Aeon Rising: The Apocalypse Begins by Matthew Mather

Author:Matthew Mather [Mather, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Babel Books
Published: 2022-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

7:52 p.m. ET

Max hunkered down in a patch of high wet grass and focused the binoculars.

Four hours of backbreaking bushwhack through this steaming and waterlogged world of towering green in search of anything they could use as a boat. It took an hour to cover two kilometers to get back to the swollen bank of the Japura. Two of the party had been bitten on rest stops—one by a spider that scurried off before it could be identified, and the other by fire ants. Kruger administered his best guesses at antivenom from the limited med kit, but both people’s wounds were already festering in the heat and wet and dirt.

An hour earlier, the sun had gone down. A bizarre scene of two setting suns, Sol to the west and Aeon to the south, casting crisscrossing gold and red rays through the treetops. The light of the two suns danced and flickered between scudding clouds threatening lightning. Thunder echoed in the distance. The scent of burning suns was somehow in the air, part of an aftertaste in the back of the throat, paired with the thick organic stench of rotting plants as the brown rain ate away at the forest carpet.

The sun had mercifully set over an hour ago and retreated toward the other side of the planet. All that was left now was Aeon’s glow and tendrils of auroras in breaks between the clouds, the sky purple and pregnant to the north.

But never dark.

The team had scavenged the minigun from the chopper, but they had to leave it back at the rocky outcropping. Same for batteries and other heavy items, most of the food, and half of the bottled water. Kruger forced Iona to repack half of the crates she took from the Colony. Lighten the load, he kept repeating, we need to be as nimble as possible.

It felt like the jungle was watching them.

The air hot molasses on each breath, the oxygen superheated into a glistening miasma hanging between the drenching warm rain. They had to stop every fifteen minutes to give everyone a break, make sure they were hydrated, check for heat stroke—not that there was much they could do about it. A few of the party were barely able to walk by themselves, never mind carry anything.

The sleeting rain burned the skin and eyes. Iona explained again it was the nitrides formed by the supernova in the upper atmosphere. Some of the vegetation on the ground was already beginning to turn brown, wilting before their eyes.

Nearly 8 p.m., but night would never come, not with Aeon shining. The clouds low and moving fast and tinted orange toward the south. Aeon was nearing its highest point. From their vantage just below the equator, Aeon was only a few degrees above the horizon and mostly hidden by the jungle, but its glow lit up the clouds in an eternal sunset. Hell was now a real place and creeping north by the hour as storms and heat engulfed the planet.

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