[ WP ] Someone widely presumed to have been a crackpot turns out to have been right all along .

Another body crumpled to the pavement as the cracking gunshot split the air. 
 
 A long-familiar box rolled out of fingers that only moments ago clutched it so hard the knuckles blanched. Even before blood began to mix with the rainwater in the street, some anonymous body snatched up the reflective, thin box before sprinting off into the chaos. 
 
 Natty watched from her makeshift home in a garbage-laden stoop that led up to flats stacked high enough to break the clouds. Unnoticed, she crouched, her own precious foil hidden under a knit wool cap, her signs of warning trampled down in the madness. She shifted as the wind picked up, merciless in its frigid bite. She could not hear the bones snapping under her heel, though the feeling was unmistakable. Grimacing, she used a corner of her cardboard sign to brush away the pigeon carcass, its chest now caved in, blood running from the small holes in its beak. 
 
 The birds had started falling from the sky three days ago, splattering over rooftops and umbrellas, windshields and prams. Crows, doves, finches- they all simply dropped. It only took an hour for the skies to bleed avian, drenching the manicured town in a macabre display of feathers and gore. 
 
 It had to be some solar event, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association proclaimed, attempting to settle the global population down. America, Mexico, India, Iran... only the poles were unaffected. 
 
 Natty cried that day. 
 
 She'd endured the heckling for years. Teenagers would wad up the now precious wafer-thin tin and toss it at her for sport. Community outreach constantly stopped their van and urged her to come with them to the shelters where the wireless internet flowed, where with microwaves heating cups of noodles while countless people chattered on cellular phones. She could see it all; the rings of signals humanity did not yet understand, crashing into their bodies like waves on the shore, relentlessly shredding precious particles of their DNA. They'd wanted her to take pills. Hateful little tablets of compressed white powder to counteract her brain's tendency to conspiracy and paranoia. 
 
 Even when the bees faded out, dead in their apiaries, tiny striped bodies littering gardens and sidewalks, translucent wings gone still though they still caught the light of the sun, no one listened. It was the pesticides, surely. The entomologists were on it, not to worry. A tougher hybrid was being genetically manufactured, and while the crops might suffer that year, there was no need for panic. 
 
 Natty had collected as many fuzzy little bodies as she could find, filling an old jar with them and burying them in a community lot. A uniformed officer had stopped her as she lay a stone over the hole she'd dug with her hands, the damp earth still clinging to the underside of her fingernails. `` Move along,'' he'd warned her, oblivious to the catastrophe happening around them. 
 
 There was no officer now. 
 
 She pressed her back to her little corner where she'd blended in for years, watching the growing pool of crimson black blossom around the young woman who's fingers curled like dead spiders to the grey sky. She pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders, looking up at the analog clock still powered by kinetic gears, ticking away the time. 
 
 Just like the little bird she'd moved aside, a thin bead slipped from her nose. 
 
 It would n't be long now. 
 

