“Ooo-kaaay,” said Jacob, his voice taking on a confused tone.
“Look,” she continued, “I know this will sound crazy. I know you’re going to think I’m out of my mind. I mean, I’m questioning my own sanity right now, but I swear I’m not making up what I’m about to tell you.”
Emily told Jacob about the strange storm of red dust she had seen, how it had seemed to be attracted to the dead vagrant and then later attempted to invade her apartment. She thought to gloss over how she had heard what she thought was a baby crying, tracked it down to the level above, broken down the door and what she had found inside, but the truth was, everything she had already told him sounded crazier than a soup sandwich anyway; so why not?
When she was done recounting her story, Emily waited to hear the click of the phone as Jacob hung-up. She could imagine him wondering how on earth he had managed to connect with the last crazy person alive in New York.
“Interesting,” he said finally.
Well, that certainly wasn’t the response she’d expected.
“You believe me?” she asked, still not sure what to make of his response. “I’m not crazy?”
“I can’t speak to what you’ve experienced since the red rain, Emily. And, to be totally honest, I think we both know that if you’d told me the same story before everything that’s happened over the last couple of days, my response would probably have been different. But, after what you… what we have all experienced? I can’t discount any evidence, no matter how subjective it may be.”
There was silence for a few seconds as both strangers considered what to say next. Finally, Jacob spoke.
“I told you we really only have conjecture to work with, but we’ve had little else to do around here than run ideas past each other since everything…” he searched for the right word, “…ended. We’ve parsed every possibility we could think of as a group, no matter how far-out-there it might seem, and eliminated the majority of them as either impossible or highly improbable. What we’re left with is, well, to quote you Emily, is ‘crazy’ sounding.”
Emily heard Jacob take a swig of something, swallow and then carry on the fast-paced delivery of his idea.
“What we’re sure of,” Jacob continued, “is something far outside the realms of probability has happened across the globe. That ‘something’ is so unlikely it might just as well be defined as a random event because it’s so far off the scale of probability. When we throw in the new data you’ve supplied us, it pretty much removes the possibility of the red rain being a manmade event; there’s no way human technology could have the kind of rapid effect on a human body you described, which means we’re back to trying to define that elusive ‘something’ again. So, if we rule out manmade technology then we’re left with only two probable causes for the red-rain and what you witnessed. The first is that our ‘something’ is a part of the natural cycle of the earth, an extinction level event, similar to the ‘great dying’ in the Permian-Triassic period. That one event wiped out about seventy-percent of land animals and ninety-six-percent of marine life. And there’s plenty of data to suggest mass extinctions happen—on a planetary timescale, at least—pretty regularly, and we’re long overdue for the next one. So, maybe the red-rain is part of a cycle that kicks in every few-hundred-million years or so and wipes the planet clean. It’s just the delivery of this event that’s so strange, so unexpected. It just doesn’t seem likely that we would have missed some kind of evidence of it in the fossil record.”
“And what’s the second possibility,” asked Emily, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.
“Well, again,” said Jacob, “you can call me crazy but the only other possibility we can come up with is that this is some kind of extraterrestrial event.”
Emily was stunned. “What? You mean like ET? We’ve been invaded by little green men or something? You’re kidding me, right?”
“Yes, well, kind of. It depends on your definition of ‘invaded’. What we could be experiencing here is a kind of extraterrestrial biological entity. Our planet is really just a massive super-organism, the red-rain could be the equivalent of a virus, but one that exists out there in the vastness of space and affects planets instead of individuals.” Emily could imagine Jacob energetically waving his hands towards the roof of his office all those thousands of miles away from her. “It just floats around until it randomly lucks on a suitable host planet and then boom… mass-extinction’s the result. The theory is really kind of fascinating when you look at it dispassionately.” Jacob seemed to realize getting excited over the reason for the almost total extermination of humanity may not seem quite so attractive to anyone else outside of his small band of colleagues.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I didn’t mean to sound so enthusiastic about it all. That’s what happens when you spend too much time cooped up with scientists twenty-four hours a day for months on end.”
“It’s okay,” Emily told him, “I understood what you meant.” And, if she was honest with herself, Jacob was right; it was a fascinating concept. Terrifying, but also incredibly interesting.
“So, that’s just two of the prime possibilities we came up with,” the scientist continued. “Hell, for all I know we could have been on the receiving end of the equivalent of a galactic bug-bomb. We just don’t know and I don’t believe we’ll ever find out the real cause. But what we are sure of is that something unprecedented in the entirety of human history has occurred, and all the old rules, well, they’ve been thrown right out the window. And, if we factor in your encounter, then the logical conclusion would seem to be that something far greater than a simple random catastrophe is at play here. Which means that ‘something’ is probably much more complex than we can even begin to estimate at the moment.”
There was a long pause and then Jacob’s voice filled her ear again, crackling with static. “So, what are your plans, Emily. How are you going to get out of New York?”
Jacob’s question caught Emily completely off-guard. “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”
The earlier excitement Emily had heard in Jacob’s voice vanished, replaced by a patient, quieter tone that she thought he probably reserved for first-year students at the university and kids… and now he could add crazy reporters to that list.
“There are a couple of good reasons for you to get out of the city: first and foremost, you’re surrounded by several million dead bodies that are already well on their way to decomposing. At some point, that’s going to bring you into contact with God-knows how many potentially fatal pathogens; cholera, typhus, you name it, it’s all going to be floating around out there. It is not going to be a very healthy place for you to be.”
Jacob hesitated before continuing, but when he did Emily could sense his words were couched by a level of misgiving bordering on reticence, but she couldn’t tell whether it was directed at her or Jacob’s doubt at voicing his own thoughts.
“If you’re right about what you saw then who’s to say it’s not happening everywhere? It’s not my intention to scare you, Emily, but maybe we need to consider this event will have even farther reaching effects than we’ve imagined so far. I hear myself say the words and I know how screwy I sound, but have you considered that the transmutation you saw with the family might be happening elsewhere? Because if it is, then we’re talking about an unprecedented shift in the biological hierarchy of this planet, and to be quite frank, that scares the living shit out of me.”