Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

Directly across from the apartment block was a row of offices and stores, and as Emily scanned the buildings for any sign of life, her eye caught an indistinct shape curled up in the recessed entranceway to the florist. It was hard to make out exactly what it was from where she was standing so she took a few extra steps closer. Stopping at the curb, Emily instinctively looked both ways before stepping into the road.

She stopped in the center of the road, and stared at the shape in the doorway. It was a body. She was pretty sure she could see a pair of scuffed black boots sticking out from beneath a blanket.

“Hello?” she called out, her voice surprisingly squeaky to her ears. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

There was no reply and no movement from the blanket covered shape. Emily took a few more steps towards the doorway, stopping when she was about ten-feet away. It was definitely a person; she could make out the shape beneath the ragged, dirt-stained, blanket covering everything from the head down, except for the aged boots. It looked as though whoever was under it had simply curled up in the doorway, and pulled the blanket up over their body, like a child trying to hide under the sheets.

“Are you okay?” Emily repeated as gently as she could. Again, there was no answer from the bundled form. With a deep breath Emily walked the few remaining steps until she was standing next to the huddled shape. She reached down and slowly lifted one frayed edge of the blanket.

The man beneath the blanket was dead, of course. He looked to be in his late forties; a thick beard streaked with gray covered his lower jaw echoed by a smattering of stubble across his cheeks. His skin was tanned leather brown from too many years exposed to the elements and a skein of tiny blue veins extended like a road-map over his nose and cheeks. The vagrant’s black, blood clotted eyes regarded the equally dead and wilting flowers of the florist’s window display. The dead man clutched a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka to his chest with both hands, like a child holding onto their favorite toy.

There was something not quite right with the scene though.

It took Emily a minute to realize it was an absence that had caught her attention, there was no blood anywhere on the dead man. Instead, a nimbus of fine red dust outlined the man’s head where she thought the blood should be.

The same red dust coated the blanket covering the man and, as she pulled it back further down the corpse, the tiny particles floated gently up into the air then slowed and began to fall back toward the dead man, settling on his exposed skin. As Emily watched, she saw more dust float down and settle on the pale skin of the dead vagrant, as though the corpse was attracting it with some weird magnetism. In fact, it wasn’t just the red dust she’d disturbed on the blanket that Emily could see moving towards the body, more of the red dust was floating in from outside the store’s entryway. If it hadn’t been for the afternoon sunlight streaming in at just the right angle she wouldn’t have even noticed it moving towards this man’s impromptu burial plot. Her memory recalled the way the red rain had dissipated yesterday, how it had seemed to break apart and float away rather than evaporating.

An impulse overcame her and before she knew why she was doing it Emily exhaled a long strong breath aimed at the particles floating around the cubby of the florist’s entrance. Her breath pushed the tiny red specs back out into the street but, instead of being drawn away from her, the particles slowly began to float back toward the dead man. They weren’t just floating, Emily corrected, they were actually moving horizontally, as though powered by some inner force, drawn towards the dead skin. But not to her, she noticed, only towards the corpse beneath the blanket.

“No way,” said Emily in disbelief. “No. Freaking. Way.”

Fascinated, Emily continued to watch as, in a matter of minutes, the entire exposed portion of the man’s face became covered by a layer of the red dust to the point she could no longer make out any of his features. It looked like he was wearing a red mask.

Once the dust touched the man’s skin the particles seemed to jostle and jiggle with each other for position, rearranging themselves so they filled in any exposed areas of skin.

Just like iron filings on a piece of paper when you move a magnet underneath them , she thought.

Emily resisted the urge to touch the red layer of dust. She was beginning to come to terms with the probability that, by some strange twist of fate or good fortune of her DNA, she was a survivor of whatever this event was, but she didn’t feel the need to push her luck. It was bad enough that she was probably inhaling this stuff in with every breath she took.

Of course, there could be any number of reasons for what she had just seen happen. Maybe the dust was attracted to the man’s skin by static electricity. The blanket was made of polyester, so when she pulled it back it could have generated enough static to cause the red dust to be attracted to the man’s skin. Surely though, if that was the reason, wouldn’t the dust just have headed to the blanket instead of the dead man?

Still not one-hundred-percent convinced what she just witnessed was real, Emily carefully pulled back the rest of the blanket from the body, listening for the tell-tale crackle of static electricity while exposing the man’s hands to the open air. Instantly, she saw the red motes of dust still circulating in the entranceway begin to head towards the exposed leathery skin of the body. There was no mistaking it this time; the dust was making a beeline straight towards his hands. Emily watched a dust particle that had, until moments earlier, been heading out towards the street perform a meandering u-turn, before descending slowly down toward the corpse and settle into place on the man’s left hand. It had been about four-feet away from her, too far to be affected by any kind of static she was sure. It had unmistakably changed its course and headed methodically down before joining the other particles that moved gently back and forth on the dead skin like the gentle swell of lake water, as they rearranged themselves into a uniform layer.

More particles fell towards the man’s hand and Emily decided to test her experiment a little more. She pulled the blanket back up to the vagrant’s chin, careful so as not to create even the slightest disturbance to the air, while keeping her eyes on the descending particles of dust.

As soon as the blanket covered his hands, the dust that had been heading toward them slowed then turned leisurely in the still air and began moving back out in the direction of the street again.

What did I just see ? The thought lodged in the center of Emily’s brain like a splinter and throbbed almost as painfully. First the red rain, now this weird dust. She had the feeling something far larger and far more complex than a simple virus was responsible for this strange new world she found herself in.

While she might be the last living human for God-knew how far, Emily had an uneasy sense that she was no longer alone.

As hard as she tried, she could not shake the idea something intangible was becoming aware of her. Maybe it was paranoia, but Emily felt as though a million hidden eyes had focused suddenly on her, watching her, examining her every move. Although she knew it was impossible, the feeling of disquiet it created proved just as impossible to shake. There was no explanation Emily could think of that could adequately explain the events taking place around her.

She felt bad for leaving the dead vagrant in the doorway but what could she do? She supposed she could drag him somewhere and bury him, he looked like he weighed less than she did, probably even less now that he was a regular at the great barroom in the sky. But bury him where? There wasn’t anywhere she could put him for miles. That would be a job for the rescue services if they ever came… when they came, she corrected herself.