Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

In the total blackness of her apartment, Emily Baxter crawled along the corridor on her hands and knees until she found her bedroom. She crept inside, still on her hands and knees, over to the walk-in closet on the far side of the room. Opening the door to her closet, she pulled herself inside and closed the door securely behind her.

That night, cowering in the corner of the closet, Emily listened to the calls of an awakening world.

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.