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.
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
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.
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:
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
