Return to Eden (4 page)

There
was
no such thing,
though!

There
had
to be another
explanation!

She couldn’t think of one. That thing,
unless it was just some kind of advertising gimmick she hadn’t
noticed before—like a billboard built to look like a space
ship—couldn’t be something from earth. She knew she hadn’t just
missed it, been too preoccupied with getting gas, finding a snack,
and bathroom to notice it.

But what kind of invasion could it be
when the thing hadn’t blown up?

But she thought she’d seen smoke coming
from it.

Maybe it was a dud?

It wasn’t the lightening of the world
outside that presaged morning that woke Anya some time later. It
was the clods of dirt sifting down on her and the sense that she
was sitting in an ant bed. Waking with a start, Anya brushed
frantically at herself, trying to beat the stinging insects off and
then abruptly pitched herself out of the culvert and into the
ditch. It was as well she did because even as she rolled over to
look for the ant bed she’d apparently fallen to sleep on top of,
chunks of the culvert began to fall.

Her eyes, burning as if she had dirt in
them, Anya blinked several times and rubbed them, trying to
comprehend what she was seeing, trying to convince herself that it
was nothing but her imagination.

The culvert collapsed. At
about that same moment, Anya’s brain assimilated the fact that she
still felt like something was crawling all over her. Looking down
to find the culprits, she discovered to her absolute horror that
her clothing seemed to be disintegrating. She could see … something
crawling over her. If not for the movement, she didn’t think she
would’ve been able to discern even that much, though. Whatever it
was was smaller than a gnat and moving in mass and
eating
her
clothing!

Sucking in a sharp breath,
Anya swatted at the dark patches several times and then abruptly
leapt to her feet and began to strip frantically. It didn’t take
much effort. Her clothes seemed to fall off of her even as she
tugged at them. She saw dark patches attach themselves to her bra
and panties. The momentary reluctance she felt about
discarding
those
vanished as soon as she saw bare patches of skin.

She pitched them, beating frantically
at her hair, brushing at her arms and legs and dashed off a few
feet to examine her skin. Somewhat relieved when she discovered she
seemed to have rid herself of whatever it was, she looked back to
the spot where she’d discarded her clothing just in time to see the
last scraps vanish.

“
What the f?” she gasped
and then glanced around uneasily to see if anyone was around to see
her standing stark naked by the side of the road.

She didn’t see anyone. She
did see the dark clouds of whateverthehell those things were, and
where ever they settled … dust. The parking lot of cars was half
gone already. The
asphalt
was turning to powder. She stared at the
phenomena disbelievingly for a few moments and then glanced up and
down what remained of the highway. To the south, she could still
see cars and trucks that seemed intact, at least in the sense that
they were there. To the north, where that
thing
had landed, even the overpass
she remembered from the night before was gone.

“
Oh my god!” She couldn’t
entirely comprehend what seemed to be happening, but the world
seemed to be vanishing.

Sucking in a sharp breath, she whipped
around and began jogging south. She had no destination in mind—not
in the forefront of her mind anyway—but running away from what was
happening seemed imperative.

She quickly discovered that no amount
of fear was sufficient to make her completely unaware of her
nakedness. Everything on her body seemed to jiggle when she’d never
noticed it before—when she was wearing clothes! Her breasts felt
like f’ing yoyos! Clamping one arm over her breasts, more for the
sake of minimizing discomfort than due to any sense of modesty,
Anya struggled with the imbalance that created in her stride and
kept going.

That
thing
, she realized after a while,
might not be a bomb like anything she’d ever seen or heard of, but
it
was
a bomb.
They’d been invaded by aliens!

It wasn’t until Anya was so breathless
from running that she thought she would pass out if she didn’t stop
and catch her breath that she realized that she wasn’t outrunning
whaterverthehell was eating everything in sight. At some point
while she was frantically trying to save herself, the voracious
hoard had swept past her.

A whimper of sheer terror escaped her
when she glanced around to see how much headway she was making and
saw that the dark swarm was well on its way to devouring the cars
and the highway beside and in front of her. Gasping hoarsely,
trying to gather enough spit into her mouth to swallow, she veered
sharply away from the highway, sprawled out in the ditch and then
clawed her way up the other side. Thankfully the fence, designed to
keep wildlife off the highway, was just wire, not barbed wire. She
still scraped her hide going over it. Ignoring the sting, she
plunged into the woods.

She became instantly aware of the lack
of protective clothing and shoes. Branches slapped at her, stinging
her skin. Briars caught at her and left claw marks as she pushed
through them, and the pine cones, rotting leaves and branches,
rocks, and tree roots nearly crippled her as they dug into the soft
soles of her feet.

She began to feel a lot better once
she’d gone far enough into the woods that she could no longer see
the destruction behind her, however. The metal, clothing, and
asphalt eating insects, or whatever they were, didn’t seem
interested in her or the woods around her.

That was odd, she realized. Why would
they eat things like that and not flesh or
vegetation—apparently?

She frowned, uneasy with her
assessment, but there was no getting around the fact that the
things had been on her bare skin and hadn’t eaten holes in her or
that the trees and plants didn’t seem effected.

Did that mean she was safe or
not?

She didn’t feel safe. She just felt
less in danger—for the moment—more able to notice her misery. She
was so dehydrated she felt like she was going to dry up to a husk.
Her stomach felt like it was going to gnaw a hole in her backbone
and she hurt everywhere. Her skin was stinging all over the place
from scratches. Her feet were killing her and she felt every bruise
from the falls she’d taken, every sore muscle she hadn’t worked out
in effing forever!

It occurred to her that she was going
to be a hell of a lot worse off if she got lost in the woods but
the alternative of turning around and testing her theory that the
alien bugs wouldn’t eat her didn’t appeal.

She could see the glint of the rising
sun through the trees and knew if she put that to her left shoulder
she would be heading south—toward home—but would she be any safer
there? If she was right, and she was afraid she was, those things
had landed all over the place. Was there any place on earth that
would be safe?

Unfortunately, nothing came to mind,
but she realized she needed to get water, at least, or she was
going to die whether those things got to her or not.

God! She was so sorry she’d dropped
that damned twinky and coke! Why hadn’t she had the presence of
mind to hang on to them?

She’d been trudging south for a couple
of hours, by her stomach’s reckoning, when she heard a thrashing
noise that made her freeze. It leapt instantly to mind, although
she’d spared no thought for it before, that the woods belonged to a
lot of animals she didn’t want a close encounter with. After trying
to determine the direction the noise was coming from, she peered
uneasily through the foliage, trying to see what it was and decide
whether to run the other way or try to climb a tree or scream her
head off.

She didn’t actually make a
decision. The moment her gaze finally focused on the brightly
colored, insect-like thing that was the size of a medium sized dog,
she screamed like a banshee and ran for all she was worth. Deafened
by the noise she was making herself, she had no idea whether the
thing was pursuing her or not, but she didn’t slow down to check
until she ran out of steam. Huffing for breath, she glanced around
for any sign of it and spied a
something
crawling along the ground
that looked vaguely like a millipede—except it was about two and a
half feet long.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem to be
moving very fast. Sucking in a sharp breath, holding her side with
one hand and her bouncing breasts with the other, she jogged on at
the best speed she could muster.

It dawned on her that she
needed a weapon since it also occurred to her that the two monster
insect-like things she’d spied probably weren’t one of a kind. She
thought yearningly of the pistol tucked into her glove box—probably
long gone now—and dismissed it. Nothing she’d had before mattered.
They weren’t available and she needed
something
now!

Slowing, she began to search her
surroundings for anything that might make a weapon she had some
hope of defending herself with. She spied a fair sized branch on
the ground, but discovered as soon as she picked it up that the
thing was rotted and would probably fall apart as soon as she
whacked something with it. A little further, she found a rock about
the size of her hand. Hefting it, she decided it was too heavy for
her to throw very far. She could either try bashing something with
it, up close and personal, or throw it and hope that was enough to
scare whatever it was away.

Pines dominated the forest tree
population and those didn’t produce branches that were particularly
useful as spears or clubs. She finally merely tore a green branch
from a small maple and stripped the leaves from it. It wasn’t heavy
enough to knock anything unconscious or beat it to death, but, if
memory served her, and she thought it did, the whip effect was
unpleasant enough to be some deterrent. It had certainly
discouraged her from getting on her grandmother’s bad side when
she’d been a child!

She was still searching for something
lethal when the silence around her was shattered once more by the
loud crashing sound of something big blundering through the brush.
Her heart seemed to stand still in her chest for a moment. She
stopped dead in her tracks. Her head came up like a startled deer.
The crashing noises had been preceded by a loud yelp that sounded
as if it came from a human throat—a male.

It hadn’t sounded fearful. It seemed to
have been a sound of surprise.

The abrupt urge to burst into tears
came out of nowhere.

She hadn’t realized she’d begun to feel
as if she was the only person left in the world until that
moment.

Abruptly, she dropped the rock and took
off. She was too breathless to manage running and shouting at the
same time otherwise she would’ve been screaming her head off as she
charged through the woods in search of the man she’d
heard.

She was so desperate to find someone
she tripped over a root and plowed face first down the hill several
yards before she managed to stop her descent. Shoving herself up on
her hands and knees, she spied the man lying at the bottom, staring
up at the sky.

She hoped he was staring up at the sky.
The fear that he’d managed to break his neck and was dead assailed
her as did the urge to burst into tears again—this time from fear
rather than hopefulness. Her nose stung and her vision blurred.
Scrambling on all fours, she reached the man and bent over
him.

Relief washed over her
dizzyingly when she realized he
was
breathing. It crashed almost as quickly as her
vision cleared and she got a really good look at the face. Her
first thought was that he was in costume but almost as soon as that
flashed through her mind, she dismissed it. No makeup artist in the
world was
that
good! As human as he seemed in some respects, the eyes
absolutely weren’t human-like at all aside from the fact that there
were two of them on either side of the bridge of the
not-quite-human nose and they were roughly the same size and shape
as human eyes.

Her mind leapt from that to the obelisk
she’d seen and the nearly microscopic bugs that seemed to be eating
everything in sight and she surged to her feet before she even
realized she’d commanded herself to rise. She’d managed to take one
leaping step in retreat when he clamped a hand around her opposite
ankle just as she shifted her weight in preparation to lifting it.
She plowed the dirt with an inelegant grunt. Fear and shock
dominated, however, and she hardly felt the blow. Whirling to
discover what had tripped her, she found his hand clamped around
her ankle and tried to kick him in the face with her free leg. She
missed both his face and his vulnerable throat and planted her foot
against his chest. Instead of releasing her, though, his hand
tightened and she rolled up and began beating him about the head
and shoulders with the switch she still gripped. “Let go! Let go!
Let go!” she screamed at him as she flailed with the
switch.