The Year of the Locust, page 59
There was no reply. “Rebecca, it’s beautiful, you should come—”
“What is it?” Rebecca said from the doorway. She had emerged—her face was drawn and pale, the dark circles under her eyes were a testament to her sleepless nights, and she had clearly lost a lot of weight.
“It’s sort of lights,” Laleh replied. “Christmas is coming early—it must be part of that.”
Rebecca joined her at the window and looked out. She put her palms against the glass, taken aback by the downpour of luminous filaments and the number of people gathering in the street. “No,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with Christmas.”
“What is it then?” Laleh asked.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca replied. She turned, walked to the end of the bed, and turned on a TV. It was already tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel and a montage of the glowing spore falling like rain over Paris, London, and Washington was playing.
“A White House source said initial studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed the phenomenon originated in either Kazakhstan or central China,” the anchor was saying. “Minutes ago, the Chinese government denied any knowledge of the source of what is now being described as the ‘symphony of lights.’ The NOAA is presently trying to determine the exact point of origin.
“Meanwhile, in Canada, a professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia said it almost certainly resulted from the premature germination of spores from the Northern Hemisphere’s vast conifer forests. Because they are immature, he said, they absorb moisture and appear to glow. He was confident they presented no danger to anyone but advised people with asthma or severe pollen allergies to remain indoors.”
Laleh looked at Rebecca. “We don’t suffer from either of those,” she said brightly. “Let’s go outside—it’ll do us both good.”
Rebecca looked out the window. The voices were louder, more animated, and the falling spores—if anything—had grown more intense. Laleh pleaded with her. “Please.”
Rebecca continued to look out the window. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t understand any of this. I’ve got babies to think of.”
Laleh stared at her, crestfallen, and had she not been a guest she would almost certainly have argued. “Close the blind,” Rebecca said.
Laleh reluctantly did as she was asked, and it was that small decision—not to go outside—that saved both their lives as they knew them, although it was, in many ways, a Pyrrhic victory; very soon the living would envy the dead.
CHAPTER 13
Just before midnight Rebecca was roused by an unusual flickering light creeping around the edges of the closed window blind.
She was tired and she tried to ignore it. Surrendering at last, she went to the window and—half asleep—pulled the blind aside. And stared.
The luminous spores had vanished, but houses all along the street were ablaze, sending up an eerie orange light. The sky and distant horizon were aglow and filled with smoke. Devil’s Night, Rebecca thought with a spike of fear, recalling the annual ritual, years earlier, when marauding gangs in Detroit would set thousands of derelict buildings on fire.
In Maryland, it certainly looked like a vision of hell. Irrigation systems across countless gardens had been turned on and were pumping out fountains of water. Then Rebecca saw the first of them.
Shadowy figures—three men and a woman, powerfully built—appeared amid the smoke and spray, thrown into sharp relief by the flames from a burning house behind them. Their bodies were almost colorless, their hair missing, and Rebecca, grasping for any explanation, thought they might be burn victims, although she could not understand how they could be walking so purposefully. But then one of the men turned his back and she saw through his torn T-shirt that the skin had formed a hard ridge down his spine. In all of her years of medicine, Rebecca had never seen anything like it.
Reeling, Rebecca looked more closely at the woman. Her body had changed and her facial features were more brutal, but aspects of her were still familiar; Rebecca recognized her as a neighbor, a woman who had always been unfriendly, last seen dancing with her partner—taking a video selfie—as the shower of tiny lights had fallen all around her.
Trying to walk the nightmare back, to shake herself into an awakening that would never come, Rebecca grabbed a remote and switched on a TV. The Christmas classic Silent Night was playing, and Rebecca was momentarily relieved—until she realized the broadcast was on some sort of autoplay. She changed channels a dozen times. There was static or white noise.
Fear rocketing, she looked out the window again to see the four ridgebacks, or whatever the hell they were, approaching the house, the only one in the neighborhood that was not yet alight. One of the men had an assault rifle and the woman was carrying a baseball bat.
In a moment of strange lucidity, Rebecca guessed the spore was somehow responsible and that heat and moisture were instrumental in effecting some kind of transformation. She pulled on her jeans, yelling for Laleh, and headed for the door: somehow she had to survive, the twins had to survive. The two women met at the bottom of the stairs.
“Did you see them?” Laleh asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” Rebecca replied, throwing her a set of car keys.
“Who are—?”
“No time,” Rebecca said. “Turn on the watering system and get in the car. Don’t open the garage door, not yet.”
Laleh nodded. “What about you?”
“I’ll burn the house. If they think we are like them, it might buy us time.”
She swung to a window and lifted a corner of the blind—the four ridgebacks had just started to cross the neighbor’s lawn, coming closer. Rebecca looked at the military-grade rifle with a scope on the barrel that one of them was carrying and, from her work, knew exactly what sort of damage that could do.
She ran for the kitchen, turned on the gas burners, and dumped a bottle of cooking oil on them, leaping back as flames exploded and started to consume the entire wall.
A moment later, the sprinklers outside burst to life, and with the kitchen already ablaze, she grabbed a flashlight and a hammer from a drawer and ran for the downstairs spare bedroom that served as my office.
She threw the door open, crossed to a filing cabinet, and used the hammer to smash the lock until it broke. Using the flashlight, she searched the drawers, flinging out files and notebooks. I had never told her about it, she had no way of knowing, but she was confident she would find what she needed. In the bottom drawer, she tossed aside stacks of photos, old railway tickets, and journal pages ripped from logbooks—the detritus of a life lived in the secret world—and knew she was close.
Hidden underneath she found a pistol—a SIG Sauer M17, the best combat sidearm in the world and a weapon that I kept at home for our protection. Rebecca didn’t know how to shoot but she was ready to learn, and she grabbed a box of ammo sitting beside it, killed the flashlight, and headed out of the office—
There was a sudden crash as the glass in the front door shattered and Rebecca heard a male voice on the porch: “Maybe she already left—”
“She hasn’t. The place has been closed up for days; the husband—or whatever he was—got himself killed,” the woman said. “I never saw her outside tonight. I think she’s fired up the house and turned on the sprinklers to fool us. She was always clever.”
Rebecca, in the hallway, looked across at the front door: the woman’s hairless and colorless hand and arm came through the shattered glass and groped to unlock the catch.
Rebecca raised the SIG, thinking in her panic about shooting, but realized she didn’t have the skill to take out four of them. She didn’t know then—nobody did—that their skin was a carapace, almost as good as body armor. With only a few seconds before they were inside, she ran for the kitchen and the back door, which was well alight, with flames roaring up the walls and across the ceiling.
She heard the intruders pounding down the hallway behind her. No time to hesitate—she grabbed a kitchen towel, held it over her mouth, and plunged into the inferno.
It was the best thing she could have done: the intruders arrived at the kitchen moments behind her, but she was engulfed by smoke and flame; they couldn’t see her.
Only when she ripped open the back door, allowing a blast of air from outside to enter, did the intruders realize she had been only yards ahead of them. They would have followed instantly except that the whirlwind of fresh air hitting the enclosed, superheated space caused what firefighters call a “flashover.” The kitchen and the entire side of the house exploded in flames, forcing the intruders back.
Rebecca sprinted across the yard to the garage, where Laleh was waiting for her, the sky all around her aglow as more buildings were torched.
“It was the spore? Breathe it in and—” Laleh called to her.
“That’s what I figure.”
“They’re gone now,” Laleh said, indicating the sky. “It’s clear.”
“Thank God,” Rebecca replied. “It seems like they’re finished once they land. They must need to find a host.”
The two women ran for the side door that led into the garage.
“I got the car started,” the young woman said.
Rebecca led the way through the side door, into the garage. “Open it,” she said, indicating the large electric door. As Laleh ran for the control, Rebecca scrambled into the driver’s seat of the small SUV. With the garage door still rising, she put it into gear.
When Laleh dived into the passenger seat, Rebecca, pedal to the metal, realized that she had forgotten to release the emergency brake. She hit the button, taking the brake off, and the car launched backward, exiting the garage at speed.
Directly in its path, the woman tried to dive. The rear fender hit her full-on, breaking one leg and sending her crunching into a small retaining wall.
Rebecca, driving at full speed backward, barely in control, sent the vehicle careening across the lawn, heading toward a low picket fence.
The male ridgeback with the assault rifle scrambled to his feet and raised the weapon, but by the time he adjusted his aim, Rebecca had smashed through the fence, blasted across a nature strip, and hit the asphalt. She swung the wheel wildly and, tires screeching, headed southwest.
“Where to?” Laleh asked.
“The freeway.”
“It’s not safe,” Laleh replied, alarmed, desperate, pointing at a shopping mall ablaze with scores of pale figures roaming the parking lot, torching vehicles. “Nowhere is.”
“One place might be.”
CHAPTER 14
A late-rising moon—bloodred from the smoke and flames burning across the world—was casting a pale light over the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
With Rebecca hunched over the wheel and the SIG in her lap, the SUV—its rear fender missing and two tires shredded—sped down a deserted four-lane blacktop, swung into a side road, and accelerated hard.
Up ahead a pair of metal gates blocked the entrance to a large marina—scores of expensive boats were bobbing at a complex of quays. A huge shed with slipways provided maintenance facilities, and a sleek office and café extended out over the water. On an ordinary summer’s evening, it must have been quite the place.
But at five a.m. on Devil’s Night, a high wind was rattling the rigging on the yachts. Like the motor cruisers moored nearby, their hatches were fastened and tarpaulins had been deployed to protect the decks and running gear from a wild summer storm that was heading up the coast.
Without pausing, Rebecca continued to accelerate, smashing into the metal gates, tearing them apart, and then barreling into the parking lot. The two women scanned their surroundings and, to their relief, could not see any ridgebacks, but unfortunately neither had they seen any other survivors during the miles of chaos they had driven through.
Ahead, Rebecca saw the entrance to the marina office, but instead of slowing, she spun the wheel and drove straight at it, plowing the SUV across the foyer and into a shop selling supplies and nautical artifacts.
Rebecca hit the brakes and, SIG still in hand, leapt out of the vehicle. She headed at a sprint toward an inner office where there was a steel security cupboard fixed to the wall behind the manager’s desk. It was exactly what she was looking for.
She raised the SIG, spent a moment finding the safety, slid the action to cock it, and aimed at the cupboard’s lock. It took her three shots—their retorts echoing sharply in the silence of the marina—before she scored a direct hit and the cupboard door sprang open.
Inside, hanging on a board in neat rows and numbered to correspond to their berths, were the keys to all of the boats.
CHAPTER 15
Carrying the board with the keys, Rebecca suddenly stopped at the doorway and grabbed a pair of binoculars hanging on a coatrack.
Laleh, towing a cart piled with batteries, flashlights, wet-weather gear, and everything else she had pillaged from the shop, stopped beside her.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“The right sort of boat,” Rebecca replied, scanning from vessel to vessel. “Not a party palace, something serious, a big engine, built for heavy weather…”
She pointed across the marina to the waters of the bay, which, lit by moonlight, was covered in whitecaps and wild spray from the wind. “Once we leave the shelter of the bay,” she continued, “it’s going to be rough out there. Will you be okay?”
Laleh smiled. “It can’t be any worse than the Persian Gulf.”
Rebecca grinned back. “Sorry, I forgot.” She kept the glasses fixed on one boat. “Red zone,” she said. “Berth thirty-four.”
Rebecca grabbed a set of keys off the board she had retrieved from the steel cupboard and ran. Laleh followed, jogging along the wharf, towing the cart behind her, before they both stopped at berth thirty-four.
Moored at it, surrounded by other, far bigger and more impressive boats, was a sixty-foot sportfishing boat; deep-hulled and with a wide beam to provide stability, sleek and low enough not to be battered by the wind, she had five big outboard engines on the back to provide enormous power. She had the look of a boat that could go anywhere. Heaven only knew how much she was worth but Rebecca had already taken possession, ripping off the tarpaulin that covered the wheelhouse and using the keys to open the door.
Inside, Rebecca used the ignition key to turn on the electrical system. The gauges and screens came alive, but only one instrument interested her.
“Thank God,” she said. “She’s fueled up.”
Minutes later, the big outboards rumbled to life, and with Rebecca trying to learn to control the vessel, the Lonesome Dove—as she was called—smashed into the bumpers on either side of her berth, scraped noisily along the side of a ninety-foot sailing sloop, and finally reached the channel outside the marina. As they headed into the bay and turned south, Laleh asked: “And now?”
“Open water,” Rebecca replied. “Twenty miles out we should be safe for a while—then we can try to decide what the hell we’re going to do.”
Laleh made no reply. Instead, she was studying her friend closely. Despite their terrifying circumstances, she was reassured—for the first time since Rebecca had heard the news of my death, she was ready to fight.
CHAPTER 16
Dawn was breaking as the Lonesome Dove, heading south, approached the eighteen-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which crossed the mouth of the bay and marked the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.
With the wind howling from the north, the tide was running hard behind them, a steep swell churning the ocean into whitecaps beyond the bridge. Battered by the constant wind and spray, Rebecca fought the wheel, keeping the engines throttled back, her face a picture of fierce concentration as the bridge loomed ever closer.
With Laleh watching anxiously, she brought the boat’s bow around slightly and steered for the center of a gap between two of the bridge’s huge pylons. The sea was surging between the concrete structures, the water hitting their bases with enormous force, turning into a riot of white foam. The darkness of the sky and the deep shadow cast by the roadway above made the gap seem even more threatening, ominous.
“Have you seen the—?” Laleh asked, glancing up toward the roadway nearly two hundred feet above them. It was littered with burning cars, and several dozen ridgebacks were leaning over the railing, looking down at the boat.
“I saw them,” Rebecca said, not shifting her gaze from the gap between the pylons, which was approaching faster than she had anticipated. Within seconds, the craft was almost in the gap. As the water swirled faster around her hull, the vessel was inexorably pulled into the maelstrom.
Rebecca felt the wheel jump and spin hard in her hands. The bow veered toward the left—and, by misfortune, the looming slime-covered concrete of the closest pylon. One hit and the boat would be at the bottom within seconds.
She had no idea how to slow the boat against the power of the elements. Counterintuitively, at the last moment, she realized she had to take command. She hit the throttle. The five big outboards roared up to full power, bringing the Lonesome Dove alive, her bow raised up. Though she flew faster toward the pylon, the wheel felt suddenly far lighter in Rebecca’s hands.
She spun it hard. The pylon was almost on top of them. The boat turned on its heel and the left side of the hull skimmed the slime and slid past the pylon. They were through the gap.
Above them, the ridgebacks, racing across the roadway, watched the boat emerge from the shadows, blasting out the other side of the bridge and straightening up on her course.
Rebecca, drenched in sweat, rested her forehead on the wheel. Laleh lifted her friend’s chin up and put her arms around her, and they held each other, trying to stop shaking.
Laleh spoke quietly in Arabic. Rebecca drew back and looked at her. “What is that?”
