Oliver Milman

The world’s insects had vanished, but the lag of human inertia meant that the first howl of horror, oddly, came not from us but rather from birds. The skies and forests were the settings for increasingly frantic bluebirds, nighthawks, woodpeckers, and sparrows as they searched for aphids, moths, and other meals no longer there. The deficit was huge—around 200,000 insects had to be served up to raise a single swallow chick to adulthood. Now there were none. In all, half of the roughly 10,000 species of birds on Earth starved to extinction, their withered corpses strewn on the ground and within barren nests.

An array of dead bodies—birds, squirrels, hedgehogs, humans, in fact anything that set foot on land and was mortal—began to build up across valleys, hills, parks, and neglected city apartments. Blowflies, which laid maggots able to consume 60 percent of a human corpse within a week, were now absent, as were the moths, dermestid beetles, and the rest of the cavalcade of insects that previously arrived to break down the deceased. Bacteria and fungi were still there to do the job, but at a far slower pace. It wasn’t enough. The rotting carcasses and putrid smell triggered public revulsion, until that, too, became normal.

As if the world around us was conspiring to turn our stomachs, the lingering flesh and bone was compounded by a tsunami of feces, seemingly everywhere, left wherever it fell.