The Black Hawk descended and Emily felt the safety harness hold her in place as it swung sharply east. MacAlister guided the helo between two nameless hotels and headed in the direction of where the main drag would have been visible if it was not concealed beneath the fifty-foot-high wall of vegetation. He slowed their forward momentum until the Black Hawk was hovering at roof level with the nearby buildings, then slowly began to rotate the aircraft 360 degrees, as he and his passengers took in the full effect of what lay just beyond the safety of their cabin.
There was some kind of visible damage to almost every building still left standing, either as a result of the red storm or from the panic and aftermath of the first fall of red rain, Emily assumed. She could see the remains of what had once been Bally’s jutting up like a broken tooth. The hotel wing of the casino had suffered some kind of traumatic accident, half of the building was missing, sheared off as if the missing part of the structure had simply slid away, lost in the jungle below. Emily could see into rooms opened up to the elements. Curtains and blankets hung from broken timbers and shattered windows, blowing crazily in the downdraft of the helicopter’s rotor wash. As MacAlister continued their slow rotation, she saw an exposed wall wobble, then topple in slow motion, falling silently into the jungle canopy below. Beyond the remains of Bally’s, unidentifiable because of the amount of damage it had sustained, a burned-out shell of what must have been another landmark hotel was silhouetted starkly against the blue sky, scorched beams and fire-blackened buttresses the only indication that a building had once stood at that spot. Alien trees already sprouted from the gutted skeleton of the building, twisting their vines around the remnants as they claimed the decaying remains for their own.
“Jesus! Look at that,” MacAlister said in a hushed tone as he surveyed the damage. “It looks like a war zone.”
“Yeah, but it looks like a war that was fought fifty years ago,” Burris said from the passenger cabin.
He was right too, Emily thought. The town had a sense of abandonment to it, as though something terrible had happened, but long ago. It was as though they had stumbled across an ancient abandoned city lost to the red jungle and to time, a Machu Picchu, or perhaps, more aptly, El Dorado.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Emily quoted beneath her breath quietly. It was as fitting an epitaph for this town as any.
MacAlister allowed the Black Hawk to hover for a few more seconds, then dipped its nose and guided the helo along what had once been Las Vegas Boulevard.
“McCarran Airport—no relation to yours truly, to the best of my knowledge—is northeast of here,” MacAlister said over the intercom as he powered the engines up enough to allow the helicopter to climb above the debris-strewn roof of a towering nearby casino. Emily found herself staring into the building’s windows as the Black Hawk climbed higher, the neatly cut, almost-perfect circular holes she saw in many of the rooms’ still-intact windows told her everything she needed to know about what had happened to the majority of the town’s vacationing tourists and staff. “I’m going to circle us around toward the airport,” MacAlister continued, “and see if we can… holy shit!” The last two words were a hiss, like gas escaping from the Scotsman’s mouth, and his head spun around to face Emily as his hand jerked the joystick, wobbling the Black Hawk away from whatever it was that had taken him by surprise.
In the distance, running along the base of the sweep of a mountain range, a huge chunk of earth had seemingly been scooped out of the ground, leaving a ragged, black crater where whatever had fallen from the sky had finally come to rest. A scar, at least two miles long, extended out from behind the impact site like a dirty tail, delineating where the object had hit the ground, careening through a housing development before finally coming to rest close to the base of the mountains. All the alien vegetation along the edge of the crater had either been burned away by the approach or intentionally removed in the days since it had “landed.” Whatever the reason, a swath of desert, unsullied by the red vegetation, now lay on either side of the crater and along the trench that stretched for what looked like miles out behind it.
Whatever this thing was, it had come in nose first and it had come in hard and fast. A huge wave of dirt had been pushed up on either side of the crater, demolishing houses and roads and whatever else was unlucky enough to have been in the way. The debris had formed a berm of dirt and debris around the depression’s perimeter. But there was no other sign of damage to the immediate area surrounding the crash.
The thing that had passed overhead less than a week earlier had been massive and travelling at a tremendous rate of speed, and the destruction they were now looking at just did not jive with what any of them had expected to see.
Emily had read an article once on the Barringer Crater in Arizona; it was massive, around four thousand feet in diameter, and almost six hundred deep, if she remembered correctly. It had been created by a meteorite that was pretty small, around a couple of hundred feet. She would have expected to see massive devastation for miles around the crash site if what had crashed here had been a meteorite. The shock wave alone should have flattened most of the vegetation in the area, but aside from the damage along its approach and around the actual crater, the surroundings looked to be untouched, as though there had been a degree of control exerted on the landing.
Still, the crater was huge. Easily a quarter mile across and maybe a mile long. At its center, Emily could see a vague shape, something rounded, with jagged points jutting out at odd angles. It was impossible to see clearly from this distance, even with their bird’s-eye view of the area.
“We need to get closer,” Emily said finally.
MacAlister nodded, his eyes already scanning left and right as he maneuvered the Black Hawk higher. The ground between their location and the downed craft might just as well have been an ocean, there was no place for them to set down safely.
“What about the open ground around the crater?” Emily suggested.
“Too close,” MacAlister said, shaking his head. “Besides, we don’t know what’s in the crater. If Jacob was right, and we have some unwelcome visitors, it stands to reason that they will have a weapon system. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to announce our presence just yet. We’re going to have to find somewhere safe to land this thing and then we’ll use the drone to get a better peek at what’s in that crater.”
“Don’t some of these casinos have landing pads?” Emily said.
“That’s what I was thinking. Let’s take a look,” said MacAlister as he fed power to the engines and Emily felt the helicopter begin to rise quickly until they had a better view of the roofs of the remaining still-intact structures on either side of the Vegas Strip.
The roofs of everything Emily could see either had no landing area or if there was one, it was either storm-damaged or covered in debris.
“Nothing on my side, either,” said MacAlister. “Let’s head downtown a wee bit.” The Black Hawk banked left and started heading toward the opposite, older end of the Strip.
“Try over there,” Emily said, pointing to an ugly square of a building, its architecture tasteless enough it might as well have screamed it was built during the 1970s. THE TACOMA read a faded sign running around the top of the building. The sides of the casino were covered in red creepers that had spread like engorged veins across the walls and windows, but as the helicopter flew closer, Emily spotted a raised circular dais with a large H printed on it in red. It looked intact and free of plant life. She tapped MacAlister on the shoulder and pointed in the pad’s direction.