Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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