Extinction Point: The End

north they were. Eight hours after I last spoke with my wife, I tried calling her again on the shortwave but she didn’t answer. Nobody answered.” Jacob whispered the last sentence between a barely restrained sob and a ragged intake of breath.

The climatologist paused again as he collected himself before continuing. “We have a couple of satellite- phones, so we all took turns calling family, friends, and colleagues at other research sites around the world. We called everyone that we could think of, but no one picked up. Since then, our tech guys have been scouring all the major websites and listening on the shortwave, trying to find someone, anyone who is still alive. That was how we found you, Emily. And we are so very glad to hear your voice.”

No one on his team had a solid theory for what exactly had happened, Jacob told her, just some wild conjectures. They were, for the most part, baffled. But one thing did seem quite obvious to the team of scientists: from the data they had managed to collect before losing contact, the red-rain phenomena covered a significant portion of the globe, and in Jacob’s opinion, it seemed to be an almost directed action against the most populated areas of the planet. As far as they could tell, not one country was left unaffected; there was not a major city, town, precinct or village anywhere south of latitude sixty-eight-degrees-north that had not been decimated.

Emily was the first person his team had made contact with. They’d picked-up a few fleeting messages on the camp’s short-wave receiver but the signals had been too weak and too garbled to make any sense of, but it was a good indication, Jacob said, that others had survived the catastrophe, somewhere.

“Of course, logic dictates there must still be pockets of survivors out there; probably small groups like us who live in the colder areas. Maybe there are some military installations left. I guess submarine crews are the most likely to have been unaffected by all of this, but who knows what will happen to them when they surface,” Jacob explained.

“What about you and your team,” Emily asked. “How do you think you survived?”

“There’s no way for us to understand whether this phenomenon is virus based, a nerve agent, or something else completely. We’re guessing that, for some reason, whatever kind of agent the red-rain is its ability to multiply and spread is affected by the cold, which is why my wife reported so little of it in Fairbanks and the other stations north of her. Of course, it appears that even minimum exposure to the rain proves fatal. Unless we can contact other survivors in colder areas across the globe we won’t be able to confirm that hypothesis. For all we know, the moment we set foot inside the contamination zone, we’ll drop dead. Same could happen to any other survivors outside the areas where the rain fell. You can probably guess no one here wants to put that theory to the test. ”

Emily listened intently to everything Jacob had to say, but in the back of her mind she found herself wondering whether she should mention what she had experienced with the red-dust storm or the thing she had seen in the apartment on floor 18. Would he think she was crazy? If she was in his shoes, she sure as hell would. Telling him she had seen some kind of a monster made up of the young family that once lived in the apartment wasn’t exactly going to lend any kind of credence to her story.

“I saw… something, Jacob,” she finally blurted out before she even knew she had made-up her mind. “Something strange. Not normal.”

Jacob stopped midsentence. “What do you mean ‘not normal’, Emily?”

Oh, shit! Now I’ve done it, she thought, doubt filling her mind again. But she knew she had seen what she had seen, it wasn’t a figment of her stressed out brain. She just had to tell him.

“There’s other stuff that happened after everyone died, the rain turned into some kind of autonomous dust and…” she paused, drew in a deep breath and then blurted out, “something is happening to the family in an apartment on the floor above me. They’re dead but…they’re… changing into something else.”

“Ooo-kaaay,” said Jacob, his voice taking on a confused tone.

“Look,” she continued, “I know this will sound crazy. I know you’re going to think I’m out of my mind. I mean, I’m questioning my own sanity right now, but I swear I’m not making up what I’m about to tell you.”

Emily told Jacob about the strange storm of red dust she had seen, how it had seemed to be attracted to the dead vagrant and then later attempted to invade her apartment. She thought to gloss over how she had heard what she thought was a baby crying, tracked it down to the level above, broken down the door and what she had found inside, but the truth was, everything she had already told him sounded crazier than a soup sandwich anyway; so why not?

When she was done recounting her story, Emily waited to hear the click of the phone as Jacob hung-up. She could imagine him wondering how on earth he had managed to connect with the last crazy person alive in New York.

“Interesting,” he said finally.

Well, that certainly wasn’t the response she’d expected.

“You believe me?” she asked, still not sure what to make of his response. “I’m not crazy?”

“I can’t speak to what you’ve experienced since the red rain, Emily. And, to be totally honest, I think we both know that if you’d told me the same story before everything that’s happened over the last couple of days, my response would probably have been different. But, after what you… what we have all experienced? I can’t discount any evidence, no matter how subjective it may be.”

There was silence for a few seconds as both strangers considered what to say next. Finally, Jacob spoke.

“I told you we really only have conjecture to work with, but we’ve had little else to do around here than run ideas past each other since everything…” he searched for the right word, “…ended. We’ve parsed every possibility we could think of as a group, no matter how far-out-there it might seem, and eliminated the majority of them as either impossible or highly improbable. What we’re left with is, well, to quote you Emily, is ‘crazy’ sounding.”

Emily heard Jacob take a swig of something, swallow and then carry on the fast-paced delivery of his idea.

“What we’re sure of,” Jacob continued, “is something far outside the realms of probability has happened across the globe. That ‘something’ is so unlikely it might just as well be defined as a random event because it’s so far off the scale of probability. When we throw in the new data you’ve supplied us, it pretty much removes the possibility of the red rain being a manmade event; there’s no way human technology could have the kind of rapid effect on a human body you described, which means we’re back to trying to define that elusive ‘something’ again. So, if we rule out manmade technology then we’re left with only two probable causes for the red-rain and what you witnessed. The first is that our ‘something’ is a part of the natural cycle of the earth, an extinction level event, similar to the ‘great dying’ in the Permian-Triassic period. That one event wiped out about seventy-percent of land animals and ninety-six-percent of marine life. And there’s plenty of data to suggest mass extinctions happen—on a planetary timescale, at least—pretty regularly, and we’re long overdue for the next one. So, maybe the red-rain is part of a cycle that kicks in every few-hundred-million years or so and wipes the planet clean. It’s just the delivery of this event that’s so strange, so unexpected. It just doesn’t seem likely that we would have missed some kind of evidence of it in the fossil record.”

“And what’s the second possibility,” asked Emily, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.

“Well, again,” said Jacob, “you can call me crazy but the only other possibility we can come up with is that this is some kind of extraterrestrial event.”

Emily was stunned. “What? You mean like ET? We’ve been invaded by little green men or something? You’re kidding me, right?”

 “Yes, well, kind of. It depends on your definition of ‘invaded’. What we could be experiencing here is a kind of extraterrestrial biological entity. Our planet is really just a massive super-organism, the red-rain could be the equivalent of a virus, but one that exists out there in the vastness of space and affects planets instead of individuals.” Emily could imagine Jacob energetically waving his hands towards the roof of his office all those thousands of miles away from her. “It just floats around until it randomly lucks on a suitable host planet and then boom… mass-extinction’s the result. The theory is really kind of fascinating when you look at it dispassionately.” Jacob seemed to realize getting excited over the reason for the almost total extermination of humanity may not seem quite so attractive to anyone else outside of his small band of colleagues.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I didn’t mean to sound so enthusiastic about it all. That’s what happens when