Exodus (2 page)

Approximately eight hours later she received her answer.

The crew of the ISS had slowly begun to lose contact with its global tracking stations and mission control centers.

First to go was the ISS mission control center in Korolev, Russia, closely followed by Moscow. Then, as the deadly effects of the rain swept indefatigably across the continent, the center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, went dark; the Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands went down not long after that. By the time the ISS lost contact with the European Space Agency Headquarters in Paris, the crew had managed to piece together as clear a picture of what was going on down on the ground as was possible given their limited access to experiential data.

The station’s final contact had been with a radio operator from the Twenty-Second Space Operations Squadron based at the Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The young operator had tried her best to sound calm as she relayed what little news she had about the events taking place worldwide.

The girl was from Colorado originally, she had told Fiona. Her family and husband still lived there, just outside Denver. She had lost contact with them hours earlier. The woman was trying to be brave as she kept the station updated with the little information that still crossed her desk, but Fiona had heard the fear gradually creep into her voice as the inevitable deadline approached the American military base. The operator had died midsentence; Fiona had heard her scream her daughter’s name before the connection had broken.

It was in that instant, as the horrified crew listened to the dying woman, that Commander Mulligan and the crew of the ISS had come to the realization that what had been their home for the last four months had, in a single instant, almost certainly become their tomb.

Of course, the station had enough fuel to maintain its orbit pretty much indefinitely, but they would all be dead long before that was exhausted. They had enough provisions to last them for the next four months or more, and the onboard oxygen-generating systems might last for at least that long, and there were also several redundancy measures built into the station that would keep them alive long past the last meal.

But what then? There was no hope of rescue, only a slow painful death as they starved.

Her crew was a pragmatic bunch, made up of the best of the best and not given to snap judgments, but there had already been calm discussion of breaking out the little red boxes the European Space Agency had considerately provided them for just such an occasion. Each box contained three pills of a derivative of tetrodotoxin, a fast-acting neurotoxin that would leave them dead—painlessly, they had been assured—within minutes of swallowing one. They had all agreed to give it as long as possible before resorting to such extreme measures, but she knew no one on board held out much in the way of hope that rescue was even the slightest of possibilities.

They had spent the next few days taking shifts on the communication systems, working their way through the military and private bands in the hope that there might be someone out there still listening or transmitting. There had to be military and government installations still left untouched by the red rain, they reasoned. Whatever the event had been, it could not have been so viciously effective at its job that it could reach out and wipe out even the secret hardened command-and-control bases they all knew existed in their home countries.

Could it?

They had picked up some minor radio chatter, fleeting and ghostlike as it crackled across the airwaves, and for a moment hope had bloomed that their situation was not as terrible as it seemed. But the transmission was in no language they recognized. “My best guess is it’s probably encrypted in some way, maybe military. Who knows? Without the key there is no way to decrypt it,” Bryant, the team’s communication expert, had explained.

As time rolled on, from the vantage point of the ISS, Commander Mulligan and her crew had an unprecedented view of the changes that had begun to unfold across the earth. With each revolution the station made, they noticed subtle changes to their planet, changes that appeared miniscule from the distance they were watching from but that must have been massive and rapid at ground level.

There had been nothing for the first day or two. The world kept revolving, storms moved across oceans, and, at night, cities still glowed as brightly as they always had done. If they had not known better, the crew would have thought they were a part of some elaborate practical joke that had just gone on for far too long.

Krikalev was the first to point it out, a slight red bloom in the air over Kirovograd in the Ukraine.

With each orbit, the astronauts could see new blotches of red, small and barely visible at first, mainly concentrated over the most densely occupied cities across the globe. The next time their orbit passed over that area, they could see those same pinpricks of red had blossomed and grown, spreading out like drops of red dye splashed into water. By day five after the event, the sky beneath the space station and the earth had become clouded with angry alien storms. Thick tendrils of swirling red reached out across continents, carried on trade winds across oceans, spreading out
and blanketing the world in a gauzy web of red that grew ever thicker and more complex with each passing hour. Huge swirling hurricane-size storms had developed off the southeast coast of the United States and had begun to move inexorably toward the East Coast.

Fiona found herself transfixed by the inexorable spread of the creeping red across her planet. There was a pattern to it, she was sure, but she simply could not put her finger on what that pattern was. It was a futile exercise, anyway, she supposed. There was nothing any of them could do but watch as, day by day, the world was slowly suffocated beneath a veil of red death.

Emily Baxter had a craving. She wanted a burger…bad.

Not just any burger, either. In the four days since she had escaped from her apartment in Manhattan, she had passed by plenty of abandoned McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and God knew how many other fast-food restaurants. Those were all easily ignorable.

No, what she had a hankering for was a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms, onions, mayo, pickles, and tomatoes; hold the ketchup and mustard. She would add a large order of their fries—Cajun-style, of course—and an extra-large, ice-cold Coke. Emily felt her saliva glands begin to water at the thought of sinking her teeth into that juicy burger.

There had been a Five Guys franchise over on West Thirty-Fourth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment she had left behind in Manhattan. She’d stop by there at least once a month when she had the urge to add an extra couple of inches of cholesterol to her arteries. She was already bored by her diet.
Canned beans. Canned soup. Canned fruit. Canned everything. A burger would be the only thing right now that would satisfy her desire for real, honest-to-goodness all-American junk food.

Of course, that wasn’t going to ever happen, seeing as how the world had come to an abrupt, and total, end.

Maybe it was all the extra exercise she was getting? She had thought herself a pretty proficient cyclist before the red rain, but these past few days of constant pedaling had helped prove her wrong. Everything ached. She had no idea how Thor did it, poor thing. The malamute padded uncomplaining alongside her bike.

Only a few days had passed, but the event that had wiped all but a handful of humanity from the face of the earth already seemed distant and vague to her now. The red rain had fallen across the world, seemingly from nowhere. Within hours everyone and everything was dead…well, apart from her, Thor, and a bunch of scientists trapped in a research station in the Stockton Islands on the far north coast of Alaska. That was where she was heading. Alaska.

Guess there’s something to be said for the end of the world, she thought. It had certainly done a world of good for her cardio health. The post-apocalypse diet: guaranteed to trim inches from your waistline, or you’ll die trying. She could have made millions in book sales, if there had been anyone left to sell the book to.

Thor, an Alaskan malamute, had been Emily’s only companion since he had rescued her from an attack by a trio of alien creatures in an equally alien forest just outside Valhalla. In their brief time together, she had often thought he must have received some sort of training, because he responded to many of her commands and was very protective.

“So, what do you say, mutt? You hungry?”

Thor looked up at his mistress and bounced his tail back and forth enthusiastically.

“Okay, then. Let’s find somewhere we can eat.” Emily slowed the bike to a crawl and began looking over the street in front of her. She quickly found the building she was looking for, pulling to a stop outside a small corner convenience store and dismounting. She could feel the burning ache in her calves as she wheeled the bike toward the sidewalk. The military-style backpack strapped to her back had grown lighter as she and Thor consumed the initial stockpile of food she had brought with her. Emily had to admit, losing the bulk of the weight had been a relief, but it was time to replenish her stock.

Pausing for a second, she scanned the street ahead of her; grayscale buildings lined both sides of the empty road. It was the same everywhere she had traveled since leaving Manhattan. No sign of any other living creature except for her and Thor. No birds, no dogs, no cats—not even an insect, as far as she could tell. And no people. She had no idea what that meant for the world, but she knew it couldn’t possibly be good. What would be the effect of the total destruction of most, if not all, of the earth’s indigenous species?

It was no mystery what had happened to life on this little blue planet. It had been annihilated by the red rain, consumed and then reconstituted into the weird alien life-forms she had encountered in the days after everything had died.

As she continued traveling north, Emily had seen more signs of the insidious encroachment of the red forests into the earth’s environment. The second day into her ride, she had noticed small pockets of the towering trees similar to what she had encountered in Central Park scattered here and there along her route, usually near a water source like a lake or a river. She had seen a couple of
small clusters of trees growing on sidewalks with their roots spiraling down inlets into sewers, but these had been much smaller, almost scaled-down versions of their bigger brothers. But by day two and three, she had begun to notice larger groups and far more frequently. To her mind, there was an almost exponential growth occurring, although she had seen nothing on the scale of the forest she had traveled through in Valhalla. Not yet, at least.

She had seen little of the spider-aliens other than the occasional distant sighting, but on day three she had found one, or at least the desiccated remains of one, hanging from an iron security fence outside a block of offices. Evidently it had impaled itself on the spikes when it had leaped from the building; she could see the telltale circular escape hole in a window three stories up. She was tempted to take a closer look, but Emily had begun to recognize that her reporter’s nose was more likely to get her into trouble these days. She gave the thing a wide berth and continued on her way.

The only other survivor she had spoken to was Jacob Endersby. He was part of a team of scientists on the remote Stockton Islands, just off the northern shore of Alaska. She still wasn’t convinced that Jacob’s hypothesis—that the farther north she traveled, the colder it would get and the less of a foothold the invading alien life-forms would have—was right, because it sure as hell didn’t seem to be having much of an effect so far. Truth be told, there was little in the way of temperature difference in the hundred or so miles she had already traveled; so maybe it was going to take a much more severe drop before there was any observable decrease.

Emily slipped the backpack from her shoulders. The wounds she had sustained during the attack by the alien creatures in the forest were healing nicely; her shoulder still ached and she felt
the occasional spasm of pain if she moved her arm too quickly or spent too long riding her bike.

She knew she would have to find an alternative form of transportation soon. With winter closing in, and the temperature already starting to drop, finding a vehicle that would protect her from the elements was also going to have to be a major consideration in her plan of reaching the Stockton Islands. There were thousands of cars and trucks left at the side of the road or waiting in garages for owners who would never return.

Of course, that meant she would have to learn to drive.

She’d need something easy to handle but large enough that she could stash her bike, supplies, and, of course, Thor. It was also going to have to be robust enough to cope with the bad weather she was sure to hit when she crossed over into Canada. Roads were going to be closed once the winter weather set in, with no one to clear the inevitable snowfalls that would make them all but impassable. She would give it some serious consideration over the next couple of days, she decided.