you spend too much time cooped up with scientists twenty-four hours a day for months on end.”
“It’s okay,” Emily told him, “I understood what you meant.” And, if she was honest with herself, Jacob was right; it
“So, that’s just two of the prime possibilities we came up with,” the scientist continued. “Hell, for all I know we could have been on the receiving end of the equivalent of a galactic bug-bomb. We just don’t know and I don’t believe we’ll ever find out the real cause. But what we are sure of is that something unprecedented in the entirety of human history has occurred, and all the old rules, well, they’ve been thrown right out the window. And, if we factor in your encounter, then the logical conclusion would seem to be that something far greater than a simple random catastrophe is at play here. Which means that ‘
There was a long pause and then Jacob’s voice filled her ear again, crackling with static. “So, what are your plans, Emily. How are you going to get out of New York?”
Jacob’s question caught Emily completely off-guard. “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”
The earlier excitement Emily had heard in Jacob’s voice vanished, replaced by a patient, quieter tone that she thought he probably reserved for first-year students at the university and kids… and now he could add crazy reporters to that list.
“There are a couple of good reasons for you to get out of the city: first and foremost, you’re surrounded by several million dead bodies that are already well on their way to decomposing. At some point, that’s going to bring you into contact with God-knows how many potentially fatal pathogens; cholera, typhus, you name it, it’s all going to be floating around out there. It is not going to be a very healthy place for you to be.”
Jacob hesitated before continuing, but when he did Emily could sense his words were couched by a level of misgiving bordering on reticence, but she couldn’t tell whether it was directed at her or Jacob’s doubt at voicing his own thoughts.
“If you’re right about what you saw then who’s to say it’s not happening everywhere? It’s not my intention to scare you, Emily, but maybe we need to consider this event will have even farther reaching effects than we’ve imagined so far. I hear myself say the words and I know how screwy I sound, but have you considered that the transmutation you saw with the family might be happening elsewhere? Because if it is, then we’re talking about an unprecedented shift in the biological hierarchy of this planet, and to be quite frank, that scares the living shit out of me.”
”But that’s just—” Emily started to answer but Jacob cut her off as if she had not even spoken, his voice insistent.
“Either way, you need to get out of there, Emily. And If I were you, I’d be heading North as fast as I could.”
“So what am I supposed to do? I can’t drive and I’m pretty sure you guys aren’t going to volunteer to come pick me up. How do I get out of here and where am I supposed to go?” Emily could hear the whine of desperation —or was it panic—begin to creep back into her voice again.
“How do you get out of New York? That I can’t really help you with, but where you need to go, that’s simple; you need to head as far north as you can, come to us, we’re not going anywhere. The colder it gets the better your chances probably are of surviving this. But you have to prepare and you have to go soon, Emily.”
From upstairs, Emily heard the wailing of the thing in the apartment. The idea that there could be who-knew how many more of them all around her turned her blood to ice. It was all she could do not to throw the phone to the floor, rush to the closet and hide until she woke up from this nightmare.
“Okay,” she said before she even realized that she had consciously made the decision to leave. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“First things first,” said Jacob. “The power’s not going to stay up forever and we need to make sure that you have some way to stay in communication with us. Do you know where you can lay your hands on a satellite phone?”
As it happened, Emily did. The paper had a pair of them they handed out to correspondents covering foreign events or who had to head out to remote areas where regular cellphone coverage was either poor or nonexistent. The paper had put all their reporters through a two-hour long training course when they’d bought them; Emily had even had a chance to make a couple of calls, so she knew how to operate one. These units were state of the art and even came with a small 12-Watt portable solar-panel which could be setup in a couple of minutes and used to charge the battery when there was no access to a regular power source.
“That’s excellent,” Jacob said when she told him. He gave her the number for their sat-phone. “Just in case things start shutting down faster than we anticipated.”
“I’ll head over to the paper once we’re done. Keep your fingers crossed nobody was using them when the shit hit the fan.”
The difficult part wasn’t going to be getting out of New York, Jacob explained. There was close to 4,500 miles between Emily and Fairbanks; that meant months of hard travelling just to reach the university. Then, once she arrived in Fairbanks, there was another four or five-hundred miles of travel over some of the coldest and roughest terrain in North America, with no major roads, to reach the Stocktons. She’d either have to complete that last leg on foot, or hope the snow-mobiles Jacob told her she would find at the University were still where they should be and in working order.
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Jacob told her. “Worst case scenario, we can come and get you once you make it to the University. What’s important is that we get you out of New York while this event is still in its early stages. We can narrow down a better plan once we know you’re safe.”
They talked for another hour, exploring plans and ideas for the best course of action to get her on her way. Eventually the conversation turned to personal protection and the need to defend herself. “Who knows what’s out there Emily. You need a weapon of some sort. Do you know where you can lay your hands on a gun?”
Emily’s mind instantly flashed back to Nathan. His service revolver had still been in its holster when she dragged his body into the apartment down the hall. She mentally kicked herself for not grabbing the pistol when she had a chance to, but, she reminded herself, she had other things on her mind at the time. And how was she supposed to have known she would even need it? She had been so sure help was going to be on its way. No one in their right mind would have guessed she would need to defend herself against some freak of nature made up of a dead baby and its parents. And what if what she’d witnessed upstairs was also happening to her dead boyfriend too? Did she really think she could handle that? So, no; no way was she going to try to get into that room and put what was left of her sanity at risk. She’d worry about a weapon when she had to.
“I’m going to have to get off this phone if I want to get to the paper and back again before it gets dark,” Emily told Jacob, finally.
“Okay, well, you have the email and the sat-phone if you need us. Just remember you’re not alone, Emily. You can call us anytime; someone will always be up, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied. The idea of hanging up, of severing the only connection she had had with anyone for the last few days was excruciatingly hard to do. Jacob must have sensed that; “Emily, don’t worry, everything is going to be just fine, I promise you. We’ll speak again soon, okay? Good luck and be careful.” Jacob hung up, leaving nothing but dead air between them.
Everything was going to be just fine he had promised her.
Emily doubted that very much.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Emily closed her phone and glanced over at the clock on the stove. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. That gave her about four hours of sunlight still, which should be more than enough time for her to make the ride to the
Emily went to the closet in her bedroom, raised herself on tiptoe and started feeling around on the top shelf. Eventually her fingers found what she was looking for and she pulled out a large military style bergen. It was
