Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

Could she have been mistaken? Was this stuff she thought of as dust actually some kind of animal? She leaned closer to the window, trying to follow one of the motes as it hit the pane of glass, but it moved across the glass too quickly for her to follow, whisked away before she could get a good look at it, only to be replaced by another, slightly larger piece. In the few moments she was able to briefly track the larger particle of dust she could see it certainly didn’t resemble any kind of bug she had ever seen. It looked, well, like dust. Actually, it was more like plant pollen. It had an irregular bulbous shape with sharp points sticking out at odd angles, but rather than appearing solid the particle she was staring at was diaphanous and almost as delicate as the dandelion seeds she’d seen floating on the wind, back home in Iowa.

It was impossible to tell with the limited perspective the window offered just how much of the city was enshrouded by the dust storm. If she wanted to do that, she was going to have to leave the apartment. Hopefully it was just some kind of localized effect that had caused the dust to collect on her side of the building. The idea this might be happening all over the city was unnerving.

Emily unlatched the security lock on the apartment door and opened it, but stopped dead before she even set a foot outside the entrance.

Running along the ceiling just outside her front door was a tendril of the red dust. Emily poked her head outside the apartment doorway and glanced quickly down the corridor towards the elevator. The dust spiraled and twisted about an inch below the ceiling, it seemed to be coming from the direction of the exit to the main stairwell. A few feet into the corridor, it split into two branches, with one tendril heading toward the apartments right of the stairwell and the other inching its way in her direction. But that wasn’t all it was doing, the dust was also splitting off at each doorway. Branches of the dust spiraled down over the doors of each of the corridor’s apartments like smoke pulled along by some unfelt breeze. Or, like the tentacles of some giant monster , Emily thought, with a creeping sense of horror. As she watched, she saw a strand of the dust break off from the main root and descend down to the door of Mrs. Janowitz’s apartment just three apartments down from her own. The strand descended over the doorway, the tip making small movements left and right as though it was feeling its way. When it found the keyhole, the dust disappeared into the tiny opening as a second strand continued down to the base of the door. When it reached the floor, the tendril began to probe at the narrow space between the base of the door and the floor, as it looked for another entrance into the apartment.

That was it, Emily decided. This was just too fucking much. She slammed her own door shut and sprinted to the linen closet. She flung the closet open and snatched up a handful of the thickest towels she could find then ran to the kitchen, almost slipping as she rounded the corner but recovering enough she didn’t fall head-first into the corner of a cupboard. She threw the towels into the sink and turned on both faucets full force. Sure the towels were absolutely soaked, Emily raced to the front door and threw the sopping wet towels down onto the floor to block the crack, pushing them tightly into place as though she was trying to stop smoke from a fire. The edge of the door where it met the doorframe looked secure; the apartment owner had installed a plastic dust excluder that sat between the door and the frame, so she wasn’t worried that anything could get through that. The keyhole was another matter though, it was too small to block with a towel and she didn’t want to plug it with wet paper because that would be a bastard to get out and there was no way she was going to risk not being able to lock her door, or worse, trapping herself inside.

Emily ran back into the kitchen and began pulling out each of the draws. She knew she had a roll of duct-tape around here somewhere. She found it after she pulled out the contents of her third drawer, tucked at the back behind a bunch of plastic carrier bags she always meant to return to the local market.

Racing back to the front door, she tore off two eight-inch strips of the gray industrial-strength tape with her teeth. She pressed the pieces over the keyhole just as the first few particles of the red dust began to float through the hole. She watched the dust float away from the door towards the kitchen. Emily tore off a third piece of tape and stuck it diagonally across the other two she had already applied: just to be on the safe side , she thought.

She stepped back from the door and gave it the once over, taking care to look for any telltale signs the dust might have found some other way through she hadn’t seen. But there was no indication she’d missed any gaps and, after a tense minute of double-checking, she exhaled a heavy breath.

“Shit!” she said aloud as another thought struck her. The air-conditioning had failed to kick-in this morning. The apartment block used a central forced-air system that fed all of the apartments in the building from two external industrial-sized air conditioning units on the south side of the apartments. The two massive units fed the apartment block through a series of ducts that interconnected throughout the walls of the building, supplying the ceiling vents in each room. Of course, it could just be a simple technical problem with the machinery, a couple of days of human free intervention may have created some mechanical problem causing them to overload and stop working. But, after witnessing the methodical way the dust had seemed to search out every possible entry point into the rooms on her floor, Emily doubted it was anything as simple as mechanical failure. The unit’s sudden demise was more likely because the red dust had found some way into the machinery, overloading the air conditioning unit somehow and even now it could be making its way through the miles of heat-ducting, looking for a way into every goddamned apartment.

Grabbing the roll of duct-tape, she raced back down the corridor to the living room. The vents were too high for her to reach so she had to double-back into the breakfast nook and grab a chair. A vent sat directly over the glass table in the breakfast nook, so she climbed up onto the chair and pushed the thumb-slider to the closed position sealing it. Even with the vent closed, she could still see a small gap between each of the vent’s oblong fans that she was sure was more than large enough for the tiny particles of red dust to make it through. Also, the cover of the vent was held in place by two flat-head screws and she could clearly see a black line of shadow between the edges of the vent cover and the white paint of the ceiling. That meant the vent casing wasn’t sitting flush with the ceiling.

She began tearing off strips of duct-tape and sticking them over the exposed seams between the vent cover and the ceiling, carefully pushing them into place with her finger tips to make sure it made a tight seal. Emily tore off more strips and attached them across the panels, completely obscuring the vent. She hoped she had enough tape to cover all the apartment’s vents. If she didn’t, well she’d be up the goddamn creek without the proverbial paddle.

Twenty minutes later, Emily placed the final strip of tape against the vent in her bedroom. She’d managed to cover all of them and, glancing at the roll, it looked like she still had enough left for a couple of strips to patch up anything she might have missed, but she was confident she had effectively made her apartment airtight.

That was going to be her next problem, she realized. With no air conditioning the apartment was going to get warm quickly, in fact, she thought could already feel the temperature in the bedroom beginning to rise. It could just be her imagination, after all she’d just spent the last thirty-minutes or so rushing around like a mad woman and she was sweating profusely. Imaginary or not, she was going to use up all the air in the room and things would get very uncomfortable. At some point, she would have to open up the apartment to the outside and allow some fresh air in. When she did would depend on how long the dust decided to hang around, of course.