by Various
Outside the café’s window, she could see the daily bustle of life in New York City continuing as it had for countless years. The people changed, the buildings got dirtier and taller, but it all really just boiled down to folks getting on with their lives, doing the best they could to stay in the rat race.
Emily loved it.
“That’ll be $8.75,” the Italian man behind the counter said. Emily swiped her debit card and typed in her PIN, pocketing the receipt in a small pouch she carried with her. Come tax season every little bit would help.
“Have a great…” He stopped midsentence, his eyes looking over her left shoulder, out to the street behind her. “Whaddya think’s going on out there?” he asked almost to himself. Emily noticed a slightly confused look cross the man’s face as she twisted around to see what he was talking about.
Through the window, she could see heat shimmer playing off the sidewalk and the asphalt-covered road. Instead of the usual hustle and bustle she had noticed just a few minutes earlier, she saw that many of the pedestrians were now simply standing still. Most were shading their eyes against the bright sun as they looked skyward.
“What the…?” exclaimed Emily, taking a step closer to the window.
From the cloudless New York sky, a crimson rain had begun to fall with the force of a light summer shower. The drops pattered onto the scorching sidewalk, and began collecting into small bloody red puddles.
A thick glob of the red liquid splashed against the store window. Emily watched it slide slowly down the glass; it seemed far more viscous than normal rain and she suddenly had an inkling of how appropriate the label “blood rain” was. In the space of a few seconds, the light drizzle increased to a heavy shower. Red rain pummeled the sidewalks, roads, and buildings beyond the sanctuary of the café. It clung to the glass of the window like mud, or, more appropriately, like blood splatter at a murder scene. Gravity slowly pushed it down the windowpane, leaving a bloodlike trail of the viscous liquid behind. More drops hit the window; these were larger and hit with enough force that she could hear the thump of the impact against the glass. It was almost as loud as hail.
Pedestrians, who had until moments before stood staring in confused fascination at the bizarre spectacle, scattered and ran for shelter, some holding briefcases or clutch bags over their heads as they sprinted under awnings or into doorways and stores. Within seconds, everyone caught outside looked like victims from a slasher movie, their thin summer shirts stained carmine and any exposed area dripping with the blood rain, which seemed capable of adhering to anything it came into contact with.
This is unbelievable!
Emily strained her neck to try to get a better view. It was hard to see clearly because the buildings were so tall, but she could just make out a patch of clear blue high above the rooftops. There were no clouds that she could see and no sign of any aircraft that could have been dumping this stuff—just a pincushion of red dots dropping from an empty sky. So much was falling now that large pools of the gunk had formed on the pavements, fed by the overflowing gutters of the buildings that spewed bloody waterfalls onto the streets below like severed arteries. Streams of the rain ran into the street’s gutters and along the sidewalks.
A sudden thud caused Emily to give a yell of surprise and leap back from the window. Something large had hit it and fallen flapping to the pavement just outside. It was a pigeon, covered in the red rain; the half-blinded bird had flown straight into the café’s storefront. The bird, with one wing obviously broken, flapped and convulsed in a circle for a few seconds, twitched twice, and then lay motionless on the sidewalk.
As Emily stood mesmerized by the pigeon’s final moments, she heard the storeowner exhale a single heavily accented expletive. “Merda,” he hissed under his breath, reverting to his native Italian in disbelief.
Emily looked up from the dead pigeon in time to see more birds dropping from the sky. They spiraled down like autumn leaves, bouncing off car roofs or hitting the sides of buildings, then falling into the road where some were promptly crushed beyond recognition under the wheels of the few cars still moving. Emily wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw crows mixed in with the dying pigeons. Something even larger—was that a seagull?—crashed into the windshield of a parked car across the street, setting off the antitheft alarm, which whooped and wailed in protest.
And then, just as suddenly as it had all begun, the deluge began to slow. The harsh patter faded away to nothing, leaving behind congealing pools of the strange red liquid clinging and dripping from every exposed surface, and eight million utterly perplexed New Yorkers.
• • •
Within minutes of the red rain stopping, people began to abandon their shelter, tentatively edging out from wherever they had managed to take cover. Some, in typical New Yorker fashion, seemed totally unfazed by the event, interested only in continuing on with whatever they had been doing before the interruption to their day, apparently unconcerned with the unprecedented phenomenon they had just witnessed. Others, in complete contrast, decided to bide their time, choosing to stay exactly where they were rather than risk being caught in another downpour of blood. Emily could see their wide eyes peeking out from under awnings, while others had their faces pressed to windows staring up at the sky, their mouths agape or relaying back what they could see to those who had sought shelter with them.
Emily’s heart rate slowly began to return to its normal level as she continued to watch, choosing to stay behind the safety of the café’s front door, unwilling to leave the shelter it offered. Those of a more inquisitive nature had begun examining the remnants of the bloody storm, which, from what Emily could see of the puddles outside the café, appeared to be slowly evaporating into the early afternoon heat.
“Jesus!” Emily exclaimed, her natural reporter’s inquisitiveness finally getting the better of her as she cautiously opened the door of the café and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Dead birds lay everywhere, hundreds of them, their bodies littering the road, sidewalks, and parked vehicles. Each tiny body was silhouetted by a halo of the slowly dissipating red goop. It took another couple of minutes for Emily to realize she was missing a perfect opportunity for a story. She unslung her backpack, pulled her Nikon from its case, and began shooting a panoramic HD video of the scene. After she’d recorded enough footage she switched the camera to regular photo mode and began firing off close-ups of the dead birds, the pale shocked faces of bewildered locals, and, most importantly of all, the now fast disappearing remnants of red rain. A few globules of the red stuff still hung from the handlebars of her bike, and she took photos of it as it dripped obscenely into a small puddle around her front tire.
Through the macroscopic zoom of the camera Emily could see that the rain, or whatever the hell it actually was, was not simply evaporating or being absorbed into the pavement like normal liquid. Instead, the red goop looked as though it was breaking apart into smaller pieces. As Emily continued to shoot footage of the puddle she saw one piece simply disintegrate into hundreds of tiny red particles that flipped and somersaulted on the street’s warm currents of air like an aerosol spray, before spiraling away like the dandelion seeds she used to love to watch float on an evening breeze as a kid.
“What do you think that was?” asked a young man, startling her from her observation. The kid had been sheltering under the awning of a bookstore next to the café. Streaks of red stained his white business shirt, and Emily could see droplets of the rain still clinging to his hair. “I mean, where did it come from? There were no clouds at all.”
Emily considered his question for a moment before replying, “I have no fucking clue, no clue at all.”
Chapter Two
EMILY STEPPED back into the café.
“So, whaddya think it is?” the owner asked. He had chosen to stay safely behind his counter and Emily couldn’t say she blamed him.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answered. The old Italian seemed to take her reply
in stride, nodding as if she had confirmed something he’d already known.
“Is not natural,” he said to no one in particular.
Emily had been meticulous about avoiding the remainder of the red rain, carefully stepping around the puddles on the sidewalk and avoiding any kind of skin contact with the crap. But there was still a splatter of the stuff on her bike’s handlebars and she wasn’t going to risk touching it if she could help it.
“Can I grab a couple of these?” she asked the Italian, pointing at a container of disinfecting wipes on the side counter.
“Sure, sure,” said the old man. “Help yourself.”
Emily pulled five of the wipes from the plastic dispenser and walked back out to her bike. She carefully wiped down the handlebars, leather seat, and the crossbar and frame, making sure to toss the used sheets into the trashcan outside the café.
Satisfied with the cleanup, Emily climbed onto the saddle of her bike, gave the café owner an A-OK thumbs-up accompanied by her brightest smile, and then began pedaling back in the direction of the Tribune’s offices.
Already the daily routine of New York City had begun to swing back toward normal, as though the downpour of red rain from the afternoon’s empty blue sky was an everyday occurrence and not something that should stop the city dead in its tracks. On the streets, the usual sluggish flow of vehicles continued much as it did every day. Horns sounded in outrage as pedestrians chanced their luck at jaywalking and drivers’ tempers began to fray. Tourists wandered aimlessly, staring in store windows and snapping pictures with expensive-looking cameras, apparently oblivious to the dead birds littering the sidewalks, while the occasional kamikaze cyclist tempted fate hurtling between vehicles.
But, here and there, Emily spotted remnants of the red rain: in puddles on the sidewalk, on stained clothing, and on the occasional worried face of a passerby. And, she noted, the air now seemed full of barely visible particles of red dust, floating on the warm eddies wafting past her like pollen.
While the majority of the city seemed to have already shrugged off the event, Emily sensed this was no normal day. She knew, with a concrete certainty that sank deep to the bottom of her stomach, the world would remember this day, and those that followed it, for as long as there was still a human race.
• • •
There are few things more disconcerting to a career reporter than to walk into a paper’s newsroom and find it silent. It’s where the stories are made, put together, and researched. On any normal day, no matter what time you walked in, the room should be a controlled commotion of reporters running back and forth, consulting in corners, or answering ringing phones; the newsroom is the beating heart of any newspaper.
And as Emily pushed through the double doors into what should be a room full of chaos and noise—especially given the incredible meteorological events she had just witnessed—what greeted her instead was the sonic equivalent of a library reading room.
Pausing for a moment, she scanned the room. While the day shift of thirty-plus journalists and editorial staff all seemed present and correct, instead of being at their workstations eagerly putting together that evening’s edition, they had gathered in groups around the five 50-inch TV screens mounted on the walls of the room. On a normal day, each TV would be tuned to a different major national or international news channel, ready to catch any breaking stories that may have escaped the paper’s ever-watchful staff. Right now, every screen showed CNN. The reporting staff, all the way up to the senior editor himself, stood silently watching as others reported on a developing story that, on any other day, they would be tirelessly pursuing.
No one noticed Emily as she entered the newsroom. There was none of the usual banter or greetings from her friends and comrades; in fact, not one pair of eyes shifted from the TV screens to Emily as she moved to her cubicle and dropped her backpack on the desk.
There were only a couple of possible reasons for the paper to come to a grinding halt, especially this close to a deadline. The first was that no one had witnessed the event that had happened less than an hour ago. Emily instantly dismissed this theory, as it was obvious everyone must be aware of what had just happened. She could see from the crimson stains on her workmates’ clothing that some, like her, had been away from the office when the red rain struck.
The second reason, and Emily found this very hard to believe, was that a news event even more earthshaking had supplanted the one Emily thought would be the biggest event to demand a paper’s headlines since the 9/11 attacks… and that idea frightened Emily very much.
“Emily? Where have you been? You okay?” The barrage of questions from Sven Konkoly, one of the paper’s assistant editors, broke her introspection.
“Yes. Out. Fine,” she fired back before taking a deep breath to calm nerves she hadn’t even realized were frazzled. “What’s going on? Did you see what just happened?” she asked, her hand fluttering toward the window.
Sven ignored her question. “Come on over here,” he demanded. “You need to take a look at this, right now.” Not waiting for Emily to comply, Sven grabbed her by her elbow and guided her to the group crowded around the nearest TV. On screen, a female CNN news anchor was talking to a young man via a laptop videophone connection. His frightened face filled a box in the top right corner of the screen giving the appearance he was talking over the news anchor’s shoulder. A caption under the image of the man read, “Francois Reveillion.” Emily estimated that he was no more than twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight, tops. His eyes were bloodshot and betrayed a barely restrained panic that belied the calmly delivered answers he was giving to the news anchor’s questions.
“—exactly is going on there? Can you describe what you’re seeing?”
When the young man spoke it was with heavily accented English. Emily guessed he was either French or maybe Belgian.
“Everyone is very, very sick,” Francois said, his face so close to the lens of the camera Emily could see the pale, almost translucent quality of his skin. Red veins stood out on his forehead and a spider’s web of tiny broken blood vessels seemed to be spreading from his left temple to his cheek, terminating just above the man’s blond mustache. Emily could see beads of sweat pooling on his forehead and beginning to drip slowly down his face. When he turned his head and looked away from the camera for a second she saw more of the ruptured blood vessels on his neck. His eyes were striated with thick lines of red, and deep pockets of blood had collected in the corner of each eye until little of the normal white remained. He looked like a boxer who’d just taken a twelve-round pummeling.
“People are dying here,” he said. “Many people. They are becoming sick and then they just die. I see them on the streets, in their cars. There are many, many dead here.”
“When you say that there are many deaths, how many? Can you tell us?”
The man paused for a second before replying, “Everyone,” he said. “Everyone is dead.” His voice stuttered slightly as the terror everyone knew he felt momentarily flashed across his face.
“Look, I will show you,” he continued. The screen wobbled as he picked up the laptop and carried it a short distance before turning the lens to face out through a second-story set of bay windows. It was dark wherever Francois was broadcasting from, but light from several street lamps cast enough illumination for those gathered around the TV to be able to make out a tree-lined street with rows of two-story houses on either side. The houses, nothing but dark square-shaped silhouettes, looked European in design, like some of the pictures Emily had once seen of villages in Provence. There seemed to be several cars randomly parked in the road. A white compact was resting half on the sidewalk, its rear end straddling the curb of the road, a telltale plume of exhaust fumes floating up from the vehicle’s still-running engine.
“What are those?” a reporter next to Emily asked, pointing to several dark, almost indistinguishable shapes scattered randomly on the sidewalk and in the road. One of the shapes seemed to be slumped against a str
eetlight.
“Are those bodies? Fuck! Those are bodies!” The panic in the young reporter’s voice made his words rise in pitch as he uttered each expletive.
Emily quickly counted at least fifteen unmoving shapes lying in the street. It was impossible to distinguish their sex from this distance, but she could see one that definitely looked small enough to be that of a child. Next to the child a larger form lay spread-eagled on the pavement, one arm seemingly reaching out to the motionless body of the child.
This was bad, she realized. This was probably very bad.
The view on the screen switched from the street back to the face of the young man and a gasp of astonishment mixed with horror escaped from many of those watching. In the few seconds the camera was focused on the unfolding disaster outside, the striations in the man’s eyes had spread until no white could be seen at all; his eyes looked like two pools of congealed blood. The network of veins Emily had noticed earlier had doubled in thickness and now extended across his entire face. A delicate web of veins appeared suddenly on his cheeks and a steady stream of thick bloody mucous began flowing from both of his nostrils.
Perhaps it was just her own fear reflected back at her but, despite the obliteration of his eyes, which were now nothing but black pits, Emily thought she could still see the terror he was experiencing captured in them. As the group continued to watch in morbid fascination, Francois’s mouth opened and closed once as though trying to speak. Instead of words a thick gush of red liquid exploded from his mouth. Droplets splattered against the camera lens and he dropped from view, replaced by the image of a chair leg as the laptop computer toppled from his hands and fell to the floor. A low, gurgling moan filtered through the TV speakers but it was quickly silenced as the newsfeed cut back to the CNN presenter.
The female presenter was visibly shaking, her skin so pale even the layer of makeup she wore could not hide it. She pulled herself together and continued her narration. “If… if you’re just joining us…” Her words were lost to Emily as a petite blond standing next to her suddenly began to sob and grabbed for Emily’s hand.