Another growl rumbled up from deep within his chest.
Emily’s eyes slowly followed the direction Thor was staring. Despite the heat of the jungle, her breath chilled in her lungs at what she saw.
In a clearing ahead was a sight unlike anything she had seen before: three entities, humanoid looking, tall, with long, slender yet muscular limbs. They stood about eight feet in height, their oval, featureless heads swaying back and forth as they moved with balletic adroitness around the clearing on long, articulated lower appendages. Emily hesitated to call them legs, because the only resemblance they bore to a human limb was the elongated shape. Each “leg” seemed able to flex at any point along its length, even though she could see no sign of a joint, and where a human foot should be was a half-globe-shaped hoof that looked like an upturned dish. Each creature held an object in its right hand: a cube. Although holding was perhaps the wrong word; guided would be more accurate as the cube appeared to float about an inch above the outstretched palm of each triple-fingered hand, glowing with a faint green luminescence. Occasionally one of the three slender digits of the hand manipulating the cube would twitch, just the tiniest of flexes, and the box would change color, pulsing brightly before dimming again. They wore no clothes and appeared completely sexless. The creatures’ skin had an almost metallic sheen to it, as though they had all been stamped from a single block of aluminum. Each looked identical to the other.
They moved with such grace, their long limbs shifting in smooth unison as they strode across the clearing, pushing the glowing cubes before them, or perhaps being guided by them? When the cubes stopped the creatures became completely motionless. So still were they Emily could have mistaken them for the petrified victims of Medusa if it were not for the occasional minute finger movement as they manipulated the cube-device floating before them.
They’re not even breathing, Emily thought, watching the nearest being go about its work, not two hundred feet from where she and Thor crouched. It stopped momentarily, moving the cube up to a low overhanging branch of a ruby-red tree.
The cube throbbed, contracting in on itself and then expanding in a weird hall-of-mirrors distortion as it seemed to shrink then expand. Just for a second, in the weird prismatic bowl of light the cube had become, Emily thought she saw somewhere else, another place reflected out of that shimmering box of light. It was a fleeting glimpse into some place manufactured, certainly not the jungle that she knew lay beyond the alien-cube’s operator.
The cube suddenly contracted back to its normal shape with a bright flash of orange and an audible snap. Emily felt a stabbing pain just above her eyebrows, as though she had been staring at a computer screen for far too long.
When she looked again, the branch the humanoid had been examining had vanished, leaving a black cauterized nub near the trunk.
The strange elegant alien moved again, stepping lightly through the few trees that lay between it and Emily’s hiding place, the box’s glow casting strange light and long shadows over the ground.
Thor let out another low growl as it moved closer to them, seemingly oblivious to their presence behind the bush.
“Shush!” Emily whispered, her lips level with Thor’s ear as she cradled the dog to her. She could feel his muscles tense, taut with potential energy beneath his thick, gray fur.
A sudden crashing sound behind them made Emily swirl around, her heart in her mouth, just in time to see Reilly trip and almost fall as he stumbled over a tree’s root.
“Fuck!” he yelled, but managed to recover his balance.
Emily hissed at him to be quiet, but when she turned back to the clearing all three creatures had stopped what they were doing, their bald, eyeless heads swiveled intently in her direction.
Then, as one, they began striding over the ground toward her.
“Oh, shit!” Emily yelled, unconsciously scuttling backward as the aliens—and Emily had no illusions that that was what they were, not created on this world, but from some other distant place—moved in that elegant, flowing gait toward her hiding place. As she moved backward, her grip on Thor’s collar loosened momentarily and he was gone again, launching himself toward the silver figures with a snarl, drool flying from his lips as he raced at the three aliens.
“No, Thor. Stop!” Emily yelled, fear in her voice now. “Please stop.”
She was in a waking nightmare, and she knew there was nothing she could do other than watch as her dog ate up the ground between her and these three humanoid intruders.
All three aliens stopped as they registered the dog rushing toward them. One of them raised its cube and, just as Thor launched himself at the nearest creature, it flashed red.
Thor yelped once and went limp.
Emily let out a strangled shriek of horror as she watched Thor’s limp body crash to the ground at the feet of the creature.
“No!” she screamed in a voice an equal mix of anguish, fear, and rage. She leaped from her hiding place behind the bush and unshouldered her shotgun, quickly leveling it at the nearest alien as she stalked toward it. Her first shot disintegrated the low-hanging branches of a tree to the creature’s right, her aim affected by the blur of tears that had suddenly filled her vision. She wiped one hand across her eyes and took aim at the alien again. The second shot caught it at the waistline, severing it in two. The top half toppled backward, the cube in its hand glowed brightly and stayed suspended in the air for a second, then turned to black and fell to the floor next to the twitching torso. The legs of the creature crumpled and collapsed next to the motionless body of Thor.
“Emily!” MacAlister’s roar of concern was a distant whisper even though she knew he must be yelling. “For Christ’s sake get back here,” he called after her as she walked past the bifurcated body of the fallen alien.
She ignored him and racked another shell into the shotgun. Moving quickly now across the open ground toward the two remaining aliens, she raised the Mossberg to her shoulder again and sighted down the barrel at the next nearest creature just as it turned toward her, the cube in its outstretched palm pulsing rapidly.
“I’m going to kill all you fucks,” she yelled, hot tears of rage spilling over her cheeks. “You’re going back to whatever hellhole you came from. You hear me? Do you fucking hear me?” Her finger caressed the trigger of the shotgun just as the alien’s cube seemed to explode brilliantly.
A numbing buzz surrounded her. It ran across the surface of her skin like static electricity and filled the inside of her head with a momentary flash of blinding light that pulsed through every synapse, penetrated every memory she had, filled each molecule of her being. Abruptly, she was disconnected from her body. It was as though a switch had been thrown, freezing all communication between her brain and her nervous system.
The only way Emily knew she was falling was because her eyes were still her own: She saw the red grass rushing up to meet her, and in the final second before she hit the ground, she saw Mac’s distraught face as he rushed from the edge of the clearing toward her.
Then everything went white.
CHAPTER 28
Emily found herself suspended in a place between sleep and wakefulness, enveloped by a warm light that had no color, yet seemed to contain every shade and hue imaginable. It might be that place, she dreamed, that humanity had defined as the ever-so-thin line between life and death; limbo, if you pleased. Or perhaps it was the sanctuary which, as a child, defined the limits between life and dreams, and that as an adult, had seemed lost to her forever. No matter where she was, it was peaceful, quiet; she was finally at rest. The non-light tingled against her skin, its silk-like texture holding her securely in place, not against her will, but because she willed it to embrace her. It brushed against her skin, warming her like the first sigh of a mother’s breath against her newborn’s body.