Almost two miles later and Emily began to feel the effects of the almost constant up and down and over as they negotiated their way around the labyrinth of abandoned vehicles. It was like climbing rather than walking, that and the fact that she was soaked through with perspiration from the humidity. She had to resist constantly reaching to pull her clammy shirt from her chest, the jacket was already off and tied around her waist. And God! Her underarms itched like a mother too.
No conversation passed among the group. Only the occasional grunt of exertion as they negotiated yet another obstacle broke the monotonous silence.
Ahead of them, a large swath of the forest had been swept aside, crushed and broken by the collapse of an entire hotel, its name lost forever in the rubble, as it had swept down into the street like an avalanche. Emily wanted to climb over it, but MacAlister diverted them around instead.
“Can’t risk the chance that there might be hidden pockets that might collapse under our feet,” he said.
The deeper they moved into this jungle, the more Emily had the feeling that they were walking through a living, breathing organism rather than a simple collection of plants and trees. To her there was an almost physical sense that the twists and knots of vines and branches, and the seemingly never-ending rows of triple-trunked trees, were aware of them all as they sweated their way forward. It was a spooky yet strangely unthreatening sense of trespassing.
Eventually, MacAlister stopped ahead. “Let’s take a twenty-minute breather,” he said, his face wet with perspiration, his jacket, underarms, and back stained a deep black.
Reilly didn’t need to be told twice; he dropped his backpack and sat down, his eyes almost instantly closed, and, if Emily wasn’t mistaken, he was asleep in almost a minute.
“Does he suffer from narcolepsy or something?” Emily said, nodding at Reilly, as she joined the two men against the side of a Buick that had found its final resting place buried engine-deep into the driver’s side of a Toyota Land Cruiser.
Mac gave a good-hearted laugh. “No, in the navy you learn pretty quickly to grab as much sleep as you can whenever the opportunity presents itself.”
Emily emptied water into a bowl she took from her backpack and held it while Thor lapped thirstily from it, then swallowed down a couple of gulps of the lukewarm water from the canteen herself.
“This place is creepy as hell,” she said when she was done, wiping away the excess water from her lips.
“Oh, I don’t know,” MacAlister replied. “I’ve seen worse. At least nobody’s shooting at us.”
“You’ve seen a lot of action?”
“I’ve seen my share, more than my share, maybe.”
“Have you ever shot anyone?” She mentally kicked herself as soon as the words had left her lips.
MacAlister looked up at Emily. “That’s kind of a personal question for someone you barely know, don’t you think?”
“Sorry, can’t help it, I’m a journalist. Okay, how about, has anyone ever shot you?”
MacAlister laughed, more from exasperation than mirth. “No,” he said, adjusting his backpack so he could lean back against it comfortably. “But I was blown up once.”
“Really?” Emily said, her voice incredulous.
“Yup, I’ll tell you about it sometime. In fact, not only was I blown up, I was also technically dead for a whole eight minutes.”
“No way? You’re shitting me, right?”
“I am most certainly not. I saw the whole white light and everything.”
Emily said nothing this time, but her expression said go on.
Mac gave another long sigh of exasperation but the smile on his face spoke otherwise. “I was involved in an operation in… well, let’s just say, overseas. It went pear-shaped at one point and we were engaged by a much larger enemy force. While we were waiting for the helo at the extraction point, the vehicle I was taking cover behind was hit by an RPG, and I was blown up with the truck. Boom!” He used his hands to illustrate the blast.
When he started talking again his voice became quiet, almost wistful.
“I don’t remember anything about the explosion, but I do remember standing in a very long tunnel with a white light at the opposite end. I couldn’t walk but I kind of floated toward the light, there were figures in the light that I know I recognized, knew exactly who they were, but now there’s just a faint memory of recognition and I have no idea who I think I saw. Anyway, while all this was going on, my mates grabbed me and brought me back. They kept me alive long enough for the helo to pick us up and get me to a field hospital in Germany. Next thing I remember, I was back home and laid up in hospital. Since then, I’ve tried to keep an open mind about death and what comes next.”
“I would imagine that kind of an experience could change your outlook on life pretty quickly,” she said gently.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” MacAlister recited.
“Now you’re quoting Shakespeare? There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Mr. MacAlister.”
“My guys chose not to leave me behind that day. I left them all behind the day the red rain came. I’m really not sure how I’m supposed to handle that.”
A sudden wave of snoring rattled from Reilly’s slack-jawed mouth, interrupting them.
“Get some rest, we’ll be out of here again before you know it,” MacAlister said, and closed his eyes.
CHAPTER 26
An hour’s walk brought them to the edge of the destruction.
The lush red jungle stopped abruptly, and Emily and her companions found themselves standing in the devastated area near the initial impact site of the object. The tall trees and sweeping branches were suddenly replaced by a carpet of severed trunks, their ends cauterized by the intense heat of the object from space. Everything else in the area was incinerated to a gray dust that lay all around them, creating tiny smoke signals beneath Emily’s feet as she and the others maneuvered through the gravestone-high stumps.
One after the other, MacAlister, Emily and Thor, then Reilly picked their way out of the forest’s demarcation line and onto the scar of furrowed ground the object had created as it burned through the atmosphere and crashed into the Nevada desert. Each instinctively raised their hands to shade their eyes against the sudden transition from the gloomy interior of the red jungle to the bright luminescence of the Nevada afternoon, brutally reminded again that this was a desert.
Emily fumbled for her sunglasses, her sweat-drenched clothing already beginning to dry under the pounding sun, rubbing uncomfortably against her chafed skin.
“Damn that’s bright,” said MacAlister, reaching for his own sunglasses and sliding them over his eyes.
Reilly stepped up beside MacAlister and Emily, a baseball cap had magically appeared on his head along with his own sunglasses. “Jesus! Would you look at that,” he said.
The images the UAV had relayed back to the computer screen on the roof of the Tacoma had not done the destruction the justice it deserved. It looked to Emily as though a giant hand had reached out of the sky and scooped out a furrow through the desert landscape, leaving a huge tidal wave of dirt and detritus frozen in the second before it crashed ashore. On this side of the trench, the berm was perhaps thirty-plus feet high, tall enough that it would be impossible to see the other side without climbing up the steep bank of debris and poof dirt. Random pieces of the old world poked out of the wall of dirt: Broken shingles lay everywhere; a sheet of plasterboard waved in the breeze halfway up the wall of dirt; a power socket, the electrical wires still trailing from it and its broken serrated edges an indicator of the violence with which it had been ripped from the home that had surrounded it.