Exodus

EPILOGUE

From her perch, high above the world, Commander Mulligan watched as the blanket of red closed over all but the tiniest sliver of North America.

The warning she had issued to the survivors on the planet’s surface regarding the storm’s destructive potential had been greatly underestimated, she had come to realize. That storm had been only the forerunner of something much larger. Something far more awesome.

Over the past six days she had witnessed more and more storms form over the earth’s major landmasses, seething pools of blood that swirled and flowed across continents and seas. She had watched them gestate; growing from tiny spots of red before gradually expanding, reaching out with crimson feelers to find and merge with other systems, each growing in size and ferocity with every orbit the ISS made around the earth.

She had managed to count eight of these massive storms, each one at least a thousand miles across, before, like their earlier incarnations, they, too, had begun searching out and connecting with each other. A continual barrage of lightning, each bolt hundreds of miles in length, exploded silently across the anvil of the planet, illuminating the storms from within like some grand light show.

Over the course of days, each storm found the other, and when they touched they fused into a single, massive superstorm, which in turn gradually expanded to blanket the world in a swirling pall of vermilion cloud.

That storm had grown exponentially in ferocity and size until it blotted out everything but two small cones of blue over each of the planet’s poles.

And what would emerge from that chaos below her? she wondered. Who could say? She was certain, though, that if the red curtain was ever lifted, the world it revealed would be a very different place from what any of them had known. A small part of her welcomed the fact that she would never set foot on her planet again.

Fiona wondered how Emily had fared. Had they made it? She would never meet the woman, but she had sounded strong, had struck her as a more than capable individual. If anyone could have made that incredible journey, she believed it would have been Emily. Still, the silence she had met with each time she tried to reestablish contact with Jacob had been disconcerting.

It did not bode well for the tiny group of survivors.

“God help them,” she whispered to the invisible world beneath her.

Far, far below the station, a dark-red cataract within the storm raged over what had once been Alberta, Canada.

“God help them all.”