“Pull, don’t try to lift,” Emily yelled.
The two women dug their heels into the soft ground and began to tug the unconscious soldier back toward the fence line. He weighed a freaking ton, but inch by precious inch they dragged him away from the flames of the fire.
A pair of arms seemed to appear from nowhere, reaching past her, grabbing MacAlister by the collar of his combat jacket. Another pair of hands reached over her own and grabbed the front of the jacket as another sailor ran past them and lifted MacAlister’s legs off the ground.
Suddenly Emily was stumbling backward as Mac’s weight was lifted from her. Then she was running alongside the sailors as they carried his unconscious body back to the safety of the encampment and the waiting medic.
She felt a childlike fear grip her, irrational and overwhelming. But wasn’t that what fear was, at its essence? A direct conduit to the inner child, through all the armor and fortifications that we build as adults. Fear always managed to find that quivering child hiding in the center of every human, surrounded by darkness and cowering in the slowly dimming light of an exhausted candle.
As they ran for the gate they passed the smoldering body of the thing that had leapt from the fire. Flames still flickered along its flank. She could smell burning meat and the astringent reek of singed fur. It stank to high heavens and beyond. The creature lay on its side, its body twisted, huge jaws hanging wide open, a pink tongue, bleeding from where it had bitten itself in terror and agony, hanging from between razor teeth. One large round eye stared sightlessly toward the smoke-filled sky. The body was riddled with bullet holes.
They dragged MacAlister through the gates and straight to the waiting medic.
“Is he going to be alright?” Rhiannon asked, as she pushed herself close to Emily.
“Hard to tell at the moment,” said Amar, as he ran his fingers around the cut on MacAlister’s head, trying to gauge how deep the laceration was. He pressed harder and the soldier’s eyes fluttered open, flicking first to Amar, then to Emily and Rhiannon, then back to the Amar.
“Do you make a habit of taking advantage of unconscious men?” MacAlister asked, his eyes on Emily again, his voice croaky, as though he had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Or is this what counts as a first date where you come from?” he added as he struggled to sit up.
“Why don’t you just lay there a while so I can get a better look at you?” Amar insisted.
“Not going to happen. I’m fine.”
With help from Emily and Rhiannon, MacAlister climbed to his feet. He wobbled for a second, leaning hard on Emily, and his arm slipped around her shoulder as his own hand found its way to her waist.
“You could have a concussion or a fractured skull for all I know,” Amar continued, his exasperation obvious.
“I’ve taken worse knocks from your grandmother,” MacAlister retorted. “Now, would someone like to tell me what the hell just happened?”
CHAPTER 13
She had miscalculated.
Both the captain and MacAlister insisted that they were as much to blame, but it had been Emily’s idea to set the fire and she bore the responsibility completely for it getting out of hand. Her miscalculation had been in the ill-founded belief that the new plant life would react the same as the old; that if it wasn’t dry, it would not burn. They had been wrong. She had been wrong.
The alien vegetation seemed particularly susceptible to fire, far more so than any Earth fauna that Emily had ever encountered before the red rain had come. What had started out as an attempt at a small controlled burn had escalated quickly into a ravaging conflagration as the fire MacAlister set ignited acre upon acre of the alien jungle around the camp. It devoured the vegetation like some ravenous monster. A huge tower of smoke rose from the fire, rolling into the air and blocking out the sun through the rest of the evening and into the next day.
The fire burned for almost twelve hours before it finally died away, stopped by a natural firebreak of rocky terrain that choked off the ravaging fire-beast’s food.
Now, what should have been a bright morning was instead a dreary gray, smoke obscuring everything that was not within ten feet of the survivors as they looked out from behind the relative safety of Building One’s windows.
“Everyone stays inside until the smoke clears,” Captain Constantine ordered. “The last thing we want is any of you getting lost out there and overcome by the fumes.”
So they sat and they waited.
Throughout the previous night a flickering orange wall of indistinct flames had been visible through the pall of smoke as the gluttonous fire ate its way through the jungle. But as Emily waited in the corridor with Rhiannon and several sailors, she could see nothing but smoke now. The fire was either out or it had moved far enough away that it was no longer a threat to the camp and its new occupants.
A sea breeze kicked up just before noon, wafting between the buildings of Camp Loma, probing the smoke and pushing it farther west, slowly emptying the courtyards as it spread the choking smoke away from the camp. The stench of burned vegetation mixed with the distinctive aroma of the sea remained though.
There had been a few touch-and-go moments during the night when embers carried by hot air from the fire gushed into the compound, but these had been ruthlessly tracked down by teams of sailors and, according to MacAlister, they had suffered nothing worse than a few singed roof tiles.
It was easy to spot those who had been outside on fire watch; their smoke-dirtied raccoon faces filed through the corridor as they returned to the building, eyes watering, coughing and hacking as their shipmates took them aside and led them to water stations.
Everywhere she looked, Emily saw nothing but zombies: bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived zombies. But as the hours ticked by the smoke thinned and eventually cleared and by mid-afternoon, the Point Loma survivors made their way cautiously outside again.
A thin layer of ash covered every exposed surface; it powdered beneath their feet as they stepped out into the courtyard in front of Building One.
“Good God,” Emily said, standing in the gray shadow of the sun as it tried to force its way through the residual layer of smoke that still floated high in the afternoon sky. “We’ve only been here for a day and we’re already back to our old ways.”
“What do you mean?” Rhiannon asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, but she couldn’t shake the notion that the column of smoke rising into the atmosphere was a stark reminder of humanity’s impact on the planet, a footprint, she supposed, of her civilization, of humanity’s time spent at the top of the food chain. But by the same token, she delighted in seeing the blackened stalks and charred husks of the alien plant life that had spread across this land, or the iron ore–red soot that blew through the camp on the hot thermals of the fire. She felt a strange delight when she saw the burnt-down trunks of incinerated trees jutting from the still-smoking ground outside the fence like skeletal fingers.
There wasn’t much left of the dragon—as everyone had now come to call the creature they had shot the previous day—left for them to examine. The out-of-control fire had caught up with it, roasting it to nothing more than a black lump of charcoal, save for the lower part of one leg and some skin on its underbelly.
“Is this the thing that grabbed Collins?” asked the captain, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth to keep out the residual smoke and the stink of burned flesh.