Exodus Read Online Free Page A

islands, she would have to convince Jacob’s group it should be their primary goal to locate and rescue as many survivors as they could. Quite how that particular feat was to be accomplished was another thing altogether.
    All that day, Emily had been keeping her eye on a huge bank of billowing clouds close to the horizon. It looked as though it was still many miles away, but it was hard to get a clear view of it as she traveled along the narrow, tree-lined streets of Stockport. The storm clouds were preceded by an honor guard of red sky that swept from a coral pink behind her to a deep crimson where the sky mated with the storm. There was not an inch of blue left up there.
    It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight.
    The red sky had become a permanent fixture. Emily guessed it was a result of the dust she had seen the alien forests releasing into the air. It didn’t take much of a stretch of her imagination to draw a disturbing conclusion: the red rain had killed off the indigenous species of the earth, humanity included, then used their bodies to create their own life-forms. Those in turn had created the alien forest and whatever those creatures were that had attacked her, and the trees were now spreading the red dust across the world. Whatever plant life the dust touched began the transformation process, as it was turned to the invaders’ own needs. It would not be long, Emily estimated, before what little was left of earthborn life was totally subsumed and replaced.
    And then there was whatever she had seen growing in the forest. Just thinking about the strange orbs hanging from the tree in the forest gave her the creeping heebie-jeebies. She had no ideawhy. There was just something about them that seemed…wrong. They were all smaller parts of a much larger, much more complicated conundrum, and she didn’t have the first clue as to what it meant.
    Rounding a corner, Emily came to an abrupt stop.
    Thor stopped beside her, panting heavily as he looked up at her. Ahead, the road was blocked.
    Stretching out into the distance before them was a river of vehicles of all descriptions. They filled both lanes, even overflowing onto the grass border on either side of the road, pushing up against tree trunks and fences. Most were crushed against its neighbor, bumper-to-bumper, but here and there she saw an SUV, compact, or truck that stood on its own. All the cars Emily looked into as she wheeled her bike between the snaking alleys of metal were empty, their doors either ajar or one of the telltale perfectly round holes testifying to the occupant’s fate.
    That, in and of itself, was disturbing enough, but the award for weirdest experience of the day definitely went to the three-quarter-finished alien tree sprouting up from the tarmacadam of the road, its roots burrowing deep into the blacktop. Beyond the first tree, several hundred feet or so farther along the road, Emily could see the outline of another, and, beyond that, another and another.
    The occupants of the vehicles had not had to travel very far to complete their part of the alien agenda, it seemed.
    Emily stood below the first tree, straining her neck to look up at the black trunk. Halfway up, fracturing the almost perfect symmetry of the shiny black surface, Emily could see the back end of a silver Buick jutting out at an odd angle. She walked around the base of the tree, climbing over the thick roots that had burrowed into the road’s surface, uprooting concrete and tilting carsas though they were nothing. On the other side, farther up the tree, Emily saw another car—this time it was just the front headlight of some indistinguishable make—embedded in the trunk. Unconcerned by the sea of vehicles, their newly transformed owners had simply built straight through them.
    It was, Emily had to admit, an amazing feat of bioengineering. In fact, the whole subjugation of planet Earth had been an astonishingly successful process, as much as she did not want to admit it,