The Animals Knew Before We Did

Two months ago, a stargazer captured the first known instance of a “string shower” on video. The video made rounds on the internet with other amateur astronomers, but it lost its popularity within a few days.  Some claimed the footage was edited; others shrugged it off as a freak occurrence.

A week after the original sighting, the string showers returned. With thousands of people across the world claiming to have seen them, the professionals decided to get involved. A string shower was confirmed to be a sequence of five larger-than-average meteors following the same arc across the night sky in quick succession. A single event lasted no more than two seconds.

Hundreds of thousands of pets stopped eating that night. No one would notice the severity of this issue for another day or two. Park rangers encountered an increase in mutilated animal bodies.

In the following two weeks, the string showers became a natural occurrence. The majority of world population had encountered at least one. An unease grew within the scientific community. The astronomers struggled to capture clear footage of the phenomena, each video or picture coming out distorted and blurry, just like the original footage. They reasoned the string showers had some electromagnetic effect.

The conservation scientists scrambled to capture animals in order to ensure the survival of the species. The grey wolf population disappeared in one night. The animals had turned on each other, leaving behind stained battlefields of shredded corpses. Despite their more docile nature, the black bears followed suit.

Two weeks ago, governments around the world declared a state of emergency. The string showers had increased exponentially, with China reporting at least 300,000 cases in one night. Religious fanatics declared it was the end of the world, and the string showers were their hail of fire and brimstone.

Apart from emotional fatigue, humans had been unaffected. However, the other species continued their descent into extinction. People stopped burying their cats and dogs, and garbage trucks became hearses. Zoos closed due to the level of aggression between the animals. The surviving creatures were placed in separate cages to prevent them from killing each other. Those animals then stopped eating, dying within a week.

Three days ago, the string showers began to appear during the day. Exposed to the light, people began seeing a connective body between the meteors, almost a translucent film. People panicked. Chaos ensued.

The following day, the string showers stopped. Millions of meteors suddenly hung suspended in the sky across the world. Each still burned. Where it was night, the meteors overwhelmed the stars. Where it was day, people witnessed the snakelike bodies for each set of meteors. They saw the thin tendrils which connected them.

No bird sang. No ant crawled across the ground. No flies collected around the mountains of corpses in the farms. This morning, only humanity was left to gaze upon the meteors. Only humanity saw the meteors collectively blink.