“No way to tell,” said MacAlister. He had a bandage wrapped around the gash on his head, Vaseline spread over the burn—concessions to the medic who had finally persuaded the Scotsman to let him assess his wounds, with some encouragement from Emily and a liberal dose of chiding from Rhiannon—and had been deemed fit for duty.
“What we saw was nothing more than lights, this hardly seems to fit the description. But then, who can tell what this thing is exactly? I’d bet my last paycheck it wasn’t roaming the woods before the rain came.” He poked the carcass with a charred stick. The flesh cracked and flaked away.
“Yuck!” said Rhiannon, wrinkling her nose at the smell that flooded out of the gash.
“Well I guess this puts to rest any qualms we may have had about whether you were being entirely truthful with us, Emily,” Captain Constantine said. “MacAlister, let’s get a couple of men to drag this thing off. We don’t want it stinking the place up; who knows what it might attract.”
The fire had created an open stretch of blackened wasteland that stretched out in a horseshoe curve to at least a half mile of space around the compound. It looked like a scene from some catastrophe movie.
The ground was still too hot to examine closely, but where there had once been a jungle there was now nothing more than blackened skeletons jutting up from a carpet of powdery ash. Smoke still rose from the ground, like tiny genies searching across the bleak landscape. Oddly, there was still the occasional plant or bush left more or less untouched by the fire. Somehow they had survived with little more than a few singed branches or burned leaves.
It was an echo of Emily’s own strange story of survival.
Given the circumstances of the past month or so, she had had little time to ponder the reasons as to just how or why she, amongst the billions on this planet, had somehow survived the red rain. But maybe she was alive for exactly the same reason these plants were still standing alone in this field of devastation—just blind luck. Right place at the wrong time.
“Well your idea certainly did the trick alright,” said MacAlister, sidling up to her shoulder and gazing out over the devastated stretch of land that now surrounded the base.
“It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she said.
“Pfft! It got the job done and we’re all still here in one piece. That’s a win in my book any day of the week.”
“How are you feeling?” Emily asked without turning around, but she could sense the closeness of him, his breath brushing against her face as he spoke.
“I’m good. I’m good. Just this bump on my head and few bruises. Nothing a few days of light duty won’t fix. Listen, I wanted to say thank you for what you did, pulling me away from the fire like that,” he said, his voice a low whisper.
Emily turned to look at him, their faces just inches apart. “It was nothing,” she said, her eyes fixed on his.
“No, it was definitely something, Emily. It was most definitely something. Look, I was thinking, wondering really, if—”
The sentence was broken by the sudden appearance of three sailors at their side. “Sergeant MacAlister. Captain Constantine told us to report to you for cleanup duty.”
Emily smiled at MacAlister’s obvious embarrassment. He smiled back when he saw her eyes still on him.
“Perfect timing as always, gentlemen,” he scolded the sailor.
“Sir?” the sailor replied, oblivious to the connection he had just neatly severed.
“Don’t call me ‘Sir,’ I work for a living. Oh, never mind. Emily, thank you again. Maybe we’ll get a chance to chat later?”
“Maybe,” Emily replied, then turned and walked back toward the camp.
The first anyone knew the power had finally been restored to the encampment was when the security lights around the perimeter fence crackled into life just before sunset. When the gantry lights mounted around the concrete concourse in front of Building One flickered on too, dusk was suddenly turned back into day. Light flooded the grounds and the still-smoldering area around the fence line. A loud cheer erupted from the sailors who were still working at clearing the vegetation from inside the fence line.
Somewhere, in one of the office buildings not too far from where Emily stood, an electric guitar began to play faintly, a ghostly yet unmistakable voice eventually joined the guitar, floating across the encampment. Even though she couldn’t hear the words she recognized the voice and the song: the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter.” Kind of apt, in a freaky, déjà vu-ey kind of a way, she thought.
When Parsons walked out of the building housing the generator, wiping oil and grease from his hands with an equally dirty rag, he was greeted with more cheers and a round of applause from his gathered shipmates.
“Well done, Parsons,” the captain told him, slapping the man on the back. “And perfect timing too.”
“Thank you, sir,” the engineer replied, a huge grin cracking his usually stern features. “We’ve taken stock of the camp’s at-hand diesel supply, and I estimate we have a good four to five weeks left, if we’re judicious with the demand we put on it. We could stretch it out another week maybe, if we only run the security lights for a few hours at night. We’ll need to locate more diesel pronto though.”
“Security is our main concern right now,” the captain said. “I don’t want to lose anyone else. So, no, the lights stay on all night, for now at least. Once we’re dug in here a little more securely, we’ll locate another supply at the earliest opportunity. There have to be other fuel dumps or civilian establishments we can commandeer more supplies from around here.”
With the camp generator up and running again, Emily found herself once again donning her chef’s apron. After raiding the sub’s still adequately stocked cold-storage locker the smell of steak began to filter to the crew as their workday finally came to an end. The aroma of roasting meat was awfully close to the smell of the creature that had been caught in the fire, but Emily’s stomach quickly overrode any objections her brain may have had, as she and Rhiannon joined the rest of the men of HMS Vengeance in the newly opened camp cafeteria.
Thor made the rounds from table to table, fixing each person who made the mistake of meeting his stare with starved puppy-dog eyes that would have surely gained him an Oscar, had he been human. Finally Emily had to order him to her side.
“I don’t need you stinking the bedroom up all night,” she scolded the dog, who settled on the floor between her and Rhiannon with a sigh, apparently content with his plunder.
The air around the room was lighthearted. Tired eyes brightened as several bottles of wine, found in one of the camp’s officer’s quarters during a scavenging mission by some of the men, were opened and dispensed, with the captain’s permission. The sound of laughter and the hum of banter soon filled the room. The group, already tightknit, had grown even closer over the past few days of hard work clearing the weed from the compound, and Emily was glad to feel the warm glow of acceptance into the group.
Toward the end of the meal, Constantine stood and, as though he were presiding over a wedding ceremony, tapped the side of his wine glass until the room fell silent.
He cleared his throat then spoke. “We’ve come a long way, you and I. And we’ve lost some fine companions and shipmates along the way.” He paused as he collected himself, gulping down a lump that had risen to his throat. “But we’ve also found new friends, and we have made a new start. So, I’d like you all to raise your glasses and toast with me our fallen comrades and our new friends. May God have mercy on us all.”