A pool of light from above appeared like a spotlight on the floor near her, quickly moving to illuminate her and the surroundings.
“Em, can you hear me? Are you hurt?” MacAlister yelled.
“No, I’m okay, I think,” she spluttered as she spat more of the dust from her mouth and brushed remnants of the ceiling from her chest and shoulder. It had been a short, abrupt fall that could have been much, much worse. If she had dropped awkwardly or the ceiling-slash-floor had not slowed her fall, she could have easily broken an ankle or an arm, and then she would have been screwed. They would have had no other option than to return her to the helicopter and go on without her, or even abandoned the mission completely.
Slowly, she withdrew her arm from the hole it had made in the wall. In the light of Mac’s flashlight she could see the same pockmarks scattered across it. Her arm brushed gently against the hole as she extracted herself, sending a cascade of fine gray dust to the floor. The drywall was completely desiccated.
Her arm now free, Emily tried to stand up, carefully monitoring herself for any injury that might be lurking beneath the rush of adrenaline that still had her heart beating like a drumline.
The floor shifted beneath her again and she froze.
“Shit!” she murmured as she felt the carpet sag. “This whole fucking place is crumbling around us,” she yelled to MacAlister. His face was faintly visible next to the white flare of his flashlight, peering through the ragged hole in the ceiling. “I don’t think I can move without risking another collapse.” As she spoke the floor dropped another inch and she let out a squeak of fear.
“Hold on,” MacAlister called down, his voice calm enough to worry her.
“Not like I can go anywhere, is it?”
MacAlister’s face disappeared from the hole; it came back a few seconds later and Emily could just make out something in his hands through the dazzling light. “Here,” he called out, “I’m lowering a rope down to you.”
The floor shifted again beneath her as Emily reached out to take the length of Paracord as it dropped down from above. MacAlister had tied the end into a large loop with a slipknot. She was going to have to sit up to get it over her head and shoulders, and as she carefully repositioned herself, the floor buckled beneath her butt again, and Emily felt something give. Part of the floor to her right dropped away, tumbling to the level below. Emily glanced down through the newly formed hole. Illuminated by Mac’s light she could see that the next floor down was also gone and maybe even the one below that. It was as though the building was dissolving, from the ground on up. If she fell now it would be at least a three-story fall… and that would be it. Game over.
Slowly she slipped one arm through the loop of rope, then her second arm. Only then did she let out a sigh of relief.
“Okay, I’m—” The floor beneath her gave a loud crack and she felt herself falling again. Her scream became an Oomph! as the loop of Paracord pulled taut around her chest and jerked her to a halt, leaving her dangling over the three-story drop. Above her she heard Thor’s frantic barks echoing down to her, mixed with grunts of exertion from Mac and Reilly as they strained to hold her.
“Hold on, Em,” Mac yelled, his voice echoing through the empty corridors and floors below her. “We’ve got you.”
Emily concentrated on controlling her breathing as she swung like a plumb bob at the end of its line. Just breathe, she told herself. Slow, deep breaths. Her eyes searched the exposed space around her, looking for anything she could use to hold her weight, to give the two men above her some help.
She had come to a stop just below the ceiling that had, moments before, been the floor that had broken her fall. She saw that the floor of this corridor was almost completely disintegrated, collapsed along with thirty feet or so of wall, exposing the rooms beyond and the ones below that. A lichen-like mold covered most of the remaining walls and the ceiling above her. The mold was a dark-brownish color, covered in small tubular fronds, similar to those of a sea anemone. The fronds undulated back and forth, swaying as though driven by a breeze, and as the creaking rope swung her back and forth, she saw a piece of the remaining wall crumble and fall in a cascade of mortar and red.
“Oh, shit!” she exhaled as what she had thought was lichen suddenly and inexplicably began to inch its way in the direction of the newly exposed wound in the wall.
As the men two floors above her began to slowly raise her back up to safety, a single thought occupied Emily’s mind: The destruction to the building wasn’t because of bad workmanship or poor material, it was being slowly but surely being devoured by the plant life that was growing around it.
MacAlister grabbed Emily under the arms and heaved her over the lip, dragging her away from the crevasse. When he let her go they were both lying next to each other on the carpet, panting hard, almost face to face, and she peered into his eyes for a second, analyzing the emotion she saw in them.
Thor’s wet tongue on her cheek broke the moment.
“I love you too,” she said, then quickly added, “Thor.”
MacAlister stood and held out his hand to her, hefting her to her feet.
“That’s one less ‘I owe you,’” he said. “But don’t think this means you’re getting out of dinner with me.”
They edged their way carefully along the corridor toward the stairs, their backs against the wall with enough distance between them that if one fell, the others would at least have a chance to react. They might just as well have been walking across a glacier, at any time a crevasse could open up and swallow one of them… or all of them. But they reached the landing of the stairwell with little more than a few worrying moments brought on by sagging floors and the occasional loud crack beneath their feet. Feeling secure in the shelter of the stairwell Emily began to explain what she had seen while she was dangling so precariously from the rope.
“It makes no sense,” said Reilly when she was done telling them about the strange building-eating mold she had seen while she was, quite literally this time, at the end of her rope.
“The one thing I know for certain about these aliens is that they are super-efficient, they waste nothing. If the lichen I saw really was eating the concrete and the drywall, then I would say it’s a safe bet that it was designed to do just that.”
They had already passed beyond the level that had been blocked on the opposite side of the building. The rest of this stairwell seemed to be intact, but as they dropped level after level they began to see pockmarks in the wall again where the lichen had begun to eat its way through.
“Well, at least it only seems interested in devouring the building rather than us. That’s a refreshing change,” said MacAlister. He pushed open a door onto the corridor with the barrel of his rifle and stuck his head through to check out the damage for himself.
“Jesus, that’s a hell of a mess. This place isn’t going to be standing for very much longer. If that shit keeps eating through the walls, it won’t be long before it hits a support wall. All it’s going to take is for one of those to give way and the whole thing is going to come down like a house of cards. We need to get this job done and get the hell out of here.”
The stairs terminated at the ground-floor casino level next to a bank of closed elevators. Row upon row of slot machines lined the floor of the room beyond, deactivated robots standing sentry over gold that no one was ever coming back for. The only light other than their flashlights came from a set of smoked-glass doors at the opposite end of the huge gaming room and they threaded their way through the dead machines toward it.