Writhing clods of them gather on anything slightly moist, which is rare in this withering, persistent heat. Black masses undulate and stubbornly stick to whatever they have found. They won’t dissipate with a wave of the hand like before. Stomping them with a boot, or scraping them away with a knife, will only see them scatter and reform on whatever it is they have in their clutches. A pool. A rotting apple. Anything with sugar or water. And they are everywhere, covering everything.
It’s hard to say when it got this bad. Things tend to go bad slowly, and you only notice the rot when its stench becomes overwhelming. There’d be more flies than usual around bins and animal shit. Then it was around toilets and fridges. Soon they were ubiquitous in all the places we were; the offices, the parks, the houses. Everywhere.
The attempts to deal with them were meek, with so much else going on in the world - the rising temperatures, water shortages, transport failures, civil unrest, spreading autocracy - a few flies were a long way down the doomsday list. But when they started getting mulched up in the water system and out of the taps ran viscous, yellow goop, that’s what really stirred us into action.
By then it was far too late. They had infected food stores across the planet. Reached a critical mass that snowballed over the course of a few, savage months. Ate crops in the fields. Spread disease among livestock. The collapse happened in a matter of weeks. Millions died. Perhaps billions. Hard to say with all our communication networks failing.
Thing is, now that they’ve eaten everything else, there’s little left for the flies to devour. There’s just what remains of us.
Paddy Dobson
11th August 2022