Eirik: New page: Category:Story Category:Eirik Category:Animal {{DEFAULTSORT:At the End of Time}} {{title|name=At the End of Time|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}} I know how the world is coming to an...

2007-09-05T01:35:26Z

New page: Category:Story Category:Eirik Category:Animal {{DEFAULTSORT:At the End of Time}} {{title|name=At the End of Time|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}} I know how the world is coming to an...

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[[Category:Story]] [[Category:Eirik]] [[Category:Animal]] {{DEFAULTSORT:At the End of Time}}
{{title|name=At the End of Time|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}}
I know how the world is coming to an end, but I won't be there to see
it.

I write this, not knowing how much time I have left, not knowing even
if anyone will miss me. Not knowing if anyone who reads this, who
believes this, will share my fate. So many have vanished so far that
one more won't be noticed. By the time the police look into it,
they'll be gone too.

I saw a bird today. I recognized it. My time is short.

No one really knows when it started. I suspect now it's been going on
for years. We've all heard stories of people that seem to vanish
without a trace. A teenage runaway, a businessman, a mother, a
loner. People who were there one minute and gone the next, never to
be heard from again. We usually just assumed that the body was
rotting in a shallow grave somewhere, the victim of foul play, or they
were living life in some new town with a new identify, escaping what
they left behind.

That's not happening now, for the forest would be full of bodies
stacked like firewood and the cities full of people with new
identities.

But the forest is full of animals, and the cities are far from full.

The press didn't catch on until three notables vanished in a single
day. A prominent television star in Los Angeles, a high ranking
Canadian official in Vancouver and a Belgian scientist who had just
won the Nobel Prize. It was only then that a European paper noticed
the spike in missing persons reports in Belgium. Then Canada. Then
the States.

It was only days before there was a collective realization: Hundreds
of people were vanishing without a trace every day. Soon it was
thousands.

Yesterday, it was over ten thousand.

Some called it the beginning of the Rapture. Some people thought that
it was an evil plot, either by the government or the UN or aliens.
One serious fellow even thought that these people are living the high
life in a bubble city on Mars. He claimed to have proof.

He used to be on the radio all the time, but no one has seen or heard
from him in two weeks.

I think that its God, or maybe Earth herself.

I know the real truth, because I've seen.

I noticed the reports in the paper first, but didn't realize their
importance. Tiny stories buried in the middle, given all of an inch
of print, if that. Five wild California condors sited near
Atascadaro, California. A sudden surge of black footed ferrets, for
reasons unknown. The blue whale population was the highest it had
been since the turn of the century. Key deer were being sighted in
the swamps around Orlando in unusually high numbers.

The reports came is separated by weeks or months, so they never came
together in my head. Until this morning, when I saw the bird sitting
on my back fence.

I knew it from my old books, from old drawings and descriptions. Man
had been its demise. The pinkish gray feathers were a tip off. Then
the other reports came together. The other animals surging from near
extinction, people vanishing.

Now the passenger pigeon is back.

I've been going through the lists since I made the connection. People
disappearing lately aren't totally random. Scientists and journalists
are vanishing faster than the rest, the very people that you would
expect to make connections like this.

And now I have…

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Eirik: New page: Category:Story Category:Eirik Category:Animal {{DEFAULTSORT:At the End of Time}} {{title|name=At the End of Time|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}} I know how the world is coming to an...