Extinction Point - Exodus Part 11

Emily squeezed Rhiannon's hand in return, leaned in, and kissed her gently on the forehead. "I do, too," she replied. "I do, too."

They took advantage of the unscheduled stop and allowed Thor out to stretch his legs. Ten minutes later, as Emily climbed into the driver's seat, she heard the front pa.s.senger door open, then Rhiannon pulled herself up into the leather seat and fastened her seat belt into place.

Emily turned and smiled at her. Neither said a word; none were needed, so Emily just slipped the Dodge into gear and drove.

ALASKA.

"It's snowing," said Rhiannon.

"What?"

"It's. Snowing."

Emily looked up from the road and saw fat flakes of white drifting slowly down from the sky. She had been driving for so long on this particular stretch of the Alaska Highway, mile after mile after dreary mile, that her mind had switched to autopilot and she hadn't even noticed the blanket of gray clouds as they had moved in from the northeast.

According to the digital thermometer display, the temperature outside was thirty-two degrees. The temperature had dropped more than fifteen degrees over the past three days.

"Where are we?" Emily asked.

Rhiannon picked up the road atlas from the floor and thumbed it open to a dog-eared page. She traced their route with a finger, holding the book open and angled toward Emily so she could glance at it. "I don't think it's very far now. We just pa.s.sed a sign for Eielson Air Force Base."

Fairbanks was about another twenty miles or so farther northwest from the military base; another twenty minutes or so drive, Emily estimated.

The road they were driving was what pa.s.sed for a two-lane highway but amounted to little more than two lanes of concrete with a median of brown gra.s.s between them. On either side of the road was an expanse of the equally dead gra.s.s. The gra.s.s terminated at a seemingly never-ending line of what she thought were silver birch trees. Whatever they were, their skinny trunks and naked branches became ridiculously monotonous after the first twenty miles or so.

When she had spoken with Jacob the previous night, he had told her to make sure her first stop was at a cold-weather outfitters.

"You need to find winter clothing. It'll hit below zero before you know it, and I can guarantee you won't want to be caught outside in any of your regular clothes," he had told her. He'd given her directions to the store he used, and Emily had promised him they would head straight there as soon as they made it into Fairbanks.

Temperatures this far north could vary wildly. At this time of year, daytime temperature might reach thirty or even forty degrees, and at night, you would be lucky if the thermometer stayed above minus fifteen. "The right clothing is the difference between life and a very painful death," Jacob had warned them.

They had stopped the previous night in a small town, weirdly named Tok. Setting out the following morning, it had struck Emily how normal the routine had become for her and Rhiannon. After their talk back in Calgary, all signs of the petulant little girl she had first encountered had completely disappeared as Rhia slipped willingly into the role of navigator.

And Emily had surprised herself at just how easily she had come to rely on Rhiannon. She had never given children a second thought in her life; there had never been enough time to even think about them or a man that she was willing to settle down with or who would be willing to put up with her. She loved the little girl, she realized. If she ever had a child of her own, she would hope that she turned out like Rhia.

"Watch out!" yelled Rhiannon, suddenly bracing her arm against the dashboard.

Emily's attention had been lost in thought again, her eyes off the road, so she had failed to see the debris of the downed airplane splashed across the lane ahead of them. She hit the brakes and brought the Dodge to a screeching halt.

The wreckage looked to be of some kind of fighter plane, probably from the air base. It had crashed nose first into the north-bound lane, leaving a crater gouged out of the earth that stretched across all four lanes. Strangely, the nose of the plane was still intact, severed just behind the c.o.c.kpit, which was missing its canopy and pilot's seat. The pilot had probably ejected when he felt the oncoming effects of the red rain, Emily surmised. Lot of good that had done him.

The rest of the plane was nothing but blackened bits and pieces scattered across the ground.

"Sorry," said Emily, turning to Rhiannon. "I guess I'm just tired." Who knew sitting down for hours on end could be so exhausting?

Emily glanced up at the rearview mirror and put the SUV into reverse, backing up about twenty feet, then drove off the road and onto the field, steering around the wreckage of the downed aircraft.

Up ahead, on the right side of the road, Emily could see what looked like a line of adobe-colored blocks. She accelerated the Dodge back up to speed. The blocks quickly resolved into buildings and military aircraft hangars. A six-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the air base.

Emily slowed the SUV to a crawl as she eased past the main entrance. The guard post was deserted, but the metal security gate was down, blocking the entrance to the military buildings beyond it. She could make out vehicles parked uniformly off in the distance, and what looked like several commercial-size gray aircraft parked on one of the runways.

The crumpled skeleton of a helicopter, its tail snapped from its fuselage pointing skyward, sat alone in an open field. It was missing one of its rotor blades, and those that remained hung limply toward the ground.

There was no sign of life. No movement except for the flakes of snow that had now begun to settle on the gra.s.s and concrete of the road in front of them.

"Do you think the soldiers are alive in there?" Rhiannon asked.

Emily stared at the silent base. She had hoped that maybe, just maybe, the military had figured out how to survive the blood rain. If anyone could have, it would have been them. But that hadn't been the case. Everyone here was dead.

"No," she said with a final glance at the base. She drove on.

She wasn't sure what she had expected from the town of Fairbanks. Maybe a small town full of single-wide trailers and strip joints. That was the impression she had always had of these ends-of-the-world kind of places; a backward whistle-stop of a place, in the middle of nowhere, populated by fat bearded men in plaid shirts and aging wh.o.r.es. Instead, as she finally pulled into the town, she found herself in a community that would have looked at home in any Midwest state. Pleasant-looking, well-kept homes, their lawns dead and brown now that no one was alive to maintain them, bland apartment buildings, a theater, a smattering of gas stations and car dealerships. The tiny houses were never going to appear on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, but then again, nothing was.

Emily got the impression that even before everybody had died, this town had been, for the most part, quiet.

Slowly maneuvering through the empty streets, she turned right onto Second Avenue and immediately stomped on the brake. Ahead of her, in a plot of land that had once been a children's playground, a cl.u.s.ter of alien trees sprouted from the ground. She had failed to notice them earlier because they were hidden by a phalanx of spruce trees lining the park's border. There was something different about these invaders, something that was unlike the usual uniform, almost cookie-cutter versions that had become a daily sight since leaving Manhattan.

These were stunted and irregular. The usual black sheen that coated the bark was missing, and she could see gray splotches scattered across their trunks. Where their cousins south of Fairbanks stretched skyward for hundreds of feet, these barely reached the height of the crossbar of the playground's swing set. They should have been towering over them by now.

Emily pulled the Durango to the curb and rolled down her window. A cold breeze stung her face, and she exhaled sharply, sending a pale cloud of vapor out into the atmosphere to mix with the vehicle's exhaust fumes and the flakes of snow that still fell from the leaden sky. The air felt crisp and clean, knife-sharp against the back of her throat.

"Stay here," she told Rhiannon to the whine of the window whirring back up. "I'll be right back."

Rhiannon just nodded her head. Thor shifted uneasily in the back, but Emily commanded him to stay.

Standing on the sidewalk, Emily shivered as a gust of wind sliced through her thin shirt, straight to her spine. She was going to have to find that cold-weather clothing store, soon. Already, a half inch of snow had settled on the low hedge at the front of the playground, and the pavement was quickly becoming slippery underfoot.

She was going to have to make this quick.

Following the path into the park, Emily walked past the set of swings, their rusty chains squeaking loudly in the breeze, and headed toward the group of scrawny-looking alien trees.

Emily froze-an appropriate term, she supposed, given how G.o.dd.a.m.n cold it was. In front of her, scattered around the base of the nearest trees like fallen leaves, were at least twenty of the spider-aliens, their ugly-a.s.s heads staring straight at her.

Emily didn't dare move. A day-long minute ticked by in her head as she stared at the creatures. Like the stunted alien trees behind them, there was something not quite right with them. In every encounter she'd had with the spider-things they had always been the alien equivalent of a hyperactive kid; always on the move, never still. In fact, she thought, the only one she had ever seen not moving had been long dead, impaled by the iron bars of a fence back in New York.

Dead! These things were dead...probably.

She took a tentative step forward. No movement from them. Then another step. Still no reaction. Emboldened, she took another step closer and another until she was standing next to the closest motionless alien. She prodded it with the tip of her sneaker. It didn't move, frozen solid to the concrete playground. It was the same for the rest of them, all deader than dead, their carapaces hard and unyielding she found as she stomped down hard on one with her heel.

It was almost as if they had been flash-frozen, she thought. Caught out in the open when the temperature had dropped. More proof that Jacob had been right about the temperature all along.

Sure that they posed no threat to her, Emily turned her attention back to the deformed alien trees. They looked half-finished. Instead of the geometric keenness of the top edges that had defined the trees she had seen being built, these were irregular. Pieces were missing, and here and there were gaps, long seams that stretched up the tree like cracks. She squeezed two fingers into the gap. Her fingers slipped in all the way to the second knuckle. The gray splotches she had seen were in reality half-formed pieces of the tree; when she touched one, it cracked, sending a large section down into the interior of the trunk.

The red rain had accomplished its mission, killing everyone in the town, but the growth of the trees had been stopped in its tracks. It looked as though they had been completely unable to deal with the cold. Judging by the lack of growth of the trees and the dead aliens scattered around the base of the trees, she would not be surprised if she found thousands of the aliens, or maybe even their precursor pupae stages, scattered throughout the houses in the town. She would have to remember that when they looked for a place to spend the night.

She gave one of the dead spider-aliens a swift kick to the face, breaking off the thing's frozen tentacles with a satisfying clink that sounded like shattered icicles.

"That's for everyone in this town," she said and walked back to the warmth of the SUV.

"What took you so long?" asked Rhiannon as Emily closed the door of the Durango and turned the heater up as high as it would go.

"Nothing. I just needed to check out the trees," she replied as she felt the heat chase the frigidness from her fingers. Emily didn't see any point in scaring Rhiannon with the news of the dead aliens.

"So, what are we supposed to do now?"

"How about I take us clothes shopping?" she answered.

The strip mall parking lot still held two cars. Their owners, presumably, had not heeded the warnings about the effects of the red rain and had perished while shopping. I guess there are worse ways to go, Emily thought as she pulled the Dodge to a stop out front of the store Jacob had directed her to.

Large red letters over the entrance to the building read FRONTIER OUTFITTERS, and below that in smaller letters: HUNTING. FISHING. CAMPING. APPAREL.

Emily grabbed the shotgun and her flashlight and stepped outside. She left the engine running not just for security, but also because it was so d.a.m.n cold that the idea of waiting for the car to warm up again was not a pleasant thought.

"Stay here for a second while I check around," she told Rhiannon. "Thor, come on." The dog leaped from the backseat to the driver's, then down onto the concrete. He stretched and followed Emily as she headed to the store's entrance.

The door creaked open, and Emily pushed it open farther with the barrel of the Mossberg. She stepped inside and scanned the interior with the flashlight while Thor ran around checking every nook and cranny. There were no windows in the building, so the interior was lit only by the meager light that made it through the panes of the gla.s.s double doors.

Thor trotted back to her side after a minute, giving no indication they were anything but alone in the store. Emily leaned around the door and beckoned to Rhiannon to join her.

"Bring your flashlight," she yelled to the girl as she exited the SUV.

Inside the store, row upon row of shelves were stacked with heavy-duty boots, camping equipment, dry goods, and fishing gear. Clothing racks held cold-weather jackets and trousers, thick wool sweaters, even thicker scarves, gloves, and balaclavas. Everything the modern outdoorsman would ever need to survive in this unforgiving climate and more.

Emily couldn't see any carts, so, after a quick look around, she found a large gray plastic storage container. She discarded the lid and carried the container over to the racks of clothes.

Rhiannon had already found a parka with a fur-lined hood that she had zipped up so far her face was completely hidden.

"A big improvement," said Emily, smiling.

They worked their way down each aisle, pulling what they needed from the racks, filling the plastic container to almost overflowing.

Near the camping equipment, Emily found a selection of heavy-duty sleeping bags. The tags attached to them said they were good down to minus thirty degrees. She added two of them to the container, the electric-pink one for Rhiannon.

Emily double-checked their loot one last time, running over the mental list she had made, making sure they had forgotten nothing.

Sure they had liberated everything on the list, Emily and Rhiannon each took one end of the box and readied themselves to carry it out to the idling SUV.

As they navigated carefully between the racks, Emily's flashlight glinted off a gla.s.s display case that took up most of the right wall of the store.

"Hold on a second," she said, lowering her end of the box to the ground. She walked over to the display case and played the light over the contents of the case, then along the back wall behind it.

"Excellent," she called back to Rhiannon. "Guns. Lots of guns."

The gun cases were all locked. Emily solved that particular problem with the b.u.t.t of the Mossberg.

"Here, hold this," she said as she handed Rhiannon her flashlight, the sound of the shattered gla.s.s still reverberating in their ears. "Keep it angled like this and be careful of the gla.s.s." She used the b.u.t.t of the shotgun to clear away the remaining broken shards of gla.s.s that still jutted from the surround of the case.

There was a selection of about twenty handguns to choose from. Each one had a small plaque beneath it that displayed the make and model. When Nathan had taught Emily how to shoot, she had used several handguns, but her favorite had been the Glock 19. It was light enough for her to handle easily and held fifteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition.

She searched the gla.s.s-strewn case until she spotted the model she was looking for. Emily carefully picked up the pistol, shook off a couple of pieces of broken gla.s.s, and gave it a quick once-over. The magazine was missing, but she'd probably find that in the plastic case that came with the weapon.

She was about to start looking for the Glock's case when another pistol caught her eye. She picked up the little revolver and placed it next to the Glock on the counter behind the gun case.

She found both pistols' protective cases in a drawer beneath the gun display. She added gun oil and a couple of cleaning kits and a shoulder rig for the Glock along with a leather belt holster for the little revolver. Adjacent to the display case were shelves of ammunition. She pulled several boxes of ammo for each of the guns and added them to the clothing and pistols, then went back and grabbed four boxes of sh.e.l.ls for the shotgun.

It took two trips to carry their new "purchases" to the waiting vehicle. They hefted the overflowing container up into the cargo s.p.a.ce of the Durango, sliding it in between the remainder of their food and Emily's bike.

"Brrrrrrr!" Both girls were shivering as they climbed back into their seats, glad to be out of the biting cold. Emily cranked the heater back up.

In the thirty minutes or so their shopping trip had taken to complete, a layer of white fluffy snow had covered almost everything, completely transforming the image of the town from empty frontier to cla.s.sic Christmas card. Emily was surprised at how comforting it was. With the layer of white covering everything, it was easy to think of each of these businesses and homes as containing families huddled around the fire, talking and laughing, safe and warm.

Emily glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard; it read 3:18. Still a couple of hours of light left but with the snow reducing visibility, it was probably better if they tried to find the university as quickly as possible.

Jacob had told Emily that it would be a mistake to try to make the final leg of the trip in the Durango. "It just won't be capable of making it," he had explained. "The engine isn't designed to take the kind of gasoline you'll need, and if it gets cold enough, it'll freeze in the lines and you along with it."

He had told her she needed to find his department at the university. "Look for the Geophysical Inst.i.tute building. We have a couple of Sno-Cats that will be better suited to the terrain."

When she had expressed her concern about how she was supposed to drive this new vehicle, Jacob had told her not to worry. "If you figured out how to drive the Durango, you shouldn't have a problem."

Emily wasn't sure she agreed with him, but he had been right about most things so far.

"Okay, young lady, buckle up," she said and carefully edged the SUV out onto the snow-covered road.

They spent the night on the second floor of the Geophysical Inst.i.tute building, serenaded by a storm that, come morning, had added a fresh layer of snow several inches deep, completely covering the SUV they had left parked on the narrow road outside the building.

Jacob had told Emily that she would find the Sno-Cat in a storage facility on the north side of the Geo-Phys building, so, after breakfast-soup they found in the second-floor lounge-they threw on their cold-weather gear and headed out, descending down to ground level. Rhiannon found a fire escape that led them out to the rear of the building, but when Emily pushed down on the bar to open it, the door would not budge. She tried again, this time leaning her shoulder into it, and she felt the door give a little, then a little more as she b.u.mped her shoulder hard against it.

Sunlight streamed in through the gap along with a large clump of snow that fell with a splat onto the floor.

Well, that explained the problem with opening the door. A drift of snow, at least four feet high, had piled against the outer door. She thumped the flat of her arm against the door, each time she hit it, the door budged a little bit more until there was just enough room for them to kick the snow away and squeeze through.

The early morning sun bounced painfully off the top layer of snow, blinding them both momentarily as they stepped from the darkness of the corridor into the open daylight.

Thor was off in a heartbeat, leaping like a fox through the snow that came up to his belly.

Emily, her hand pressed against her forehead to shade her eyes, scanned the field of white for any indication of the building that Jacob had talked about.

At the top of an embankment about three hundred feet or so away, past several mounds of snow that were probably buried cars, Emily saw a large building, its roof heavy with snow and its white sides blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding scenery.

Parked outside the entrance were several large dump trucks.