Genesis (20 page)

“Do you think it’s people?” Rhiannon said, her voice full of excitement.

Emily stared at the windows. There was no way the orange glow
leaking from them could be mistaken for anything other
than the illumination from a lightbulb. And that meant two things:
there had to be power to the building
and
someone had to turn on
the lights. Both of which were, well, stunning in their implications.

“It
is
people,” Rhiannon insisted. “It has to be.”

“Let’s go and find out,” said Emily, “but we have to be careful. This could be anything.”

Rhiannon nodded and began to follow Emily across the road toward the safety barrier at the side of the freeway. The devastation of the crash, fire, and, by the looks of the debris pattern, subsequent explosion had flung parts of the vehicles everywhere, but the concentration of broken machines was still mainly on the freeway. If they wanted to avoid it they would need to get off the road for a while.

“Rhiannon, slow down,” said Emily as the girl began to move at almost a jog. She stopped and turned around to look at Emily, her face brighter than Emily had seen in a very long time.

“But—”

“No buts,” Emily interrupted. “We
have
to be careful.”

Grudgingly, Rhiannon slowed.

Seventy meters away, Emily brought them to a stop.

“Get out your pistol,” Emily ordered.

“But what if they’re friendly?”

“If they are, then they’ll understand why we had to be cautious, but if they’re not, then I don’t want any misunderstandings.” Emily had already pulled her .45 from its holster and ratcheted a round into the chamber. She waited for Rhiannon to pull her own pistol and ready it.

Thoughts cascaded through Emily’s mind, and a twinge of excitement, countered by an equal part of anxiety, set her heart racing. The possibility that others had survived the red rain and the megastorm that followed had vanished from her mind within the first week. Obviously there had been survivors, but they had been safely tucked away in submarines or at either end of the Earth’s poles; she had given no thought to there still being life left on land since then. And out here, in the middle of the desert? How the hell had they managed to make it for so long? And where were they getting their power from? If they had lights, then they must have a power source. Maybe a generator? That was possible, she supposed, but where would they get the gas to power it for all these years? And generators were loud; this close to the building, she would have heard it running by now. Maybe there was still a power plant operational? If that were true, then it meant someone had to be keeping it running, and if someone was willing to maintain a power plant, then they had to be producing power for more than just a building in the middle of nowhere. Which meant that there might be more survivors, maybe even a town or a city. Her heart began to swell with the possibility. Maybe she had been wrong and Valentine had been right all along. Maybe.

“I can’t see a surveillance camera or a lookout,” Emily said, straining her eyes against the pale light of the dying day, “but that doesn’t mean that whoever is in there isn’t keeping an eye out. We’ll get off the road and approach it from the blind side.”

The west side of the building was just a large wall with no windows.

“Come on,” Emily said, “let’s move.” They left the road and cut across the open plain in the direction of the building . . . and instantly regretted doing so. With so little red vegetation here to bind the dirt together, the constant rain had turned the ground to a thick, heavy mud. It sucked at their already-sodden feet and slowed them to a clumsy, lurching, slurping plod. Only Thor seemed to have little problem navigating the ground, but then he had four-wheel drive.

It took them twenty minutes of slowly picking their way through the mud to travel the remaining distance to the building. Emily’s feet ached worse now than they had during the entire journey, thanks to the heavy coating of wet clay that clung to both of her boots. Her calves burned from the effort of pulling one foot after the other from the quagmire.

“Well this wasn’t your best idea,” said Rhiannon, a little too sarcastically for Emily’s liking.

“Hush!” Emily hissed back. She scanned the building. From what she could see at this obtuse angle it looked remarkably intact. It was quite large, not a home, she thought, but maybe some kind of office building? Bisecting their position and the side of the building was a concrete driveway that led in from the freeway along the side of the building to a parking lot at the back. Two rusting cars still sat in the lot, but even from where they crouched Emily could see that the vehicles were weather worn, their tires flat as proverbial pancakes and the glass of their windshields scattered around the ground.

Nothing moved. There was no indication of life from within the building.

“Stay put,” said Emily, turning to face Rhiannon.

“But . . .”

“No buts, I need you to wait here with Thor. If whoever is in there isn’t friendly, I might need you to bust me out again, okay?”

Rhiannon did not look happy with the order. “Okay,” she grumbled.

“Good girl. Keep your head down, alright, and only come in if I call you, understood?”

Rhiannon nodded.

“Thor, stay,” Emily commanded and pulled her .45 from the holster, checked it again, and reholstered it. She looked left and right for any signs of movement, then slowly began to make her way to the concrete road leading to the parking lot just a few meters away.

Mud clung to her boots like concrete, slowing her movement to an exaggerated spacewalk as she hobbled across the road and leaned against the side of the building. She took a few moments to use the wall of the building to gently and as quietly as she could scrape the majority of the mud from her shoes. The damn stuff was like glue. When she was done, she followed the wall toward the back section of the building, bobbed her head around the corner, saw nothing, and cut left, edging toward the nearest window. When she reached it, Emily crouched down and slowly leaned in until she could see into the room within.

It was an office. An empty office, she noted after scanning it for a few seconds. It looked completely normal and untouched; papers were stacked on one side next to a mesh pen holder. Several metal filing cabinets lined one wall, and a couple of pictures, local landscapes, she thought, hung on the other walls. The ceiling light was on, glowing orange and spilling light out onto the concrete where Emily crouched. The door was ajar a few centimeters or so. Gradually, she adjusted her position until she could see through the crack of the door—just a gray wall of what looked like a corridor beyond. The corridor led to an external door about three meters farther on from where she stood.

When she was sure there was no sign of movement within, Emily ducked beneath the window frame and scooted past it. She reached the door and placed an ear against the cold wood, listening for any sound that would betray any occupants. Again there was nothing. Quiet as a tomb.
Probably not the most uplifting analogy,
she thought as she tried the door handle and eased it slowly toward her.

The door cracked open, allowing a thin sliver of light to bleed out.

Well, okay.

Emily took a deep breath and pulled the .45 from its holster. The weight felt good in her hand, reassuring, but she slipped it behind her back, out of sight of anyone she might surprise or who might be waiting for her. No need to present a threat to anyone she found within, she had already decided. Edging the door open another couple of centimeters, she stepped inside, pausing in the doorway, her body half inside, listening. After a minute of no sound she slipped through the doorway as quietly as possible and eased the door closed behind her.

The corridor ran from where Emily stood down to what looked like some kind of reception area at the front of the building; she could see a water cooler and the corner of a sofa. There were three more doors along this corridor, all closed.

It was significantly warmer inside. She wiped her sodden hair out of her eyes, then quickly covered the few meters to the doorway of the office she had peeked into from outside and ducked inside. A quick glance around the room confirmed it was still empty.

The room smelled . . . normal. There was no stench of decay. No signs of any infestation. No signs of life at all, in fact. Not yet, anyway, but there was still plenty of the building to explore where any number of people could be hiding.

The place seemed pristine. Frozen in time.

Emily moved back to the door and peeked into the corridor.

“Shit!” she hissed. A trail of muddy boot prints betrayed her entry into the building from the outside door. She silently berated herself as she quickly unlaced her boots and hid them next to one of the filing cabinets. Her socks were soaked through and felt like ice against her feet, so she pulled those off and tossed them with her boots, rubbing her feet against the carpet to dry them off. It would help her move more silently. This place
was
a lot warmer, and her naked toes had already begun to feel quite toasty against the tightly knitted weave of the carpet.

Emily edged out into the corridor, her eyes and ears open as she edged her way down toward the room with the water cooler. The second and third doors were both unlocked. She eased each door carefully open and looked inside, both empty save for almost duplicate editions of the furniture she had found in the first office. Emily closed each door again behind her, wincing as the third door creaked on dry hinges. The fourth room was locked, but there was no reason to suspect it was anything other than another office, so she moved on. The corridor ended in a larger room. It wasn’t the reception area she had first suspected but some kind of waiting area with a large, comfortable-looking sofa and a couple of chairs scattered against the walls, a coffee table in the center with a lonely coffee mug waiting for its owner, and an industrial-size coffee maker next to a microwave on a waist-high cabinet.

On the opposite wall from where she stood was a glass-fronted snack machine. It still hummed quietly. Her heart sank at the same moment a feeling of relief washed over her when she saw the now-mummified rotted sandwiches behind the glass of the vending machine. If there were anyone living here those sandwiches would have either been eaten in the first few days after the red rain or at least cleaned out and the power turned off, she reasoned. That was an assumption, of course; it might just be that any survivors could not be bothered, or other survivors, immune to the red rain’s effects as she was, had found this place after the fall. She didn’t think so, though; the place looked so untouched, as though everyone had just stepped outside for a smoke break and would be back any second. No, the probability of humans still living here had dropped significantly in Emily’s estimation. Of course, that did not rule out the possibility of something else setting up home in the building. So far, though, there was no sign of any kind of a resident, human or otherwise. Of course, empty or not, it did nothing to dispel the mystery of where the building was getting its power from.

There was another door on the other side of the waiting room. Emily opened it and found a second corridor leading deeper into the rest of the building. The corridor was dark, but there was enough illumination from the staff room that she quickly found the light switch. She flicked it on and the fluorescent overhead lights complained for a second, then flickered to life. At the farthest end of the corridor, she saw yet another door, but between her and it were two more offices. These contained filing cabinets and a table. The door at the end had the words “Service Area” stenciled across it.

The door opened inward, but whatever was beyond was completely hidden within the darkness, save for a few feet of light bleeding in from the corridor, revealing a stark gray concrete floor. Emily brought her pistol up, pointing it into the darkness while she felt around for a light switch on the wall. She found it and turned it on, flooding the room with light.

“Well, what do—” The words turned into a scream of fear as Emily felt a hand land heavily on her shoulder.

Emily ducked and swung the .45 around like a club before she realized the hand on her shoulder belonged to Rhiannon.

“Jesus Christ, I just about peed my pants,” she gasped, bent over at the waist, leaning both hands against her knees, sucking in a deep breath of air. She had to wait for her muscles to unclench and her heart to slow before she could manage to get out any more words between the thumping in her chest.

“I thought I told you to wait outside?” she managed eventually.

Thor stood at Rhiannon’s side. He sat and stared at his mistress, his tail wagging slowly, unsure if it was him she was mad at. Rhiannon’s face was a picture of barely suppressed mirth. “I know, but you were gone so long and it started to rain much harder, so I decided to come inside. I worried that you were in trouble. I didn’t mean to scare you . . . sorry . . .” The girl, bedraggled and sopping wet was trying to do her best to look penitent, but Emily could see the mischievous light in her eyes.

Finally, she smiled too. She took Rhiannon’s hand in her own—it was cold, alabaster pale, and as wrinkled as if she had been sitting in a bath for an hour—pulled her close, and gave her a long hug. “It’s okay,” she said, “you did what you thought was right.” She released Rhiannon, grinned conspiratorially, and said, “Here, look at this.” Emily pushed the door open and ushered Rhiannon into the space beyond.

The room—
It’s more of a bay,
Emily thought—was around forty
meters deep and twenty wide. Strips of multiple fluorescent lights along the ceiling brightly illuminated the space. Six large roll-up
doors, interspersed at two-meter intervals, ran along
most of the long wall to their left. The opposite wall had narrow windows running along the top near the ceiling and workbenches at floor level. But it was what occupied the main floor of the bay
that had Emily excited: four of the vehicle bays were still occupied.

“Do they work?” Rhiannon asked, a brightness entering her voice.

“I haven’t had time to check them yet, thanks to someone trying to scare me to death.” Emily gave Rhiannon a playful nudge with her elbow. “Only one way to find out, though. Come on.” She beckoned for Thor to follow them. “But let’s still be careful. This place looks deserted, but that doesn’t mean it is.”

Rhiannon nodded that she understood and slipped her pistol into her hand.

They approached the first vehicle, an imposing mechanical excavator. It was painted a bright orange. On the door to the cab, in black lettering, was “N. M. D. O. T.” The hood of the excavator’s engine compartment was propped open, and a toolbox still rested on the engine block.

“Of course, it makes sense,” Emily said, walking around the lowered bucket of the excavator.

“What?” Rhiannon said.

“It’s a storage depot or maybe a repair shop for the state department of transportation,” Emily explained. She was already at the second vehicle, an even bigger dump truck, painted the same garish orange.

“It kind of looks like the snowcat,” Rhiannon said as she joined her, ducking down to check underneath the vehicle.

She was right, Emily thought, it did remind her of the snowcat, the tracked vehicle they had used to drive across the snowy wastes of Alaska to reach the Stockton Islands, oh, so very long ago now. It had the same sense of utility as the snowcat; when you looked at this machine, you knew exactly what it did. No need for speculation; its design yelled its function.

One of the ceiling lights flickered for a moment, splashing the bay with dancing shadows and freezing Emily midstep. They flickered again, then came back on. Emily held her breath, waiting to see if they would stay on.

“Can we use any of these?” Rhiannon asked, pointing at the big trucks as they walked toward the next bay, apparently unperturbed by the faulty light.

“Maybe.” Emily wasn’t sure what kind of a range the vehicles would have or if they even worked. They were extremely large, and she was sure they would usually be delivered to wherever they needed to be on a flatbed truck rather than driven directly. Still, any port in a storm, as Mac would say.

The third space was occupied by another dump truck.

“Does anything come in a color other than orange around here?” Rhiannon asked as they scouted around the front of it.

Sitting in the fourth bay, hidden behind the other oversized vehicles, was a pickup truck with a cluster of antennas fixed to the roof and side of the cab. It, too, was orange.

“That’s more like it,” said Emily, heading to the driver’s side as Rhiannon gave the exterior of the truck a quick inspection.

“Crap!” said Rhiannon, pointing at the rear passenger-side tire. “We’ve got a flat.”

“See if you can find a spare,” Emily called back. In her mind she was crossing every possible part of her body as she reached for the driver’s door of the truck. She pulled the door handle and it opened easily, but no cabin light came on.

“Damn,” she whispered. The truck had been sitting here for over two years, so it wasn’t really a surprise that the battery was dead, but still . . . it would have been nice to have caught a break. Well, another break if you counted finding it in the first place, she supposed.

“Found the spare,” said Rhiannon, appearing at the door with Thor. “Will it start?”

Emily shook her head. “Battery’s dead.” She climbed down from the cabin. “We’ve got power to the building, though, and I’d bet there has to be a jumper cable here somewhere.” She eyed the workbenches and cabinets at the opposite end of the bay.

The first couple of benches came up with nothing but neatly stored tools and parts.

“What are these?” said Rhiannon, pointing to a couple of brick-size boxes plugged into a power strip.

“I think that’s what we’re looking for,” said Emily, smiling as she
recognized the oversized crocodile clips of the battery charger, but she was confused as to why it would be plugged into a wall socket. A green light on the front of the units glowed brightly, which she
decided to take as a good sign. She read the words on the side of the
first unit: “Start-N-Go 900 Peak Amp Ultra-portable 12V Starter.”

“I think,” said Emily, reaching across and removing the first of the two units from the power supply, and smiling as the green light stayed on, “that it’s a portable starter. Let’s go give it a shot.”

She carried the unit over to the truck and set it down on the passenger seat as she climbed inside. “Keys have to be here somewhere.” She checked everywhere she could think of in the cabin for a set of keys but found nothing.

“Damn it!”

“Maybe they’re in the office?” said Rhiannon. “There’s a sign over there.” She nodded toward the back wall and a spray-painted sign and arrow pointing into the far corner.

Emily climbed down from the cab and slammed the door closed. “Let’s go take a look.”

The depot’s office was at the opposite end of the bay. It was locked.

There’s always something else to break,
Emily thought as she brought the butt of her pistol down hard against the glass of the office door. She reached through and unlatched the lock. “Hold on to Thor, there’s too much glass on the floor.” She quickly found a gray metal box fixed to the wall, opened it, and saw several rows of hooks and four sets of keys, each clearly labeled with a license plate number. She grabbed all of them.

“Let’s see which one of these works,” she said, jingling the keys at Rhiannon.

Emily quickly matched the correct set of keys with the truck’s license plate and discarded the others. She inserted the key and twisted it, just on the off chance that the universe was paying them extra special attention, but there wasn’t even the slightest response from the starter motor. “Deader than the proverbial dodo,” she said to herself, while mentally adding,
Along with everything else on this planet.

“Let’s see if we can’t get this big boy started?” She grabbed the portable starter unit, found the handle that popped the hood, and jumped down. Propping up the hood, she quickly found the truck’s battery and removed the cover, attached the two crocodile clips to the terminals, and switched the charger to the “Engine Start” position. There was a crackle of energy across the terminals.

The two women smiled hopefully at each other.

A couple of seconds later Emily was back in the driver’s seat, keys
grasped between thumb and forefinger. “Here goes nothing,”
she
said, turning the keys to the start position and pressing the brake.

The starter motor whirred, then whirred again. The dash lights flickered briefly to life, then glowed brightly as the powerful V-8
engine coughed once and fired up, filling the bay with a deep rumble. A large plume of gray-black smoke escaped from the exhaust, and Emily felt the truck vibrate violently for a second, then settle down into a low tremble. She revved the engine a few times, and the truck responded, eager to be moving again.

Rhiannon gave a whoop of joy and jumped in excitement. Emily smiled back.

She checked the lights, windshield wipers, and heater.

“Looks like we’ll be travelling in style,” Emily said, smiling as she rolled down her window.

“What’s that for?” Rhiannon pointed at a box with dials, displays, and buttons.

Emily picked up a microphone from the side of the box. “It’s a radio transmitter. I think this might have been used as some kind of communications relay for the work crew when they were out of range of cell towers.” She turned a knob to the on position and the cab was filled with the static hiss of empty airwaves. “I guess it works,” she said before switching it off again.

Emily checked the truck battery’s charge indicator: it was flickering at about the quarter point, which she knew should be higher, but it was going to take some time for the battery to actually gather a charge. There was no way that she was going to leave the engine running for as long as it would need to fully charge. Even though the gas tank registered as full, she still had no idea how far they were going to have to travel, and every single drop of gasoline was going to make a difference on this journey. They were just going to have to rely on the portable starter for at least one more start. The important thing was that the engine seemed to run fine, a testament to the grease monkeys and mechanics who had worked on it before the collapse. Reluctantly, she turned the engine off.

“We need to conserve the gas,” she told Rhiannon, “besides, we’re not going anywhere until we change that flat tire. Wanna show me where the spare is?”

Rhiannon led Emily to the back of the truck and pointed to the underside where the spare was stored. Emily opened the rear door and quickly found the jack kit in a compartment. The rear of the truck was enclosed, with plenty of space to stow their gear, perfect for Thor too.

“Here, give me a hand with—”

The ceiling lights flickered again, crackling as they pulsed on and off, dimmed to a low orange glow, pulsed on again for a half second, then went dark; and this time they did not come back on.

“Emily!” Rhiannon’s voice, sharp with panic, cut through the darkness.

“It’s okay, just hold on a second.” The last time Emily had been in darkness this profound she had been alone in the stairwell of her apartment, still blissfully unaware of how far-reaching and terrible the transformation beyond her building would be. “Just wait here.”

She used the flat of her hands against the body of the truck to guide herself around to the front of the cab, fumbled blindly for the door handle of the truck, found it, and pulled the door open. The faint orange glow of the cabin light illuminated just enough for Emily to see Rhiannon crouched next to Thor, her arms wrapped around the dog’s neck.

“Hold on a second.” Emily searched for the headlight switch, found it, and turned it on. Without the engine running only the parking lights came on, but it was enough light for Emily to see where they had left Rhiannon’s backpack resting against the garage door.

“Rhiannon, it’s okay. Go grab the flashlight from your pack.” Rhiannon reluctantly let go of Thor, ran to the pack, and rummaged through it until she found her flashlight. She turned it on and made her way back to the truck.