Revelations (20 page)

Emily squeezed herself into the Black Hawk’s copilot seat, pulled the safety harness over her shoulders, and fastened it into place.

“Thor, lay down,” she ordered over her shoulder. The dog obeyed, settling down between the back of her chair and the passenger compartment behind it. While Thor had seemed at ease in every vehicle they had used during their journey to Alaska, Emily wasn’t sure how he was going to react to a helicopter ride. Truth be told, she wasn’t exactly sure how
she
was going to react. She had never flown in a helicopter before. That her first flight would be in a military one seemed pretty much par for the course when it came to her experience of “firsts” these days.

MacAlister appeared at her door and climbed up, his head ducked down to avoid the low ceiling. He visually checked her safety harness then gave it a sharp tug.

“Looks good,” he said, smiling at her, a pair of aviator sunglasses he had found in the helo’s cockpit covering his eyes but not his smile as he gave the harness a second yank. “Here, put these on,” he said, reaching for a pair of headphones that hung from a cord dangling from the ceiling. When she had placed them on her head, MacAlister pulled a microphone down from the side of the headphone and positioned it just in front of her mouth.

He said something that she couldn’t hear. “What did you say?” she said, lifting one headphone from her ear.

“I said they look very becoming on you. They’ll allow us to communicate during the flight. Just say what you need to say and the microphone will engage automatically.”

She nodded and let the headphone snap back against her ear.

MacAlister checked on the two sailors who had fastened themselves into the seats in the passenger compartment, making sure they were all secure and that everything that could move was either stowed away or tied down securely. He gave Thor a pat on the head and fired a thumbs-up at Emily as he climbed back into the cockpit, settling into the pilot’s seat. He began methodically working through the engine startup routine, his hands moving over a console that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie: so many dials and levers and switches.

Mac’s voice crackled over the intercom: “Okay, let’s get this thing turning and burning.”

A low rumble began to vibrate through Emily’s seat and up her spine. The wall of the cabin began to tremble. She looked out through the side window at the collection of sailors who had accompanied them across the bay, their hands already raised to protect themselves from the whirlwind they knew was coming. The four rotor blades of the Black Hawk cast shadows against the concrete of the landing pad and she saw them slowly begin to move. Then, as the vibration began to increase to a bone-shaking rattle, the ground began to drop away and she felt her stomach lurch as the helicopter lifted from the ground and rapidly ascended. She looked down at Thor. The damn dog was asleep already, totally unfazed.

Emily swallowed rapidly as her fingers searched and found the chair’s seat, curling around the metal frame. Her ears popped but gradually the weird feeling of falling up began to fade as their ascent slowed. Then the engines began to thrum faster and louder as the Black Hawk picked up speed, the nose dipped down slightly, and the helo swung around in a wide, lazy arc until it faced northeast toward their destination, Las Vegas.

Emily started as MacAlister’s voice suddenly filled her head. “Lady and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Please remain seated for the duration of the flight. Our expected flight time is two hours and we do hope you enjoy your flight. Unfortunately, the only inflight entertainment will be my rendition of ‘Danny Boy,’ please do try to refrain from leaping from the aircraft while we are still airborne. Thank you for flying MacAlister Airlines.”

Through the window Emily watched the concrete of the airfield slip away into the distance only to be replaced by water as they left Coronado Island and crossed the channel to the mainland. By this time the Black Hawk had already climbed to several thousand feet, and their bird’s-eye view gave Emily a unique, unobscured perspective of the world beneath her. It was a world that she could no longer recognize.

Jacob had explained to her that the red storm had acted as some kind of incubator, creating just the right environment to catalyze the substances released by the trees. She understood that, for the most part, at least, but good God, the scale of it all from up here was just overwhelming.

During the time it had enclosed the world within its deadly embrace, the storm had changed
everything
. There was no green left now, it was all reds and purples and browns. Here and there were gaps in the canopy that might have been fields before the rain, but were now tangles of smaller red plants. Beyond them was the jungle, a huge alien mix of trees and vegetation and vines. Giant fronds and branches reached out to each other, tangling and intertwining together to form a cratered landscape of twisted foliage.

It was only from up here that she could truly appreciate the total and absolute finality of the planet’s overthrow. While she had still been on the ground Emily could always imagine that beyond that great barrier of red there was still
somewhere
that remained normal, somewhere that was still Earth. But now, as she looked out over the uninterrupted landscape of red spreading from one horizon to the next, all hope that there was anywhere left evaporated.

“It’s devastatingly beautiful, isn’t it?” MacAlister’s voice whispered in her ear.

“Terrifying,” she said back. “It’s terrifying.”

“Look at that,” said MacAlister. “To the west, do you see that?”

Emily adjusted her position so she could get a better view through the window. In the distance, reaching up through the jungle she could see a collection of tall buildings; at least, she could just make out the top floors of the skyscrapers. While the majority of the upper parts of the skyscrapers were clear of the invasive red plants, thick ropes of red had climbed up from the jungle below and wound their way around the walls, entwining the buildings. To Emily it looked like the skyscrapers were slowly being pulled down into the jungle below. Nothing would escape the slow, inexorable takeover. She had no doubt that, given enough time, even these last few examples of man’s fragile dominion over the planet would crumble and fall beneath the weight of alien life. More of the huge birds that she had come to think of as phoenix circled and swooped around the top of the building.

“They want it entirely for themselves, don’t they?” Emily said. “Not a trace of the old world, our world, left.”

MacAlister nodded silently, his eyes fixed on the northern horizon.

“Why?” Emily asked, voicing a question that had bugged her since her first inkling of what was going on. “Why would anyone, any
thing
, go to such great trouble to wipe out an entire planet’s life and replace it with another?”

“We’ll know that in a couple of hours,” said MacAlister.

Let’s hope it’s an answer we can all live with
, Emily thought as she watched the towers disappear into the distance behind them.

The unearthly jungle rolled by beneath them as the Black Hawk thundered onward toward their destination. Occasionally, Emily would see a break in the canopy of red that exposed open ground and she would catch a glimpse of houses or buildings, their gardens overrun, their roofs punctured by the limbs of the trees and plants that grew around them.

Eventually, as they drew closer to what had once been the border between California and southern Nevada, the deep waves of lush vegetation began to fall away, replaced by waist-high reedlike plants that swayed and billowed like corn in the summer, caressed by a brisk wind.

“According to my map, that used to be the Mojave Desert down there,” said MacAlister, the noise of the rotors bullying his voice over the headphones.

“Doesn’t look like much of a desert now,” Emily replied. Whatever it had looked like before, now it was a plain of lush, red plant life spreading out toward a quickly approaching mountain range to the north. The plants extended halfway up the sides of the mountain before petering out as they drew closer to the snowcapped peaks.

MacAlister had spotted it too. “Looks as though this new plant life has as much of an aversion to the cold as your creepy-crawlies do,” he said over the intercom. They flew what seemed to Emily to be perilously close to the mountains, before turning a few degrees to the east.

“Look,” said Emily. “On the right. There’s a road.”

A strip of six-lane highway, a few miles long, had appeared as it climbed over the mountain before dipping down again and vanishing into the waves of red as the road dropped down toward the plain below.

MacAlister said, “That should be the Fifteen down there. Means we’re on the right track. Vegas shouldn’t be too far away now. I hope you all remembered to bring your suntan lotion and swimsuits.”

No one said anything, so MacAlister kept flying.

Las Vegas, or, at least, what was left of the city of sin, appeared out of the morning haze like an oasis.

The miles of undulating plants that had turned the desert into a lush, red sea were again replaced by the towering trees and twisted vines of the jungle that had sprung up to claim the city. MacAlister adjusted the flight path so they would approach from the southwest, skirting around the edge of the town.

“I’m going to do a little reconnoiter,” he said, “just to see what we’re dealing with.”

Just as they had seen over San Diego and every town they had flown past since leaving Point Loma, the alien jungle was well on its way to having claimed Las Vegas as its own. Creepers and tendrils clung to every wall, streetlight, sign, and walkway in the town, obscuring all but the uppermost parts of the tallest casinos and hotels.

The thrum of the Black Hawk’s powerful rotors echoed back to the occupants of the helo, bouncing off the buildings as it cruised slowly around the westernmost edge of the Las Vegas Strip. The hotels and casinos that had made the desert town so famous had mostly disappeared beneath a cloak of scarlet. The roads and sidewalks were choked with plant life, obscuring all but the occasional street sign or stoplight. Only the taller casinos and landmarks still pushed their way through the canopy of the red jungle.

It was a dead town. A city of ghosts.

Emily saw a glint of sunlight bouncing off an odd angle. It was the Luxor casino, the giant glass pyramid jutting out of the jungle like the ancient wonder it was modeled after. Farther on she spotted a huge arm thrust into the air, the forever-extinguished torch it held aloft in what seemed to Emily to be a final desperate gesture of defiance was all that was still visible of the New York–New York Statue of Liberty, drowned beneath the sea of red leaves and branches.

The Black Hawk descended and Emily felt the safety harness hold her in place as it swung sharply east. MacAlister guided the helo between two nameless hotels and headed in the direction of where the main drag would have been visible if it was not concealed beneath the fifty-foot-high wall of vegetation. He slowed their forward momentum until the Black Hawk was hovering at roof level with the nearby buildings, then slowly began to rotate the aircraft 360 degrees, as he and his passengers took in the full effect of what lay just beyond the safety of their cabin.

There was some kind of visible damage to almost every building still left standing, either as a result of the red storm or from the panic and aftermath of the first fall of red rain, Emily assumed. She could see the remains of what had once been Bally’s jutting up like a broken tooth. The hotel wing of the casino had suffered some kind of traumatic accident, half of the building was missing, sheared off as if the missing part of the structure had simply slid away, lost in the jungle below. Emily could see into rooms opened up to the elements. Curtains and blankets hung from broken timbers and shattered windows, blowing crazily in the downdraft of the helicopter’s rotor wash. As MacAlister continued their slow rotation, she saw an exposed wall wobble, then topple in slow motion, falling silently into the jungle canopy below. Beyond the remains of Bally’s, unidentifiable because of the amount of damage it had sustained, a burned-out shell of what must have been another landmark hotel was silhouetted starkly against the blue sky, scorched beams and fire-blackened buttresses the only indication that a building had once stood at that spot. Alien trees already sprouted from the gutted skeleton of the building, twisting their vines around the remnants as they claimed the decaying remains for their own.

“Jesus! Look at that,” MacAlister said in a hushed tone as he surveyed the damage. “It looks like a war zone.”

“Yeah, but it looks like a war that was fought fifty years ago,” Burris said from the passenger cabin.

He was right too, Emily thought. The town had a sense of abandonment to it, as though something terrible had happened, but long ago. It was as though they had stumbled across an ancient abandoned city lost to the red jungle and to time, a Machu Picchu, or perhaps, more aptly, El Dorado.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Emily quoted beneath her breath quietly. It was as fitting an epitaph for this town as any.

MacAlister allowed the Black Hawk to hover for a few more seconds, then dipped its nose and guided the helo along what had once been Las Vegas Boulevard.

“McCarran Airport—no relation to yours truly, to the best of my knowledge—is northeast of here,” MacAlister said over the intercom as he powered the engines up enough to allow the helicopter to climb above the debris-strewn roof of a towering nearby casino. Emily found herself staring into the building’s windows as the Black Hawk climbed higher, the neatly cut, almost-perfect circular holes she saw in many of the rooms’ still-intact windows told her everything she needed to know about what had happened to the majority of the town’s vacationing tourists and staff. “I’m going to circle us around toward the airport,” MacAlister continued, “and see if we can…
holy shit
!” The last two words were a hiss, like gas escaping from the Scotsman’s mouth, and his head spun around to face Emily as his hand jerked the joystick, wobbling the Black Hawk away from whatever it was that had taken him by surprise.

In the distance, running along the base of the sweep of a mountain range, a huge chunk of earth had seemingly been scooped out of the ground, leaving a ragged, black crater where whatever had fallen from the sky had finally come to rest. A scar, at least two miles long, extended out from behind the impact site like a dirty tail, delineating where the object had hit the ground, careening through a housing development before finally coming to rest close to the base of the mountains. All the alien vegetation along the edge of the crater had either been burned away by the approach or intentionally removed in the days since it had “landed.” Whatever the reason, a swath of desert, unsullied by the red vegetation, now lay on either side of the crater and along the trench that stretched for what looked like miles out behind it.

Whatever this thing was, it had come in nose first and it had come in hard and fast. A huge wave of dirt had been pushed up on either side of the crater, demolishing houses and roads and whatever else was unlucky enough to have been in the way. The debris had formed a berm of dirt and debris around the depression’s perimeter. But there was no other sign of damage to the immediate area surrounding the crash.

The thing that had passed overhead less than a week earlier had been massive and travelling at a tremendous rate of speed, and the destruction they were now looking at just did not jive with what any of them had expected to see.

Emily had read an article once on the Barringer Crater in Arizona; it was massive, around four thousand feet in diameter, and almost six hundred deep, if she remembered correctly. It had been created by a meteorite that was pretty small, around a couple of hundred feet. She would have expected to see massive devastation for miles around the crash site if what had crashed here had been a meteorite. The shock wave alone should have flattened most of the vegetation in the area, but aside from the damage along its approach and around the actual crater, the surroundings looked to be untouched, as though there had been a degree of control exerted on the landing.

Still, the crater was huge. Easily a quarter mile across and maybe a mile long. At its center, Emily could see a vague shape, something rounded, with jagged points jutting out at odd angles. It was impossible to see clearly from this distance, even with their bird’s-eye view of the area.

“We need to get closer,” Emily said finally.

MacAlister nodded, his eyes already scanning left and right as he maneuvered the Black Hawk higher. The ground between their location and the downed craft might just as well have been an ocean, there was no place for them to set down safely.

“What about the open ground around the crater?” Emily suggested.

“Too close,” MacAlister said, shaking his head. “Besides, we don’t know what’s in the crater. If Jacob was right, and we have some unwelcome visitors, it stands to reason that they will have a weapon system. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to announce our presence just yet. We’re going to have to find somewhere safe to land this thing and then we’ll use the drone to get a better peek at what’s in that crater.”

“Don’t some of these casinos have landing pads?” Emily said.

“That’s what I was thinking. Let’s take a look,” said MacAlister as he fed power to the engines and Emily felt the helicopter begin to rise quickly until they had a better view of the roofs of the remaining still-intact structures on either side of the Vegas Strip.

The roofs of everything Emily could see either had no landing area or if there was one, it was either storm-damaged or covered in debris.

“Nothing on my side, either,” said MacAlister. “Let’s head downtown a wee bit.” The Black Hawk banked left and started heading toward the opposite, older end of the Strip.

“Try over there,” Emily said, pointing to an ugly square of a building, its architecture tasteless enough it might as well have screamed it was built during the 1970s.
THE TACOMA
read a faded sign running around the top of the building. The sides of the casino were covered in red creepers that had spread like engorged veins across the walls and windows, but as the helicopter flew closer, Emily spotted a raised circular dais with a large
H
printed on it in red. It looked intact and free of plant life. She tapped MacAlister on the shoulder and pointed in the pad’s direction.

“Let’s give it a once-over,” said MacAlister, gently maneuvering the helo in the direction of the landing pad. He flew twice around the roof, inspecting the pad, looking for any obvious structural damage. “Wouldn’t want to land on it and have the damn thing collapse beneath us, would we?” he informed his passengers.

He must have been satisfied because the next words out of his mouth were, “Okay, here we go,” and the helo abruptly dipped toward the landing pad.

Emily found herself once again searching for something to hold on to as the Black Hawk swooped down toward the Tacoma and her stomach tried to claw its way up her throat.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she mumbled. She thought she heard MacAlister give a cackle of glee at her discomfort.

And then with a bump and bone-rattling shudder they were down and Emily felt her fingers slowly begin to unfasten from the chair.

“Welcome to Las Vegas, lady and gentlemen,” said MacAlister, smirking beneath the mirrored lenses of his aviators. “Just stay in your seats until I tell you, please.” And with that, he began flipping switches on the console to their off position.

Emily punched MacAlister hard on the arm. “Bastard,” she said, with a half smile.

MacAlister cut the engines, grabbed his rifle, and leaped out onto the roof of the Tacoma, quickly followed by Reilly and Burris, their rifles raised and at the ready.

A set of rickety-looking steps led down from the landing pad onto a flat roof surrounded by a raised wall along its edges. Air vents protruded seemingly at random from the rooftop cover, their aluminum skins dully reflecting the sun. Access to the roof from the hotel was via a wardrobe-size stucco box with a large door that stood off toward the eastern side of the roof. At the center of the oblong-shaped roof sat two massive cages containing what Emily assumed must have been industrial-strength air-conditioning units or pumps of some kind. The three sailors methodically fanned out across the top of the building, checking every possible location as they maneuvered between the air vents, scrutinizing the opposite side of the roof access, the blind corners, and shadowed access passage between the two cages.