by Paul Jones
DAY THREE
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
Emily woke with a start.
She popped her head out from under the covers and glanced at her bedside alarm clock; it showed 8:23 am in bright red numerals. The bedroom felt overly warm, the air conditioning should have kicked in by now. Obviously, the power was still on because her alarm clock was still working,. Maybe there was something wrong with the thermostat?
She climbed out of her bed, pulled on her dressing gown from the hook on the back of the bedroom door, walked out into the living room and emptied enough water into the coffee maker to brew six cups. She had the distinct feeling this was going to be a six-cup kind of a day.
She had slept well and this was the first morning since the world ended she actually felt normal, clear-headed enough that she could turn her mind back to figuring out how she was going to reach whoever was still alive out there. It was obvious from her efforts yesterday that simply calling locations she thought might be the logical centers for an organized rescue just wasn’t going to work. She couldn't be the only person left in the world, she was certain of that; the law of averages made it next to impossible for her to be the sole survivor. So today was going to be the day she figured out how the she was going to contact them.
Grabbing a fresh mug from the cupboard above the sink, she filled it with coffee and wandered over to the living-room window. The question burning in her mind was how was she supposed to locate other survivors when there were no clues to who they are, their location, or whether there was even anyone alive to contact.
How? How? How?
Emily reached out and drew back the drapes from the window.
Outside her window—she corrected herself; outside her seventeenth-story window—was nothing but a whirling mass of the red dust. Emily could not move, could not look away, the swirling flow of the red storm was mesmerizing.
It filled the entire skyline, silently blocking the view of everything for miles. Below, she could vaguely make out the very dim glow of the streetlights; their light detecting circuits deceived into thinking darkness had arrived early by the dense swarm of red dust. It crawled over the exterior of the window like flies on a rotten carcass. In fact, now that she stopped to think about it that was exactly the analogy she had been looking for. The behavior of the dust was just like a swarm of insects methodically searching for its collective next meal.
Could she have been mistaken? Was this stuff she thought of as dust actually some kind of animal? She leaned closer to the window, trying to follow one of the motes as it hit the pane of glass, but it moved across the glass too quickly for her to follow, whisked away before she could get a good look at it, only to be replaced by another, slightly larger piece. In the few moments she was able to briefly track the larger particle of dust she could see it certainly didn't resemble any kind of bug she had ever seen. It looked, well, like dust. Actually, it was more like plant pollen. It had an irregular bulbous shape with sharp points sticking out at odd angles, but rather than appearing solid the particle she was staring at was diaphanous and almost as delicate as the dandelion seeds she'd seen floating on the wind, back home in Iowa.
It was impossible to tell with the limited perspective the window offered just how much of the city was enshrouded by the dust storm. If she wanted to do that, she was going to have to leave the apartment. Hopefully it was just some kind of localized effect that had caused the dust to collect on her side of the building. The idea this might be happening all over the city was unnerving.
Emily unlatched the security lock on the apartment door and opened it, but stopped dead before she even set a foot outside the entrance.
Running along the ceiling just outside her front door was a tendril of the red dust. Emily poked her head outside the apartment doorway and glanced quickly down the corridor towards the elevator. The dust spiraled and twisted about an inch below the ceiling, it seemed to be coming from the direction of the exit to the main stairwell. A few feet into the corridor, it split into two branches, with one tendril heading toward the apartments right of the stairwell and the other inching its way in her direction. But that wasn't all it was doing, the dust was also splitting off at each doorway. Branches of the dust spiraled down over the doors of each of the corridor’s apartments like smoke pulled along by some unfelt breeze. Or, like the tentacles of some giant monster, Emily thought, with a creeping sense of horror. As she watched, she saw a strand of the dust break off from the main root and descend down to the door of Mrs. Janowitz's apartment just three apartments down from her own. The strand descended over the doorway, the tip making small movements left and right as though it was feeling its way. When it found the keyhole, the dust disappeared into the tiny opening as a second strand continued down to the base of the door. When it reached the floor, the tendril began to probe at the narrow space between the base of the door and the floor, as it looked for another entrance into the apartment.
That was it, Emily decided. This was just too fucking much. She slammed her own door shut and sprinted to the linen closet. She flung the closet open and snatched up a handful of the thickest towels she could find then ran to the kitchen, almost slipping as she rounded the corner but recovering enough she didn’t fall head-first into the corner of a cupboard. She threw the towels into the sink and turned on both faucets full force. Sure the towels were absolutely soaked, Emily raced to the front door and threw the sopping wet towels down onto the floor to block the crack, pushing them tightly into place as though she was trying to stop smoke from a fire. The edge of the door where it met the doorframe looked secure; the apartment owner had installed a plastic dust excluder that sat between the door and the frame, so she wasn't worried that anything could get through that. The keyhole was another matter though, it was too small to block with a towel and she didn't want to plug it with wet paper because that would be a bastard to get out and there was no way she was going to risk not being able to lock her door, or worse, trapping herself inside.
Emily ran back into the kitchen and began pulling out each of the draws. She knew she had a roll of duct-tape around here somewhere. She found it after she pulled out the contents of her third drawer, tucked at the back behind a bunch of plastic carrier bags she always meant to return to the local market.
Racing back to the front door, she tore off two eight-inch strips of the gray industrial-strength tape with her teeth. She pressed the pieces over the keyhole just as the first few particles of the red dust began to float through the hole. She watched the dust float away from the door towards the kitchen. Emily tore off a third piece of tape and stuck it diagonally across the other two she had already applied: just to be on the safe side, she thought.
She stepped back from the door and gave it the once over, taking care to look for any telltale signs the dust might have found some other way through she hadn't seen. But there was no indication she'd missed any gaps and, after a tense minute of double-checking, she exhaled a heavy breath.
"Shit!" she said aloud as another thought struck her. The air-conditioning had failed to kick-in this morning. The apartment block used a central forced-air system that fed all of the apartments in the building from two external industrial-sized air conditioning units on the south side of the apartments. The two massive units fed the apartment block through a series of ducts that interconnected throughout the walls of the building, supplying the ceiling vents in each room. Of course, it could just be a simple technical problem with the machinery, a couple of days of human free intervention may have created some mechanical problem causing them to overload and stop working. But, after witnessing the methodical way the dust had seemed to search out every possible entry point into the rooms on her floor, Emily doubted it was anything as simple as mechanical failure. The unit’s sudden demise was more likely because the red dust had found some way into the machinery, overloading the air conditioning unit somehow and even now it could be making its way through the miles of heat-ducting, looking
for a way into every goddamned apartment.
Grabbing the roll of duct-tape, she raced back down the corridor to the living room. The vents were too high for her to reach so she had to double-back into the breakfast nook and grab a chair. A vent sat directly over the glass table in the breakfast nook, so she climbed up onto the chair and pushed the thumb-slider to the closed position sealing it. Even with the vent closed, she could still see a small gap between each of the vent's oblong fans that she was sure was more than large enough for the tiny particles of red dust to make it through. Also, the cover of the vent was held in place by two flat-head screws and she could clearly see a black line of shadow between the edges of the vent cover and the white paint of the ceiling. That meant the vent casing wasn’t sitting flush with the ceiling.
She began tearing off strips of duct-tape and sticking them over the exposed seams between the vent cover and the ceiling, carefully pushing them into place with her finger tips to make sure it made a tight seal. Emily tore off more strips and attached them across the panels, completely obscuring the vent. She hoped she had enough tape to cover all the apartment’s vents. If she didn't, well she'd be up the goddamn creek without the proverbial paddle.
Twenty minutes later, Emily placed the final strip of tape against the vent in her bedroom. She'd managed to cover all of them and, glancing at the roll, it looked like she still had enough left for a couple of strips to patch up anything she might have missed, but she was confident she had effectively made her apartment airtight.
That was going to be her next problem, she realized. With no air conditioning the apartment was going to get warm quickly, in fact, she thought could already feel the temperature in the bedroom beginning to rise. It could just be her imagination, after all she'd just spent the last thirty-minutes or so rushing around like a mad woman and she was sweating profusely. Imaginary or not, she was going to use up all the air in the room and things would get very uncomfortable. At some point, she would have to open up the apartment to the outside and allow some fresh air in. When she did would depend on how long the dust decided to hang around, of course.
She had managed to cover all the possible ways into the apartment she could think of, and Emily felt her panic finally begin to subside. She began to run the mind-bending events she had just encountered back, analyzing everything she saw, or thought she had seen, through the filter of her reporter’s brain.
To her mind, the obvious intelligence the red dust had exhibited to coordinate entry into the apartments was incontrovertible proof that what she had observed over the past forty-eight hours or so was not some coincidental cluster of unrelated events but actually part of a far bigger phenomenon. That phenomenon was itself a part of a larger process or plan, she was not sure which yet, but she could sense that the answer was just out of reach of her senses. Whatever the answer was, Emily understood something massive had been set in motion with the fall of the red rain, and it was moving methodically and systematically toward its final goal.
* * *
Emily quickly tired of checking the window to see if the maelstrom of dust had receded. Each time she pulled the curtains aside and peeked out it seemed the storm had only become worse. It was so thick now that glancing down toward the street she could not tell if streetlights had simply stopped working or if the cloud of dust covering Manhattan was so thick the light just couldn't make it through.
As the hours passed, Emily paced the apartment, turned on the TV and scanned every channel in the hopes that some station somewhere would be broadcasting something, anything to give her a clue or an indication there was somebody else alive. All she found was static from channels that had gone off the air or emergency service broadcasts that did nothing but loop, warning people they should stay in their homes until the crisis was over. Oddly enough, many of the satellite channels were still broadcasting. She guessed that was because the systems had been preprogrammed weeks in advance, so the computers controlling the broadcasts would probably just trundle along until the power went out or the satellites fell out of orbit.
She decided to try her luck with the Internet. Pulling her laptop from its bag, she connected it to the docking station she kept on a small desk in one corner of her bedroom. She expected the Internet would be down, but to her surprise, when she plugged the Ethernet cable into the connector on the side of her computer, she saw the connection indicator in the bottom right-hand corner of her monitor turn from red to green. She was online!
Emily tried all of the major news sites first. CNN was still up but displayed the same headline it had the day of the red rain. The same was true for MSNBC and Fox. Up, but no new news. When she tried to load-up the website of one of the local TV channels all she got was a 404-error and the message "The page you are looking for cannot be found." Undeterred she began working her way through the list of social networking sites she had compiled the day before, looking for any hint someone had posted a message they were still alive. It was like looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack, only this haystack spanned the entire globe.
She logged in to her Twitter account and read the messages she'd missed. She hadn’t accessed it from before the red rain had first fallen, so the bulk of the messages expressed concern or fear over the then upcoming event. Some messages explained their authors were hunkering down and hoping to ride out the storm, there were even one or two that dismissed the threat as nothing more than mass hysteria.
How'd that work out for you? Emily wondered.
There was no sign of any new messages posted to Twitter since the red plague had hit, though.
On each social media website or platform she visited, she left the date, her telephone number, and a simple message: I am alive. Please, contact me!!! She did not think it would be a good idea to leave her exact address, so she just wrote New York City. That was close enough.
Emily spent the next four hours checking in to every website and web-hang-out she could find, looking for any sign of recent activity that might indicate someone, somewhere, was watching. She found nothing. She left her message on every one of them and, where possible, activated the option that would notify her if there were any new updates to her post.
By the time she exhausted her list of websites Emily’s eyes had begun to ache from the strain of staring at the screen for so long. She could feel beads of warm sweat dripping down her back and across her chest from the steadily growing humidity in her sealed off apartment.
She headed into the bathroom. The bathtub still held her emergency supply of water, which meant she would have to drain it if she wanted to take a shower. Instead, she filled the basin with water, stripped out of her clothes and rinsed herself off with a face cloth. The cold water felt wonderful against her clammy skin. Refreshed, she threw on a fresh tee and panties.
She was beginning to feel her hunger pangs howl so she pulled a can of soup from her cache and heated it on the stove, raising the temperature in the apartment even further, but Hey! She had to eat. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa, she devoured the soup with the last few slices of bread she had left. While she ate, she turned on the TV and found a movie channel that was still broadcasting.
Restless and unable to focus, Emily switched the movie off before it ended and went to check the window one final time. The red dust still beat against the glass and she'd be damned if she could tell whether it had gotten worse or stayed the same. If she was perfectly honest with herself, at that particular moment, she didn’t care whether it had or not. She'd felt the depression begin to set back in after she'd logged off from the last website. It was hard to fight off the nagging feeling that, despite her best efforts to remain upbeat and reassured, she really was the only person left alive on this lump of rock the human race had called home.
The steadily growing temperature in the apartment and her own agitated nerves slowly sapped away at Emily’s energy, darkening her mood even further. There was little more she could do today, other than sit and brood the rest of the evening away.
That wouldn’t help. She wanted to rest, but the clammy heat made her sticky and uncomfortable, besides she was tired but not sleepy. She grabbed a bottle of over-the-counter sleep aids she kept in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, popped two of them into her mouth and swallowed them with a swig of water before climbing onto her bed and burying herself in the welcoming coolness of the comforter.
Outside the apartment window, the red dust continued to scratch against the glass, blindly looking for a way in. Emily didn't care. Within minutes, the stress of the day and the sedating effects of the sleeping pills pulled her down into sleep.
DAY FOUR
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
Emily awoke to the faint but unmistakable sound of a baby crying.
At first, as the sound penetrated her Diphenhydramine induced sleep, Emily thought she was simply dreaming.
She felt damp and she could sense tiny pinpricks of perspiration all over her skin. With no air conditioning to cool her, the temperature had continued its gradual rise overnight. She’d kicked the comforter off at some point and now lay spread-eagled diagonally across the bed. The medication she’d taken to help her sleep had left her feeling woozy while it continued to try to drag her back down into sleep.
Of course it’s not a baby. Just a dream. Go back to sleep. No need to wake up yet, her addled mind whispered to her.
Then the sound came again. A drawn out wail that was unmistakable. Adrenaline instantly pumped into her body negating the pills effects and she bolted upright, listening intently to make sure she was not just hearing some sound created by the building.
Wagghhhhh!
The sound floated to her again. It was undeniable now. That was the sound of something alive; distant, but definitely in the building and somewhere above her. Maybe on the next floor up?