Extinction (11 page)

The first shouts came from the aisle next to Alyssa.
That’s mine!
It was a woman’s voice, coarse, penetrating.
Get your hands off it! I mean it!
The man’s voice was equally coarse, threatening. Then others joined in, and there was scuffling as the man and woman went for each other. Shopping carts were pushed to the side and crashed into shelves as people tried to split them up. More shouts erupted, and then it sounded as if a full-scale fight had broken out down the aisle, and not just the man and woman now but many more, taking sides against each other. Alyssa flinched as the shelves swayed towards her, pushed by the struggling bodies on the other side. It held, but only just.

And then other fights broke out, all around the store, and Alyssa watched in mute desperation: two men kicking a woman on the floor, their feet repeatedly stomping on her belly, her head; another man driven face first into a refrigeration unit, the thick glass shattering and cutting him, blood pooling down his neck and chest to the floor; four women fighting in the queue directly in front of her, pulling each other’s hair, kicking at each other with sharp heels; and then the man with the gun.

At its appearance, the whole store seemed to go quiet for a fraction of a second; or at least that was the way Alyssa would later remember it. Maybe it only went quiet in her own mind as her senses focused on the terrifying sight in front of her: the dull black metal of the pistol being raised by the panicked man in the pinstriped suit and glasses, the slight pressure on the trigger, the slide ratcheting backwards and forwards, the empty shell casing ejected; the head of the woman next to her exploding, covering her own face with the unknown woman’s sticky, thick, bright red brain matter.

Despite herself, Alyssa screamed. The man dropped the gun in terrified recognition of what he’d done and was tackled to the ground by the people surrounding him. Alyssa clamped down on her scream. As she watched the gunman being mercilessly kicked to death by the crowd, his glasses broken across his bloodied, smashed face, she knew she had to keep her head together or she wasn’t going to make it out of there alive.

Wiping the blood and brain tissue off her face, she went into a low, protective crouch and looked around, assessing the situation. The gunshot had acted as a catalyst for true chaos to break out, and her options were limited.

All around her, scenes of violence erupted, as people started fighting everywhere, most using just their fists but others using bottles, shopping carts baskets and any other improvised weapon that came to hand. People trying to escape were trampled underfoot, their screams muffled by dozens of pairs of shoes and boots.

And then the sheer force of the crowd smashed through the storefront windows, glass shattering on to the street outside, people spilling out after it. The violence gave way to looting then. People gathered up as many items off the shelves as they possibly could and raced for the huge opening that was once a window. People fled from the store carrying piles of goods in their arms or in overflowing baskets. Some even pushed their shopping carts over fallen shoppers on their way out, crushing them.

Alyssa edged her way forwards, sidestepping as a man fell to the floor, hit on the side of the head by another man wielding a heavy piece of wood. She looked outside to gauge her chances of escaping through the window, and decided that they weren’t good. Shoppers were being jostled and shoved to the ground by people pushing their way out of the minimart with their stolen goods; and Alyssa now noticed that other people were actually
entering
the store through the hole where the window had been, opportunists seeking to loot the store, maybe perfectly normal people until recently, now possessed by the mentality of the rampaging mob.

She looked to the check-outs and saw some of the staff fighting running battles with the looters, trying desperately to stop them, but it was hopeless, there were simply too many of them.

Alyssa sensed movement behind her and reacted, dodging to one side as a greasy fat man in a suit threw a punch at the back of her head. Without even stopping to consider why he would do such a thing, Alyssa stamped down on his knee. As the leg buckled, the man’s weight collapsing on top of it, Alyssa grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head straight on to her knee. The impact knocked him out cold and his heavy body hit the floor. Alyssa was no stranger to fighting – had discovered years earlier that she was actually good at it – but she knew when discretion was the better part of valour. She couldn’t fight them all.

You’re a climber
, she told herself.
Climbing’s what you do
. Her eyes tracked upwards, following one of the nearest aisle’s huge central shelving units as it led up towards the plasterboard ceiling, and knew that she had a chance.
Climb!

She started to push against the crowd, avoiding punches, to her disgust even treading on some of the other shoppers who had fallen to the floor, until she was at the shelves. And then she started climbing, fingers gripping each shelf in turn as she pushed off with her feet, propelling herself upwards.

Hands started to claw at her from below, and she kicked out – hitting an arm here, a face there – and then she was at the top, pulling herself up on to the shelving unit, which ran from one end of the store to the other.

Keeping down, she quickly crawled along the length of the unit, ignoring the cans thrown at her by the people below. She saw the staff exit at the rear, saw how it was unobstructed, everyone’s attention on the broken glass of the storefront, and knew that was going to be her way out.

She felt the shelving unit begin to sway underneath her, and looked down to see a group of women pushing against it, trying to send it smashing down to the floor. Again, Alyssa didn’t stop to ask herself why they would do such a thing; instead, she looked at the shelving unit across the aisle, doing a quick mental calculation. Could she make it? It would be a standing long jump, with no room for a run-up. But it seemed so
far
. Logic told her that it was only two metres – far enough, but not out of the question. But up there, balanced precariously three metres off the ground, the women below screaming for her blood, it seemed much further.

But what choice did she have?

And so Alyssa braced herself, did a half-squat, and jumped straight over the aisle. For a few brief, terrible moments she felt she wasn’t going to make it, would miss the shelves entirely and fall to the floor where she would be kicked to death by the angry mob; but then she was there, landing with a shudder on the top of the shelves opposite.

Her balance was good but she still almost lost it, struggling to compensate for the movement of the shelves that came from her weight hitting the top of it. But she managed to stop herself from falling over the edge, and composed herself. The exit was three aisles over.

The women below her pointed and screamed, rushing forward to push at the new line of shelves. Other people in the store started to notice her too, the mob mentality taking over, and they joined the women below and started to push at the shelves, for no other reason than that they could. They could take this jumping female down and kick her to death, and nobody there in the shop would judge them for it, they were free from all constraint. Alyssa could feel the violent energy, and jumped, just moments before the shelving unit collapsed.

She teetered on the top of the next one, getting her balance again, blocking out the screams of the people trapped beneath the crushing weight of the shelves behind her, and then jumped again.

She was a prime target now, people from all over the store were heading towards her, but it was quieter at the back, most of the crowds were at the front, and those coming for her were hampered by the crush and the obstruction caused by the fallen shelves.

Looking forwards once more, she made her final jump to the last shelving unit, her legs tired now, collapsing under her as she landed, spinning her off the top. She gasped in momentary surprise and panic but managed to correct herself as she went over the edge, catching hold of the top shelf with her strong hands; but her own weight, combined with the momentum of her jump, started to pull the whole unit down, and she shouted at the people below her to get out of the way, riding the shelves down as the unit arced towards the floor and jumping clear as it crashed down into the aisle with a deafening noise.

She saw a group of people – an unruly, violent mob – moving across the broken shelves and bodies to get to her, and she turned for the door to the staff exit, just feet away now. Sprinting forwards, she barrelled a man out of the way who had decided to block her path, kicking through the door just as the first hands were starting to reach her.

Then she was through into a whitewashed concrete corridor, and she pivoted on her heel and slammed the door shut behind her, sliding the locking bolt home even as the door bulged inwards from the weight of the ferocious crowd behind it.

She turned and fled down the corridor to the fire exit at the far end. Pushing through it, she heard the inner door break behind her and the flood of people rushing down the corridor in pursuit of her – their mind operating as one now, their only desire to track down and kill the jumping woman. Why?

Why not?

As Alyssa gulped in the clean night air of the service alley, she knew she didn’t have much time before they would be upon her. She turned back to the minimart and looked up. The building was four storeys high.

She pulled off her shoes and threw them into a garbage bin opposite, then hauled herself up into a boarded-up window frame, her fingers and toes reaching for the ridges and depressions that would give her the purchase she need to climb.

Within seconds she was on top of the window frame, and then started on the harder part, her fingers and toes feeling for the gaps between the brickwork, using the tiny ridges to give her leverage to haul herself up the exterior of the old building.

By the time the first rioters broke out into the service alley, she was already two storeys up, but she didn’t stop, she just kept on climbing, her mind focused on nothing else. Adrenalin coursed through her body, sharpening every sense; she could see the brickwork in exquisite detail, her fingers and toes probing the tiny gaps and depressions as she hauled herself upwards.

She could hear the shouts far below –
Where’s she gone? – Where is the bitch? – Come on, down here! – Let’s get her!
– and realized that they had never looked up; and now she was so high, she would be almost invisible in the dark.

She kept on climbing, until finally she pulled herself over the parapet of the roof; drained, exhausted, the breath simply drained from her.

But she’d done it. She was alive.

Alyssa spent the next few hours on the rooftop, watching with increasing horror the scenes around her.

The fighting and looting continued, spreading out from the minimart to engulf other shops on the street. And then innocent bystanders were pulled in, beaten, robbed of their money and jewellery. Cars and vehicles were set on fire, and then the shops too. Mercifully not the minimart – Alyssa felt safe on the roof, and didn’t want to come down – but several other shops and business units on the street were set alight, some with people still inside.

And then the riot police descended on the scene and moved in with shields and batons, while water cannon and rubber bullets were used as suppressing fire from the rear.

The violence was terrifying, and surprisingly lengthy; the rioters held out for quite some time, despite the advantage of the police unit’s weapons and equipment.

But slowly and surely some semblance of order was restored; the street was cleared, and Alyssa counted fifty-four people being loaded into the back of the police vans. Hundreds more fled across the city.

Finally, she felt confident enough to climb back down the building. She collected her shoes from the dumpster and made her way just two blocks further to her own apartment building. She avoided the police; she knew they were doing their job for her protection but if she’d gone to them, she would have been taken downtown as a witness, and she had no idea how long it would have been before they took her statement. Hours? Days?

But she was home now, finally; although – as the magnitude of what had happened to her began to sink in – she had to admit, she no longer felt safe anywhere.

O
SWALD
U
MBEBE GRIMACED
as he took a sip of sweet tea. The pain in his chest was agonizing, yet he knew that it was a not a problem with which he would have to concern himself for much longer.

He had been diagnosed with the disease just six months ago, after refusing to visit a doctor about the pain for several years. And by the time he went, it was inoperable; it had already spread from his lungs, outwards through his body. He knew he was going to die – the doctor had told him as much on that first day – but this didn’t trouble him in the least. Everyone was going to die one day. And Umbebe knew something most other people didn’t – that day was coming sooner than they thought.

He was the High Priest of the Order of Planetary Renewal and it was his firm belief that the world was going to end very soon. At least, the world in its present form was going to end, to make way for another to rise from the ashes. That was the beauty of it.

This wasn’t just a way to cash in on the current situation, to part fools from their money. The order didn’t ask anyone for money, they never had, not once in their thousand-year history.

Their philosophy was simple. The world had to periodically renew itself in order to survive. It had to cleanse itself, to cure itself of the malaise it periodically experienced. Catastrophic incidents had occurred on several occasions in the earth’s four and a half billion-year history, and the ancient scientists who had established Umbebe’s order had charted these events, discerning a pattern amongst the seeming randomness.

According to the ancient scholars, this year was due to see another Apocalypse, another renewal of the world’s finite energy. Umbebe was thrilled that he would be presiding over the order during the time of final upheaval. It was an honour of the highest magnitude, and he had worked hard to build up the order, until now membership stood at over eighty thousand across the world. Not that they would have any sort of reward; they would perish along with everyone else. But they would die knowing that their deaths had purpose, and that was the real difference.