Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

She had managed to cover all the possible ways into the apartment she could think of, and Emily felt her panic finally begin to subside. She began to run the mind-bending events she had just encountered back, analyzing everything she saw, or thought she had seen, through the filter of her reporter’s brain.

To her mind, the obvious intelligence the red dust had exhibited to coordinate entry into the apartments was incontrovertible proof that what she had observed over the past forty-eight hours or so was not some coincidental cluster of unrelated events but actually part of a far bigger phenomenon. That phenomenon was itself a part of a larger process or plan, she was not sure which yet, but she could sense that the answer was just out of reach of her senses. Whatever the answer was, Emily understood something massive had been set in motion with the fall of the red rain, and it was moving methodically and systematically toward its final goal.

Emily quickly tired of checking the window to see if the maelstrom of dust had receded. Each time she pulled the curtains aside and peeked out it seemed the storm had only become worse. It was so thick now that glancing down toward the street she could not tell if streetlights had simply stopped working or if the cloud of dust covering Manhattan was so thick the light just couldn’t make it through.

As the hours passed, Emily paced the apartment, turned on the TV and scanned every channel in the hopes that some station somewhere would be broadcasting something, anything to give her a clue or an indication there was somebody else alive. All she found was static from channels that had gone off the air or emergency service broadcasts that did nothing but loop, warning people they should stay in their homes until the crisis was over. Oddly enough, many of the satellite channels were still broadcasting. She guessed that was because the systems had been preprogrammed weeks in advance, so the computers controlling the broadcasts would probably just trundle along until the power went out or the satellites fell out of orbit.

She decided to try her luck with the Internet. Pulling her laptop from its bag, she connected it to the docking station she kept on a small desk in one corner of her bedroom. She expected the Internet would be down, but to her surprise, when she plugged the Ethernet cable into the connector on the side of her computer, she saw the connection indicator in the bottom right-hand corner of her monitor turn from red to green. She was online!

Emily tried all of the major news sites first. CNN was still up but displayed the same headline it had the day of the red rain. The same was true for MSNBC and Fox. Up, but no new news. When she tried to load-up the website of one of the local TV channels all she got was a 404-error and the message “The page you are looking for cannot be found.” Undeterred she began working her way through the list of social networking sites she had compiled the day before, looking for any hint someone had posted a message they were still alive. It was like looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack, only this haystack spanned the entire globe.

She logged in to her Twitter account and read the messages she’d missed. She hadn’t accessed it from before the red rain had first fallen, so the bulk of the messages expressed concern or fear over the then upcoming event. Some messages explained their authors were hunkering down and hoping to ride out the storm, there were even one or two that dismissed the threat as nothing more than mass hysteria.

How’d that work out for you ? Emily wondered.

There was no sign of any new messages posted to Twitter since the red plague had hit, though.

On each social media website or platform she visited, she left the date, her telephone number, and a simple message: I am alive. Please, contact me!!!She did not think it would be a good idea to leave her exact address, so she just wrote New York City.That was close enough.

Emily spent the next four hours checking in to every website and web-hang-out she could find, looking for any sign of recent activity that might indicate someone, somewhere, was watching. She found nothing. She left her message on every one of them and, where possible, activated the option that would notify her if there were any new updates to her post.

By the time she exhausted her list of websites Emily’s eyes had begun to ache from the strain of staring at the screen for so long. She could feel beads of warm sweat dripping down her back and across her chest from the steadily growing humidity in her sealed off apartment.

She headed into the bathroom. The bathtub still held her emergency supply of water, which meant she would have to drain it if she wanted to take a shower. Instead, she filled the basin with water, stripped out of her clothes and rinsed herself off with a face cloth. The cold water felt wonderful against her clammy skin. Refreshed, she threw on a fresh tee and panties.

She was beginning to feel her hunger pangs howl so she pulled a can of soup from her cache and heated it on the stove, raising the temperature in the apartment even further, but Hey ! She had to eat . Sitting cross-legged on the sofa, she devoured the soup with the last few slices of bread she had left. While she ate, she turned on the TV and found a movie channel that was still broadcasting.

Restless and unable to focus, Emily switched the movie off before it ended and went to check the window one final time. The red dust still beat against the glass and she’d be damned if she could tell whether it had gotten worse or stayed the same. If she was perfectly honest with herself, at that particular moment, she didn’t care whether it had or not. She’d felt the depression begin to set back in after she’d logged off from the last website. It was hard to fight off the nagging feeling that, despite her best efforts to remain upbeat and reassured, she really was the only person left alive on this lump of rock the human race had called home.

The steadily growing temperature in the apartment and her own agitated nerves slowly sapped away at Emily’s energy, darkening her mood even further. There was little more she could do today, other than sit and brood the rest of the evening away. That wouldn’t help. She wanted to rest, but the clammy heat made her sticky and uncomfortable, besides she was tired but not sleepy. She grabbed a bottle of over-the-counter sleep aids she kept in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, popped two of them into her mouth and swallowed them with a swig of water before climbing onto her bed and burying herself in the welcoming coolness of the comforter.

Outside the apartment window, the red dust continued to scratch against the glass, blindly looking for a way in. Emily didn’t care. Within minutes, the stress of the day and the sedating effects of the sleeping pills pulled her down into sleep.

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

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

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

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

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