Monsters (2 page)

The electronic world on which mankind had come to depend was the first of the catastrophic failures that sent
Homo sapiens
spiraling back into the Stone Age. The winter ice that killed so many crippled the electrical grid. Computer servers had become the bastions of knowledge and communication. Without power they became paperweights.

Few books survived that first winter. In the northern regions of Europe and the US, the dull glow of their smoldering remains kept millions alive long enough to perish in the floods that followed in the spring thaw. In the equatorial regions, heavy rains and sweltering summers caused those books and newspapers not kept in sealed containers to rot. Within a few years, books were a distant memory, hoarded by the rich.

The decade that followed the passing of Holt became known as the Fall. Those fragments of newspapers that survived the Fall were given a status akin to holy relics, as though somehow their preservation kept the past alive and contained a hope for the future. In reality, few read their contents anymore, even fewer understood them. Brittle sheets of typeset paper were sealed behind glass, kept in makeshift safes, wrapped in plastic and hidden under floorboards, their greatest value being found in trade. Some still read them, most didn't see the point, the general populace regarded the papers with almost medieval superstition, thinking knowledge had inflamed man's hubris predicating the Fall.

After a few decades, the wealthy chose to be buried in newspapers, wrapped in loose print pages, taking what precious little remained of the Old World to rot with them in the grave. Like diamonds and gold in a bygone age, the scarcity of newspapers caused even fleeting scraps of newsprint to become objects around which wealth could concentrate. As time passed, the realization that their true wealth lay in the knowledge they preserved became incidental, and then irrelevant.

During the Fall, water levels rose. The sea invaded the land, flooding lowlying areas, submerging coastal cities. The US government built levees around New York and Miami, but they were fighting a rear-guard action, leaving these cities isolated and exposed to the ravages of the sea. The need for a second line of defense to protect these cities in the event of a breach strained construction resources, limiting the area that could be effectively protected.

Environmental scientists said it wasn't just Comet Holt that was at fault, that the combined effect of global warming along with the greenhouse effect caused by the Sparkles had raised global temperatures by an average of four degrees.

In Europe, most of Holland, Belgium and the northern regions of France became a shallow inland sea. China's great rivers, that for thousands of years had sustained the burgeoning population, flooded on a scale that spanned hundreds of thousands of square miles, washing villages, towns and cities out to sea. Indonesia lost entire islands to rising sea levels, while several pacific nations slipped beneath the waves, but that wasn't the worst of the curses brought by Comet Holt.

Four degrees didn't sound like much of an increase, but it wasn't spread evenly around the globe, some places experienced only a moderate increase in the average local temperature. Trade winds shifted, sending warm air over Antarctica and breaking up the great ice packs and glaciers that had dominated the continent for millions of years. Within a few years, the average depth of the glaciers covering Antarctica dropped from two thousand meters to a little over six hundred.

The Himalayas exacerbated the problem, with flood waters flowing down across the subcontinent of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The influx of fresh water crippled the coastal ecology of Asia, destroying food supplies and forcing mass migrations in search of sustenance. Those that escaped the floods succumbed to disease and famine, killing 1.4 billion people within the first decade. As tragic and heartrending as this catastrophe was, it too was not the worst of the curses brought on by the coming of Comet Holt.

Drought ravaged Asia, Africa and the Americas, crippling crop production. Hundreds of millions of people starved.

It might have been the climatic changes that brought man to his knees, but it was the rise of monsters that kept him there.

During the first few years, the monstrosities were dismissed as oddities. Mankind was too busy struggling with the natural disasters overwhelming civilization to understand what was happening at a biological level. Those scientists that had the luxury to investigate the gigantism arising within dogs, cats, wolves and bears struggled to understand the cause.

Birthrates dropped among domesticated farm animals like cows and pigs. For those that remained fertile, complications arose during birthing as sows, ewes and mares struggled to bear oversize stock, often proving fatal to both mother and child. The number of stillborn farm animals and complications during birthing resulting in death reached alarming levels, but the primary concern of scientists was the impact on food production, not the implications of rapid evolutionary change on the distribution of species. Natural Selection was pushing back against artificial selection.

The thickness of eggshells decreased in both domestic poultry and wild birds, reducing the number of offspring to an average of 1.8 per roosting nest in North America alone. At that rate, biologists predicted the extinction of all but the hardiest of bird species within a decade.

So many amphibian species succumbed to extinction in the wake of Comet Holt that scientists initially thought the entire phylogenetic clade had been wiped out, destroying tens of thousands of individual species. The discovery of desert frogs and cane toads surviving in the remote outback of Australia gave hope that some amphibians had survived to continue a genetic line that predated the dinosaurs.

Algae blooms choked the Great Lakes, while microscopic plankton and other strains of cyanobacteria dominated large tracts of the Pacific Ocean, spanning upwards of ten million square miles from the coast of Chile to New Zealand. Although the mechanism stimulating the algae was unknown, scientists hailed the bloom as a carbon sink. They said the bloom acted as a counterweight to anthropogenic climate change, and they thought that atmospheric warming might reverse, but it didn’t. They noted that the algae was exchanging CO2 for oxygen, but the blooms suffocated the oceans, decimating fish stocks. Within a few years, the proportion of oxygen within the atmosphere began to change, creeping up toward prehistoric levels.

Scientists predicted the biosphere would be self-regulating, and expected oxygen levels to peak well below 25%, but even a small increase of less than two percent within the first decade encouraged forest fires to run rampant. The CO2 released by the fires only fueled the algae further.

It took some time for scientists to recognize the relationship between the devastation of entire families of species and the advent of gigantism, as not every species was equally affected. At first, the enlargement of surviving species was assumed to be a naturally selected response to the rapid loss of competitive pressures from other species, but Natural Selection didn't explain the changes to domestic pets.

Although most cats and dogs had become feral, being abandoned by their owners either through desperation or an untimely death, even the litters of those that continued in the care of humans showed enlargement. Within a few years, cats were reaching four feet in length.

Dog breeds like the German Shepherd reached the size of a small pony within a decade.

Comparisons were made to studies on the recognized changes in feral animals, like the lengthening of the gut and thickening of the intestinal tract, but these had previously corresponded with dietary changes. That these new variations should arise in animals still reared on processed pet food was alarming. Little attention was paid to the issue, though, and it barely registered in the back sections of the newspapers.

The advent of gigantism was gradual. It was an anomaly, a nuisance, nothing compared to the annual cycle of the Sparkles, with their driving snow and spring floods.

Although the newspapers made fun of the scientific name for cats,
Felis catus
and
Felis silvestris catus
, joking about the similarity to Felix The Cat, Sylvester and Tweety Bird, serious research was undertaken using the common, household cat to examine the potential long-term effects of gigantism.

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a controlled study of twenty five generations of cats from five distinct pedigrees over three years, in order to understand the phenomenon more precisely. Their findings were controversial. Not only were cats becoming progressively larger, but the composition of their physiology was subtly changing. Muscle tissue became more dense, nerve endings increased in frequency, hip bones morphed in shape, giving the cats more leverage when springing for prey, but the most controversial aspect of their findings was that the animal’s canine incisors were increasing in length and thickness.

Time Magazine picked up on the implications of this research and ran a front page story titled,
Our Future
? With a picture of cavemen using spears to battle saber tooth tigers, the imagery was inflammatory. Several prominent biologists spoke out against the article, saying it was speculative, that there was no reason to think animals were undergoing genomic regression, and yet there was no doubt gigantism wasn’t merely enlarging animals. Life on Earth was being subject to rapid genetic change, but the question was, how? The ability of scientists to investigate the problem was hampered by the seasonal impact of the dust trail left by Comet Holt.

In spite of government warnings, large sections of the population fled to the equatorial regions to escape the extreme winter snow storms. The influx from Europe and the Americas inundated third-world resources. There was an expectation that the government or the military would be able to make everything right, but the scale of migration was unprecedented and quickly escalated out of control.

Tribes formed within the various migration camps, mostly along ethnic lines as they always had, but a few were based on religious affiliation. With millions of people displaced, disease soon swept unchecked through the makeshift camps. Man preyed on man in a struggle for survival that was barbaric and cruel.

Those newspapers that still survived were largely run by volunteers. They reported outbreaks of cannibalism. It seemed once that particular taboo lifted, once it was accepted by one tribe, it quickly became the norm in an area as food and medical supplies dwindled. The army and police were stretched too thin. They had to pick and choose which laws they could enforce, with their preference being to turn a blind eye where there was at least a semblance of civil order, regardless of what evil lay beneath.

Political structures collapsed, leaving local fiefdoms in their place. The presumption of innocence was lost, and bitter feuds broke out between tribes vying for dominance of the camps. In the midst of the chaos, religious groups struggled to maintain their character, pleading with their followers to stay loyal, but the abuse of authority within their own ranks undermined their credibility. It seemed opportunity was the greatest temptation of all. When the animal attacks began, preying on the sick, the elderly and the weak, mankind finally realized gigantism was more than a novelty, a new world order had formed. Man was no longer the apex predator.

Investigations were made into the possible causes for gigantism and a biological agent was identified in the fallout from the comet. Although the structure was simple, being a rudimentary combination of amino acids forming a non-bacterial pathogen, it acted like a virus. It wasn't a virus in the technical sense of the word, as its helical structure was far too small, but the word virus was all the newspapers needed to hear. Comet Holt had brought an extraterrestrial plague upon Earth.

The New York Times broke the story with one word plastered across its cover in letters eight inches high, VIRUS. The Washington Post called it THE FINAL HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE. There wasn't enough time to study the celestial biological agent, let alone to develop a strategy for containing or reversing its effects. What research could be done focused on the genetic differences between quadrupeds and quadrumana, as mankind and primates were largely unaffected by the pathogen. Investigations were made into the evolutionary genetics of the long-extinct megafauna and their relationship to an oxygen-rich environment, but the effort was too little, too late.

Hard decisions had to be made, and those that still held to the authority of the Old World knew their days were numbered. The survival of the human race depended not just on the priorities being set, but the speed with which decisions could be implemented. Governments became ruthless. Martial law was implemented in the camps. Punishment was swift and severe. Looting was a capital offense. That discretion was given to field commanders to determine guilt and innocence became a worse problem. The army found itself as judge, jury and executioner.

Somehow, the newspapers still printed. Even when it seemed doubtful anyone would read them, the major papers felt a sense of obligation to voice the concerns of a populace reeling in shock. In some cases, only flyers were printed, just a couple of folded pages, but someone somewhere understood the importance of the news, someone kept the presses running.

The United Nations called the institution of martial law a tactical response, but that was a clever way of avoiding the truth. Martial law was merciless. What began as disaster response morphed into preparations for the radical restructuring of Western society. Rather than seeking to save all, Western governments adopted the tactics of those in the East. They chose to save only some, but their choices were based on money, power and influence, qualities that were transient and rapidly moving out of vogue. For all the fear and alarm that was raised in those final days, few saw the end coming. There was still a sense that somehow civilization would escape the downward spiral into animalistic violence, but it didn't.