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  Of course, they shared this water-aided agility with many other creatures, including the fur seals and elephant seals that long ago had recolonised Grytviken after its whaling days were done, and that had been around when the Sea Sprite had stopped there just a few weeks before. Then, these new colonists had still been sharing this abandoned facility with a small but steady stream of two-footed visitors and the more permanent two-footed residents of the nearby King Edward Point. And, although certainly plentiful and all too evident, they had not overwhelmed the place. Their caution had clearly kept their numbers in check. But not any more. In some way they had already sensed that the rusty remnants of the whaling station and all the land surrounding this stain on South Georgia’s coast had been bequeathed to them by those now-disappeared intruders. So now there were hundreds if not thousands more of these creatures occupying every nook and cranny of the station itself and indeed the whole of the cove in which it sat. One huge bull elephant seal had even used his prodigious weight to flatten part of the white-painted fence around the tiny whalers’ cemetery, and was now sprawled across Ernest Shackleton’s grave. In making himself comfortable, he had knocked over Shackleton’s headstone, the tall granite column carrying a quote from Robert Browning that would never again be read. It was as though he was reclaiming every last aspect of this former unwanted outpost of humanity, even if it meant desecrating the last resting place not of a whaler, but of one of humanity’s recognised heroes. Maybe for too many seals – as for too many whales – humanity wasn’t something they associated with any sort of heroics…

  Back in Ushuaia, it wasn’t just desecration going on. It was more an outbreak of mayhem. And gorging. The rats were the first on the scene, but as the red foxes in the surrounding countryside noticed that Ushuaia had lost its noise, its smells – and its hostile, potentially dangerous air – they too arrived. And then there were the hawks and the caracaras. In their hundreds. And what all of them were doing, with some urgency, was what Derek’s planning team had anguished about for four weeks: clearing away the former apex species of the planet that had now been reduced to no more than an all-you-can-eat buffet, and that would soon be just a scattering of bones. It was gruesome. But not in the eyes of the feeders. And theirs were the only eyes to bear witness.

  It was a similar story around the globe. Every village, every town and every city had become an omnivore’s and carnivore’s paradise, and the omnivores and carnivores hadn’t waited for an invitation. There were cougars and bears – and rats and crows – in Seattle. There were tigers, vultures and rats in Delhi. And there were hyenas, leopards, rats – and honey badgers – in Johannesburg. It wouldn’t last for long, of course. Even eight billion people can’t feed a world of opportunistic feeders indefinitely, and the mayhem would eventually recede. Albeit the pressure on humanity’s past realms from the wildlife they had formerly excluded would not. Crops were already being consumed by every grazer and every browser that could reach them. Monkeys, baboons, opossums, raccoons and a whole host of other animals were already busy in people’s homes. And the first sprouts of Himalayan balsam and giant hogweed were pushing up through the pavements of countless cities and countless towns; the spearhead of a huge army of trees and bushes that would one day bury them under thick vegetation. Eventually, they’d even manage to engulf all those new radiation hot spots that had once been mankind’s nuclear answer to its energy needs; needs that very definitely no longer existed…

  But, back to that new era. Because the beginnings of a permanent change in the world’s appearance – and all that grisly chaos – did presage a new chapter in its history; one in which a certain balance had been fortuitously restored by the actions of the one species that had been well on its way to upsetting that balance – irreversibly. No longer would a majority of the Earth’s residents be under the threat of extinction. The Holocene extinction, the extermination of tens of thousands of species and tens of millions of individual creatures that had been triggered by man’s selfishness, blindness, greed and sheer weight of numbers, had been brought to a shuddering stop. From now on, all the world’s fauna – and all the world’s flora – could recover and then thrive, and not have to face a future of culling, starvation, hunting, dispossession, clearance, trashing, felling or man-made fire. The world was going to be mended. And all those animals, and all those birds, fish, insects, trees, shrubs and bushes that hadn’t already been wiped from the face of this planet could look forward not just to a temporary (albeit extended) respite from man – as postulated by Roy – but to a permanent respite from his relentless and malignant activities.

  They were the fortunate ones. They had been facing unparalleled perils, but now the principal architect of those perils had been removed. And whether they were, in some way, aware of it or not, they would soon be savouring the sweet, long-lasting taste of… survival.

  Afterword

  I conceived this story in 2019. I began writing it on 18th January 2020. I first heard of COVID-19 at the beginning of February 2020.

  David Fletcher