Extinction Point: The End

CHAPTER ONE

The waiting room was small and cramped.

Emily hated it. The drab off-white colored walls, lined with cheap folding chairs, only added to her sense of claustrophobia. At the opposite end of the room, a bored-looking receptionist tapped at a keyboard with a single, neatly manicured finger. Her jaw worked a piece of gum; it appeared occasionally between the young woman’s lips as a pink bubble before popping nosily and disappearing again.

A gray haired man and a teenage boy sat waiting for their turn to see the doctor. The kid was absorbed in a cellphone, his thumbs flying over the tiny keyboard, while the man flipped through the pages of a tattered magazine, pausing now and then to raise a hand to his mouth to cover a dry, rasping cough.

Emily glanced at the magazine in the man’s hands: DOG GROOMING MONTHLY the title read.

Why do these offices always have such weird tastes in magazines? Emily wondered, as she made her way over to the receptionist’s desk. Was there some obscure magazine subscription plan especially designed for doctors, dentists and accountants waiting rooms?

The receptionist was too engrossed in whatever was going on with her computer to notice Emily as she patiently waited in front of her desk. After a half minute of standing there with not even a glance from the woman, Emily cleared her throat loudly. “Hi! I’m Emily Baxter from the Tribune. I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Doctor Evans,” she announced.

The receptionist, her constant chewing paused momentarily so she could push the gum to one brightly rouged cheek, glanced up from her computer (which Emily could now see had some kind of game running).

“I’m sorry,” said the woman, “what did you say your name was?” The chewing gum put in another brief appearance, flashing a glimpse of pink against the girl’s white teeth.

“Emily… Baxter,” the young reporter repeated slowly, just to make sure the receptionist got it right. “I’m from the New York Tribune and I’m here to interview your boss about the clinical trial he’s working on.”

The receptionist made an obvious pretense of checking her computer then picked up the cheap phone sitting on her desk and punched in a pair of numbers.

“Doctor Evans, I have an Amelia Bexter here for you. Yes, she says she’s a reporter… okay.” Emily matched the woman’s disingenuous smile at the obvious mangling of her name. “His office is just down there,” the receptionist continued, gesturing towards a corridor behind her desk. “Third door on the left.”

“Thank you,” said Emily as she moved in the direction the woman had indicated, but the receptionist’s attention had already returned to the pressing issues of her computer game.

“Bitch!” Emily muttered under her breath and knocked.

Forty-five minutes later, Emily allowed the door to the doctor’s office to swing shut behind her. She let out a small sigh of contentment as the sounds and smells of New York City washed over her. Emily loved this city. She’d grown up in Denison, Iowa. A small backwater farm-town that was as unremarkable as the hundreds of other towns surrounding it. Looking back, it seemed like she had spent most of her youth just waiting for the moment when she could get out of town and move somewhere, anywhere, as long as there were people… lots of people.

She had never meant to be a reporter; in fact, she had fallen into it by luck rather than design. Like many small towns, hers had an even smaller local paper. It published an issue once a week covering everything from the county Sheriff’s arrest record to the usual small-town politics. They had been looking for an entry-level reporter to cover the local town-board meetings and Emily had, on a whim, decided to apply for the position. Hal, the editor, interviewed her. He was a grizzled old man who looked eighty but could well have been one-hundred, for all she could tell. He had been in the newspaper business since the Second World War where he had served with the U.S. Marine’s Combat Correspondent Corp. He’d told her he would try her out and pay her as a stringer for a couple of weeks. “If you fit in, we’ll see about something permanent, young lady,” he had told her.

Emily had taken to the job in a way she never imagined possible. Comfortable as a tick on a dog’s ass, Hal had eloquently described her success, and within a month, Emily had secured her place as a staff writer for the little local paper. Two years later, Emily found herself promoted to lead-writer. She stayed with the paper for another five years before she felt she had enough experience to take on the extra challenge of working for a bigger publication. She’d been pleasantly surprised by the number of requests for interviews she received, but had finally decided to accept an offer from the New York Tribune that was just too good to pass up. It was her ticket out of the small town she had longed to leave for so long.

She’d been working the Metro Desk at the Tribune for six years now and loved every single minute of it. The job would never make her rich but it paid enough that she got by without having to worry about when the next paycheck was due. She lived alone, so she didn’t have a lot of the overheads other reporters had, like a family to take care of.

Emily never learned to drive, there never seemed to be a need for it. Back in Denison, she could hop on a bike and be anywhere she needed to be in less than ten minutes. In New York City, she would have spent more time stuck in traffic jams than she could afford, so she stuck with her trusty bike. For longer jaunts, she would usually just take the subway.

Of course, no matter how much she loved the job and the city, there would always be days like today. It was sweltering hot, 92 degrees with 65% humidity. When you coupled the coma inducing humidity and heat with the idiot receptionist and her equally annoying boss, you had the makings of a less than perfect day. But Emily didn’t mind too much, it was almost noon and she had her first story for the day in the bag, which meant she was already ahead of the game.

She had a choice now; head back to the newsroom or grab a bite to eat at a local café and then write-up her article. Emily pulled her smart-phone from its holder on her belt and checked her itinerary for the day. She had another three hours before her next appointment, so the choice was hers.

There was a small Internet café a couple of blocks away that she knew also did an astoundingly good BLT sandwich. At the thought of it her stomach gave a little grumble. Well, that decided it then. Emily unlocked the chain securing her bike to a NO PARKING sign, slung her backpack over her shoulder and set off in the direction of lunch.

Emily brought her bike to a stop in front of the café. Glancing through the large storefront window into the interior, she could see the place was deserted. She had her pick of tables to set up her computer and spread out her notes, leaving enough room to eat her sandwich. She chained her bike to the security rack the store had courteously installed just outside and walked into the café.

Emily felt the sweat under her armpits chill uncomfortably enough for her to give a little shiver as she entered the air-conditioned interior of the café. The mellow sound of smooth-jazz, smell of roasted coffee and fresh baked bread immediately grabbed the attention of her senses. Her stomach gave an anticipatory grumble.

In complete contradiction to her reception at the doctor’s office, a warm and honest smile from the café’s owner greeted Emily as she walked to the counter. “Good afternoon, young lady. What can I get for you today?” he asked, a slight accent betraying his Italian origins.

“I’ll take a Cappuccino,” Emily said after looking over the chalkboard list of coffees, “and a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich to eat in, please.”

The café was deserted, the lunchtime rush still an hour away, so she had her pick of tables. She chose a four-seater near the window where she could keep an eye on her bike while she ate. Emily pulled her laptop computer from the backpack and hit the on button. It only took a minute for the computer to boot-up and locate the café’s wireless Internet signal. Emily clicked on her email-client and waited for it to load any emails she’d received since going incommunicado over the past couple of hours. There was a message from her editor at the paper reminding her to get her stories in before deadline along with the usual collection of spam promising to increase her penis size and offering cheap prescription medication imported directly from China. Nothing important.

She pulled up her web browser and checked CNN. There was the usual potpourri of stories on the news website’s front page: conflicts still raged across some Godforsaken third-world country; a politician had been caught with his pants down again; reports of some weird weather throughout Europe, and some thoroughly uninspiring stock-market numbers that meant her 401k was going to be worth even less than it was yesterday.

Emily clicked on the weather article and began reading.

The Associated Press was reporting strange phenomena throughout most parts of Europe, the article said. Local government agencies were reporting an “unknown red precipitation” with no apparent meteorological cause. The first case had been reported in Smolensk, Russia over twelve-hours ago with similar reports of what the news agencies had conveniently, if somewhat unoriginally, labeled ‘red rain’, coming in from Finland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the UK, and Spain as the day had progressed.

“Anything interesting going on in the world?” the café owner asked, as he placed the plate with her sandwich next to her steaming cup of coffee.

Emily looked up and smiled, “Not unless you want to talk about the weather,” she said. Apparently, that didn’t appeal to the café owner as he fired another smile her way before walking back to his counter. Emily took a large bite from her sandwich, careful not to let any crumbs fall on her keyboard—it was absolutely delicious—and continued reading the news report.

CNN had decided to eschew the European press’ red-rain nomenclature and labeled the phenomenon Blood Rain, instead. Right, her reporter’s brain thought. Good move; give an arbitrary weather phenomenon a scary sounding name and it makes the whole non-event sound that much more frightening and threatening. It virtually guaranteed a front-page article and would probably give the writer a chance at a couple of follow-up stories, too. Lucky bastard!

The news piece also had a selection of quotes from eyewitnesses to the ‘Blood Rain’ epidemic sweeping across Europe. The witnesses reported the rain had begun falling at around 12:30 pm, seemingly from nowhere. “It smelled funny and when I licked it, it tasted like sour milk,” one witness in Smolensk had said.

Why the hell would you stick that stuff in your mouth? Emily wondered. The level of some people’s intelligence never failed to amaze her. Who knew where it came from?

There was no denying it was an interesting story, she had to admit, but the probability was that some unknown chemical plant in an equally unknown part of Russia had gone all Chernobyl and was spilling this toxic red shit into the atmosphere. And, knowing the former Soviet Union’s track-record for reporting these kinds of accidents, well, it would probably be months or even years before the offending chemical plant was located. Even then the Russians would maintain their lie, lie until you die policy of non-admission. Some things just never changed.

Emily took another large bite from her sandwich and glanced at the clock on the wall behind the counter: 12:28 the digital display showed. Time to get my ass into gear. She began the process of shutting her computer down and packing it away for the bike ride back to the paper.

Outside the café, she could see the daily bustle of life in New York City continuing as it had for countless years. The people changed, the buildings got dirtier and taller, but it all really just boiled down to folk getting on with their lives, doing the best they could to stay in the rat race.

Emily loved it.

“That’ll be eight-seventy-five,” the Italian man behind the counter said. Emily swiped her debit card and typed in her PIN, pocketing the receipt in a small pouch she carried with her. Come tax season every little bit would help.

“Have a great…” He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes looking over her left shoulder, out into the street behind her. “What’daya thinks’ going on out there?” he asked almost to himself, and Emily noticed a slightly confused look cross the man’s face as she twisted around to see what he was talking about.

Through the store window, she could see heat-shimmer playing off the sidewalk and the asphalt covered road. Instead of the usual hustle and bustle she had noticed just a few minutes earlier, she saw many of the pedestrians were now simply standing still. Most were shading their eyes against the bright sun as they looked skyward.

“What the…?” exclaimed Emily, taking a step closer to the window.

From the cloudless New York sky, a crimson rain had begun to fall with the force of a light summer shower. The drops pattered onto the scorching sidewalk, and began collecting into small bloody red puddles.

A thick glob of the red liquid splashed against the store window. Emily watched it slide slowly down the glass; it seemed far more viscous than normal rain and she suddenly had an inkling of how appropriate the label ‘blood rain’ was. In the space of a few seconds, the light drizzle increased to a heavy shower. Rain pummeled the sidewalks, roads and buildings beyond the sanctuary of the café. It clung to the glass of the window like mud, or, more appropriately, like blood splatter at a murder scene. Gravity slowly pushed it down the windowpane, leaving a bloody trail of the viscous liquid behind. More drops hit the window, these ones were larger and hit with enough force she could hear the thump of the impact against the glass. It was almost as loud as hail.

Pedestrians, who had until moments before stood staring in confused fascination at the bizarre spectacle, scattered and ran for shelter, some holding briefcases or clutch bags over their heads as they sprinted under awnings or into doorways and stores. Within seconds, anyone caught outside looked like a victim from a slasher movie, their thin summer shirts stained carmine and any exposed area dripping with the blood rain, which seemed capable of adhering to anything it came into contact with.

This was unbelievable!

Emily strained her neck to try to get a better view. It was hard to see clearly because the buildings were so tall, but she could just make out a patch of clear blue high above the rooftops. There were no clouds that she could see and no sign of any aircraft that could have been dumping this stuff. Just a pincushion of red dots dropping from an empty sky. So much was falling now that large pools of the gunk had formed on the pavements, fed by the overflowing gutters of the buildings that spewed bloody waterfalls onto the streets below like severed arteries. Streams of the rain ran into the gutters and along the sidewalks.

A sudden THUD! caused Emily to give a yell of surprise and leap back from the window. Something large had hit it and fallen flapping to the pavement just outside. It was a pigeon, covered in the red rain; the half-blinded bird had flown straight into the store-front of the café. The bird, its one wing obviously broken, flapped and convulsed in a circle for a few seconds, twitched twice and then lay motionless on the sidewalk.

As Emily stood mesmerized by the final moments of the pigeon, she heard the storeowner exhale a single heavily accented expletive. “Merrrrrda,” he hissed under his breath, reverting to his native Italian in disbelief.

Emily looked up from the dead pigeon in time to see more birds dropping from the sky. They spiraled down like autumn leaves, bouncing off car roofs or hitting the sides of buildings, then falling into the road where some were promptly crushed beyond recognition under the wheels of the few cars still moving. Emily wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw crows mixed in with the dying pigeons. Something even larger—was that a seagull?—crashed into the windshield of a parked car across the street, setting off the anti-theft alarm, which whooped and wailed in protest.

And then, just as suddenly as it had all begun, the deluge began to slow. The harsh patter faded away to nothing, leaving behind congealing pools of the strange red liquid clinging and dripping from every exposed surface, and eight-million utterly perplexed New Yorkers.

Within minutes of the red rain stopping, people began to abandon their shelter, tentatively edging out from wherever they had managed to take cover. Some, in typical New Yorker fashion, seemed totally unfazed by the event, interested only in continuing on with whatever they had been doing before the interruption to their day, apparently unconcerned with the unprecedented phenomenon they had just witnessed. Others, in complete contrast, decided to bide their time, choosing to stay exactly where they were rather than risk being caught in another downpour of blood. Emily could see their wide eyes peeking out from under awnings, others had their faces pressed to windows staring up at the sky, their mouths agape or relaying back what they could see to those who had sought shelter with them.

Emily’s heart rate slowly began to return to its normal level, as she continued to watch, choosing to stay behind the safety of the café’s front door, unwilling to leave the shelter it offered. Those of a more inquisitive nature had begun examining the remnants of the bloody storm, which, from what Emily could see of the puddles outside the café, appeared to be slowly evaporating into the early afternoon heat.

“Jesus!” Emily exclaimed, her natural reporter’s inquisitiveness finally getting the better of her as she cautiously opened the door of the café and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Dead birds lay everywhere, hundreds of them, their bodies littering the road, sidewalks and parked vehicles. Each tiny body was silhouetted by a halo of the slowly dissipating red goop. It took another couple of minutes for Emily to realize she was missing a perfect opportunity for a story. She unslung her backpack, pulled her Nikon from its case and began shooting a panoramic HD video of the scene. After she’d recorded enough footage she switched the camera to regular photo mode and began firing off close-ups of the dead birds, the pale shocked faces of bewildered locals and, most importantly of all, extreme close-ups of the now fast disappearing remnants of red rain. A few globules of the red stuff still hung from the handlebars of her bike and she took a few photos of it as it dripped obscenely into a small puddle around her front tire.

Through the macroscopic zoom of the camera Emily could see the rain, or whatever the hell it actually was, was not simply evaporating or being absorbed into the pavement like normal liquid. Instead, the red goop looked as though it was breaking apart into smaller pieces. As Emily continued to shoot footage of the puddle she saw one piece simply disintegrate into hundreds of tiny red particles that flipped and somersaulted on the street’s warm currents of air like an aerosol spray, before spiraling away like the Dandelion seeds she used to love to watch float on an evening breeze as a kid.

“What do you think that was?” said a young man, startling her from her observation. The kid had been sheltering under the awning of a bookstore next to the café, streaks of red stained his white business shirt and Emily could see droplets of the rain still clinging to his hair. “I mean, where did it come from? There were no clouds at all.”

Emily considered his question for a moment before replying; “I have no fucking clue,” she finally said. “No clue at all.”

CHAPTER TWO

Emily stepped back into the café.

“So, whad’ya think it is?” the owner asked. He had chosen to stay safely behind his counter and Emily couldn’t say she blamed him.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answered. The old Italian seemed to take her reply in stride, nodding as if she had confirmed something he’d already known.

“Is not natural,” he said to no one in particular.

Emily had been meticulous about avoiding the remainder of the red rain, carefully stepping around the puddles on the sidewalk and avoiding any kind of skin contact with the crap. But there was still a splatter of the stuff on her bike’s handlebars and she wasn’t going to risk touching it if she could help it.

“Can I grab a couple of these?” she asked the Italian, pointing at a container of disinfecting wipes on the side counter.

“Sure, sure,” said the old man. “Help yourself.” Emily pulled five of the wipes from the plastic dispenser and walked back out to her bike. She carefully wiped down the handlebars, leather seat, and then the cross bar and frame, making sure to toss the used sheets into the trashcan outside the café.

Satisfied with the job she had done of the cleanup, Emily climbed into the saddle of her bike, gave the café owner an a-okay thumbs-up accompanied by her brightest smile, then began peddling back in the direction of the Tribune’s offices.

Already the daily routine of New York City had begun to swing back towards normal, as though the downpour of red rain from the afternoon’s empty blue sky was an everyday occurrence and not something that should stop the city dead in its tracks. On the streets, the usual sluggish flow of vehicles continued much as it did every day. Horns sounded in outrage as pedestrians chanced their luck at jaywalking and drivers’ tempers began to fray. Tourists wandered aimlessly, staring in store windows and snapping pictures with expensive looking cameras, apparently oblivious to the dead birds littering the sidewalks, while the occasional kamikaze cyclist tempted fate hurtling between vehicles.

But, here and there, Emily spotted remnants of the red rain: in puddles on the sidewalk, on stained clothing and the occasional worried face of a passerby. And, she noted, the air now seemed full of barely visible particles of red dust, floating on the warm eddies wafting past her like pollen.

While the majority of the city seemed to have already shrugged off the event, Emily sensed this was no normal day. She knew, with a concrete certainty that sank deep to the bottom of her stomach, the world would remember this day, and those that followed it, for as long as there was still a human race left.

There are few things more disconcerting to a career reporter than to walk into a paper’s newsroom and find it silent. It’s where the stories are made, put together and researched. On any normal day, no matter what time you walked in, the room should be a controlled commotion of reporters running back and forth, consulting in corners or answering ringing phones; the newsroom is the beating heart of any newspaper.

And as Emily pushed through the double doors into what should be a room full of chaos and noise—especially given the incredible meteorological events she had just witnessed—what greeted her instead was the sonic equivalent of a library reading room.

Pausing for a moment, she scanned the room. While the day-shift of thirty-plus journalists and editorial staff all seemed present and correct, instead of being at their workstations eagerly putting together that evening’s edition, they had gathered in groups around the five 50-inch TV screens mounted on the walls of the room. On a normal day, each TV would usually be tuned to a different major national or international news channel, ready to catch any breaking stories that may have escaped the paper’s ever-watchful staff. Right now, every screen showed CNN. The reporting staff, all the way up to the senior editor himself, stood silently watching as others reported on a developing story that, on any other day, they would be tirelessly pursuing.

No one noticed Emily as she entered the newsroom. There was none of the usual banter or greetings from her friends and comrades, in fact, not one pair of eyes shifted from the TV screens to Emily as she moved to her cubicle, and dropped her backpack on the desk.

There were only a couple of possible reasons for the paper to come to a grinding halt, especially this close to a deadline. The first was that no one had witnessed the event that had happened less than an hour ago. Emily instantly dismissed this theory, as it was obvious everyone must be aware of what had just happened. She could see from the crimson stains on her workmates clothing that some, like her, had been away from the office when the red rain struck.

The second reason, and Emily found this very hard to believe, was a news event even more earthshaking had supplanted one Emily thought would be the biggest event to demand a paper’s headlines since the 911 attacks… and that idea frightened Emily very much.

“Emily? Where have you been? You okay?” The barrage of questions from Sven Konkoly, one of the paper’s sub-editors broke her from her introspection.

“Yes. Out. Fine,” she fired back before taking a deep breath to calm nerves she hadn’t even realized were frazzled. “What’s going on? Did you see what just happened?” she said, her hand fluttering towards the window.

Sven ignored her question, “Come on over here,” he demanded. “You need to take a look at this, right now.” Not waiting for Emily to comply, Sven grabbed her by her elbow and guided her to the group crowded around the nearest TV. On-screen, a female CNN news-anchor was talking to a young man via a laptop videophone connection, his frightened face filled a box in the top right corner of the screen giving the appearance he was talking over the news anchor’s shoulder. A caption under the image of the man read FRANCOIS REVEILLION. Emily estimated he was no more than twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight, tops. His eyes were bloodshot and betrayed a barely restrained panic that belied the calmly delivered answers he was giving to the news anchor’s questions.

“—exactly is going on there? Can you describe what you’re seeing?”

When the young man spoke it was with heavily accented English, Emily guessed he was either French or maybe Belgian.

“Everyone is very, very sick,” Francois said, his face so close to the lens of the camera Emily could see the pale, almost translucent quality of his skin. Red veins stood out on his forehead and a spider’s web of tiny broken blood vessels seemed to be spreading from his left temple to his cheek, terminating just above the man’s blond mustache. Emily could see beads of sweat pooling on his forehead and begin to drip slowly down his face. When he turned his head and looked away from the camera for a second she saw more of the ruptured blood vessels on his neck. His eyes were striated with thick lines of red and deep pockets of blood had collected in the corner of each eye until little of the normal white remained. He looked like a boxer who’d just taken a twelve-round pummeling.

“People are dying here,” he said. “Many people. They are becoming sick and then they just die. I see them on the streets, in their cars. There are many, many dead here.”

“When you say that there are many deaths, how many? Can you tell us?”

The man paused for a second before replying: “Everyone,” he said. “Everyone is dead.” His voice stuttered slightly as the terror everyone knew he felt, momentarily flashed across his face.

“Look, I will show you,” he continued. The screen wobbled as he picked up the laptop and carried it a short distance before turning the lens to face out through a second-story set of bay-windows. It was dark wherever Francois was broadcasting from, but light from several street lamps cast enough illumination for those gathered around the TV to be able to make out a tree-lined street with rows of two-story houses on either side. The houses, nothing but dark square-shaped silhouettes, looked European in design, like some of the pictures Emily had once seen of villages in Provence. There seemed to be several cars randomly parked in the road; a white compact was resting half on the sidewalk, its rear end straddling the curb of the road, a telltale plume of exhaust fumes floated up from the vehicle’s still running engine.

“What are those?” a reporter next to Emily asked, pointing to several dark almost indistinguishable shapes scattered randomly on the sidewalk and in the road. One of the shapes seemed to be slumped against a streetlight.

“Are those bodies? Fuck! Those are bodies.” The panic in the young reporter’s voice made his words rise in pitch as he uttered each expletive.

Emily quickly counted at least fifteen unmoving shapes lying in the street. It was impossible to distinguish their sex from this distance, but she could see one that definitely looked small enough to be that of a child. Next to the child a larger form lay spread eagled on the pavement, one arm seemingly reaching out to the motionless body of the child.

This was bad, she realized. This was probably very bad.

The view on the screen switched from the street back to the face of the young man and a gasp of astonishment mixed with horror escaped from many of those watching. In the few seconds the camera was focused on the unfolding disaster outside, the striations in the man’s eyes had spread until no white could be seen at all; his eyes looked like two pools of congealed blood. The network of veins Emily had noticed earlier had doubled in thickness and now extended across his entire face. A delicate web of veins appeared suddenly on his cheeks and a steady stream of thick bloody mucous began flowing from both of his nostrils.

Perhaps it was just her own fear reflected back at her but, despite the obliteration of his eyes, which were now nothing but black pits, Emily thought she could still see the terror he was experiencing captured in them. As the group continued to watch in morbid fascination, Francois’ mouth opened and closed once as though trying to speak, instead of words a thick gush of red liquid exploded from his mouth. Droplets splattered against the camera lens and he dropped from view, replaced by the image of a chair-leg as the laptop computer toppled from his hands and fell to the floor. A low, gurgling moan filtered through the TV speakers but it was quickly silenced as the newsfeed cut back to the CNN presenter.

The female presenter was visibly shaking, her skin so pale even the layer of makeup she wore could not hide it. She pulled herself together and continued her narration. “If… if you’re just joining us…” Her words were lost to Emily as a petite blond standing next to her suddenly began to sob and grabbed for Emily’s hand.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” the woman, whom Emily did not recognize, gasped repeatedly. The pretty young girl’s voice was tinged with a growing tone of panic, and Emily felt the woman’s grasp on her hand tighten as tears began to stream down her face. “Is that going to happen to me?” she bleated, her voice barely audible as she clutched at her own crimson stained blouse with her free hand. “Am I going to die?”

Emily squeezed the woman’s hand back as firmly as she could. “No, of course not,” she said, although she could hear the lack of conviction in her own voice. “We’re going to be just fine,” Emily reassured her, mustering as much faith to her voice as she was able and reinforcing her weak words with a forced smile.

Sven pulled Emily aside. “Do you believe this shit? Jesus Christ!”

“What about the other news outlets? What are they saying?” Emily asked.

“The same: first the red rain comes and then people die. There’s been no news from anywhere East of Germany for hours. It looks like the whole of Europe’s fucking dead.”

“So, just what are we supposed to do exactly?” asked Frank Embry, one of the crime-beat reporters. Embry was in his late sixties, and looked as though he had been plucked right out of the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. His hair was always slicked back and he would never be found without his gray raincoat (Frank insisted on calling it a mack) which he wore in the winter and slung over his arm in the summer. He’d always carry a rolled-up copy of the previous days Tribune in his free hand. “It adds to the mystique,” he would tell anyone who asked why he chose to dress like that. Most every other reporter thought he was a little nuts but Emily thought it was quite charming.

The full staff of the Tribune crammed into the lower floor meeting room. Senior editorial management had decided to call a conference and pulled everyone in twenty-minutes after Emily arrived back at the office. A feeling of dread permeated the little meeting room, not helped by the overbearing smell of sweat as too many people crowded into too small a space. Senior staff members were already seated around the eight-person conference table when Emily joined the meeting. The rest of the paper’s employees were either standing or leaning against the walls.

“It’s really up to you guys,” said Konkoly. “On any other day, I’d say we stay at our posts, I mean, shit, everyone remembers 911, we didn’t leave for three days. But this? This is a whole other bucket of fish.”

Under other circumstances, Emily—along with the majority of the staff—would have laughed aloud at Konkoly’s unintentional slip of the tongue. He had a habit of mangling idioms when he was nervous which was endearing and often hilarious, but his mistake went unnoticed today.

“I’ve spoken with both the senior editor and the publisher,” Konkoly continued, “and, while they would obviously like to see today’s paper go out, they’re watching the TV too. They told me to tell you it was your choice whether we stay or we go.”

“You got that right,” a voice piped up from the far side of the room.

Konkoly looked around the room at the grim faces staring back at him. “I’m pretty sure I know what the result will be already, but let’s see a show of hands for those who want to call it a day and get out of here.” Everyone except Frank raised their hands. He continued to lean against the wall, his hands folded in front of him. He’d left his mack at his desk.

“Frank?” The sub-editor’s voice was tinged with concern for the eccentric crime reporter.

“I’m staying,” Frank replied stubbornly. “I’ve been with this paper for almost thirty years and I’ll-be-damned if I’m leaving now.”

“Jesus, Frank, were you watching the TV? You saw what’s happening in Europe. What do you think this town’s going to be like if that happens here?” Emily couldn’t see who had spoken but judging by the thick Brooklyn accent it was probably Janice one of the paper’s legion of proofreaders. “You have to go home. Who knows how long this is going to last. It could be days before everything gets back to normal.”

“This is my home,” replied Frank. “Besides, there’s no one for me to go home to. At least if I’m here I can do some good. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. And when this all blows over, I’ll be the first to tell you ‘I told ya so.” He added a half-hearted smile to his last statement that seemed to convince everyone he was resolute about staying put.

“Alright people. It’s decided, this paper is officially closed until this all blows over. I’ll see you all then. Keep your cellphones close; we’ll call you when we need you. In the meantime… don’t you all have homes to go to?”

The paper’s staff began filing out of the meeting; what little conversation there was, continued in hushed, subdued voices. Emily stopped at her cubicle and waited, pretending to check through her mail while the rest of the staff grabbed their belongings and headed towards the exit. Finally, when only Frank and Sven were left, she walked over to them. Frank’s back was to Emily as he talked with Sven. She pulled the elbow of his tweed jacket to get his attention.

“Emily, my dear,” he said, turning to look at her. “I thought I saw your beautiful face in the meeting room. What a day, eh? What a day.”

“It truly sucks, Frank. Listen, why don’t you come home and stay with me? I’ve got the room. There’s no need to stay here alone.”

Frank smiled at her, his gray eyes twinkling, “While I appreciate the offer, I’m going to man my post. Besides, I won’t be alone; Mr. Konkoly here has decided to keep me company, haven’t you?”

Konkoly just nodded, and while his mouth smiled his eyes were unconvinced. “Yeah, someone’s got to make sure this old coot doesn’t run off with the computers.”

“You’re sure? The both of you are more than welcome to stay with me.”

“While the offer is tempting,” said Frank, “we’re staying. You’ll find us right here when you come back. Don’t worry.”

Konkoly simply smiled and shrugged. Both men looked at her reassuringly and she knew they wouldn’t budge.

“Take care you two,” she said over her shoulder as she turned and walked back to collect her belongings from her desk. “You know where I am if you change your mind. Just give me a call and let me know you’re on your way, if you change your mind. Okay?”

She smiled as she caught Frank’s whispered words to Sven, “Oh, if only I was thirty-years younger, I might just take her up on that offer. Life is just so damn unfair.”

Emily pushed through the Tribune’s revolving doors and stepped out onto the street. The day seemed just like any other. The streets filled with people and vehicles intent on getting wherever it was they were headed. She couldn’t detect any hint of panic or even an undercurrent of unease as she stood for a moment watching. It looked like the news of the deaths in Europe had not reached the majority of the city’s occupants yet. Everything looked and sounded so normal. Down the street, near the intersection, Emily heard the screech of brakes followed by a burst of profanity. While the world was falling apart around them, the people of New York continued with their day, either oblivious or uncaring of what was happening across the ocean in Europe.

Occasionally, someone would pass her with a look of worry fixed to their face, a cellphone pushed firmly against their ear as they spoke in low concerned tones to the person on the other end of the line, maneuvering their way through the crowd and on to some unknown destination. Emily thought she was probably witnessing the slow dissemination of the news as it gradually filtered down to the city’s inhabitants.

At some point the spread of information would reach a tipping point among the city’s inhabitants, a critical mass that Emily knew would turn this city inside out and upside down. As news of the deaths across the Pacific became common knowledge people would panic, and then New York would become a very dangerous place to be caught out in the open. It was imperative she got home as quickly as possible. She needed to prepare for whatever was heading her way. Emily had seen enough disaster movies in her time to know whatever came next was not going to be pretty.

She moved out into the crowd, cutting diagonally against the flow of pedestrians so she could reach the bike. She released the lock and unthreaded the chain from between the bike’s wheels, stowed the chain in her backpack, checked there were no taxis using the bike-lane as a shortcut, and, when she saw it was clear, began peddling towards home.

Forty minutes after leaving the Tribune offices, Emily pulled up outside her apartment block. She locked her bike to the security stand out front and headed inside.

The lobby was busier than it should have been at this time of day, a sure sign, she thought, that news of the deaths sweeping across Europe had finally begun to filter on to the general populace’s radar. A group of five people waited nervously in front of the elevator. They looked scared, more scared than she had seen anyone since leaving the Tribune’s newsroom. She wondered how much information had actually trickled down in the time it had taken her to get home.

Emily recognized a couple of the tenants waiting in front of the elevator and almost said hello, but she noticed stains from the red rain on their clothes and thought better of it, choosing instead to simply nod, smile and keep what was hopefully a safe distance between them and her. She had managed to keep herself free of any contact with the red rain so far. She did not know if that would matter in the long run, but it was probably better not to take any chances and to remain as far away from those who had been caught in the deluge as much as she possibly could.

She had no way to tell how the agent or pathogen or whatever this red rain turned out to be had killed those people in Europe, or how it was spread. For all she knew, it could be airborne and simply breathing the same air or touching a doorknob used by an infected person could mean the difference between living and dying. In fact, it was probably a good idea to avoid enclosed spaces like the cabin of the elevator and avoid any contact with possibly contaminated people, period.

“Jesus!” she said aloud, surprised at how little time it had taken her survival instincts to label everyone a potential threat to her life. She felt shitty for thinking that way, but how else was she supposed to think? Less than two hours ago, she had witnessed a man die horribly, live on TV. And if that was what lay in store for the people of New York, well, she was sure as hell going to do whatever it took to guarantee it didn’t happen to her.

With that thought still burning brightly in her mind, Emily opened the door to the emergency stairwell and began climbing the stairs up to her apartment.

CHAPTER THREE

Emily knew how lucky she was to have snagged her apartment. Perfectly placed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it was just a stone’s throw from the Hudson River and some of the most amazing restaurants in the area. It was also handy for the 66th Street and Lincoln Center Subway station, if she needed it, which was rare, but sometimes her stories took her outside of her comfortable biking range.

The kind of rent her apartment usually went for was well outside of what Emily would normally be able to afford on a journalist’s salary, but she’d landed it for an unbelievable price after she’d written a flattering piece for the owner of the complex. Her article had helped him fill vacant units and he’d been very happy with her. To show his appreciation he had given her a sweet discount; that’s how it worked out sometimes, just one of the perks of the job. Who was she to complain?

The apartment was a one-bedroom, one-bath studio on the seventeenth of twenty-five floors. She knew a couple of the other tenants on her floor; most were single professionals, but there was a married couple in one of the apartments and a single mom with a eight-month-old little boy—his name was Ben and he was just so adorable—a few apartments down from Emily’s. While the majority of her neighbors were friendly, she knew them on nodding terms only; everyone kept to themselves for the most part, which was fine by her.

The complex had its own gym in the basement area and a covered community pool on the roof. Not that Emily ever had the time to use either, of course, but it was nice to know they were there if she ever decided to take advantage. One day, maybe when she retired, she’d get to use them, but until that day she was just too busy and far too committed to the job to be bothered with minor distractions like staying healthy. Besides, her daily bicycle commute was more exercise than the majority of people got in a month.

Emily grabbed a diet soda from the fridge and walked into the living room. The far wall was framed by a large bay-window that looked out over the nearby rooftops toward the Hudson River and beyond. She was secretly in love with whoever had designed the apartments because they were smart enough to include a seat beneath the window where she could sit and watch the world pass by. Emily called the little area her roost. It was just a wooden bench with a thick layer of padding and a pastel blue microfiber cover, but it was one of her favorite places to sit and unwind from the many and varied stresses her job had a tendency to throw at her on a daily basis.

Emily kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bench. Pulling her legs up to her chin, she took a long pull of her soda and stared out over the city. While most of her view was blocked by a row of equally tall buildings positioned between her apartment block and the Hudson, she could still see the tree lined shore of West New York in the distance.

Until today Emily had always thought of the sprawling metropolis of New York as a microcosm of the US, a multi-cultural machine with very different parts that, despite their differences, worked together for the common good of all. It was loud, it was brash, and it was unapologetic. It had always seemed to unstoppable in its continual forward movement. That all changed today. Not since the dark days of 911 had she seen so much fear on people’s faces.

Emily looked down at the street. The buildings were mainly older office blocks, but sprinkled here and there was the occasional small store. Within walking distance, a hungry office worker could find a coffee shop, a florist, and just across the street from her place, a small corner convenience store that kept a stock of canned goods, newspapers and candy.

As Emily’s eyes roamed the buildings, she saw a flurry of motion in the street. A group of about twenty people had gathered outside the convenience store. At this distance, there was no way she could hear what the group was saying, but their body language was unmistakable; they were pissed. Fingers were being pointed, fists clenched and people were being pushed. Most of the anger seemed to be directed at a single man, he stood in the doorway of the store, his hands raised to the side of his head, palms out, as though trying to tell the angry crowd to stay back. The crowd, which seemed one wrong word away from being reclassified to mob status by Emily, apparently wasn’t having any of it.

Emily thought she saw a fist connect with the man in the doorway’s face and then he disappeared in a mass of flailing arms and bodies as the crowd pushed their way forward, surging through the narrow doorway and into the little store. Seconds later, she watched as people began running from the store, their hands full of the shop’s stock. She watched a man trip and fall, the cans and bottles of water he carried spilling from his hands, as he sprawled into the road, narrowly avoiding a speeding SUV as it barely managed to swerve around him. The vehicle didn’t even try to brake, Emily noted. By the time the man raised himself to his feet and dusted himself off, others had already grabbed everything he’d stolen. He stood dazed in the middle of the road for a moment, then took off running up the street, quickly disappearing from Emily’s view.

Emily had seen plenty of disturbing incidents during her time at the paper, but there was something uniquely upsetting about the scene she had just watched play out beneath her window. She felt… impotent. It was like watching someone she loved dearly succumb to madness, and there was no one and nothing that could help.

The sound of someone knocking at her apartment door dragged Emily from her thoughts. She wasn’t expecting company so it could only be Konkoly and Frank. They must have changed their minds and decided to take her up on her offer to stay with her. But if that was true why hadn’t they called ahead to let her know they were on their way?

“Coming,” she called and walked to the front door.

The owner of the building was big on security, so every apartment was equipped with a peephole that gave the occupant a fish-eye view of the corridor directly outside. When Emily placed her eye to the viewer it wasn’t her colleagues from the paper, instead she saw a police officer standing outside her door.

Emily unlatched the security chain and opened the front door. The cop was a good six-two, with sandy brown hair cut so short most of it was concealed beneath his cap. A nametag over the left breast pocket of the cop’s uniform jacket read MEADOWS.

“Nathan? Thank God you’re here,” she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “Have you heard what’s going on? Do you know anything?”

The cop didn’t answer; instead, he pushed past Emily into the apartment entrance then turned to face her.

“Shut the door, “ he said brusquely, his usually calm voice laced with an edge of panic she had never heard before.

“Jesus, Nathan. Not even a hello?” she replied, allowing anger to creep into her voice, more to cover her own uneasiness than because she was truly annoyed at him.

“I’m sorry, Em.” he said and leaned in to kiss her firmly on the mouth. When he finally released her, she took a single step back and stared up into the face of her boyfriend.

“I thought you were on duty today?”

“I’m supposed to be,” he answered as he walked towards the kitchen, “but Em, it’s crazy out there. I couldn’t even get within ten-miles of the precinct. Everyone’s leaving Manhattan and heading out of the city. The roads are jammed, people are going crazy.” He stepped around the counter to the sink, took a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the faucet.

“I tried calling the Captain,” he continued, as he sipped at the water, “but the lines are all busy. I thought I’d check on you and hold-up here for a couple of hours until the roads clear, and then I’d head in.”

They took a few minutes to talk about what they knew. Nathan had seen the same newscast as Emily and had no more information than she had.

“How bad do you think it will be?” Emily asked eventually, trying to keep her voice from betraying the panic she could feel in the pit of her stomach.

“Honestly, I don’t know, Em. But shit, did you see the red rain? I was on my way out the door when it came and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. You’re the reporter, how do you explain that?”

She couldn’t, of course. She’d seen the same phenomenon and had no idea how the rain had fallen from a clear sky. “I can’t,” she finally said, and moved around the counter to join him. “All I know is that I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and took hold of the lapels of his jacket, pulled him to her and kissed him again.

As she released him, Emily felt something wet beneath her fingers. She glanced down at her hand and gasped, feeling the world shrink until the only thing that existed were the tips of her fingers… and the dapple of red covering them.

“Oh!” she said in disbelief, and, as realization of what she was looking at sank in, added a sharp: “Shit!” She turned and ran to the kitchen, throwing open the cabinet beneath the sink, she grabbed the bottle of Clorox bleach.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she whispered through panic stretched lips. She rammed the plug into the drain then emptied the entire liter container of bleach into the sink, tossed the empty bottle onto the counter and plunged her hands into the bleach. She counted the seconds off in her head: one-one-thousand… two-one-thousand… three-one-thousand…

Only after she was sure her hands had been submerged for at least thirty seconds did she pull them out, just long enough to grab a scouring pad from the counter and begin rubbing furiously at the remaining red stains on her hands.

This cannot be happening, she thought. After all the precautions, after managing to avoid contact with that fucking rain all day and everyone who might have come into contact with it, she’d been tripped up by something as simple as wanting to kiss her boyfriend?

How fucking fair was that?

Emily began to sob quietly to herself as the full weight of the day finally broke through the crack of her consciousness, delivering an emotional sledgehammer blow against her chest.

“Jesus, Em. Are you okay?” Nathan was at her side, a hand resting gently on her shoulder.

She spun around and knocked his hand away. “Why didn’t you tell me you had that shit on you?” she yelled, spittle flying from her lips. Nathan flinched and took a step back. While they’d had their arguments since being together, he’d never seen her as upset or as angry as she felt now. “You should have told me, goddamn it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I… I’m sorry, Em,” he stuttered. “I didn’t even think…”

Emily looked up at Nathan’s horrified face, his concern for her was so obvious and his reaction to her fear so like him. It was a big reason why she loved him.

They had met just over two years earlier at the scene of a multiple car pileup. The accident claimed the lives of a young family of three along with two other drivers. The guy that had caused the crash—smashed out of his gourd, of course—had walked away with just a couple of scratches.

“How romantic is that!” she would usually tell people who asked how two seemingly polar opposites had got together. But the truth was, Nathan was the only cop Emily had met in all her years on the job who was still moved by the arbitrary nature of destruction, loss of innocent life and the pain he witnessed on a daily basis. Unlike other cops, Officer Nathan Meadows still knew how to feel, he retained a human heart, and he wasn’t afraid to allow it to show. And in the often-dark world both she and Nathan inhabited, well, that was a trait she found very attractive.

Oh yeah, and he had no problem with her use of ‘language’, as her Mother would call Emily’s ability to swear like a proverbial sailor. Dating was hard enough in this town; finding someone to put up with her inordinate knowledge of cuss words was even harder.

Emily felt the anger leave her. She stepped in close to Nathan and threw her arms around his waist, sinking her head onto his chest, aware that she was probably opening herself to more contamination with this simple act of intimate contact, but not caring anymore. She knew she had deluded herself into a false sense of security from the moment she set foot outside the safety of the café after the red rain had fallen.

How did that happen exactly, she wondered.

The world was literally falling to pieces and she was trying to act as though it was all okay, as though she was somehow outside of it? When had she become so unnerved? At what point in the day had her subconscious started to delude her into ignoring the obvious, terrifying probability that the world was about to suffer through a catastrophe unlike any in modern history? How did that happen? I mean, this could be as bad as the Spanish flu, it could kill millions across the globe, she thought. Maybe even more.

Fuck, her mind shouted at the thought of all the suffering this could bring. She buried her face deeper into Nathan’s chest, smelling the musk of his sweat through the layers of his uniform, fighting the urge to cry. Dark waves of fear smashed through her body. Weakened by the panic that held her firmly within its grasp, Emily felt her legs turn into so much jelly. She just couldn’t hold back anymore, hot tears welled up and began to trickle down her cheeks.

Nathan let her lean against him, resting his cheek against the top of her head until her sobbing gradually began to subside.

Emily could not think of any other time in her life when she had been quite as scared as she felt right now. Her fear was a gnawing uncertainty whittling away at the lining of her stomach, it seized every bone, nerve, and muscle in its ice-cold grasp, demanding that she stop, right now, and curl up into a ball until everything was back the way it should be.

She had never been one to simply give in to fear, and she certainly wasn’t going to start now she told herself, despite what had just happened, but her body was in the grip of an ancient, primal survival instinct and she found it very hard to resist.

Nathan had finally managed to reach the precinct and he had spent the last ten minutes stalking back and forth through the apartment while he spoke in a hushed voice to whoever was on the other end of the line. When he was finished, he snapped his phone shut, slipped it back in his pocket and joined Emily in the living room.

“They’re pulling everyone’s leave,” Nathan said, sitting next to her on the couch. “They aren’t telling us much other than the city’s going into full lockdown.”

“Is that just here or throughout the state?” she asked, blowing her nose in a tissue Nathan handed her from a supply he kept in his jacket pocket.

Nathan considered her question for a second, she knew him well enough to know when he was pondering whether he should divulge some piece of private info or not.

“Christ, Nathan. It’s not like I’m going to run off to the paper and publish your every word. You can’t hold out on me with this. Not now. Not today,” she said, unhappy with the whiney tone her voice had taken on.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” he said, “it’s just that I don’t want to scare you any more than you already are. Besides, the intelligence we have isn’t much more use to you than what you’re seeing on the TV. The Captain told me the word is they’re prepping for massive casualties. The CDC has absolutely no idea what to do. They can’t even fathom what the red shit is, let alone what it’s going to do to us, so there’s no chance of a vaccine. They don’t know how it’s communicated or why it does what it does, Em.”

“So what are we supposed to do while these guys sit on their thumbs? Just wait and hope for the best? Shit!” Emily jumped up and began searching for the TV remote. She found it sitting on the kitchen counter and pressed the ON button.

The TV was tuned to a movie channel from the night before, it was playing some fifties science fiction flick, so she quickly tapped in the number for the local news station. Unsurprisingly the presenters were talking about the red rain.

“—seems to be confirmation that the news out of most of Europe is as devastating as we have heard. The President issued a statement just a short time ago stating, and I quote: ‘while there is no reason to expect the same problems here in the US, I recommend that you practice an abundance of caution and avoid anyone who has come in to contact with the red rain until the Center for Disease Control has had time to analyze samples and can determine exactly what we are dealing with.’ The President went on to say that he thought it best if all citizens return to their homes and remain inside for the next twelve hours. Reports are also reaching us that National Guard units across the country have been mobilized to help deal with any unrest and to ensure the security of major population centers. Going back to our main story, all contact with Europe and the Russian Federation appears to have ceased approximately eight-hours after the first reports of the so called ‘blood rain’. However, news agencies across the US have received numerous videos and messages apparently depicting mass casualties from countries including Britain and France.

Similar incidents of the red rain phenomenon have been reported across the continental US, Canada and South America. Again, if you’re just joining us, the President of the United States has announced that…”

Nathan turned the TV off. “I’m not reporting for duty,” he said. “Fuck ‘em. I think it’s better if we just ride it out here. “

“They’ll fire you, Nathan,” she said, surprised that he would be willing to risk losing his job.

Nathan thought about what she said before answering. “I don’t care,” he said finally. “Besides, I don’t know if there’s even going to be a job to go back to.”

“How much food do you have, Em?”

Nathan’s question left Emily stumped for a moment because she hadn’t even given her supply of food a thought. Her job wasn’t your standard nine-to-five, so most days she would eat lunch at her desk or at the nearest café, as she had today. When she got home, she would usually grab something light like a salad or a sandwich. She didn’t exactly keep a well stocked pantry.

She checked the shelves, inventorying what food she did have: a six-pack of instant soup, two six-packs of V8 Juice, a couple of cans of tinned fruit, a tin of peas and one of mixed vegetables. There was a half a loaf of eight-grain bread in the breadbasket on the counter. The fridge held the remains of a quart of skimmed milk, an almost full bottle of orange juice, half-a pack of honey-roast ham, enough fresh vegetables to make a couple of decent salads, some leftover vegetable lasagna from two nights earlier, and four cans of Bud Light beer. It wasn’t what anyone could call a stockpile, but it would be enough to last them a couple of days until this all blew over.

It couldn’t take any longer than that, right?

Nathan apparently didn’t agree with her assessment because when he saw how much food was left, Emily had to stop him from leaving and heading out to the store to pick up more supplies.

“You can’t,” she said. “It’s not worth the risk. We have to minimize our exposure, and you traipsing off to the store is only going to heighten our chances of getting sick. We can survive for a couple of days on what we have; we’ll just have to be careful.” She paused for a second then added with a coy smile, “We’ll just have to find ways to take our mind off the lack of food.”

Nathan seemed on the verge of going anyway. Emily reached out and took his hand in hers, she could see the frustration written across his face; he was a man used to acting in situations, to being in control, a solution-finder who was now faced with an insolvable problem. “It’s okay,” she said, squeezing his hand. She saw the look of resignation on his face now, but that quickly transformed into a smile. He leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips, then placed both hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length, looking deep into her eyes. “I love you, Emily Baxter,” he said.

She thought about it for only a second: “I love you too,” she said then pulled him close and kissed him again.

There was little real news on any of the TV channels. Most of what was being broadcast was just speculation or reruns of video and audio collected from webcams and phone messages recorded at the time the effects of the red rain hit Europe. And, of course, there was sensationalism, lots of it. Depending on who a reporter was interviewing, it was either the Rapture, a Chinese backed attempt to exert a stranglehold over the world, or just a big hoax to try to frighten the American people into paying more taxes for healthcare. No one actually knew what was going on, it was all just so much speculation, but mainly it was depressing and incredibly frightening. So, after an hour of staring at the same talking-heads, Emily switched channels and searched for anything that would take their minds off what was going on outside the apartment. She settled for a rerun of an old black-and-white movie.

Emily and Nathan sat next to each other on the sofa and allowed themselves to be soothed into a sense of normalcy, her head resting against his shoulder, his hand resting in her lap. Her eyelids became heavy and, rather than struggle against it, she allowed the gentleness of the moment to sweep over her. Within minutes, her eyes closed and she was asleep.

Emily awoke with a start, unsure of where she was. It took her a moment to realize she was stretched out on her sofa, Nathan’s jacket was lying over her chest, but he was no longer sitting next to her. For a brief moment, she thought he had decided to chance a trip out to the stores for supplies but, as she sat up, she heard his voice from behind her.

“Hey there, sleepy-head. How you feeling?” She turned in her seat to face him, he was standing in the kitchen working on a cup of coffee.

“Want a cup?” he asked.

“No. Thanks,” she replied, then stretched and stood up, placing his police jacket on the arm of the sofa. She glanced at the stove’s digital clock: she’d been asleep for almost two hours.

At some point during her impromptu nap, Nathan had switched the TV back to CNN. He had lowered the volume to just above a whisper.

The news anchor spoke in an urgent rapid tone, but he didn’t have anything new to add and was just repeating the same news she had already heard. Emily was reaching for the remote to switch the TV off, still tired of feeling terrified, when she noticed something odd. The presenter was bleeding from his nose; it started with just a few drops splashing onto the pile of loose paper he held in front of him then quickly turned into a rapid drip. It took him a couple of seconds before he realized he was bleeding. He dabbed at his nose with his right hand, a look of surprise and embarrassment crossing his face as it came back bloody. He began to apologize for the unscripted interruption but stopped mid sentence as the blood suddenly streamed from both nostrils, his hand fluttered up to his face to staunch the bleeding but the blood was flowing so quickly it ran straight over the back of his hand and between his fingers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I… I’m terribly sorry about this…” He began to cough, pulling in huge gulps of air, then to choke, his face turning as white as the blood splattered sheet of paper he still clutched in his free hand. Emily could see the fear in his eyes as he and probably several million people across the state realized what they were witnessing. With a sudden spasm, the man’s head flew back, exposing his throat and the thick bright-red engorged veins pulsing beneath the skin. A violent muscle spasm snapped the presenter’s upper-body forward, his face and chest smashed into the desk, sending a spray of blood flying across the room, one globule hit the camera and slid slowly down the lens leaving a pink translucent smear behind. The man convulsed again, his body flying back into the upright position; his eyes stared directly into the camera as a slow wet gurgling escaped from his throat.

The man’s microphone picked up screams of terror from the studio staff but they were barely audible above the sound of the TV presenter as he slowly drowned in his own blood, his body gripped by violent convulsions as though he was in the midst of a grand-mal seizure. A thick red stream of blood exploded from his mouth, sloshing across the news desk. He continued to shake violently for a few seconds then abruptly stopped. His jaw fell open and he exhaled a long sigh as his head slumped forward until his chin came to rest against the lapel of his bloodstained shirt.

The screams the microphone picked up as the presenter died had been replaced by the sounds of faint gurgles and cries.

Emily realized she was shaking. “Oh my God,” she cried, through hands clasped tightly to her mouth. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Nathan? Are you watching this? Dear God almighty, it’s here.”

Emily turned to look back at Nathan. Her boyfriend was still standing in the kitchen, his face pale with shock, bloodshot eyes locked on hers as a stream of red gore exploded from his mouth, flooded onto his shirt and began to form a crimson pool on the carpet.

CHAPTER FOUR

Nathan was dead on the kitchen floor.

His body lay slumped against the wall next to the refrigerator, a large pool of blood slowly congealing next to him and on his gore covered uniform.

Emily wasn’t sure how long she had stared at Nathan’s lifeless body, it must have been a while, because the screams and cries of the dying she heard filtering through her walls from surrounding apartments, had finally, mercifully, stopped.

She had registered the suffering of her fellow residents only in passing, her attention caught completely by Nathan as he collapsed and began to convulse, his left foot banging spastically against the refrigerator. Each time his shoe struck the refrigerator door the cuff of his jeans inched up a little, revealing the almost translucent skin of his leg. Bulging veins pushed against the skin; engorged with blood they looked ready to burst out of his body.

The blood-splattered walls of her kitchen told the story of the violence of Nathan’s final seconds on earth. There was so much blood, she thought. It looked like someone had gone to work on him with a knife. Streaks of blood covered the counter, the cabinets and the floor. But there were no wounds on Nathan’s body, just his open mouth from which a slowing stream of blood still dripped. His wide-open eyes, black with hematoma, stared off into nothingness. Clots of blood collected in the corner of each eye, dark droplets trickling down his cheeks like tears.

Emily noted all of this with a dispassionate eye as she waited for her turn to die.

Death was coming for her, she knew and waited. It was just a matter of seconds before she joined Nathan and the millions of victims across the world who had already succumbed to this violent, insidious red-plague. What was strange though was with the inevitability of her death came a serenity of sorts, a calmness within her mind as everything complicated in her life ceased to matter. Her only responsibility now was to wait.

The cold honesty of her situation, the simplicity of it all, was a welcome relief.

So, she waited.

The clock on the stove showed the minutes ticking away: first one, then five, then twenty. Each time she managed to rouse herself from the almost hypnotic state that had overcome her, Emily would catch another glimpse of the clock and see that time was still passing and she was still breathing. Her hand periodically drifted to her nose to check for the telltale nosebleed that would herald her coming death. The first time her hand came back bloody, she began to sob quietly. She absentmindedly wiped the blood away with the sleeve of her blouse, waiting for the pain to grip her.

When next she checked, there was nothing but dried blood on her skin, and somewhere in the back of her mind she began to realize it wasn’t her blood, it was Nathan’s, splattered across her face in his final seconds as the convulsions seized control of his body and he slumped lifeless to the floor.

Her next coherent thought was that she had done nothing to help him.

But what could she have done, she asked herself. It was all over in seconds, not even enough time to have picked up the phone and dialed 911, and certainly too fast for him to have been saved by paramedics who would have been thirty minutes out, at least, if they even showed up at all. So, she had stood there paralyzed and watched the man she loved die.

She was certain some of the screams she had heard echoing through the apartment had been hers, but she could not be sure; the event was already becoming a blur as her mind struggled to grasp the unreal nature of what had just happened. Everything seemed so dreamlike, so distant to her, she couldn’t even be sure who she was anymore, whether this was reality or just some terrible, terrible nightmare from which she was unable to wake herself.

Apart for the laconic whir of the apartment’s ceiling fan and her ragged breathing, there was nothing left but silence now. The constant background noise city dwellers become so accustomed to became conspicuous by its very absence. The stomping feet of the couple above her apartment, the distant grinding metallic whoosh and whir of the elevators as they moved from floor to floor, the constant roar of rolling tires on tarmacadam outside the apartment had all ceased. As the city’s inhabitants died, its essence had died with them; all that remained was this crushing silence.

It was so very strange, thought Emily, as she realized this was the first time she could remember ever hearing her own breathing, or the noise of the icemaker in the refrigerator as it pushed neatly frozen cubes into the dispenser. Even on those rare sleepless nights when she found herself awake at two-a.m., the city still seemed alive. She had still been able to hear the traffic outside the apartment, or the sound of TVs drifting to her ears from other apartments.

Now there was nothing.

New York, the city that never slept, had been silenced forever.

CHAPTER FIVE

An hour had passed since Nathan died. The feeling of calm Emily had felt began to evaporate as, slowly, she began to surface from her mind’s self-imposed fugue state.

She was alive!

Emily tried to stand but her legs cramped and she flopped back down on to the floor, pain spiking up the calves of her legs. She felt as though all her energy had been sucked right out of her.

She crawled over to the coffee table and picked up her cellphone, trying to ignore the cramps in her legs that felt like a dog nipping at her ass.

Flipping the phone open, she punched in 911. “Come on,” she whispered. “Please. Come on. Somebody pick up.”

The phone rang and rang. No one answered,

She hung up and immediately dialed the number for the front-desk of the Tribune. It rang four times before a woman’s recorded voice answered and said “If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now.”

No one had picked up at the front desk, which was okay, she hadn’t expected anyone to be operating the reception area; everyone except for Konkoly and Frank had left, after all, so the system had defaulted to afterhours mode. She entered Konkoly’s extension number. It rang twice before she heard his voice in her ear. “Hi, you’ve reached the desk of Sven Konkoly. If you’d like to leave a message…” Emily hit the # key on her phone and the system returned her to the main menu. “If you know your party’s extens—” The recording cut off when she tapped in the two-digit number for Frank Embry’s extension.

It went to message, too.

Emily carefully worked her way through every extension number she could remember. Each time the voice of her friends and colleagues greeted her and asked her to leave them a message, they would get back to her when they could. Emily had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She stared at the phone in her hand, willing it to ring, for somebody, anybody to call her back.

The pain in her legs and bottom had turned into tingling pins-and-needles. She flexed her legs a couple of times hoping to get the blood to flow a little faster, it helped a little but they were still twitchy after so much time spent in one position. She tried to stand again, and found her legs were once again willing to obey her. She raised herself to her feet, and moved over to the window. She couldn’t see Nathan from there, his body blocked by the counter and the sofa.

There was one more call she needed to make. Slowly she dialed the number for her parent’s home.

Mom and Dad had retired ten years earlier. After selling the farm, they had packed up and moved to Orlando, Florida. “Gonna get while the getting’s good,” her dad told her in his best John Wayne drawl during one of her annual trips back home. “We’re craving some sun and sea,” he had gone on to say. “After sixty years of living here, I think we both deserve it, don’t you?”

Emily had agreed, it was the best move they could make, but she still felt a pang of sadness at the loss of the home she had grown up in, and, despite her childhood desire to leave Denison as soon as she was physically able, the idea of never going back there had been painful.

Listening to the phone’s distant ringing she remembered how happy her parents seemed the last time she had seen them. They both sported a deep tan from too many days on the beach. They were like a couple of teenagers, holding hands, cuddling-up on the sofa together as they had talked with their one and only child. When Emily heard the answering machine click on she let out a deep sigh, fighting back a rush of tears at the sound of her father’s voice: “Hi, you’ve reached Bob and Jane. We can’t get to the phone right now but if you’d like to leave a message we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

At the beep, Emily spoke softly into the phone: “Mom? Dad? If you get this message, I’m okay. I’m alive. I think… I think everyone else here might be dead. I love you. Please call me.” She left her cellphone number on the machine before hanging up. As she flipped her phone closed, she was left with the disconcerting feeling she had not left a message for her parents but a goodbye note.

Emily stepped into the corridor outside her apartment. She had left her keys sitting on the countertop in the kitchen. The idea she might accidentally lock herself out made her nervous, so she stood in the doorway with her right foot resting against the bottom rail of the door to keep it from closing.

“Hello?” Emily called, her voice echoing along the empty corridor. “Can anyone hear me?” There was no answer, just the gentle hiss of the air conditioning and an annoyingly familiar sound from further along the corridor she could not quite identify.

From somewhere on the floors above her, Emily thought she caught the sound of music playing but she couldn’t be sure. She had already tried flicking through the local TV channels but found nothing but empty desks and preprogrammed shows. At least the TV was still on the air, she reasoned.

“Hello?” she yelled again, louder this time, but still no one answered her.

Emily stepped back inside the apartment and started toward the kitchen. She grabbed her keys and placed them safely in the pockets of her jeans then turned and retraced her steps back to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

The click of the lock engaging as the door closed made her heart pound a little faster as panic gave her system a little tweak. She shrugged it off and started down the corridor towards the elevator.

There were forty apartments on each floor of her building. Emily made her way to her nearest neighbor. She knocked loudly and rang the apartment’s doorbell.

“Hi?” she called out. “Is there anybody in there? Can you hear me?” Placing her ear against the cold wood of the door, Emily listened for some kind of an answer, something that would tell her she was not alone. But there was no reply, not even the warning yap of one of the Chihuahuas or Shih-Tzus she knew some of her neighbors kept as pets.

Emily moved on to the next apartment and repeated the process. After the sixth door remained closed, she stopped knocking.

Hiss. Clang. Thump. There was that sound again, so damn familiar but Emily just couldn’t identify it. The sound grew louder the further she moved towards the center of the corridor.

Hiss. Clang. Thump.

Set back in an alcove off the main corridor, the waiting area for the elevator remained hidden from view until Emily rounded the final corner, following the sound.

Hiss. Clang. Thump.

The body of the dead woman lay half-in and half-out of the elevator doorway. Every few seconds the automatic doors would try to close and then spring back open as they thumped loudly against the unmoving woman. This was the source of the sound she had been hearing.

Hiss. Clang. Thump.

Each time the doors collided with the dead woman, her body would give a little twitch that Emily found incredibly unnerving.

The corpse lay face down, her head and upper torso resting on the linoleum floor of the corridor. A halo of congealed blood spread out around her head while the woman’s lower body remained in the elevator compartment. Two brown paper bags of spilled groceries lay at her feet, their contents—mostly canned peaches and plastic gallon-bottles of water—had escaped from the bag when the woman died and now lay scattered over the floor of the elevator. The dead woman was dressed in an expensive looking gray business suit, the jacket and white shirt beneath it had ridden-up around her middle, exposing the small of her back and the myriad of tiny engorged veins creating an ugly latticework across her pale skin.

One of the dead woman’s hands lay outstretched in front of her, her fingers cupped as though she had died while trying to drag herself out of the compartment. Her other arm was pinned beneath her body.

Emily had seen her share of dead bodies in her time in New York; it went with the territory of being a reporter. Most had been the result of accidents, suicides, or the occasional murder victim. She thought herself inured to the dead, but there was something incredibly disturbing about this corpse’s involuntary movements every time the door banged against it that reminded Emily of the zombie movies she used to love to watch. There was that, and the fact that the continuous hiss, clang and thump of the elevator doors’ opening and closing was head-achingly loud in the confines of the elevator alcove.

No way was she going to leave the poor woman just lying there. It was just too disturbing. Emily stood over the body for a few moments before deciding what she needed to do. She placed the heel of her right foot against the corpse’s shoulder and pushed. The body moved a few inches, leaving a red smear of blood, but then stopped as the friction of the escalator’s rubber-lined floor made it impossible to push her any further. There was only one way this was going to happen and that was for Emily to pull the corpse into the elevator by its legs.

She stepped gingerly over the body, carefully avoiding the congealed pool of blood and avoiding the doors as they once again tried to close and then sprung back open. Emily half expected the woman to suddenly reach out and grab her foot. She had a mental image of herself being dragged kicking and screaming into the compartment and the elevator doors sliding silently shut, her screams slowly fading down the empty hallway as the elevator moved on to pick up more undead riders to feast on her flesh.

The dead woman didn’t grab for her, she just remained where Emily had pushed her. Emily grabbed the woman’s legs by her blue pumps—Christian Louboutin, if she was not mistaken. Whoever this woman was, she had taste and money—and pulled. The body made a disturbing slurping sound as she dragged it feet-first the remaining distance into the elevator compartment.

Emily was surprised at how much flexion there was in the corpse. Wasn’t rigor mortis supposed to have set in by now? She lifted the cuff of the woman’s trouser and pushed it back, exposing the woman’s ankles and a few inches of the calf of her leg. Although the skin was certainly pale, it did not have the gray cast she had seen in other dead bodies. Also, there didn’t seem to be any noticeable lividity either, the natural pooling of blood to the lowest point in the body that leaves corpses looking bruised and battered.

Strange.

She was no doctor, but she was sure that was part of the normal course of decomposition. Apparently, she was wrong. Or the rules had changed.

So involved in her thoughts was she, Emily failed to notice the corpse was now completely clear of the elevator doors which promptly began to close again. She thrust her hand between them just in time to stop them from trapping her in the traveling metal coffin with the dead woman. As the doors opened again, Emily leaped from the elevator cabin to the safety of the alcove. Free of their obstruction, and with the woman’s body curled fetal-like in the corner of the cabin, the elevator finally clanged shut and this time the doors stayed closed. Emily watched the glowing LED numbers on the floor-indicator rise through 18 then 19, before finally stopping at floor 21 to pick up a passenger Emily was certain would never take the ride.

The door to apartment #32 was ajar.

Emil’s heart began to beat faster as she approached. Maybe there was someone alive in there.

Not wanting to walk into the apartment unannounced, Emily leaned towards the crack of the door and called out “Hello? It’s Emily. I live in apartment number six. Is there anyone home?” As she leaned in, her shoulder nudged the door open further and the sudden squeak of its unoiled hinges caught her momentarily off guard, setting her heart racing even more. It took her a second to gather herself before she pushed the door wider and stepped into the apartment.

The hallway lights were on and from where she stood Emily could see the curtains pulled closed in the living room at the opposite end of the corridor, shrouding it in darkness. The apartment was tastefully furnished, an expensive looking vase rested on a sofa-back table in the hallway holding a fresh bunch of oriental lilies. Beneath the scent of the lilies was another, not so pleasant smell. Emily recognized the unmistakable odor of vomit mixed with the metallic, heavy tang of spilled blood. It wasn’t strong at this end of the apartment but the open door allowed the air-conditioned corridor to pull the scent towards her.

Emily moved further into the apartment’s hallway, not bothering to announce herself again, as she already knew what she would find. Where the corridor opened into the living room area Emily saw a small shape spread-eagled on the floor: it was a child, no more than four or five, a little boy. His dead, blood-black eyes stared at the ceiling and a tiny fist gripped at the blood soaked t-shirt he wore. In the dead child’s other hand was a small brown teddy-bear. An oval pool of flakey blood had dried around the boy’s head, leaking from his nose and his mouth, which hung loosely open, forever locked in a state of shock and terror.

Emily stifled a cry of horror. Trying to avoid looking at the little boy, she stepped around him, keeping her eyes fixed instead on a painting hanging on the far wall as she moved into the living room.

The bodies of two adults lay nearby. The man was still sitting upright on the living room sofa, his arms hung loosely at his side and his head drooped toward his left shoulder. A stream of dried blood and congealed vomit cascaded from his mouth running down the front of his business suit, forming a black pool in his lap. The dead man’s eyes stared sightlessly at the equally black flat-screen TV fixed to the far wall of the apartment.

A woman, Emily assumed it was the boy’s mother, lay crumpled on the floor in front of the man. When she collapsed, she had fallen through a glass coffee table, smashing it into a thousand pieces. Shards of broken glass were everywhere, covering the floor in front of the sofa and jutting from between the threads of a beautiful oriental rug the table had sat on. One large fragment had penetrated through the woman’s left arm. It must have severed an artery, Emily thought, because the lake of blood around the woman was much larger than she had seen from the other victims of the red rain.

Curled up in the corner of the room, she saw another small shape motionless on the expensive carpet. Not a child this time; the family cat, Emily guessed. It too was dead, dark red clots of blood congealing at every orifice. This sickness, this red plague, did not seem to discriminate between species and Emily was pretty sure that that was a very bad thing. Viruses were not supposed to transfer between species. It was supposed to take time or bad luck for it to mutate into a form where it would be able to jump across, but this one seemed more than capable of killing anything it came into contact with. She remembered the dead birds she had witnessed falling from the sky when the red-rain first came.

This was bad, Emily realized. It probably meant the situation was far worse than she had first thought. If the rain was able to kill across species then where would it stop? Would it mean every creature on Earth was affected or just those that had come into contact with the red rain? The idea was terrifying.

It was also something she simply was not willing to contemplate right now. For all she knew this was a localized event and help was already on its way. If it was, then she wouldn’t have to worry about what kind of a threat the rain was. She could leave it to the experts to figure out, not her; she was just a journalist. Emily knew her line of reasoning was tenuous at best, but it was all she had, and she was going to hang onto it at all costs.

There was nothing more for her here. Emily began backtracking towards the front door, careful to avoid looking at the bodies of the family who had once lived here.

Outside, as the cool of the air-conditioning washed over her, Emily considered moving her search to the other floors of the apartment building. She got as far as the elevator and almost pressed the call button before she caught herself from summoning the dead woman back to her floor.

She already knew what she would probably find if she left the safety of her floor. If the footage she had seen of the devastation in Europe had been anything to go by, Emily’s survival was an anomaly. Everyone else was most likely dead, both here in the apartment building and throughout the city, probably even across the country and maybe—as hard as it was to allow herself to even contemplate—the world.

And if there were survivors in her building, surely she would have heard something from them by now. Someone would have been moving around, looking for others as she was. There was no way she was going to put herself through the pain of finding more bodies like those of the elevator woman and the poor family she had just left.

It was all just too… sad. Yes, that was exactly the word to describe this situation. It was all just too goddamn sad.

Emily stood in front of the door leading into the emergency stairwell. She pulled open the door and yelled into the open cavity “Is there anybody there? Can you hear me?” She waited a few seconds for an answer—none came, just the hollow sound of her own voice echoing back to her and the metallic clang of the door as she let it close behind her.

There had to be another way to get the attention of anyone left alive, she thought as she walked back towards her apartment.

Strategically placed at key points on each floor of the apartment building were four bright-red pull-station activators for the complex’s fire alarm system. Emily had passed two of them before she grasped she had the perfect solution and stopped at the one nearest her apartment.

Emblazoned with the word FIRE in large white letters on each case, the alarm could be triggered by simply pulling down on a small plastic handle. If there was anyone left alive in the building, or even nearby for that matter, this would be the way to let them know there were other survivors or at least flush them from their apartment.

Still, Emily was reticent to activate the alarm system. It wasn’t like she was yelling fire in a crowded cinema, she argued with herself, this was an emergency and the only way of guaranteeing she would get the undivided attention of any survivors left in the building.

Emily gripped the handle with her fingers and pulled it down.

Instantly, a white strobe light set high up on the wall began flashing. It was accompanied by an ear splitting alarm so loud it forced Emily t o throw her hands to her ears in pain.

“Ouch,” she exclaimed while simultaneously allowing herself a weak smile of triumph. If this didn’t get someone’s attention she didn’t know what would.

With her hands still firmly over her ears, Emily sprinted back to the entrance of the emergency stairwell. She opened the door and positioned herself half in the doorway where she could see anyone who came down the stairs while still giving her a clear view of the elevator floor display. If the lights of the display changed it would mean someone was using the elevators to head to the ground floor.

The piercing electronic wail of the alarm quickly induced a throbbing headache in the front of Emily’s skull, but she waited almost fifteen minutes in the stairwell, hoping someone might appear. But the illuminated floor number above the closed elevator doors did not waver and no one met her on the stairs. Still, she gave it another five minutes before allowing herself to let go of the hope of others being alive within her building.

Fighting back a steadily growing surge of despair, Emily allowed the door to close behind her as she walked back to the refuge of her own apartment.

CHAPTER SIX

Emily unlocked her apartment and stepped inside, made her way to the kitchen for a glass of water and froze when she saw Nathan’s body lying there.

It was as though she had completely forgotten about him the second she left the apartment. It was the trauma of the whole event, she knew that, but this was just too much for one person to be able to handle. How was she supposed to cope with this? There was no one to help her. So what was she supposed to do now? She had the dead body of her boyfriend in her kitchen, a bad enough scenario on any other day, but today it was simply a nightmare.

The sound of the fire alarm was squelched somewhat by the walls of her apartment but it was still loud enough to be a constant distraction, especially as the headache was blossoming into a face-numbing migraine. She knew now she hadn’t thought the whole activate-the-fire-alarm plan through quite as well as she should have, blinded by the hope of finding somebody else alive. Sure, it was loud enough to attract attention but how the hell was she supposed to turn it off? The incessant screech was beginning to drive her just a little insane.

It was all just too much for her overwrought emotions to deal with and she felt her consciousness begin to spiral back down toward that nice, safe place, deep inside the recesses of her mind. It was so tempting to just let go of reality. To allow herself to regress and forget about the whole god-awful mess she found herself in. But Emily knew if she allowed herself the luxury of skipping out on reality, the chances were she would never come back. She could feel herself standing on the very brink of madness, all it would take was a single mental step off that precipice and it would all be over for her.

And, oh God, it was so very, very tempting.

“No,” she said through teeth gritted so firmly she could feel the pressure waves rolling up through her jaw. “That’s not going to happen.”

She dismissed any thought of giving-up from her mind. She was a survivor. She had always been a survivor, and she sure-as-shit wasn’t going to change now just because it looked like the world was ending.

Emily started purposefully towards the bedroom, doing her best to push the sound of the alarm from her mind and concentrate on what she had to do next. Opening the linen cabinet, she pulled out a spare pair of bed sheets. She tossed the top sheet back in the cabinet, choosing the elasticated fitted-sheet instead. Thankfully, it was a queen size, anything smaller probably wouldn’t have worked for what she had in mind.

She took the sheet back to Nathan’s body and considered exactly how she was going to do what she needed to do. He was sitting upright which would help, but he weighed close to one-eighty and she wasn’t sure she was physically strong enough to carry that kind of weight—dead weight, her mind cackled at her, but she ignored it—if this didn’t go as planned.

Emily allowed most of the fitted sheet to drop to the floor while keeping the top hem stretched between both her hands. She looped the edge over Nathan’s head and forced it down between his shoulders and the refrigerator his body leaned against. She had to press her right knee against his chest so he wouldn’t keel over, not just yet. Emily pulled the elasticated edge of the sheet first over Nathan’s left shoulder and then the right, being sure to push it down as far as she could until both the right and left edges met. She tucked the side edges of the sheet underneath his elbows and pulled the remainder of the sheet down over the feet. With the sheet securely in place, Emily moved off to the side of Nathan’s body, grasped the edges of the sheet together as tightly as she could then pushed against his shoulder.

Nathan’s body slowly slid sideways down the refrigerator until he lay flat against the floor. Emily had to give the edge of the sheet a couple of tugs to pull the right side free so it met the opposite side. She grabbed his legs at the ankles and straightened them out, then moved back to his shoulders, still holding the edge of the sheet together, and pushed.

Nathan’s body rolled over to rest face down on the kitchen floor, completely encased within the fitted sheet like some modern day Mummy.

Emily had already figured out exactly where she was going to have to take him. She had considered the elevator but she just couldn’t bring herself to do that. Instead, she decided to take Nathan’s body to the apartment where she had found the dead family. It was further but it also seemed more fitting somehow.

There was a roll of twine in the kitchen utility drawer and Emily cut several four-feet long lengths of it. She slid the first piece under the sheet near Nathan’s head and wiggled it down until it was parallel with his wrists then tied the two loose ends together, securing his arms to his sides within the shroud. She repeated the procedure again to secure his arms at his shoulders and then to lock his ankles together.

When she was finished, Emily scrunched together a handful of the fabric near his feet until she had enough to give her a secure handgrip. She tied that off with a shorter piece of the twine. She gave the shroud a couple of careful tugs just to make sure Nathan’s body was secure within the sheet. Satisfied with her work she took hold of the handgrip with both hands and began to pull the corpse of her boyfriend toward the front door.

It was relatively easy to slide Nathan along the smooth tiled kitchen floor, but when she hit the carpeted area of the hallway the friction of the cotton sheet against the carpet made moving his body much more difficult. By the time she pulled his body through the front door and out into the 17^th floor corridor, she was sweating hard and breathing even harder. She dropped Nathan’s feet to the floor and took a minute to get her breath. The alarm, so much louder out here, beat Emily’s head like it was a tribal drum, she could feel a vein begin pulsing in her forehead as the pain banged against the front of her skull.

When she reached the halfway mark near the elevator, her head felt as though it would explode, and the muscles in her arms, back, and neck were burning. Her fingers ached in every joint where she had gripped the fabric so tightly to avoid it slipping from her grasp. Emily was half-tempted to leave the body there for the night but the idea of facing this first-thing in the morning was unthinkable. She interlocked the fingers of both her hands and flexed them until her knuckle joints popped, then reached down and began hauling her grisly load towards the waiting door of apartment #32.

Emily bumped the door of the apartment open with her butt. She pulled Nathan’s body down as far into the entrance corridor as she could before her hands finally told her they could take no more and she had to let go. His sheet covered feet clumped to the carpet and Emily slumped down right after them, her back resting against the wall as she fought to catch her breath. Her blond hair had matted to her forehead and she pushed it back out of her stinging sweat filled eyes. Her head was thumping with the mother of all headaches, her vision was swimming and her heart pounded in her ears. She had never felt so exhausted in her life. It took all her will power not to close her eyes and sleep right there. Instead, she raised herself to her feet, ignoring the pain in her back and the objections of her knees, and hobbled out of the apartment.

At the door she paused momentarily and stared at the shrouded form of Nathan. “Bye, baby,” she whispered and pulled the door shut until she heard the click of the lock engage.

She had taken two steps toward her apartment when the wailing of the fire alarm suddenly stopped. There was a second or two’s pause and then Emily heard three short, sharp beeps as the system had either shut itself down or reset.

“Thank you, God,” said Emily, and staggered the remainder of the distance home.

She was utterly spent.

The pain in her head eventually began to fade but only after she washed down a couple of painkillers with one of the remaining cans of beer from the fridge. Neither the beer nor the painkillers did much to help her back which spasmed and shuddered every time she moved. And no amount of alcohol or pills was ever going to ease her numbness over the death of Nathan.

She sat facing the window of her apartment, sipping the remainder of the Bud Light while she stared out at her little slice of the city, watching dusk slowly descend over the buildings. Emily had never experienced such a profound silence before, both outside the apartment and within her heart.

Who knew such absolute stillness existed.

The streets were free of cars and people, the sky, usually buzzing with aircraft and birds, was vacant and clear. It was quite beautiful. A light brown haze of smog still swirled high above the rooftops, the only reminder of the millions of lives that had traversed the streets and alleys below, just hours before.

As dusk gradually edged toward night, she watched the streetlights begin to flicker silently on, casting long shadows that stretched and grew before being swallowed up in the descending darkness.

The silence quickly became intolerable, and Emily abandoned her spot at the window for the couch instead. She switched on the TV, more for the comfort gained from filling the room with any sound other than her own breathing. She felt as though her head had been stuffed full of cotton balls. It wasn’t a bad feeling, not really, kind of like a shot of Novocain for her spirit, buffering her against the pain of the reality of her situation.

On the TV screen the image of the dead news presenter stared back at her, his eyes as black and blank as she was sure hers were. She returned his stare for several minutes, then switched off the TV and dragged her sorry excuse for a body to the bedroom.

As she passed through the kitchen, Emily glimpsed the blood stained pool where Nathan’s body had lain and the splatter on the counter. She was just too tired to take care of it right now; it would have to wait until the morning. She trudged into her bedroom and collapsed on top of the comforter.

Within minutes, she was asleep. Mercifully, she did not dream.