Extinction Point: The End

“I’m supposed to be,” he answered as he walked towards the kitchen, “but Em, it’s crazy out there. I couldn’t even get within ten-miles of the precinct. Everyone’s leaving Manhattan and heading out of the city. The roads are jammed, people are going crazy.” He stepped around the counter to the sink, took a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the faucet.

“I tried calling the Captain,” he continued, as he sipped at the water, “but the lines are all busy. I thought I’d check on you and hold-up here for a couple of hours until the roads clear, and then I’d head in.”

They took a few minutes to talk about what they knew. Nathan had seen the same newscast as Emily and had no more information than she had.

“How bad do you think it will be?” Emily asked eventually, trying to keep her voice from betraying the panic she could feel in the pit of her stomach.

“Honestly, I don’t know, Em. But shit, did you see the red rain? I was on my way out the door when it came and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. You’re the reporter, how do you explain that?”

She couldn’t, of course. She’d seen the same phenomenon and had no idea how the rain had fallen from a clear sky. “I can’t,” she finally said, and moved around the counter to join him. “All I know is that I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and took hold of the lapels of his jacket, pulled him to her and kissed him again.

As she released him, Emily felt something wet beneath her fingers. She glanced down at her hand and gasped, feeling the world shrink until the only thing that existed were the tips of her fingers… and the dapple of red covering them.

“Oh!” she said in disbelief, and, as realization of what she was looking at sank in, added a sharp: “Shit!” She turned and ran to the kitchen, throwing open the cabinet beneath the sink, she grabbed the bottle of Clorox bleach.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she whispered through panic stretched lips. She rammed the plug into the drain then emptied the entire liter container of bleach into the sink, tossed the empty bottle onto the counter and plunged her hands into the bleach. She counted the seconds off in her head: one-one-thousand… two-one-thousand… three- one-thousand…

Only after she was sure her hands had been submerged for at least thirty seconds did she pull them out, just long enough to grab a scouring pad from the counter and begin rubbing furiously at the remaining red stains on her hands.

This cannot be happening, she thought. After all the precautions, after managing to avoid contact with that fucking rain all day and everyone who might have come into contact with it, she’d been tripped up by something as simple as wanting to kiss her boyfriend?

How fucking fair was that?

Emily began to sob quietly to herself as the full weight of the day finally broke through the crack of her consciousness, delivering an emotional sledgehammer blow against her chest.

“Jesus, Em. Are you okay?” Nathan was at her side, a hand resting gently on her shoulder.

She spun around and knocked his hand away. “Why didn’t you tell me you had that shit on you?” she yelled, spittle flying from her lips. Nathan flinched and took a step back. While they’d had their arguments since being together, he’d never seen her as upset or as angry as she felt now. “You should have told me, goddamn it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I… I’m sorry, Em,” he stuttered. “I didn’t even think…”

Emily looked up at Nathan’s horrified face, his concern for her was so obvious and his reaction to her fear so like him. It was a big reason why she loved him.

They had met just over two years earlier at the scene of a multiple car pileup. The accident claimed the lives of a young family of three along with two other drivers. The guy that had caused the crash—smashed out of his gourd, of course—had walked away with just a couple of scratches.

“How romantic is that!” she would usually tell people who asked how two seemingly polar opposites had got together. But the truth was, Nathan was the only cop Emily had met in all her years on the job who was still moved by the arbitrary nature of destruction, loss of innocent life and the pain he witnessed on a daily basis. Unlike other cops, Officer Nathan Meadows still knew how to feel, he retained a human heart, and he wasn’t afraid to allow it to show. And in the often-dark world both she and Nathan inhabited, well, that was a trait she found very attractive.

Oh yeah, and he had no problem with her use of ‘language’, as her Mother would call Emily’s ability to swear like a proverbial sailor. Dating was hard enough in this town; finding someone to put up with her inordinate knowledge of cuss words was even harder.

Emily felt the anger leave her. She stepped in close to Nathan and threw her arms around his waist, sinking her head onto his chest, aware that she was probably opening herself to more contamination with this simple act of intimate contact, but not caring anymore. She knew she had deluded herself into a false sense of security from the moment she set foot outside the safety of the cafe after the red rain had fallen.

How did that happen exactly, she wondered.

The world was literally falling to pieces and she was trying to act as though it was all okay, as though she was somehow outside of it? When had she become so unnerved? At what point in the day had her subconscious started to delude her into ignoring the obvious, terrifying probability that the world was about to suffer through a catastrophe unlike any in modern history? How did that happen? I mean, this could be as bad as the Spanish flu, it could kill millions across the globe, she thought. Maybe even more.

 Fuck, her mind shouted at the thought of all the suffering this could bring. She buried her face deeper into Nathan’s chest, smelling the musk of his sweat through the layers of his uniform, fighting the urge to cry. Dark waves of fear smashed through her body. Weakened by the panic that held her firmly within its grasp, Emily felt her legs turn into so much jelly. She just couldn’t hold back anymore, hot tears welled up and began to trickle down her cheeks.

Nathan let her lean against him, resting his cheek against the top of her head until her sobbing gradually began to subside.

* * *

Emily could not think of any other time in her life when she had been quite as scared as she felt right now. Her fear was a gnawing uncertainty whittling away at the lining of her stomach, it seized every bone, nerve, and muscle in its ice-cold grasp, demanding that she stop, right now, and curl up into a ball until everything was back the way it should be.

She had never been one to simply give in to fear, and she certainly wasn’t going to start now she told herself, despite what had just happened, but her body was in the grip of an ancient, primal survival instinct and she found it very hard to resist.

Nathan had finally managed to reach the precinct and he had spent the last ten minutes stalking back and forth through the apartment while he spoke in a hushed voice to whoever was on the other end of the line. When he was finished, he snapped his phone shut, slipped it back in his pocket and joined Emily in the living room.

 “They’re pulling everyone’s leave,” Nathan said, sitting next to her on the couch. “They aren’t telling us much other than the city’s going into full lockdown.”

“Is that just here or throughout the state?” she asked, blowing her nose in a tissue Nathan handed her from a supply he kept in his jacket pocket.

Nathan considered her question for a second, she knew him well enough to know when he was pondering whether he should divulge some piece of private info or not.

“Christ, Nathan. It’s not like I’m going to run off to the paper and publish your every word. You can’t hold out on me with this. Not now. Not today,” she said, unhappy with the whiney tone her voice had taken on.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” he said, “it’s just that I don’t want to scare you any more than you already are. Besides, the intelligence we have isn’t much more use to you than what you’re seeing on the TV. The Captain told me the word is they’re prepping for massive casualties. The CDC has absolutely no idea what to do. They can’t even fathom what the red shit is, let alone what it’s going to do to us, so there’s no chance of a vaccine. They don’t know how it’s communicated or why it does what it does, Em.”

“So what are we supposed to do while these guys sit on their thumbs? Just wait and hope for the best? Shit!” Emily jumped up and began searching for the TV remote. She found it sitting on the kitchen counter and pressed the ON button.