Before the rain came, every one of these creatures had been a New Yorker, busy leading their life. It may not have been much of a life, but it had been theirs and they had lived it as they saw fit. Now, those lives had been snatched away from them. They had been transformed into the spider-like aliens she could see eagerly making their lopsided way to this forest, to undergo yet another metamorphosis into something even larger again, a part of some alien production line, the result ending in … well, that really was the sixty-four thousand dollar question, wasn’t it. Ending in what?
Emily watched impassively for another few seconds then turned and began cycling home.
She did not look that way again.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
By the time Emily reached the apartment complex a solid bank of gray cloud tinted by a halo of red had begun to creep menacingly across the sky from the north-west. The fine weather could not have lasted much longer, she realized. This was still New York, after all, but Emily found herself already missing the implied sense of security the previous few days of clear skies had given her. She doubted the cloud would bring any rain but it would bring a sense of heaviness to the air that would cast a torpid blanket over everything and maybe give her a nagging headache from the change in air pressure. In the recesses of her mind though, Emily hoped the change in weather was not an omen of darker days or darker things to come.
She was reluctant to leave the bike outside the apartment building now that it contained her vital cache of supplies. With the added weight of the full panniers and her hurt arm, the bike was just too cumbersome for her to lift, so she wheeled it up the disabled-persons’ ramp, maneuvered it carefully through the door and into the foyer of the building. A small manager’s office sat adjacent to the elevators; Emily could not recall it ever having been manned during the entire time she had lived in the building. It would give her extra peace-of-mind if she stored the bike in the tiny room, away from any potentially prying alien eyes. She wheeled the bike inside and left it resting against its kickstand.
She knew the bergen would have to come upstairs with her but it was so tempting to just leave it next to the bike in the manager’s office. It would be a dumb move to leave all of her supplies in one location but she really didn’t want to have to carry that extra weight up those stairs. She had no idea what the feeding habits of Earth's newest owners were, but she didn't want to risk losing all of her supplies to some hungry bug-eyed freak that suddenly discovered it had a hankering for a can of New England clam chowder. So, the bergen and its contents would have to go with her. Besides, she still needed to pack a supply of clothes before she left and she planned to carry the lighter stuff like clothing on her back.
And, speaking of clothes, that was going to be one of the roughest parts of this journey for her. While she would never consider herself vain she was as committed to her creature comforts as the rest of the world was …
had been
, she corrected. The thought of limited access to clean underwear, in particular, was not something she was looking forward to. Of course, Emily knew a fresh pair of panties each morning was probably going to be the least of her worries. Still, a girl had certain standards she was expected to maintain, right?
She smiled as she pushed open the door to the stairwell and began her slow, painful climb up to the 17
th
floor. As she had predicted, the trek up was even more grueling with the backpack full of tinned food and supplies strapped to her back. By the time she reached her floor Emily’s knees felt as though they were ready to pop right out of their sockets. Her back didn't feel much better either. Her shoulder seemed to be improving though, it felt better than it had since she took her spill. There was still pain but she was getting more flexion back in the joint.
In her bedroom, Emily unclipped the bergen's belt from her waist and shrugged off the backpack as carefully as she could, but it still hit the floor with the sound of a dead body being dropped. She bent over at her waist and tried to touch her toes, stretching out the kink in her back. It relieved the tension there enough that she didn't think she was going to need to take any more pain pills, for a while at least. After a few more stretches, she moved to the living room to check on the sat-phone. The indicator on the battery-unit showed it had managed to reach eighty-percent of its capacity. She was tempted to try the phone now but, looking out the window, the clouds she had spotted earlier had crept even closer and she decided it would be best to allow the battery-unit as much time as possible to charge, while the sun was still visible. The instruction manual had said the solar-charger would still work under an overcast sky, but at a greatly diminished rate. But who knew when the next clear day would be, so she left the unit on its perch next to the window.
There were still a couple of hours of sunlight left, as long as the clouds didn’t advance any faster than they already were, but she grabbed her flashlight anyway and placed it on the kitchen counter, then pulled the candles she had looted earlier out of the bergen. She walked around her apartment and placed one in the living room, one in the kitchen and another in the bedroom. Just to be sure; she didn’t want to be caught with no light and have to fumble around in the dark. While the candles would only give off a limited amount of illumination, they would at least give her some light and allow her to save the flashlight’s batteries unless she really needed them.
She walked into the bedroom and opened up her closet. Emily had always been a bit of a neat freak, bordering on obsessive but just the right side of compulsive, a trait she had picked up from her mother, and one that she was glad of today. She had her wardrobe neatly arranged by season: on the right was where she kept her tee-shirts, lighter blouses, jeans and dresses. Then on the left was where she kept her sweaters, heavier blouses, jackets, dress-slacks and winter coats. Between the two sides, at the far end of the closet, was a set of shelving designed to hold her limited collection of shoes and boots, and below them, a set of six drawers where she kept her underwear, socks, and her gloves and hats.
Layers, she knew, were the key to keeping warm while still being able to regulate her temp and not overheat. The further north she travelled the colder and wetter it was going to get, but it would be a bad idea to dress for that weather right now. She would need to move gradually from the lighter clothing to the cold weather gear.
She began by sorting the clothes she intended to take with her by material. Lighter cotton tee-shirts and socks to help wick away moisture would act as her first layer. She pulled out all her tees and set them on the bed, laying her socks next to them. Next, she picked out a selection of wool sweaters; they would act as a great second level by trapping a layer of dead air between it and her tee-shirt. That would help keep her body heat in and the cold air out. The final layer would need to act as her wind, rain and snow barrier. For that she grabbed her two parkas; made from tear-resistant Gore-Tex, each was filled with goose down and, best of all, stretched almost to her knees but with enough play that it wouldn’t affect her ability to safely peddle her bike.
Next, she chose a pair of sneakers and a second, spare pair. They would work for her general day-to-day cycling and, as long as she wore a couple of pairs of socks, they would help when the weather got colder. She grabbed a pair of waterproof boots from the top rack; she didn’t know when she’d need to go walk-about or scavenge for food in the snow, so it would be a good idea to have something that was guaranteed to keep her feet dry and warm.
Finally, she pulled out her thermal socks and dug around in the back of a drawer until she found her pair of Pro X-Pert winter bike gloves. She added them to the pile and then began planning how best to pack them.
First, she needed to empty the food from the bergen. She would pack the clothes in and then replace the food on top of them. If she ate the food from the bergen first that would give any extra room she needed for extra supplies as she travelled.
The heavy-duty winter wear could go at the bottom of the bergen, she wouldn’t need any of that for a while. Emily put her sweaters in next, then her boots and sneakers, before making a final layer with her tee-shirts and trousers. Last of all, she repacked the supplies she had removed earlier. She rolled up her underwear, paired off her socks and stored them in the side pouches of the pack along with her gloves.
She pulled an extra pair of jeans and a tee-shirt from the closet and left them draped over a chair, ready for the morning.
Her packing complete, Emily walked back to the living room. Through the window, she could see dusk had crept up on her while she had been busy in the bedroom. The room was already beginning to disappear into shadow. She took the box of matches she’d set on the coffee table and moved from room to room lighting the candles she had placed out earlier. The candles actually gave off a decent amount of light, more than enough for her to see by and the flickering orange of the flame gave the apartment a welcoming warm appeal.
She headed back to the living room to check on the battery-pack. There was barely any daylight left now, so whatever charge was in the pack was going to have to suffice for now. The pack’s LED indicator glowed green, showing it was fully charged and ready to use. Now all she needed to do was charge the actual battery of the phone. She attached the charging lead to the sat-phone’s battery and flipped the rapid-charge button on the pack; the phone’s battery would take about forty-five minutes to charge fully from the pack.
In the meantime, she needed to grab a bite to eat; she was famished. Emily opened the pantry and took out two cans of mixed-fruit cocktail. She pulled the lid off the first, sat down at the coffee table in the living room and began spooning the contents into her mouth as she let her mind drift toward her plan for the morning.
Her top priority was to put as much distance as possible between herself and New York. She’d toyed with simply taking the most direct route toward her final destination but, as she thought back to her conversation with Jacob, she decided to just head directly north. If she did that she would be out of the city in a day at most. That meant—
Emily’s train of thought was interrupted by the sound of something moving in the apartment above. Her hand stopped halfway to her mouth, a spoonful of fruit dripping onto the coffee table, her head cocked to the left as she listened to hear if the noise would repeat. Sure enough, there it was again, the now familiar
pitter-patter
of something skittering across the floor, this time in the apartment above hers.
As she listened, Emily heard the first eerie cry of one of the alien creatures rising from an apartment somewhere in the building. The call was answered by another beast on a floor below her, another added to the growing chorus, and then another. Within seconds, her apartment was echoing with the sound of a hundred alien voices, their high-pitched trilling filled her head. It sounded as though many more of the creatures had joined with this strange otherworldly choir. She guessed what she had experienced the night before was just an early batch of the freshly minted creatures, the first wave of what could tonight turn into a flood. It wasn’t hard to imagine, over the past twenty-four hours, that the rest of the city’s new occupants had been ‘born’. Were they even technically being ‘born’ or was it more of a metamorphosis?
Who knew?
Emily dropped the spoon and rose slowly to her feet, all thought of food gone as the calls were joined by new, more disturbing sounds. In her mind’s eye, Emily added images to the sounds she heard; she could see the creatures exploring their new world and, finding themselves trapped in mostly locked homes and apartments, following their inbuilt need to escape. The creatures, sensing the onset of night, had begun stirring in the apartments all around her, their excited scuttling back and forth punctuated by the sound of furniture pushed aside and the occasional crash of something delicate falling to the floor. Emily though she heard something shatter, probably a vase, in the apartment next door. The creatures seemed to be whipping themselves into a frenzy.
The calls stopped as suddenly as they started.
A few moments of silence followed, punctuated only by the occasional noise of a creature moving before that too was replaced with another, familiar sound. The sound of splintering wood buzzed through her head like an electric saw, but this was more… organic. It reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen on TV of beavers chewing through a fallen tree. The sound effects made by the rodents in the cartoon were exaggerated almost to absurdity, but the gnawing
zing
she heard echoing through the building would have fit right into the cartoon.
From the corridor outside her apartment, she heard something heavy hit the floor with a resounding
thud
. She rushed to the front door, and peered through the spy-hole. Across from her was a circular hole where the wall of the opposite apartment had been, she caught the movement of a creature that had just exited the apartment as it ran along the wall in the direction of the stairwell, its talon tipped legs grasping at the wall as it pulled itself along the vertical surface.
Something fast and dark flitted across her vision.
Emily gasped and threw herself away from the door as her view was suddenly obscured by another of the creatures landing directly on her doorway. It paused for a second as if it could sense her watching from behind the safety of the door and then she heard it running along the wall.
Emily backed down her hallway, turned and moved towards her bedroom but froze when she heard a commotion almost directly above her head. The creature in the upstairs apartment sounded royally pissed off. She could hear it throwing itself repeatedly against a wall as though trying to barge its way through.
It sounds as though it’s trapped
, she thought?