But, here and there, Emily spotted remnants of the red rain: in puddles on the sidewalk, on stained clothing and the occasional worried face of a passerby. And, she noted, the air now seemed full of barely visible particles of red dust, floating on the warm eddies wafting past her like pollen.
While the majority of the city seemed to have already shrugged off the event, Emily sensed this was no normal day. She knew, with a concrete certainty that sank deep to the bottom of her stomach, the world would remember this day, and those that followed it, for as long as there was still a human race left.
There are few things more disconcerting to a career reporter than to walk into a paper’s newsroom and find it silent. It’s where the stories are made, put together and researched. On any normal day, no matter what time you walked in, the room should be a controlled commotion of reporters running back and forth, consulting in corners or answering ringing phones; the newsroom is the beating heart of any newspaper.
And as Emily pushed through the double doors into what should be a room full of chaos and noise—especially given the incredible meteorological events she had just witnessed—what greeted her instead was the sonic equivalent of a library reading room.
Pausing for a moment, she scanned the room. While the day-shift of thirty-plus journalists and editorial staff all seemed present and correct, instead of being at their workstations eagerly putting together that evening’s edition, they had gathered in groups around the five 50-inch TV screens mounted on the walls of the room. On a normal day, each TV would usually be tuned to a different major national or international news channel, ready to catch any breaking stories that may have escaped the paper’s ever-watchful staff. Right now, every screen showed CNN. The reporting staff, all the way up to the senior editor himself, stood silently watching as others reported on a developing story that, on any other day, they would be tirelessly pursuing.
No one noticed Emily as she entered the newsroom. There was none of the usual banter or greetings from her friends and comrades, in fact, not one pair of eyes shifted from the TV screens to Emily as she moved to her cubicle, and dropped her backpack on the desk.
There were only a couple of possible reasons for the paper to come to a grinding halt, especially this close to a deadline. The first was that no one had witnessed the event that had happened less than an hour ago. Emily instantly dismissed this theory, as it was obvious everyone must be aware of what had just happened. She could see from the crimson stains on her workmates clothing that some, like her, had been away from the office when the red rain struck.
The second reason, and Emily found this very hard to believe, was a news event even more earthshaking had supplanted one Emily thought would be the biggest event to demand a paper’s headlines since the 911 attacks… and that idea frightened Emily very much.
“Emily? Where have you been? You okay?” The barrage of questions from Sven Konkoly, one of the paper’s sub-editors broke her from her introspection.
“Yes. Out. Fine,” she fired back before taking a deep breath to calm nerves she hadn’t even realized were frazzled. “What’s going on? Did you see what just happened?” she said, her hand fluttering towards the window.
Sven ignored her question, “Come on over here,” he demanded. “You need to take a look at this, right now.” Not waiting for Emily to comply, Sven grabbed her by her elbow and guided her to the group crowded around the nearest TV. On-screen, a female CNN news-anchor was talking to a young man via a laptop videophone connection, his frightened face filled a box in the top right corner of the screen giving the appearance he was talking over the news anchor’s shoulder. A caption under the image of the man read FRANCOIS REVEILLION. Emily estimated he was no more than twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight, tops. His eyes were bloodshot and betrayed a barely restrained panic that belied the calmly delivered answers he was giving to the news anchor’s questions.
“—exactly is going on there? Can you describe what you’re seeing?”
When the young man spoke it was with heavily accented English, Emily guessed he was either French or maybe Belgian.
“Everyone is very, very sick,” Francois said, his face so close to the lens of the camera Emily could see the pale, almost translucent quality of his skin. Red veins stood out on his forehead and a spider’s web of tiny broken blood vessels seemed to be spreading from his left temple to his cheek, terminating just above the man’s blond mustache. Emily could see beads of sweat pooling on his forehead and begin to drip slowly down his face. When he turned his head and looked away from the camera for a second she saw more of the ruptured blood vessels on his neck. His eyes were striated with thick lines of red and deep pockets of blood had collected in the corner of each eye until little of the normal white remained. He looked like a boxer who’d just taken a twelve-round pummeling.
“People are dying here,” he said. “Many people. They are becoming sick and then they just die. I see them on the streets, in their cars. There are many, many dead here.”
“When you say that there are many deaths, how many? Can you tell us?”
The man paused for a second before replying: “Everyone,” he said. “Everyone is dead.” His voice stuttered slightly as the terror everyone knew he felt, momentarily flashed across his face.
“Look, I will show you,” he continued. The screen wobbled as he picked up the laptop and carried it a short distance before turning the lens to face out through a second-story set of bay-windows. It was dark wherever Francois was broadcasting from, but light from several street lamps cast enough illumination for those gathered around the TV to be able to make out a tree-lined street with rows of two-story houses on either side. The houses, nothing but dark square-shaped silhouettes, looked European in design, like some of the pictures Emily had once seen of villages in Provence. There seemed to be several cars randomly parked in the road; a white compact was resting half on the sidewalk, its rear end straddling the curb of the road, a telltale plume of exhaust fumes floated up from the vehicle’s still running engine.
“What are those?” a reporter next to Emily asked, pointing to several dark almost indistinguishable shapes scattered randomly on the sidewalk and in the road. One of the shapes seemed to be slumped against a streetlight.
“Are those bodies? Fuck! Those are bodies.” The panic in the young reporter’s voice made his words rise in pitch as he uttered each expletive.
Emily quickly counted at least fifteen unmoving shapes lying in the street. It was impossible to distinguish their sex from this distance, but she could see one that definitely looked small enough to be that of a child. Next to the child a larger form lay spread eagled on the pavement, one arm seemingly reaching out to the motionless body of the child.
This was bad, she realized. This was probably very bad.
The view on the screen switched from the street back to the face of the young man and a gasp of astonishment mixed with horror escaped from many of those watching. In the few seconds the camera was focused on the unfolding disaster outside, the striations in the man’s eyes had spread until no white could be seen at all; his eyes looked like two pools of congealed blood. The network of veins Emily had noticed earlier had doubled in thickness and now extended across his entire face. A delicate web of veins appeared suddenly on his cheeks and a steady stream of thick bloody mucous began flowing from both of his nostrils.