Phytosphere by Scott Mackay

Author:Scott Mackay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Human-Alien Encounters, Adventure, Life on Other Planets, General
ISBN: 9780451461582
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

30

Darkness was her world, and her car was her life.

At last they reached Georgia. Glenda couldn’t believe how long it was taking them to travel the four hundred miles from Raleigh to Marblehill. She was anxious because her charge was getting lower and lower, and Hanna’s coughing was getting worse and worse. They were well up in the mountains and, luckily, there hadn’t been any more road washouts or landslides. The rain had stopped, and the hills were holding. What bothered her were the immense fog banks—fog so thick it was like cheese, with a stench like rotten algae.

She took 441 south through Clayton, Tallulah Falls, and Turnerville, glad to reach Turnerville because the hills and valleys weren’t so big, and the road didn’t wind so much. Also, there was some farmland, not the chilling and grotesque dead forest all the time, which was really starting to frazzle her. But she was also unnerved to reach Turnerville because Turnerville was where they really had to start looking out for Buzz.

Though it was ten o’clock in the morning, the sky was black. The only light came from her headlights.

They pierced the misty gloom like twin swords.

Ten miles later, they came to Clarkesville. She veered onto 17. The charge needle was on empty. Yet Clarkesville was a heady milestone to Glenda, the last town they passed before they reached Marblehill.

She remembered the road now, and didn’t need Gerry’s old map. Seventeen twisted north to 75, at which point she turned left on 75 and headed west again on an old blacktop highway that looked as if it had been abandoned by road crews years ago.

She was no more than a mile along 75 when a cloud of flies enveloped the car. She slowed right down because she couldn’t see through the flies. They landed on her windshield and didn’t blow off. This made seeing difficult. She turned on her windshield wipers and brushed them away. But too late. She bashed into something, and the car lurched to a halt. Her kids jerked forward in their seat belts. The pressure of

Hanna’s seat belt against the girl’s chest made her cough again, and it was a miserable, exhausted cough.

“Jake, give me the handgun,” said Glenda.

“What’d we hit?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see a thing. These damn flies.”

Jake handed the gun to her, and she got out of the car.

She shut the door so the flies wouldn’t get in, and walked around to the front. The flies immediately got in her hair, eyes, and ears. She brushed them away as best she could, but there were so many that she made only a halfhearted effort, and then resigned herself to suffering through them.

She shone the flashlight on the road and saw that she had run into a dead horse. The horse looked as if it had been shot through the head. Who would shoot a horse through the head? The animal was horribly emaciated, and starting to putrefy.

Shining her flashlight further up the road, she saw three other dead horses blocking the way at various distances.

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