Herdenmord - ONC2021

Herdenmord

"They didn't make it." Quan flung himself onto the couch, his long, black fringe flopping over one eye. He looked tired and pissed off. He was always pissed off now—ever since they'd come for Oscar, his fuzzy-muzzled dog. They'd promised he'd get Oscar back, once the danger passed, but we all knew the truth. Even if we never spoke it.

"Why? What happened?" Dimi managed to sound surprised, though none of the Australia-New Zealand Infomissions had been successful.

"Birds again. In the engines. The plane crashed. No survivors." He hid his eyes in the crook of his elbow.

Birds. Always birds. And there was no way to stop them.

"Maybe the ships will have better luck," Dimi said hopefully.

"If they ever make it back," Quan snarked.

The ships had been plagued with setbacks. Whenever they moored, rats used the mooring lines to come aboard and chew through wires and cables. The ships went dark until every rat had been located and destroyed and technicians could repair the damage.

At sea, birds smashed themselves into windows and found their way into any unshielded funnel. If they anchored, the anchor chains became entangled in underwater formations, and when divers were sent to investigate, they found monster sharks circling the chain. Waiting for them.

They only sent big ships now. Small vessels found themselves beset by whales. They rammed the hulls or flung themselves over the bow and the sharks took care of the rest.

"I don't think we'll ever know what's happening," I said. They'd already said if the last plane didn't get through, they wouldn't send anymore. It was hard to accept the Northern Hemisphere had gone dark. Dimi couldn't.

"Some of them are still alive!" she said. "They'll have to contact us eventually."

Dimi had family in Greece. She'd heard nothing from them for months, but she lived in hope. I'd seen the photos on her bookshelves—groups of smiling people with her dark curls and soft, brown eyes. And she was right—there were survivors.

We'd all seen the footage. People coming out of their underground bunkers to forage in the abandoned supermarkets before retreating to their hideouts. There were people in homemade bunkers, and in vast military installations. At first, they sent out SOS messages and situation reports, but, one by one, they fell silent. The limited satellite imagery we could still get proved they survived, but they were not talking.

The animals must have found a way to block satellite communication too.

"I don't know if they can contact us, Dimi," I said, as gently as I could. "It's been weeks."

It had started in Greece, not far from Ioannina, where Dimi's family (had) lived. At first it was isolated incidents. Bears attacking villages in the mountains. Wolves gathering in packs and tearing unlucky hikers to pieces. But it wasn't only predators. Deer and mountain goats rushed people as they walked the steep cliff paths, butting and pushing them to their deaths on the rocks far below. The phenomenon did not stay in the Greek mountains. It spread. Swiftly.

It was as though something sent the wildlife into a frenzy. Something catching. A virus? A bacterial infection? Whatever it was, it was a pandemic. The wildlife of Europe attacked people in droves. There were rumours the odd small, rural farm or community had been left untouched, but nobody could confirm this or explain why they'd been spared.

Cities were not.

We watched, horrified, as wildlife invaded faraway streets, killing and rampaging. The rats and mice moved in first, taking down power for whole city blocks. The larger animals followed. Big herbivores, with their horns and bulk. Big carnivores. And, perhaps worst of all, smaller omnivores, running up people's bodies to attack their eyes and bite their tongues as they screamed and smacked at their own faces.