Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones Page B

building’s lobby, a streamer of the red dust following her inside before the door closed, severing it. The stream of dust whirled around for a second within the lobby then dissipated.
    She dropped the basket to the ground and stared at the white welts left by the handles on the palm of her hand. She could barely feel her fingers. She flexed them a few times to try to get blood flowing back into them before she made the long climb up the stairs to the apartment.
    The elevator still held the body of the woman she'd found on her floor and Emily wasn't interested in spending anymore time in the presence of dead people, thank you very much.
    Giving her fingers a few extra flexes for good measure, Emily picked up the basket and began to climb the stairs to the 17th floor.
     
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    Emily stood at her window looking down over the streets below. She had already put her precious supplies away, taking stock of exactly how much food she had collected with what she already had in the pantry. It wasn’t much. She estimated there was maybe three days worth of food and enough drinking water to last her a minimum of a week, longer if she rationed it.
    She had decided to fill the bathtub with as much water as she could before she went to bed—just in case—along with a couple of empty plastic gallon containers she could use before she broke out the bottled water. She would use the water in the bathtub for cleaning herself and her clothes; she could transfer it to the washbasin from the tub as needed. Emily didn’t know whether the purification process the city used to sanitize the water they supplied would function for long without human interaction, so it was probably best to err on the side of caution and not drink water from the faucet anymore after tonight. Who knew what was happening out there or what contaminants could have entered into the supply with several million dead people just lying around. It wasn't worth the risk of drinking tainted water when there was so much bottled water available from local stores and other apartments in her block. But she was going to allow herself one final indulgence before she resigned herself to austerity and caution.
    Emily moved from the living room into her bathroom and turned on the bath’s hot and cold faucets, filling the tub until the water lapped precariously close to the brim. She threw in some bath-salts, grabbed the tub of Häagen-Dazs ice cream she'd liberated from the store, stripped off her dirty clothes and climbed into the steaming bath.
    She soaked her tired muscles for forty-five minutes. By the time she climbed out the water was tepid and she was as wrinkly as a Shar Pei dog. The tub of ice cream was empty, but Emily felt almost human again. The bath had been a luxurious treat that she was knew she would not be able to look forward to for a very long time.
    She emptied the bath water and then refilled the tub with cold water while she toweled herself down. She pulled on her favorite pink flannel dressing gown and walked back into the living room.
    Now, she stood staring down from her lofty perch into the darkness. The street below was virtually invisible, even the streetlights were barely perceptible beneath the thick river of red dust that seemed to be growing larger by the minute. It had been too dark to confirm it by the time she arrived,
 
sweaty and exhausted, back at the apartment, but Emily would bet her last dollar what she had witnessed from the confines of the little corner store was happening throughout the city, maybe even across the whole of the country.
    A sense of relief settled over her as she sat entranced by the whirling spirals of dust moving through the street. This was something so massive, so completely out of her control that it was actually quite liberating to know there was not a damn thing she could do about it. All she had to do was sit back and watch the show, see what happened and hope she was able to get out the other side when the