“
Ladies and gentlemen, I … I’m terribly sorry about this …
” He began to cough, pulling in huge gulps of air, then to choke, his face turning as white as the blood splattered sheet of paper he still clutched in his free hand. Emily could see the fear in his eyes as he and probably several million people across the state realized what they were witnessing. With a sudden spasm, the man's head flew back, exposing his throat and the thick bright-red engorged veins pulsing beneath the skin. A violent muscle spasm snapped the presenter’s upper-body forward, his face and chest smashed into the desk, sending a spray of blood flying across the room, one globule hit the camera and slid slowly down the lens leaving a pink translucent smear behind. The man convulsed again, his body flying back into the upright position; his eyes stared directly into the camera as a slow wet gurgling escaped from his throat.
The man's microphone picked up screams of terror from the studio staff but they were barely audible above the sound of the TV presenter as he slowly drowned in his own blood, his body gripped by violent convulsions as though he was in the midst of a grand-mal seizure. A thick red stream of blood exploded from his mouth, sloshing across the news desk. He continued to shake violently for a few seconds then abruptly stopped. His jaw fell open and he exhaled a long sigh as his head slumped forward until his chin came to rest against the lapel of his bloodstained shirt.
The screams the microphone picked up as the presenter died had been replaced by the sounds of faint gurgles and cries.
Emily realized she was shaking. "Oh my God," she cried, through hands clasped tightly to her mouth. "Shit! Shit! Shit! Nathan? Are you watching this? Dear God almighty, it's here."
Emily turned to look back at Nathan. Her boyfriend was still standing in the kitchen, his face pale with shock, bloodshot eyes locked on hers as a stream of red gore exploded from his mouth, flooded onto his shirt and began to form a crimson pool on the carpet.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Nathan was dead on the kitchen floor.
His body lay slumped against the wall next to the refrigerator, a large pool of blood slowly congealing next to him and on his gore covered uniform.
Emily wasn't sure how long she had stared at Nathan’s lifeless body, it must have been a while, because the screams and cries of the dying she heard filtering through her walls from surrounding apartments, had finally, mercifully, stopped.
She had registered the suffering of her fellow residents only in passing, her attention caught completely by Nathan as he collapsed and began to convulse, his left foot banging spastically against the refrigerator. Each time his shoe struck the refrigerator door the cuff of his jeans inched up a little, revealing the almost translucent skin of his leg. Bulging veins pushed against the skin; engorged with blood they looked ready to burst out of his body.
The blood-splattered walls of her kitchen told the story of the violence of Nathan’s final seconds on earth.
There was so much blood
, she thought. It looked like someone had gone to work on him with a knife. Streaks of blood covered the counter, the cabinets and the floor. But there were no wounds on Nathan's body, just his open mouth from which a slowing stream of blood still dripped. His wide-open eyes, black with hematoma, stared off into nothingness. Clots of blood collected in the corner of each eye, dark droplets trickling down his cheeks like tears.
Emily noted all of this with a dispassionate eye as she waited for her turn to die.
Death was coming for her, she knew and waited. It was just a matter of seconds before she joined Nathan and the millions of victims across the world who had already succumbed to this violent, insidious red-plague. What was strange though was with the inevitability of her death came a serenity of sorts, a calmness within her mind as everything complicated in her life ceased to matter. Her only responsibility now was to wait.
The cold honesty of her situation, the simplicity of it all, was a welcome relief.
So, she waited.
The clock on the stove showed the minutes ticking away: first one, then five, then twenty. Each time she managed to rouse herself from the almost hypnotic state that had overcome her, Emily would catch another glimpse of the clock and see that time was still passing and she was still breathing. Her hand periodically drifted to her nose to check for the telltale nosebleed that would herald her coming death. The first time her hand came back bloody, she began to sob quietly. She absentmindedly wiped the blood away with the sleeve of her blouse, waiting for the pain to grip her.
When next she checked, there was nothing but dried blood on her skin, and somewhere in the back of her mind she began to realize it wasn’t
her
blood, it was Nathan’s, splattered across her face in his final seconds as the convulsions seized control of his body and he slumped lifeless to the floor.
Her next coherent thought was that she had done nothing to help him.
But what could she have done, she asked herself. It was all over in seconds, not even enough time to have picked up the phone and dialed 911, and certainly too fast for him to have been saved by paramedics who would have been thirty minutes out, at least, if they even showed up at all. So, she had stood there paralyzed and watched the man she loved die.
She was certain some of the screams she had heard echoing through the apartment had been hers, but she could not be sure; the event was already becoming a blur as her mind struggled to grasp the unreal nature of what had just happened. Everything seemed so dreamlike, so distant to her, she couldn't even be sure who she was anymore, whether this was reality or just some terrible, terrible nightmare from which she was unable to wake herself.
Apart for the laconic whir of the apartment's ceiling fan and her ragged breathing, there was nothing left but silence now. The constant background noise city dwellers become so accustomed to became conspicuous by its very absence. The stomping feet of the couple above her apartment, the distant grinding metallic whoosh and whir of the elevators as they moved from floor to floor, the constant roar of rolling tires on tarmacadam outside the apartment had all ceased. As the city’s inhabitants died, its essence had died with them; all that remained was this crushing silence.
It was so very strange, thought Emily, as she realized this was the first time she could remember ever hearing her own breathing, or the noise of the icemaker in the refrigerator as it pushed neatly frozen cubes into the dispenser. Even on those rare sleepless nights when she found herself awake at two-a.m., the city still seemed alive. She had still been able to hear the traffic outside the apartment, or the sound of TVs drifting to her ears from other apartments.
Now there was nothing.
New York, the city that never slept, had been silenced forever.
CHAPTER
FIVE
An hour had passed since Nathan died. The feeling of calm Emily had felt began to evaporate as, slowly, she began to surface from her mind’s self-imposed fugue state.
She was alive!
Emily tried to stand but her legs cramped and she flopped back down on to the floor, pain spiking up the calves of her legs. She felt as though all her energy had been sucked right out of her.
She crawled over to the coffee table and picked up her cellphone, trying to ignore the cramps in her legs that felt like a dog nipping at her ass.
Flipping the phone open, she punched in 911. "Come on," she whispered. "Please. Come on. Somebody pick up."
The phone rang and rang. No one answered,
She hung up and immediately dialed the number for the front-desk of the
Tribune
. It rang four times before a woman’s recorded voice answered and said "
If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now.
"
No one had picked up at the front desk, which was okay, she hadn’t expected anyone to be operating the reception area; everyone except for Konkoly and Frank had left, after all, so the system had defaulted to afterhours mode. She entered Konkoly’s extension number. It rang twice before she heard his voice in her ear. “Hi, you’ve reached the desk of Sven Konkoly. If you’d like to leave a message …” Emily hit the # key on her phone and the system returned her to the main menu.
“If you know your party’s extens—” The recording cut off when she tapped in the two-digit number for Frank Embry’s extension.
It went to message, too.
Emily carefully worked her way through every extension number she could remember. Each time the voice of her friends and colleagues greeted her and asked her to leave them a message, they would get back to her when they could. Emily had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She stared at the phone in her hand, willing it to ring, for somebody, anybody to call her back.
The pain in her legs and bottom had turned into tingling pins-and-needles. She flexed her legs a couple of times hoping to get the blood to flow a little faster, it helped a little but they were still twitchy after so much time spent in one position. She tried to stand again, and found her legs were once again willing to obey her. She raised herself to her feet, and moved over to the window. She couldn’t see Nathan from there, his body blocked by the counter and the sofa.
There was one more call she needed to make. Slowly she dialed the number for her parent's home.
Mom and Dad had retired ten years earlier. After selling the farm, they had packed up and moved to Orlando, Florida. “Gonna get while the getting’s good,” her dad told her in his best John Wayne drawl during one of her annual trips back home. “We’re craving some sun and sea,” he had gone on to say. “After sixty years of living here, I think we both deserve it, don’t you?”
Emily had agreed, it was the best move they could make, but she still felt a pang of sadness at the loss of the home she had grown up in, and, despite her childhood desire to leave Denison as soon as she was physically able, the idea of never going back there had been painful.
Listening to the phone’s distant ringing she remembered how happy her parents seemed the last time she had seen them. They both sported a deep tan from too many days on the beach. They were like a couple of teenagers, holding hands, cuddling-up on the sofa together as they had talked with their one and only child. When Emily heard the answering machine click on she let out a deep sigh, fighting back a rush of tears at the sound of her father’s voice: "
Hi, you've reached Bob and Jane. We can't get to the phone right now but if you'd like to leave a message we'll get back to you as soon as possible
."
At the beep, Emily spoke softly into the phone: "Mom? Dad? If you get this message, I'm okay. I'm alive. I think... I think everyone else here might be dead. I love you.
Please
call me." She left her cellphone number on the machine before hanging up. As she flipped her phone closed, she was left with the disconcerting feeling she had not left a message for her parents but a goodbye note.
*
*
*
Emily stepped into the corridor outside her apartment. She had left her keys sitting on the countertop in the kitchen. The idea she might accidentally lock herself out made her nervous, so she stood in the doorway with her right foot resting against the bottom rail of the door to keep it from closing.
"Hello?" Emily called, her voice echoing along the empty corridor. "Can anyone hear me?" There was no answer, just the gentle hiss of the air conditioning and an annoyingly familiar sound from further along the corridor she could not quite identify.
From somewhere on the floors above her, Emily thought she caught the sound of music playing but she couldn’t be sure. She had already tried flicking through the local TV channels but found nothing but empty desks and preprogrammed shows. At least the TV was still on the air, she reasoned.
“Hello?” she yelled again, louder this time, but still no one answered her.
Emily stepped back inside the apartment and started toward the kitchen. She grabbed her keys and placed them safely in the pockets of her jeans then turned and retraced her steps back to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.
The click of the lock engaging as the door closed made her heart pound a little faster as panic gave her system a little tweak. She shrugged it off and started down the corridor towards the elevator.
There were forty apartments on each floor of her building. Emily made her way to her nearest neighbor. She knocked loudly and rang the apartment's doorbell.
"Hi?" she called out. "Is there anybody in there? Can you hear me?" Placing her ear against the cold wood of the door, Emily listened for some kind of an answer, something that would tell her she was not alone. But there was no reply, not even the warning yap of one of the Chihuahuas or Shih-Tzus she knew some of her neighbors kept as pets.
Emily moved on to the next apartment and repeated the process. After the sixth door remained closed, she stopped knocking.
Hiss. Clang. Thump.
There was that sound again, so damn familiar but Emily just couldn’t identify it. The sound grew louder the further she moved towards the center of the corridor.
Hiss. Clang. Thump.
Set back in an alcove off the main corridor, the waiting area for the elevator remained hidden from view until Emily rounded the final corner, following the sound.
Hiss. Clang. Thump.
The body of the dead woman lay half-in and half-out of the elevator doorway. Every few seconds the automatic doors would try to close and then spring back open as they thumped loudly against the unmoving woman. This was the source of the sound she had been hearing.
Hiss. Clang. Thump.