Emily started as MacAlister’s voice suddenly filled her head. “Lady and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Please remain seated for the duration of the flight. Our expected flight time is two hours and we do hope you enjoy your flight. Unfortunately, the only inflight entertainment will be my rendition of ‘Danny Boy,’ please do try to refrain from leaping from the aircraft while we are still airborne. Thank you for flying MacAlister Airlines.”
Through the window Emily watched the concrete of the airfield slip away into the distance only to be replaced by water as they left Coronado Island and crossed the channel to the mainland. By this time the Black Hawk had already climbed to several thousand feet, and their bird’s-eye view gave Emily a unique, unobscured perspective of the world beneath her. It was a world that she could no longer recognize.
Jacob had explained to her that the red storm had acted as some kind of incubator, creating just the right environment to catalyze the substances released by the trees. She understood that, for the most part, at least, but good God, the scale of it all from up here was just overwhelming.
During the time it had enclosed the world within its deadly embrace, the storm had changed everything. There was no green left now, it was all reds and purples and browns. Here and there were gaps in the canopy that might have been fields before the rain, but were now tangles of smaller red plants. Beyond them was the jungle, a huge alien mix of trees and vegetation and vines. Giant fronds and branches reached out to each other, tangling and intertwining together to form a cratered landscape of twisted foliage.
It was only from up here that she could truly appreciate the total and absolute finality of the planet’s overthrow. While she had still been on the ground Emily could always imagine that beyond that great barrier of red there was still somewhere that remained normal, somewhere that was still Earth. But now, as she looked out over the uninterrupted landscape of red spreading from one horizon to the next, all hope that there was anywhere left evaporated.
“It’s devastatingly beautiful, isn’t it?” MacAlister’s voice whispered in her ear.
“Terrifying,” she said back. “It’s terrifying.”
“Look at that,” said MacAlister. “To the west, do you see that?”
Emily adjusted her position so she could get a better view through the window. In the distance, reaching up through the jungle she could see a collection of tall buildings; at least, she could just make out the top floors of the skyscrapers. While the majority of the upper parts of the skyscrapers were clear of the invasive red plants, thick ropes of red had climbed up from the jungle below and wound their way around the walls, entwining the buildings. To Emily it looked like the skyscrapers were slowly being pulled down into the jungle below. Nothing would escape the slow, inexorable takeover. She had no doubt that, given enough time, even these last few examples of man’s fragile dominion over the planet would crumble and fall beneath the weight of alien life. More of the huge birds that she had come to think of as phoenix circled and swooped around the top of the building.
“They want it entirely for themselves, don’t they?” Emily said. “Not a trace of the old world, our world, left.”
MacAlister nodded silently, his eyes fixed on the northern horizon.
“Why?” Emily asked, voicing a question that had bugged her since her first inkling of what was going on. “Why would anyone, any thing, go to such great trouble to wipe out an entire planet’s life and replace it with another?”
“We’ll know that in a couple of hours,” said MacAlister.
Let’s hope it’s an answer we can all live with, Emily thought as she watched the towers disappear into the distance behind them.
The unearthly jungle rolled by beneath them as the Black Hawk thundered onward toward their destination. Occasionally, Emily would see a break in the canopy of red that exposed open ground and she would catch a glimpse of houses or buildings, their gardens overrun, their roofs punctured by the limbs of the trees and plants that grew around them.
Eventually, as they drew closer to what had once been the border between California and southern Nevada, the deep waves of lush vegetation began to fall away, replaced by waist-high reedlike plants that swayed and billowed like corn in the summer, caressed by a brisk wind.
“According to my map, that used to be the Mojave Desert down there,” said MacAlister, the noise of the rotors bullying his voice over the headphones.
“Doesn’t look like much of a desert now,” Emily replied. Whatever it had looked like before, now it was a plain of lush, red plant life spreading out toward a quickly approaching mountain range to the north. The plants extended halfway up the sides of the mountain before petering out as they drew closer to the snowcapped peaks.
MacAlister had spotted it too. “Looks as though this new plant life has as much of an aversion to the cold as your creepy-crawlies do,” he said over the intercom. They flew what seemed to Emily to be perilously close to the mountains, before turning a few degrees to the east.
“Look,” said Emily. “On the right. There’s a road.”
A strip of six-lane highway, a few miles long, had appeared as it climbed over the mountain before dipping down again and vanishing into the waves of red as the road dropped down toward the plain below.
MacAlister said, “That should be the Fifteen down there. Means we’re on the right track. Vegas shouldn’t be too far away now. I hope you all remembered to bring your suntan lotion and swimsuits.”
No one said anything, so MacAlister kept flying.
CHAPTER 22
Las Vegas, or, at least, what was left of the city of sin, appeared out of the morning haze like an oasis.
The miles of undulating plants that had turned the desert into a lush, red sea were again replaced by the towering trees and twisted vines of the jungle that had sprung up to claim the city. MacAlister adjusted the flight path so they would approach from the southwest, skirting around the edge of the town.
“I’m going to do a little reconnoiter,” he said, “just to see what we’re dealing with.”
Just as they had seen over San Diego and every town they had flown past since leaving Point Loma, the alien jungle was well on its way to having claimed Las Vegas as its own. Creepers and tendrils clung to every wall, streetlight, sign, and walkway in the town, obscuring all but the uppermost parts of the tallest casinos and hotels.
The thrum of the Black Hawk’s powerful rotors echoed back to the occupants of the helo, bouncing off the buildings as it cruised slowly around the westernmost edge of the Las Vegas Strip. The hotels and casinos that had made the desert town so famous had mostly disappeared beneath a cloak of scarlet. The roads and sidewalks were choked with plant life, obscuring all but the occasional street sign or stoplight. Only the taller casinos and landmarks still pushed their way through the canopy of the red jungle.
It was a dead town. A city of ghosts.
Emily saw a glint of sunlight bouncing off an odd angle. It was the Luxor casino, the giant glass pyramid jutting out of the jungle like the ancient wonder it was modeled after. Farther on she spotted a huge arm thrust into the air, the forever-extinguished torch it held aloft in what seemed to Emily to be a final desperate gesture of defiance was all that was still visible of the New York–New York Statue of Liberty, drowned beneath the sea of red leaves and branches.