Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

Next, she chose a pair of sneakers and a second, spare pair. They would work for her general day-to-day cycling and, as long as she wore a couple of pairs of socks, they would help when the weather got colder. She grabbed a pair of waterproof boots from the top rack; she didn’t know when she’d need to go walk-about or scavenge for food in the snow, so it would be a good idea to have something that was guaranteed to keep her feet dry and warm.

Finally, she pulled out her thermal socks and dug around in the back of a drawer until she found her pair of Pro X-Pert winter bike gloves. She added them to the pile and then began planning how best to pack them.

First, she needed to empty the food from the bergen. She would pack the clothes in and then replace the food on top of them. If she ate the food from the bergen first that would give any extra room she needed for extra supplies as she travelled.

The heavy-duty winter wear could go at the bottom of the bergen, she wouldn’t need any of that for a while. Emily put her sweaters in next, then her boots and sneakers, before making a final layer with her tee-shirts and trousers. Last of all, she repacked the supplies she had removed earlier. She rolled up her underwear, paired off her socks and stored them in the side pouches of the pack along with her gloves.

She pulled an extra pair of jeans and a tee-shirt from the closet and left them draped over a chair, ready for the morning.

Her packing complete, Emily walked back to the living room. Through the window, she could see dusk had crept up on her while she had been busy in the bedroom. The room was already beginning to disappear into shadow. She took the box of matches she’d set on the coffee table and moved from room to room lighting the candles she had placed out earlier. The candles actually gave off a decent amount of light, more than enough for her to see by and the flickering orange of the flame gave the apartment a welcoming warm appeal.

She headed back to the living room to check on the battery-pack. There was barely any daylight left now, so whatever charge was in the pack was going to have to suffice for now. The pack’s LED indicator glowed green, showing it was fully charged and ready to use. Now all she needed to do was charge the actual battery of the phone. She attached the charging lead to the sat-phone’s battery and flipped the rapid-charge button on the pack; the phone’s battery would take about forty-five minutes to charge fully from the pack.

In the meantime, she needed to grab a bite to eat; she was famished. Emily opened the pantry and took out two cans of mixed-fruit cocktail. She pulled the lid off the first, sat down at the coffee table in the living room and began spooning the contents into her mouth as she let her mind drift toward her plan for the morning.

Her top priority was to put as much distance as possible between herself and New York. She’d toyed with simply taking the most direct route toward her final destination but, as she thought back to her conversation with Jacob, she decided to just head directly north. If she did that she would be out of the city in a day at most. That meant—

Emily’s train of thought was interrupted by the sound of something moving in the apartment above. Her hand stopped halfway to her mouth, a spoonful of fruit dripping onto the coffee table, her head cocked to the left as she listened to hear if the noise would repeat. Sure enough, there it was again, the now familiar pitter-patter of something skittering across the floor, this time in the apartment above hers.

As she listened, Emily heard the first eerie cry of one of the alien creatures rising from an apartment somewhere in the building. The call was answered by another beast on a floor below her, another added to the growing chorus, and then another. Within seconds, her apartment was echoing with the sound of a hundred alien voices, their high-pitched trilling filled her head. It sounded as though many more of the creatures had joined with this strange otherworldly choir. She guessed what she had experienced the night before was just an early batch of the freshly minted creatures, the first wave of what could tonight turn into a flood. It wasn’t hard to imagine, over the past twenty-four hours, that the rest of the city’s new occupants had been ‘born’. Were they even technically being ‘born’ or was it more of a metamorphosis? Who knew?

Emily dropped the spoon and rose slowly to her feet, all thought of food gone as the calls were joined by new, more disturbing sounds. In her mind’s eye, Emily added images to the sounds she heard; she could see the creatures exploring their new world and, finding themselves trapped in mostly locked homes and apartments, following their inbuilt need to escape. The creatures, sensing the onset of night, had begun stirring in the apartments all around her, their excited scuttling back and forth punctuated by the sound of furniture pushed aside and the occasional crash of something delicate falling to the floor. Emily though she heard something shatter, probably a vase, in the apartment next door. The creatures seemed to be whipping themselves into a frenzy.

The calls stopped as suddenly as they started.

A few moments of silence followed, punctuated only by the occasional noise of a creature moving before that too was replaced with another, familiar sound. The sound of splintering wood buzzed through her head like an electric saw, but this was more… organic. It reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen on TV of beavers chewing through a fallen tree. The sound effects made by the rodents in the cartoon were exaggerated almost to absurdity, but the gnawing zing she heard echoing through the building would have fit right into the cartoon.

From the corridor outside her apartment, she heard something heavy hit the floor with a resounding thud . She rushed to the front door, and peered through the spy-hole. Across from her was a circular hole where the wall of the opposite apartment had been, she caught the movement of a creature that had just exited the apartment as it ran along the wall in the direction of the stairwell, its talon tipped legs grasping at the wall as it pulled itself along the vertical surface.

Something fast and dark flitted across her vision.

Emily gasped and threw herself away from the door as her view was suddenly obscured by another of the creatures landing directly on her doorway. It paused for a second as if it could sense her watching from behind the safety of the door and then she heard it running along the wall.

Emily backed down her hallway, turned and moved towards her bedroom but froze when she heard a commotion almost directly above her head. The creature in the upstairs apartment sounded royally pissed off. She could hear it throwing itself repeatedly against a wall as though trying to barge its way through. It sounds as though it’s trapped , she thought?

Maybe, before they died, the owner of the apartment above hers had locked himself or herself in the bedroom, completely unaware they would trap their transformed selves after they died.

Whatever the reason, it did not sound happy.

Emily was just about to continue into the bedroom when she noticed sawdust begin to fall from the ceiling, just beyond the bedroom’s threshold. The apartment suddenly filled with the weird gnawing noise as the creature trapped in the apartment above hers began chewing through its floor and her ceiling. Emily took an involuntary step back into the hall just as a large chunk of ceiling tumbled to the bedroom carpet, a contrail of dust and debris following it down.

Emily was a second away from dodging past the bedroom door and heading towards the living room when the creature dropped through the hole and bounced out into the hallway, blocking her path.