Multitude, p.4
Multitude, page 4
part #2 of Dimension Space Series
Teetering on the verge of another awkward silence, Vaughn gave Angela a self-deprecating smile. “How ‘bout them Yankees?”
She guffawed. “I know, right? Those guys …!”
For the next several minutes, the steep, traversing climb provided a welcome diversion, occupying their otherwise wandering thoughts.
Another turn of the trail brought them to a section of jagged rocks that protruded at multiple odd angles. Some of them looked precariously balanced. Vaughn gave the entire setup a quick once-over. Spotting his route, he held up a hand to Angela. “Wait here, let me check it out.”
Without pausing for a response, he hopped onto the first ledge and then onto one of the large boulders. It rocked beneath his feet, so Vaughn let his inertia carry him onto the next rock. Two additional loping jumps brought him to the top of the ledge. He looked down at Angela and held his arms out to his side. “Ta-da!”
To his surprise, Angela was shaking her head, her face ash-white. “God protects drunks and idiots.”
“What do you mean? That was pure skill.”
“No, that was pure idiocy.” She pointed down over the ledge. “If you had tripped or if that boulder had toppled, you’d have fallen a thousand feet.”
Vaughn followed the line of her finger. Looking down, he felt his stomach turn. He’d been so intent on analyzing the best route across the obstacle, he hadn’t noticed that it stuck out over a cliff … a damned high one!
When that rock had shifted under his feet, he’d been teetering above a drop of over a thousand feet.
Suddenly, Angela burst into snorting laughter. “Oh my God! You should see … the look on your face!”
Vaughn looked at her and shook his head. “Laugh it up.” He crossed his arms. “I’m here. You’re there. How are you going to get up?”
After a few more snorts, she stopped laughing, finally. A serious look took over her face.
He watched as she studied the hillside. As she’d done innumerable times during that long climb, she overanalyzed every option, a trait that was starting to drive him crazy.
“Any day now.”
Angela nodded. “I’ll be right there.”
She turned and walked away from him, disappearing into the tree line.
Vaughn stared into the woods for a while. He smirked and then cupped his hands around his mouth. “I don’t think capitulation or surrender is a viable …”
He faltered as Angela emerged from the forest a few feet to his side, now standing on his upper ledge.
“Close your mouth, Captain. You’ll attract flies.”
She smiled whimsically and shook her head. “I can’t believe you survived long enough to actually rescue me.” She arched her eyebrows and grinned. “Although in the end, I guess it was me that rescued you, wasn’t it?”
She walked past Vaughn, not waiting for him.
Left in her wake, he could only shake his head. “Guess I had that coming,” he said under his breath.
Speaking over her shoulder, Angela continued up the steep slope. “Yep, you sure did.”
Vaughn thought they must be nearing the top. The levitating line of steel looked closer than ever. However, when he reached the next rise, it proved to be just another false pass. They had encountered several of them. Each time they crested one ledge, they found another waiting above them.
Angela reached the top of the next one and then froze mid-step.
“What is it?!”
She didn’t respond.
Having lagged a few dozen feet behind her, Vaughn sprinted the rest of the way up the hill. As he reached Angela, he grabbed her elbow. “What’s the ma—?”
His hand fell, as did his jaw.
Staring in shocked silence, Vaughn and Angela stood fixed in place for a long moment.
He felt his mind lock up as he tried and failed to process the image.
This was no false pass.
Angela and Vaughn had indeed reached the top of the hill.
Now they stood at the southern end of the long, V-shaped ravine that cut a notch across the small ridge. It was the same narrow cut that they’d seen from the helicopter.
Vaughn could only see a sliver of Geneva through the far end of the ravine.
But a sliver was all he needed.
The image painted across the triangular canvas of horizon visible through the ravine’s opposite end said significantly more than a thousand words. It spoke of a fallen society, a lost people, and now, Vaughn realized, a lost war as well.
The narrow sliver of city visible through the distant end of the pass revealed an entirely new city where Geneva had once stood. There was no doubting this assertion. The structures eclipsed anything man had ever built.
Enormous silver edifices now towered above the floor of the valley that once housed Geneva. Where the city used to sit, now countless structures of varying sizes and shapes blotted out the land. Instead of façades of stone and wood, everything in this surreal metropolis sported a skin of shiny, polished metal.
On his left, Angela was slowly shaking her head. “It was a war.”
Through a suddenly dry throat, Vaughn said, “Yeah … Yeah, it was.” He shook his head. “A war that ended before we even knew it had started.”
Chapter 6
Angela breathed heavily as she crawled along on her belly. Tall grass cocooned her. The late afternoon sun beat down on her back. A trickle of sweat ran down the line of her nose.
They had dropped off their backpacks at the mouth of the ravine. Not wanting to be silhouetted in the V-shaped pass, they were crawling on their bellies, or low-crawling, as Vaughn had called it.
Angela looked up, warily studying the bottom of another ship as it floated silently past them, gliding only a hundred feet above their heads. This was the closest they’d been to the line of levitating structures.
Her gaze returned to front. Not that she could see anything in that direction—at least not yet. The tall grass obscured all but the sky and its steel cargo.
Her knees churned, one after the other, as she slowly inched toward the Geneva side of the cut.
“You’re too high,” Vaughn whispered harshly. “Get your butt down. Pretend like you’re crawling under barbed wire … just like in the movies.”
Angela nodded and dropped flat.
Crawling through the tall grass at the bottom of the draw reminded her of her childhood and playing in the parks. It even smelled the same. The sweet aroma of the pines and grasses seemed crazily disjointed when taken in with the scenery that waited ahead.
That and the sky full of floating ships and buildings.
There was another aspect that she hadn’t noticed during their climb. It was the utter silence. Aside from the periodic rustle of the breeze, there were no other sounds, no chirping crickets or birds.
Angela stopped moving and held her breath.
Beside her, Vaughn also stopped.
Tilting her head, Angela listened. The world suddenly felt like a movie minus its soundtrack. The sound of her racing heart rose to fill the void.
“What are you doing?”
Angela looked at Vaughn and released the held breath. Panting again, she shook her head. “Nothing.”
He gave her an odd look but then nodded.
They started crawling again.
“Not like that!” Vaughn whispered urgently. “Keep your knees off to the side, like this.”
Angela looked over to him and then dropped her belly, displacing her knees to the side like Vaughn.
Whispering seemed ridiculous. They were still miles from the city, but she couldn’t help it. She supposed it was for the same reason that they were crawling up for a better view.
As they neared the far end of the ravine, Angela began to glimpse silvery glints through the tall grass. The nervous feeling in her stomach grew as each subsequent shuffling crawl brought more and more of the alien city into view.
She still couldn’t see the ground, just the huge structures rising from it.
Obviously, Vaughn had more experience with this whole low-crawly thing. As they neared the edge, his faster pace had him half a body length ahead of her. Angela could barely see his arms through the grass.
Suddenly, his whole body flinched and then froze. She heard Vaughn swearing under his breath as he began to breathe harder.
Angela stopped crawling. “What is it?!”
He motioned for her to move up. “Come on up … but be careful. There’s a drop-off.”
Angela verged on hyperventilating as she nosed her way through the weeds. A foot later, the vegetation disappeared altogether.
As did the land.
“Oh, my …!” Angela’s panting breath hitched in her throat.
Vaughn swallowed and then nodded. “I know.”
The scale of the panorama painted across what had been Geneva Valley shocked Angela’s system.
It was … too much … too big.
Her mind balked at the unreal reality.
She suddenly felt light-headed and dizzy.
They had emerged from the edge of the grass, their heads now peering out over a thousand-foot-high cliff. Usually, the sight of that much empty air between her and the fallow farmland below the rocky precipice would have been enough to make her blood run cold, but that incredible sight paled in comparison to the disjointed alien vista that spanned the horizon.
A metropolis populated by colossal silver buildings stretched out as far as she could see left and right.
“It’s huge! I mean …” She swallowed hard, fighting to rein in her breathing. “Those buildings …!” She paused, struggling for the right words. “They’re as tall as mountains.”
Vaughn nodded. “I can’t wrap my head around it, the scale of it all.”
Angela’s mind reeled. Questions bounced through her thoughts like careening pinballs.
What did it all mean?
Why would someone wipe out a world only to build a city of steel?
Who were they?
And why here? How did it all tie into Geneva’s supercollider?
In the hazy distance, the three lines of structures that were passing overhead and to Angela’s left and right appeared to terminate just before reaching the outer limit of the alien metropolis. After crossing over the ridgeline, the ships, buildings, and bridges that made up the levitating rows of steel soared a thousand or more feet above the land, but even their lofty altitude paled in comparison to the massive buildings that towered over their far ends.
Through the smog, Angela could just make out an enormous cruise-ship near the front of the levitating line. Even though several hundred feet lay beneath its hull and the ground beneath, the top of the huge ship reached less than a quarter way up the nearest building.
Vaughn’s voice broke through her trance. “I don’t see anything moving.” He pointed up. “Other than this stuff.”
Angela nodded. Then her eyes narrowed as a flicker of orange drew her gaze to a place on the ground near the outer edge of the city.
Sudden recognition slammed home.
She scanned left and right and saw two additional vermillion spots sitting exactly where she remembered.
She pointed. “Look! I saw those from space.”
“What?”
“Those orange spots.”
At her extreme distance, Angela could barely discern them. From above, they had looked round, but her current oblique viewing angle gave them a squat, oval shape. As she’d seen from the space station, each line appeared to terminate at its own spot of orange.
Still pointing, she swept her arm left and right. “It looks like there’s one for each line. Can you tell what they are?”
Vaughn shook his head. “No, still too far away. But damn! They’re huge, a lot bigger than anything in these lines. Looks like they’re even bigger than a stadium!”
For long moments, they stared at the scene silently.
Miles of undeveloped countryside sat between them and the closest edge of the alien city.
Fallow farm fields dotted by small communities filled the land below their vantage point. Beyond it, Angela could see the wrecked and burned remnants of Geneva’s outskirts. The periphery of the original city protruded from beneath the outer edge of the massive alien metropolis like the ejected entrails of squashed roadkill.
The analogy turned her stomach, but Angela realized it was all too accurate. Humanity had become roadkill, crushed under the invading wheel of uncaring aliens.
Flickering light drew her gaze east toward Lake Geneva. Then she saw why the body of water had appeared to have spilled out of its banks. When Angela had first seen the area’s changes from space, she’d thought that Lake Geneva had spread out and covered the surrounding land, but now she saw that the lake still sat in its original banks. It hadn’t grown at all, but currently she was having a hard time discerning its surface against the ocean of silvery buildings that now surrounded and reflected off it. Everything blended, appearing as one just as it had when she’d seen it from the space station’s 200-mile altitude.
Her eyes returned to front. Ahead of them, a line of shadows drifted across the bizarre milieu. Cast by the slowly drifting rows of steel structures, the dark silhouettes dotted the land between their vantage point and the city.
Angela shook her head. “There’s no way we will ever find a way into the collider. We can’t get to CERN. It’s impossible.”
Vaughn looked at her. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t know that.”
She pointed to the city. “We don’t stand a chance against someone that can build something this big and complicated. None of this was there a few months ago. We’ll be like cavemen trying to pick a fight with gods.”
“We’re not going to fight them,” Vaughn said. “I thought you wanted to find out what happened in the collider … how it all links to CERN!”
Angela’s eyes widened. “How in the hell are we gonna get in there?!” She thrust a finger toward the distant skyline. “It’s buried under all that!”
Vaughn pursed his lips as he turned and stared at the surreal metropolis. After a moment he shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m not ready to give up. Not yet.”
“Then what?” Angela looked at him. “What in the hell can we do?”
He turned from her and studied the land ahead of them. Then he glanced up at a truck that was gliding overhead.
Incredulous, Angela thought she could see him formulating a plan.
Finally, Vaughn looked around their hiding position and then nodded. “Let’s backtrack out of this cut. Then we can move farther down the ridge and set up camp. We’ll watch things for a while, see what they’re doing, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure out a way into the city.”
“I thought you were ready to head for the Caribbean.” She extended an arm toward the mountainous pillars of steel. “Now you want to take on this?”
He pointed up at the sky. “We haven’t seen any spaceships, no invading hordes. Where did all of this come from? Who is doing it?” His head lowered, and he stared out at the ruined land. “And why here? Why us? Why in the hell did they erase humanity?”
Angela stared at the thin sliver of Geneva’s ruined remnants and chewed her lip as Vaughn listed the same questions that were racing through her own thoughts.
“Come on,” he said softly.
Rolling onto her side, Angela looked at Vaughn.
He smiled self-consciously. “Let’s scout it out for a day or two.” He winked. “Then we can decide whether or not to retreat to that island paradise.”
Angela chewed her lip for a moment longer. Finally, she nodded. “Okay, you’re right.” She scanned their surroundings and then looked back to Vaughn. “Let’s go see if we can find a spot under the trees, somewhere that’s not this exposed.”
Vaughn’s head bobbed slowly. “Okay.”
Angela rolled onto her belly and looked out over the city.
She heard a rustling sound and turned to see Vaughn backing away from the precipice. The tall grass soon hid him from sight.
She glanced at the city again and swallowed. Then she too began to back away from the ledge, crawling backward on her belly.
Suddenly, the ground shook beneath her as a thunderous noise split the air.
Angela froze.
Had something fallen from the levitating line? The image of concrete roadbed falling from that suspension bridge flooded into her mind’s eye.
Was it happening again?
She rolled onto her back and stared up into the sky.
Nothing.
Then the ground began to roll beneath her. The screech of renting metal split the air. It seemed to come from everywhere, but then Angela heard the sound of falling rocks.
She sat up, looking back toward the far end of the cut, where they had first entered the ravine.
“Oh no!”
A giant ship, a supertanker by the looks of it, was grinding its way through the pass. The front of its bulbous prow was plowing up the ground, throwing rocks and boulders into the air as it careened through the narrow cut. In spite of the incredible drag generated by its ground contact, the ship continued inextricably, grinding its way toward them.
Vaughn jumped to his feet. He scooped up their packs in one hand. With his other, he grabbed Angela.
“Run!”
Chapter 7
Angela took Vaughn’s hand and jumped to her feet.
They ran to the nearest side of the ravine. It looked too steep to scale. Out of options, Angela threw herself at it, but only managed to climb a few feet before the steep slope sent her sliding back to the bottom.
She glanced at the slowly approaching ship and then at the opposite end of the ravine. The thousand-foot drop and its alien overlook sat a mere ten feet away.
She turned to see Vaughn trying to climb the opposite side of the cut, but he had the same result, sliding back into the ravine in a cloud of dust.
Angela ran over and joined him.
Together, they tried twice more, but still couldn't scale the side of the ravine.
