Extinction Point: The End

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Emily did not know what time the creatures stopped their wailing. As the night wore on, her mind gave her the only protection it could, providing her with a buffer against the overwhelming sense of dread that gripped her as she listened to the cries of the creatures calling to each other.

Her mind retreated into itself, filtering out the strains of the alien dissonance that pummeled her senses. Emily found herself regarding the situation from a place where, if she had cared to try to explain it, she could only describe as the center of her mind. It was so quiet there. Not the scary quiet she had experienced after everyone else had died, this was a peaceful, warm, quiet. Her pain, both physical and mental, became a distant distortion, more fascinating to her than distracting.

At some point during the night, her body, shocked and in pain, had demanded to shut down and, despite Emily’s best efforts to remain awake in that beautiful island of peace her mind had taken her to, she had slept.

When she awoke, the memories of the previous night came flooding back to her, and they brought with them a new fear: that while she slept the creature she had heard in the corridor might somehow have made it into her apartment.

She had no idea how long she had hidden in the closet or even what time it was. Her closet-sanctuary was almost as dark as the corridor she had fought her way through the night before, but a bright line of light filtering through the crack at the bottom of the door could only mean day had arrived, and that at least helped to alleviate some of the fear gnawing at her courage.

As her head began to clear, her injuries also began to make their presence known. Emily winced as she eased her body away from the wall she had been leaning against, her legs complained as she unfolded them from beneath her.

She gave her injured right arm a cautious experimental flex. A dull throb, starting in her deltoid muscle and continuing down into her tricep, pulsed with each movement she made. It hurt but it wasn’t debilitating. Next, she tried lifting her elbow to shoulder height but only managed a few inches before a sharp burst of pain in her neck made her grimace and decide it probably wasn’t such a good idea to try that again for a while. Looking on the bright side though, the pain level wasn’t as bad as last night. It was just an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, instead of a 15. Hopefully, that was a good indicator her injury wasn’t as severe as she had first thought. Still, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch and was going to slow her down for sure.

“Okay, on the count of three,” she whispered. “…Three.” She used her left arm to help push herself to a standing position, coddling her right arm, keeping it tight to her body, but the pain was still enough to force a hiss of air from her as she raised herself to her feet.

She allowed herself a moment for her strained muscles to relax. As she stood in the darkness, she turned her thoughts to her next problem: whether she had picked up a new roommate overnight. It could have been her imagination, of course, but the thing in the corridor had seemed very interested in her last night. Emily was sure the sound of her door being broken down by some multiple-legged freak that used to be one of her neighbors would have gotten her attention, even given the almost catatonic state in which she had spent the night. Still, given the magnitude-ten on the weirdness scale of the past few days, it was better to err on the side of caution from now on. She was hardly in a fit state for another fight, after all.

Emily reached for the closet’s doorknob and, ever so cautiously, twisted it, cringing as the latch squeaked back. Keeping her hand firmly on the handle, Emily pushed the door open until a crack large enough for her to view her bedroom and the door leading into it was visible. She was ready to snatch the closet door closed again if she spotted anything out of place, but everything looked normal to her. There wasn’t any sign of a disturbance, so she pushed the door open a few more inches until the gap was large enough for her to stick her head through. She scanned the rest of the room and the back of the door, just in case anything was lurking out of sight back there—nothing.

With the coast apparently clear, Emily cautiously slipped out of the closet and into the bedroom. Only when a loose tie-down caught on the door handle did she realize that she was still wearing the bergen; she had slept with the damn thing on her back all night. With a little luck, she hadn’t damaged the sat-phone while she was asleep. She’d check later but right now she needed to recon the rest of the apartment.

Emily crossed over to the bedroom door and looked out into the hallway, but again, there was nothing. The front door was in one piece with the thumb-lock and security chain both still in place. She began to breathe a little easier, but she’d need to do a full survey of the apartment before she could relax fully.

Pushing the bedroom door closed with a click of the lock, Emily moved to her bed and undid the quick-snap belt from around her waist dropping the bergen onto the comforter. She winced as a jab of pain shot across her shoulder like an electric shock.

She had left the knife next to the remains of the pupa back at the paper, but the hammer she had used to break the lock of the security cabinet was still in the sat-phone bag, so she quickly undid the flap covering the main compartment of the bergen, pulled out the sat-phone bag and located the hammer. The weight of it in her hand felt good, even if she would have to carry it in her left hand. It wasn’t as comforting as the knife but it sure would put a dent in the day of anything that might be lurking elsewhere in the apartment.

With hammer in hand, Emily opened the door of the bedroom and began searching the remainder of her apartment. Quickly moving from room to room it was soon clear to her that whatever had been lurking in the corridor had apparently lost interest in her and had failed to breach her apartment’s defenses. The place looked exactly as she had left it; nothing waited for her in any of the closets or behind the breakfast nook or even under the bed

Her place was clear.

Returning to the bedroom, Emily unpacked the sat-phone and accessories, inspecting them all for any damage. Everything looked to be in good shape, but when she pressed the ‘on’ button for the phone the display remained black; the battery was dead. She popped the plastic back-panel off the phone, pried out the old battery and inserted the spare, hoping there might be some charge left in it, but it too was spent. She would need to charge them both as quickly as possible.

Emily glanced over at her bedside alarm clock. The alarm’s display was blank. She walked over to the light switch on the wall, flicked it on and off a couple of times but the light above her head remained dark.

With the power still down—and with little chance it was ever coming back—she going to have to use the solar charging unit she had picked up with the sat-phone to charge the batteries.

It was imperative that she reestablish a line of communication with the scientists in Alaska as quickly as possible. They had to know what was happening.

Emily unboxed the solar-charger and scanned over the instructions on how to operate it. The device came with a separate battery unit that plugged into the collapsible solar panel. This separate unit would hold a charge up to six-times longer than a regular battery and would allow her to then charge the phone’s batteries from the unit. This meant she would always have an extra charge available. Simple. The only problem was it was going to take about nine hours to fully charge the solar-unit and then the phone. Emily took the battery-unit and solar panel into the living room where it would get the most sun. On the way in she checked the clock on the cooker, realizing she had no idea what time it was. With the power off, though, that clock was also dead, so she had to backtrack into her bedroom to read the battery powered analog clock on the wall: 11:07 am the hands showed. That was good; it gave her at least seven hours of sunlight, which should be enough to get a full charge.

Using the instruction book to guide her, Emily made quick work of assembling the unit, snapping each piece into place and then moving the completed unit to the sideboard close to the window where the solar charging panel could gather the energy it needed. Almost immediately, a small red LED indicator on the top of the unit began flashing to show it was indeed charging.

Emily’s stomach grumbled loudly. She had ignored her hunger pangs while she worked to get the unit up and charging. With that chore out of the way, she figured she had time to grab something quick to eat.

She opened the refrigerator, the air was still cool inside but that wouldn’t last long now the power was down. She had half a pack of honey-roast ham left and decided it was best to use that up before it spoiled. She pulled a couple of slices from the packet, rolling them into a tube before biting a chunk off the end. The remaining meat she put between two slices of bread, smothered them in some mayo and chowed-down, savoring the flavors while wondering whether this would be the last time she ever tasted any of them. She chased the sandwich with the last of the milk along with a couple of extra-strength Tylenol from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom,

With her belly full, Emily turned her mind to the next looming item on her agenda: how was she going to get out of New York?

For anyone else, she supposed the option would be clear: grab any of the tens of thousands of vehicles left abandoned on the side of the road or parked in apartment garages, and head out of town, but Emily had zero driving experience. She had never had a need for it. She supposed that she could try and learn to drive but there was always the chance that she’d crash the damn car and end-up dead, or worse still, trapped in a wreck with no hope of rescue and only a slow painful death to look forward to. Besides, while the roads were pretty much clear around her patch of Manhattan, who knew what they were like on the routes out of the city. She could spend the time hunting down a suitable vehicle, trying to learn to drive while not killing herself only to find the roads blocked somewhere along the way. She’d be in a worse position than she was now and without the security of her apartment, the mobility of her bike, and the chance to plan far enough ahead. Besides all of those reasons, Emily had a creeping suspicion last night’s chorus line was only the beginning of a totally new act in this bizarre show. She could not afford the time she would need to spend screwing around with learning to drive when she could be using it to gather supplies and start on her way. No, when she left, it was going to have to be with the help of her trusty bike and her own two feet.

Her first objective then, was to gather more supplies. She was confident that when she left the city, if she chose the right route, she could avoid the major population centers. If she stuck to the rural areas, she could still scavenge for food and find somewhere safe to rest each night while lowering her chances of running into anything nasty. If she could do that then she wouldn’t have to worry about carrying more than a few days worth of food and water with her, which meant she could move faster. Of course, she would have to take the time to track down provisions and shelter on a daily basis but she was confident that would not be too much of a problem. When you are conceivably the sole remaining human being left on the east coast, the world was pretty much your oyster.

Most homes, she thought, would have a supply of tinned goods in their pantry. She was sure those nonperishable’s would last for months, if not years, before spoiling. She would collect food as she travelled. The extra space she gained from carrying minimal provisions would be taken up with other essentials like a medical kit, spare parts for her bike, the sat-phone equipment and extra water… and, of course, some kind of weapon. At some point she was going to have to address that, the sooner the better she supposed, but the idea of entering the apartment where she had left Nathan with the dead family frightened her. She wasn’t afraid to admit it. The possibility he had become one of whatever she had encountered in the darkness last night, well, that was not something she was sure she could face.

The one thing that could prove to be a problem was finding spare parts for her bike; a punctured tire, snapped brake-line or a broken chain could be hard to fix and slow her down by days if the bike hit was damaged in the middle of nowhere. And, she suspected, the less of a reason she had to travel into major population areas the safer she would be.

If she was honest with herself, her current bike was not exactly in its prime anymore. It might be worth paying a visit to her local bike store one last time. First, Emily needed to change her clothes and wash-up because she stank worse than a pissed-off skunk on a summer’s afternoon. Her clothes were torn and covered in whatever the thing she had killed in the newsroom called blood.

Just because it was the end of the world didn’t give her an excuse to start acting like a bum.

The image that greeted Emily in the bathroom mirror was unnerving, to say the least. She raised a tentative hand to her cheek and touched the purple bruised skin beneath her right eye. The throbbing pain in her shoulder had distracted her from the fact her face looked like she had gone a couple of rounds with Manny Pacquiao. While she lightly probed around the puffy broken skin with her fingers, Emily’s mind drifted back to the events that had caused her to run headlong into the wall. Looking back at it now, in the clear light of day, she began to wonder whether the creature she thought was chasing her had been nothing more than a phantom created by her stressed out, over excited mind. She hadn’t actually seen anything, right? But it had been too damn dark to see anything in that corridor, and what about the caterwauling that had caused her panic in the first place? Emily knew she hadn’t imagined that.

She smarted as her fingers pressed against the inflamed skin of her cheek a little too hard. An inch long cut just below her right eye stung every time she blinked. It wasn’t too deep and had already scabbed over. Emily was confident she would live.

It was okay to joke but Emily knew she was going to have to be extra cautious when treating any open wounds she suffered from now on. A minor cut could easily become infected and, with no access to a doctor, she would be on her own. She made a mental note to try and find a supply of antibiotics before she left.

And what was with her hair? It was a matted mess and looked like a family of sparrows had built a nest back there. The final addition to her end-of-the-world makeover was the flaky streaks of dirt slashing diagonally across her face like camo-paint from some war movie.

“Well don’t you just look lovely,” she told her reflection, before bending to the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink and pulling out the small first-aid kit she kept there. She unclipped the lid and rifled though the contents until she found an antiseptic pad, which she set on the glass shelf underneath the mirror. She’d need to clean herself up before she used the pad, but the idea of washing in cold water held no appeal for Emily. Instead, she chose the next best option: wet-wipes. She pulled the plastic packet from the medicine cabinet on the opposite wall and began wiping as gently as she could at the dirt and dried blood on her face. It took most of the pack before she felt she looked presentable again and had cleared the dirt and muck away to reveal the full extent of the abrasion on her cheek.

“Son of a goddamn bitch!” she yelled as she wiped the antiseptic swatch across her the grazed skin, the pain in her shoulder forgotten for a moment, as the sudden burning of her cheek demanded all her attention. She hoped the extra abuse she was putting herself through was worth the effort, she’d cut her cheek over eight hours ago and wasn’t sure her late attempt at first-aid would actually do her any good. But, in the spirit of her earlier commitment to an overabundance of caution when it came to medical issues, she wiped the antiseptic pad across the gash on her face a couple more times.

With her bout of self-torture finally over, Emily slipped out of her disgustingly dirty shirt and jeans, pulled off her panties and socks, balled them all together, and tossed them into the far corner of the bathroom. With no electricity to wash with, she wasn’t going to be wearing them again but Emily was confident she also wasn’t going to be here long enough to worry about cleaning up after herself.

The air was cool against her exposed skin as Emily moved from the bathroom into her bedroom. She pulled a clean tee-shirt and jeans from the same closet where she had spent the night. As she pulled on her fresh set of clothes, she caught a whiff of her own body odor, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She would need to figure out a way of heating water at some point. She didn’t think she could handle her own stench for too many days.

A few minutes later, wearing her fresh clothes and another pair of sneakers — whoever came up with the idea of replacing laces with Velcro strips was a genius — Emily felt she was finally ready to start moving forward with the next part of her plan.

This time, she would be ready for any trouble. She gathered together a collection of essential items: her trusty hammer, a large bottle of water, several snack bars she found hidden behind a bag of flour in the pantry and, determined to never be caught in the dark again, a six-cell Maglite flashlight she kept in her bedroom tallboy in case of a brown out. The flashlight would also double as a baton if it came down to it. She packed everything except the hammer into the bergen and shouldered it, slotting the hammer into the waist belt.

The pain-pills she had taken with her late breakfast had kicked in and the pain in her strained muscles was already beginning to fade to a sufficiently ignorable level. Feeling as ready as she was ever going to be Emily checked the corridor outside her front door, looking through the security spyhole for any sign of the creature she thought she had heard in the darkness. It looked clear, but she decided to err on the side of caution and pulled the hammer from her belt before slowly opening her front door.

Nothing lay in wait for Emily outside her apartment. The corridor was as empty as she remembered it being when she left the day before. There was something different though. On the opposite wall from her apartment, a number of ragged holes punctuated the wall. They were spaced almost evenly apart, and as she looked closer, Emily could see they left a trail that extended along the wall back towards the door to the stairwell before curving up onto the ceiling and ending at the stairwell entrance. She leaned in to get a closer look at the holes ; they were large enough for her to place her pinky finger in and looked to have been cut by something sharp enough that it left a clean hole with no rough edges.

They were track marks, she realized.

Something had come up through the stairwell last night. While she had struggled in the darkness, it climbed along the corridor wall after her and stopped outside her apartment. The hair on the nape of Emily’s neck stood erect. Emily wasn’t sure she felt any better knowing she hadn’t imagined the incident, because now she was truly unnerved. Instinctively she looked up and down the corridor again, double-checking to make sure whatever had made these tracks was not hiding somewhere nearby.

The divots in the drywall were spaced in two parallel arcs, six on each side. Emily placed her left arm in the space between the two sets of tracks, her fingertips touching the top set of holes; her elbow didn’t even reach the center of the gap between the two tracks. Whatever had come through that door was big, at least four-feet across, if her rough measurements were anything to gauge it by.

Her grip on the shaft of the hammer grew tighter as her imagination spiked into overdrive, conjuring up images of what could create the kind of marks she was looking at on the wall. Emily quickly dismissed the thoughts. She knew whatever imaginary creatures she created, the reality was going to be far more alien than her tired mind could produce.

She had always considered herself willing to confront anything—a reporter who wasn’t able to face down opposition wouldn’t last very long—but this whole situation was just too far out, too strange. The drive to hide and pretend it was all okay was overwhelming, but if she gave into it, Emily knew she would surely die. Her only hope of survival was to move forward with her plan. That meant leaving this city and heading north as quickly as she could.

Emily’s trip down the stairwell was far simpler this time than her previous night’s adventure. She followed the tracks she found outside her door as they continued along the wall of the 17th floor and eventually into the darkness of the stairwell. Her flashlight illuminated her way down each flight of stairs as she tracked the holes down another two floors until they disappeared when the spider-thing, as she had come to think of it, presumably decided to stop using the wall and instead jumped to the stairs like any other self respecting New Yorker would.

The foyer of the apartment block was clear. Nothing looked disturbed or out of place, but she did notice three more sets of tracks leading from the ground floor and out through the building’s main doors. That could only mean there were more of the spider-things on the loose, but at least the tracks appeared to be heading out of the building and away from her.

Stepping into the open air and the beautiful day that greeted her, Emily felt her spirits surge. The apartment, now that she was fully committed to leaving, had gradually become more and more claustrophobic and stuffy to her, but out here in the sunshine, it was simply glorious.

The sun shone brilliantly, framed by a clear, cloud free sky, much the same as the day the red-rain had fallen. Emily didn’t care about the similarity; the warmth of the sun against her skin felt fabulous and she paused for a moment, closed her eyes and allowed herself to simply bathe in the radiated warmth of her planet’s star. For that moment, as she stood rejoicing in the simple act of sun worship, the orange warmth permeating through her tightly closed eyelids, she could imagine that this was just another day. That the sights and sounds that were this great city’s heartbeat had simply paused for a moment to allow her these few seconds of bliss and, when she opened her eyes, the world would be as it once was, as it had always been, as it should be.

Of course, when Emily finally allowed her eyes to flutter open again, the world was as empty as when she closed them. It was okay, she supposed, because she was still alive, she knew that she was not the only survivor, and today would most likely be the final day she would have to spend in this vast city of ghosts and scuttling unseen monsters.

Emily let out a sigh of resignation. Her aching body was already complaining about the prospect of this latest jaunt, the painkillers she had taken earlier were still doing their job but they weren’t powerful enough to blunt the pain completely.

Her bike was where she had dropped it the night before. For some reason she thought it would be gone, spirited away by whatever she had heard awakening in her apartment complex last night. In fact, there was no sign of any of the owners of the fricative alien voices that had serenaded the city, and Emily pondered whether they had some kind of aversion to daylight.

Maybe they were just late sleepers, she joked to herself. She didn’t laugh.

Bending over to lift the bike caused a warning spasm of pain to quiver through her shoulder. Even though the discomfort was numbed by the painkillers, she had to keep in mind her body was beat-up, and her injuries could easily be exacerbated if she overexerted herself. Any other time and she would put herself on light-duty, but time had run out for both Emily and the human race, she could no longer simply take to her bed for a couple of days while she healed.

She had to be extra careful from here on out, she reminded herself again.

Emily scooted her bike around until it was facing east, mounted it and began peddling at a leisurely pace, resisting the urge to pick her pace up to her normal cruising speed. There was no need to rush today, it was more important to ensure she didn’t put her recovering body under any more stress. Besides, at her current speed she could also keep her eyes open for any of the owners of the strange cries she had heard last night.

There were several bike shops within a few miles for her to choose from but she decided to head to her favorite, the oddly named STEALS ON WHEELS over on Lexington and 75th. It wasn’t one of those mega-store we-sell-everything emporiums where you could buy just about anything but no one knew you from Adam. This was just a small-time boutique bike shop, owned and operated by a life-long cycling enthusiast named Mike Stanley who stocked what he liked to call ’the best bargains on two wheels‘. Despite the store’s name and Mike’s sell-line, the bikes he sold were anything but cheap, but they were most definitely some of the most robust, reliable and well made bikes you could pick up anywhere in the city. Plus, it was only a block or so away from a Whole Foods Market that had opened up just a few months earlier. With a little luck she could find a new bike plus all the spare parts she could carry at Mike’s store, and then head over to the market and stock up on the supplies she would need for the first leg of her trip.

She pedaled south-west on Amsterdam Avenue, past the eerily empty stores and businesses and the equally deserted sidewalks. When she made the left onto West 86th Street Emily had to swerve and brake suddenly to avoid a huge delivery truck jutting out from the semi collapsed building it had collided with. The road was littered with kegs of beer. They lay scattered across the road like mines, their silver casks glinting in the sun and mixing with the debris from the decimated building.

The cab of the truck had buried itself deep inside the shattered building. Splintered floorboards, pieces of ceiling and plasterboard hung from the mouth of the decimated building reminding Emily, oddly, of the Christmas decorations that had always seemed so appealing to her when she visited Santa’s Grotto as a child. Strange how the mind works, she thought as she slowed to a stop.

Emily dismounted and propped her bike up against the curb using the flat of the left pedal. The truck’s cab was barely visible through the tangle of fallen debris. She had to pick her way towards it, carefully avoiding the sharp splinters of wood jutting like stalagmites and stalactites, seemingly from every angle. She reached the front of the vehicle unscathed; the doors to the truck were both closed, but the driver’s-side window had an almost perfectly circular hole in it measuring a couple of feet across. Emily used the truck’s footplate to step up and examine the hole; it looked as though someone had taken a circular saw and cut through the glass. She ran her fingers over the edge of the opening. The edge felt sharp, serrated almost, as though whatever had made it had gnawed through the glass.

Peering through the hole into the cab, Emily could see nothing remained of whoever had been driving the delivery truck, they were gone and in their place was the remains of one of the giant pupae she had seen—and splattered, she reminded herself—at the paper yesterday.

Both doors of the truck were still locked from the inside of the cab, which meant whatever had emerged from the pupa could only have escaped through the circular hole in the glass. The hole was just too neat to have been caused by the crash, so the logical assumption, Emily concluded, would be it could only have been cut by the thing trapped in the cab. The transformed driver was, she hoped, long gone, because Emily did not even want to imagine the kind of being that had climbed out from the cocoon and then been able to bore through the truck’s window with such precision to escape.

Emily turned her attention back to the remains lying on the floor of the truck’s cab. The pupa had split open along its middle like a giant clamshell. The inside was a dull brown now but Emily could make out several slimy looking tubes that she guessed had acted like umbilical cords to feed the creature the nutrients it had needed. The faint reek of ammonia still filled the truck’s cabin.

She climbed down from the truck and cautiously made her way back out into the sunshine, but even as the warmth of the sun welcomed her back, an icy tentacle of fear wrapped itself around the base of her spine and began to tighten its grip.

Emily sped across the junction of Central Park West and 81st, her head instinctively flipping right and left despite the dead traffic lights and mostly empty road.

A single police car, its front driver’s side and passenger seat windows wound all the way down, blocked the right lane of the entrance onto the 79th Street Transverse, positioned to stop any traffic continuing past it, she guessed. Emily could imagine the cop sitting in his car, arm resting on the sill of the open window, but she had no idea why he would have chosen to stop there.

Emily had already cycled several hundred yards past the abandoned police car when she had an idea. She slowed the bike and circled back to the cop car. Not bothering to dismount from the bike, she pulled up alongside the driver’s side, opened the door and leaned in, her eyes quickly searching the interior of the black-and-white. She found what she was looking for secured between the passenger and driver’s seat.

Emily mentally crossed her fingers before giving the shotgun a sharp tug.

“Yesss!” she yelled in victory as the Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun pulled free of its security rack. A bandolier of spare shells rested in a recess beneath the weapon, alongside a full box of extra shells. The shells would be useful but the bandolier would be uncomfortable to wear with the bergen so she pulled the cartridges from their individual holders and added them to the box, tossing the empty bandolier back into the cab of the patrol car.

The previous summer, Nathan had insisted on teaching Emily how to shoot and had taken her out to the gun range. While she had enjoyed learning the ins and outs of firing a handgun, she had really enjoyed shooting the shotgun. She liked the heft of it but most of all she enjoyed knowing that whatever she pointed it at she was probably going to hit. It could effectively hit a target out as far as seventy-yards or so, but at close range, it was absolutely deadly. The Glock 15 Nathan had handed her was cute and had left neat little holes in the paper target she was firing at, but the shotgun, well that had cut the paper target in two.

Dismounting from the bike, Emily quickly removed her backpack and pushed the spare shotgun shells into a side pouch. Once she had fastened herself back into the bergen she looped the strap of the Mossberg over her head and across her chest. It wasn’t particularly comfortable but it would do for now.

While she wasn’t sure just how effective the shotgun might be against the creatures roaming her apartment’s corridors, she certainly felt more secure knowing she now had something to defend herself with.

The shoulder-high sandstone retaining walls on either side of the two-lane road were almost entirely obscured by a green waterfall of plants that clung to every inch of the gray stone. The lush foliage spilled over the cold stones and drooped towards the pavement. The road Emily was riding cut directly across Central Park and avoided what would normally have been paths crowded with pedestrians and tourists. Emily slowed her speed slightly, marveling at what a couple of days of no traffic could do for the air. Despite her many trips down this same road over the years, this was the first time she could actually smell the park and its plant life. The air was thick with the fecund aroma of vegetation; it tickled her nostrils and filled her mind with images of sweeping fields of grass. It was intoxicating.

Under any other circumstances, this would probably rank right up there on her list of perfect days: the sun, warm and welcoming on her skin; the road empty before her; the heady aroma of eight-hundred acres of grass, trees and flowerbeds. If it had not been for the rest of the city’s occupants lying dead around her and in the process of being consumed by some strange menace, then yes, this would certainly have ranked right up there.

Despite the obvious drawbacks, Emily allowed herself to bask in the simple illusion as she pedaled onwards. The road dipped beneath a footbridge and she swept past a row of dilapidated storefronts on her right. She could be anywhere in the world right now, she thought. The old stone architecture reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Europe and she allowed herself to imagine she was riding through the back-roads of Provence, or maybe Tuscany; she had always wanted to take a trip to Italy.

Her daydream ended when she rounded the final bend approaching the exit onto 5th Avenue and 79th. Three cars, or what was left of them at least, had collided at the junction. Two were full-on yellow, with NYC TAXI stenciled on their doors. The third was a white Nissan Pathfinder SUV. One of the taxis had T-boned the Pathfinder, the second taxi had apparently careened into the back of the first taxi effectively blocking the junction. Three police cruisers, one at each junction, had positioned themselves to stop traffic from getting past.

The accident must have happened just as the majority of Manhattan’s workers learned of the approaching disaster, because in the lanes blocked by each patrol car were row upon row of empty vehicles. Most bore the same yellow livery as the crumpled taxi’s involved in the accident, but Emily could see the occasional delivery truck, a couple of tour busses, and even a motorcycle or two here and there, lying on their side in the road.

Caught up in this traffic snarl, every driver had undoubtedly been sitting impatiently behind the wheel of their vehicle, unaware that that would be their final resting place.

The exit lanes leading away from the lights were more or less empty, apart from the occasional car caught in the process of making a u-turn, hoping to head in the opposite direction of the accident before it was too late. Emily saw one car that had run through a bus-stop, scattering bits of the decimated shelter across the sidewalk and road. There wasn’t any sign of an ambulance, so the accident must have happened just minutes before death stepped into the city.

Emily slowed her bike to a walking pace, and made a wide curve around the debris field of the accident. The vehicles engines must have all been running at the time the red plague struck because, in every vehicle she looked into, the keys were still in the ignition. Most had their doors closed and locked, she noted. Some of the unlucky drivers had apparently managed to get their doors open before succumbing to the effects of the red-rain (or maybe they had simply opened them to yell and scream at the drivers in front of them in true New York fashion). But every locked vehicle Emily passed as she free-wheeled slowly down the center divider between the two lanes had one thing in common: they all had the same almost perfectly round hole in one of their windows as she had seen in the beer delivery truck, minutes earlier.

The crush of cars disappeared as she crossed over Madison Avenue. The road was virtually clear of vehicles as she continued heading east along 79th street, except for a few stragglers who must have managed a u-turn before they got caught up in the traffic snarl ahead. When she hit the Lexington junction she hung wide right and continued down the next four or five blocks until the road met with 72nd Street.

STEALS ON WHEELS was another block further on, nestled between a Wells Fargo bank and a Starbucks. Emily pulled to a halt with a squeal of brakes in front of the bike store. She pulled her bike up onto the pavement and leaned it against a parking meter just outside.

The door to the bike store, unsurprisingly, was locked. She could see a bunch of bikes in the window, all neatly arranged in order of price, but Emily knew the bike she was looking for would be inside, safely away from the window just in case somebody decided to do exactly what she planned to do next.

Emily was getting a little tired of having to commit B&E every time she needed something, but she guessed she would have to get used to that from now on. The majority of storeowners, Emily thought, would probably have shut up shop and headed home as quickly as they could, locking their stores behind them. Emily wondered how many of them had really believed they would ever return.

Pulling the hammer from the pack, she flipped it over so the ball-peen would act as the business end. She was going to have to use her damaged right arm for this little exercise in vandalism. She still couldn’t raise that arm much above seventy-degrees and she needed to cover her eyes from any flying glass, just in case. Only her left arm was flexible enough for that.

She slid out of her jacket and rolled it around her right hand until only the shaft of the hammer and the head were visible, then, turning sideways to the plate-glass window, positioned her feet in a wide stance. She turned her face away from the window, burying it deep into the crook of her elbow.

Emily struck the window with the hammer with as much force as she could muster.

The glass shattered with the sound of a thousand icicles smashing to the ground, amplified to a nerve jarring level by the empty streets. As Emily took a step back to escape the rain of shattered glass, she felt something tug at the leg of her jeans. Looking down she saw a four-foot long triangular shard from the shattered window protruding from the cloth of her jeans. Just an inch or so to the left and the spike would have speared her leg instead of the hem of her jeans. She reached down with her gloved hand and took careful hold of the lance of glass while she held the pleat of her jeans with her other hand. She tugged at the glass. It came away after a few pulls with a ripping sound, leaving an eight-inch hole through both sides of her jeans leg. Emily tossed the deadly piece of glass away and cringed as it smashed to pieces on the sidewalk, shattering the silence of the dead street once again.

Mental note: need more jeans.

Turning to look at the front of the store Emily examined her handiwork. Almost half of the window now resided in a million pieces on the pavement. A few stubborn fragments of glass protruded here and there from the metal surround that had held the window in place, but they disappeared under the might of Emily’s hammer.

The broken glass crunched beneath her sneakers as she stepped up and into the front display area of the store. If the power had still been on, the alarm system would have been screaming bloody-murder at her and the cops would be there in, let’s say, thirty minutes, give or take an hour?

Instead, only the sound of broken glass crunching beneath her sneakers accompanied Emily as she edged past the display of bikes and stepped down onto the main floor of the store. She was glad she had brought the flashlight with her as the interior of the store gradually became darker the further back from the front of the shop she walked.

She fished the flashlight out of her bergen, switched it on and twisted the beam-adjuster until it gave off a wide angle of light that pushed back the remaining darkness. There was almost enough light to see by without the flashlight, but the weight of the Maglite in her hand added an extra sense of security she welcomed and meant she didn’t have to unstrap the shotgun from around her chest.

Spare wheels, frames, and bicycle forks lined the walls on either side of the store. Everything a cycling enthusiast would need to build her own bike from scratch or replace a broken part was available somewhere in the store. On the main shop floor, two rows of bicycles formed an honor guard on either side of a wide strip of industrial strength carpet that stretched down into the darkest end of the store. From her previous visits, Emily knew Mike liked to keep the cheaper bikes at the front of the store, and the deeper into the store one walked the more expensive the bikes became.

The bike Emily wanted was about three quarters of the way down and on the right. She’d been eyeing it for months, slowly stashing away a little bit here and there from each paycheck. By the time the red rain came, she was still a couple of months shy of having the twelve-hundred-bucks she needed to buy it. Of course, money was no longer an issue for her now, she could choose whatever bike she wanted, but there was something about this particular model that just spoke to her. She followed the carpet pathway toward the back of the store, sweeping the flashlight left and right as she walked.

Emily didn’t think there would be any kind of threat in the store; Mike was too smart to have stayed. He would have gone home and died with his family just like millions of other Americans probably had. But she was learning to be cautious, so she made sure to check out the entire store, poking her head warily into all the corners and cubbies where one of the creatures could have gestated. She needn’t have worried because, just as she had expected, there was no sign of any kind of a threat. Satisfied she was alone in the shop, Emily headed back towards the center of the store and quickly located her new bike.

It was the perfect bike for the grueling trip that lay ahead of her: a Novara Randonee touring bike in dark green with FSA Wing Compact handlebars and a Shimano Deore LX derailleur. It had a saddle that was the closest thing to a La-Z-Boy recliner, puncture resistant inner tubes and, most importantly for her, it weighed less than thirty-pounds.

Emily pulled the bike from its stand, giving it a quick once-over to check the tires were inflated. She lifted the back wheel off the ground and used the pedal to get it spinning while simultaneously running up and down all the gears, checking for any slippage. Satisfied everything worked just as it should, she pushed her new set of wheels to the front of the store and leaned it against the cash desk.

Next she walked back along each of the walls and grabbed everything she thought she might need for her journey: puncture kits and spare inner tubes, brake-blocks, a hand pump, a can of WD-40, a rain smock, a set of pedals, brake cables, a couple of plastic drinking bottles she could fit to the crossbar of the bike, a multi-tool, and finally, a GPS unit. The GPS had a specially designed clip to mount it on the handlebars of her bike. By the time she collected everything she could think of, a large pile of items had collected on the glass counter of the cash-desk. Emily had to draw the line at a spare pair of wheel rims, though, there really was going to be nowhere for her to carry them. She would just have to hope she wouldn’t need them. However, she could deal with that pile of spare parts she had accumulated.

Emily walked to the furthest end of the store, shining her light into the darkness until she found what she was looking for; a display rack of panniers. She picked out the two largest sets she could find; one to fit over the back wheel and a second, smaller pair that would fit nicely over the front wheels. The addition of the two pairs of modern-day saddlebags would greatly increase her ability to carry extra supplies.

Emily fitted both pairs of panniers to the new bike using the multi-tool she had found earlier. Then she placed all of the spare parts she had collected into one of the rear carrier’s pouches. She gave a final mental run through her list just to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything; once she was on her way, she didn’t want to find herself without the means to fix her only form of transportation. She was sure she hadn’t forgotten anything—apart from those spare wheel rims; leaving them really irked her—so she hefted the bike onto her left shoulder, marveling at how light it was, even with the panniers and extra parts she had picked up, then carefully made her way out of the shop. When she was clear of the debris field of broken glass, she set the bike down, leaning it against its kickstand.

Emily looked at her old bike, battered and bruised after so many years of use, and a tinge of betrayal touched her heart. She felt like she was about to shoot a faithful but old horse while picking up a younger replacement.

“Don’t be so damned ridiculous,” she said to herself and started to wheel her new bike away. But after just a few steps, Emily dropped the bike’s kickstand again and, with a resigned sigh, walked back to where she had set her old bike to rest, picked it up—good God it was heavy by comparison to the new one—and carried it into the store, setting it down in the space left by her new Novara.

“You’re a bloody idiot,” she told herself, then turned and climbed back through the broken window, leaving the last vestige of her old life behind.

The new bike handled like a dream and Emily found herself quickly shifting up through the gears, as she sped east along 79th Street in the direction of the Whole Foods Market. The tires made a satisfying purr of rubber against macadam, and the efficient metallic whirr of the drive-chain complimented it perfectly, creating a simple tune of efficiency that was perfection to Emily’s ear.

She pulled over in front of the Whole Foods store.

Outside the store’s entrance, a confusion of plastic shopping carts lay scattered on the pavement. Spilled bags full of food had emptied their contents onto the sidewalk and road, dropped by their owners as they fled the market or maybe in a crush of looters, like she had seen at the little store next to her apartment.

The store’s automatic doors were closed, and for a moment, Emily thought she was going to have to smash yet another window. They weren’t locked, and Emily was able to slip her fingers between the rubber seals and push one apart until there was enough room for her to squeeze through into the entrance area.

The stench of rotting meat and vegetables greeted her as she walked through the entrance and headed towards the produce section. Where there had once been rows of apples, organic tomatoes, and other assorted veggies, was nothing but a rotting mass of almost unrecognizable decay. There were no flies buzzing around the decaying food, Emily noted. The place should have been black with them and Emily began to wonder just how far along the food-chain the red rain’s impact had been felt.

There was obviously nothing worth scavenging in this section, and even if there had been, Emily wasn’t going to spend any more time breathing in that stink than she had too. She pulled a shopping cart from a row stacked in front of a checkout and pushed it towards the opposite end of the huge store. The front left wheel seemed to have a life of its own, it squeaked insistently and refused to go in the same direction as the other three. The world as she knew it had apparently ended, humanity was on its knees, and an inscrutable menace threatened her very survival, but still she managed to choose the one wonky cart in the store. Typical!

As Emily squeaked her way up the aisles, she spotted a pallet of gallon bottles of drinking water on an end-rack. She pulled four of them from the pallet and set them down in the aisle. She would pick them up on her way out of the store. If she limited herself to a liter or so of water a day she would have enough drinking water to last her almost two weeks, as long as she didn’t exert herself too much. She made a mental note to grab some of that instant energy powder, too. She could add it to her water for when she was riding.

Next stop, tinned goods. The aisle was mainly full of soups, so Emily grabbed as wide a selection as she could. She wasn’t a soup fan but it would be easy to prepare, hot, filling, and most importantly, had a long shelf life. Worst-case scenario, she would simply drink it right from the can. She made sure only to grab the cans that had the pull-tab tops so she wouldn’t have to worry about a tin opener. She spotted a selection of canned meats and added four cans of organic corned beef.

She pushed the cart up and down the rows of aisles, grabbing cans of vegetables, tinned fruit—no peaches though, definitely no peaches—, and chili.

Then it was on to the health supplements aisle. She pulled out enough bottles of multi-vitamins to last her a year. It couldn’t hurt to start adding them to her daily regimen; she wasn’t exactly going to be eating a balanced diet from this point onwards. On the same aisle, she also found the powdered energy supplements. She added a handful of boxes to the basket.

Emily snatched-up two large boxes of oatmeal, placing them in the rapidly growing pile of food in the cart. The cartons were bulky and the oatmeal would need to be heated before she could eat it, but Emily thought it would be worth the extra space the packaging took up. Hearty and filling, it would be a good way to start her day and a great source of energy; she was going to need as much of that as she could get over the next few months.

Her final stop was at the feminine hygiene section. She added enough boxes of tampons and panty liners so she wouldn’t have to worry about that particular problem; at least, not for a couple of months.

Emily maneuvered the cart in the direction of the front of the store and picked up the four containers of water she left there earlier. As she moved toward the exit, she spotted something she had forgotten near one of the checkout lanes… candy. She pushed the squeaking cart to the checkout and grabbed a handful of chocolate bars, chewing gum, and mints, and tossed them into the cart with everything else. She took a final moment to think about what she might have missed. Satisfied she had everything she was going to need for at least the next week or more, Emily squeezed the cart between the exit doors and back out into the sunshine.

Emily had never ridden a bike carrying as much weight as she was about to. She guessed the secret to assuring she stayed on the road, instead of ending up in a ditch, was to spread the load as evenly as possible and ensure the bike stayed balanced. The last thing she wanted to do was change the dynamics of her new ride and find out about it when she least expected it. She unpacked the provisions she had collected from the shopping cart and loaded the majority of them into the bergen. The remainder went into the panniers. Emily made sure to distribute the weight evenly over both sides of the bike. When she was finished, she buckled down the tops of each pannier and then pushed the bike-stand up with her foot, testing the bike’s balance with the extra weight. The addition of the supplies certainly made a difference to the feel of the bike, she wouldn’t be taking corners anywhere near as sharply as she was used to and it was going to be harder to get it rolling from a dead stop. Overall though, she was happy with the feel of it.

She swung her legs into the saddle and started in the direction of her next stop. The bike felt a little unsteady at first. Now that she was on the move, the dynamics were harder to gauge than she had expected, but after a few minutes she became accustomed to the changes and barely noticed the difference.

There was one final place she needed to stop before heading home. The power was down, most likely gone forever, but that didn’t mean she had to suffer through cold meals for the rest of her life. A couple of blocks further on from the Whole Foods Market was an outdoor sports and camping store. She was hoping she could pick up some camping gear to help make her trip just a little more comfortable and that was where she pointed the bike.

A few minutes later, she pulled up outside and leaned her bike against the storefront window. Emily didn’t plan on wasting any time inside, she knew exactly what she wanted, but she took the shotgun with her anyway.

The door to the camping shop was, surprisingly, unlocked so she stepped inside. A large sign hung from the ceiling by fishing wire directed Emily to the back of the dark store for camping gear. She followed the sign’s instructions and was soon rooting around a selection of portable propane-gas fueled cookers. She was tempted to take the largest one but it was just too bulky and would add far too much weight to her pack. She settled for a double-burner model that was one-third the size and half as heavy. A couple of shelves up from where she found the cooker was a row of the small green propane gas tanks that powered it. She grabbed four of them, then added a lightweight pot and pan and a utensil set. She was tempted to take some dehydrated food supplies with her but decided against it. She had enough food to last her and she was still confident she could scavenge whatever she needed as she travelled. On her way back toward the exit, she spotted a box of long stem candles and picked up a box of twelve.

Emily left the camping store and packed the cooker and fuel in the bike’s rear set of panniers. When she finished tying the panniers’ flap down, Emily mounted the bike and pushed off in the direction of home.

She found herself making much better headway than she had expected as she again approached the traffic jam of empty vehicles on 79th street. Rather than take the same route she had arrived by, Emily decided to cut through Central Park instead and test her new bike’s performance on the weaving paths that interlaced it.

She zigged off the road to her left then up onto the pavement using the curb-ramp, aiming her bike at the park entrance between two five-foot high pillars of sandstone. She passed by an abandoned hotdog stall, the stink of rotten meat fleetingly filled her nostrils, then she was into the park and the welcoming smell of grass and trees quickly replaced it.

The concrete path forked after a couple of hundred feet and she followed the branch curving off to the left. Emily allowed the bike to tilt gently into the curve, applying the brakes just a touch. She continued down the path, past empty benches, and the occasional abandoned picnic lunch. She deftly maneuvered around an empty baby-stroller resting on its side in the middle of the path.

The pathways through the park were convoluted affairs, designed more for the walker to enjoy than to quickly get you from point-A to point-B. Whoever had designed their layout did not believe in straight lines, apparently. Emily eased her bike to the right and cut across the grass, slowing her speed sufficiently she had to drop down to second-gear and pedal just a little harder. She maneuvered through a copse of trees and then slanted left until her tires found the asphalt of East Drive, one of the main arteries running through the park. She planned to keep heading south until she reached Terrace Drive where she would make a turn, cut across the path and then back up West End Avenue.

Off to her right Emily could see the park’s boathouse. The paddleboats and rowboats had all collected on the far bank like a flock of lost sheep. As she followed the curve of the road, leaving the building and boats behind her, Emily saw something she had never noticed in all her trips through the park; there was some kind of structure in the open grass about 300-feet south-east of the Boathouse. As Emily zipped along the final curve of the road before turning onto Terrace Drive, she caught a longer glimpse of the structure through a break in the line of trees edging the path.

What she saw made her pull back so hard on both brake levers it sent the bike into a sideways slide, the break blocks squealed in protest as she fought to keep the bike from toppling over and spilling her and her precious cargo of supplies into the road.

Barely avoiding a nasty crash Emily reined in the bike as if it was a headstrong horse, finally bringing it to a safe, if wobbly stop. Slipping forward off the saddle she planted both feet firmly on the ground and stared at the sight in front of her. Rising above the tree line to her left was a tower-like structure reaching towards the sky. It was hard to make out any real details from this far away, but she felt a flutter of nervousness in her stomach as she looked at the obviously out of place object.

Using her feet to propel the bike forward, Emily scooted closer, heading towards the break in the tree line surrounding the open field. As she approached, Emily could see that what she was looking at was colossal and certainly not a natural part of the park vegetation. Leaving the road, she lifted the front tire of her bike up onto the grass verge of the field and headed through a natural corridor between the trees. In front of her the sun was beginning its descent toward the western horizon, its light reflecting off the still surface of the ornamental pond known as the Conservatory Water. The pond was—had been—a favorite hangout for model boaters from all across the city.

The sun’s rays bounced and scintillated off the lake’s surface, sending bursts of light through the gaps between the trees. The light was so bright Emily had to squint and shade her eyes to avoid the dazzling reflection.

She couldn’t see a damn thing from where she was standing; she’d have to risk getting closer, she decided. It was probably better to do it on foot, if this developed into a situation, she would be faster on the grass using her own two feet rather than trying to pedal the bike across the field. She leaned the bike against a nearby maple tree. She was tempted to drop the bergen too, but if something unpredictable did happen then she needed to get out of there as fast as she could. She did not want to risk having to leave the bergen and its precious contents behind.

A break between the trees where she stood led into the open field, beyond that there was another line of trees and beyond those, was the structure. She started through the break, cautiously heading towards the object. Emily was still two-hundred feet away from the structure when the light breeze ruffling through the branches of the trees shifted in her direction and she caught the faint, but now familiar smell of ammonia.

She stopped, her head pivoting from side to side, looking for any sign that she was not alone, but she could not see anything she considered a threat. The aroma of ammonia was so faint it could be from anywhere; in fact, for all she knew, the smell might just as easily be the millions of gallons of water of the Conservatory pond slowly stagnating. Her better judgment told her to just turn around, get back on her bike and ride away as fast as she could, but her natural curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to press on.

She was glad she hadn’t left the shotgun with the bike. Her hand unconsciously reached out and caressed the black metal of the weapon slung across her chest.

Emily took a few steps closer, shading her eyes as best she could from the glare. She guessed it must have been a cloud drifting across the face of the sun for a moment that finally gave her the chance to see the object clearly. The light from the pond suddenly dimmed, her vision cleared and the towering structure swam into breathtaking focus. As her eyes roamed over the object, Emily knew that if she had a week to stand there and stare at the sight before her, there was no way she would ever be able to understand what it was she was seeing.

It stood at least forty-feet in height; a towering, incongruous amalgamation of red flesh. Three intertwining limbs as thick as Emily’s torso twisted together and reached towards the sky. The base of the structure swept out into hundreds of interweaving duplicates of the main shaft; where they met the grass of the park Emily could see mounds of dirt kicked up like gopher holes, as the thick tendrils burrowed into the ground.

The main trunk seemed to be made of scales, large red scales that overlapped each other like armor. The structure gave Emily the impression of a piece of artwork, as though it had been specifically designed to look like a natural structure but made from the leftover bits and pieces of something unnatural. Its symmetrical appearance was ruined as Emily’s eyes took in the top of the trunk; it looked unfinished, as though the designer had simply stopped midway in its creation. It was a mess of irregular angles and crenulations.

Emily began edging her way closer, her eyes fixed firmly on the imposing structure, oblivious to the low hanging branches of trees she pushed through as she moved nearer. She maneuvered around the left flank of the structure, placing the water of the pond behind her and it. From this vantage point, Emily could see a mass of translucent tendrils, each shot through with mottled spots of pink and red, growing from the base of the structure. They crept across the grass, between the thing’s roots, over the concrete boat dock and then dropped down beneath the surface of the pond.

Emily stepped down onto the concrete landing area of the boat-dock and took a few careful steps nearer to the mass of tendrils. Standing just a few feet from them, she knelt and leaned in closer. Through the transparent outer skin, she could see the tendril contained some kind of clear liquid within it. It looked like water from the pond, but this giant plant—it was hard to categorize exactly what phylum she was looking at—must be filtering out the dirt and other crap from the lake, because the water in the tendril looked crystal clear to her, while the water in the Conservatory pond was green and brackish. Running through the center of each gelatinous tendril was a second smaller tube, as thick as Emily’s thumb and filled with a darker fluid. This other liquid was a mass of different shades of red ranging from bright red to dark congealed-blood brown.

As Emily watched, the tendrils periodically expanded and then contracted, squeezing the water further up the tendril towards the trunk, and with each pump of the water heading towards the ‘plant’, Emily could see a smaller amount of the mottled red fluid in the inner vein pumping out towards the pond.

Emily got to her feet and followed the tendril to the lip of the concrete dock where it disappeared into the water of the pond. She looked out across the expanse of the water, shading her eyes with her hand as the sun was once again bouncing uncomfortably off the water. Towards the center of the lake Emily could just make out a thick red sludge forming on the surface, but the sun and the distance made it difficult to focus on it.

Emily turned in the direction of the structure, began walking back across the dock toward the grass verge… and froze. From the corner of her right eye, she caught something moving fast along the concrete toward her.

Tap–Tap–Tap–Tap.

Emily’s head snapped to face the source of the noise. She instantly regretted her decision.

The creature skittering across the hot concrete landing toward her was like something out of the tortured dreams of an insane-asylum inmate. The thing had eight long spider-like legs; each leg was articulated by four bulbous joints that gave the creature a lopsided, almost limping gait. The end of each leg was tipped by a scimitar shaped claw, tempered to a point, and made the creature look as though it were standing on tiptoe. The top of each leg attached to another bulbous extrusion much like a human shoulder joint, and that joint was in turn attached to a long corkscrew shaped body. The head was nothing but a burgundy colored bulb attached by a short neck of concentric rings that allowed the head a small degree of pivotal motion. Positioned at 12-and 6- o’clock on the creature’s featureless head was a long fleshy stalk. At the end of each stalk was a black bulb and Emily realized with horror that she had seen that same strange appendage before. She knew that if either of those black bulbs were to open, each would contain a single eye.

Just below the bottom eye, where the creature’s chin should have been, a third limb sprouted, swaying left and right as the monster scrambled over the concrete. This limb ended in a pair of serrated blades that whirled periodically like a rotary saw. At the tail end of the creature, Emily saw a wavering set of diaphanous red streamers, similar to the poisonous stinging arms of a jellyfish but much finer. As the creature loped towards her the streamers undulated and flowed in a sinusoidal rhythm that was, to her stunned mind at least, absolutely beautiful in its elegance, and the exact opposite of the rest of this repulsive monster’s body.

Emily recognized that, up until that exact moment, she had not fully accepted the whole extraterrestrial virus idea Jacob had postulated in their phone call. Now, as she stood defenseless in the shadow of an otherworldly tree, as a horror on legs sped toward her, Emily realized his theory was totally and utterly true. She was staring at the proof. This… this? What was it exactly? She may as well call it an alien because, although it may have been born here, it surely was not from this planet.

As the creature ate up the last of the space between itself and her, a single surprising thought passed through Emily’s mind: Finally!

She closed her eyes tight-shut and waited for the monster to fall on her and extinguish her sad little life.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tap–tap–tap–tap.

The rapid staccato beat of the creature’s spike-tipped feet on the concrete grew louder as it rushed headlong toward Emily, then, just as quickly it had passed her by.

It didn’t stop. It didn’t tear her to pieces.

Emily opened her eyes and twisted her body to follow the creature as it continued along the boat dock. It ignored her as though she was not even there. It just kept on running.

Run Forest, run! She almost yelled the movie quote aloud, and had to stifle a burst of terrified, relief fueled, laughter.

Abruptly, the creature made a ninety-degree turn. Its right legs simply stopped moving while the right side continued; just like the tracks on a tank, Emily thought. It moved on its new course up the grass embankment toward the alien tree. When it was within twenty-feet of the main trunk, the bizarre creature’s body suddenly dropped towards the ground and then it was flying upwards, launched into the air by its spindly articulated legs. It landed halfway up the trunk of the huge structure. There was no reduction in the creature’s forward momentum as it continued its lopsided leg-over-leg scuttle around the circumference of the tree until it reached the top of the structure.

Only then did it stop.

The highest point of the tree—at least one-hundred, if not a hundred-and-twenty feet up by Emily’s estimate—was nothing but a ragged unfinished edge, totally at odds with the natural flowing outline of the rest of the structure. It was almost as though whatever had built it had simply stopped midway through its construction.

Emily watched, her chin drooping almost to her chest, as the freakish thing began to crab-walk along the uneven lip, its eyestalks swiveling back and forth as if it was searching for something. After about a minute of scuttling along the lip, the creature reached out with its two spindly front limbs and pulled itself up into a space between two protruding crenellations on the ragged edge. It immediately began working itself down into the space using the fine streamers of its tale like an extra set of limbs until it seemed content with the fit.

Then something even stranger happened. The creature began to melt.

At least, that’s what it looked like to Emily. The eye appendages went first, dripping down over the creature’s body like glue. The liquid filled the few small gaps of daylight Emily had been able to make out in the spaces between the creature and the surrounding edges of the tree’s upper lip. Then the legs splayed out, grasping onto the protuberances on either side of it with its wicked looking claw tips. The spider-like creature gave a final wiggle as if it was ensuring it fit just right and then the legs melted into the structure. The tail was the last to vanish, fanning out in a final flourish before it too dissolved, vanishing into the main body of the trunk just below it.

It was all over in less than thirty-seconds. The creature had added itself into the tree, become a part of it completely, as if it had never existed. In its place was one more part of the structure sprouting up against the Manhattan skyline. Emily wondered just how big this thing would actually grow. Or was it being built?

Emily decided it was not a question she was interested in hanging around and answering. Her inquisitiveness was well and truly satiated; a human mind could only cope with so much information, so much change in one sitting, she realized. She gave the alien tree growing before her a final glance, then turned on her heels and began walking as quickly as she could back to where she had parked her bicycle.

Emily readjusted the bergen, the shoulder pads had shifted as she walked back to her bike and now the webbing of the right strap was digging uncomfortably into her shoulder. The painkillers had long ago worn off, and the dull throb had slowly returned. She turned her thoughts to what she had just seen to try to take her mind off the pain.

Where the alien-thing on the dock had appeared from, she had no idea. At the time it showed up her attention had been focused solely on the latest addition to her growing list of weirdness. It could have been wandering around the park for God-knew how long, gestating from some dead park visitor. Hell, there was over eight hundred and forty acres to choose from in the park alone. Or maybe it came from the city’s sewer system? With more than six-thousand miles of tunnels running under the city, it would seem like the perfect place for those things to congregate and move around.

How ironic was it, she thought, that in every alien invasion movie she had ever seen, every sci-fi book she had ever read, the aliens were always either intent on eating us or just misunderstood. No one ever seemed to consider the possibility they might just ignore us completely; that the survivors of the human race might be so very inconsequential to their plan.

Could it simply be that the creature had not been able to sense her presence? Emily didn’t think so. When she’d stabbed the one still in its cocoon back at the paper’s offices, she was sure it had seen her. It had, at the very least been aware of her, and yet, now that she thought back to that moment, it had not tried to stop her, it hadn’t even fought back. It had simply tried to get away from her.

Now that she had seen what had crawled out of one of those cocoons with her own eyes, there was little doubt left that what she had witnessed over the past few days was connected, part of some unfathomable plan. None of it made any kind of sense to Emily. Her head ached from trying to wrap her brain around the implications of the events, let-alone attempting to fathom any kind of structured motive to why this was happening or what the outcome would be.

The size of the assault on her planet was fantastic in its scale, she realized. The ease of its implication, the complete destruction of humanity and its replacement with this new life form, seemed to be as calculated and unemotional as she would feel calling in a pest-control company to rid themselves of a colony of termites or kill off a hive of bees.

She was just an insignificant survivor.

With the bergen strap once again resting comfortably against her shoulder, Emily swung her leg over the bike and placed her butt back on the saddle.

Her heartbeat slowly returned to its regular rhythm as she began riding once more toward home. Emily pedaled as quickly as she could, following Terrace Drive in the direction of the 72nd Street west-side exit, eager to get back to the apartment and put as much space between her and the park as possible. As she drew alongside the Bethesda Terrace, with its terra cotta stonework and now silent fountain, Emily again brought her bike to a stop.

This time it was only for a few brief moments, long enough to take in the view in front of her. Just beyond the Bethesda fountain, where the Terrace met with the body of water someone in their wisdom had simply called The Lake, Emily could see the shore was lined with more of the giant red, alien structures she had come to think of as trees. She counted twenty-three of them stretching out along the lake’s edge. There could even be more, she reasoned, but the ones she could see were so closely packed together it was impossible to see past the first row of them. Each one of the towering red alien monoliths was in a different stage of construction; some were far taller than the lone one she had seen earlier, with wispy leaf-like additions protruding from their summits, others had progressed little past the base.

While she watched, Emily saw movement, the blur of fast moving limbs as more of the spider-things scuttled along the ground in the distance, heading toward these newest additions to the park’s flora. There was movement around the base of the trees too; Emily saw more creatures clambering up the trunk of one of the strange, exotic plants, on its way to sacrificing itself to the structure.

Before the rain came, every one of these creatures had been a New Yorker, busy leading their life. It may not have been much of a life, but it had been theirs and they had lived it as they saw fit. Now, those lives had been snatched away from them. They had been transformed into the spider-like aliens she could see eagerly making their lopsided way to this forest, to undergo yet another metamorphosis into something even larger again, a part of some alien production line, the result ending in… well, that really was the sixty-four thousand dollar question, wasn’t it. Ending in what?

Emily watched impassively for another few seconds then turned and began cycling home.

She did not look that way again.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the time Emily reached the apartment complex a solid bank of gray cloud tinted by a halo of red had begun to creep menacingly across the sky from the north-west. The fine weather could not have lasted much longer, she realized. This was still New York, after all, but Emily found herself already missing the implied sense of security the previous few days of clear skies had given her. She doubted the cloud would bring any rain but it would bring a sense of heaviness to the air that would cast a torpid blanket over everything and maybe give her a nagging headache from the change in air pressure. In the recesses of her mind though, Emily hoped the change in weather was not an omen of darker days or darker things to come.

She was reluctant to leave the bike outside the apartment building now that it contained her vital cache of supplies. With the added weight of the full panniers and her hurt arm, the bike was just too cumbersome for her to lift, so she wheeled it up the disabled-persons’ ramp, maneuvered it carefully through the door and into the foyer of the building. A small manager’s office sat adjacent to the elevators; Emily could not recall it ever having been manned during the entire time she had lived in the building. It would give her extra peace-of-mind if she stored the bike in the tiny room, away from any potentially prying alien eyes. She wheeled the bike inside and left it resting against its kickstand.

She knew the bergen would have to come upstairs with her but it was so tempting to just leave it next to the bike in the manager’s office. It would be a dumb move to leave all of her supplies in one location but she really didn’t want to have to carry that extra weight up those stairs. She had no idea what the feeding habits of Earth’s newest owners were, but she didn’t want to risk losing all of her supplies to some hungry bug-eyed freak that suddenly discovered it had a hankering for a can of New England clam chowder. So, the bergen and its contents would have to go with her. Besides, she still needed to pack a supply of clothes before she left and she planned to carry the lighter stuff like clothing on her back.

And, speaking of clothes, that was going to be one of the roughest parts of this journey for her. While she would never consider herself vain she was as committed to her creature comforts as the rest of the world was… had been, she corrected. The thought of limited access to clean underwear, in particular, was not something she was looking forward to. Of course, Emily knew a fresh pair of panties each morning was probably going to be the least of her worries. Still, a girl had certain standards she was expected to maintain, right?

She smiled as she pushed open the door to the stairwell and began her slow, painful climb up to the 17^th floor. As she had predicted, the trek up was even more grueling with the backpack full of tinned food and supplies strapped to her back. By the time she reached her floor Emily’s knees felt as though they were ready to pop right out of their sockets. Her back didn’t feel much better either. Her shoulder seemed to be improving though, it felt better than it had since she took her spill. There was still pain but she was getting more flexion back in the joint.

In her bedroom, Emily unclipped the bergen’s belt from her waist and shrugged off the backpack as carefully as she could, but it still hit the floor with the sound of a dead body being dropped. She bent over at her waist and tried to touch her toes, stretching out the kink in her back. It relieved the tension there enough that she didn’t think she was going to need to take any more pain pills, for a while at least. After a few more stretches, she moved to the living room to check on the sat-phone. The indicator on the battery-unit showed it had managed to reach eighty-percent of its capacity. She was tempted to try the phone now but, looking out the window, the clouds she had spotted earlier had crept even closer and she decided it would be best to allow the battery-unit as much time as possible to charge, while the sun was still visible. The instruction manual had said the solar-charger would still work under an overcast sky, but at a greatly diminished rate. But who knew when the next clear day would be, so she left the unit on its perch next to the window.

There were still a couple of hours of sunlight left, as long as the clouds didn’t advance any faster than they already were, but she grabbed her flashlight anyway and placed it on the kitchen counter, then pulled the candles she had looted earlier out of the bergen. She walked around her apartment and placed one in the living room, one in the kitchen and another in the bedroom. Just to be sure; she didn’t want to be caught with no light and have to fumble around in the dark. While the candles would only give off a limited amount of illumination, they would at least give her some light and allow her to save the flashlight’s batteries unless she really needed them.

She walked into the bedroom and opened up her closet. Emily had always been a bit of a neat freak, bordering on obsessive but just the right side of compulsive, a trait she had picked up from her mother, and one that she was glad of today. She had her wardrobe neatly arranged by season: on the right was where she kept her tee-shirts, lighter blouses, jeans and dresses. Then on the left was where she kept her sweaters, heavier blouses, jackets, dress-slacks and winter coats. Between the two sides, at the far end of the closet, was a set of shelving designed to hold her limited collection of shoes and boots, and below them, a set of six drawers where she kept her underwear, socks, and her gloves and hats.

Layers, she knew, were the key to keeping warm while still being able to regulate her temp and not overheat. The further north she travelled the colder and wetter it was going to get, but it would be a bad idea to dress for that weather right now. She would need to move gradually from the lighter clothing to the cold weather gear.

She began by sorting the clothes she intended to take with her by material. Lighter cotton tee-shirts and socks to help wick away moisture would act as her first layer. She pulled out all her tees and set them on the bed, laying her socks next to them. Next, she picked out a selection of wool sweaters; they would act as a great second level by trapping a layer of dead air between it and her tee-shirt. That would help keep her body heat in and the cold air out. The final layer would need to act as her wind, rain and snow barrier. For that she grabbed her two parkas; made from tear-resistant Gore-Tex, each was filled with goose down and, best of all, stretched almost to her knees but with enough play that it wouldn’t affect her ability to safely peddle her bike.

Next, she chose a pair of sneakers and a second, spare pair. They would work for her general day-to-day cycling and, as long as she wore a couple of pairs of socks, they would help when the weather got colder. She grabbed a pair of waterproof boots from the top rack; she didn’t know when she’d need to go walk-about or scavenge for food in the snow, so it would be a good idea to have something that was guaranteed to keep her feet dry and warm.

Finally, she pulled out her thermal socks and dug around in the back of a drawer until she found her pair of Pro X-Pert winter bike gloves. She added them to the pile and then began planning how best to pack them.

First, she needed to empty the food from the bergen. She would pack the clothes in and then replace the food on top of them. If she ate the food from the bergen first that would give any extra room she needed for extra supplies as she travelled.

The heavy-duty winter wear could go at the bottom of the bergen, she wouldn’t need any of that for a while. Emily put her sweaters in next, then her boots and sneakers, before making a final layer with her tee-shirts and trousers. Last of all, she repacked the supplies she had removed earlier. She rolled up her underwear, paired off her socks and stored them in the side pouches of the pack along with her gloves.

She pulled an extra pair of jeans and a tee-shirt from the closet and left them draped over a chair, ready for the morning.

Her packing complete, Emily walked back to the living room. Through the window, she could see dusk had crept up on her while she had been busy in the bedroom. The room was already beginning to disappear into shadow. She took the box of matches she’d set on the coffee table and moved from room to room lighting the candles she had placed out earlier. The candles actually gave off a decent amount of light, more than enough for her to see by and the flickering orange of the flame gave the apartment a welcoming warm appeal.

She headed back to the living room to check on the battery-pack. There was barely any daylight left now, so whatever charge was in the pack was going to have to suffice for now. The pack’s LED indicator glowed green, showing it was fully charged and ready to use. Now all she needed to do was charge the actual battery of the phone. She attached the charging lead to the sat-phone’s battery and flipped the rapid-charge button on the pack; the phone’s battery would take about forty-five minutes to charge fully from the pack.

In the meantime, she needed to grab a bite to eat; she was famished. Emily opened the pantry and took out two cans of mixed-fruit cocktail. She pulled the lid off the first, sat down at the coffee table in the living room and began spooning the contents into her mouth as she let her mind drift toward her plan for the morning.

Her top priority was to put as much distance as possible between herself and New York. She’d toyed with simply taking the most direct route toward her final destination but, as she thought back to her conversation with Jacob, she decided to just head directly north. If she did that she would be out of the city in a day at most. That meant—

Emily’s train of thought was interrupted by the sound of something moving in the apartment above. Her hand stopped halfway to her mouth, a spoonful of fruit dripping onto the coffee table, her head cocked to the left as she listened to hear if the noise would repeat. Sure enough, there it was again, the now familiar pitter-patter of something skittering across the floor, this time in the apartment above hers.

As she listened, Emily heard the first eerie cry of one of the alien creatures rising from an apartment somewhere in the building. The call was answered by another beast on a floor below her, another added to the growing chorus, and then another. Within seconds, her apartment was echoing with the sound of a hundred alien voices, their high-pitched trilling filled her head. It sounded as though many more of the creatures had joined with this strange otherworldly choir. She guessed what she had experienced the night before was just an early batch of the freshly minted creatures, the first wave of what could tonight turn into a flood. It wasn’t hard to imagine, over the past twenty-four hours, that the rest of the city’s new occupants had been ‘born’. Were they even technically being ‘born’ or was it more of a metamorphosis? Who knew?

Emily dropped the spoon and rose slowly to her feet, all thought of food gone as the calls were joined by new, more disturbing sounds. In her mind’s eye, Emily added images to the sounds she heard; she could see the creatures exploring their new world and, finding themselves trapped in mostly locked homes and apartments, following their inbuilt need to escape. The creatures, sensing the onset of night, had begun stirring in the apartments all around her, their excited scuttling back and forth punctuated by the sound of furniture pushed aside and the occasional crash of something delicate falling to the floor. Emily though she heard something shatter, probably a vase, in the apartment next door. The creatures seemed to be whipping themselves into a frenzy.

The calls stopped as suddenly as they started.

A few moments of silence followed, punctuated only by the occasional noise of a creature moving before that too was replaced with another, familiar sound. The sound of splintering wood buzzed through her head like an electric saw, but this was more… organic. It reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen on TV of beavers chewing through a fallen tree. The sound effects made by the rodents in the cartoon were exaggerated almost to absurdity, but the gnawing zing she heard echoing through the building would have fit right into the cartoon.

From the corridor outside her apartment, she heard something heavy hit the floor with a resounding thud. She rushed to the front door, and peered through the spy-hole. Across from her was a circular hole where the wall of the opposite apartment had been, she caught the movement of a creature that had just exited the apartment as it ran along the wall in the direction of the stairwell, its talon tipped legs grasping at the wall as it pulled itself along the vertical surface.

Something fast and dark flitted across her vision.

Emily gasped and threw herself away from the door as her view was suddenly obscured by another of the creatures landing directly on her doorway. It paused for a second as if it could sense her watching from behind the safety of the door and then she heard it running along the wall.

Emily backed down her hallway, turned and moved towards her bedroom but froze when she heard a commotion almost directly above her head. The creature in the upstairs apartment sounded royally pissed off. She could hear it throwing itself repeatedly against a wall as though trying to barge its way through. It sounds as though it’s trapped, she thought?

Maybe, before they died, the owner of the apartment above hers had locked himself or herself in the bedroom, completely unaware they would trap their transformed selves after they died.

Whatever the reason, it did not sound happy.

Emily was just about to continue into the bedroom when she noticed sawdust begin to fall from the ceiling, just beyond the bedroom’s threshold. The apartment suddenly filled with the weird gnawing noise as the creature trapped in the apartment above hers began chewing through its floor and her ceiling. Emily took an involuntary step back into the hall just as a large chunk of ceiling tumbled to the bedroom carpet, a contrail of dust and debris following it down.

Emily was a second away from dodging past the bedroom door and heading towards the living room when the creature dropped through the hole and bounced out into the hallway, blocking her path.

She caught herself just in time. If she had jumped she would have collided with the alien in mid leap. She was convinced that would not have ended well for her.

The creature had pulled in its legs and culled itself up into a ball when it dropped through the hole, but now it flicked out all eight of its legs at once, they snapped into place with an almost plastic click. The alien raised itself into its normal stance, and shook like a dog after a swim, sending bits of wood, plaster, and dust flying across the room. Its two eyestalks extended and the eyes popped opened, focusing squarely on Emily as she backed slowly away from it. The monster’s jaws vibrated in a blur of motion, rubbing together so rapidly it created a sound almost like a warning growl. It took a couple of steps toward Emily who in turn took a stumbling step backwards, her only means of escape—other than leaving the apartment and joining this one’s friends in the corridor—cutoff by the creature.

Thoughts raced through her head: Was she quick enough to run past it or jump over it? She didn’t know and wasn’t willing to take a risk like that unless she absolutely had to, she had seen how agile these things could be when she watched the one climb the alien tree sprouting up in Central Park.

She continued to take small backwards steps, keeping her eyes focused on the thing in her apartment but trying not to make any sudden movements that it might translate into an aggressive move on her part. The front door handle poked her in the small of her back; there was no place left to go.

“Shit,” she hissed. The creature had kept pace with her as she moved but it hadn’t closed the six feet or so between her and it, choosing to keep its distance… for now.

For a moment that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, the last woman left alive in New York and a creature that had, until just a few days earlier been a living breathing member of the human race but which was now something totally alien, stared across that six-foot divide between them. Each assessed their situation, each with their own imperative.

Then the creature sprang.

It leapt into the air, powering towards Emily. She ducked and screamed, expecting the thing to hit her and tear right through her. Instead, the spider-alien rotated sideways in midair and attached itself to the apartment wall, thrusting its feet deep into the plasterboard. It was now just three feet from her and at her head height. She could see her own distorted, fear filled face reflected back at her from the creatures black glistening head.

The thing gave another, louder chatter, the disturbed air from its blade-like jaws washing over her as its eyestalks moved back and forth, scanning her as if it was assessing her threat potential.

But it didn’t attack her.

Instead, it just clung to the wall, its obscene eyestalks continuing to move up and down but never leaving her. Twice, now, Emily had been in close proximity to one of these aliens and neither of those times had it attacked. Emily had no illusions the thing could take her apart in a heartbeat if it so desired, it had her cornered like a proverbial rat in a trap…but it hadn’t. That had to mean it would rather simply get past her and continue on doing whatever it had planned for its first night out on the town.

Emily began to move her left hand very slowly behind her, feeling blindly around until she found what she was looking for.

Click! The thumb-latch to the door was unlocked.

She began to edge ever so slowly to her right; easy does it, she told herself, fighting the urge to simply sprint past the alien spider-thing sitting impatiently on her wall. She knew that idea would be a major mistake on her part. It sensed her but she didn’t think it knew what to make of her and she didn’t qualify as a threat to it just yet. That could all change in a second if the thing became tired of waiting around and decided to simply kill her and get on with joining its buddies that she could still hear moving around the building.

This is beyond surreal, her mind told her as it struggled to come to terms with the impossible situation.

When she judged she’d edged far enough, Emily slowly raised her left arm until she found the security latch, then, ever so carefully she slid it free of its receiver. The creature regarded her dispassionately, continuing to chatter at her while rocking slowly back and forth on its legs as though readying itself to launch at her at any moment. Emily, could feel cold beads of sweat begin to trickle down the nape of her neck, freezing against her skin as it traced its way down her spine. She lowered her shaking hand to the door-handle, pushed down until she heard the latch click, and then slowly pulled.

Inch by inch the door gradually opened, until a foot of space between the jamb and the edge of the door had been exposed, the creature exploded forward, scuttling quickly along the wall before disappearing through the gap.

Emily suppressed a gasp of horror as one of the legs brushed against her hand as the thing shot out into the corridor, its legs gouging holes in the wall as it ran, sending puffs of powdery debris to the floor. She slammed the door shut and quickly reset the thumb-lock and the security chain.

Her mind was telling her to run and find somewhere, anywhere to hide. But where was there to run to—nowhere! She had to press on. She forced her thoughts back to dealing with the situation.

And that was when she noticed the thin streamer of black smoke spiraling up from her open bedroom door. A cloud of smoke had already collected against the ceiling and was now moving slowly in her direction.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she yelled as she remembered the candle she had left burning in her bedroom. She rushed to the doorway and looked inside. On the bed one of her pillows was on fire, small yellow tongues of flame were slowly consuming the cotton pillowcase. When the creature had dropped through the ceiling, something, either it or a piece of debris, had struck the candle, knocking it off the bedside cabinet where she had left it and onto her bed.

She rushed into the room and grabbed the edge of the pillow furthest away from the flame, trying to avoid burning her hand in the process. Flipping it over Emily threw it to the floor with the flame side down then started stomping as hard as she could until she was sure the fire was extinguished.

Goddammit, that was my favorite fucking pillow.

The room stank of burnt plastic. Emily coughed a couple of times and flipped the pillow up. It was ruined, of course. Her impromptu attempt at firefighting had also left a large scorch mark in the carpet. There goes my security deposit.

Emily let out a long sigh then realized with a sense of dread that now the fire was out the only light was coming from the candles in the outer rooms. She was standing in a virtually dark room with the hole above her head where the creature had dropped through, just minutes earlier. One close encounter of the weird kind was enough for her, she decided. That one was gone but what if more of them decided to pay her a visit while she stood there in the dark? She dropped the still smoking pillow to the floor, gave it a final stomp and then headed out of the room as quickly as her feet would carry her.

Emily picked up the flashlight, turned it on and headed back to the bedroom, peeking her head through the doorway as she scanned the room with the flashlight, ready to run if she was saw any sign of another of the creatures. The room looked empty, so she turned the flashlight toward the hole in her ceiling. It was an almost perfect circle, much like the one she had seen in the window of the crashed delivery truck and the stalled cars. Cut electrical wires dangled from the opening and she could vaguely make out some of the furniture from the apartment the creature had come from. It was a pity the power was off, she thought, chewing through those electrical wires might have fried the little son-of-a-bitch.

She had no way of patching up the hole, it wasn’t like she could call the building manager to come take a look, and there was no way in hell she was going to spend the night in the bedroom with that hole up there and the potential for more of those things to come crawling through. Besides the place stank now.

Tentatively, she stepped back inside her bedroom, keeping her eyes on the hole, just in case another unexpected visitor decided to put in an appearance. The bergen lay where she had left it on the bed, thankfully untouched by the fire. Emily pulled it off and onto the floor, choosing to drag it rather than try to lift it. She reached out with her free hand and pulled the comforter from the bed, pulling both it and her bag of precious supplies out into the corridor before returning to close the bedroom door.

Her earlier encounter with the alien had proved these things had no idea how to deal with a closed door. They seemed quite happy to bore through it rather than simply open it, so she felt sure that she would at least get a heads up if any more of them decided to drop by. She left the bergen in the hallway but took the comforter with her into the living room, shaking off dust and broken bits of ceiling.

Through the apartment window, Emily could see the last vestiges of daylight succumbing to the night. The light from the two candles cast flickering shadows across the walls and her still shocked mind was only too happy to turn those shadows into more of the creatures.

She dropped the comforter onto the sofa—she would spend the night there, she decided—then moved over to the table where she had left the sat-phone. The green LED indicator on the battery-pack showed just three out of five of the green lights lit. It wasn’t fully charged but Emily felt that would be more than enough juice to call the group in Alaska, she could finish the rest of the charge over night. Besides, she really needed to hear another human voice right now.

She disconnected the battery from the charger, popped off the plastic back panel of the phone and pushed the battery into place before reattaching the panel. The phone needed a clear line of sight of the sky to latch on to the satellite signal. There was no way she was going outside again tonight so she would just have to hope her roost by the living-room window would do the trick.

She extended the antenna from the side of the phone, clicked it into place and pressed the red ON switch on the phone’s keypad. The LCD display blinked the message SEARCHING… as it looked for a satellite signal. A minute later and the phone locked onto a signal and the display changed to READY.

She tapped in the number Jacob had given her and waited, listening to the chirrup of his phone ringing at the research base in the Stockton’s. It rang five times before it was picked up and Jacob’s voice answered “Hello, Emily. We were beginning to worry about you.”

Emily let out a sigh of relief, feeling some of the tension leave her body. She had secretly been harboring the thought no one would answer her call, that maybe something awful had happened in the time since she and Jacob last talked… or that she really had lost her mind and imagined the whole conversation. It was good to know she wasn’t crazy.

She wanted to say something profound to transmit her relief to him but all she could manage was a weak, “Well I guess the phone works.”

Jacob gave a good-humored chuckle, then: “So how are things looking? Are you all set to leave?”

Emily considered telling him about what she had experienced since they last talked but how could she explain something so inexplicable? Best if she just skipped those details for now, so she answered with a simple “Good. I’m packed and out of here first thing tomorrow.” She added, “I’m going to send you my route via email, as soon as I figure out how to do that. I’m following your advice and just getting clear of the city as quickly as possible. Once I’m out I’ll identify the best route to get to you guys. Things are getting a whole lot stranger here.”

Jacob sounded as though he was on the verge of asking her to elaborate on her comment but then seemed to think better of it. “Okay,” he said, “that sounds like a plan.” He paused for a moment then added, “Are you sure you’re safe? Do you have protection?”

Emily glanced over at the Mossberg leaning against the wall, “I’m covered,” she said.

They spent the next few minutes hashing out a plan for a daily communication schedule: she would call him at 6:00 pm her time every evening, and if she missed her schedule’s timeframe someone from his group would call her. Emily knew the calls were entirely for her benefit, to give her a sense of connection and safety, something concrete for her to fix on, because both Emily and Jacob realized she was going to be well and truly on her own out there. At least with his calls she could hold onto the illusion of company. Emily was thankful for Jacob’s kindness.

By the time Emily hung up the phone, she felt as confident as she could expect about her chances of reaching the Stocktons, given the circumstances.

Beyond her little apartment, the sounds of alien movement and their incessant calls had ebbed away to almost nothing .Emily began slowly to ease down from the intense emotional high of the day.

She knew she should get some sleep but her nerves were still buzzing. She reconnected the phone to the battery-unit and checked the charge level; four of the five green LEDs were now lit, it would take a little while still for the phone to fully charge but it would definitely be ready in the morning.

She took a can of Diet Pepsi from the counter, popped the top and downed a long swig from it as she moved around the living room back to the window. Darkness had well and truly descended, but the storm clouds that earlier had threatened to blot out the sky had dissipated and a fat full moon cast its glow over the city. With the lights of the city extinguished Emily realized this was the first time she had ever been able to see the stars that, until today, had been invisible to New York’s residents.

Her eyes scanned the shadowy horizon of the greatest city in the world, its towering skyscrapers and mighty financial industries now nothing more than history; a history only Emily Baxter could recall. The poignancy of the moment bit deep into her heart. Her eyes continued to roam over the shadowy rooftops and finally fell on the street below the apartment block. Emily let out a gasp of astonishment, the can of soda almost slipping from her.

The streets below and the rooftops of the stores lining them were nothing but a mass of shifting alien bodies. Thousands of the eight-limbed creatures jostled and pushed for position, scuttling over each other in what appeared to be two distinct streams; one heading north and the other south, moonlight glinting off their red bodies. Her limited view from the window, and the dim illumination, meant she could only see as far as a couple of blocks in either direction. Even so, she was sure she saw each of those streams bifurcate each time they reached a junction as a spur of the creatures left the main stream and headed off to whatever destination called them

It was like watching some strange migration.

The creatures seemed to be communicating on a level imperceptible to Emily or they were driven by a preprogrammed imperative to search and find their objective, whatever that might be.

Emily’s mind immediately flew back to the giant alien trees she had witnessed being built in Central Park. Was this where this exodus was bound? If she rode through the park tomorrow, would she see even more of those tree-like structures? Maybe this time they would be complete as each of these creatures below her sacrificed itself to the structure like some kind of biomechanical building block?

She looked down at the river of alien bodies streaming past her building, her eyes following others as they scuttled over the rooftops and out of buildings, leaping to join the flow of their kin. There was something strangely hypnotic about it. The ebb and flow of these creatures had a certain mathematical quality to it as they scuttled and crawled along.

Although Emily could not hear anything from her 17^th floor aerie, she wondered what it would sound like to stand on the sidewalk down there and listen as they clicked and clattered past on their spindly legs: terrifying, she decided. It would be terrifying, like something from the deepest depths of hell.

Emily stepped back from the window and drew the curtains together. In the solitude of her apartment, she resolved not to look out that window again until daybreak.

An hour later, Emily flicked on the flashlight and blew out the last of the candles as she stifled a long overdue yawn.

She picked up the shotgun and carried it to the sofa, laying it on the floor next to her, within easy reach if the need should arrive. She doubted she would. Each encounter with the creatures seemed to point squarely in one direction: they were nothing but drones, building blocks if you will, for something far larger and much more complicated. If they had wanted to do her harm, well, she knew she would already be dead.

She thought she may have caught sight of some small part of the overall plan out there in the park. The creatures were adding to that structure, building something to only they knew what end. While she did not think these drones were any danger to her unless they were threatened, any plan created by an intelligence that could wipe out the majority of humanity and possibly most other life on this planet in a twenty-four hour period was the purest epitome of evil to her, no matter how unfathomable that plan may be.

It was no longer what had taken place over the past few days that concerned Emily; it was what was coming next that worried her now. She had the distinct feeling she was cutting her evacuation from what was left of New York by as close a margin imaginable, because this city no longer belonged to humanity.

New York and the Earth now belonged to the aliens.