Extinction (3 page)

But in the blink of an eye Sebastian launched himself at Joyce, forcing her to the ground. She cried out as in a frenzy his claws and teeth ripped her to pieces.

H
ANS
G
LAUBER LOOKED
out of the little window of the huge aircraft and stifled a yawn. Four hours already, and only halfway there.

He loved his job as head of international sales for a distinguished yacht firm, but the travel could be a real killer, hopping from one continent to the next, sometimes more than four times in a single week. He’d grown accustomed to it now of course but it hardly made it any easier.

He’d arrive at his hotel at about eight in the morning and, although the temptation would be to simply crash out and get some sleep, he knew the best thing to do would be to follow his daily routine and go to bed that night at the normal time. His body would adjust to the time difference naturally this way, and he’d be absolutely fine by the following morning, which was when the big meeting was scheduled for.

‘What’s that?’ he heard himself ask, almost without realizing.

The middle-aged lady in the seat next to him leant across to have a look. ‘What’s what?’ she asked.

Glauber wasn’t sure. He peered out of the window, looking harder.

‘There!’ he exclaimed, prodding at the glass with a pudgy finger.

The woman looked in the direction of Glauber’s finger, towards the front of the aircraft. There was movement in the sky ahead but she couldn’t make out what it was.

Glauber stared. It looked like lots and lots of tiny specks criss-crossing the sky, a long way away. Like grains of sand, moving independently of one another, coming together in small groups, then separating again. How many were there? A thousand? A million?

‘Are they birds?’ the lady asked him, and he realized she was right; they were birds, circling the sky maybe dozens of miles away, vast numbers of birds, swarming together, separating, and then swarming again.

But why?

In the cockpit, Flight Navigator Lao Che Huan turned to the pilot, Hoa Man. ‘They’re on the radar now,’ he announced, voice calm and professional. ‘They must be converging.’

Huan and Man had been observing the birds for some time; they were following the same course as the airplane. At first the men had had no idea what the specks in the distance were, but after a while it became clear that they were birds. But they behaved in a way neither man had seen before, flying apart and then coming together in larger groups. And now it seemed that they had formed one enormous supergroup.

‘How large?’ Man asked.

‘I’ve got no idea,’ Huan said, now struggling to contain himself. ‘There must be millions of them.’

‘But they’re still some way ahead of us,’ Man said hopefully.

‘Yes, sir,’ Huan answered immediately. ‘They’re about twelve . . . Oh no,’ he gasped.

‘What?’ Man questioned.

Huan swallowed hard. ‘They’re turning.’

In the cabin, Glauber felt the woman beside him shudder. He’d seen it too, the birds coming together into one huge group, bigger than anything he’d thought possible.

And it wasn’t just Glauber and the woman – other passengers had also noticed now. There was a collective gasp as the birds all came together, and then there were cries of alarm when the birds turned, and started flying towards the aircraft.

The pilot and navigator tensed as the flock swooped and turned, until it was flying directly towards them, less than a mile away now.

Hoa Man tried to take evasive action, but the birds turned with him, getting closer, ever closer, until they were all he could see, all that anyone could see; the cockpit window was filled with the birds, coming relentlessly towards them, a huge black cloud of birds that seemed to fill the whole sky.

Glauber watched as the birds soared towards the aircraft. The woman next to him gripped his arm reflexively, her fingers tight with anxiety.

The birds swarmed from all sides, all over the aircraft, and the plane lurched up and down as if hitting turbulence. Glauber heard the woman next to him scream, heard others scream all through the cabin; and then the birds were gone, the sky outside clear once more.

‘What the hell is going on?’ the woman asked breathlessly. ‘What do they want?’

Glauber’s brow furrowed, as he searched the sky for the birds. What do they
want
? He had never considered the idea. What
do
animals want? Food, shelter, to reproduce; Glauber knew that, as far as an animal could
want
anything, it wanted to survive. But how was this behaviour accomplishing anything? Flying towards the plane in a group of thousands, maybe millions, then breaking away and flying off? It seemed that the purpose was merely to frighten the people in the aircraft, but that was clearly ridiculous. Why would any animal want to do that?

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

There were cries from around the cabin –
There! – Over on the right! – There they are!
– and Glauber saw them again, circling in smaller groups, swarming and then breaking away as they had before. But he realized moments later that this was another group entirely. Surely it must be. The aircraft would be travelling at well over five hundred miles per hour, an impossible speed for birds to keep pace with.

This realization filled him with even greater horror. It was as if nature was rebelling. It seemed utterly impossible for there to be another group of these birds; but there they were, as before, coalescing into a huge, living, pulsating mass.

‘They’re coming again,’ Flight Navigator Huan said, his voice urgent, panic creeping in. Their flight training was rigorous – what to do in case of mechanical malfunction, terrorist attack, even how to keep control in the face of a hurricane – but nothing had prepared him for this.

‘A different flock,’ Man said, his tone uneven, disbelieving.

Huan nodded his head; he could see the two separate groups on his radar system, the first group left far behind. Two separate groups of birds, both acting in a way which seemed to contradict the very laws of nature. What did it mean?

But then this group of birds was on them also, and he heard Man grunting with the effort of keeping the plane stable as it was rocked up and down, side to side, by the army – for that was surely the word for it – of winged creatures, no longer the benign little angels that Huan had once believed them to be, but savage beasts, cruel and vindictive.

The plane was rocked harder this time, for longer, but the army finally passed again, flying away to swarm and regroup. Huan breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Damage report?’ Man demanded, doing his best to retain his professionalism, although the sweat that dripped down his face revealed the pressure he was under.

Huan’s keen eyes swept the instruments, trying to identify any irregularities – altitude, oil pressure, fuel, engine temperature, bearing, rudder adjustment – but miraculously everything was still fine, all as it should be.

‘Nothing,’ he reported, regaining some of his own composure.

Glauber wasn’t sure which was more frightening – the third group of birds, massing again in their millions underneath the dark, ominous clouds, creating a huge, even more menacing cloud of their own – or the scene inside the aircraft, where fear and panic were starting to take hold.

Some people merely stared out of the tiny windows in open-mouthed disbelief, whilst others screamed, screams of a sort that Glauber had never before heard in his life – screams of pure terror. Children sobbed gently or cried hysterically; actually, not just the children, Glauber realized, but men and women too. Most people who weren’t screaming were crying.

Others, however, were more active. Some were hammering on the cockpit door, demanding answers from the flight crew, and Glauber was disgusted as he saw a big, bearded man grab a stewardess by the front of her dress and slam her into the toilet door, yelling in her face. He was tackled to the floor by other passengers.

Another man had begun to talk loudly, preaching to the passengers –
this is it, it’s finally time, better repent now, Judgement Day has come, it’s the time of the Apocalypse
.

Further along, one family was taking down their luggage from the overhead racks, almost as if they expected to be getting off the plane at any moment, forgetting they were still thirty-eight thousand feet in the air. Shock, Glauber thought.

Glauber glanced to his side, saw the woman bent with her head between her knees, muttering prayers to herself – actually, Glauber realized, it was the same prayer, repeated over and over and over again. He himself wasn’t in shock. He felt something different. Disbelief perhaps? Disbelief that something like this was happening?

No. As the third group of birds began to converge on the aircraft, starting their final approach in one huge amorphous mass, moving with seemingly demonic intent, Glauber realized what he felt was acceptance.

He knew he was going to die.

In the cockpit, Man was the first to scream, just half a second before Huan.

The third attack had started the same way as the first two. Anticipating the move, Man had violently turned the aircraft, cutting across the line of attacking birds, avoiding them entirely.

Man had taken a short breath, allowed himself a brief glimmer of hope, but then he saw the birds ahead had been a decoy. His evasive action had taken his airplane, his crew, and his three hundred and fifty-six passengers directly into the path of another flock, this one even bigger, a fact neither man thought possible but which was undeniable.
There must be tens of millions of them
, Man thought with a shudder, just before they reached the plane.

The first line of birds hit the cockpit window, bodies breaking across the glass, bones, feathers and blood smeared and splattered everywhere. Then the next wave hit, then the next, wave after wave after wave of broken and smashed bodies, until the window started to break, to cave inwards.

Huan, despite his fear and panic, still managed to notice the warning lights go on for the engines, first one, then two, then three, then four, until all engines were out, and his mind was still able to process the fact that the birds had flown straight into the huge, churning jet engines, sacrificing themselves to destroy the aircraft, just as the birds were doing against the windscreen in front of him. He noticed the altitude start to drop, saw how cabin pressure was being lost in the main passenger area, realized that the birds must have broken through the cabin windows.

And then the reinforced glass of the cockpit finally gave way, and Huan’s screams were forever silenced by a crushing mass of feathers, blood and bone.

Glauber could now hear nothing – not the prayers of the woman next to him, nor the cries of the children, nor the screams of everyone else.

Vision was his only sense, and he looked on in mute amazement as the birds flew into the jet engines mounted on the wings, hundreds upon hundreds, until the engines blew, flames and charred feathers bursting across the sky. But still the birds didn’t stop, and Glauber watched with an almost fascinated terror – not even feeling the drop in altitude, the ferocious rocking of the plane’s fuselage – as the broiling, seething mass succeeded in ripping the entire wing off, sending it spinning away across the sky in an almost balletic display.

Glauber was still watching the wing spiralling down to earth when the first of the birds smashed through into the cabin, the pressure reducing, anything unsecured – luggage, food, drink, magazines, bodies – being sucked out by the vacuum. But then more birds entered, and nothing else could be sucked out, and Glauber felt the entire aircraft start to spin and understood that the other engines were lost, maybe the entire wing too.

His attention was now focused inside the aircraft, and he saw, through the incredible shaking and spinning of the fuselage interior, how the passengers were entirely covered in birds, little broken bodies smeared over people’s features, and he couldn’t recognize anyone any more, there were just hundreds of people covered in
bird
– terrible, bloody, greasy, broken
bird
.

And then Glauber’s window broke open, and he too was covered in
bird
, a terrible mass of tiny bodies breaking across his face, and he realized – too late – that more than anything else in the world, he finally wanted to scream.

S
IRENS BLARED IN
the background, almost deafening James Carter as he addressed the television camera, which picked up the scenes of chaos surrounding him – storefronts smashed and broken, people still escaping with clothes and sneakers from the sports store behind, and with wide-screen TVs and computers from the electronics store to the side. One of the buildings was on fire, along with several of the cars which lined the normally peaceful street, the flames licking perilously close to Carter as he gave his report.

‘I’m here on Hudson Boulevard,’ he announced over the din of rioters and looters, ‘where chaos is running rampant. After the giant statue was seen to move last week, there have been more strange incidents all over the world – domestic pets have attacked their owners, birds have destroyed large passenger airplanes by flying into them in huge numbers, zoo animals have gone on the rampage, fish have been dying in their millions. And some people believe that these unexplained incidents are heralding the end of the world, the Apocalypse.’

Carter flinched instinctively as one of the cars behind him erupted in a huge fireball, then continued, ‘Already, apocalyptic cults are emerging, driving people into a frenzy, claiming all sorts of things – but the bottom line is that we are all doomed.’

Carter looked around to survey the carnage behind him, then turned back to the camera. ‘Whether that is true or not,’ he went on, gesturing to the destruction of the neighbourhood, ‘it is clear that their words are having an effect. Earlier this evening the first riot broke out, here on these streets. The police managed to arrest the main offenders but now the looters have moved in.

‘It starts here, but mark my words,’ Carter said gravely, ‘it will spread. This is only the beginning.’