Extinction Point

by Paul Jones

  With her bout of self-torture finally over, Emily slipped out of her disgustingly dirty shirt and jeans, pulled off her panties and socks, balled them all together, and tossed them into the far corner of the bathroom. With no electricity to wash with, she wasn't going to be wearing them again but Emily was confident she also wasn't going to be here long enough to worry about cleaning up after herself.

  The air was cool against her exposed skin as Emily moved from the bathroom into her bedroom. She pulled a clean tee-shirt and jeans from the same closet where she had spent the night. As she pulled on her fresh set of clothes, she caught a whiff of her own body odor, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She would need to figure out a way of heating water at some point. She didn’t think she could handle her own stench for too many days.

  A few minutes later, wearing her fresh clothes and another pair of sneakers – whoever came up with the idea of replacing laces with Velcro strips was a genius – Emily felt she was finally ready to start moving forward with the next part of her plan.

  * * *

  This time, she would be ready for any trouble. She gathered together a collection of essential items: her trusty hammer, a large bottle of water, several snack bars she found hidden behind a bag of flour in the pantry and, determined to never be caught in the dark again, a six-cell Maglite flashlight she kept in her bedroom tallboy in case of a brown out. The flashlight would also double as a baton if it came down to it. She packed everything except the hammer into the bergen and shouldered it, slotting the hammer into the waist belt.

  The pain-pills she had taken with her late breakfast had kicked in and the pain in her strained muscles was already beginning to fade to a sufficiently ignorable level. Feeling as ready as she was ever going to be Emily checked the corridor outside her front door, looking through the security spyhole for any sign of the creature she thought she had heard in the darkness. It looked clear, but she decided to err on the side of caution and pulled the hammer from her belt before slowly opening her front door.

  Nothing lay in wait for Emily outside her apartment. The corridor was as empty as she remembered it being when she left the day before. There was something different though. On the opposite wall from her apartment, a number of ragged holes punctuated the wall. They were spaced almost evenly apart, and as she looked closer, Emily could see they left a trail that extended along the wall back towards the door to the stairwell before curving up onto the ceiling and ending at the stairwell entrance. She leaned in to get a closer look at the holes ; they were large enough for her to place her pinky finger in and looked to have been cut by something sharp enough that it left a clean hole with no rough edges.

  They were track marks, she realized.

  Something had come up through the stairwell last night. While she had struggled in the darkness, it climbed along the corridor wall after her and stopped outside her apartment. The hair on the nape of Emily's neck stood erect. Emily wasn’t sure she felt any better knowing she hadn’t imagined the incident, because now she was truly unnerved. Instinctively she looked up and down the corridor again, double-checking to make sure whatever had made these tracks was not hiding somewhere nearby.

  The divots in the drywall were spaced in two parallel arcs, six on each side. Emily placed her left arm in the space between the two sets of tracks, her fingertips touching the top set of holes; her elbow didn’t even reach the center of the gap between the two tracks. Whatever had come through that door was big, at least four-feet across, if her rough measurements were anything to gauge it by.

  Her grip on the shaft of the hammer grew tighter as her imagination spiked into overdrive, conjuring up images of what could create the kind of marks she was looking at on the wall. Emily quickly dismissed the thoughts. She knew whatever imaginary creatures she created, the reality was going to be far more alien than her tired mind could produce.

  She had always considered herself willing to confront anything—a reporter who wasn’t able to face down opposition wouldn’t last very long—but this whole situation was just too far out, too strange. The drive to hide and pretend it was all okay was overwhelming, but if she gave into it, Emily knew she would surely die. Her only hope of survival was to move forward with her plan. That meant leaving this city and heading north as quickly as she could.

  * * *

  Emily's trip down the stairwell was far simpler this time than her previous night's adventure. She followed the tracks she found outside her door as they continued along the wall of the 17th floor and eventually into the darkness of the stairwell. Her flashlight illuminated her way down each flight of stairs as she tracked the holes down another two floors until they disappeared when the spider-thing, as she had come to think of it, presumably decided to stop using the wall and instead jumped to the stairs like any other self respecting New Yorker would.

  The foyer of the apartment block was clear. Nothing looked disturbed or out of place, but she did notice three more sets of tracks leading from the ground floor and out through the building’s main doors. That could only mean there were more of the spider-things on the loose, but at least the tracks appeared to be heading out of the building and away from her.

  Stepping into the open air and the beautiful day that greeted her, Emily felt her spirits surge. The apartment, now that she was fully committed to leaving, had gradually become more and more claustrophobic and stuffy to her, but out here in the sunshine, it was simply glorious.

  The sun shone brilliantly, framed by a clear, cloud free sky, much the same as the day the red-rain had fallen. Emily didn't care about the similarity; the warmth of the sun against her skin felt fabulous and she paused for a moment, closed her eyes and allowed herself to simply bathe in the radiated warmth of her planet's star. For that moment, as she stood rejoicing in the simple act of sun worship, the orange warmth permeating through her tightly closed eyelids, she could imagine that this was just another day. That the sights and sounds that were this great city's heartbeat had simply paused for a moment to allow her these few seconds of bliss and, when she opened her eyes, the world would be as it once was, as it had always been, as it should be.

  Of course, when Emily finally allowed her eyes to flutter open again, the world was as empty as when she closed them. It was okay, she supposed, because she was still alive, she knew that she was not the only survivor, and today would most likely be the final day she would have to spend in this vast city of ghosts and scuttling unseen monsters.

  Emily let out a sigh of resignation. Her aching body was already complaining about the prospect of this latest jaunt, the painkillers she had taken earlier were still doing their job but they weren't powerful enough to blunt the pain completely.

  Her bike was where she had dropped it the night before. For some reason she thought it would be gone, spirited away by whatever she had heard awakening in her apartment complex last night. In fact, there was no sign of any of the owners of the fricative alien voices that had serenaded the city, and Emily pondered whether they had some kind of aversion to daylight.

  Maybe they were just late sleepers, she joked to herself. She didn’t laugh.

  Bending over to lift the bike caused a warning spasm of pain to quiver through her shoulder. Even though the discomfort was numbed by the painkillers, she had to keep in mind her body was beat-up, and her injuries could easily be exacerbated if she overexerted herself. Any other time and she would put herself on light-duty, but time had run out for both Emily and the human race, she could no longer simply take to her bed for a couple of days while she healed.

  She had to be extra careful from here on out, she reminded herself again.

  Emily scooted her bike around until it was facing east, mounted it and began peddling at a leisurely pace, resisting the urge to pick her pace up to her normal cruising speed. There was no need to rush today, it was more important to ensure she didn’t put her recovering body under any more stress. Besides, at her current speed she could also keep her eyes open for
any of the owners of the strange cries she had heard last night.

  There were several bike shops within a few miles for her to choose from but she decided to head to her favorite, the oddly named STEALS ON WHEELS over on Lexington and 75th. It wasn't one of those mega-store we-sell-everything emporiums where you could buy just about anything but no one knew you from Adam. This was just a small-time boutique bike shop, owned and operated by a life-long cycling enthusiast named Mike Stanley who stocked what he liked to call ’the best bargains on two wheels‘. Despite the store's name and Mike's sell-line, the bikes he sold were anything but cheap, but they were most definitely some of the most robust, reliable and well made bikes you could pick up anywhere in the city. Plus, it was only a block or so away from a Whole Foods Market that had opened up just a few months earlier. With a little luck she could find a new bike plus all the spare parts she could carry at Mike’s store, and then head over to the market and stock up on the supplies she would need for the first leg of her trip.

  She pedaled south-west on Amsterdam Avenue, past the eerily empty stores and businesses and the equally deserted sidewalks. When she made the left onto West 86th Street Emily had to swerve and brake suddenly to avoid a huge delivery truck jutting out from the semi collapsed building it had collided with. The road was littered with kegs of beer. They lay scattered across the road like mines, their silver casks glinting in the sun and mixing with the debris from the decimated building.

  The cab of the truck had buried itself deep inside the shattered building. Splintered floorboards, pieces of ceiling and plasterboard hung from the mouth of the decimated building reminding Emily, oddly, of the Christmas decorations that had always seemed so appealing to her when she visited Santa's Grotto as a child. Strange how the mind works, she thought as she slowed to a stop.

  Emily dismounted and propped her bike up against the curb using the flat of the left pedal. The truck's cab was barely visible through the tangle of fallen debris. She had to pick her way towards it, carefully avoiding the sharp splinters of wood jutting like stalagmites and stalactites, seemingly from every angle. She reached the front of the vehicle unscathed; the doors to the truck were both closed, but the driver's-side window had an almost perfectly circular hole in it measuring a couple of feet across. Emily used the truck’s footplate to step up and examine the hole; it looked as though someone had taken a circular saw and cut through the glass. She ran her fingers over the edge of the opening. The edge felt sharp, serrated almost, as though whatever had made it had gnawed through the glass.

  Peering through the hole into the cab, Emily could see nothing remained of whoever had been driving the delivery truck, they were gone and in their place was the remains of one of the giant pupae she had seen—and splattered, she reminded herself—at the paper yesterday.

  Both doors of the truck were still locked from the inside of the cab, which meant whatever had emerged from the pupa could only have escaped through the circular hole in the glass. The hole was just too neat to have been caused by the crash, so the logical assumption, Emily concluded, would be it could only have been cut by the thing trapped in the cab. The transformed driver was, she hoped, long gone, because Emily did not even want to imagine the kind of being that had climbed out from the cocoon and then been able to bore through the truck’s window with such precision to escape.

  Emily turned her attention back to the remains lying on the floor of the truck’s cab. The pupa had split open along its middle like a giant clamshell. The inside was a dull brown now but Emily could make out several slimy looking tubes that she guessed had acted like umbilical cords to feed the creature the nutrients it had needed. The faint reek of ammonia still filled the truck’s cabin.

  She climbed down from the truck and cautiously made her way back out into the sunshine, but even as the warmth of the sun welcomed her back, an icy tentacle of fear wrapped itself around the base of her spine and began to tighten its grip.

  * * *

  Emily sped across the junction of Central Park West and 81st, her head instinctively flipping right and left despite the dead traffic lights and mostly empty road.

  A single police car, its front driver’s side and passenger seat windows wound all the way down, blocked the right lane of the entrance onto the 79th Street Transverse, positioned to stop any traffic continuing past it, she guessed. Emily could imagine the cop sitting in his car, arm resting on the sill of the open window, but she had no idea why he would have chosen to stop there.

  Emily had already cycled several hundred yards past the abandoned police car when she had an idea. She slowed the bike and circled back to the cop car. Not bothering to dismount from the bike, she pulled up alongside the driver’s side, opened the door and leaned in, her eyes quickly searching the interior of the black-and-white. She found what she was looking for secured between the passenger and driver’s seat.

  Emily mentally crossed her fingers before giving the shotgun a sharp tug.

  “Yesss!” she yelled in victory as the Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun pulled free of its security rack. A bandolier of spare shells rested in a recess beneath the weapon, alongside a full box of extra shells. The shells would be useful but the bandolier would be uncomfortable to wear with the bergen so she pulled the cartridges from their individual holders and added them to the box, tossing the empty bandolier back into the cab of the patrol car.

  The previous summer, Nathan had insisted on teaching Emily how to shoot and had taken her out to the gun range. While she had enjoyed learning the ins and outs of firing a handgun, she had really enjoyed shooting the shotgun. She liked the heft of it but most of all she enjoyed knowing that whatever she pointed it at she was probably going to hit. It could effectively hit a target out as far as seventy-yards or so, but at close range, it was absolutely deadly. The Glock 15 Nathan had handed her was cute and had left neat little holes in the paper target she was firing at, but the shotgun, well that had cut the paper target in two.

  Dismounting from the bike, Emily quickly removed her backpack and pushed the spare shotgun shells into a side pouch. Once she had fastened herself back into the bergen she looped the strap of the Mossberg over her head and across her chest. It wasn’t particularly comfortable but it would do for now.

  While she wasn’t sure just how effective the shotgun might be against the creatures roaming her apartment’s corridors, she certainly felt more secure knowing she now had something to defend herself with.

  * * *

  The shoulder-high sandstone retaining walls on either side of the two-lane road were almost entirely obscured by a green waterfall of plants that clung to every inch of the gray stone. The lush foliage spilled over the cold stones and drooped towards the pavement. The road Emily was riding cut directly across Central Park and avoided what would normally have been paths crowded with pedestrians and tourists. Emily slowed her speed slightly, marveling at what a couple of days of no traffic could do for the air. Despite her many trips down this same road over the years, this was the first time she could actually smell the park and its plant life. The air was thick with the fecund aroma of vegetation; it tickled her nostrils and filled her mind with images of sweeping fields of grass. It was intoxicating.

  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.