Extinction Point: The End

Her normal cognitive processes had been superseded by a blind animal survival instinct of the most primitive kind; instincts most humans had not felt since their caveman ancestors first began exploring their new world.

Her feet slid out from under her as she hit the corridor and she went down hard, knocking the air from her lungs, but she was up in a heartbeat, arms flailing as she sprinted towards the stairwell. She took the stairs down to her floor three steps at a time, her feet working on autopilot. Somehow, miraculously, she did not stumble or trip.

Emily kicked open the door leading from the stairwell onto her corridor so hard it slammed back against its hinges, the aluminum handle taking a chunk out of the interior wall. Still sprinting towards her apartment, Emily found the door keys in her jeans and pulled them free. She tried three times to slot the key into the lock but her right hand was shaking so violently and the key seemed so massive by comparison to the tiny receiver she had to steady it with her left hand. Finally, the key found its mark and the door opened. She leapt inside, slamming the door shut behind her with a boom that echoed throughout the entire apartment complex. She fumbled the security chain into place, quickly followed by the thumb-lock and then she sprinted down the hallway.

Emily’s mind did not register any of those events because all it was concerned with was the dreadful baby- thing that lived in apartment number twenty-six on floor eighteen. Caught in a processing loop as it tried to assimilate exactly what this latest assault on her sanity was, her mind refused to do anything but force her feet to move.

When Emily’s brain finally returned control of her body, she found herself standing in her bedroom, leaning rigidly against the door. Her first thought was: how the fuck did I get here? Her next was that she needed to change her underwear and jeans because, apparently, for some reason she just couldn’t fathom, she had wet herself.

With control of her mind and body now returned to her, the full, terrible truth came flooding back to Emily. She understood why she was bracing her bedroom door closed. She knew why she had peed herself. It was because the thing upstairs should not, could not, exist.

And yet, it did.

Her eyes drifted to the bedroom’s ceiling. That thing was up there, just feet above her head.

Another terrifying thought struck Emily like the proverbial thunderclap from on high and, given the absolute insanity of the last few days, this latest thought most certainly did not seem to be outside the realms of possibility: What if what she had just seen in the apartment upstairs was able to get out of the room? And what if there was more of them out there too? What was she supposed to do about that? What if she, Emily Baxter, really was the last human being left on earth, the sole surviving woman in a world full of monsters?

What if she was completely and absolutely alone?

It was at that very moment, with so many questions exploding in her brain like dark fireworks, Emily heard her cellphone ringing on the table in the kitchen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’ll call them back later, Emily thought, her mind still trying to wrap itself around the events of the last thirty-minutes. They can leave a message.

Only after the third trill from her cellphone did the fog filling her brain clear sufficiently enough for her to grasp what she was hearing. Emily was out the bedroom door and halfway to the kitchen before she even realized she was moving. Grabbing the phone from the table, Emily flipped it open, pressing it to her ear.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” she whispered, her voice barely a croak. “Please, be there. Please.” She was no longer surprised at how desperate her voice sounded.

The silence continued for a second but then Emily heard someone take in a deep breath and a man’s voice broke through the silence: “Is this Emily Baxter?”

Emily had been sick once when she was a kid. Really sick. The doctor had informed her parents it was probably just food poisoning, but to Emily it had seemed as though she was dying. The pain had been excruciating; two days of vomiting and diarrhea had left her exhausted and dehydrated. She had eaten nothing and drank little but cool water fed to her by her mother with a spoon. On the third day, as she began to recover, Emily’s father brought her a can of her favorite orange soda with a cute pink straw in it. It was one of those straws with a concertina section two-thirds of the way up, so you could bend it towards your mouth. She had drunk that same soda a hundred times before she had become sick, but this time, this time the soda tasted like pure liquid heaven to her parched throat and deprived taste buds. The flavors were so intense, the bubbles so exciting on her tongue, and the cold rush of the soda as it exited the straw and hit the back of her mouth so exquisite, it was as though she was experiencing it in a completely new body.

The smooth resonance of the stranger’s voice in her ear had the same effect on her now. She felt as though she had received a call directly from God himself.

“Yes, this is Emily,” she managed to blurt out before she broke into a flood of tears.

* * *

“It’s okay! It’s alright!” the man’s voice on the end of the telephone line said softly. “You’re not alone.”

At that moment, if the stranger had asked how she was feeling, Emily would have been unable to articulate the rush of different emotions she felt sweeping through her. Gratitude, fear, happiness, sorrow, all simultaneously took hold of her body; but greater than all of those emotions combined was an overwhelming sense of hope. The flood of emotions coalesced into an immobilizing mixture which, for the first ten minutes of the conversation, such as it was, refused to allow Emily to respond to the man’s questions other than with a faint, bleated “yes” or “no”. Attempting to say anything more than that was futile, the second she tried she dissolved into a huffing bout of tears.

Until this moment, Emily had no inkling she was so totally and overwhelmingly terrified. Even the memory of the horror she had witnessed minutes earlier seemed to have diminished as she allowed the relief of knowing she was not the only person left alive to wash her fear away. Finally, as the rush of endorphins subsided and her self- control began to exert itself again, Emily found her tongue and began answering more fully the patient questions her caller was asking.

His name was Jacob Endersby, he told her. There were eleven other people with him; eight men and four women in total. They were a team of scientists, techs and support staff working at a remote climate monitoring station on a tiny, frozen island off the northern coast of Alaska, part of a small cluster known as the Stockton Islands. Their group was, at least until the red rain came, a research team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Climate Research Center, and they’d been stationed at the Stockton’s for just over three months, gathering climatological data as part of a semi-annual study.

Jacob explained that no red-rain had fallen anywhere near their base in the Stocktons, but Jacob’s wife, Sandra, who was stationed several hundred miles south of his team’s location, back at the University in Fairbanks, had reported the phenomena falling as far North as the Noatek Preserve, which was about 180-miles South West of Jacobs research team’s location.

Jacob became silent for a minute at the mention of his wife. Emily listened patiently, a light static hiss buzzing in her ear, not sure whether he was still on the line or not.

Eventually, she spoke quietly into the receiver: “Jacob? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he replied, just as quietly. Emily could hear his barely concealed pain vibrate in his voice. This man was carrying a burden of loss as great as any she was feeling over the passing of her family and friends.

“We had a TV satellite feed, so we were following what was happening throughout Europe after the rain had fallen,” he continued. “Sandra said the rain had fallen all around the university; not much, just a smattering, but that I shouldn’t worry because she hadn’t been in contact with it. The university was going into lockdown and they were quarantining everyone who had any contact with the rain, as best as they could.

“Sandra said she’d managed to contact a few other weather and climate monitoring stations scattered south of her and across the border in Canada. They all reported significantly decreased amounts of the red-rain the further