They moved silently through the lower corridors of the building, checking room after room. The majority of the office’s windows had survived the storm intact, apart from the occasional crack or missing pane. Oddly though, the offices looked to have been picked over already. Desk drawers hung open, their contents spilled on the floor, security lockers too. The glass front of a vending machine at the end of the corridor they stood on had been smashed and emptied of its contents.
At the sight of the broken vending machine, MacAlister put a finger to his lips and then beckoned Emily and Rusty to him. “I think we may have stumbled on some survivors here,” he said in a hushed voice.
“Couldn’t this have happened before the storm, during the panic after the red rain?” Emily asked, her own voice barely a whisper.
MacAlister shook his head. “I don’t think so. This is all too methodical. Either way, it’s best if we continue with caution, okay?”
“We should get out of here,” said Rusty, his voice hushed, nervous.
Emily shook her head. “No, if there’s someone else alive in here we need to find them and help them. We’re going to need all the warm bodies we can get.” MacAlister nodded his agreement. Rusty did not seem happy with the decision but he was outranked and outvoted.
They took the stairs up to the next floor. MacAlister led the way, his weapon raised and covering the landing, Rusty followed at the rear covering their six, and Emily stayed in the center, her Mossberg in hand. On the second floor landing, they moved down the left corridor, MacAlister quietly sweeping each room as they went, while Emily and the young sailor monitored the corridor.
When they reached the third room, MacAlister hissed quietly to Emily to come and join him. She glanced in the room. The desk that had occupied it was gone and the filing cabinets and other furniture had been pushed to one end of the room to make way for three adult-size sleeping bags. An assortment of military clothing, mostly fatigues, hung from a makeshift clothes rack in one corner, and a propane stove sat on a table beneath the window. Under the table were several boxes of MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. There was also an assortment of candy, probably from the ransacked machine on the first floor.
“Looks like we definitely have company,” said MacAlister.
They left the room as it was and continued moving farther down the corridor. MacAlister’s flashlight played over the wall.
Something on the wall ahead of them reflected the light back at them; it glinted and scintillated like cat’s eyes on a highway. MacAlister moved the light back over the wall again and Emily recognized the same beautiful sapphire-like glow of the substance she had seen when they first explored Point Loma after the fire. They had found it on the walls of one of the buildings near the harbor. While the lichen and jungle flora seemed to be almost everywhere, this oddly reflective substance seemed to prefer flat surfaces like walls. The refracted light from the beam of Mac’s flashlight made a beautiful, oily mixture of color over the floor.
“Move your light over the far wall,” Emily asked MacAlister.
The opposite wall was covered in the same sapphire-like crust too, and as he ran the light along the walls, they could see it extended about ten feet farther down along each surface of the wall and up onto the ceiling too. It looked almost like a cave entrance, or a grotto.
“What is it?” asked Rusty.
“I have no idea,” whispered Emily, “but we saw it on some of the buildings when we were reconnoitering the day after we arrived, remember? It looks too hard to be a plant.” She remembered how the alien dust had eventually become inert, turning to crystal once its job had been completed back in her apartment in Manhattan. “Maybe it’s just some kind of residue left over from the storm?” she offered.
Rusty reached out a hand to touch the crust.
“Will you never learn?” MacAlister slapped his hand away before he could touch it. Rusty was living up to his name doubly so now, his face flushed almost as red as his hair. “Come on,” said MacAlister, “let’s check the last stretch of the rooms, then we’re out of here.”
They doubled back to the landing then crossed to the second corridor. The first room was clear, but in the second they found more of the sapphire growth. It was plastered over one wall and all around the window, completely covering the sill and one pane of glass. In the natural sunlight it was even more beautiful. The blue rays sparkled and painted the room like a laser show.
In the third room they found the survivors.
Emily gave a gasp of surprise and horror as she peeked her head into the room. There were three bodies lying on the floor. Actually, not bodies, they were little more than brown-stained skeletons, the flesh stripped from the bone.
The room looked like a medical-student prank, as though the three skeletons had been purposefully placed there for maximum effect. The skeletons were fully clothed, two in Marine fatigues and the third in a skirt and blouse. The white cotton of the blouse was stained with blood. A pistol and a submachine gun lay near the two deceased Marines.
MacAlister said nothing, his eyes taking in the scene with the dispassionate professionalism of a soldier who knew he was looking at something he had not been trained for.
“Fuck me!” Rusty exclaimed as he stepped into the room. “Would you look at that?” He stepped closer to the bodies, peering with morbid curiosity at the remains.
Emily noticed more of the sapphire growth on the wall around the window. The growth extended out across the floor to the foot of one of the dead Marines.
“What do you think killed them?” said Rusty as he took another step closer, dropping to one knee to get a closer look at the skeleton of the deceased woman.
A shimmer passed over the surface of the sapphire growth on the wall.
At first Emily thought it was maybe the light from MacAlister’s flashlight that he had forgotten to switch off, but in the split second it took for her to process the thought she knew that she was wrong, and she knew that it was already too late.
“Rusty! Get back!” she yelled.
The sailor started to turn in her direction, a look of confusion on his face that instantly turned to horror as the sapphire growth on the wall began to break apart and cascade down the wall and flow across the floor toward him.
Beetles. Hundreds of tiny beetles, their hexagon-shaped shells, glittering like cascading jewels, swept across the floor and onto Rusty’s boot then swarmed up the legs of his combat fatigues.
There was just enough time for Emily to register a multitude of tiny black feet beneath the shell of each beetle—like a centipede, she thought—before Rusty realized something was terribly wrong.
He looked down at his leg and screamed, a high-pitched yelp of horror, girlish in its shrillness. He swatted furiously at the bodies of the creatures as they swarmed up the material of his trousers, knocking a few off while he backpedaled away from the stream of iridescent creatures, but not nearly enough to change the direction of his fate.
They were on him in a heartbeat, skittering over his chest, climbing over his face and hands as he tried to bat them away. The beetles instantly headed toward the soft parts of the sailor’s body. He managed another brief scream but that was choked off to a wet gurgle as the beetles flooded into his mouth and began burrowing down his throat and through his cheeks.
Instinctively Emily started forward to help the sailor, but she felt herself grabbed roughly around the waist and hoisted into the air as MacAlister set her down in the corridor.
“Run!” he yelled as she caught a final glimpse of Rusty, one arm outstretched, reaching toward her, his body already invisible beneath the cloud of beetles as he fell forward, knocking some of the creatures off only for them to bounce to a stop and scuttle back to their dinner.