Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

Under any other circumstances, this would probably rank right up there on her list of perfect days: the sun, warm and welcoming on her skin; the road empty before her; the heady aroma of eight-hundred acres of grass, trees and flowerbeds. If it had not been for the rest of the city’s occupants lying dead around her and in the process of being consumed by some strange menace, then yes, this would certainly have ranked right up there.

Despite the obvious drawbacks, Emily allowed herself to bask in the simple illusion as she pedaled onwards. The road dipped beneath a footbridge and she swept past a row of dilapidated storefronts on her right. She could be anywhere in the world right now, she thought. The old stone architecture reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Europe and she allowed herself to imagine she was riding through the back-roads of Provence, or maybe Tuscany; she had always wanted to take a trip to Italy.

Her daydream ended when she rounded the final bend approaching the exit onto 5th Avenue and 79th. Three cars, or what was left of them at least, had collided at the junction. Two were full-on yellow, with NYC TAXI stenciled on their doors. The third was a white Nissan Pathfinder SUV. One of the taxis had T-boned the Pathfinder, the second taxi had apparently careened into the back of the first taxi effectively blocking the junction. Three police cruisers, one at each junction, had positioned themselves to stop traffic from getting past.

The accident must have happened just as the majority of Manhattan’s workers learned of the approaching disaster, because in the lanes blocked by each patrol car were row upon row of empty vehicles. Most bore the same yellow livery as the crumpled taxi’s involved in the accident, but Emily could see the occasional delivery truck, a couple of tour busses, and even a motorcycle or two here and there, lying on their side in the road.

Caught up in this traffic snarl, every driver had undoubtedly been sitting impatiently behind the wheel of their vehicle, unaware that that would be their final resting place.

The exit lanes leading away from the lights were more or less empty, apart from the occasional car caught in the process of making a u-turn, hoping to head in the opposite direction of the accident before it was too late. Emily saw one car that had run through a bus-stop, scattering bits of the decimated shelter across the sidewalk and road. There wasn’t any sign of an ambulance, so the accident must have happened just minutes before death stepped into the city.

Emily slowed her bike to a walking pace, and made a wide curve around the debris field of the accident. The vehicles engines must have all been running at the time the red plague struck because, in every vehicle she looked into, the keys were still in the ignition. Most had their doors closed and locked, she noted. Some of the unlucky drivers had apparently managed to get their doors open before succumbing to the effects of the red-rain (or maybe they had simply opened them to yell and scream at the drivers in front of them in true New York fashion). But every locked vehicle Emily passed as she free-wheeled slowly down the center divider between the two lanes had one thing in common: they all had the same almost perfectly round hole in one of their windows as she had seen in the beer delivery truck, minutes earlier.

The crush of cars disappeared as she crossed over Madison Avenue. The road was virtually clear of vehicles as she continued heading east along 79th street, except for a few stragglers who must have managed a u-turn before they got caught up in the traffic snarl ahead. When she hit the Lexington junction she hung wide right and continued down the next four or five blocks until the road met with 72nd Street.

STEALS ON WHEELSwas another block further on, nestled between a Wells Fargo bank and a Starbucks. Emily pulled to a halt with a squeal of brakes in front of the bike store. She pulled her bike up onto the pavement and leaned it against a parking meter just outside.

The door to the bike store, unsurprisingly, was locked. She could see a bunch of bikes in the window, all neatly arranged in order of price, but Emily knew the bike she was looking for would be inside, safely away from the window just in case somebody decided to do exactly what she planned to do next.

Emily was getting a little tired of having to commit B&E every time she needed something, but she guessed she would have to get used to that from now on. The majority of storeowners, Emily thought, would probably have shut up shop and headed home as quickly as they could, locking their stores behind them. Emily wondered how many of them had really believed they would ever return.

Pulling the hammer from the pack, she flipped it over so the ball-peen would act as the business end. She was going to have to use her damaged right arm for this little exercise in vandalism. She still couldn’t raise that arm much above seventy-degrees and she needed to cover her eyes from any flying glass, just in case. Only her left arm was flexible enough for that.

She slid out of her jacket and rolled it around her right hand until only the shaft of the hammer and the head were visible, then, turning sideways to the plate-glass window, positioned her feet in a wide stance. She turned her face away from the window, burying it deep into the crook of her elbow.

Emily struck the window with the hammer with as much force as she could muster.

The glass shattered with the sound of a thousand icicles smashing to the ground, amplified to a nerve jarring level by the empty streets. As Emily took a step back to escape the rain of shattered glass, she felt something tug at the leg of her jeans. Looking down she saw a four-foot long triangular shard from the shattered window protruding from the cloth of her jeans. Just an inch or so to the left and the spike would have speared her leg instead of the hem of her jeans. She reached down with her gloved hand and took careful hold of the lance of glass while she held the pleat of her jeans with her other hand. She tugged at the glass. It came away after a few pulls with a ripping sound, leaving an eight-inch hole through both sides of her jeans leg. Emily tossed the deadly piece of glass away and cringed as it smashed to pieces on the sidewalk, shattering the silence of the dead street once again.

Mental note: need more jeans .

Turning to look at the front of the store Emily examined her handiwork. Almost half of the window now resided in a million pieces on the pavement. A few stubborn fragments of glass protruded here and there from the metal surround that had held the window in place, but they disappeared under the might of Emily’s hammer.

The broken glass crunched beneath her sneakers as she stepped up and into the front display area of the store. If the power had still been on, the alarm system would have been screaming bloody-murder at her and the cops would be there in, let’s say, thirty minutes, give or take an hour?

Instead, only the sound of broken glass crunching beneath her sneakers accompanied Emily as she edged past the display of bikes and stepped down onto the main floor of the store. She was glad she had brought the flashlight with her as the interior of the store gradually became darker the further back from the front of the shop she walked.

She fished the flashlight out of her bergen, switched it on and twisted the beam-adjuster until it gave off a wide angle of light that pushed back the remaining darkness. There was almost enough light to see by without the flashlight, but the weight of the Maglite in her hand added an extra sense of security she welcomed and meant she didn’t have to unstrap the shotgun from around her chest.

Spare wheels, frames, and bicycle forks lined the walls on either side of the store. Everything a cycling enthusiast would need to build her own bike from scratch or replace a broken part was available somewhere in the store. On the main shop floor, two rows of bicycles formed an honor guard on either side of a wide strip of industrial strength carpet that stretched down into the darkest end of the store. From her previous visits, Emily knew Mike liked to keep the cheaper bikes at the front of the store, and the deeper into the store one walked the more expensive the bikes became.