Genesis (16 page)

“Come on,” Emily said, grabbing the girl’s backpack from the floor and handing it to her before shrugging her own over her shoulders. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

A halfhearted drizzle had begun to fall by the time Emily and Rhiannon stepped outside.

“Oh great,” said Rhiannon, pulling her hood up, the sky a forewarning of the desultory mood she was sure would mark the rest of the day.

“We need to make locating a working vehicle our top priority,” Emily said, pulling the hood of her own jacket up, trying to give both her and Rhiannon a positive task to focus on. “If we have to walk we’re either going to starve to death or die of exposure. We sure as hell don’t need a repeat of last night.” Of course, finding a vehicle out here was so much easier said than done.

A malaise as gray as the sky settled over the travelers and for the next few hours they followed the I-40 east in silence, the only sound the faint squelching of the soles of their shoes and the rustle of their waterproof jackets. Emily felt colder than she had in years; the balmy California weather had spoiled her, apparently. She pulled the hood of her jacket deeper over her head and turned to check on Rhiannon.

“You okay?”

“Cold and tired,” Rhiannon said, trying her best to force a smile despite the constant gray that seemed to hang in the air around them. Even Thor’s usual boundless enthusiasm and energy seemed to have been sucked dry by the dull dreariness of the weather.

“Well, at least it’s not snowing.”

“Yet,” the girl replied without a hint of irony.

They plodded on.

“Cell phones,” Rhiannon said about a kilometer later.

“What?”

“I really, really miss my cell phone.”

Emily smiled. Of course, she was playing the what-I-miss game.

“I used to text my friends all the time,” Rhiannon continued. “I had a lot of friends, and Dad was always telling me to turn my phone off, but I didn’t.” Rhiannon laughed like the little girl she had been, an innocent giggle of joy at the memory of her family. “At dinner I used to sneak it under the table, and I didn’t even need to see the keyboard, I was that good at texting. Until Ben told Dad about it, because he always wanted to use my phone, and Dad said he wasn’t old enough to have one yet . . . I wish I had let him, now,” she said, her head dipping toward the road, shoulders slumping. “I miss them
so
much.”

The pain in the girl’s voice stabbed Emily straight through the heart. She had managed to store the memory of what she had done—what she had
had
to do—to Ben, Rhiannon’s little brother, deep in the darkest corner of her mind, but sometimes the horror of it all, of what she was capable of doing, would surface, percolating up through the cracks of its prison like a poisonous gas, suffocating her mind and soul. This was her penance, her responsibility
to Rhiannon
and the grief of knowing that she could never share it with her, could never make her understand the horror she felt at hav
ing to lie to the girl for the rest of her life. It was
her
cross to carry.

“I know, sweetheart. I know.” Emily reached a reassuring arm around Rhiannon’s shoulders.

What a picture they must make, Emily thought: a pair of the last remaining humans standing on a road in the middle of a rain-soaked alien plain. Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. But the love she felt for the girl she held in her arms was overwhelming.
In spite of it all, everything I’ve done, everything I’ve seen, I am still human. I am still capable of love,
she told herself.

The desire to survive was almost the most astonishing to her. And what was even more surprising was that that desire to survive did not exist on just a personal level. If she spent the time to really think about it, the driving desire behind her emotion was not for her own survival, not even to ensure the safety of her immediate family and friends, but a need to ensure that the human race kept going. It was astounding, really, to think about how deep the connection she felt toward her fellow humans was, despite what Valentine and those like her had done. Only recently, standing on the brink of extinction, did Emily realize that she
loved
being human. Only after her son had vanished, taken by an invisible hand, did she understand what humanity truly meant to her. Only now that everything that had defined her before the rain was gone forever did she understand the connection, the honor she and every other man and woman had been handed by nature, the responsibility that had been given to them. Only now that it was all gone, did she understand what it truly meant to be human.

“It’s all going to be okay,” she told Rhiannon as rain dripped off the bridge of her nose. And strangely, she believed her words to be true.

The four lanes of the freeway—two heading east and two west—stretched out ahead of the companions for about two hundred meters before the rain, low clouds, and mist swallowed it. They had decided to walk along the eastbound lanes, near the center median. “If we hit any trouble, we can at least get the guardrails between us and it,” Emily said. She did not need to elaborate on what the “it” might be. Both women knew the world held unknown terrors.

Since leaving the shelter earlier that morning, the only other building they had seen was the skeleton of a burned-out gas station, its blackened remains sticking out of the ground like a picked-clean carcass.

They had walked for kilometer after kilometer, and more than once, her feet aching from the constant step after step, Emily had wished for the trusty bicycle she had started her journey with.

For the last hour or so Emily had felt the incline of the road rising slightly in the back of her calf muscles. The drizzle had gradually grown heavier and now fell in a constant sheet of light, almost misty rain, nothing like the downpour they had experienced last night, thank God, but still dishearteningly uncomfortable enough to dampen the companions’ spirits, all while limiting their visibility to under thirty meters.

Up until the world ended, the I-40 had been a major artery of the US supply chain, filled with trucks moving goods from east to west and back again. You could travel from California on the West Coast to North Carolina and never leave it. Tens of thousands of vehicles a day passed along the freeway, the third longest in the United States. And that fact was what made it seem so strangely deserted. Of the few vehicles they had seen, most had been mere rust-covered carcasses, fossils of another time. And there had been so few of them, at least along the stretch of clear road that they had been travelling.

Maybe that was why the road was so clear, Emily thought, putting one foot in front of the other. Perhaps the majority of vehicles had made it to a city or to their homes, took one of the numerous spurs off to who knew where. Maybe.

“Can I ask you a question?” Rhiannon said a little while later.

“Shoot!”

“Why didn’t the Caretakers just come and explain things to us? You know, rather than just destroy everything.”

The question caught Emily off guard. Rhiannon had been quiet, contemplative even, for most of the journey since leaving their sanctuary that morning. Their conversations had been limited to whether she wanted to stop for water or a bathroom break. Emily was sure the kid was wading through the murk of what had happened over the past few days, but she was a different girl than the one she had found living with her brother and father so many years ago now. She was tougher, harder. If Rhiannon wanted help wrestling with the demons Emily was under no illusion the girl had, she would ask Emily for her help when she was good and ready.

“That’s a good question,” Emily said, buying herself some time to think about it.

The Caretakers. Emily had often thought about her experience with the aliens that had wrecked the world, trying to reason out just what their motivations were. They had told her that they were constructs of an even older race, tasked with ensuring that life, rare though it might be, thrived wherever they found it. When they did find it, they were the judge, jury, and executioner of any species that did not meet their level of worthiness. Humans, the Caretaker that had taken on the role of Jacob had explained to her, had all but guaranteed that life on Earth was close to being annihilated. They had stepped in and ensured, in the most brutal manner imaginable, that the planet would get a second chance.

“I guess they thought that if we were too dumb to not be able to see what was right in front of our eyes, then we probably weren’t going to take their word for it either?” she said finally.

Rhiannon cocked her head inquisitively. “What do you mean?”

“We had years, decades and decades, to see what we were doing to the planet,” Emily said, almost absentmindedly, “and I think that we had the chance to think,
really
think, about every barrel of oil we used, every doctor who overprescribed an antibiotic, every species we drove into extinction so we could make a profit, and every weak-kneed politician in the pocket of some big business more than happy to tell us what we wanted to hear rather than what we needed to hear, but we didn’t. If we had
really
thought about it, we would have realized that all we were doing was driving another nail into our collective coffin. I think that if it had just been us humans that were threatened with extinction, then maybe the Caretakers would have just moved right along, but it wasn’t, was it? We had become a threat to the entirety of life on this planet.” Emily paused for a moment, her mind the clearest it had ever been. “So we did this to ourselves; well,
you
didn’t, but my generation and everyone who came before us. We could have done . . . something to change it . . . something to make a difference. If we’d just had a couple more generations . . .”

Emily was astonished at the vehemence she heard in her own voice; a vein of bitterness ran through her that she had been totally unaware of, a begrudging acceptance of the logic that had been presented to her as
reason
by the Caretakers, and she was mad at them and the rest of humanity because they were right, Goddamn them, they were
right
in their justification. But that had not given the Caretakers the right to do what they did, not by a long shot. It had been the humans’ problem to solve, and Emily was sure, deep down, that they could have succeeded. She had had faith in humanity; she just had not seen it back when she could have done something about it.

Rhiannon thought about what Emily had said for thirty paces. “But doesn’t it seem, I don’t know, like, really, really wasteful? I mean, why would the Caretakers want to change
all
life?”

“It never made any sense to me,” said Emily, “but then they’re not people. On my best day I had problems understanding the human race, so I’m not sure that I’d have much of a chance trying to comprehend the thought process of an alien race.”

It was another full minute before Rhiannon spoke again. “You said they told you they’ve been doing this for, like, forever, right? So that means there are more aliens out there. More species like us, or kinda like us. If this was a movie, we’d all get together and kick their asses.”

“If this was a movie,” said Emily, with a smile, “we would have won already.”

Rhiannon laughed too. Not a bitter laugh but an honest chuckle at the thought.

“But what they’re saying, though, is that sometimes it’s okay to take life if it means more life will be saved, right?”

Emily suddenly realized what the discussion was really about. Rhiannon was rationalizing her own trauma. She was trying to grasp any meaning that might provide a life preserver for her innocence, to justify what she had had to do to the guard to get Emily out of that cell. And who was she to deny that rationale to her?

“Yes,” said Emily, smiling at her companion, “I think that’s exactly what they meant.”