning out across the roof, providing cover for every potential angle of attack.
Emily allowed them a few seconds to position themselves then followed behind the last sailor, her Mossberg at the ready.
“Collins?” Emily heard MacAlister yell out again, then, “What the…? Oh, Jesus!” A flashlight flicked on, illuminating MacAlister’s standard issue boots.
He was standing in a wide pool of blood.
They found no sign of the sentry’s body or any of his equipment. And judging by the amount of blood that had pooled on the roof, Emily did not think there was much chance of locating Collins alive, either. Apparently MacAlister shared her grim reasoning. Flashlights illuminated the darkness of the roof they stood on as sailors shone their lights over the sides of the building and down onto the ground surrounding it, searching for any clue as to where their comrade had disappeared.
“I want everyone off this roof right now and back to the main building immediately,” MacAlister said once he was sure Collins wasn’t lying injured nearby. Emily could hear the restraint it took not to yell the command. “And switch those damn lights off. We’re too exposed up here.”
“But sir, what about… Collins?” a voice from the darkness asked.
“He’s gone and there’s nothing we can do for him. Right now we need to get back to the main building and make sure it’s secure. If there are any more of those things out here I don’t want them getting access to it. We’ll organize a search party for Collins in the morning.”
“But, sir—”
“No buts. We don’t have nearly enough light; we have no idea what that thing was, and no way of tracking it. No, we get off this roof now,” MacAlister commanded.
Emily followed the shadows and sound of scuffing boots back to the exit door and down to the ground floor. The group jogged quickly across the open ground and back to the safety of their building.
“Everyone in?” MacAlister asked the guard standing just inside the exit doors.
“You’re the last, sir.”
“Good. I don’t want you to move from this position until I send someone to relieve you, am I understood?”
The sailor nodded, his head bobbing nervously.
“And if you see anything at all out there I want to know about it immediately. You do not engage it. You come and get me or the skipper. Got it?”
Another nod from the sailor.
MacAlister positioned a pair of guards at the door to each floor, then told everyone else to head back to bed. “There’s nothing you can do, and it’s going to be another long day tomorrow. We’re going to need to organize a search party to try and find Collins so I need you all alert and ready.”
When Emily quietly opened the door to her room, Rhiannon was still awake, her worried face illuminated in the glow of a battery-powered LED lamp. Thor was sitting on the cot next to her, his tail thumped loudly as Emily stepped into the room.
“Is everything alright?”
Emily sat next to Rhiannon, stroking Thor’s head. “Everything is just fine,” she lied. “Just a false alarm.”
“I heard gunshots.”
“It was just a mistake, nothing to worry about. Now, come on. It’s late and I don’t know about you, but I need my beauty sleep.”
Rhiannon seemed to accept the lie and, before Emily had even removed her clothes for bed, she heard the girl’s breathing change to a slow, steady rhythm as sleep overcame her.
Emily switched off the lamp and climbed between the sheets. She lay staring into the darkness, running the strange event she had witnessed earlier over in her mind again.
Those lights had seemed to be linked together, almost as if they were part of the same creature, or at least, operating as a single entity.
This world, this truly new world, was waking up, she thought. Humanity’s crown had been stripped from its head and they had been cast out into the red wilderness as naked and vulnerable as every other creature that now walked this planet. More so, in all probability, because none of them had any idea what the rules for this new world were, and those rules had most assuredly changed…
…and every soul under the roof of this building was as vulnerable as the next.
CHAPTER 12
Early the following morning the whirling mist between Point Loma and the rest of the world had turned into a deep, impenetrable fog. It hung in the air, sucking in all the light from the rising sun, turning the world a depressing gray.
Captain Constantine and his men were already up and assembled when Emily joined them in the refectory. He had split the remaining crew not tasked with guarding the compound into two search parties. One led by him, the other by MacAlister. Emily could tell from the looks on the men’s faces that they held out little hope of finding their missing comrade. Everyone present on the roof last night who had witnessed the attack had also seen how much of Collins’s blood had been left behind after the man was plucked into the darkness. There was little doubt as to his fate. If the man had still been alive last night, there was no way he was going to have survived for more than a few minutes before he bled out. Constantine was just going through the motions for his men’s sake.