With the aid of the powerful binoculars Emily could make out several almost intact jetties still visible along the San Diego coastline, but, other than the wreck in the bay, there was no sign of any of the yachts, boats, or ships that would have surely been moored there. They must have been washed away by the huge storms that had swept over almost every mile of the planet. Several huge buildings, hotels or office blocks she assumed, it was impossible to say now, rose up above the trees. They too were wrapped in the ubiquitous red vines, but Emily could see the occasional glint of sunlight reflecting off windows buried deep within the alien vegetation that draped every side.
She moved the binoculars first left then right along the coast, then up and beyond where the city should have been, focusing the binoculars to their highest magnification. She could see no roads, no buildings, nothing! All had succumbed to the creeping, insidious plant life that had taken root.
“It’s gone,” she said, finally answering MacAlister’s question. “It’s all gone.” San Diego had been completely swallowed up beneath the sea of red.
Emily pulled the binoculars’ focus back to the shoreline and moved north again, but as she passed the red monoliths of hidden hotels she stopped, her eye caught by blurred movement. Several indistinct blobs of light had risen up from what would have been the roof of one of the shrouded tall buildings and now swirled in the air above it.
She adjusted the focus until the blobs became sharper, more distinct. Whatever they were, they moved fast and Emily had to move the binoculars around for a few seconds until she found the darting shapes once more.
Birds?
She followed one shape as it sped directly upward before swooping down toward one of the towering trees. Pulling up at the last second, it settled onto an outstretched branch near the top of the foliage. It was too far away, too indistinct to make out, so Emily zoomed in on the creature.
“What is that?” she said, as the blurry image finally swam into view.
It was beautiful. It was massive. It was no bird.
It was also difficult to make out exact details at this distance but she could see a slender body, covered not in feathers but what might have been short fur. A curving neck, like that of a swan, terminated in a small head with two forward-facing eyes and a narrow mouth that was more of a snout than a beak. It had binocular vision! That was something new. Everything she had seen created by the rain and dust had been very different from anything that had come from Earth, monstrous in appearance. This new creature flew using huge whisper-thin wings, four of them: two large petal-shaped wings that sat close to where its shoulders would be, then two smaller ones budding out from the rear of its abdomen. The creature sat upright, its two lower limbs grasping onto the upper branches of the tree, while it occasionally reached into the foliage surrounding it and plucked something from it with a pair of long, dainty arms. It pulled whatever it had found to its mouth and began to chew.
Occasionally, one of the creature’s wings would beat, blurring into invisibility as it stabilized itself on its perch. As she watched, the first creature was joined by a second that landed next to it. The first looked up, seemingly unperturbed by the new arrival. It dipped its head toward it in a sinuous up-down motion. The second creature did the same and then it too began plucking food from the tree. It almost seemed like some kind of greeting. Maybe they were a pair? Mates, perhaps?
“Beautiful,” Emily said aloud.
“What do you see?” asked Rusty.
“Here, take a look for your—”
She was about to hand the binoculars back to MacAlister when there was a disturbance in the trees close to the creatures she was watching. One of the giant birds sprang into the air, fluttering away to safety, but the other was not so lucky.
A huge tentacle, at least eighty or more feet long with rose-thorn-shaped barbs running along each edge of it, appeared from somewhere deep within the jungle. It arched backward until it resembled the top half of a question mark, then whipped forward and up.
It caught the startled creature around the midsection and immediately flicked backward with such force that it snapped the fragile body in half. Although the scene was playing out close to two miles away, Emily grimaced as her mind imagined the snapping sound the creature’s body must have made as it folded in on itself. The tentacle rewound down into the trees, dragging the creature with it until it disappeared within.
A single torn wing fluttered down into the trees like an autumn leaf.
“Come on,” Emily said as she handed the binoculars back to MacAlister. “Get me the hell out of here.”
Emily and her companions continued their trek for another half mile before stopping again, confronted by yet another barrier of vegetation that had overgrown the path almost all the way down to the bay. It effectively blocked any further movement north, except along a narrow strip of beach at the waterfront.
As they walked, Emily told the others what she had seen earlier, how the flying creature had been plucked from the tree in the blink of an eye by the tentacle that must have belonged to some far larger creature, hidden within the depths of jungle that had overtaken San Diego.
“We keep a healthy distance from the edge of the jungle from now on,” MacAlister ordered. “At least twenty meters.”
Unwilling to risk moving forward so close to the jungle’s edge, the group reversed direction and retraced their path back toward Point Loma, but when they reached the edge of the fire-cleared area they cut diagonally across the ash-covered ground, heading toward the western side of the peninsula. They were stopped again by another wall of jungle left untouched by the fire. They switched directions again, heading south, following the line of the jungle at a healthy distance until, eventually, after several miles of walking, the jungle slowly began to thin before it finally faded to nothing more than a few small bushes and saplings.
Ahead of them Emily saw a hill and they climbed the hundred feet or so to the top. From its summit the group had an unhindered view of everything south of their position all the way to land’s end. Off to the east, across the plain of ash, Emily could see Point Loma, and beyond that, anchored in the bay, was the black silhouette of the HMS Vengeance. But south of the base, apart from the ubiquitous coating of red lichen that covered every inch of the ground around them that had not been consumed by the fire, there was little incursion of the larger alien plant life. Sure, they could see sporadic clumps of red vegetation sprouting seemingly at random from the landscape, or the occasional small cluster of half-grown reeds reaching skyward, but for the most part, the southern end of the island remained clear.
“If we keep this area free of that alien crap, we have a nice defensible section of land. We should be able to see any of those things that got Collins before they get anywhere near us,” said MacAlister as he traced the outline of the clear land with an outstretched hand. “Of course it means we’re going to be doing most of our traveling by boat and foot. But it’s a start. We got lucky.”