Clide

The land has been ravaged by disease and famine. Creatures who were once thought to be extinct or imaginary have risen from the shadows, and the humans are now the prey.

Clide's thick biking boots caught on an exposed root and he fell heavily, scrambling frantically through the loose loam of the forest floor, desperately trying to regain his footing. He dared not look back, he could not go back. His only hope was to make it to the relative safety of 'The Sanctuary.'

As he stood and began to run once again, the chitinous clicking of thousands of creatures rose behind him and his legs pumped furiously, propelling him away from their ravenously hungry mouths.

No one was certain how it had begun. The rising sea temperatures, an earthquake, drilling for oil, reverse evolution. It no longer mattered. The scientists who could have found out were now long dead. All that Clide knew is that several years ago there had been a small ruckus made in the media as scientists had discovered a species thought to be long extinct. Most called them Falcons, their true scientific name was Cambroraster-falcatus, they looked a little like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, in their fossil form, so scientists had named them after it. They were a lot nastier than their namesake ship.

It was not clear if some five hundred-million-year-old eggs had somehow survived or whether a colony of them had lived in a deep-water cave system for millennia. What was clear was that they bred better than rabbits and that they were now the dominant species on the planet. Forget global warming wiping out all life on earth. Falcons were going to wipe out all life on earth.

It had only taken months for the slimy shelled predators to expand into all oceans. Fish stocks dwindled, all aquatic mammals were wiped out, vast forests of seaweed were stripped bare. The Great Barrier Reef was turned a stark white as all life upon it had been eaten away.

Clide had seen one up close, in a containment tank back at ULA. Thirty centimetres of dull, dark grey shell, pitted and holed, protecting its head. It looked a little like a horseshoe crab only its body was longer and much more powerful. Behind the shell two large eyes looked out, dark as night and more malevolent than a nightmare. Its body was a segmented muscular tail, protected on the upper portion with armoured chitinous plates, it used this tail to thrash at great speeds through the water. More disturbing was when they had moved onto land, the segmented muscle and chitin used as 'legs' to propel it over ground.

Turn them over and you exposed their softer underside. Around the mouth there was a pair of frilly antennae, sensitive to small electrical charges and to changes in pressure. The mouth was a circle of razor-sharp teeth which pulsed constantly, tearing and ripping its food and passing the pulped remains into its body. They ate almost anything, but they preferred meat.

One on its own was easy enough to kill. If you knew where to strike you could easily get a knife to sever its brain stem. Shoot it with a gun and you would cause unsustainable damage to it. Set them on fire and they cooked like crab. Pour acid on them and they dissolved just as quick as you would. But they never came on their own. They were shoal animals. They hunted in massive numbers.

He charged out of the tree line so abruptly that for a moment the disorientation of being in the open sent his brain reeling. Then his mind snapped back. Before him a swathe of barren brown earth stretched hundreds of metres towards distant trees. The rough undulating ground was barren, no plants, no animals. He knew that if he checked there would be no insects and, in the earth, no worms. A shoal had passed this way and scoured the land clean and sterile.

If he could move fast enough and get far enough out into this scar on the land, perhaps the shoal behind him would turn and he could survive another day. His legs kept pumping, his arms swinging in time as his boots kicked up gritty dirt behind him.

His pace slowed to a stumbling walk, then he shambled for a while. He didn't remember falling to his knees but at some point, he could go on no more. He turned in the dirt and faced to look back along the wavering path of his boot prints. He was far enough away that he could not see the individual animals but he witnessed their movement. The tops of the trees waved wildly about. Branches lowered down, then whole trees fell. All the towering vegetation bowed down, slowly disappearing as it fell to the ground. At this distance the sound was just an unceasing rustling, rasping and clicking. He saw the dark mass spread out onto the scarred land. Moving directly out from the cleared forest, spilling like a tide of dark water towards him.

But just like a spilled bucket, when the initial rush died the front edge slowed and then turned, pouring down hill and back towards the verdant life of the lush, forested valley. Clide could see a few individuals linger for a time, their antennae feeling the air along his tracks, tasting. Then they too turned to rush back into the shoal as it surged off to feed.

Clide took a long, slow drag from his waterbottle, recapped it, stood and shouldered his pack again. He looked uphill. Hecould follow this scar higher into the mountains, up towards the peaks wherethe earth became barren and cold. With luck he could make it to 'The Sanctuary'before night fall. He could survive another day. Humanity could survive anotherday. Perhaps soon they could do more than survive. They would find a way totake back the land, then the sea. Couldn't they?