Exodus (37 page)

Emily couldn’t help herself, she laughed, spraying a fine mist of her own burger—which was as delicious as she had imagined it would be—over the table.

Rhiannon choked down her own bite of the burger and coughed. “Sorry,” she said, snickering.

“Wow! What a great first impression we’ve made,” laughed Emily after she swallowed her food. “Sorry about that, it’s just the tension…This is just all such a relief.”

Jacob joined them in their laughter, raising both hands in a gesture of détente. “Not a problem at all, ladies.”

They ate the rest of the food in silence, savoring the flavors and the full feeling as their stomachs began to process the burgers. It was the first real food they had eaten since leaving Stuyvesant.

“That was delicious,” said Emily after finishing. “Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome. There’s dessert. Parfaits, if you would like one?” Rhiannon nodded her head enthusiastically; Emily declined. Jacob wheeled himself over to a small refrigerator and pulled out a plastic container of parfait, complete with a disposable plastic spoon attached to the lid. “Sure I can’t tempt you?” he asked Emily.

“No. Thanks. I think I’ll pass.”

Rhiannon eagerly dug into the plastic cup of fruit and cream. She devoured it with the same look of bliss she had while eating the burger. The two adults sat back and watched, enjoying the child’s pure joy.

Finally, Emily spoke. “Thank you so much for that. I honestly don’t know what either of us would have done without you, Jacob. We would have…well…I guess we would have been lost without you.”

“I’m just glad you’re here, safe and sound,” he replied.

“So, do you think we can meet the rest of your team?” she asked, smiling in anticipation.

Jacob bit his bottom lip for a second, dropping his eyes to his immobile feet. When he raised them again, it was to meet Emily’s expectant gaze.

“There is nobody else,” he said finally.

“What? I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“There is nobody else,” he repeated. “It’s just me.”

There. Is. Nobody. Else.

Even when she sounded them out individually, the words just did not fit together as a sentence. They didn’t seem to want to stay still in Emily’s brain long enough for her to rationalize what Jacob really meant by them. They kept sliding around, bouncing off of each other, refusing to form any recognizable meaning.

“What?” she repeated for the third or fourth time.

“I know you’re probably confused, and I know you’re probably very upset, but I just need you to hear me out, okay? I need you to understand why I had to do what I did.”

Emily couldn’t quite fathom what he was saying. “But you said you had a team. What about your team?”

“They left, not long after the rain began. They wanted to head back to Fairbanks and check it out. I volunteered to stay to keep the place running. They said they would be back. They never came back.”

Emily thought about the convoy full of dead people on the road to Fairbanks and the murdered men and women she had
found in Deadhorse. Could any of them have been a part of Jacob’s team? she wondered.

She glanced over at Rhiannon. Her mouth was agape as she stared hard at Jacob. “Emily?” she asked. “What does he mean?” Her voice cracked with uncertainty.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. But why don’t you come on over here beside me while we figure this out?” She patted the seat next to her. The sound of the chair scraping across the floor as Rhiannon jumped to her feet and ran to Emily’s side was grating in the suddenly painful silence filling the room. “Good girl,” she said, placing a reassuring hand on the kid’s knee as she took the chair next to Emily.

Jacob began to wheel his chair over to where the two women sat. “I really can expl—”

Emily jumped to her feet. “Stay right where you are,” she bellowed. “Do not fucking come anywhere near us.”

Jacob froze, a look of utter horror crossing his face.

Thor, who had been dozing quietly under the table, was suddenly at Emily’s side. He sat down next to her, his eyes focused on Jacob.

Jacob swallowed hard and backed up from the trio, very aware of Thor’s silent lupine gaze. “I had no choice,” he said after a pause, his voice as calm and soothing as it had been during their countless telephone conversations. “If I had told you I was here alone, would you have come?”

Emily didn’t answer.

“No, of course you wouldn’t. You would have thought I was some kind of nut job, and you wouldn’t have come here. You would have just stayed in your apartment and waited. And you would have died.”

Rhiannon began to quietly cry, fat tears trickling over her cheeks and staining the front of her jogging pants. Emily switched
her arm from the child’s knee and wrapped it around her shoulder, never taking her eyes off Jacob.

“I told the team not to leave,” he continued. “I warned them that they should stay. But they had families, wives, mothers, kids. Someone had to stay. Someone had to. But I knew. I knew that they wouldn’t be coming back.” His voice had taken on a tone of sadness, maybe even mixed with frustration. “When I found you, Emily, I knew I couldn’t tell you I was here alone, so I lied. I’m sorry, but I had to try to save you.”

“And what about your wife? Sandra, wasn’t it? She was supposed to be back at Fairbanks University. Was any of that true?”

Jacob could not meet her gaze. He chose to stare at his feet and shake his head in answer.

“You risked mine and Rhiannon’s life to try to save your own skin? Is what you did?” she yelled, suddenly on her feet, her voice livid with anger. “You brought us all the way here to rescue you? You fucking piece of shit.” Emily’s words hit Jacob like hammer blows; she could see him physically reeling as each word struck home.

Good!

“You were stranded here, and you needed us to come and rescue you? All that…that sanctimonious posturing about wanting to save me, it’s just bullshit you use to convince yourself that you were doing the right thing, isn’t it? Answer me, goddamn you!”

Emily had to admit, the look of hurt on his face was good. He actually believes what he said, she thought. She shook her head at him in complete disbelief.

“Wow! Just wow.”

Rhiannon threw her arms around Emily’s waist, sinking her head deeper into her shoulder as she sobbed. Emily could feel the dampness of Rhia’s tears seeping through the material of her sweater.

Jacob took a deep breath, composing himself, then spoke. His voice was level and clear, free of any hint of anger. “Yes, you’re somewhat right. I did want you to come and rescue me, but it was an added benefit. I have enough food here to last me a year, probably a lot longer. But most of all I wanted to help you, Emily. You were the only person I knew for certain was still alive, and I wanted to save you. I didn’t make anything else up. Everything I told you about traveling north was true. You’ve seen that for yourself. I did not lie to you about any of that.”

Emily bent in and kissed the crying girl on the forehead. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said, not sure if she was trying to convince Rhiannon or herself. What was she supposed to believe? There was no doubt that he was not lying about the cold holding back the spread of the alien infestation, but everything else had the thin veneer of pretense to it. How was she supposed to trust him? Where was she supposed to go? Where could she go? God! She thought she had left all the pain and stress behind her when they’d stepped onto the island. Instead, she was handed a whole new package of BS.

“You had me riding a fucking bike here, Jacob,” she whispered, her voice heavy with disappointment as the anger began to seep away, replaced by a feeling of emptiness.

Jacob pushed his wheelchair closer to the two girls. “Look,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I know I screwed up by not telling you, and I am truly sorry. But you’re here now. You are safe, and I know we can make a go of this. We can figure it all out. I promise you.”

Emily had, at least until today, always considered herself a good judge of character. It was something she had honed over the course of her career as a journalist, an essential tool that had served her well. She looked up from Rhiannon and met Jacob’s
eyes. There was no cruelty there. No deceit. Fear? Yes. Regret? Maybe.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

From somewhere else in the building a buzzing hissing sound filtered through the still air. It sounded like the static that flowed between AM radio stations. The buzzing became louder, then dropped away, then returned a little stronger as the static finally resolved into a garbled human voice.

“This is ZzzZZZzz HM ZzzzzzZZzzzz ZzzzZZZzzzz. Do yo zzZzzZZzz me?”

All three occupants of the room looked up. A look of stunned disbelief crossed over Jacob’s face, and Emily was sure her own face had the same look of astonishment.

It was a man’s voice but Emily could only make out the occasional word through the buzz of the interference.

“Who’s that?” asked Rhiannon, wiping away the tears and snot from her face with the back of her hands. As if in answer to her question, there was another burst of static, then the man’s voice boomed loud and clear down the hallway.

“This is Captain Edward Constantine of her Majesty’s Royal Navy submarine HMS
Vengeance
. Do you read me?”

Emily continued to stare at Jacob, unsure of whether she should trust him or just shoot him. Finally, she took a deep breath and spoke.

“Show me where your radio room is.”

From her perch, high above the world, Commander Mulligan watched as the blanket of red closed over all but the tiniest sliver of North America.

The warning she had issued to the survivors on the planet’s surface regarding the storm’s destructive potential had been greatly underestimated, she had come to realize. That storm had been only the forerunner of something much larger. Something far more awesome.

Over the past six days she had witnessed more and more storms form over the earth’s major landmasses, seething pools of blood that swirled and flowed across continents and seas. She had watched them gestate; growing from tiny spots of red before gradually expanding, reaching out with crimson feelers to find and merge with other systems, each growing in size and ferocity with every orbit the ISS made around the earth.

She had managed to count eight of these massive storms, each one at least a thousand miles across, before, like their earlier
incarnations, they, too, had begun searching out and connecting with each other. A continual barrage of lightning, each bolt hundreds of miles in length, exploded silently across the anvil of the planet, illuminating the storms from within like some grand light show.

Over the course of days, each storm found the other, and when they touched they fused into a single, massive superstorm, which in turn gradually expanded to blanket the world in a swirling pall of vermilion cloud.

That storm had grown exponentially in ferocity and size until it blotted out everything but two small cones of blue over each of the planet’s poles.

And what would emerge from that chaos below her? she wondered. Who could say? She was certain, though, that if the red curtain was ever lifted, the world it revealed would be a very different place from what any of them had known. A small part of her welcomed the fact that she would never set foot on her planet again.

Fiona wondered how Emily had fared. Had they made it? She would never meet the woman, but she had sounded strong, had struck her as a more than capable individual. If anyone could have made that incredible journey, she believed it would have been Emily. Still, the silence she had met with each time she tried to reestablish contact with Jacob had been disconcerting.

It did not bode well for the tiny group of survivors.

“God help them,” she whispered to the invisible world beneath her.

Far, far below the station, a dark-red cataract within the storm raged over what had once been Alberta, Canada.

“God help them all.”