“Would you look at that?” MacAlister said, his voice filled with awe as they approached the exit. Through the doors the group could see the red-covered floor of the alien jungle. Before them lay a primal spectrum of red hues laid bare by bright shafts of light that had managed to cut their way through the thick foliage of the forest’s canopy far overhead. Everything else was blanketed by deep shadows and ominous-looking silhouettes of what Emily imagined were the huge trunks of trees. The result was a surreal palette of color that was completely disorienting to their eyes, as though they found themselves at the bottom of an ocean.
“Where’s the fucking Mad Hatter?” said Reilly.
Thick roots and branches had pushed open or shattered several of the glass exits, allowing runners and vines to creep inside the entrance of the casino, across the floor, and along the walls.
“You’re not kidding,” said MacAlister, “but we’re not here to sightsee. Are you both ready?”
Emily nodded and repositioned the shotgun.
MacAlister and Reilly readied their weapons and stepped closer to the exit, covering each other as they advanced. Emily unslung her Mossberg from her shoulder.
“Everyone remember where we parked,” MacAlister quipped and gave the door handle a tug. It rattled open far enough for him to kick away the creepers winding up the pane and through the door handle and slip through, followed quickly by Reilly and Emily.
CHAPTER 25
“Jesus, why is it so quiet?” Reilly asked, his voice so low you would have thought he was in a library instead of standing on the edge of a sprawling alien world.
He was right, though; it was eerily quiet out here. What sound there was came from the rustle of the canopy a hundred or more feet above their heads and the scrape of stiff vines against the side of the Tacoma as the vibration travelled down their stems.
Emily was glad it wasn’t just her that found the silence of the jungle more disturbing than the actual presence of the alien plants themselves. It was as though the three humans had walked out onto a movie set or a theatre stage, the actors and audience not yet arrived. Or maybe we are the actors in this particular movie? Emily thought.
The air was thick and wet, and Emily felt her lungs complain as she sucked the heavy air in. The exterior walls of the Tacoma, those that she could see through the thick tangle of vegetation that clung to its walls, were dimpled with huge pits, the bigger brothers of the holes they had seen inside. It looked as though direct exposure to the exterior environment either sped up the process of deterioration or there was a more potent agent at work out here.
The forest in Valhalla she had travelled through on her way to Alaska had been something to behold, and she had barely managed to make it out of there with her life, but it paled into insignificance compared to the space she now stood within.
Looking up, she could see the boughs of giant trees intermingling in the canopy, twisting into tight bundles and knots, then exploding outward to form a latticework of chaotic branches that blocked all but the smallest amount of light from reaching the ground. It looked so different from below than when they had flown over it in the Black Hawk. From down here, she could see the same mesh of broad, overlapping leaves that gave the roof of this forest an almost skin-like texture, but below it the intricate tangle of branches, ropelike vines, and hanging creepers ran across the surface like veins, fastened to the main lattice of thicker branches. Below that was level upon level of twisted limbs running from one corkscrew tree trunk to the next. The floor was littered with the twisted roots of trees and a thick, red carpet of lichen as well as an ever-growing layer of detritus falling from the limbs above that carpeted what had once been road and sidewalk.
Down here, it smelled even more dank, musty, and moldy, like a laundry basket full of soiled clothing.
MacAlister pulled his compass from his pocket and took another bearing. “Our target came down just on the other side of McCarran Airport. We’re going to get as close as we safely can to the landing point and lay up there while we recon the area and see what we can see. Once we’ve got an idea of what we’re dealing with, we are out of here. So, consider this a friendly reminder that this little excursion is strictly a recon trip. Once we get the intel back to Point Loma we’ll figure out what we intend to do next. No heroics. Am I understood?” As he spoke he adjusted the backpack he carried to a more comfortable position on his shoulders.
Emily nodded. Reilly just shrugged.
“It’s a five-mile hike through this jungle. We don’t know what might be waiting for us, and I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to end up as lunch for some beastie. So, we keep it tight and we keep it quiet. If you see anything, I want to know about it. Do not engage unless I give you the go ahead. You both understand?”
They did.
“Alright, let’s get a move on then. Time’s a-wastin’.”
MacAlister positioned himself at the front of the group and took a final bearing from his compass. Reilly dropped back behind Emily and Thor.
Then they were off, moving in the same direction the UAV had taken along the Strip.
Unlike the majority of the towns Emily had travelled through on her way to Alaska, it looked as though very few people had actually made it out of Las Vegas. The main drag was choked with vehicles, tail-to-nose lines of car after car, with the occasional truck or Metro bus thrown in for good measure. It was a total state of disarray; carnage might describe it best if it wasn’t for the absence of bodies.
It was a snapshot of a moment in time, frozen along this street for eternity. It marked the end of humanity, a final chapter to a story that was now lost forever to time. Each vehicle they passed was both a tomb and a metal monument, a eulogy written in plastic and chrome and aluminum, with no one left to observe or mourn the occupants’ passing.
It stood to reason, when Emily thought about it, that there would be so many cars clogging the streets considering how most of the town’s residents would have been temporary, vacationers trapped here in the middle of the desert with no way to get home, the only way out by vehicle or through the airport. This city’s final moments would have been of panic and absolute terror. She shuddered to think what it must have been like in the casinos as desperate vacationers sought some way to escape the catastrophe falling toward them like a tidal wave. It must have been terrible. Truly, truly terrible.
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, Emily thought as she passed a light-green Ford, three perfectly round holes drilled through the windshield and side windows. Well that slogan sure as hell turned out to be truer than most people ever expected it would.
Sidewalks were all but impassable, between the vehicles that had careened into storefronts and the thick knots of roots forcing their way through splintered and cracked concrete. Add to that the accumulation of fallen debris from crumbling buildings littering the street, and the ever-present danger that part of the hotels and casinos lining either side of them might collapse on top of the travelers at any moment, and it was safer to simply walk in the road.
And anywhere there was still an exposed stretch of road or shop façade or section of sidewalk that had not yet succumbed to the creeping red invader, the same pockmarked deterioration devouring the innards of the Tacoma could be seen. The town was dissolving bit by bit around them, being picked apart like a turkey carcass dropped near a nest of ants.