by Paul Jones
Emily had compiled a list of numbers to try and listed them in order of priority of their likelihood to answer. She picked up her cellphone and dialed the first number on her list, listening as the phone at the other end of the line rang three times before picking up.
“You have reached the Whitehouse. If you know your party’s extens—” Emily hung up and tried the next number. No one answered at the Pentagon either. She tried the numbers for the FBI, the CIA, the Smithsonian Museum, every police precinct and hospital within a fifty-mile radius. When she exhausted New York State’s political party HQs, she moved on to numbers in California.
The only voices she heard belonged to ghosts.
Right around two in the afternoon the three cups of coffee took their toll and she had to stop what she was doing and use the bathroom. She was beginning to get hungry, too, so she decided to take a break and grab something to eat. She warmed up a can of clam chowder on the stove and added a few saltine crackers to it. She ate her lunch quickly and quietly then returned to her phone calls, choosing key numbers in Kansas this time.
By three-thirty, both Emily and her cellphone were precariously close to empty. She hung up from her last call, snapped the phone shut and almost threw it at the wall in utter frustration. Instead, she walked into the kitchen and attached it to the charger she kept permanently plugged into a wall socket. It would take a few hours for it to fully charge, so now was as good a time to go grab those supplies she needed. When she got back, she could start working on checking the social networking sites for any signs of life.
Got to keep your chin-up girl, the ghost of her father said inside her head as she grabbed her keys from the kitchen counter and headed out the front door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Emily stepped onto the concrete terrace outside the apartment block and stared up at the clear sky.
Even though the shadow of the building protected her from the full glare of the sun, she still found herself squinting at the dramatic change in brightness. After a day of being cooped-up in the apartment with just artificial light, this sudden exposure to actual sunlight was a shock to her retinas and she quickly found herself raising a hand to her brow in a semi-salute to protect her strained eyes.
For the first few minutes, as she allowed herself time to acclimate to being outside, Emily could almost believe that nothing had really changed; that maybe, just maybe, yesterday really had been just a dream. But, as the seconds ticked by and her eyes became accustomed to the daylight, she began to sense just how truly profound a change had swept over her beloved city.
Besides the gentle rustle of a flag on a nearby mast, there was no sound at all: no cars, no people, no music, no birds twittering, no dogs barking, no arguing couples or babies crying. None of the background noise of a city full of people chatting on phones and to each other, nothing but the rhythmic thumping of her heart and a stillness that seemed to triple the weight of the air around her.
When she was a kid, Emily had gone on a school trip to a bird sanctuary over in Black Hawk County. The school bus was packed with kids and all the way there and all the way back the bus was filled with the constant innocent chattering of the children, the bus had buzzed with conversation and life. When the trip was over, the school bus driver dropped the kids off directly outside their homes. Emily lived the furthest away and hers was the last stop. By the time the driver pulled up outside her parents' home, the bus was empty save for herself and the driver, who wasn’t particularly chatty on the best of days and even less so after spending four hours with a bus load of over excited kids. The noise of forty chattering kids that had filled the bus quickly evaporated, and young-Emily had felt the first disquieting sense of absence, of how life can suddenly change.
Now, as she stood in the sunshine of what should have been a beautiful New York day, Emily had the same sense of absence she felt when she was the last kid on the bus, magnified a million times. All sound had left the city and in the vacuum it left behind there was nothing but peaceful, pure, perfectly terrifying silence.
The city smelled different, too. It smelled clean. Yes, that was exactly it, she thought. That quintessential aroma of New York—a mixture of carbon monoxide, burgers, hotdogs, dry cleaners, and bakers, mixed with the sweat of eight-million people—had also vanished.
Sometimes, after a heavy rain, the city almost smelled this way, like crisp fresh linen. It would linger for a few minutes, but even then, there was always an underlying flavor to the air that never really disappeared—until now. This morning the city smelled pristine and the air tasted sweet, free of all pollutants, dirt, and everything else that made it so special to her, that gave it its unique character. It was all gone.
Emily’s sense of scale of the previous day’s events suddenly exploded.
Her apartment had acted as a buffer against the desolation that now covered her hushed city like a shroud, insulating her from the power of the true gravity of the emptiness that surrounded her. Nobody and nothing but Emily Baxter remained alive for miles around.
She could feel the void of its passing deep within her core. She was a single cell flowing through a city that was now nothing more than a dead heart lying within an already decaying body. A profound sense of solemnity snatched her up into its grasp. Emily knew that she was, quite possibly, the sole witness to something few other humans had ever experienced before: the passing of an entire civilization, maybe the entire human race.
"Fuck!" she said aloud, surprising herself with how loud her voice sounded on the empty concrete terrace.
That single expletive was not exactly what she would describe as the most profound statement on the world's passing, but it summed up her feelings quite succinctly, she thought.
"Fuck!" she said again, glancing around at the empty street. "Oh, fuck!"
Except for a few scattered and presumably abandoned vehicles, the roads were empty. Had everyone managed to get out of the city before the plague, or whatever it was, hit?
She supposed it made sense, there had been enough warning in the hours after the red-rain had fallen for even the most technologically unconnected of New York's residents to learn what was happening in the rest of the world and decide whether to stay or go home. Who could blame them? After all, wasn't that what she had decided to do? And she didn't have any family here to speak of.
In the hours after the rain, the news would have quickly percolated down to every level of the city. People would have been faced with the same decision: stay or go? It looked like most of them had decided to go home to their families. Somewhere they felt safe, protected.
Of course, there could be other survivors holed up around the city or maybe even some that had hunkered down in their offices. There could be hundreds or even thousands of others just like her who'd survived and decided to wait it out for a couple of days, see how things panned out, in the hope of rescue. It was such a seductive, comforting thought, but surely, if there were survivors, they would have tried to make others aware they were alive, right?
It didn't feel right to her. As weird as it sounded even to Emily, she had no sense of anyone else being alive in this city; there was a distinct lack of what? Spirit? Life? The very air—so crisp and clean now—felt bereft of energy. It was as though the very life force of the city had suddenly gone AWOL. She didn't know why she felt the way she did, but with each passing minute, she was growing certain she was the last living person left for many miles. Life as she knew it had come to a very abrupt stop on good old planet earth.
Directly across from the apartment block was a row of offices and stores, and as Emily scanned the buildings for any sign of life, her eye caught an indistinct shape curled up in the recessed entranceway to the florist. It was hard to make out exactly what it was from where she was standing so she took a few extra steps closer. Stopping at the curb, Emily instinctively looked both ways before stepping into the road.
She stopped in the center of the road, and stared at the sh
ape in the doorway. It was a body. She was pretty sure she could see a pair of scuffed black boots sticking out from beneath a blanket.
"Hello?" she called out, her voice surprisingly squeaky to her ears."Can you hear me? Are you okay"
There was no reply and no movement from the blanket covered shape. Emily took a few more steps towards the doorway, stopping when she was about ten-feet away. It was definitely a person; she could make out the shape beneath the ragged, dirt-stained, blanket covering everything from the head down, except for the aged boots. It looked as though whoever was under it had simply curled up in the doorway, and pulled the blanket up over their body, like a child trying to hide under the sheets.
"Are you okay?" Emily repeated as gently as she could. Again, there was no answer from the bundled form. With a deep breath Emily walked the few remaining steps until she was standing next to the huddled shape. She reached down and slowly lifted one frayed edge of the blanket.
The man beneath the blanket was dead, of course. He looked to be in his late forties; a thick beard streaked with gray covered his lower jaw echoed by a smattering of stubble across his cheeks. His skin was tanned leather brown from too many years exposed to the elements and a skein of tiny blue veins extended like a road-map over his nose and cheeks. The vagrant’s black, blood clotted eyes regarded the equally dead and wilting flowers of the florist’s window display. The dead man clutched a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka to his chest with both hands, like a child holding onto their favorite toy.
There was something not quite right with the scene though.
It took Emily a minute to realize it was an absence that had caught her attention, there was no blood anywhere on the dead man. Instead, a nimbus of fine red dust outlined the man’s head where she thought the blood should be.
The same red dust coated the blanket covering the man and, as she pulled it back further down the corpse, the tiny particles floated gently up into the air then slowed and began to fall back toward the dead man, settling on his exposed skin. As Emily watched, she saw more dust float down and settle on the pale skin of the dead vagrant, as though the corpse was attracting it with some weird magnetism. In fact, it wasn't just the red dust she'd disturbed on the blanket that Emily could see moving towards the body, more of the red dust was floating in from outside the store’s entryway. If it hadn't been for the afternoon sunlight streaming in at just the right angle she wouldn't have even noticed it moving towards this man's impromptu burial plot. Her memory recalled the way the red rain had dissipated yesterday, how it had seemed to break apart and float away rather than evaporating.
An impulse overcame her and before she knew why she was doing it Emily exhaled a long strong breath aimed at the particles floating around the cubby of the florist’s entrance. Her breath pushed the tiny red specs back out into the street but, instead of being drawn away from her, the particles slowly began to float back toward the dead man. They weren’t just floating, Emily corrected, they were actually moving horizontally, as though powered by some inner force, drawn towards the dead skin. But not to her, she noticed, only towards the corpse beneath the blanket.
"No way," said Emily in disbelief. "No. Freaking. Way."
Fascinated, Emily continued to watch as, in a matter of minutes, the entire exposed portion of the man's face became covered by a layer of the red dust to the point she could no longer make out any of his features. It looked like he was wearing a red mask.
Once the dust touched the man’s skin the particles seemed to jostle and jiggle with each other for position, rearranging themselves so they filled in any exposed areas of skin.
Just like iron filings on a piece of paper when you move a magnet underneath them, she thought.
Emily resisted the urge to touch the red layer of dust. She was beginning to come to terms with the probability that, by some strange twist of fate or good fortune of her DNA, she was a survivor of whatever this event was, but she didn't feel the need to push her luck. It was bad enough that she was probably inhaling this stuff in with every breath she took.
Of course, there could be any number of reasons for what she had just seen happen. Maybe the dust was attracted to the man's skin by static electricity. The blanket was made of polyester, so when she pulled it back it could have generated enough static to cause the red dust to be attracted to the man's skin. Surely though, if that was the reason, wouldn't the dust just have headed to the blanket instead of the dead man?
Still not one-hundred-percent convinced what she just witnessed was real, Emily carefully pulled back the rest of the blanket from the body, listening for the tell-tale crackle of static electricity while exposing the man's hands to the open air. Instantly, she saw the red motes of dust still circulating in the entranceway begin to head towards the exposed leathery skin of the body. There was no mistaking it this time; the dust was making a beeline straight towards his hands. Emily watched a dust particle that had, until moments earlier, been heading out towards the street perform a meandering u-turn, before descending slowly down toward the corpse and settle into place on the man’s left hand. It had been about four-feet away from her, too far to be affected by any kind of static she was sure. It had unmistakably changed its course and headed methodically down before joining the other particles that moved gently back and forth on the dead skin like the gentle swell of lake water, as they rearranged themselves into a uniform layer.
More particles fell towards the man’s hand and Emily decided to test her experiment a little more. She pulled the blanket back up to the vagrant’s chin, careful so as not to create even the slightest disturbance to the air, while keeping her eyes on the descending particles of dust.
As soon as the blanket covered his hands, the dust that had been heading toward them slowed then turned leisurely in the still air and began moving back out in the direction of the street again.
What did I just see? The thought lodged in the center of Emily's brain like a splinter and throbbed almost as painfully. First the red rain, now this weird dust. She had the feeling something far larger and far more complex than a simple virus was responsible for this strange new world she found herself in.
While she might be the last living human for God-knew how far, Emily had an uneasy sense that she was no longer alone.
* * *
As hard as she tried, she could not shake the idea something intangible was becoming aware of her. Maybe it was paranoia, but Emily felt as though a million hidden eyes had focused suddenly on her, watching her, examining her every move. Although she knew it was impossible, the feeling of disquiet it created proved just as impossible to shake. There was no explanation Emily could think of that could adequately explain the events taking place around her.
She felt bad for leaving the dead vagrant in the doorway but what could she do? She supposed she could drag him somewhere and bury him, he looked like he weighed less than she did, probably even less now that he was a regular at the great barroom in the sky. But bury him where? There wasn’t anywhere she could put him for miles. That would be a job for the rescue services if they ever came … when they came, she corrected herself.
So, she had left him to the red dust that swarmed and whirled around him like flies. Where were the flies? She hadn’t seen one since the red rain. The thought flitted across her mind for a second but she dismissed it. All she could do now was carry on with her plan, she had already lost enough time trying to figure out just what she had observed with that freaky flying show the red dust had performed. She had bigger problems to worry about and it was time for her to pull herself together and to get back on track.
Two buildings down from the florist was the corner convenience store where she had witnessed the near-riot the day before. The street was clear now. There was no sign anything untoward had happened except for a few crushed cans of what had probably been green beans on the road outside the store. The door to the shop was unlocked; she pushed it open and stepped inside.
Bing-Bong!!!
Emily let out a screech of surprise as the electronic door chime activated. For a second she thought she was going to pee herself with fear. Her heart was pounding hard enough to shatter her ribcage as a sudden surge of adrenalin pumped through her veins.
She wasn't sure how many more scares like this she could take before she simply went into cardiac arrest and keeled over. To be honest, the thought wasn't so bad, she admitted. The idea she may be the last living human was petrifying and made a sudden death seem almost attractive.
"Don't be stupid, girl," she said aloud and then began to giggle. The giggle turned into laughter as the full weight of what had transpired over the past two days and her growing realization of her predicament finally hit her.
It was an absolutely absurd situation to be in. Emily had spent the majority of her life feeling as though she was prepared for anything, confident in her own capabilities and focused on moving forward, just like everyone else she knew, but now, here she was; completely alone and unprepared. At a complete and utter loss as to what she should do next. And, wasn't it truly ironic, that the sole surviving human—that's what she felt like, after all—would be a journalist? The biggest news-story ever and there was no one left alive to tell it to. It really was just too much.
Emily's legs felt like they were ready to give way as the laughter suddenly turned to snuffling tears and a hot well of fear and desperation bubbled up from inside her. She tried to force the emotion back but she didn’t stand a chance. Emily covered her face with her hands and began to weep at the thought of everything she had lost .
