Exodus.

Extinction Point Series.

Paul Antony Jones.

PROLOGUE.

Commander Fiona Mulligan had made a habit out of watching the sunrise.

Of course, when you were on board a two-hundred-and-forty-foot-long hunk of metal, hurtling along at just over seventeen thousand miles per hour in a low orbit above the earth and completing almost sixteen revolutions of the earth a day, you got to see a lot of sunrises.

The longest most crew members of the International s.p.a.ce Station got to sleep at any one time was about six hours; couple that with the disorienting effect of waking surrounded by darkness after one period, then sunlight the next, and it could play havoc with your biological clock. Fiona had found a simple solution, though; whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would try to time the end of each sleep period to coincide with one of those sunrises.

Dawns aboard the ISS were a very different affair from those the billions of souls on the gleaming blue planet beneath her feet experienced. Most earthbound sunrises could be obscured by clouds and smog and cityscapes, obfuscating the simple wonder of watching the birth of a new day. By contrast, the little market town of Dorking, in the UK where she had grown up, had given her an exemplary view of the heavens and fueled her love of s.p.a.ce when she was just a child. But even those misty mornings and ebony nights of her childhood paled by comparison to the G.o.dlike perspective afforded her and the ISS crew, so many miles above the earth. Up here, they were simply glorious.

Watching from the cupola of Tranquility (Node 3), a room-size cylinder jutting out from just below (or above, depending on the station's orientation at any given moment) the US laboratory Destiny, Fiona could see the lights of cities moving slowly by through the darkness beneath her. In the distance the faint glow of the rapidly approaching morning cut a laser-sharp crescent against the arch of the earth. Slowly, it expanded into a thin band of spectral blues and yellows and began to creep from the horizon across the curvature of the earth toward the station, revealing clouds floating above a blue sea and the far-off coastlines of islands and the undulating curve of the continent of Africa.

An aurora of surging light painted broad strokes of turquoise over the South Pole as the sun emerged, rising sideways like an ancient phoenix from the blackness of s.p.a.ce. It pushed back the shadows enveloping her world, until finally the planet's home star appeared in all its glory, welcomed by the gentle whirring vibration of the station's solar panels as they gradually oriented themselves to collect its life-giving energy.

According to the station's telemetry system, they were currently over the South Atlantic Ocean, rapidly heading toward Namibia. They would pa.s.s across that ma.s.sive continent that had given birth to humanity, skirting Europe, and then onward over central Russia.

She had seen many sunrises during her two-month stay on the station. Each one was different in its own way, depending on the orientation and position of the station over the surface of the earth.

Sunrise the day the world ended was different for another reason.

At first, Commander Mulligan thought the anomaly was some kind of optical illusion; a refraction of light off the low-lying clouds that blanketed most of the view below them, or maybe it was some kind of visual artifact of the aurora borealis that still flickered and played far to the north. But as she continued to focus on the unusual phenomenon stretching out far below, Fiona realized this was something else altogether, something quite extraordinary.

Trailing behind the rapidly advancing dawn was a scintillating ribbon of red that began as a barely distinguishable needle-thin line south of her position toward Indonesia and extended over the horizon toward Finland. As she followed the ribbon north, she could see it was gradually expanding in width. By the time it pa.s.sed over the equator, it had grown to a thick band of crimson. Fiona estimated it was at least thirty miles wide at its broadest point, from leading edge to trailing edge. As it pa.s.sed over the Tropic of Capricorn, she could see the crimson line begin to taper off again before it became nothing but a slight thread in the distance and then disappeared completely a few miles short of the Arctic Ocean.

She had immediately reported the strange event to mission control while relaying the station's incredible images back to the agency as the ISS swept over the phenomenon, continuing along its...o...b..t.

No one seemed to have any idea what it was she was seeing. The ribbon of red appeared to be moving in an almost regimented progression across the globe. Scientists on the ground and in the ISS postulated that it might be some kind of freak weather event, or maybe the smoke from an un.o.bserved undersea volcanic eruption. But if either of those theories were correct, then surely there would have been some kind of disruption to the consistency of the ribbon, just as a contrail of a high-alt.i.tude aircraft will slowly lose its coherence. It stood to reason that whatever this event was, over time it should begin to dissolve, pulled away by winds and disruptive weather patterns. But there was no loss of cohesion; its edges had remained sharply defined as it swept methodically onward across the globe.

And whatever this stuff was made of, it was sufficiently dense that it was impossible to see through to the sea beyond. She watched as it completely obscured a small black dot that was probably a supertanker plying its way between countries. The tanker disappeared as the red streamer pa.s.sed over it before reappearing on the opposite side and continuing on its way to wherever it was bound. It seemed unharmed, and there was no sign that it had changed course or even seen the red band that it had pa.s.sed directly beneath.

It was difficult to say just how high above the surface this strange red anomaly was, but judging by the ship's unaltered course, the captain either hadn't considered it a threat or hadn't had time to make any evasive maneuvers. Not that it would have helped; the ribbon seemed to be spread almost completely across the globe.

The observation port of the cupola of Tranquility had the best view of the ongoing event, but it was too cramped to comfortably fit any more than two observers at once. Each member of the crew joined the commander in turn to watch the slowly advancing ribbon and offer up his or her opinions and theories.

It was Ivan Krikalev, the team's resident flight surgeon as well as a highly competent engineer, who finally voiced what everyone else had been thinking. "Perhaps it is some kind of alien life-form," he whispered as he floated next to Fiona, watching through the observation port next to hers.

"What?" she said, not sure she had heard him correctly.

The implacable Russian slowly rotated to face her. "I said, perhaps it is alien in origin. The theory of panspermia is an accepted possibility of how life began on earth. Maybe what we are observing is an example of that theory in action. Who knows for certain? I have no other suggestions."

Fiona vaguely remembered watching a doc.u.mentary on the Discovery Channel at some point that briefly covered the theory behind the unproven hypothesis. "Isn't that the idea that life on earth originally came from outer s.p.a.ce?"

"You are basically correct," said Krikalev. "The theory is more complex than that, of course, but it has been around since the fifth century. It is all mainly conjecture, of course-life is transferred from planet to planet by microorganisms trapped in meteors or blown on the solar winds, just like pollen travels on the wind. There are many theories, but, in the end, it boils down to life being seeded throughout the galaxy. Perhaps we are quiet witnesses to one of those very events."

As the ISS sped onward and away from the rapidly receding thread of red bisecting the horizon like a giant b.l.o.o.d.y slash across the earth, Commander Mulligan found herself pondering Krikalev's theory, wondering what it would mean for the planet speeding by beneath them and the life that called it home if he was right.

Approximately eight hours later she received her answer.

The crew of the ISS had slowly begun to lose contact with its global tracking stations and mission control centers.

First to go was the ISS mission control center in Korolev, Russia, closely followed by Moscow. Then, as the deadly effects of the rain swept indefatigably across the continent, the center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, went dark; the s.p.a.ce Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands went down not long after that. By the time the ISS lost contact with the European s.p.a.ce Agency Headquarters in Paris, the crew had managed to piece together as clear a picture of what was going on down on the ground as was possible given their limited access to experiential data.

The station's final contact had been with a radio operator from the Twenty-Second s.p.a.ce Operations Squadron based at the Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The young operator had tried her best to sound calm as she relayed what little news she had about the events taking place worldwide.

The girl was from Colorado originally, she had told Fiona. Her family and husband still lived there, just outside Denver. She had lost contact with them hours earlier. The woman was trying to be brave as she kept the station updated with the little information that still crossed her desk, but Fiona had heard the fear gradually creep into her voice as the inevitable deadline approached the American military base. The operator had died midsentence; Fiona had heard her scream her daughter's name before the connection had broken.

It was in that instant, as the horrified crew listened to the dying woman, that Commander Mulligan and the crew of the ISS had come to the realization that what had been their home for the last four months had, in a single instant, almost certainly become their tomb.

Of course, the station had enough fuel to maintain its...o...b..t pretty much indefinitely, but they would all be dead long before that was exhausted. They had enough provisions to last them for the next four months or more, and the onboard oxygen-generating systems might last for at least that long, and there were also several redundancy measures built into the station that would keep them alive long past the last meal.

But what then? There was no hope of rescue, only a slow painful death as they starved.

Her crew was a pragmatic bunch, made up of the best of the best and not given to snap judgments, but there had already been calm discussion of breaking out the little red boxes the European s.p.a.ce Agency had considerately provided them for just such an occasion. Each box contained three pills of a derivative of tetrodotoxin, a fast-acting neurotoxin that would leave them dead-painlessly, they had been a.s.sured-within minutes of swallowing one. They had all agreed to give it as long as possible before resorting to such extreme measures, but she knew no one on board held out much in the way of hope that rescue was even the slightest of possibilities.

They had spent the next few days taking shifts on the communication systems, working their way through the military and private bands in the hope that there might be someone out there still listening or transmitting. There had to be military and government installations still left untouched by the red rain, they reasoned. Whatever the event had been, it could not have been so viciously effective at its job that it could reach out and wipe out even the secret hardened command-and-control bases they all knew existed in their home countries.

Could it?

They had picked up some minor radio chatter, fleeting and ghostlike as it crackled across the airwaves, and for a moment hope had bloomed that their situation was not as terrible as it seemed. But the transmission was in no language they recognized. "My best guess is it's probably encrypted in some way, maybe military. Who knows? Without the key there is no way to decrypt it," Bryant, the team's communication expert, had explained.

As time rolled on, from the vantage point of the ISS, Commander Mulligan and her crew had an unprecedented view of the changes that had begun to unfold across the earth. With each revolution the station made, they noticed subtle changes to their planet, changes that appeared miniscule from the distance they were watching from but that must have been ma.s.sive and rapid at ground level.

There had been nothing for the first day or two. The world kept revolving, storms moved across oceans, and, at night, cities still glowed as brightly as they always had done. If they had not known better, the crew would have thought they were a part of some elaborate practical joke that had just gone on for far too long.

Krikalev was the first to point it out, a slight red bloom in the air over Kirovograd in the Ukraine.

With each orbit, the astronauts could see new blotches of red, small and barely visible at first, mainly concentrated over the most densely occupied cities across the globe. The next time their orbit pa.s.sed over that area, they could see those same pinp.r.i.c.ks of red had blossomed and grown, spreading out like drops of red dye splashed into water. By day five after the event, the sky beneath the s.p.a.ce station and the earth had become clouded with angry alien storms. Thick tendrils of swirling red reached out across continents, carried on trade winds across oceans, spreading out and blanketing the world in a gauzy web of red that grew ever thicker and more complex with each pa.s.sing hour. Huge swirling hurricane-size storms had developed off the southeast coast of the United States and had begun to move inexorably toward the East Coast.

Fiona found herself transfixed by the inexorable spread of the creeping red across her planet. There was a pattern to it, she was sure, but she simply could not put her finger on what that pattern was. It was a futile exercise, anyway, she supposed. There was nothing any of them could do but watch as, day by day, the world was slowly suffocated beneath a veil of red death.

Emily Baxter had a craving. She wanted a burger...bad.

Not just any burger, either. In the four days since she had escaped from her apartment in Manhattan, she had pa.s.sed by plenty of abandoned McDonald's, Burger Kings, and G.o.d knew how many other fast-food restaurants. Those were all easily ignorable.

No, what she had a hankering for was a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms, onions, mayo, pickles, and tomatoes; hold the ketchup and mustard. She would add a large order of their fries-Cajun-style, of course-and an extra-large, ice-cold c.o.ke. Emily felt her saliva glands begin to water at the thought of sinking her teeth into that juicy burger.

There had been a Five Guys franchise over on West Thirty-Fourth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment she had left behind in Manhattan. She'd stop by there at least once a month when she had the urge to add an extra couple of inches of cholesterol to her arteries. She was already bored by her diet. Canned beans. Canned soup. Canned fruit. Canned everything. A burger would be the only thing right now that would satisfy her desire for real, honest-to-goodness all-American junk food.

Of course, that wasn't going to ever happen, seeing as how the world had come to an abrupt, and total, end.

Maybe it was all the extra exercise she was getting? She had thought herself a pretty proficient cyclist before the red rain, but these past few days of constant pedaling had helped prove her wrong. Everything ached. She had no idea how Thor did it, poor thing. The malamute padded uncomplaining alongside her bike.

Only a few days had pa.s.sed, but the event that had wiped all but a handful of humanity from the face of the earth already seemed distant and vague to her now. The red rain had fallen across the world, seemingly from nowhere. Within hours everyone and everything was dead...well, apart from her, Thor, and a bunch of scientists trapped in a research station in the Stockton Islands on the far north coast of Alaska. That was where she was heading. Alaska.

Guess there's something to be said for the end of the world, she thought. It had certainly done a world of good for her cardio health. The post-apocalypse diet: guaranteed to trim inches from your waistline, or you'll die trying. She could have made millions in book sales, if there had been anyone left to sell the book to.

Thor, an Alaskan malamute, had been Emily's only companion since he had rescued her from an attack by a trio of alien creatures in an equally alien forest just outside Valhalla. In their brief time together, she had often thought he must have received some sort of training, because he responded to many of her commands and was very protective.

"So, what do you say, mutt? You hungry?"

Thor looked up at his mistress and bounced his tail back and forth enthusiastically.

"Okay, then. Let's find somewhere we can eat." Emily slowed the bike to a crawl and began looking over the street in front of her. She quickly found the building she was looking for, pulling to a stop outside a small corner convenience store and dismounting. She could feel the burning ache in her calves as she wheeled the bike toward the sidewalk. The military-style backpack strapped to her back had grown lighter as she and Thor consumed the initial stockpile of food she had brought with her. Emily had to admit, losing the bulk of the weight had been a relief, but it was time to replenish her stock.

Pausing for a second, she scanned the street ahead of her; grayscale buildings lined both sides of the empty road. It was the same everywhere she had traveled since leaving Manhattan. No sign of any other living creature except for her and Thor. No birds, no dogs, no cats-not even an insect, as far as she could tell. And no people. She had no idea what that meant for the world, but she knew it couldn't possibly be good. What would be the effect of the total destruction of most, if not all, of the earth's indigenous species?

It was no mystery what had happened to life on this little blue planet. It had been annihilated by the red rain, consumed and then reconst.i.tuted into the weird alien life-forms she had encountered in the days after everything had died.

As she continued traveling north, Emily had seen more signs of the insidious encroachment of the red forests into the earth's environment. The second day into her ride, she had noticed small pockets of the towering trees similar to what she had encountered in Central Park scattered here and there along her route, usually near a water source like a lake or a river. She had seen a couple of small cl.u.s.ters of trees growing on sidewalks with their roots spiraling down inlets into sewers, but these had been much smaller, almost scaled-down versions of their bigger brothers. But by day two and three, she had begun to notice larger groups and far more frequently. To her mind, there was an almost exponential growth occurring, although she had seen nothing on the scale of the forest she had traveled through in Valhalla. Not yet, at least.

She had seen little of the spider-aliens other than the occasional distant sighting, but on day three she had found one, or at least the desiccated remains of one, hanging from an iron security fence outside a block of offices. Evidently it had impaled itself on the spikes when it had leaped from the building; she could see the telltale circular escape hole in a window three stories up. She was tempted to take a closer look, but Emily had begun to recognize that her reporter's nose was more likely to get her into trouble these days. She gave the thing a wide berth and continued on her way.

The only other survivor she had spoken to was Jacob Endersby. He was part of a team of scientists on the remote Stockton Islands, just off the northern sh.o.r.e of Alaska. She still wasn't convinced that Jacob's hypothesis-that the farther north she traveled, the colder it would get and the less of a foothold the invading alien life-forms would have-was right, because it sure as h.e.l.l didn't seem to be having much of an effect so far. Truth be told, there was little in the way of temperature difference in the hundred or so miles she had already traveled; so maybe it was going to take a much more severe drop before there was any observable decrease.

Emily slipped the backpack from her shoulders. The wounds she had sustained during the attack by the alien creatures in the forest were healing nicely; her shoulder still ached and she felt the occasional spasm of pain if she moved her arm too quickly or spent too long riding her bike.

She knew she would have to find an alternative form of transportation soon. With winter closing in, and the temperature already starting to drop, finding a vehicle that would protect her from the elements was also going to have to be a major consideration in her plan of reaching the Stockton Islands. There were thousands of cars and trucks left at the side of the road or waiting in garages for owners who would never return.

Of course, that meant she would have to learn to drive.

She'd need something easy to handle but large enough that she could stash her bike, supplies, and, of course, Thor. It was also going to have to be robust enough to cope with the bad weather she was sure to hit when she crossed over into Canada. Roads were going to be closed once the winter weather set in, with no one to clear the inevitable snowfalls that would make them all but impa.s.sable. She would give it some serious consideration over the next couple of days, she decided.

The pain in her shoulder paled into inconsequence when compared to the soreness she had experienced in the first few days of eight-hour cycling sessions. She now knew the true meaning of the old cowboy phrase saddle sore because her b.u.t.t chafed like n.o.body's business after long hours parked on the saddle of the bike. She learned quickly that she needed to make frequent rest stops or suffer the consequences, that and the liberal application of cream from a tube of Desitin she had picked up from an abandoned pharmacy to her more tender areas.

She had decided to follow the Hudson as far north as she could. Keeping the river to her left gave her a sense of security; it was one direction she didn't think she'd have to worry about an attack. Staying on the east side of the river also had the added advantage of keeping the half-mile stretch of water between her and what had been, up until only a week or so ago, some of the more populated areas of New York.

That first day, as she and Thor had stood on the hill and looked back at the village where she had spent the previous night slowly succ.u.mb to fire, Emily had worried her canine companion wouldn't be able to keep up with her. But as she rode along the deserted highways and side roads, she had quickly learned how wrong she was about that. Thor was more than capable of matching her pace. In fact, he could go far longer than she could between breaks; a result, she believed, of malamutes having originally been bred as sled dogs. She found herself having to limit herself to a maximum of thirty or so miles a day for herself rather than the dog. Emily guessed that Thor would be able to easily cover twice that distance, if she gave him his head.

Thor wasn't the problem, though. It had quickly become apparent to Emily that cycling the forty-five hundred miles to reach the Stockton Islands and the group waiting for her there was going to be a next to impossible undertaking. She was utterly exhausted by the end of each day. She had been lucky so far and not had any accidents, although she had come close on a couple of occasions. But she knew her luck wouldn't hold out forever, and the odds were stacked well and truly against her traveling that kind of distance and not hitting a pothole or letting her attention slip momentarily and ending up lying in some ditch with a broken arm, leg, or worse.

And then, of course, there were the alien creatures she had encountered. Who knew what strangeness was wandering around the world ahead of her? It was like living in some crazy zoo where she was the prey.

Emily glanced down at Thor sitting patiently at her feet, his ears alert, tongue lolling from his mouth as he panted gently in the warmth of the afternoon sun.

"Coming?" she asked the dog, but he seemed quite happy to stay where he was. "All right," she said after a second. "You guard our things. I'll be right back out." She picked up the almost empty backpack from where she had set it down and walked toward the store.

The door was unlocked. Surprisingly, the shelves looked untouched and almost fully stocked, unlike the majority of shops Emily had stopped at on her trip so far. The unmistakable chaos of panic buyers and thieves marked virtually every location she had tried to look for food.

Sunlight cut through the gla.s.s window and illuminated the two middle rows of shelves. The rest of the small room was shrouded in shadow. She paused for a moment, listening for any sound of movement that might indicate that she was not alone. Motes of dust floated gently through the shaft of light; just regular dust, not the weird semi-sentient stuff she had witnessed in Manhattan.

As she walked to the nearest aisle, she began running through a mental checklist of the items she would need. Soup and fruit, maybe some cans of meat if she could find it; it would still be good. She'd also need to grab a bag of dog food for Thor. He was running low.

A shadow to Emily's left shifted. She stopped midstep, her breath catching in her throat. Instinctively, she reached for the Mossberg shotgun she kept strapped around her shoulder, but it wasn't there.

"d.a.m.n it," she cursed under her breath as she took a step backward. She could have sworn that she had brought it in with her, but she must have left it with the bike.

Emily took another slow step backward and reached behind her as she searched for the exit she knew was just a few feet away. If she could just get to the door, she could alert Thor and make a run for- The shadow separated from the darkness surrounding it and moved into the dim light.

It was a spider-alien. Its eight articulated scimitar-clawed legs clicked across the tiled floor of the store. As she watched, first another and then two more joined it from the shadows. One climbed over the nearest set of shelving, perching on the top boxes of instant potato, its two eyestalks swaying back and forth as it focused on her.

She took another step backward. As she did so, the leading spider matched her.

A gla.s.s jar of preserves smashed against the floor to her right, the sound like a thunderclap in that enclosed s.p.a.ce. Emily yelped. Another creature was climbing over the nearest shelf. More of the freaks were emerging from the darkness, edging toward her across the floor.

She counted seven, then eight, then twelve. Her chest felt heavy as the air she had sucked into her lungs seemed to turn into a dense fog.

Emily could hear Thor barking ferociously from the other side of the door and the frantic sc.r.a.pe of his claws against the gla.s.s as he tried to get to her. But the door opened outward, so there was no way he was going to be able to reach her.

She took another step back, too afraid to take her eyes from the ruin of monsters advancing on her. It was some kind of a nest; she had stumbled into a rally point where these things collected and waited to move on to become a part of one of those huge alien trees, or who knew what else.

Her encounters in Manhattan, when one of the ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had fallen into her room and she had almost been run over by another in Central Park, had taught her that the things seemed mostly harmless, unwilling to attack her while they were gripped by whatever deep motivation drove them. But these were reacting differently; they seemed p.i.s.sed, and by the way the eyestalks flicked and wavered like an agitated cat's tail, she was pretty sure they weren't in a mood to share their newfound home with her.

Emily kept moving back, one slow careful step at a time, until, finally, her hand closed around the door handle. Thor was still growling and whining his frustration and anger outside, his paws batting against the door so hard that she was afraid to open it; he might slip in and go straight for the nearest creature. She was sure he could easily dispatch one or two of them, but there were at least twenty stalking her now, and he would surely be overwhelmed if he tried to take them all on.

"Thor," she hissed, "be quiet, boy."

At the sound of her voice, the gathered creatures' serrated lower jaws jittered up and down so fast she could barely see them. They sounded like dry autumn leaves blown over pavement.

Thor's agitated scratching at the door stopped, and his barking dropped to a low growl.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder; Thor had stepped back a few paces and was now sitting, staring at her, his tail moving back and forth across the flagstone pavement in either agitation or antic.i.p.ation. But she could not see any new threat behind him.

When she looked back, the creatures had advanced on her again-the walls and ceiling were covered with them, and every featureless black bulbous head and eyestalk was turned and focused squarely on her. As she watched, a barely noticeable ripple of movement flowed through the creatures.

One after another the creatures launched themselves at her.

Spinning around, she pulled the door toward her and slipped through the crack, pulling the door back into place behind her. Black bodies flung themselves against the gla.s.s, smacking against it before dropping to the floor. She clung to the handle, leaning back and pulling it against the jamb as wave upon wave of the creatures tried to get to her. The weight of the ma.s.s of flailing aliens kept the door closed.

As more and more of the creatures sank to the floor, they began to form a drift of twig-like flailing legs, writhing eyestalks, and chattering jaws that soon became indistinguishable as individual creatures.

At a mental count of three, she let the door handle go and stepped away. For a second she stood and stared at the monsters as they mindlessly tried to reach her.

"f.u.c.k you!" she yelled eventually, then flipped them the bird, grabbed her bike, and hurtled away from the swarm.

The next afternoon Emily found herself in the rustic town of Stockport. It had taken her almost that long to shake off the encounter at the store. Thoughts of the creatures had even invaded her sleep when she had finally pulled over for the night.

Until she had stumbled into their lair, she hadn't seen any sign of the spider-aliens for days, and to come across so many of them concentrated in one location was a disconcerting new development in an already surreal week. The more she thought about it, the more it was as if they had been congregating in the store, like troops awaiting fresh orders. Maybe that was exactly what was happening; maybe they were waiting to be given new directions by whatever was orchestrating this strange overthrow of her world.