Genesis (2 page)

Speak of the devil,
Emily thought playfully as Adam, now almost eight months old, crawled from behind Rhiannon’s legs, a smile of pure joy lighting up his face.

“Gah!” he said and propelled himself toward his parents, his right hand tightly clutched around an object that he held out in front of him. “Gah!” he burbled again and slapped the object into Emily’s outstretched hand. It was a beautifully carved wooden racing car, complete with moving wheels, and painted a bright green.

Emily looked at Rhiannon, puzzled.

“Parsons stopped by and dropped it off for him,” said Rhiannon,
smiling.

During the voyage from Alaska to California, the
Vengeance
’s chief engineer had cottoned to Rhiannon as though she was his own daughter. That loyalty had now expanded to include Adam, for which Emily and Mac were eternally grateful. An extra set of eyes on her family was a welcome addition, especially those of someone as loyal as Parsons.

And judging by the craftsmanship that had gone into the toy, Parsons had also become adept at working the wood harvested from the Titans—the name they had given to the enormous alien trees that now covered the planet—which the survivors used for repairs and building new structures. The detail of the toy was amazing; the Welshman was apparently an accomplished woodworker.

Emily reached down and plucked up her son with both hands, which brought an even wider toothless grin along with a cascade of giggles as she handed him back his new toy.

She stared:
My God, he is so beautiful
.

Adam was the first newborn child on the planet since the red rain had fallen, and, while at first glance he looked and behaved just like any other child his age would have before the coming of the rain, his eyes betrayed his heritage as firstborn on this alien world. Each was flecked with tiny specks of red that seemed to glow and scintillate in the light.

Although far less pronounced, Emily had noticed similar faint flecks of red in her own eyes. She was sure that they had not been there before her excursion to the alien ship, and, while they were only visible to anyone who got within kissing distance, she had resorted to wearing sunglasses whenever she was outside or not with her immediate circle of family and trusted friends.

A small but distinct and growing sense of paranoia existed within the camp as the inevitable clash of cultures and beliefs of the survivors ground against each other on an almost daily basis, and Emily did not want to add any more fuel to that particular slow-burning fire.

Mac had seen her eyes, of course, but the only reason he could come up with was that they might be some kind of side effect of whatever process the Caretakers had used to transport Emily to their ship back in Las Vegas.

“Maybe there was some kind of malfunction in their transporter beam, you know, like in
Star Trek
,” he had said, only half joking.

“That would make you Scotty, then?” she had said, nodding her agreement, but beneath the humor she knew better. She did not feel the same since her return; her nights had been plagued by odd dreams, strange voices echoing in her head and a sense that she was . . . fractured, splintered almost, and yet part of something larger, something unseen that was as elusive as trying to hold on to the past.

The dreams were not nightmares, exactly, but they were disconcerting enough to wake her on more than one occasion bathed in sweat. Instead of fear, she woke with a sense of longing, of missing something close to her that she simply could not figure out. And, of course, there was also the possibility that each of the twenty or so millimeter-sized red specks were a side effect of her being the only human to have survived direct contact with the red rain. Every other survivor had either been safely hidden away at the bottom of the ocean, protected by the extreme cold of the Arctic and the Antarctic, or hundreds of kilometers above her head in the International Space Station.

Before he died, Rhiannon’s father had told Emily that the rain had stopped short of their hilltop home; they had been protected by the peculiar weather system of the area. So that left Emily as the sole witness to the metamorphic effect of the rain, how it had changed human life along with every other life-form on the planet, molding it to a preprogrammed plan that transformed the skin of the planet into what lay beyond the border of Point Loma. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the virus had had some kind of effect on her too, even if only as small as changing her eyes.

“You okay, love?” Mac’s question tugged her mind back to reality.

“What? Oh yeah! I just zoned for a second.”

Mac lifted the boy from his mother. “You wee rascal, you weigh a bloody ton already,” he said. Adam gurgled his contentment and clung tightly to his father.

Rhiannon tickled the boy under his chin, which brought about another fit of giggles.

Emily wasn’t really sure when it had happened, maybe that first day after they had buried Ben, but the truth was it did not matter: Rhiannon had become her surrogate daughter, and, eventually, once Mac came into their life, his too. And when Adam was born Emily had seen an almost instantaneous shift in Rhiannon; she had gone from being a child to a young woman, a big sister eager to take on whatever responsibilities Emily was willing to delegate to her. Emily was sure that the loss of Rhiannon’s little brother, Ben, had played a huge part in the girl’s almost obsessive dedication to Adam. And if Emily were being completely honest she had leaned on Rhiannon a little too much in these early months. But that was what families did, right? When things were tough, they stuck together and held each other up and helped when and wherever they were needed, each one shouldering whatever load was placed on them. It was sad to think that this little group of five entities was in all likelihood the only complete family left on the planet.

Emily sidled over to Rhiannon and placed an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.

“What’s that for?”

“Just because.”

“We’ve got a council meeting to go to. You okay looking after His Royal Highness for a little while longer?” Mac asked, nodding at his boy, who was now happily playing with his new toy car again.

“Sure thing,” said Rhiannon.

“We’ll only be a couple of hours,” Emily said. She leaned in and gave Rhiannon a kiss on the head and the same to Adam. “You’re a life saver.”

“I know,” said Rhiannon with an assured smile.

For some unknown reason Dr. Sylvia Valentine flat out did not like Emily.

From the second the woman stepped off the USS
Michigan
and stood on the dock squinting in the California afternoon sunshine, Emily had sensed a tension emanating from her—a disturbance in the Force, Mac would have described it—a sense of aloofness that Emily realized later, after everything that had happened, she had never expected to experience again. She
had
expected some humbleness. Every other survivor Emily had greeted in her capacity as Camp Loma’s official welcoming party had looked tired from weeks or even months of travelling, but inevitably they had a smile on their faces when they felt the welcoming California sun on their skin and saw the crowd of smiling faces waiting to greet them.

But when Sylvia—“That’s Doctor Valentine,” the woman would insist later when Emily made the mistake of using her given name—stepped off the deck of the
Michigan
, refusing the outstretched hand of a sailor placed there to assist the debarkation, her face was cloaked in a scowl.

And right then Emily knew she was going to have a problem with this one.

The doctor was tall, easily five nine, maybe even five eleven. The woman’s brunette hair was tied in a tight, neat knot behind her head. She was smartly dressed in a light-yellow blouse and dark-gray business pantsuit that showed off her trim figure. She carried a large suitcase in one hand. With her free hand Valentine had pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her breast pocket and placed them on her face, then slowly turned her head to survey the dock, as if she were looking over a piece of property she was going to buy. She did not look particularly happy with what she saw.

Fine,
Emily thought,
you can catch the next boat back to McMurdo for all I care
. But she had to admit, the stranger looked damned good for a woman she guessed must be in her midfifties and had spent months locked away in a submarine.

Emily had met plenty of women like this during her time at the
New York Tribune
, back in Manhattan: professional, smart, capable, used to getting her own way. This was a woman who was only ever at ease when she was in control. And that was just fine as far as Emily was concerned. Camp Loma was a big enough place for them both, and God knows women were in short enough supply around here. Emily was willing to overlook any potential character quirks if only for the sake of having an additional feminine mind in the same vicinity amid all the testosterone flooding the camp. They would warm to each other, given enough time, she was sure of it. The woman had been cooped up on a frozen island for the last year and a half or so. Emily could afford to cut her some slack.

But as Emily had stood on the quay watching the newcomers disembark, she remembered a warning from the McMurdo radio operator: “Don’t trust Valentine.”

The truth was, everything had been fine right up until the bitch had to go and confirm every Goddamn thing Emily had been worried about.

Thor, always riding shotgun with Emily and always happy to make a new friend, had immediately launched into his own welcome routine. Running from newcomer to newcomer as the
Michigan
disgorged them one by one, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, he happily accepted pats on the head and the inevitable “Oohs!” and “Ahhs!” that followed.

But Valentine . . . Valentine was different.

As Thor reached her, his head up, back end swinging like it was about to fly off from all the tail wagging, the woman barely even acknowledged his presence. The malamute continued to circle her for a few seconds, looking up expectantly, his tail gradually dropping as he lost some of his enthusiasm. Finally he sat at her feet and raised a single paw.

The kick was subtle; if Emily had not been looking directly at Valentine she would have missed it completely. It was aimed at the muscles of Thor’s haunches, and exercised as casually as anyone else might swat away an annoying fly. Emily heard Thor yelp in pain and saw her friend flinch, his tail dropping between his legs as he scooted sideways while the woman stepped past him and onto the concrete quay.

Valentine’s head tracked back and forth across the camp and the forest of red that lay off in the distance.

Emily felt her own smile falter. Her right hand instinctively dropped to the butt of the HK45T holstered on her hip as her anger boiled up . . . and for a second she forgot where she was. In that moment she was back on the road to the Stockton Islands, her instincts and sheer will to survive the only thing keeping her alive. And her instincts told her that this woman wasn’t just a social threat, this woman was dangerous. Emily almost drew the pistol . . . almost.

Instead she forced her fingers to relax and dropped her hand to her hip.
Be civilized, now.
“Thor, come here, boy,” she yelled out, her eyes remaining fixed squarely on Valentine. With those big sunglasses she looked like a giant bug: a praying mantis.

She needs to watch her step,
Emily thought,
because I would be more than happy to step on the bitch if she gets out of line.

The big malamute scampered to Emily’s side, his tail back in the air and his tongue lolling again, but he was still occasionally looking back at the stranger as if he suspected she might deliver another swift kick when he wasn’t looking.

“Sit, boy,” Emily told him. Thor obeyed, and his mistress rested the flat of her hand on the dog’s head.

For many of the new arrivals, this would be the first glimpse of the strange alien world they all now lived in. Most of them would have seen the original news reports when the red rain had first fallen, witnessed the sudden and final severance of all communication with the rest of the world. All of them would have experienced the great red storm that had changed the world so absolutely, and all of them had heard the stories of survival relayed to them via Point Loma’s radio. But this first step into the world, this was reality, and seeing the changes for themselves was often the psychological equivalent of being cracked on the head by a hammer.

And given those mitigating circumstances, Emily would give Valentine a chance to change her first impression, she decided. This time.

Every developed nation from both the east and west had had a base on Antarctica before the red rain had fallen. Around fifty of the seventy bases were permanent, while others operated only during the summer months. On the day the rain came there were 1,722 souls on the continent. An American submarine, the USS
Michigan
, was in port for a routine visit, along with two large container ships, docked at McMurdo base to supply the islanders with both food and fuel. Counting the crew of these three vessels, the total number of humans present was just shy of two thousand.