Extinction Read Free Page A

front of the aircraft. There was movement in the sky ahead but she couldn’t make out what it was.
    Glauber stared. It looked like lots and lots of tiny specks criss-crossing the sky, a long way away. Like grains of sand, moving independently of one another, coming together in small groups, then separating again. How many were there? A thousand? A million?
    ‘Are they birds?’ the lady asked him, and he realized she was right; they were birds, circling the sky maybe dozens of miles away, vast numbers of birds, swarming together, separating, and then swarming again.
    But why?
    In the cockpit, Flight Navigator Lao Che Huan turned to the pilot, Hoa Man. ‘They’re on the radar now,’ he announced, voice calm and professional. ‘They must be converging.’
    Huan and Man had been observing the birds for some time; they were following the same course as the airplane. At first the men had had no idea what the specks in the distance were, but after a while it became clear that they were birds. But they behaved in a way neither man had seen before, flying apart and then coming together in larger groups. And now it seemed that they had formed one enormous supergroup.
    ‘How large?’ Man asked.
    ‘I’ve got no idea,’ Huan said, now struggling to contain himself. ‘There must be millions of them.’
    ‘But they’re still some way ahead of us,’ Man said hopefully.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Huan answered immediately. ‘They’re about twelve . . . Oh no,’ he gasped.
    ‘What?’ Man questioned.
    Huan swallowed hard. ‘They’re turning.’
    In the cabin, Glauber felt the woman beside him shudder. He’d seen it too, the birds coming together into one huge group, bigger than anything he’d thought possible.
    And it wasn’t just Glauber and the woman – other passengers had also noticed now. There was a collective gasp as the birds all came together, and then there were cries of alarm when the birds turned, and started flying towards the aircraft.
    The pilot and navigator tensed as the flock swooped and turned, until it was flying directly towards them, less than a mile away now.
    Hoa Man tried to take evasive action, but the birds turned with him, getting closer, ever closer, until they were all he could see, all that anyone could see; the cockpit window was filled with the birds, coming relentlessly towards them, a huge black cloud of birds that seemed to fill the whole sky.
    Glauber watched as the birds soared towards the aircraft. The woman next to him gripped his arm reflexively, her fingers tight with anxiety.
    The birds swarmed from all sides, all over the aircraft, and the plane lurched up and down as if hitting turbulence. Glauber heard the woman next to him scream, heard others scream all through the cabin; and then the birds were gone, the sky outside clear once more.
    ‘What the hell is going on?’ the woman asked breathlessly. ‘What do they want?’
    Glauber’s brow furrowed, as he searched the sky for the birds. What do they
want
? He had never considered the idea. What
do
animals want? Food, shelter, to reproduce; Glauber knew that, as far as an animal could
want
anything, it wanted to survive. But how was this behaviour accomplishing anything? Flying towards the plane in a group of thousands, maybe millions, then breaking away and flying off? It seemed that the purpose was merely to frighten the people in the aircraft, but that was clearly ridiculous. Why would any animal want to do that?
    ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
    There were cries from around the cabin –
There! – Over on the right! – There they are!
– and Glauber saw them again, circling in smaller groups, swarming and then breaking away as they had before. But he realized moments later that this was another group entirely. Surely it must be. The aircraft would be travelling at well over five hundred miles per hour, an impossible speed for birds to keep pace with.
    This realization filled him with even greater horror. It was as if