Extinction Point: The End

His skin tingled as though a light coat of static electricity played across it. There was an odd leaden fluttering sensation in his stomach and he felt as though he had come to a sudden abrupt stop after a long fall.

He breathed in. Leather, like expensive new shoes; the smell filled his nostrils.

The young store assistant stared back at him across the counter top. She looked to be about to speak, her rouged lips opened… and then closed again as a cloud of confusion passed across her face. Her brow knitted above brown eyes, the pupils of which had suddenly and fully dilated. The left side of her mouth lifted while the right side dipped down, her head tilted towards her right shoulder as though she was suddenly deep in concentration.

“I… I,” she stammered as the cloud of confusion turned rapidly into a storm of bewilderment that billowed and rolled with her expression.

“I’m terribly sorry but I… what were you saying?” A momentary pause in which he could have answered but did not, his own confusion freezing his tongue, arresting any possibility of a reply from him as his mind furiously tried to understand what was going on. The silence between the two strangers stretched out before she asked in a timid, apologetic, frightened voice, “Where am I?”

Auburn hair whipped back and forth across her face as she glanced frantically left and then right; panic now superseding confusion. Her cheeks flushed red as blood rushed to her head and Jim could see her breathing rate increase rapidly.

He regarded the confused woman standing across from him for a long second. His own head now cocked questioningly to one side. He was sure that he had a similar look of confusion on his face because he had no idea on God’s good green earth where he was or why he was here. He could not even remember how he got here. Panic began to claw its way out of its hiding place in the pit of his stomach, crawling on taloned fingers towards his throat.

The last thing he could remember was answering the phone to his agent. He had been talking to him just a second ago — the phone had been in his hand. It was New Year’s Eve. He had been out, had a couple of drinks and made it home sometime after midnight; exactly what time he couldn’t recall. A cold shiver of fear ran down his spine as a single thought filled his mind: Alzheimer’s. They could fix it nowadays of course but they had to catch it early enough to stop any damage. Once memories were lost to the disease, that was it, they were gone forever and if this was an episode of the disease, then how far had it progressed?

It had been four years since Jim had been to his doctor and he mentally kicked himself for not keeping those yearly appointments for his checkups. He swung around and took in his surroundings. He recognized nothing. This was not the comfortable bedroom he had been standing in seemingly only an instant before. Instead, he found himself next to a glass counter-top, on the other side of which stood the woman who looked as confused as he felt; three rows of display racks ran through a store that was lined top to bottom with expensive looking leather luggage; bags, women’s purses and crocodile skin briefcases. A rotating display unit off to his left was full of men’s wallets and a sign fixed to the top of the stand proclaimed finest calf leather in an elegant hand.

Behind the glass counter that separated them, the young store assistant had started speaking again, calling out as if to a lost child or dog, “Steven? Alison?”

A disturbing edge of panic creeping into her voice each time she called out the names.

How the hell did I get here, he thought to himself. Where am I?

“Do you think I could use your phone?” he asked but the girl did not even register his question, her gaze sweeping over him like a searchlight and moving on having found nothing of interest.

“Steven? Alison?” The panic in her voice now pronounced.

“It’s just that I don’t seem to remember where I am. It’s just a local call,” he said. He was disturbed to hear a note of desperation in his own voice.

“Alison? Oh, my God.” The young woman’s voice now so alarmingly tremulous he could barely understand what she was saying.

Something was not right. Jim could see three other customers in the store, all of them a lot younger than him but as he regarded each of them in turn, he could see that same strange look of confusion reflected back from each of their bewildered faces. They looked as though they had all just walked into a room and then forgotten why they were there or what they had come to do; as though they had left something undone that should have been otherwise.

A large glass window filled one wall, through it he could see a white marble-effect walkway that ran parallel to the store. Across the walkway, he could make out two other shops: a Gap clothes store and a Pretzel-Time. Reflective aluminum safety rails ran down the center of the walkway, guarding an open space that, presumably he guessed, dropped down to at least another level below the one he was on.

Several people had gathered outside the store window, milling aimlessly. Jim watched them looking around in that same bewildered manner. One of them — a young woman who until seconds ago had been revolving in slow circles as she gazed up at the ceiling somewhere outside of Jim’s vision — seemed oblivious to the baby stroller that her left hand rested upon, it’s plastic hood concertinaed back into the closed position. As the young mother completed one more slow turn the clutch bag slung loosely over her shoulder clipped the handle of the stroller and sent it rolling noiselessly away from her. Noticing it for the first time, she took two quick steps after it, taking hold of the handles with her outstretched hands she brought the errant pram to a halt before stepping around to the front of it. Kneeling almost reverently before it, Jim was sure he could see tears beginning to flow down her face; her jaw seemed to be vibrating. Reaching out, her hands disappeared inside the buggy, when they returned into his view she held a baby no more than six months old. Her mouth began moving but he could not hear what she was saying. Whatever it was, she was repeating the words again and again. A smile of utter joy lit her face as she stared at the child she now held cradled to her breast.

Jim’s confusion deepened as two balding middle aged men who had been walking hand-in-hand now turned and faced the other, regarding each other as though they had not seen the other in years before throwing their arms around the others neck and falling to their knees together locked in their embrace.

A teenage boy sprinted up to the store window. He stopped for a second in front of it and placed his forehead against the glass. Using his hands to shade the glare from the store’s reflected light, he gaped at the people inside, a look of frantic desperation on his face as his eyes darted from one face to the next. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he sprinted off out of sight leaving only a grease stain where his forehead had contacted the glass.

A keening began from a woman who sat crossed legged on the industrial carpeted floor an aisle or so away from him. Her low moaning voice set a beat to the under-swell of fear Jim could feel seeping into the air.

“What is going on here,” a large man in a business suit demanded, in a loud pompous voice.

The store assistant, still calling forlornly for Steven and Alison, ran past him towards the exit at the far end of the shop.

Jim followed her.

He pushed through the double glass doors of the store and stepped out into the mall. A tsunami of sound struck him as a wave of anguished voices washed over him, soaking him in its confusion. Here and there, intermingled with the dissonant buzz of voices Jim could occasionally make out an ecstatic cry of laughter or the rapid chatter of happiness. It floated through the confusion, emotional flotsam riding on a sea of panic. All of this playing to a background score of Muzak that wafted down from speakers set high up in the latticework of white metal braces holding the glass ceiling of the mall in-place overhead.

The noise amplified as it bounced from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall until finally turning into a mind numbing cacophony that forced Jim to make his way across to the aluminum safety barriers that prevented shoppers from falling through the open space to the floor below, his already assaulted mind unable to handle the sudden extra input.

He took a deep breath and leaned on the horizontal grab bar like a nauseous passenger gazing sickly over the side of a storm-rocked liner. He could see he was on the top floor of a shopping mall, three stories up. The floors beneath were just as packed with people too, all as equally disoriented as those on his.

A thought struck him: Maybe this was a terrorist attack. He remembered back in the late nineties of the last century, some Japanese religious cult had begun gassing people on the Japanese underground, and then in 2019, that home-grown terrorist group, what the hell was their name? Radical