Paul Jones - Extinction Point - The End

“Alison? Oh, my God.” The young woman’s voice now so alarmingly tremulous he could barely understand what she was saying.

Something was not right. Jim could see three other customers in the store, all of them a lot younger than him but as he regarded each of them in turn, he could see that same strange look of confusion reflected back from each of their bewildered faces. They looked as though they had all just walked into a room and then forgotten why they were there or what they had come to do; as though they had left something undone that should have been otherwise.

A large glass window filled one wall, through it he could see a white marble-effect walkway that ran parallel to the store. Across the walkway, he could make out two other shops: a Gap clothes store and a Pretzel-Time . Reflective aluminum safety rails ran down the center of the walkway, guarding an open space that, presumably he guessed, dropped down to at least another level below the one he was on.

Several people had gathered outside the store window, milling aimlessly. Jim watched them looking around in that same bewildered manner. One of them — a young woman who until seconds ago had been revolving in slow circles as she gazed up at the ceiling somewhere outside of Jim’s vision — seemed oblivious to the baby stroller that her left hand rested upon, it’s plastic hood concertinaed back into the closed position. As the young mother completed one more slow turn the clutch bag slung loosely over her shoulder clipped the handle of the stroller and sent it rolling noiselessly away from her. Noticing it for the first time, she took two quick steps after it, taking hold of the handles with her outstretched hands she brought the errant pram to a halt before stepping around to the front of it. Kneeling almost reverently before it, Jim was sure he could see tears beginning to flow down her face; her jaw seemed to be vibrating. Reaching out, her hands disappeared inside the buggy, when they returned into his view she held a baby no more than six months old. Her mouth began moving but he could not hear what she was saying. Whatever it was, she was repeating the words again and again. A smile of utter joy lit her face as she stared at the child she now held cradled to her breast.

Jim’s confusion deepened as two balding middle aged men who had been walking hand-in-hand now turned and faced the other, regarding each other as though they had not seen the other in years before throwing their arms around the others neck and falling to their knees together locked in their embrace.

A teenage boy sprinted up to the store window. He stopped for a second in front of it and placed his forehead against the glass. Using his hands to shade the glare from the store’s reflected light, he gaped at the people inside, a look of frantic desperation on his face as his eyes darted from one face to the next. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he sprinted off out of sight leaving only a grease stain where his forehead had contacted the glass.

A keening began from a woman who sat crossed legged on the industrial carpeted floor an aisle or so away from him. Her low moaning voice set a beat to the under-swell of fear Jim could feel seeping into the air.

“What is going on here,” a large man in a business suit demanded, in a loud pompous voice.

The store assistant, still calling forlornly for Steven and Alison, ran past him towards the exit at the far end of the shop.

Jim followed her.

He pushed through the double glass doors of the store and stepped out into the mall. A tsunami of sound struck him as a wave of anguished voices washed over him, soaking him in its confusion. Here and there, intermingled with the dissonant buzz of voices Jim could occasionally make out an ecstatic cry of laughter or the rapid chatter of happiness. It floated through the confusion, emotional flotsam riding on a sea of panic. All of this playing to a background score of Muzak that wafted down from speakers set high up in the latticework of white metal braces holding the glass ceiling of the mall in-place overhead.

The noise amplified as it bounced from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall until finally turning into a mind numbing cacophony that forced Jim to make his way across to the aluminum safety barriers that prevented shoppers from falling through the open space to the floor below, his already assaulted mind unable to handle the sudden extra input.

He took a deep breath and leaned on the horizontal grab bar like a nauseous passenger gazing sickly over the side of a storm-rocked liner. He could see he was on the top floor of a shopping mall, three stories up. The floors beneath were just as packed with people too, all as equally disoriented as those on his.

A thought struck him: Maybe this was a terrorist attack. He remembered back in the late nineties of the last century, some Japanese religious cult had begun gassing people on the Japanese underground, and then in 2019, that home-grown terrorist group, what the hell was their name ? Radical America, Freedom America ? Whoever they were, they had managed to dump a ton of genetically modified respiratory Syncytial virus into the water supply of some mid-western town and killed all those people. Maybe that’s what was going on here, a terrorist group had loosed a chemical agent in the mall and that was why everybody was acting so harebrained.

But, he reasoned, there hadn’t been any real terrorist threat in the world for the last fifteen years or more.

Who the hell was there left in the world with a grudge ?

There was a subtle change in the air that drew his attention away from thoughts of terrorist attack. Like the smell of ozone just before a thunderstorm, Jim could sense a change in the feeling of the crowd. Fear had replaced panic and that now was mutating into terror. Looking up from the bar he was leaning against he saw a wave of horrified faces and bodies flooding towards him.

He was transfixed: hypnotized by the crowd surging towards him. His eyes flickered from face to face, each one as pale as an avalanche as they rushed towards him. The novelist in him observed with a detached, professional attitude, taking note of everything from the look of panic in their eyes, to the way the front row of oncoming people seemed to ebb and flow with those behind.

The large pompous man from the luggage store had left just after Jim and was making his way in the opposite direction, pushing anybody who stood in his way aside. Seeing the oncoming crowd, he tried to turn and get out of their way but the mob swept over him as if he did not exist, trampling him underfoot. Others, faster than the unfortunate executive, dove for cover in shop doors or were caught up and pulled along too. Those not so lucky ended up knocked aside or smashed through the plate glass storefronts.

For a brief moment, he thought about jumping over the safety banister, holding himself there while the mob ran past but he doubted his arms would hold him long enough and his hands were too damp with perspiration for him not to expect to instantly lose his grip and fall the three stories to the ground below. No! He would take his chances with the mob, thank you very much.

Turning, Jim began to run in the opposite direction to the oncoming mob, hoping to get his legs up to some kind of competitive speed to match that of the mob behind him. To his utter surprise, he found that he was sprinting like a teenager. His legs ate up the ground; his arms were pistons pumping the air, his heart thumped in his chest and the blood pumped through veins unclogged by age.

He chanced a brief look back over his shoulder; he had a lead of five feet or so. If he could just make it to the stairs or the escalator before the horde, he would be okay.