All that day, Emily had been keeping her eye on a huge bank of billowing clouds close to the horizon. It looked as though it was still many miles away, but it was hard to get a clear view of it as she traveled along the narrow, tree-lined streets of Stockport. The storm clouds were preceded by an honor guard of red sky that swept from a coral pink behind her to a deep crimson where the sky mated with the storm. There was not an inch of blue left up there.
It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight.
The red sky had become a permanent fixture. Emily guessed it was a result of the dust she had seen the alien forests releasing into the air. It didn’t take much of a stretch of her imagination to draw a disturbing conclusion: the red rain had killed off the indigenous species of the earth, humanity included, then used their bodies to create their own life-forms. Those in turn had created the alien forest and whatever those creatures were that had attacked her, and the trees were now spreading the red dust across the world. Whatever plant life the dust touched began the transformation process, as it was turned to the invaders’ own needs. It would not be long, Emily estimated, before what little was left of earthborn life was totally subsumed and replaced.
And then there was whatever she had seen growing in the forest. Just thinking about the strange orbs hanging from the tree in the forest gave her the creeping heebie-jeebies. She had no idea why. There was just something about them that seemed…wrong. They were all smaller parts of a much larger, much more complicated conundrum, and she didn’t have the first clue as to what it meant.
Rounding a corner, Emily came to an abrupt stop.
Thor stopped beside her, panting heavily as he looked up at her. Ahead, the road was blocked.
Stretching out into the distance before them was a river of vehicles of all descriptions. They filled both lanes, even overflowing onto the grass border on either side of the road, pushing up against tree trunks and fences. Most were crushed against its neighbor, bumper-to-bumper, but here and there she saw an SUV, compact, or truck that stood on its own. All the cars Emily looked into as she wheeled her bike between the snaking alleys of metal were empty, their doors either ajar or one of the telltale perfectly round holes testifying to the occupant’s fate.
That, in and of itself, was disturbing enough, but the award for weirdest experience of the day definitely went to the three-quarter-finished alien tree sprouting up from the tarmacadam of the road, its roots burrowing deep into the blacktop. Beyond the first tree, several hundred feet or so farther along the road, Emily could see the outline of another, and, beyond that, another and another.
The occupants of the vehicles had not had to travel very far to complete their part of the alien agenda, it seemed.
Emily stood below the first tree, straining her neck to look up at the black trunk. Halfway up, fracturing the almost perfect symmetry of the shiny black surface, Emily could see the back end of a silver Buick jutting out at an odd angle. She walked around the base of the tree, climbing over the thick roots that had burrowed into the road’s surface, uprooting concrete and tilting cars as though they were nothing. On the other side, farther up the tree, Emily saw another car—this time it was just the front headlight of some indistinguishable make—embedded in the trunk. Unconcerned by the sea of vehicles, their newly transformed owners had simply built straight through them.
It was, Emily had to admit, an amazing feat of bioengineering. In fact, the whole subjugation of planet Earth had been an astonishingly successful process, as much as she did not want to admit it, and it hinted at an intelligence so far ahead of humanity’s that it was godlike in its brutal, ruthless efficiency.
Shading her eyes from the glare, Emily scanned the road. If she had been in a car, she would have had to turn around and find some secondary road that hopefully wasn’t as choked. It was one advantage the bike had over a car; obstructions like this meant she only had to walk until she found a clear route through the mess. It wasn’t much of an advantage, though, and again she wished she had taken driving lessons. A nice, safe BMW or Mercedes looked more and more attractive with every aching muscle that reminded her she still had a very, very long way to go.
Still, she consoled herself, a car was one thing. Solving how and where she would find gasoline for it was another thing altogether. She’d figure it all out when she could. The important thing right now was to get past this roadblock and continue on her way.
A concrete footpath ran parallel to the road, a line of trees separating it from the crush of vehicles. The path had not been resurfaced in years. It was a lot rougher to ride on than the blacktop. But, while uncomfortable for her long-suffering butt, it was better than pushing the bike through the lanes of empty cars.
Emily stumbled across the downed airliner two miles farther along the route.
It had come back to earth in the center of the town, smashing through houses and demolishing everything for several hundred feet. Burned-out shells of homes lay on either side of the deep furrow gouged out of the earth. The blackened skeletons of trees, unaffected by the original crash but destroyed, she assumed, by the subsequent fire, extended off in all directions and had helped spread the blaze away from the crash site. The pungent odor of jet fuel still lingered in the air, mixing with the smell of burned wood and…something else…something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The debris field stretched for at least a mile; scattered wreckage was strewn across the road and what was left of rooftops. In the street in front of Emily lay the cowling of one of the airliner’s engines. The actual engine was nowhere to be seen, though. Not far from the disemboweled cowling, Emily saw the first body. At least, she assumed it was a body. She had heard the phrase burned beyond recognition, and, looking at the black lump of charcoal, she understood exactly what it meant.
“Thor. Sit and stay,” she told the malamute, afraid he might step on some small piece of debris or broken glass while she approached the body. There was no way to distinguish whether it had been a man or a woman as the burns extended over every inch of it. The body was curled almost into a fetal position; the arms and hands looked like claws, twisted up to the blackened chest, the legs pulled almost up to the chin. White teeth gleamed incongruously from behind fleshless charcoal lips. The body smelled of overcooked meat, like a roast that had been left too long in the oven.
“Interesting,” she said, surprising herself with how simple it was for the reporter within her to still so easily disengage from what should have been a horribly disturbing sight. She glanced up from the corpse; in the wreckage of a destroyed car—it was impossible to distinguish the make or model—another body sat on the frame and springs of what had once been the driver’s seat. The body’s skeletal hands gripped what was left of the steering wheel. Again, the corpse was unrecognizable, but, she noted, it was still there. It had not been consumed by the red dust.
Did that mean the red rain needed live flesh to consume and use to create the creatures so intent on changing her world? Emily could not say. Maybe it had been the fire that destroyed the red rain infection? It was impossible to discern, but it was certainly interesting. Whatever the reason, it was good to know that the rain could be stopped. It might be too late for most of the earth’s inhabitants, but who knew what the future held? Especially when it was measured by the yardstick of the past ten days or so.
There was no way she was going to risk taking the bike or Thor through the crash site. So she reversed direction and headed back to the previous cross street, then rode at a right angle away from the debris field for a mile or so. When she was sure she was clear of the debris, Emily turned north again and began heading back toward her original destination, trying to ignore the smell of burned meat that still lingered in her nostrils.