sure that they had not been there before her excursion to the alien ship, and, while they were only visible to anyone who got within kissing distance, she had resorted to wearing sunglasses whenever she was outside or not with her immediate circle of family and trusted friends.
A small but distinct and growing sense of paranoia existed within the camp as the inevitable clash of cultures and beliefs of the survivors ground against each other on an almost daily basis, and Emily did not want to add any more fuel to that particular slow-burning fire.
Mac had seen her eyes, of course, but the only reason he could come up with was that they might be some kind of side effect of whatever process the Caretakers had used to transport Emily to their ship back in Las Vegas.
“Maybe there was some kind of malfunction in their transporter beam, you know, like in Star Trek ,” he had said, only half joking.
“That would make you Scotty, then?” she had said, nodding her agreement, but beneath the humor she knew better. She did not feel the same since her return; her nights had been plagued by odd dreams, strange voices echoing in her head and a sense that she was . . . fractured, splintered almost, and yet part of something larger, something unseen that was as elusive as trying to hold on to the past.
The dreams were not nightmares, exactly, but they were disconcerting enough to wake her on more than one occasion bathed in sweat. Instead of fear, she woke with a sense of longing, of missing something close to her that she simply could not figure out. And, of course, there was also the possibility that each of the twenty or so millimeter-sized red specks were a side effect of her being the only human to have survived direct contact with the red rain. Every other survivor had either been safely hidden away at the bottom of the ocean, protected by the extreme cold of the Arctic and the Antarctic, or hundreds of kilometers above her head in the International Space Station.
Before he died, Rhiannon’s father had told Emily that the rain had stopped short of their hilltop home; they had been protected by the peculiar weather system of the area. So that left Emily as the sole witness to the metamorphic effect of the rain, how it had changed human life along with every other life-form on the planet, molding it to a preprogrammed plan that transformed the skin of the planet into what lay beyond the border of Point Loma. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the virus had had some kind of effect on her too, even if only as small as changing her eyes.
“You okay, love?” Mac’s question tugged her mind back to reality.
“What? Oh yeah! I just zoned for a second.”
Mac lifted the boy from his mother. “You wee rascal, you weigh a bloody ton already,” he said. Adam gurgled his contentment and clung tightly to his father.
Rhiannon tickled the boy under his chin, which brought about another fit of giggles.
Emily wasn’t really sure when it had happened, maybe that first day after they had buried Ben, but the truth was it did not matter: Rhiannon had become her surrogate daughter, and, eventually, once Mac came into their life, his too. And when Adam was born Emily had seen an almost instantaneous shift in Rhiannon; she had gone from being a child to a young woman, a big sister eager to take on whatever responsibilities Emily was willing to delegate to her. Emily was sure that the loss of Rhiannon’s little brother, Ben, had played a huge part in the girl’s almost obsessive dedication to Adam. And if Emily were being completely honest she had leaned on Rhiannon a little too much in these early months. But that was what families did, right? When things were tough, they stuck together and held each other up and helped when and wherever they were needed, each one shouldering whatever load was placed on them. It was sad to think that this little group of five entities was in all likelihood the only complete family left on the
Martha Stewart Living Magazine