Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

Mina paused at the edge of the building. Pain skittered dully through her forehead, and she leaned against the wall to focus on taking one breath at a time. Help was probably on the way. She just needed to stay put. She closed her itchy eyes, but then her mind focused on the weight in her chest, the tickle in her throat. She should sit down, take a few minutes to rest and clear her head.
 

More acrid smoke drifted through the courtyard. Why hadn’t she heard anyone else? The white noise in the background grew deeper. Closer. Was that the fire?
 

No one knew Mina was here. Emergency responders wouldn’t find her if she hid in the courtyard. She needed to walk to them. She should have done that already. Mina glanced back at the thick smoke in the walkway. Blundering through the smoke was a bad idea. But what if that were the only way out? She had no way of knowing unless she tried to leave. She stood up straight and turned away from the walkway, keeping her left hand on the brick to steady herself.
 

Mina peeked around the edge of the building.

The quiet shattered. A sidewalk separated the buildings from a back parking lot where people pried at car doors, broke windows, and argued with each other over something Mina couldn’t understand. A man in a suit walked down the sidewalk, a hand on his head, blood running down through his fingers.
 

Still dazed, she skirted the edge of the cars, keeping the chaos on her left, refusing to turn and look at what might be behind her. The parking lot went on endlessly, a sea of busted cars and shouting people. At the far side, she climbed a grassy embankment, putting even more distance between herself and the rabble. At the top, she turned.
 

Smoke blew over the sea of cars and sailed on the wind toward Mina. The airport terminal burned unchecked, smoke pouring out of every window. The tail of a plane lay on the tarmac next to the burning building. The rest of the jumbo jet stuck out of the gate, a wing jutting from the windows. Another overturned plane burned on the tarmac directly behind it. The whole building shuddered and groaned, and other terminals smoldered on the outside as if they, too, were burning within. Ash drifted down, covering the ruin of the burning runways. A few straggling shadows ran through the tangle of metal, fire, and smoke looking for escape.
 

Mina turned again, expecting to see the flashing lights of fire trucks and ambulances speeding toward the airport. Instead black, dense smoke completely shrouded the horizon, blowing eastward. The entire city was aflame. She watched as a smoking skyscraper in the distance crumbled to the ground, its collapse sending a cloud of dust and debris floating upward to mingle with the smoke. The shockwave rumbled through the ground where Mina stood.

 
Strangely, one section of smoke over the city moved opposite the wind. Mina squinted. Something was gleaming from it, reflecting the sunlight.
Smoke doesn’t reflect light
, she thought.
 

Then an enormous object glided out of the smoke and into the sun, its jagged edges and polished sides shining black. One of the towers. It had turned on its side and was looming over the city.
Not towers
, she realized.
Ships
. A long black rock levitating through the air, the ship cast a deep shadow on the ground as it moved away from the center of the city.
 

Toward the airport. She searched the sky for fighter jets, helicopters—any sign of help—but the sky was empty except for the smoke and the great black monstrosity headed her way.

Mina tore her eyes away from the craft and turned back to look at the buildings behind her. Flashes of fire burned across her memory. Coughing again, she remembered screams and panic and pulling a man out of his seat, but nothing else until she woke. Whose eyes had she looked into then? Her rescuer’s? She spun around again as if merely thinking about him would make him materialize out of the haze.

Massive explosions erupted on the tarmac, sending up plumes of smoke and fire, the resulting tremor resonating in Mina’s chest. The jet fuel was burning. Screams drifted across the parking lot, but the smoke blocked Mina’s view of anything else now. Her gut twisted again, her heart pounding hard. How long had it been pounding like that? Then she coughed again, and her mind temporarily forgot to panic as it refocused on the pain in her lungs and head.
 

The ship was coming.
 

Wind blew black smoke across the parking lot. Shadows moved through it. Faceless people hurried past, away from the airport, stumbling in the grass and over one another. Maybe they were running for help. Was anyone left to help them?

More screaming from somewhere nearby. As Mina stood numbly on the grass, a woman emerged out of the haze and slammed into her. They tumbled to the ground, but the woman jumped up again almost immediately, her face a mask of sheer terror. Without a glance at Mina, she stumbled off and disappeared.

Mina, still fighting panic, struggled to her feet. The smoke was so dense she didn’t remember which way she should run, or even why she should be running. Surely the fire couldn’t reach her here?
 

The ship. She needed to run from the ship.
 

A man yelled from her right. She turned toward the sound, wanting to avoid another collision. Another shadow moved toward her, this one towering over the others running past. Rooted to the ground, Mina stared as the thing took shape in front of her, her eyes following the shadow up to a height above any normal human. Its features were a blur in the smoky haze. A piercing scream sounded somewhere near the shadow and was quickly silenced, as if it had been cut off. Something wet splashed Mina’s face. She reached up and wiped it away, her fingers coming away red.

Fear jarred her out of her daze, and she turned and ran.

“Could have been a solar storm,” Nelson pointed out as he opened a brown-wrapped MRE field ration package. The four civilians sat together in the mess tent, inspecting their supper. He narrowed his eyes at the package and sniffed. It resembled the kind of canned dog food that claimed to have real chunks of meat. “What’d you get, Carter?”

“Chicken fajita.”

“Me, too.”

“A large solar storm might do it.” Carter took a bite and grimaced. “Do you know if any were predicted?”

Schmidt joined them, sitting down in a camp chair next to Alvarez.

“Solar storms could damage power grids, but not small electronics. Anyway, seems like a big coincidence, don’t you think?” Lincoln poked at his pork rib ration. “What do you think the alien towers are for? Networking? Communication? They could have something to do with the outage.”

“Don’t solar storms cause the northern lights?” Schmidt asked. He tore open his pasta ration and stuffed some in his mouth. Alvarez gaped. “It doesn’t taste as bad as it looks,” he said.

Lincoln answered him. “A geomagnetic storm, actually. It happens when a solar flare or coronal mass ejection from the sun sends solar winds our way. They interact with Earth’s magnetosphere.”

“What’s the magnetosphere?”

Lincoln leaned over and used the end of his plastic fork to draw a small circle in the dust between his feet. “Pretend this is Earth, with North and South Poles.” He labeled the circle “E” and drew a bisecting line for the poles. Then he drew lines connecting the two poles in sweeping arcs, one arc closer to Earth than the other. “This is the magnetosphere. It’s controlled by our planet’s magnetic field. On the sun side, it’s always compressed by normal solar radiation. When something stronger, like a solar wind, hits it, it gets closer to the Earth’s surface, causing polar auroras. If the shockwave is strong enough, it will compress the magnetosphere close enough to Earth to cause electrical disturbances. A severe geomagnetic storm could potentially cause widespread blackouts, but it hasn’t happened in our lifetime.” Lincoln turned his attention back to the others. “It’s just too big a coincidence. Aliens make contact and electronics fry from a catastrophic geomagnetic storm? What are the odds they’re separate events?”

“Interesting question,” said Alvarez. “But they haven’t exactly made contact yet.”

“When they do,” said Schmidt with youthful enthusiasm, “we’ll send ’em packing.”

Leaving Schmidt behind in the mess tent after supper, the team took advantage of the camp’s current turmoil to plan their night venture into the mineshaft. Since the LED flashlights had died, Carter volunteered to create three or four torches. As long as Nash stayed out of the way, they could spend as long as they wanted exploring the tunnels.

“One problem, Lincoln,” said Carter. “After the blackout, do you think you can find the entrance to the mine in the dark? Before we light the torches?”

“The moon’s almost full, and we have clear skies. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding our way.”

They walked by a fire as someone extinguished it. The camp would be dark soon. Lincoln and Carter parted at their respective tents. To Lincoln’s dismay, Schmidt had relocated to outside his own open tent, directly across from Lincoln’s. He was engaged in spirited conversation with two soldiers. At Schmidt’s nod, Lincoln cursed under his breath. He would have to get past the kid to leave camp. They doused the fire as Lincoln crawled into his tiny tent, pretending to be retiring early. The soldiers’ conversation drifted through the tent wall.

“ . . . taller than a moose,” one of them was saying.

“I don’t think there are any moose in West Virginia,” Schmidt responded. “It was just a bear and a trick of the light through the trees. Tons of black bears around here.”

“I know what a bear looks like, Schmidt. It was too tall for a black bear and it stood on two legs. And it was the wrong color. More like gold.”

“A gold bear?” the third soldier asked.

“It wasn’t a bear!”

“Okay. Hey, Schmidt, maybe he saw Bigfoot.” The third soldier snickered at his own joke.

“Bigfoot lives in the Rockies. It wasn’t him.”

Schmidt and the second soldier guffawed.

When Schmidt stopped laughing, he said, “It was a bear standing on its hind legs. You probably startled it.”

That was enough for Lincoln. Tuning out the conversation, he pulled a blanket around his shoulders, watching the sky through the back mesh of the tent. Alvarez passed on her way to her own tent.

Mina hadn’t answered his email before Lincoln’s phone fried. Probably because her plane hadn’t landed yet. Hopefully she had accessed her email by now and made her own arrangements to get out of Atlanta. He would check on her as soon as he found a working phone. Lincoln’s gut tightened as he thought of Mina’s phone, too. Hopefully wherever she was, she hadn’t lost power like they had.

The moon rose over the mountains, and Lincoln observed the silhouettes of the other tents in the trees around him. They wouldn’t have any trouble finding the mine tonight. He zipped up his jacket and checked his pockets, feeling an odd shape in one of them—Carter’s sketchbook. He’d accidentally held onto it. Surprised Carter hadn’t asked for it back already, Lincoln reminded himself to return it when they left for the mine. He couldn’t think of much else he needed, so he stepped out of his tent, where he ran straight into Schmidt.

“Sorry, sir, just keeping watch. Everything okay?” said Schmidt.

Lincoln suspected Nash had ripped Schmidt to pieces for losing Lincoln the first time, and the corporal wasn’t about to let it happen again. Lincoln felt sorry for the kid, but only slightly.

“Schmidt, I have to pee.”

“Are you armed?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.”

Lincoln took off toward the outhouse, and once he was out of Schmidt’s line of sight, ducked into the trees, making sure he went in deep enough to avoid prying eyes. He waited while the others slowly joined him. Carter was the first to arrive, then Alvarez, then Nelson. Nelson carried his backpack, weighed down like it probably contained his damaged computer.

“Do you really need that?” asked Lincoln, nodding to his bag as they walked. “There’s nothing down in the mine to fix it.”

Nelson shook his head and shifted the backpack on his shoulders. “Doesn’t seem right leaving it in camp.”

“You think someone’ll take it?” Lincoln winked at Alvarez, but she didn’t smile as she normally would. Maybe she didn’t see him.

“Maybe,” said Nelson.

“It doesn’t work,” said Alvarez. “What would they do with it?”

“It has a solid state hard drive, and there’s nothing wrong with
it
,” said Nelson, his tone darkening. “You know as well as me that someone could remove it and put it in a working machine.”

Carter stumbled a little and sighed as he regained his footing. “Let’s watch where we’re going, huh? Instead of joking around.”

Lincoln smiled at Alvarez and clapped Nelson on the shoulder. Nelson lurched forward a little. They walked under a denser patch of trees, the night darkening considerably. “Maybe this trip will do you some good,” Lincoln said. “You need to get out of the lab more often, Nelson.”

Nelson answered with a hand gesture that Lincoln couldn’t quite see.

It turned out Lincoln had been overly optimistic about their ability to navigate in the dark, and what should have been a fifteen-minute walk turned into at least an hour. After much tripping and stumbling through the trees, and profuse swearing from Nelson, the team reached the entrance to the mineshaft.
 

They stepped inside. The low-seam mine offered little headroom, forcing Lincoln to duck as he stepped in. An oily smell filled their nostrils. Like the railroad outside, the original track had been removed.
 

Carter had wrapped sections of blanket around sturdy branches and soaked them in diesel fuel. They lit one of the torches with Carter’s lighter. Nelson carried three more.

“This way,” said Lincoln, taking the torch. He began to lead them through the labyrinth of wooden beams and piles of brown rock, their boots disturbing the dust that covered the floor.

“This place looks like it could cave in at any moment,” said Carter as he looked at the sagging timbers above them. He paused to light a cigarette.