On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 171, of 240 so far.

The Pathogen

I write this as one of the final records of humanity. Not because we have died, but because our old way of life is now gone.

It began in the way that many of our scientists predicted. As our weather changed and became more unpredictable, a pattern nevertheless emerged. The warmest days in recorded history started to stack up, until each and every day of the year set its own new record. The currents changed, sea temperatures fluctuated, and the polar ice began to melt en masse.

We saw the first effects in animal migration, ocean navigation, and of course in coastal flooding. The remoteness and inhospitable nature of the poles was the reason for the one thing that delayed the ultimate outcome: there were very few people there, and as scientific investigation of past ages became much less pressing a matter than present-day survival, we entirely missed the first signs of what was happening.

The southern research stations went silent first, but it was only a matter of days before their northern counterparts, though fewer in number, followed suit. Survey flights were sent to investigate, but they too failed to return, despite relayed telemetry showing successful landings.

Weeks had passed before the matter came to the attention of the mainstream media, and even then it was presented as little more than a human-interest mystery, or a small tragedy attenuated by great distance.

As the ice melted, time ran backwards, in a way. Exposing and thawing things that had never seen our era, and never encountered most of our flora and fauna. Microscopic organisms bred in harsher times, when the planet was much younger. They had never seen intelligence, nor did they possess it themselves, but they were biocompatible with us nonetheless.

There was a brief period, as Australia and New Zealand and east Asia began to fall to silence, when a global emergency was declared. The spectre of a new pandemic hung in the air, and the pantheon of western newscasters looked nakedly afraid as they endlessly recycled sparse facts, and plentiful speculation. Masks reappeared, and airports closed, but still the invisible line of silence marched both northwards from the south, and southwards from the north.

Cities fell, not to illness as such, and not to death — at least not at first. The concentration of remaining normalcy in Europe and the Mediterranean became increasingly panicked, closing borders and deploying burn teams to destroy anyone or anything that came for their land. But no-one came. No-one they could see, and nothing they could aim at. The world, stretching by now from the poles and into much of the rest of the planet, had vanished from the internet, and from satellite communications, and even from land, sea, and air transport. Flights never came. Boats never arrived. All shipping and international travel had ground to an utter halt.

Hoarding and stockpiling gave way to civil unrest, violence, and rioting. Police forces were overwhelmed, followed soon after by the already-stretched military. Everyone was on a high state of alert, but all the threats came from within, due to fear and lack of information.

The pathogen couldn’t be stopped, of course. It came on the winds, and in the rain, from all around. With it came the animals, now freed from their need to avoid human areas of habitation, the world’s apex predators now rendered ineffective, and absent.

As I write this, I can actually see the line of the infection’s progress. I can see it because it’s late in the evening, and the only places still lit are those where the unaffected cower, waiting for what they now know to be the inevitable. So I write, and I sometimes look out the window, and every few hours, the line comes closer. I estimate that it will be here by morning.

When it comes, there won’t be any pain. No sickness. No gasping for breath, and no bright, copper tang of blood. Not even any shock or fear. The pathogen lays bare the truth of why we languished without evolving for huge swathes of our history: it was the reason, and the cause. Only when environmental shifts killed it off did we finally make our long ascent from beasts to thinking beings.

But that’s all over now. We warmed the world, and thawed the horror, and in a few short weeks it has reclaimed the planet, except for a shrinking enclave where I now sit.

There’s a certain bitter justice in the fact that the only place where unaffected humans remain is also the only place with fear and misery. Nature’s jokes are cruel, and incubated for aeons.

I have only a few hours, and I find that I don’t particularly want to wait for my fate. I’d rather meet it on my own terms, by walking out along our few remaining lit streets, to the edge of the line and the edge of the darkness beyond which is now the new normal state of the Earth.

I’ll breathe in the pathogen, and it will apparently take hold in minutes. I’ll sit down, or lie down, and that will be it. Still alive, still aware, but never again to do or say anything at all, until I die uncaring from thirst or hunger. That is its unique evil, buried in the ice for so long.

It brings not sickness or injury, but horrible, inescapable contentment.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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