by Paul Jones
Everything dear to her was gone, swept away from her in an instant. Her parents, Nathan, music, TV, the theatre, her friends and workmates, her job even; everything that made life worth living had been stolen from her in just one day, leaving her alone and wrecked. She may as well have been on Mars for all the good being alive without all of those things meant.
Her sobbing turned into a wail of despair as she realized that none of those things would ever be coming back, either. It wasn't like the human race had stepped outside for a quick cigarette break and normal service would resume when it got back; humanity was gone, finished, snuffed out in a single day. She knew it with a certainty as strong as she had ever felt anything.
"Dear God, what am I supposed to do now?" Emily mumbled through lips trembling with the unburdening of the pent-up emotion. Her shoulders heaved and shuddered as she collapsed to the cold floor of the store, knocking over a stand of magazines and sending them slithering over the tiles. She picked a magazine up and tossed it at the door, screeching in pure frustration. She felt her body sink to the cold floor again, curling herself into a fetal position as the pain just kept coming.
A few minutes later, emotionally washed-out, her body exhausted, Emily fell into a deep sleep, hoping she would never wake up.
* * *
Emily's eyes flickered open.
The cramp in her shoulders from lying on the chilly tiled floor of the store meant she must still be alive.
She felt better. At least, as better as she was going to feel under the circumstances. Ridding herself of her emotional burden had released her from its weight and allowed her mind, and her heart, to expel the pain. That was a good thing.
Emily pushed herself to her feet, stretched her stiff legs and flexed her aching arms as she looked around the small store's interior. How long had she been asleep? It must have been a couple of hours because the inside of the market was much darker than when she first entered. In fact, as she stared out through the storefront window, she guessed it must be close to sunset because the streetlights were beginning to flicker on one by one, their sodium-vapor bulbs casting a warm glow across the street.
Emily's breath caught in her throat. Outside the store, illuminated by the glow of the nearest light, she could see a mass of red dust. The orange flush turned the dust an ominous black, but what truly disturbed her was how much of it she could see as it floated past the light. Uncountable dots of the dust moved along the street, silently flowing in a bizarre rhythmic undulation, driven by what exactly? No wind disturbed the leaves and branches of nearby trees. It was almost as though the dust had combined into a single giant creature, and that creature was now roaming the empty streets, searching for something only it knew.
The cloud of dust moved like the giant dragon puppets she had seen in Chinatown when they celebrated the New Year; up and down, a sinusoidal wave of dust undulating past the window. It was a mesmerizing sight, but at the same time, the implication of what she was witnessing chilled the blood in Emily's veins.
She walked to the window and stared out at the whirling dust on the empty street. Just yesterday she had stood in the café and watched as the red rain had fallen; the world had changed so much since then, as clichéd as it sounded to her writer's brain, it truly seemed to have been a lifetime ago. And, Emily supposed, it may just as well have been a different life, because when the rain fell, her old world, the one where Emily was just another woman trying to make it through the day as unscathed as she could, had died too.
Okay, pull yourself together. You've got to get a grip on this situation, she chided.
She was resisting the urge to speak her thoughts aloud. The temptation to talk to herself was almost overwhelming. It was less than a day since she had heard another human voice but she never would have imagined the effect it would have on her.
Whatever was happening outside the shop's window, there must be some kind of explanation for it. She was looking at the greatest story of her life; hell, for all she knew, while she may not be the last human left, she may well be the world's last reporter. So if she didn't document this, and if she didn't at least try to figure out what was going on, then who would?
So, no! No talking to myself just yet. Not until I've figured out exactly what's going on here.
"Damn right," she said aloud, allowing a flicker of a smile to cross her face as she turned her attention away from the strange red storm raging on the other side of the window, and back to tracking down supplies.
The store had been stripped clean of almost everything. Two rows of metal shelves had once held an assortment of tinned food and bottled water. One of the shelves had toppled over and now leaned against a wall. Both shelves were empty save for a torn packet of instant mashed potatoes which had spilled most of its contents over the floor.
Emily carefully picked her way through a minefield of shattered liquor bottles and crushed cans, their contents spilled and worthless after a day’s exposure to the air. Scattered pages from a broadsheet newspaper spread over the tiled floor, moving gently in the breeze of a fan whirling quietly on the counter.
Behind the cash register was a recessed pigeonhole where the owner had displayed his stock of cigarettes. It was empty now but Emily glanced behind the counter anyway. On the ground were a couple of crushed soft-packs of Marlboro Lights and an occasional orphaned cigarette. Emily wasn’t a smoker, so the cigarettes held no interest for her but what did catch her eye was a can of condensed soup—it was tomato, she hated tomato soup—which she picked up and placed on the counter top. Emily moved back behind the counter into the clerk’s area and opened a couple of small storage cupboards the looters had apparently missed. There were a couple of cartons of cigarettes that looked like they were well past their sell-by date and … score!! Pushed almost to the back of one cupboard Emily found a package of two gas-fueled lighters.
She added the lighters to the soup on the counter.
A small room at the back of the store acted as the stockroom. The wooden door was wide-open hanging from a single hinge, the imprint of a large boot near the broken lock.
Emily poked her head into the storeroom; it was dark inside so she felt around on the wall until she found the light switch. A single shade-less bulb hung from the ceiling but it was sufficiently bright to push the darkness back far enough for Emily to see there was little left to scavenge. The room had been picked over and it was as much of a shambles as the front of the store; the floor was covered in torn cardboard packaging and broken bottles of Budweiser and Miller Light.
A plastic pint bottle of water caught Emily’s eye. It had rolled against the far wall of the stockroom. She retrieved it and slipped it into her pants’ pocket. She pushed a few of the larger pieces of cardboard aside and found another can of soup—this time it was vegetable, not her favorite but a step-up from tomato, at least—and a four-pack plastic pod of mixed-fruit. Two of the pods had been crushed, so she pulled those off and tossed them away.
A couple more minutes of searching turned up a blister-pack of six C-type batteries, a tin of SPAM, another plastic four-pack of mixed fruit and, tucked away beneath a shelf, a pound bag of jerky strips. She also found a box of chocolate-chip cookie mix but she discarded that, knowing the chances of her finding fresh milk, butter or eggs was going to rapidly head toward zero.
Confident she hadn’t missed anything else Emily left the stockroom and headed back out to the front of the store. She placed everything she had just found next to her stash waiting on the counter then loaded it all into a bright blue plastic shopping basket from a stack located next to the door.
It wasn’t much of a haul, she thought, but it was better than nothing. It would buy her another day and give her time to formulate a better plan or for the authorities to show up. She knew she would have to head to one of the larger food stores soon and see if she could find a bigger supply… assuming the other stores hadn’t been wiped clean too. The power was still up and running, but who knew how long that would last? As soon as the
electricity went down her water supply would disappear right after, as would her heat and any way of cooking her food, so it was imperative she find a stock of water and anything she could eat out of a can that didn't need to be cooked to be consumed.
Emily picked up her basket of trophies and headed to the exit. A small refrigerator near the door hummed quietly to itself. She hadn’t bothered to check it when she came in, sure it would be empty but as she passed it she stopped and pulled back the sliding glass top, peeking inside. Emily fished out a pint tub of Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. “You’re coming home with me big boy,” she said with a smile, and added it to the basket.
Outside the store, full darkness had descended on New York but Emily could still see the storm of red dust swirling in the glare of the streetlights. In fact, the storm seemed to have only increased in intensity. She could barely make out the vague shape of her apartment block across the road. The building’s external security lights created a beacon that she could orient herself by, but only just. There was still just enough light to see and she knew there really wasn't anything in the road she could stumble over, but if this red storm was going to keep getting worse it was best if she left now.
Carefully, Emily cracked open the door to the street, holding onto the door handle to keep it from being ripped from her hands. She had readied herself to be pummeled by a burst of wind, but there was nothing, not even a hint of a breeze.
Motes of red dust rushed through the gap in the doorway and into the empty store, whirling around her. Within seconds, the cramped space of the convenience store filled with a whirling storm of tiny red particles.
Emily stood still, her eyes blinking mechanically as ribbons of dust flew towards her but inevitably swerved around her, continuing into the store as if she did not exist. As she watched, the dust seemed to maneuver its way through the space of the building. The dust’s movement reminded her of a dog when it first entered a new home, methodically moving around the room as though it was searching for something and, not finding it, flowing back out through the doorway again, only to be replaced by more dust.
Emily raised a hand to push an errant lock of hair from her face. Amazingly, as she moved her arm towards her forehead, the flow of red dust maneuvered around it like smoke in a wind tunnel blowing over a car, completely avoiding contact with her. She tried the same thing with her other arm and then stepped to the side. The flow shifted with her but never touched her, leaving an inch or so of space between her body and the mass of whirling particles.
My God, it’s as if it’s intentionally avoiding me.
The thought of the dust she had seen earlier attaching itself to the skin of the dead vagrant leapt to the forefront of her mind.
Was it searching for the dead?
The idea made her flinch. That just could not be. It had to be a coincidence. There had to be some other explanation. Yet, as she stood in the doorway watching the continuous stream of dust enter on her left, whirl around the room for a few seconds then exit on her right, with not even a hint of a breeze to propel it, Emily had the unsettling feeling that that was exactly what was happening.
If—and it was a very big if—she was correct then she truly was observing something far more profound than a simple chemical spill or natural disaster. If—there was that word again—the phenomenon she was witnessing was actually real then it could only mean there was some kind of intelligence behind the event, driving the dust to seek out the dead. That meant it was synthetic. That thought was even more terrifying and yet, on some level, predictable to Emily. That humanity had screwed itself over once again, this time apparently permanently, did not surprise her. It had been on the cards for years, she supposed. And after the ineptitude she witnessed on an almost daily basis, well, it came as no great surprise that someone, somewhere, might have screwed the pooch big time.
With a sigh of resignation, Emily dipped her head against the flow of red dust. She picked up the plastic shopping basket from the floor, stepped out onto the pavement, and began heading back in the direction of the apartment block.
* * *
The trip back was not nearly as strange as she had expected. It was however more difficult than she anticipated. The twisting eddies of dust made it almost impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her. It was like walking through one of those snow globes she'd had when she was a kid, eerie but also strangely beautiful. The dust still kept its seemingly self-imposed distance from her, whipping past in twirling ribbons of red as it scoured the streets in search of only it knew what. It was almost as if there was some kind of shield surrounding her that the dust was just unable to penetrate. The dust made a low shushing sound as it passed her, like sand dropping onto paper.
Very fucking weird.
While the contents of the basket were not heavy, the basket itself was another matter. The thin metal handles dug into the palm of her hand and the plastic cage of the basket kept banging against her thigh as she tried to maneuver her way through the thick swirls of dust. Half-blinded by the storm of red surrounding her, Emily did not see the raised curb of the pavement, clipping it just hard enough with her shoe to send her sprawling onto the sidewalk, spilling the basket and sending half her supplies spinning off into the darkness.
A few frantic minutes of searching recovered everything but the can of tomato soup. No loss there. Completely disoriented during the search, she wasted another ten minutes heading in the wrong direction, ending up a block away from where she thought she was.
Almost thirty minutes after leaving the store, a frustrated Emily finally pushed the door to the apartment open and stepped into the building’s lobby, a streamer of the red dust following her inside before the door closed, severing it. The stream of dust whirled around for a second within the lobby then dissipated.
She dropped the basket to the ground and stared at the white welts left by the handles on the palm of her hand. She could barely feel her fingers. She flexed them a few times to try to get blood flowing back into them before she made the long climb up the stairs to the apartment.
The elevator still held the body of the woman she'd found on her floor and Emily wasn't interested in spending anymore time in the presence of dead people, thank you very much.
Giving her fingers a few extra flexes for good measure, Emily picked up the basket and began to climb the stairs to the 17th floor.
* * *
Emily stood at her window looking down over the streets below. She had already put her precious supplies away, taking stock of exactly how much food she had collected with what she already had in the pantry. It wasn’t much. She estimated there was maybe three days worth of food and enough drinking water to last her a minimum of a week, longer if she rationed it.
She had decided to fill the bathtub with as much water as she could before she went to bed—just in case—along with a couple of empty plastic gallon containers she could use before she broke out the bottled water. She would use the water in the bathtub for cleaning herself and her clothes; she could transfer it to the washbasin from the tub as needed. Emily didn’t know whether the purification process the city used to sanitize the water they supplied would function for long without human interaction, so it was probably best to err on the side of caution and not drink water from the faucet anymore after tonight. Who knew what was happening out there or what contaminants could have entered into the supply with several million dead people just lying around. It wasn't worth the risk of drinking tainted water when there was so much bottled water available from local stores and other apartments in her block. But she was going to allow herself one final indulgence before she resigned herself to austerity and caution.
Emily moved from the living room into her bathroom and turned on the bath’s hot and cold faucets, filling the tub until the water lapped precariously close to the brim. She threw in some bath-salts, grabbed the tub of Häagen-Dazs ice cream she'd liberated from the store, stripped off her dirty clothes and climbed into the steaming b
ath.
She soaked her tired muscles for forty-five minutes. By the time she climbed out the water was tepid and she was as wrinkly as a Shar Pei dog. The tub of ice cream was empty, but Emily felt almost human again. The bath had been a luxurious treat that she was knew she would not be able to look forward to for a very long time.
She emptied the bath water and then refilled the tub with cold water while she toweled herself down. She pulled on her favorite pink flannel dressing gown and walked back into the living room.
Now, she stood staring down from her lofty perch into the darkness. The street below was virtually invisible, even the streetlights were barely perceptible beneath the thick river of red dust that seemed to be growing larger by the minute. It had been too dark to confirm it by the time she arrived, sweaty and exhausted, back at the apartment, but Emily would bet her last dollar what she had witnessed from the confines of the little corner store was happening throughout the city, maybe even across the whole of the country.
A sense of relief settled over her as she sat entranced by the whirling spirals of dust moving through the street. This was something so massive, so completely out of her control that it was actually quite liberating to know there was not a damn thing she could do about it. All she had to do was sit back and watch the show, see what happened and hope she was able to get out the other side when the dust—pardon the pun—finally settled.
The shucking of responsibility felt good, she admitted, to be just an observer, unbridled by the politics or angles she usually had to fight through for almost every story she had ever been involved in. This was simple, even pure in some respects.
Emily watched the ebb and flow of the river of red dust as it surged through the streets for almost an hour before she felt her eyelids beginning to droop. She let out a long yawn, pulled the drapes closed, and walked to her bedroom, closing the door on both the world and the day.