Genesis (12 page)

As she relaxed she felt the tingling attraction of her son’s pull return, drawing her toward the northeast like a homing beacon. The nose of the Black Hawk was off course by about twenty degrees, and as she swung the helicopter, she felt the small hairs on her skin stand erect as the attraction shifted accordingly across her body.

“Too weird,” she said.

“What?” said Rhiannon.

“Nothing. Why don’t you get some rest for an hour? It’s going to be a long flight.”

“I’m okay,” Rhiannon replied, but ten minutes later Emily heard the soft sound of Rhiannon’s breathing in her headphones.

The Black Hawk sped eastward, the grumble of the engines softened into melody by Rhiannon’s light rhythmic snore as she lay curled up into an almost fetal position in the copilot’s seat.

Emily estimated they were somewhere near the Arizona border. About a half hour earlier she had spotted what could only have been the Salton Sea in the distance, a huge forest of Titans sprouted up around its border.

The sun was almost above the horizon now, and in the early morning light the arc of Earth’s new ring glinted and sparkled like a halo against the dark blue of the morning sky, majestic and heart-stoppingly beautiful. It had doubled in size since the last time she had seen it, and even as Emily marveled at its beauty, she still could not fathom what its purpose might be. It simply should not be there. It seemed like such an irrational thing to do, to expend so much energy to create something that served no purpose, at least to her mere Earth-born mind. Saturn had rings, and she had a vague memory that there might have been another planet within the solar system that had rings too. So why would the Caretakers go to so much trouble to create something that was, as far as she knew, a pretty common naturally occurring feature? The Caretakers were nothing if not inscrutable, but still . . . this seemed pointless.

The Black Hawk had drifted off course slightly as her mind considered the problem of the ring, and she instinctively piloted the helicopter’s attitude back to better match her internal compass.

As she looked back, the first rays of morning sun hit the accretion ring, creating a light show that rivaled the aurora borealis. Waves of rainbow light played like fire across the canopy of the red forest as it rushed by beneath them, giving it the appearance of a vast ocean.

How did planetary rings get made, anyway? Wasn’t it something to do with leftover material from when the planet was first formed? Or something like that. And would a planet that supported life also have a naturally occurring ring?

No idea,
she told herself, but it sure did make for a beautiful sunrise.

This felt good. Like feeding a hunger, the urgent pull Emily felt across her skin had turned into a pleasurable tingle almost the second the helo had lifted off and she had begun directing it toward the source of the signal she was sure she was being directed to follow. With each passing kilometer, the intensity with which she felt the draw grew, as did the certainty that she was doing the right thing, that she was being called by and was answering her son. How did she know? Emily had absolutely no idea—it just, well, it felt
right
. And now she was fully committed. There was no way she was going to be able to go back, not now that Valentine had played her hand.

While it was easy to imagine Valentine giving the order to have her killed, she could not believe that Fisher would allow his men to open fire on her and Rhiannon. Fisher knew she was the only pilot qualified to fly the Black Hawk, and he knew that she would have no other choice but to come back to Point Loma at some point. Why would he risk shooting them down? Why kill her and Rhiannon? Emily had already decided Valentine was insane, but Fisher? He had never struck her as the type to react so violently. Perhaps he had lost control of his men?

Below the Black Hawk the red jungle zipped by. From this height, the canopy of the jungle looked almost cratered, the irregular span of the giant trees and tangled branches and limbs bound together to make a blood-red ocean. With the light show from the ring, the craters and dips looked like swells and waves washing across its surface. It looked almost serene, beautiful, even.

Emily’s eyes kept up a periodic scan from outside the cockpit down to her instrument panel and as her eyes checked the fuel gauge she felt her heart skip a beat. She was 100 percent certain the tank had been close to full when they left Point Loma, but now it read just over the halfway mark. They had been in the air for a little over an hour, and taking a fairly leisurely pace, so there was no way it should be that low. Fuel pressure seemed okay, so unless she had simply misread the gauge or there was some kind of a fault with it, then there was really only one possibility: one of Valentine’s goons had scored a lucky shot on a fuel line, and they were leaking fuel, slowly, but enough that it was going to impact the helo’s range.

The possibilities of what could happen ran through Emily’s mind: If the fuel came into contact with a hot engine part they could simply explode, right? Or maybe she had been watching too many movies. Did that happen in real life? She quickly decided that if it hadn’t happened yet, she wasn’t going to worry about it right now. Option two: she still had enough fuel left to turn back to Point Loma. But that would, at best, result in her being taken prisoner, but more probably, judging by the actions of Valentine, she would be tried in a kangaroo court and executed before the end of the day. And they had probably found the bodies of the two guards by now, she reminded herself. And what about Rhiannon and Thor? There was no way Valentine would let Rhiannon live and tell Mac and the crew of the HMS
Vengeance
what had happened when they finally returned. No, they would all meet with some kind of unfortunate accident. And it would also mean that Adam would be left in the hands of the Caretakers, and there was no way in Hell that she was going to let that happen.

So there was really only one choice at this stage, wasn’t there: push on and hope the fuel lasted long enough to get them where they were going . . . wherever that might be.

Just over a quarter of the Black Hawk’s fuel remained in its tank. That translated into about an hour’s worth of flight, Emily estimated, if they were lucky. A slow-burning anxiety had begun in the pit of her stomach at the realization that, unless Adam was close by, they were not going to make it by air. While she was certain that the call of her child was a very real thing, there was no frame of reference that she could use to judge just how close she was to his location. It wasn’t like there was some kind of a counter in her head that told her how far away he was, just this continual
need
to keep moving east. Adam could be just a few kilometers farther on, or somewhere back in New York. An even worse scenario, one she had not considered until now, suddenly reared up: What if he wasn’t even on this continent? She knew the Caretakers had the ability to instantly transport themselves from one location to another—they had done it to her, after all—but over what kind of distance, she had no clue. What if he was in Europe: Spain or Britain or . . . or Russia? How would she reach him then?

Jesus! She felt sick at the very thought of it even being a possibility. No, she was going to have to simply rely on her belief that her son was still in the United States. Something about the pull just felt like he was close by, almost as though she could sense him in another room. She was just going to have to trust that sense.

As soon as Emily realized their fuel supply was shot, she had started to actively look for a place to put the Black Hawk down safely, but since fleeing Point Loma, the scenery had remained the same rolling canopy of the great red alien forest.

Rhiannon had slept for most of the journey and Emily had seen no reason to wake her until now; but now an extra pair of eyes might literally be the difference between life and death. They were both actively scanning the landscape for somewhere, anywhere, they could land.

Even after all of the years she had spent living in this reimagined world, the utter transformation of the American landscape—a land that once had held great tracts of homes, cities, businesses, and industries, and upward of three hundred million people—was still stupefying to Emily. Although she lived with the encroachment of the jungle on a daily basis at Point Loma, it was only from up here that she could truly appreciate just how complete the assimilation was. Apart from the occasional building that for some reason the rampaging alien vegetation had overlooked, there was no longer much to indicate that there had ever been a dominant race present on this planet. Here and there she might recognize the outline of a tower behind its mask of red foliage, maybe a signpost in a small clearing, a crumbling ruin, or a brief glimpse of road that disappeared as quickly as it came. If she had been flying to a specific location she would have been shit out of luck because, if it weren’t for the occasional mountain range to break up the monotony, there would have been little to use as a visual gauge to show they were making any kind of headway. And if it hadn’t been for the constant caress she felt pulling her onward, Emily knew she would have had no real idea where they were. If she had to make a guess, she would put them somewhere on the eastern side of Arizona, heading toward New Mexico, but there was no way to be absolutely certain.

But over the last twenty minutes Emily had noticed a distinct change in the scenery and her anxiety had begun to fade. The dense jungle was thinning. And as the kilometers rolled by, she began to spot more and more clearings within the alien trees, until the land finally opened up and the forest became a rarity, limited to clumps scattered here and there across the landscape. The topography of the land had changed too; it was flat, an unbroken plain. There was still the ever-present red vegetation, but this stuff seemed far smaller than the dense jungle they had left behind them. It was almost uniform in feature, like looking down on a field of corn or a plush red carpet.

“Hey, look, I can see a road,” Rhiannon said, pointing down to her left.

Emily banked slightly left, dipping the nose of the chopper until she could see what Rhiannon saw. And yes, there below them, cutting a swath through the red plain like a scar across the landscape was the unmistakable gray of a freeway. It ran west to east, and here and there Emily could see the shape of a jackknifed tractor-trailer or a car.

She allowed the aircraft to continue its natural left turn until it was over the freeway, banked right, then began following the road east.

Emily descended until they were about twenty meters above the freeway. Every minute ate up another couple of kilometers, and she was determined to wring every last centimeter out of the Black Hawk’s dwindling fuel. That would mean leaving it until the very last second to land, a risk she felt she had to take. But at this height, Emily felt confident she could get them down fast when the time came. But this low to the ground, the sensation of speed was . . . alarming, to say the least. Her palms began to sweat. She resisted the urge to constantly adjust her grip on the cyclic stick. From the corner of her eye she saw Rhiannon’s hands nervously searching for armrests that weren’t there. She ended up stiffly grabbing both her knees instead.

Beyond the cockpit, the road stretched onward in an almost straight line to the horizon. Save for a few distant hills and even more distant mountains, there was nothing but featureless red plain on either side of the road. But beyond the hills, creeping toward them like a monster from some ancient B movie, Emily saw the unmistakable outline of storm clouds, gray and threatening against the backdrop of the sky. The storm collected along the eastern horizon in one large angry mass of swirling grays and blacks, hanging over the freeway like a beast. Thunderheads if ever she’d seen them. That was not good, and there was no way to tell which direction it was moving.