Extinction Point: The End

CHAPTER TEN

Emily awoke to the faint but unmistakable sound of a baby crying.

At first, as the sound penetrated her Diphenhydramine induced sleep, Emily thought she was simply dreaming.

She felt damp and she could sense tiny pinpricks of perspiration all over her skin. With no air conditioning to cool her, the temperature had continued its gradual rise overnight. She’d kicked the comforter off at some point and now lay spread-eagled diagonally across the bed. The medication she’d taken to help her sleep had left her feeling woozy while it continued to try to drag her back down into sleep.

Of course it’s not a baby. Just a dream. Go back to sleep. No need to wake up yet, her addled mind whispered to her.

Then the sound came again. A drawn out wail that was unmistakable. Adrenaline instantly pumped into her body negating the pills effects and she bolted upright, listening intently to make sure she was not just hearing some sound created by the building.

Wagghhhhh!

The sound floated to her again. It was undeniable now. That was the sound of something alive; distant, but definitely in the building and somewhere above her. Maybe on the next floor up?

Waggggggghhhhhh!!!!!

The cry sounded stronger this time, and her ears were sharp enough to distinguish it did indeed sound as though it was coming from the floor above hers, possibly the one above that. It didn’t really matter; she hadn’t a second to lose. All this time looking for survivors and it hadn’t even crossed her mind there might be kids out there. A child wouldn’t understand the implications of a fire-alarm and a baby couldn’t let her know it was there other than doing the one thing it instinctively knew would attract attention: bawling its eyes out!.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! All this time and I was so sure I was alone in this place. How fucking dumb am I.

The poor kid must have been on its own from day-one of this disaster. It sounded young, probably no older than a year. God knew what it had gone through for the past few days, stuck in the room on its own, its parents surely dead.

She would have to move fast if she was going to help, but first, she needed to check on the red dust.

While she was still 99% convinced the dust wasn’t interested in her and that probably extended to the baby too, she didn’t want to risk over exposure to it, just in case. She was dealing with indeterminables here and this situation was all so freaking weird, who knew what the long-term effects of contact to that shit would do to her. That was the least of her concerns, right now though, what mattered was finding that baby and finding her quickly.

Emily threw on a pair of jeans and tucked in the tee-shirt she’d worn to bed while she stumbled her way to the living room window. Throwing back the drapes she was greeted by a beautiful blue sky and a view of the city that stretched for miles… and not a sign of one piece of dust—nothing. Just sunny skies.

She stood, mouth agape, staring at the view outside the window. Not a trace of the dust could be seen, at least not from up here. What was going on? It was as though the storm she’d witnessed over the last two days had never happened. If she was—

Wagghhhhh!!!

The baby’s cry broke Emily from her thoughts and she immediately dragged her attention away from the dust-free sky to the finding the child.

Of course, just because the outside of the building was clear didn’t mean the dust wasn’t still lurking inside the apartment complex somewhere. She jogged back to the bedroom, grabbed her sneakers from beneath the bed, quickly laced them together and then started to make her way to the door, but before she got there she had another thought. She needed a blanket. Who knew what the poor kid had been exposed to; she needed to make sure she had something she could wrap the child in when she brought it back to her apartment. Emily rummaged through the linen closet and quickly found what she was looking for; the baby-blanket her mother had swaddled her in when she was a child. There was something very poignant in grabbing this particular blanket, Emily had never expected to have kids of her own and, at her age, the prospect had looked pretty bleak. It was something her mother and father had hinted at whenever she visited them. She laughed for a second at the thought of her mother’s not so subtle probes about her love life and whether there was anyone special.

Who knew, Mom? All it took was the end of the world for you finally to get a grandchild.

Looking through the apartment’s spy-hole out into the main corridor, Emily could see no evidence of the probing red dust that had caused her to turtle-up the previous evening. Of course, the spy-hole only allowed for a limited view of the hallway and the dust could be sitting just out of sight, like some coiled snake waiting to strike, for all she knew. That, of course, was just her nerves playing havoc with her mind. She’d been in contact with both the red rain and the red dust with no ill effects—yet, she cautioned herself mentally—but that didn’t mean she should start getting careless.

Even though the adrenalin pumping through her body was urging her otherwise, Emily decided to take her next step cautiously. Instead of pulling away the towels (now long dried out, she noted) from the base of the door and tearing the tape from the keyhole, she decided to remove just the towels first. She did this, making sure she kept them within easy reach in case she needed to throw them back in place. With the towels out of the way Emily slid the security chain off its fastener, thumbed the button on the door latch and gently twisted the door handle.

The door swung open just a crack and Emily felt a refreshing wave of cool air sweep over her. Thank God, the air conditioning was back on again. That’s a good omen, she thought hopefully.

Emily allowed herself a few short seconds for the air to cool her while she peeked through the crack. Her eyes quickly scanned up and down, first checking the ceiling then the floor of the corridor. No sign of anything. She opened the door an inch more, her eyes fixed on the corridor for any movement, ready to slam it shut at the slightest hint of trouble; still nothing. Emboldened, she pulled the door wide enough to slip her head outside far enough so she had a full view of the corridor in both directions.

There was no movement. No sign whatsoever of the strange red tendrils that had seemed so intent on insinuating themselves into every nook and crevice of the apartment and the city. Except, that wasn’t entirely true. Here and there, scattered over the floor of the corridor was a fine red residue that stood out against the light blue carpeting. While it retained some similarity to the red dust, it was now more of a pink color, and seemed to have lost the diaphanous structure that had allowed it to move so easily. Whatever this residue was, it seemed brittle, granular even, and nothing like the delicate structures she had seen propelling themselves through the air. It reminded Emily of the pink Crystal Light powdered drink she would sometimes mix-up over the summer.

Emily stepped out of her apartment, quietly closing the door behind her, listening all the time for any indication of the baby. It was only a few seconds later and she heard the telltale wail of the infant. In the corridor the baby’s cry was much louder and was definitely coming from somewhere above her. She began jogging towards the stairwell.

Crunch!

The sound surprised her and, as she looked down at her feet, Emily saw she had stepped on a pile of the seemingly inert dust, shattering it with a sound like crisp autumn leaves. Lifting her foot she saw the residue of the dust had turned to powder under her foot, leaving bits stuck to the soles of her sneakers. She had no idea what this signified, but she got the impression that whatever had happened while she was asleep, this powdered residue was all that was now left of the dust.

Doing her best to ignore the constant crackling of the desiccated dust under her feet Emily continued on her way to the stairs. She would head up to the 18^th floor first and listen for the child there. If she could not pinpoint where the plaintive cry was coming from exactly she was going to have to start going door-to-door and listening.

A sudden thought struck her as she climbed the stairs up to the next level: what if the kid wasn’t the sole survivor? What if there was someone else alive? That would explain how the kid had survived all this time without access to food or water. The thought excited her more than she would ever have expected.

For most of her life, Emily had been a loner. That she had gone into a profession bringing her into contact with people on such a regular basis had surprised both her parents and her few close friends. She had explained it easily enough; as a reporter, contact was always on her terms. She dictated the start and finish of her interaction with every person she interviewed. It was simple really, she maintained complete control of the amount of exposure she had with people and when she tired of them, she just ended the interview. Easy, really.

So, why was she so excited at the possibility of seeing another human being? She couldn’t answer that, she was a reporter not a psychiatrist, but the idea of being no longer totally alone, of having someone, anyone, to talk to was the most astonishingly important thing to her right now.

Emily smiled widely at the thought. It had created a brightness in her that she had not known had left her, and as she opened the door onto the 18th floor landing she began calling out.

“Hello?” she yelled as loud as she could. “Is there anyone else alive here?”

As if in answer to her yell she heard the cry, this time louder and definitely somewhere on the same floor with her.

Wagghhhhh!!!

She paused for a second to try to identify which direction the cry was coming from.

Wagghhhhh!!!

From her left, definitely. And not too many doors down either by the sound of it.

“Hello,” she continued yelling. “I’m here to help. Can you hear me?”

Waggghhhg! Waggghhh! The reply came, doubled to match her own urgency, and luckily too, because she had passed the door to the apartment where the cry was coming from. She doubled-back and stood outside the door. Placing her hand flat against the wood of the door she gave it an experimental push: locked! Of course it was, what had she expected?

Emily slapped her hand twice against the door.

“I’m outside your door,” she yelled. “You don’t have to worry, I didn’t get sick. I can help you. Please, just let me know that you’re okay. Please.” The sentence came out almost as a single word, she was speaking so fast, babbling with excitement, she realized.

As if in answer, the cry sounded again, this time it was a single, long, drawn out syllable.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

It was then that Emily realized with an abrupt certainty that the kid was in there on her own. How do I know she’s not a he? She thought, but it sounded better than calling her ‘it’. Somehow, she had survived for all this time on her own and now it was up to Emily to help. She had to rescue the child. But how the fuck was she supposed to get into the room?

She could try kicking down the door but she didn’t think she’d have much luck with that if it was anything like the entrance to her own apartment. Years of cycling had given her strong legs, but she knew she was not strong enough to break down a secured door. No, this was going to take a more focused application of force to open.

“Of course!” she said and ran back to the stairwell. On either side of the doorway was a large red fire extinguisher, housed in its own box behind a front of glass. Next to the fire extinguisher, on the opposite side of the doorway, was a similar red box and behind its glass was a large and equally bright red fire-ax. A small metal hammer, about the size of an icepick, hung from a metal chain on the right side of the box. She grabbed the hammer, turned her eyes away and hit the glass with as much force as possible. It shattered with her first strike crumbling to the floor. Gripping the ax with both hands, she pulled it from its retaining clasps and sprinted back to the apartment.

The apartment complex owner hadn’t skimped on anything when he built the complex, and that attention to detail also extended to the doors of each apartment. They were made of a high-density wood-mix that could withstand a fire for up to an hour. Hacking her way through the door would probably take her a month of Sundays so there was no time to spare.

Rather than try to chop a hole large enough to fit through, Emily decided to concentrate on disabling the actual locking mechanism of the door instead. If she could get to the lock, she should be able to gain access to the apartment.

Emily planted her feet shoulder-width apart with enough room between herself and the door she could put some real momentum behind her swing. The ax weighed about thirty-pounds but she managed to heft it up to head-height and take aim at the lock tumbler. She drew in a deep breath and brought the ax down with as much force as she could muster against the face of the door. The impact transmitted waves of pain through her arms and up to her shoulders but she was rewarded with the satisfying sound of wood splintering and saw the ax head bite deep into the wood. She had to wiggle the haft of the ax up and down a few times to free it from the door, but once it was out she could see a six-inch long, inch-deep gash just to the right of the lock.

As if in encouragement to her attempt at breaking and entering, the child inside the apartment let out another mournful wail. As the cry reached her, Emily raised the ax again and sent it down into the door, this time the shockwave of pain was worse as she felt the tip of the ax hit the metal shaft of the lock’s cylinder. Sweat had already begun to trickle down her forehead and she felt an uncomfortable wetness under her armpits, but it was worth it because she could see the lock was canted at a slightly different angle than when she first arrived outside the door.

This explains why I became a reporter and not a firefighter, she thought as she felt the dull ache of the pain in her muscles.

Emily summoned her energy again and drew the ax back up above her head, holding it there for a second, she sucked in as big a gulp of air as she could before exhaling it in a scream that was half frustration and half anger. The ax plummeted down, scoring a direct hit on the lock, dislodging it from the receiver and sending it whistling towards her, missing her head by mere inches.

“Jesus Christ,” Emily exclaimed as she turned to follow the trajectory of the six-inch piece of metal as it clattered to the floor behind her after rebounding off the opposite wall. When she turned back, the remainder of the lock lay on the floor too.

The door to the apartment was now ajar.

The line of work Emily was in had long ago taught her to trust her gut instinct. For some unknown, subconscious reason, she hesitated at the threshold of the apartment, the flat of her left hand resting against the door, her right hand clenched so tightly around the shaft of the ax she could feel her nails digging into the flesh of her palm. Something did not feel right, she realized. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she had a definite sense of offness about what she was hearing. From the dark apartment beyond the door the wail of the child sounded again, louder now she was so close, breaking through her indecision.

Wagghhhhh!!!

A scene from the movie The Shining—the one where an insane Jack Nicholson chops down the door to his kid’s room with an ax—leapt unbidden into her mind, sending a shudder of unease down her spine, but she dismissed it as just nerves.

“Here’s Emily,” she croaked as she pushed open the door and stepped into the apartment.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The stench of ammonia hit Emily the second she eased the apartment door open wide enough for her to slip inside. It filled her nostrils and seared the back of her throat, instantly triggering her gag reflex. She spent a full minute trying not to throw-up before she could move any further into the apartment.

The smell was not what she had expected, it wasn’t the bittersweet stench of putrefaction, this was more like a hundred cats had spent a week peeing freely in the apartment and then sealed the place up for another week.

Waves of heat rolled out through the open door. Emily felt beads of moisture condense against her skin. What had the kid’s parents been keeping in here? Were they running a meth lab or something?

How had the kid survived so long breathing this air?

If she had a towel or a rag on hand, Emily would have soaked it in water and used it to filter the cloying, ammonia-laden air. She was tempted to use the blanket but decided against it. Instead, she untucked her tee-shirt from her jeans and pulled it up until it covered her nose and mouth, keeping it place with one hand. It wasn’t perfect, she knew, but it should help keep some of that vomit inducing stench at bay. Gritting her teeth against the smell, Emily stepped into the apartment’s entranceway.

It was dark inside but she quickly found the light switch and snapped it on. The overhead lights revealed an empty corridor with just a single painting on the right wall for decoration. The humidity in the apartment was almost as overwhelming as the smell of ammonia. Within seconds of her entering, she was soaked through with sweat and moisture from the air.

“Hello?” she called out, lowering her hand from her mouth and instantly regretted it. She sucked in a huge gulp of fetid air and she felt the chemical burn as it scorched the roof of her mouth and back of her throat. Emily tried to resist but the stink and stinging irritation was just too much this time. She vomited onto the white shag-pile carpet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and quickly brought the tee-shirt back up to her mouth. The ammonia was biting at her eyes now, raising tears that blurred her vision so badly she had to wipe them away every couple of seconds with the baby blanket. She wouldn’t be able to handle this for very long without passing out, going totally blind or choking on her own vomit. She needed to find the kid as quickly as possible and get them both out of there. She had to move fast.

The apartment was the next model up from Emily’s. It had the same basic layout but came with an additional bedroom. She knew the kid’s parents would have put the child in the smaller second bedroom, so she made her way to it, pushing the door open while fumbling for the light switch. She flicked the switch and revealed what was definitely a nursery. A cute crib sat against the right wall, and suspended from the ceiling above it was a child’s mobile. Large pink plastic animals hung from the main frame of the toy; lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! White wallpaper, decorated with colorful flowers and butterflies, covered the room’s walls. Across from the door, she could see a changing station and a high-back chair where the parents could sit and spend some quality time with their kid. Emily walked over to the crib and pulled back the expensive looking wool blanket. There was no child hidden beneath it.

As if sensing her presence, Emily heard the child’s wail echo into the room. Instead of immediately rushing towards the source of the cry, Emily stopped mid-step. Her gut was trying to tell her something that her brain did not want to hear; something is not right here, it screamed at her, and this time she listened to its advice.

Waggghhhhrrrrrgh!

The cry came again, more insistent and, Emily noted, now that she was so much closer to the source, she could hear an odd trill to it that made it seem far more complicated than the simple cry of a child. It almost reminded her of the tones she’d hear when she was forced to use an old-fashioned dial-up modem to connect to the Internet. The sound was, what was the word? Mechanical? Yes, that was close enough. Now she could hear it clearly, without the layers of flooring and walls to filter it, the cry sounded less like a child.

Of course, it could just be her imagination and the strange edge to the cry she heard was just the result of the kid being stuck in this toxic room for so long, but Emily had the sudden overwhelming urge to quietly leave the apartment and never come back.

As strongly as her instincts might be telling her to leave, she couldn’t do that, she had to find out what was making that noise.

There was more caution in her step as she exited the child’s bedroom and began creeping toward the master bedroom directly across the corridor. She nudged the door open with the tip of her shoe and cautiously reached inside for the light switch. She poked her head in and quickly scanned the room: a king size bed, neatly made and waiting for sleepers who would never lay their heads down on the pillows again. A bookcase filled with paperbacks, a dresser and a tallboy, but no sign of the apartment’s tenants.

Emily turned her back on the room and made her way down the corridor, heading in the direction of the kitchen and living room areas. The curtains were drawn closed filling the living room with gloom. With every step Emily took she felt the temperature increase and the cloying smell of ammonia become stronger, until it was almost unbearable. Even though the area was dark, Emily had a sense of something moving in the living room and she froze, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling like spines on a porcupine.

A sense of panic had crept almost unnoticed up her spine and, as she moved unsteadily through the apartment, it had begun knocking on the back of her skull like a hammer, yelling at her to get the fuck out of there, pronto. But her journalistic inquisitiveness and her overwhelming need to rescue the child overrode her sense of self-preservation—again, she thought—so Emily began blindly running her hand along the wall looking for the switch that would turn on the living room’s overhead lights. The wall’s surface was sticky with something that Emily didn’t even want to think about at that moment, it felt like someone had sneezed big-time. She wasn’t sure which was worse; the stink and the wave of heat or the idea that she’d just put her hand in a huge pile of snot. Neither was terribly appealing she thought just as her fingers found the wall-switch and filled the room with light.

It took just a second or two for her eyes to adjust to the brightness but when she finally stopped squinting Emily started screaming.

It seemed as though she had turned on a light that shone directly into the center of a nightmare. In the middle of the room, covering what had probably been the family couch was something that looked as though it had crawled right out of the deepest, darkest corners of hell.

What she was looking at was the source of both the cat-piss smell and the apartment’s incredible humidity. That much Emily’s brain was able to process, but it stalled when it tried to make sense of what her eyes were relaying to it.

There was a child, or at least she supposed that it must have been a child at some point, and the parents were with it. The three had merged into a single mass of fat and tissue that hung from the ceiling in the far corner of the living room. The bottom half of the child’s body had disappeared, subsumed into the pulsating bulk of the mass, but its torso and one hand were still free. The hand moved feebly back and forth, almost as though it was waving a friendly Hello! to its new playmate. But that was impossible too, because Emily knew the child couldn’t see her; it had no eyes after all, they were gone, replaced by empty black sockets. It was from the kid’s mouth that the eerie ululation was emanating. As she stood transfixed, its mouth opened wide and the bone chilling sound of its cry spilled out, filling her ears.

Wagggghhhhhhhh!!

The parents were barely recognizable within the pulsating bulk. If it hadn’t been for a disconnected foot with a man’s shoe still attached to it that lay a few feet (pardon the pun, she thought) from whatever this thing was, and an obviously female arm that dangled limply from one flank, Emily would not have known what the damn thing was made of. And that would have been fine by her.

Thick gobs of red stuff moved over the skin of the mass, pulling pieces of the main body with them and then moving them to other parts, almost as if it was putting together some kind of puzzle. As she watched the bizarre rearrangement, her mind just a single step from insanity at the utter horror before her, a large globule of the red substance left the body and reached out for the severed man’s foot. It deftly surrounded it, shoe and all, and began moving it back to the main body; just like she’d seen ants transport leaves and other dead bugs back to their nest.

This was utter madness, she realized. What she was seeing simply could not exist, it was impossible, so she must be dreaming. But, as she continued to watch in horrified amazement as the foot was dragged back to the main mass, the child’s head began a gradual clockwise rotation until it had moved through 180-degrees. The eyeless sockets now stared at her from where the kid’s chin should have been, the mouth opened wide and let out a long piercing ululation that resonated off the apartment walls and cut through her skull with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.

Wagghghhghgggggggg!

Emily’s courage finally gave in. She exhaled a piercing scream and ran for the door.

Emily exploded from the apartment.

Her normal cognitive processes had been superseded by a blind animal survival instinct of the most primitive kind; instincts most humans had not felt since their caveman ancestors first began exploring their new world.

Her feet slid out from under her as she hit the corridor and she went down hard, knocking the air from her lungs, but she was up in a heartbeat, arms flailing as she sprinted towards the stairwell. She took the stairs down to her floor three steps at a time, her feet working on autopilot. Somehow, miraculously, she did not stumble or trip.

Emily kicked open the door leading from the stairwell onto her corridor so hard it slammed back against its hinges, the aluminum handle taking a chunk out of the interior wall. Still sprinting towards her apartment, Emily found the door keys in her jeans and pulled them free. She tried three times to slot the key into the lock but her right hand was shaking so violently and the key seemed so massive by comparison to the tiny receiver she had to steady it with her left hand. Finally, the key found its mark and the door opened. She leapt inside, slamming the door shut behind her with a boom that echoed throughout the entire apartment complex. She fumbled the security chain into place, quickly followed by the thumb-lock and then she sprinted down the hallway.

Emily’s mind did not register any of those events because all it was concerned with was the dreadful baby-thing that lived in apartment number twenty-six on floor eighteen. Caught in a processing loop as it tried to assimilate exactly what this latest assault on her sanity was, her mind refused to do anything but force her feet to move.

When Emily’s brain finally returned control of her body, she found herself standing in her bedroom, leaning rigidly against the door. Her first thought was: how the fuck did I get here? Her next was that she needed to change her underwear and jeans because, apparently, for some reason she just couldn’t fathom, she had wet herself.

With control of her mind and body now returned to her, the full, terrible truth came flooding back to Emily. She understood why she was bracing her bedroom door closed. She knew why she had peed herself. It was because the thing upstairs should not, could not, exist.

And yet, it did.

Her eyes drifted to the bedroom’s ceiling. That thing was up there, just feet above her head.

Another terrifying thought struck Emily like the proverbial thunderclap from on high and, given the absolute insanity of the last few days, this latest thought most certainly did not seem to be outside the realms of possibility: What if what she had just seen in the apartment upstairs was able to get out of the room? And what if there was more of them out there too? What was she supposed to do about that? What if she, Emily Baxter, really was the last human being left on earth, the sole surviving woman in a world full of monsters?

What if she was completely and absolutely alone?

It was at that very moment, with so many questions exploding in her brain like dark fireworks, Emily heard her cellphone ringing on the table in the kitchen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’ll call them back later, Emily thought, her mind still trying to wrap itself around the events of the last thirty-minutes. They can leave a message.

Only after the third trill from her cellphone did the fog filling her brain clear sufficiently enough for her to grasp what she was hearing. Emily was out the bedroom door and halfway to the kitchen before she even realized she was moving. Grabbing the phone from the table, Emily flipped it open, pressing it to her ear.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” she whispered, her voice barely a croak. “Please, be there. Please.” She was no longer surprised at how desperate her voice sounded.

The silence continued for a second but then Emily heard someone take in a deep breath and a man’s voice broke through the silence: “Is this Emily Baxter?”

Emily had been sick once when she was a kid. Really sick. The doctor had informed her parents it was probably just food poisoning, but to Emily it had seemed as though she was dying. The pain had been excruciating; two days of vomiting and diarrhea had left her exhausted and dehydrated. She had eaten nothing and drank little but cool water fed to her by her mother with a spoon. On the third day, as she began to recover, Emily’s father brought her a can of her favorite orange soda with a cute pink straw in it. It was one of those straws with a concertina section two-thirds of the way up, so you could bend it towards your mouth. She had drunk that same soda a hundred times before she had become sick, but this time, this time the soda tasted like pure liquid heaven to her parched throat and deprived taste buds. The flavors were so intense, the bubbles so exciting on her tongue, and the cold rush of the soda as it exited the straw and hit the back of her mouth so exquisite, it was as though she was experiencing it in a completely new body.

The smooth resonance of the stranger’s voice in her ear had the same effect on her now. She felt as though she had received a call directly from God himself.

“Yes, this is Emily,” she managed to blurt out before she broke into a flood of tears.

“It’s okay! It’s alright!” the man’s voice on the end of the telephone line said softly. “You’re not alone.”

At that moment, if the stranger had asked how she was feeling, Emily would have been unable to articulate the rush of different emotions she felt sweeping through her. Gratitude, fear, happiness, sorrow, all simultaneously took hold of her body; but greater than all of those emotions combined was an overwhelming sense of hope. The flood of emotions coalesced into an immobilizing mixture which, for the first ten minutes of the conversation, such as it was, refused to allow Emily to respond to the man’s questions other than with a faint, bleated “yes” or “no”. Attempting to say anything more than that was futile, the second she tried she dissolved into a huffing bout of tears.

Until this moment, Emily had no inkling she was so totally and overwhelmingly terrified. Even the memory of the horror she had witnessed minutes earlier seemed to have diminished as she allowed the relief of knowing she was not the only person left alive to wash her fear away. Finally, as the rush of endorphins subsided and her self-control began to exert itself again, Emily found her tongue and began answering more fully the patient questions her caller was asking.

His name was Jacob Endersby, he told her. There were eleven other people with him; eight men and four women in total. They were a team of scientists, techs and support staff working at a remote climate monitoring station on a tiny, frozen island off the northern coast of Alaska, part of a small cluster known as the Stockton Islands. Their group was, at least until the red rain came, a research team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Climate Research Center, and they’d been stationed at the Stockton’s for just over three months, gathering climatological data as part of a semi-annual study.

Jacob explained that no red-rain had fallen anywhere near their base in the Stocktons, but Jacob’s wife, Sandra, who was stationed several hundred miles south of his team’s location, back at the University in Fairbanks, had reported the phenomena falling as far North as the Noatek Preserve, which was about 180-miles South West of Jacobs research team’s location.

Jacob became silent for a minute at the mention of his wife. Emily listened patiently, a light static hiss buzzing in her ear, not sure whether he was still on the line or not.

Eventually, she spoke quietly into the receiver: “Jacob? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he replied, just as quietly. Emily could hear his barely concealed pain vibrate in his voice. This man was carrying a burden of loss as great as any she was feeling over the passing of her family and friends.

“We had a TV satellite feed, so we were following what was happening throughout Europe after the rain had fallen,” he continued. “Sandra said the rain had fallen all around the university; not much, just a smattering, but that I shouldn’t worry because she hadn’t been in contact with it. The university was going into lockdown and they were quarantining everyone who had any contact with the rain, as best as they could.

“Sandra said she’d managed to contact a few other weather and climate monitoring stations scattered south of her and across the border in Canada. They all reported significantly decreased amounts of the red-rain the further north they were. Eight hours after I last spoke with my wife, I tried calling her again on the shortwave but she didn’t answer. Nobody answered.” Jacob whispered the last sentence between a barely restrained sob and a ragged intake of breath.

The climatologist paused again as he collected himself before continuing. “We have a couple of satellite-phones, so we all took turns calling family, friends, and colleagues at other research sites around the world. We called everyone that we could think of, but no one picked up. Since then, our tech guys have been scouring all the major websites and listening on the shortwave, trying to find someone, anyone who is still alive. That was how we found you, Emily. And we are so very glad to hear your voice.”

No one on his team had a solid theory for what exactly had happened, Jacob told her, just some wild conjectures. They were, for the most part, baffled. But one thing did seem quite obvious to the team of scientists: from the data they had managed to collect before losing contact, the red-rain phenomena covered a significant portion of the globe, and in Jacob’s opinion, it seemed to be an almost directed action against the most populated areas of the planet. As far as they could tell, not one country was left unaffected; there was not a major city, town, precinct or village anywhere south of latitude sixty-eight-degrees-north that had not been decimated.

Emily was the first person his team had made contact with. They’d picked-up a few fleeting messages on the camp’s short-wave receiver but the signals had been too weak and too garbled to make any sense of, but it was a good indication, Jacob said, that others had survived the catastrophe, somewhere.

“Of course, logic dictates there must still be pockets of survivors out there; probably small groups like us who live in the colder areas. Maybe there are some military installations left. I guess submarine crews are the most likely to have been unaffected by all of this, but who knows what will happen to them when they surface,” Jacob explained.

“What about you and your team,” Emily asked. “How do you think you survived?”

“There’s no way for us to understand whether this phenomenon is virus based, a nerve agent, or something else completely. We’re guessing that, for some reason, whatever kind of agent the red-rain is its ability to multiply and spread is affected by the cold, which is why my wife reported so little of it in Fairbanks and the other stations north of her. Of course, it appears that even minimum exposure to the rain proves fatal. Unless we can contact other survivors in colder areas across the globe we won’t be able to confirm that hypothesis. For all we know, the moment we set foot inside the contamination zone, we’ll drop dead. Same could happen to any other survivors outside the areas where the rain fell. You can probably guess no one here wants to put that theory to the test. ”

Emily listened intently to everything Jacob had to say, but in the back of her mind she found herself wondering whether she should mention what she had experienced with the red-dust storm or the thing she had seen in the apartment on floor 18. Would he think she was crazy? If she was in his shoes, she sure as hell would. Telling him she had seen some kind of a monster made up of the young family that once lived in the apartment wasn’t exactly going to lend any kind of credence to her story.

“I saw… something, Jacob,” she finally blurted out before she even knew she had made-up her mind. “Something strange. Not normal.”

Jacob stopped midsentence. “What do you mean ‘not normal’, Emily?”

Oh, shit! Now I’ve done it, she thought, doubt filling her mind again. But she knew she had seen what she had seen, it wasn’t a figment of her stressed out brain. She just had to tell him.

“There’s other stuff that happened after everyone died, the rain turned into some kind of autonomous dust and…” she paused, drew in a deep breath and then blurted out, “something is happening to the family in an apartment on the floor above me. They’re dead but…they’re… changing into something else.”

“Ooo-kaaay,” said Jacob, his voice taking on a confused tone.

“Look,” she continued, “I know this will sound crazy. I know you’re going to think I’m out of my mind. I mean, I’m questioning my own sanity right now, but I swear I’m not making up what I’m about to tell you.”

Emily told Jacob about the strange storm of red dust she had seen, how it had seemed to be attracted to the dead vagrant and then later attempted to invade her apartment. She thought to gloss over how she had heard what she thought was a baby crying, tracked it down to the level above, broken down the door and what she had found inside, but the truth was, everything she had already told him sounded crazier than a soup sandwich anyway; so why not?

When she was done recounting her story, Emily waited to hear the click of the phone as Jacob hung-up. She could imagine him wondering how on earth he had managed to connect with the last crazy person alive in New York.

“Interesting,” he said finally.

Well, that certainly wasn’t the response she’d expected.

“You believe me?” she asked, still not sure what to make of his response. “I’m not crazy?”

“I can’t speak to what you’ve experienced since the red rain, Emily. And, to be totally honest, I think we both know that if you’d told me the same story before everything that’s happened over the last couple of days, my response would probably have been different. But, after what you… what we have all experienced? I can’t discount any evidence, no matter how subjective it may be.”

There was silence for a few seconds as both strangers considered what to say next. Finally, Jacob spoke.

“I told you we really only have conjecture to work with, but we’ve had little else to do around here than run ideas past each other since everything…” he searched for the right word, “…ended. We’ve parsed every possibility we could think of as a group, no matter how far-out-there it might seem, and eliminated the majority of them as either impossible or highly improbable. What we’re left with is, well, to quote you Emily, is ‘crazy’ sounding.”

Emily heard Jacob take a swig of something, swallow and then carry on the fast-paced delivery of his idea.

“What we’re sure of,” Jacob continued, “is something far outside the realms of probability has happened across the globe. That ‘something’ is so unlikely it might just as well be defined as a random event because it’s so far off the scale of probability. When we throw in the new data you’ve supplied us, it pretty much removes the possibility of the red rain being a manmade event; there’s no way human technology could have the kind of rapid effect on a human body you described, which means we’re back to trying to define that elusive ‘something’ again. So, if we rule out manmade technology then we’re left with only two probable causes for the red-rain and what you witnessed. The first is that our ‘something’ is a part of the natural cycle of the earth, an extinction level event, similar to the ‘great dying’ in the Permian-Triassic period. That one event wiped out about seventy-percent of land animals and ninety-six-percent of marine life. And there’s plenty of data to suggest mass extinctions happen—on a planetary timescale, at least—pretty regularly, and we’re long overdue for the next one. So, maybe the red-rain is part of a cycle that kicks in every few-hundred-million years or so and wipes the planet clean. It’s just the delivery of this event that’s so strange, so unexpected. It just doesn’t seem likely that we would have missed some kind of evidence of it in the fossil record.”

“And what’s the second possibility,” asked Emily, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.

“Well, again,” said Jacob, “you can call me crazy but the only other possibility we can come up with is that this is some kind of extraterrestrial event.”

Emily was stunned. “What? You mean like ET? We’ve been invaded by little green men or something? You’re kidding me, right?”

“Yes, well, kind of. It depends on your definition of ‘invaded’. What we could be experiencing here is a kind of extraterrestrial biological entity. Our planet is really just a massive super-organism, the red-rain could be the equivalent of a virus, but one that exists out there in the vastness of space and affects planets instead of individuals.” Emily could imagine Jacob energetically waving his hands towards the roof of his office all those thousands of miles away from her. “It just floats around until it randomly lucks on a suitable host planet and then boom… mass-extinction’s the result. The theory is really kind of fascinating when you look at it dispassionately.” Jacob seemed to realize getting excited over the reason for the almost total extermination of humanity may not seem quite so attractive to anyone else outside of his small band of colleagues.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I didn’t mean to sound so enthusiastic about it all. That’s what happens when you spend too much time cooped up with scientists twenty-four hours a day for months on end.”

“It’s okay,” Emily told him, “I understood what you meant.” And, if she was honest with herself, Jacob was right; it was a fascinating concept. Terrifying, but also incredibly interesting.

“So, that’s just two of the prime possibilities we came up with,” the scientist continued. “Hell, for all I know we could have been on the receiving end of the equivalent of a galactic bug-bomb. We just don’t know and I don’t believe we’ll ever find out the real cause. But what we are sure of is that something unprecedented in the entirety of human history has occurred, and all the old rules, well, they’ve been thrown right out the window. And, if we factor in your encounter, then the logical conclusion would seem to be that something far greater than a simple random catastrophe is at play here. Which means that ‘something’ is probably much more complex than we can even begin to estimate at the moment.”

There was a long pause and then Jacob’s voice filled her ear again, crackling with static. “So, what are your plans, Emily. How are you going to get out of New York?”

Jacob’s question caught Emily completely off-guard. “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”

The earlier excitement Emily had heard in Jacob’s voice vanished, replaced by a patient, quieter tone that she thought he probably reserved for first-year students at the university and kids… and now he could add crazy reporters to that list.

“There are a couple of good reasons for you to get out of the city: first and foremost, you’re surrounded by several million dead bodies that are already well on their way to decomposing. At some point, that’s going to bring you into contact with God-knows how many potentially fatal pathogens; cholera, typhus, you name it, it’s all going to be floating around out there. It is not going to be a very healthy place for you to be.”

Jacob hesitated before continuing, but when he did Emily could sense his words were couched by a level of misgiving bordering on reticence, but she couldn’t tell whether it was directed at her or Jacob’s doubt at voicing his own thoughts.

“If you’re right about what you saw then who’s to say it’s not happening everywhere? It’s not my intention to scare you, Emily, but maybe we need to consider this event will have even farther reaching effects than we’ve imagined so far. I hear myself say the words and I know how screwy I sound, but have you considered that the transmutation you saw with the family might be happening elsewhere? Because if it is, then we’re talking about an unprecedented shift in the biological hierarchy of this planet, and to be quite frank, that scares the living shit out of me.”

”But that’s just—” Emily started to answer but Jacob cut her off as if she had not even spoken, his voice insistent.

“Either way, you need to get out of there, Emily. And If I were you, I’d be heading North as fast as I could.”

“So what am I supposed to do? I can’t drive and I’m pretty sure you guys aren’t going to volunteer to come pick me up. How do I get out of here and where am I supposed to go?” Emily could hear the whine of desperation—or was it panic—begin to creep back into her voice again.

“How do you get out of New York? That I can’t really help you with, but where you need to go, that’s simple; you need to head as far north as you can, come to us, we’re not going anywhere. The colder it gets the better your chances probably are of surviving this. But you have to prepare and you have to go soon, Emily.”

From upstairs, Emily heard the wailing of the thing in the apartment. The idea that there could be who-knew how many more of them all around her turned her blood to ice. It was all she could do not to throw the phone to the floor, rush to the closet and hide until she woke up from this nightmare.

“Okay,” she said before she even realized that she had consciously made the decision to leave. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“First things first,” said Jacob. “The power’s not going to stay up forever and we need to make sure that you have some way to stay in communication with us. Do you know where you can lay your hands on a satellite phone?”

As it happened, Emily did. The paper had a pair of them they handed out to correspondents covering foreign events or who had to head out to remote areas where regular cellphone coverage was either poor or nonexistent. The paper had put all their reporters through a two-hour long training course when they’d bought them; Emily had even had a chance to make a couple of calls, so she knew how to operate one. These units were state of the art and even came with a small 12-Watt portable solar-panel which could be setup in a couple of minutes and used to charge the battery when there was no access to a regular power source.

“That’s excellent,” Jacob said when she told him. He gave her the number for their sat-phone. “Just in case things start shutting down faster than we anticipated.”

“I’ll head over to the paper once we’re done. Keep your fingers crossed nobody was using them when the shit hit the fan.”

The difficult part wasn’t going to be getting out of New York, Jacob explained. There was close to 4,500 miles between Emily and Fairbanks; that meant months of hard travelling just to reach the university. Then, once she arrived in Fairbanks, there was another four or five-hundred miles of travel over some of the coldest and roughest terrain in North America, with no major roads, to reach the Stocktons. She’d either have to complete that last leg on foot, or hope the snow-mobiles Jacob told her she would find at the University were still where they should be and in working order.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Jacob told her. “Worst case scenario, we can come and get you once you make it to the University. What’s important is that we get you out of New York while this event is still in its early stages. We can narrow down a better plan once we know you’re safe.”

They talked for another hour, exploring plans and ideas for the best course of action to get her on her way. Eventually the conversation turned to personal protection and the need to defend herself. “Who knows what’s out there Emily. You need a weapon of some sort. Do you know where you can lay your hands on a gun?”

Emily’s mind instantly flashed back to Nathan. His service revolver had still been in its holster when she dragged his body into the apartment down the hall. She mentally kicked herself for not grabbing the pistol when she had a chance to, but, she reminded herself, she had other things on her mind at the time. And how was she supposed to have known she would even need it? She had been so sure help was going to be on its way. No one in their right mind would have guessed she would need to defend herself against some freak of nature made up of a dead baby and its parents. And what if what she’d witnessed upstairs was also happening to her dead boyfriend too? Did she really think she could handle that? So, no; no way was she going to try to get into that room and put what was left of her sanity at risk. She’d worry about a weapon when she had to.

“I’m going to have to get off this phone if I want to get to the paper and back again before it gets dark,” Emily told Jacob, finally.

“Okay, well, you have the email and the sat-phone if you need us. Just remember you’re not alone, Emily. You can call us anytime; someone will always be up, okay?”

“Okay,” she replied. The idea of hanging up, of severing the only connection she had had with anyone for the last few days was excruciatingly hard to do. Jacob must have sensed that; “Emily, don’t worry, everything is going to be just fine, I promise you. We’ll speak again soon, okay? Good luck and be careful.” Jacob hung up, leaving nothing but dead air between them.

Everything was going to be just fine he had promised her.

Emily doubted that very much.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Emily closed her phone and glanced over at the clock on the stove. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. That gave her about four hours of sunlight still, which should be more than enough time for her to make the ride to the Tribune’s offices and get back before sunset.

Emily went to the closet in her bedroom, raised herself on tiptoe and started feeling around on the top shelf. Eventually her fingers found what she was looking for and she pulled out a large military style bergen. It was basically an oversized backpack with several extra-large storage pockets, a relic from the one time she and Nathan had taken a weekend camping trip up at Bowman Lake State Park. They’d bought the bergen from a military surplus store in Chinatown.

It had rained the entire time at the lake, but that hadn’t mattered, it had been great, and she smiled at the memory. It all seemed so very distant now.

Emily shook her head to dispel the melancholia she sensed creeping up on her. The bergen would be useful; if she was going to make the trip out to the paper, she may as well make a stop at one of the big stores nearby and grab some supplies while she was out.

She took the bergen and left it near the front door while she grabbed her jacket. She was reaching for the door handle when a thought stayed her hand. Emily walked back to the kitchen and pulled a twelve-inch long butcher’s knife from the block she kept on the counter next to the cooker. She wasn’t sure how much use the knife would be against the thing upstairs—or any of its relatives, for that matter—but as she hefted the blade in her hand it at least gave her some reassurance.

She slid the knife into the inside pocket of her jacket, it wasn’t a perfect fit but she didn’t think it could fall out and the jacket was loose enough she wouldn’t end up accidentally stabbing herself. Better to be prepared, she thought, as she grabbed the backpack, swung it over her shoulder then opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

The hallway was empty, but as she made her way to the stairs she paused as the sound of something shuffling on the floor above her echoed down the corridor. It was a low rumbling sound, like something was being dragged across the floor. Emily paused for a second, her heart beating loudly in her ears. She waited to see if the sound came again, but there was nothing. Taking a deep breath Emily commanded her legs to walk, they objected for a second but then she was on the move again.

There was no denying it, she was spooked.

Emily knew she was no longer alone, but the closest human being she was aware of was several thousand miles away. If the thing upstairs was moving around, how long would it be before it decided to leave that stinking apartment and explore the rest of the building? What if it was already wandering the hallways? She gave a little shudder as she reached the door to the stairwell, pausing only to peek through the glass security window and make sure the passageway beyond it was empty. Seeing nothing, she pulled the door open and headed down to the ground floor.

Emily’s bike was exactly where she had left it; chained to the security stand out front of the building. She unlocked it and swung herself into the saddle, glad to be free of the confines of the apartment block. Once she was comfortable she used her feet to get some momentum going and freewheeled down the steps in front of the building bump by bump.

There was no sign of the red dust storm from the day before, other than a few drifts of the same glass-like residue piled up against walls and collected in the entranceways to the shops and offices she passed as she pedaled north towards the Tribune offices.

She passed a few abandoned vehicles, all of them empty. In fact, during the entire trip she did not see a single corpse. Even the dead birds that had littered the roads and sidewalks seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. Maybe they’d be blown away in the red dust storm, she thought. As much as she would like the explanation to be true, it didn’t make much in the way of sense, because, from what she had experienced during her trip back through the storm, there had been no wind propelling the dust.

So that left what? They’d somehow magically walked away? Or was there a more sinister explanation to the lack of dead on the streets? She sure as hell didn’t want to think about it right now and shifted her focus back to concentrating on her riding. As she rode through the deserted streets, she started running back over some of the plans she and Jacob had talked about during their phone call. She’d need supplies: fresh water and non-perishable food would be the most important items. And of course, the further north she travelled the colder it was going to get, so she’d also need to pull together a suitable wardrobe too; warm clothes, boots, maybe even skis or snowshoes.

She did not think she would have much of a problem finding shelter on her trek north; there would be so many empty—hopefully empty, she amended—buildings between here and her destination in Alaska that she could use to hole-up for the night. Her biggest problem, the one she had no real idea how to overcome, was how she was going to transport all of this stuff on her bike? So caught up in the minutia of planning her trip as she rode, Emily soon found herself just a block away from the paper having travelled the majority of the distance on autopilot.

She pulled up out-front of the building and set her bike down in her usual spot. She instinctively went to lock it but decided against it; she didn’t think it risked getting lifted any time soon. It was also doubtful she was going to need the bergen just yet either, so she swung it off her shoulders and hung it by its straps from the seat of the bike.

The door to the Tribune’s offices was unlocked. Thank God for that, she thought as she pushed through the set of revolving doors and stepped into the deserted foyer.

The place smelled musty, as though it had been deserted for years; like an old, empty, library. She supposed that was what the place was now. Emily very much doubted there would be any more news coming out of this building ever again. That realization struck a poignant note of discord within her; the paper had been her entire world for so long she hadn’t really given any thought to its passing. It was almost as painful for her as the loss of her family and friends, more so really, as the paper represented so much more than any individual could, it was an integral part of civilization as a whole. Without it, who would write this world’s epitaph?

Jesus, when had she decided to start waxing so lyrical?

“Hello,” Emily called, hoping that she might here Sven or Frank reply. Her voice echoed through the once bustling reception area. There was no answer to her greeting so she began to make her way to the stairs leading up to the second floor and the secure storage area where the paper kept all the expensive gizmos it loaned out to its reporters.

The staircase was one of those circular affairs, winding up to the second floor like a corkscrew. Made from ornate wrought iron, it was easily wide enough to accommodate four people standing abreast of each other and must have cost a small fortune to have built and installed. Emily had always thought it was quite beautiful, but as the metallic echoes of her feet rang around the empty building she began to feel a sense of unease nibble at her mind and a cold rivulet of sweat roll down the small of her back.

Paranoia came as part of the territory for every reporter Emily had known; she’d received enough threats over the years from the targets of her stories to know a little suspicion was actually a healthy thing. How did that old saw go? Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, right? And after everything she’d witnessed and experienced over the last few days, well, a hefty dose of suspicion might just be what was needed to keep her alive.

The top of the stairs opened out on to the second floor landing and a small waiting area. A row of comfortable looking seats where visitors could look out through the glass windows overlooking the street lined one wall. At least that was the idea, but since Emily had worked for the paper, the windows had always been too grimy to see much of anything. An office lined corridor led away from the landing; this was where the editors had their suite of office and also where the main meeting room and the publisher’s office could be found.

The security locker was in the Editor in Chief’s office, the last office on the right, almost at the end of the hallway. For the entire time Emily worked at the paper she had only actually been ‘upstairs’—as anyone who wasn’t a member of senior staff called the second floor—three times; once for her initial interview and the other times for staff meetings. It wasn’t a place a staff reporter ever felt comfortable visiting. If you found yourself on that floor, it usually meant you’d been summoned by the editors, which in-turn meant you had probably screwed up.

Emily padded her way down the corridor. She found the door she was looking for at the end. A brass plaque fixed to the door had two lines of text embossed on it: JUSTINE GOLDBLOOM and below that EDITOR IN CHIEF.

Justine was—had been—a great editor and boss. She kept out of the way of her reporters for the most part, giving them just enough freedom to feel like they weren’t chained to their desks, but she was always willing to get down in the trenches with the rest of the staff if the need ever arose. Justine had started out as a stringer with the Tribune thirty-odd years before Emily had arrived, clawing her way up to the top. Emily regarded her very highly. She had managed to keep her femininity intact while still commanding the respect of both her male and female staff. That hadn’t made Justine a pushover by anyone’s measure, she was still more than capable of busting your balls if the transgression called for it.

Tough but fair; that was Justine. She would miss her.

Emily pushed down on the door handle and stepped into Justine’s office. A large mahogany desk occupied the center of the room and three matching mahogany bookcases, filled with old copies of the Tribune and reference books, sat off to one side. On the wall behind the desk, Justine had framed and hung some of the awards she had won over the years. A cubby room sat adjacent to the main office area, set back slightly off to the right. This was where Justine kept the security cupboard and where Emily hoped she would find the sat-phones.

The cupboard was far less imposing than she had imagined it was going to be. In fact, it was just a large metal storage cabinet with a tough looking padlock looped through the handles to make sure no one walked off with the cabinet’s contents. Emily gave the padlock an experimental wiggle just to make sure it was locked; it was.

“Great,” she sighed.

She felt around the top of the cabinet to see if the key was there but found nothing but dust-bunnies. It wasn’t pinned to the wall or anywhere else in the cubby that she could see so Emily moved back into the main office and began systematically searching Justine’s desktop, and when that turned up nothing, she began rifling through the drawers.

No luck there either which meant she was going to have to resort to other, more primitive methods

She wished she had thought to bring the fire-ax she had used on the door to the apartment with the baby-monster. It would have made short work of the lock, but it was still sitting where she had dropped it outside the apartment that housed the monstrosity. The knife in her jacket pocket would surely snap in an instant if she used it to try to pry the doors apart, of that she was certain, and the cabinet’s hinges were securely located behind the doors, safely out of reach of any pry-bar or screwdriver. Her only other option was to find something heavy, and try and bash the lock off.

There was a janitor’s closet on the ground floor where the cleaning crew kept their brushes, mops and other equipment. If Emily was going to find anything capable of opening the cupboard it would likely be from there.

She left the office and retraced her steps back along the corridor and the stairs, heading down into the main news-desk area. As she opened the door into the newsroom, Emily was struck by a pungent, yet strangely familiar smell: ammonia! She stopped with one hand still holding the door ajar.

“Oh shit,” she hissed.

There was one of those things in there. The urge to turn and run was overwhelming, but the smell, while unmistakable in its cat-piss aroma, was nowhere near as strong as she had encountered in the enclosed space of the apartment, but it was definitely in the air, tickling at her nostrils like week old laundry.

Emily looked around the expanse of the newsroom. Everything was just as she remembered it. In fact, it looked like everyone had just left for the day, which, she supposed, they had; never ever to return, her mind sang to her. The rows of L-shaped desks, neatly lined up like soldiers on parade, still held paperwork and notes, there were even a couple of laptops exactly where their owners had left them, their monetary importance trumped by the need of whomever had owned them, to get to the safety of their homes or to be with someone they loved. The TV screens she watched the breaking newscast from Europe on, now showed nothing but gray and black dots of static.

A wild sensation overtook Emily. She was tired or being alone, tired of being afraid and even more tired of not knowing what the fuck was going on. It was time to take charge, to take back some control of her life. She pulled the kitchen knife from her coat pocket and stared at it for a second. If it came down to it, could she really stab whatever was in here with her?

“Fuck yes,” she said aloud, and kicked the door closed behind her.

Emily moved over to the right side of the newsroom. Her sneakers squeaked against the vinyl-covered floor with each tentative step she took. She was tempted to slip them off, but the idea of having to make a rapid shoeless exit did not really hold much appeal for her.

The wall on her side of the room was pretty much clear of obstructions, except for a large photocopier and a table used for collating next to it. If she kept her back to the wall, she would have a clear view of each row of cubicles and still give herself some protection.

Emily inched her way along the wall, one hand flat against its cool surface, the other, the one with the knife, extended out in front of her to ward off any swift attacker. With each crab-like sidestep she forced her eyes to scan the dim recesses and shadows of the cubicles, watching for any movement or sudden explosion of motion. She’d seen enough horror movies in her life to know the threat always came when the character least expected it; no way was she going to fall for that trick.

She had just passed the midpoint of the room when the dim outline of a shape across the far side of the room caught her attention. It was impossible to tell what it was exactly, but Emily was familiar enough with the layout of the room to know that, whatever it was she was looking at, it hadn’t been in the room when she left the day of the red rain. It had been invisible to her while she was in the doorway, attached just out of sight to one of the large silver air-conditioning ducts that ran along the room’s ceiling and down the opposite wall. Emily stood motionless, her eyes locked on the indistinct shape, waiting to see if it would move. It was difficult to get a clear view of what it was exactly because of the deep shadows surrounding it. Just enough of it was visible to have caught her eye. If she had been focusing solely on the cubicles she would probably have walked right past it.

Emily took a tentative step forward. There was no sign of movement from the thing on the wall but she kept her arm extended out in front of her anyway, pointing the steel tip of the blade directly at the shape. If it leapt off the wall at her she was going to make damn sure it hit the knife first.

With each step closer to whatever this thing was Emily was able to make out a little more detail: it was about six-feet long and two-feet wide. The head—if you could call it that—was rounded, almost bullet shaped, while the body tapered off to a flat base at the opposite end. It’s skin glistened a pinkish-red, shot through with brighter red veins that crisscrossed over the entire length of it. As Emily took another step closer, she could see the veins periodically pulsing as some kind of liquid pumped along their length. The skin was translucent and she could make out the shadow of a darker shape inside periodically flexing and rotating. It kind of reminded her of an insect pupa or a chrysalis.

Emily’s feet caught on something lying on the floor. Her attention was so focused on the thing on the wall that she hadn’t paid attention to where she was stepping and she went sprawling, her hand instinctively letting go of the knife and grabbing for the nearest desk to steady herself. She missed and instead struck the edge of the desk with her right forearm, sending a lightning bolt of pain shuddering up her arm and into her shoulder. Her mind registered the sharp edge of a desk flashing toward her and she willed her body to roll as she continued down. Her head barely missed the corner of the desk and instead hit something firm yet yielding. She let out a muted Oomph! as the rest of her body hit the floor, forcing the air from her lungs and sending another bolt of pain down her arm.

Confused, Emily’s mind tried to reorient itself to her sudden relocation from upright to horizontal. She pulled in a deep breath of air sure that she had cracked a rib when she fell and, knowing her luck, punctured a lung. She was going to drown in her own damn blood, she just knew it.

Goddamn it!

How could she have been so stupid not to look where she was walking?

She lay motionless on the floor for a few moments trying to regulate her breathing and slow her throbbing heart while she listened to the signals from her body. There was none of the telltale pain that she knew would come with a broken rib, no wet rattle of a deflated lung, just a sharp sting in her wrist and an even more painful, but thankfully dull, throb in her shoulder. Emily flexed her fingers a couple of times while she extended her damaged arm in a slow reaching movement; nothing broken either. She had been lucky this time. She raised the arm to eye level and examined the skin, it wasn’t cut but already a dull looking patch of blue and brown was spreading from her wrist towards her elbow. It was going to develop into one hell of a bruise she was sure.

Emily craned her neck back over her shoulder trying to get a visual of the thing on the wall. It was still, thankfully, exactly where it had been before her little trip.

Emily used her good left arm to push herself to an upright position, careful to feel for any other signs she had broken something or otherwise hurt herself, but there was only the pain in her shoulder and wrist. Once she was in a sitting position and sure nothing else was damaged, she rolled over onto her knees, that way she would be able to use her left arm and the desk she had almost collided with to help pull herself back to her feet.

Emily stared at what had caused her to trip.

It was another one of those things, a pupa. This close to it she could feel warmth spilling off it, nothing like the dense waves of heat the thing in the upstairs apartment had exuded, this was more like the warmth of a naked human body. She could clearly see the thick viscous fluid as it pumped through the arteries just below the surface of the skin. In fact, this close to it, she could see an even finer network of veins, like spider webs or varicose veins, spread across its entire surface. And beneath that surface, another shape moved slowly, churning in a light pink fluid filling the interior cavity behind the pupa’s thick outer layer.

Before she realized what she was doing Emily reached out her unhurt arm and placed her hand against the pupa’s shell. She had expected it to feel slick or slimy, instead, it was surprisingly dry and smooth, hot beneath her fingers. The dark shadow inside the husk gave a sudden twitch and Emily pulled her hand back, abruptly aware that she was touching something that had once been human and was now in the process of becoming something else entirely. She doubted anyone had simply wandered in from the street to take refuge here, so this… this changeling… had been someone from the paper, someone she had known. Her mind sped back to the day the rain arrived. To a conversation held in this very room.

“Oh no,” she said aloud. “No.”

These two obscenities were all that remained of Konkoly and Frank Embry?

“No,” she said again as she looked at what she knew could only be the remains of one of her friends. This had once been someone she had worked with, talked to, interacted with on a daily basis. Now he was this… this… alien thing.

The red rain had arrived from nowhere. Killed everyone she knew and loved, tearing her world right out from underneath her. But that hadn’t been enough, no; now it was changing them into something else, something alien, with no resemblance to the person they had once been. The idea revolted her.

Emily looked around for her knife. It had spun out of her hand when she’d fallen, but she thought she had heard it clatter off into one of the nearby cubicles. She used her good arm to push herself upright, her eyes unable to break away from the monstrosity at her feet, fascinated by the rhythm of the fluid pulsing through the thing’s veins, and the oddly slick looking yet surprisingly dry skin. Finally, she managed to tear her eyes away, turned and stepped into the cubicle where she thought she had heard the knife land.

She found it lying near a next-to-dead potted palm-tree the owner had placed in their cubicle. Grabbing the knife’s hilt, she checked the blade, it looked more or less fine except the tip was broken, snapped off during its unexpected escape attempt. Still, she was sure it would be more than up to the task she had planned for it.

Exiting the cubicle, Emily stepped over the pupa on the floor and placed a foot on either side of its strange bulk. She stared down at it for a few seconds—it really was quite fascinating, almost hypnotic, to watch—then raised her good arm to shoulder height and plunged the knife down into the thing.

There was a wet Pop! as the blunt tip of the blade punctured the shell of the pupa. Emily was hit by a nausea-inducing stench of ammonia as a spray of thick red mucous exploded from the body, splattering across her face, chest and arm. Some of it managed to land in her mouth and she quickly batted at it with the back of her gore soaked hand, but that only served to push more of it into her mouth. Tastes like month-old rotten fish, she thought just as she felt her gag reflex kick in for the second time that day. She continued to spit the crap out of her mouth, the taste of vomit preferable to whatever that was she had just swallowed.

Emily forced herself to grab the hilt of the knife and push the blade even deeper into the casing of the chrysalis. When it was plunged all the way to the hilt she began drawing the blade down the length of the pupa. The thing inside the shell began to convulse violently, bucking and writhing beneath her as she methodically drew the knife—this time using both her good and injured arm—down the length of the shell like she was gutting a deer. Pink stinking fluid oozed out from between the lips of the gash and the stench of ammonia became even stronger as the creature trapped inside writhed and twisted in pain.

Something glistening and dripping red goo rose from within the bifurcated shell with a wet slurp. Emily watched in horrified fascination as a red tinted tentacle extended from within the shell. The tentacle whipped back and forth through the air spraying more of the red crap over the floor and Emily. It was about two-feet long with three thick cords of flesh coiled around each other to form a single helix shaped appendage. The tentacle was tipped with what looked like a black beak but as she watched, Emily saw the beak break open into three triangular pieces, articulated by a fleshy joint at the base that attached each piece to the tentacle. The tentacle ceased its thrashing and suddenly turned to face Emily, the weird beak-that-wasn’t-a-beak opened even wider until she could see, nestled snugly in the center of the three triangular pieces, a lidless eye that regarded her with a cold malevolence.

A fucking eye!

It looked nothing like a regular human eye, or that of any other Earth born creature she had ever seen, but she was equally sure that it was still most definitely an eye. And it was staring directly at her.

Emily tugged the knife from the shell of the monster, the pain in her arm and shoulder forgotten temporarily, replaced with an anger-fueled bloodlust. With a flick of her wrist she severed the tentacle in two. The end with the eye fell, bounced once off her knee and hit the floor with a wet splat. The bottom half, presumably still attached to whatever was growing inside the pupa, snapped from side to side, spraying more of the disgusting red goop before disappearing back within the protection of the shell. Emily raised the knife, and then plunged it deep into the pupae, aiming for the black shadow hidden inside it. The knife found its mark and the rolling of the creature became more violent as its sanctuary suddenly became its execution chamber.

Again and again she stabbed at the thing hidden in the pupa, ignoring not only her own pain but also the stench and taste of the fluid that sprayed from it. When at last there was no longer any movement from whatever was hidden at the center of the shell, Emily dragged herself to her feet and let the knife fall to the floor. She stood over the now dead thing like some ancient blood-splattered gladiator over his defeated opponent.

“One down, several billion to go,” she mumbled and spat the last of the bloody crap from her mouth.

Emily glanced at the other alien pupa; if she had the time (and a ladder) she would take care of that one too, but right now she needed to complete what she had come here to do. The pain in her shoulder was already beginning to filter through the adrenalin high and Emily knew if she didn’t break into the security cabinet soon and get on her way, she’d have problems making it home before dark.

An open box of tissues sat on the desk of whoever had owned the deceased potted palm-tree. She pulled a handful of the tissues from the box and batted at the gore she could feel splattered on her face. When she was done, she balled up the pink stained tissues and tossed them at the remains of the cocoon on the floor before heading towards the back of the office to find the janitor’s closet.

It took just three strikes from the ball-peen hammer Emily found in the janitorial closet to snap the padlock from its receiver, but that was more than enough to set her injured shoulder on fire. Emily was beginning to suspect the fall might have done a bit more damage than she had first suspected.

With the lock dealt with, she dropped the hammer and pulled the metal cabinet doors apart. Inside she found what she was looking for on the top shelf: a canvas carryall about the size of a handbag with the word IRIDIUM stenciled on the sides in large white letters.

She pulled the bag from the cabinet and lowered it to the floor, unzipped it and began pulling out the contents, laying them next to the bag: a sat-phone, charger, operating instructions, a spare battery and a solar charger in its own impact resistant case.

Perfect.

Emily quickly repacked the components back into the bag, and gave the cabinet another once-over for anything else that might be of use. There was nothing left but a cashbox that probably contained a couple of thousand dollars. No use to anyone now.

As Emily closed the door to the cupboard, she spotted the hammer she had used to break the lock lying on the floor where she had dropped it. She grabbed it by the shaft, dropped it into the bag with the phone equipment and zipped it closed again.

Picking up the bag with her uninjured hand, Emily retraced her steps back along the corridor and down the metal staircase. She winced in pain as, unthinking, she used her injured right arm to shoulder through the main door out onto the street. If she had thought about it she should have looked for a first-aid kit, or some painkillers at least, but it was too late now. The adrenalin rush from her little chainsaw-massacre moment had worn off and the throbbing in her shoulder had evolved into a sharp teeth-clenching pain that Emily suspected might be a torn muscle or—and she hoped to God this wasn’t the case—a dislocated shoulder. She was still able to move her arm before the pain really kicked in, so she suspected she could disregard the dislocated shoulder theory, but her first-aid training was minimal and the last class she had taken was back in her high school days.

There was no way she was going to have the time or the ability to do any of the extra-curricular shopping she had planned, not today. What was most important now was to get home without doing any more damage to herself and treat her injured shoulder and arm; the supply run would have to wait until she was feeling better.

She lifted the bergen from its resting place around her bike’s saddle and pulled open one of the pouches, slotting the sat-phone bag into it she secured the pouch and hefted the bergen onto her left shoulder. This next part was going to hurt, she knew, but there was no way she was going to leave the bergen behind on the street.

Her right shoulder screamed at her, the pain bringing tears to her eyes as she gingerly manipulated it through the bergen’s shoulder straps. She had to keep her elbow akimbo and slide it through, while pulling the strap across her chest with her good left hand. Without the injury it would have taken her mere seconds, instead it used up precious minutes of daylight and left her sweating like a horse that had just run a steeplechase.

The buildings threw long shadows across the street as the sun dropped behind them. A row of streetlights had already begun to brighten as she swung her leg over the top bar of the bike, settled herself into the saddle and used her feet to kick some initial momentum into the bike. She had to keep her right arm bent and resting against her chest as though it was in a sling, as she could no longer extend it far enough in front of her to reach the handlebar. That made the bike less stable, so she also had to fight her instinct to pedal at her normal rate. Instead, Emily reduced her speed to a safer, but far slower level to ensure she wouldn’t fall off the damn bike and do even more damage than she already had.

It took her almost three times as long to get home than it had taken her to get to the Tribune’s offices. As twilight slowly edged toward dusk, Emily slowed her speed even more as the pain in her shoulder became a second-by-second distraction to her. She had to avoid any kind of bump or rut in the road, hitting one caused her shoulder to explode in agony, sending spots of blackness across her vision that would in turn send her careening off course. Twice her vision had cleared just in time for her to narrowly avoid slamming into one of the few parked cars still left on the empty streets. The second time she’d almost gone over the handle bars when she pulled the brake lever too hard, forgetting she only had her front brake. The bike had reared up on its front wheel in a reverse wheelie and she had tottered there for a second before the back end had bumped jarringly back to the road.

As Emily rounded the final corner before the apartment complex, she let out a sigh of relief and began to relax, in spite of the pain. When she got home, she was going to risk draining the water she’d collected out of the tub and running another hot bath. She was going to soak in it for as long as she needed.

Purposely overshooting her destination by a half-block, Emily rode the extra distance to a pedestrian crossing where she knew she would find a disabled-ramp she could use to get her bike off the road and onto the pavement, avoiding the guaranteed pain of jumping the bike up the curb. She circled back towards her building and pulled up in front of it: exhausted, bloodied, but alive and still in one piece.

Dismounting as carefully as she could, Emily left the bike lying on the pavement in front of the entrance and headed towards the welcoming warmth of the brightly illuminated apartment block. She pushed through the building’s front door, careful to avoid her damaged shoulder this time, pulled the door to the stairs open and readied herself for the seventeen-floor climb ahead of her.

And that was when all the lights went out.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Emily had never been afraid of the dark.

When she was a child she had laughed at the other kids who insisted they sleep with a nightlight on. She had never believed there was a monster hiding in the dark recesses of her closet and she definitely had no problem taking a wander out into one of her parent’s fields after sunset, just to sit in the long grass and stare at the moon and the stars.

But this was a very different kind of darkness. It was so deep and absolute, she might as well have been blind as she cautiously maneuvered her way up each level of stairs towards her apartment, carefully feeling for the landing at each new level so she could make the 180-degree turn needed to continue up the next flight of stairs.

The stairwell was a completely enclosed space with no windows. There was supposed to be an emergency generator down in the basement that should have kicked in and turned on the back-up lights when the power went down, but that, apparently, was not going to happen.

No light meant no floor numbers either, so Emily had to count each level as she climbed and hoped she didn’t make an error in her calculation and end up a floor above or below her apartment’s level. Especially not a floor above.

It was incredible to her how the removal of a single sense, albeit the one she relied on completely, could have such a profound impact on her interpretation of the world. Alone in the mine-black darkness, with only her four remaining senses to guide her, she became acutely aware of how ironic it was that she was now in exactly the position she had once relished as a child: alone in the dark, surrounded by the unknown. Back then it had been exhilarating and inviting; right now, with the events of the past few days and the stench of the creature she had killed earlier still filling her nose, she was absolutely and profoundly terrified.

It wasn’t often Emily wished she could go back to being a kid again, but she could use an ounce or two of that childhood bravado. Of course, being surrounded by some unknown menace didn’t exactly help, either.

To distract herself Emily began counting each flight of steps out loud. It wasn’t long before the sound of her voice echoing up the empty shaft of the stairwell began to make her more uneasy than the silence, and she reverted to counting the steps off in her head instead.

By the time she reached what she was 99%-positive was her floor, Emily was barely able to put one leg in front of the other. The strap of the bergen was digging into her right shoulder and felt more like a knife than a foam padded support strap. Her head ached from the overdose of adrenalin and her back and knees objected to every step she asked them to take.

She felt around for where she thought the door should be. It wasn’t there, so she moved her hands to the right and found the crack where the door met the frame. A few inches in, her hands found the coolness of the pane of security glass in the door’s center panel and she inched her hand down from there until she located the aluminum bar-handle.

She was about to pull the door open when a faint noise dragged her attention back to the stairwell. It was distant, but definitely coming from within the building somewhere, she was sure of it. The sound was a warbling ululation unlike anything she had ever heard before, it echoed eerily through the stairwell, bouncing off the walls. Emily had the unnerving thought that she might be the first human to have ever heard this strange, unearthly, cry.

The sound came again, a lone voice probing into the darkness. As she listened, more warbling voices joined the first, answering the call and, as Emily stood mesmerized by the strange chorus filling the blackness of the stairwell, a final voice joined the choir and this one was much closer.

This one was in the stairwell with her.

Emily flung the door open and stumbled blindly out into the lightless corridor, rushing headlong into the opposite wall, her face impacting painfully with the drywall. Luckily, she had been in the process of fishing her keys from her pants’ pocket so her head was turned just enough to the left that she didn’t hit nose first. A busted nose would just have been the icing on a perfect day. Instead, her cheek and, of course, her injured shoulder took the brunt of the collision. The pain was so intense she literally saw stars; tiny white motes of light that danced around her sightless eyes. She felt like a cartoon character and wondered whether those same stars bouncing around her vision were circling around her head.

No time to think about that, her panic driven brain reported to her. Got to move. Got to get to safety.

The braying cry of the unseen creature again echoed up from the stairwell, puncturing the darkness and paralyzing Emily for a second before her brain regained control over her feet and forced them to move. She was totally disorientated, the corridor was almost as dark as the stairwell and she had no idea whether she was facing towards or away from her apartment.

She had to stop for a second and reorient. Convincing her brain that this was a good idea was next to impossible, the primal flight or fight instinct had kicked in and her brain had made its decision quickly and decisively: run like fuck! But if she followed that impulse she could end up in completely the wrong half of the corridor, so she forced her feet to remain rooted to the spot.

Emily’s heart crashed in her chest, reverberating in her ears; unfortunately, it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the cacophony of calls that now seemed to fill the night. Emily could hear other noises too, shuffling and clunking sounds that filled the empty air, seeming to come from every floor of the apartment block. Emily’s mind instantly imagined the unimaginable: all around her came the sounds of creatures emerging from their cocoons and beginning to explore their surroundings for the first time. The strange cries and warbles belonged to things that weren’t of this world and whose bodies were designed for other, far distant planets. They had woken from their slumber and were even now moving and shuffling as they called out to their brethren.

She was surrounded. Emily Baxter, until just a couple of days earlier a reporter for a mildly respected newspaper, was now the last living woman in a city that might as well be on another planet.

“Screw that,” she breathed, barely able to hear herself above the growing cacophony of calls.

She reached into her jeans and pulled her apartment keys from her pocket. These were her lifeline. Even though she couldn’t see them, the reassuring jangle of metal against metal was a welcome sound of normality and, if she could just find her door, a promise of safety. The reassuring feel of the keys in her hand was enough to force her body back under her control.

Emily drew in another deep breath and reached out with both hands, ignoring the pain in her shoulders and the twinging throb in her cheek. Her hands connected with the plasterboard of the wall and she took a step to the left, feeling her way along the surface of the wall, looking for something that she could use to orient herself within the corridor. She took another step and repeated the process but didn’t find what she was looking for so she turned around until she was relatively sure she was facing the opposite wall and took two tentative steps forward until her palms again touched a wall. She reversed the process she had begun on the other wall, taking baby-step after baby-step until, finally, her hands found what she had been searching for: the solid bulk of the stairwell door she had exited through. Now that she was oriented, Emily knew which direction to head, but she was going to have to rely exclusively on her sense of touch to locate her apartment.

From the other side of the stairwell door, Emily sensed rather than heard something large move. It was just the tiniest of sensations, a disturbance in the air brushing against the small hairs of her face, a vibration transmitted through the door and to the tips of her fingers. In the pitch-black hallway, her remaining senses had switched to a heightened state and Emily knew that the owner of the cry she had heard in the stairwell earlier was now much closer.

As if to confirm her thought, an ear-piercing scream exploded from the thing in stairwell, battering her remaining senses. The sound was so strong and so close the vibrations of its ferocity ran through the door and flowed up Emily’s arms resonating and buzzing in her brain like a swarm of angry wasps. This time the sound had the opposite effect, instead of freezing, it galvanized Emily into movement. She turned her body in the direction of her apartment, clutched her keys firmly in her hand and pushed her thumb through the loop of the key-ring, just in case she stumbled or fell.

She began walking as quickly as she dared toward her apartment, her left hand trailing behind her as it traced the contour of the wall. She let out a sigh of relief as her fingers felt the sudden lift and then dip of the frame surrounding the door of the first apartment.

“One,” she counted off and began moving forward again through the darkness.

Her fingers touched the frame of the next door and she whispered “Two”, her voice almost drowned out by the cries of the thing in the stairwell. It seemed to be closer still. Just two more doors, she told herself as terror began to creep back into her heart, just two more.

More steps, this time rushed, gauging her chance of falling versus remaining in that haunted corridor a second longer than she had to.

“Three,” she said as her fingers found her neighbor’s door. Emily ran the last few steps, the skin on her fingers tingling with the friction generated as she felt along the wall. Her hand contacted with her door just as she heard another click and the unmistakable squeak of the stairwell door opening.

Emily stopped, listening.

The squeak of the door’s hinges opening further reached her ears and then… another noise. Emily’s breath froze in her throat as the sound of something large squeezing itself through the doorway echoed down the corridor. It was followed by another noise, like stiletto heels on tile, the sharp Tap Tap Tap of multiple feet drumming against the floor as whatever had just entered the corridor began moving in her direction.

She was no longer alone, Emily realized with a growing sense of horror.

Tap… Tap… Tap… the rapid staccato sound edged closer to her, then stopped for a second before continuing.

Emily’s mind frantically worked to make a familiar association with the sound of the fast approaching creature but she came up blank. While her imagination could not piece together what was in the corridor with her, her instincts had no such qualms and screamed at her something she already knew: whatever was drawing closer in the darkness was searching for her.

She began quickly feeling around the door for the lock. Finally, she felt the cold metal of the tumbler beneath her trembling fingertips. Her fingers, clammy with sweat, tugged at the keys looped over her thumb. They were stuck on the knuckle of her thumb and would not budge. She gave an extra hard tug and felt the key-ring pull free of her thumb. Emily let out a small cry of dismay as they slipped from her damp fingers and clattered to the floor, invisible in the darkness. She dropped to her knees and began to feel around for the lost keys. How could it be so damn hard to find them? They had to be right in front of her.

…Tap… Tap…

The sound was closer this time. Her breath began to come out in short ragged bursts as her heart played a drumbeat behind her ribcage while she frantically felt around in the darkness for the lost keys.

As if the creature at the other end of the corridor could sense her panic, Emily heard a sudden acceleration to its movement.

Tap… TapTapTap…

The thing skittered even closer to her through the darkness.

Then—thank you God—she felt the shape of the key-ring beneath her finger tips. She snatched it up, feeling for the telltale rubber cover she had placed over her front-door key. The fingers of her right-hand searched for the keyhole again, and, as she felt the outline of the brass receiver beneath her fingers, she brought the key up and guided it into the lock. Turning the key, Emily was rewarded with the familiar click of the lock’s tumblers falling into place, the weight of her body pushed open the door and she stumbled into her apartment. She pulled the key from the lock, slammed the door shut with all her remaining energy and searched for the thumb-lock. With the thumb-lock securely in place, Emily patted around above it until her hand swatted the security chain, which she fumbled into its receiver on the door.

In the total blackness of her apartment, Emily Baxter crawled along the corridor on her hands and knees until she found her bedroom. She crept inside, still on her hands and knees, over to the walk-in closet on the far side of the room. Opening the door to her closet, she pulled herself inside and closed the door securely behind her.

That night, cowering in the corner of the closet, Emily listened to the calls of an awakening world.