Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

'Back around 1997—98 was when it became really noticeable. Now, hey, we're only talking a time-span of maybe twelve or thirteen years here, but the speed at which things have changed you really wouldn't know it. Like, a thousand years worth of climatic damage packed into just a decade and a half?

'So, let's go back to the years leading up to and including 1997 and '98.

'The Antarctic pack ice had already started breaking into icebergs bigger than large English counties. There were grasses and mosses and flowers where before there'd only ever been ice. Similarly, in the Arctic, the sea ice was getting thinner every year, the so-called "permanent" ice simply wasn't permanent any more, and the cap in general was shrinking. So, all that water had to go somewhere, right? My guess: into the air, the atmosphere, Jake. And as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down again — in precipitation. And brother, did we get rain!

'The Netherlands: flooded to hell… so badly that for a while it looked like all the major dams would go. Germany, and Poland: all the rivers breaking their banks. Greece: unseasonal hail, with hailstones as big as ping-pong balls that flattened the crops. The USA: Jesus, the Mississippi! All that water trying to get out of there, and God help anything that got in its way! And in '97, right here in Australia: first they had fires that scorched people out of their homes — destroying thousands of acres of prairie, woodlands, and national parks, and killing people, livestock, wildlife galore — and then monsoon rains to match anything the rest of the world had suffered. It was just crazy fucking weather!

'But the hell of it was, these were only warnings. The El Nirios are warnings; the melting ice is a warning, and likewise the ozone layer. Like planetwide alarms that have been sounding for a long, long time, all in vain because no one has been listening. Or rather, no one was listening to the ones who were listening…

'In the Far East, they wouldn't stop burning the rain forests. The Americans took the hump when people said their carbon dioxide emissions were off the scale… but they weren't half as snooty in the summer of '98 when Texas turned into a desert! Heat wave? They'd never seen anything like it! As for the Russians: well as usual they hid or disguised or denied any and all wrongdoings whatsoever. Huh! What else would you expect of the people who turned the Aral Sea into the Aral Pond… the folks with more toxic nuclear and chemical garbage per acre than most countries have per square mile! In E-Branch — during my three years with the Branch, anyway — we've been monitoring the hell out of the Russians. Ask Ben Trask about it some time.'

And Jake cut in, 'Well, at least I know something about all that: the way they dump their clapped-out subs, et cetera.'

'That's part of it,' Harvey agreed, 'but the rest of it is just as bad. Anyway, all that's away from the main subject, and in fact we were talking about—?'

'—The big fire,' Jake reminded him. 'Until you went a bit off track.'

Harvey nodded. 'Yeah, the Great Fire of Brisbane, 2007. It was around this time of year, and El Nino was up to its unusual tricks. The weather had been freakish everywhere, especially in the UK, England. For fifteen years the various water boards had been moaning about declining water tables. It could rain all it wanted during the winter, but given just three days of good old heartwarming sunshine in July and these jokers would start leaping up and down, and tearing their hair, and sticking in meters and standpipes, and demanding that people should save water by cutting down on their bathing and putting bricks in their water closet cisterns… and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. What a load of crap, zfyou could afford to take one! It was Nature all those years, warning us that the Big One was coming.

'Well, in 2007 in England it came, and that year we didn't have a summer…'

'It was washed out?' Jake felt obliged to ask. 'It was drowned out!' Harvey told him.

'I seem to remember something about that,' Jake said. 'But I missed it. I was on the Continent.'

'But you must have read about it, seen it on TV?' 'I told you, I was doing my own thing. On the Continent.' 'Yeah,' Harvey agreed. 'About the only place in the world where the weather was moderately normal. You were lucky. But in England it rained, and rained, and rained! And as for declining water tables: forget it. There's been no shortage of water ever since. Anywhere below sea level turned into a swamp. The Thames Barrier failed, and high tides combined with a flooded river to drown the city six feet deep. Through July, August, and September — shit, there were gondolas in Oxford Street! Okay, so I'm exaggerating — maybe it wasn't quite as bad as all that, but it was bad enough. And I could go on and on. Except…' He paused again.

'Except that was the UK,' Jake helped him out. 'And the

people had plenty of warning, and there was little or no loss of life. Yes, I remember it now. But we were talking about Brisbane, not quite so close to home.'

'Not just Brisbane,' the other told him. 'In 2007 it was Australia as a whole. Now, you've got to remember that in Australia the climate works backwards to how we'd expect back home. It's way hotter in January than in July: the difference between summer and winter, right? Oh, really? Well, in 2007 everything went wrong. From February on the summer weather held, there was no winter and it didn't get any colder. Just like now, in fact exactly like now, they had the freakiest of freak weather.'

Turning his head, Harvey gazed out through the limo's one-way windows at suburbs becoming city. 'I mean, just take a look out there.'

Jake looked, lifted an enquiring eyebrow. 'Well?'

'Dry, brittle, parched. Those gardens that should be green are more like miniature deserts. The grass is withered to straw and the leaves are dead on the trees and bushes. Almost all the swimming pools are empty, and you won't see anyone watering any lawns. It should be a maximum of sixty, sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit out there, but it's well over eighty, and this is late afternoon. And naturally, it's an official drought. Perfect!'

'Perfect for what?' Now Jake was really puzzled… not to mention tired of this circuitous route they were taking to the Great Fire.

'Earth Year!' said Harvey. 'The big conference that starts tomorrow right here in Brisbane, billed as the ultimate ecological summit meeting. Synchronicity at work again, or maybe not. Naturally they chose this place, because of the fire.'

'Well, you've lost me again,' Jake told him. 'And we still haven't got to the fire itself.'

The other shrugged apologetically. 'I'm sorry — it's this grasshopper mind of mine. Start me on a subject, it devours me. Okay, the fire:

'It was the weirdest thing ever — a one-of-a-kind sort of thing, or at least everyone hopes so. 2007, and we thought we'd seen it all: the worst tornadoes the USA had ever suffered, the worst floods, the strangest fluctuations and reversals of climate right across the world, with Australia taking the brunt of it. But no, we hadn't seen it all.

'Brisbane was like a tinderbox. The whole east coast from Rockhampton to Canberra — normally a green strip in the lee of the Great Dividing Range, with no water shortage and an excellent annual rainfall — was bone dry from this drought that had lasted for eighteen months. Oh, they'd had rain, but all of it had fallen on the wrong side of the Great Divide! And daily the temperature was up in the hundreds.

'And it was then that it happened. It was like… what, a tornado? An almighty tornado, a whirlwind, yes. But a whirlwind of fire! Ma Nature, Jake, getting all hot under the collar. It started in the Gidgealpa and Moomba oil and gas fields, but how or why it started, no one knows. There are various theories but, like I said, no one really knows. Though miles apart, suddenly the oil wells and gas installations became the epicentre of an enormous fireball. That in itself was a disaster, but nothing like what was to come.