Woodpecker

Chapter 15 / Ben 3 / 2 x 11 Days Left

Each time he looked at the online message board there were more and more reports. He'd first searched the internet just over two weeks ago, after seeing the swirling green murmuration impinging on the sky above the field in Somerset. It had been so dramatic and on such a large scale, that others must have seen it too. He had spent hours sifting through pages on astronomical and meteorological causes of a green sky. He could rule out aurora so far south and in broad day light, besides aurora were born of the sun and not dense enough to block its light. It was too dynamic to be noctilucent clouds or to have been caused by a thick haze of ice in the atmosphere. A green sky he found out is often connected with tornados forming. That would certainly be dynamic enough, but this wasn't a green sky, it was more like a giant whirlwind of green. Could it have been a tornado? he wondered. But it had danced in the sky unlike anything he had seen before.

He had searched through pages of discussion on chemical leaks, nuclear accidents, military experiments, biological, botanical, and mycological phenomena in the hope he could convince himself that this was something extraordinary but normal. Something explainable. And then he found this page. People were noticing the same thing that Ben had seen and were gathered in this one small spot on the internet to discuss its meaning. To begin with it wasn't many, perhaps twenty or thirty people. But then came the dog walkers, the bird watchers, the fishermen, the runners, the ramblers, the scientists, the students, the milkmen, the postmen, the clergymen, the early morning shift workers, the late-night security guards. People whose daily rhythms beat to the same drum as the sky or whose eyes were curious enough to be drawn there. Finally came the eschatologists, the apocalyptic, to join in. Wrong for millennia, practically since the moment Jesus was pulled down from the cross, they were finally correct in their proclamation that the end of the world is nigh.

Their numbers grew each day. Doubling, tripling, and then raising to a power that increased with each turn of the clock. By Bens estimation they now numbered in the high thousands. Maybe tens of thousands, all speculating on what, "The Greening", as it had become known was caused by. For the most part there was interest rather than panic. Most believed it to originate from the natural world. Perhaps a new type of fungus whose number had increased due to global heating. An airborne antipode of an algal bloom. Ben didn't know, but whatever it was had to be in some way connected with Project Starling. Everything had to be connected. Not just The Greening and Project Starling, but Professor Levitsky, DCI Geering, and the dead man Joshua Matheson. He couldn't explain it but his whole life seemed to have an inevitability about it these days. But he can't prove anything, and he hasn't told Sam about the separate investigation that he is running.

When he had shown Sam The Greening on top of the hill four days ago, she had immediately made the connection. "Do you think this is it?" she had asked.

She didn't need to say what it was. "I think so," Ben replied.

They had stood in raptured silence for a while. This thing, whatever it was, had a beauty to it, like order from chaos. "What do you think it is?" Sam asked hopefully.

"I don't know," Ben had replied gravely. "Does it matter? Nothing good for sure."

"What should we do?"

"There's not much we can do is there? We don't really know anything that could stop it. Levitsky was our only link, and his only contact to the project seems to be dead. If only you'd looked at the contents of that envelope maybe we'd know more. It was a bank statement, Geering let that slip you noticed?"

"I did. Sorry, but I did what I thought was right. Did what I was told I had to do."

"Told? Are you ever going to tell me what's going on here?" Ben said sounding frustrated that she could keep the truth from him. How could he help stop this thing if he didn't have the facts?