The Peckoning

Looking back, it was inevitable that the pigeons would rise up against us.

Of course, they would! I’m not sure how we ever thought that wouldn’t be the case. Human historians in 200 years, if they are still around, will see our actions as folly, our thoughts as simplistic, our uncertainties as certainties. Time will tell the story, as they say. Everything always led to this place.

Pigeon pre-destination.

There’s no one to blame really, besides old men in parks and city sanitation departments. I lie awake at night, thinking – if only Howard had gotten really into puzzling after his wife had died instead of birding. Or if New York had only paid their trash collectors real, livable wages. Maybe then, we could have avoided this whole mess. Feathers would never have blotted out the sun. The world would not be in shambles. Humanity would have remained the “a-pecks” predator and I wouldn’t be obsessed with collecting plastic owl decoys.

I will say that I am grateful these thoughts keep me up at night if only to spare me from the nightmares. Eyes without thought following the bagel in my hand. Heads cocked to the side. Bobbing. Cooing without patience. Inching closer to my shoe than any bird that dumb, and that size, has any right to inch. Just let me eat my bagel in peace! Please! I beg of thee! It’s a bacon, egg, and cream cheese – and I’m hungover! You don’t understand how much I need this.

Shivers.

When it came to pigeons, nothing was as it seemed. Chameleons, posing as fools when in reality? Far from it. I wish I could go back and shake someone, anyone, from the stupor we were in. Think! They co-habituated the streets of our cultural and geopolitical hotspots for crying out loud. Sleeper agents biding time, pecking at our falafels and flying circles around random rooftops.

Good grief, they perched on our fire escapes! Our fire escapes – Ready to block the exit for when they time came. Everything, everything, that they did had a purpose. Shitting on your shoulder? Marking you as a target. Cooing in the morning? Disrupting sleep, breeding stress. Nesting in anything but a tree? Adaptation, leading to invasion.

It all came to a head on August fourteenth.

P-Day.

New York was the first to fall. (Obviously)

Then, Paris. Milan. Chicago. Barcelona. Melbourne. Washington. Moscow.

Gone. Wiped out. Reduced to feathers.

I am one of the few survivors of the New York City massacre. The things I saw that day… Furious flocks invading the subways. Foul flaps echoing the walls of Grand Central. Faultless friends succumbing to swarms. My escape from the city streets would have been a great movie to watch, if those things were still around, that is.

As a born and bred New Yorker, I was quick to think on my feet. Bursting into a Nathan’s hot dog stand with pigeons hurtling their bodies against the sides, I released a storm of old buns into a dirty street puddle. A pigeon’s greatest vice. The flock clocked it immediately, and I slipped down the street into the only place that I thought pigeons would never go.

The sewers.

Why would pigeons never go into the sewers, you ask?

Because the sewers were ruled by another secondary class.

Rats.

My saviors.

Turned out, the pigeons were not the only ones biding their time. Rats took refuge beneath the earth, having gotten wind of P-Day through their incredibly inter-webbed intelligence networks.

Scavengers, we used to think of them as. Who knew that they were scavenging secrets as well as pizza crusts and half-eaten burritos?

I was not welcomed…

The rats of New York were stubborn, but curious. Wary, but brave. Conniving, but conscientious. Their cold war with the pigeons had been in effect for centuries and I learned of the animal’s shared aspirations for overthrowing humanities grip upon the earth. Rats and pigeons, pinched by human civilization for eons, each one striving for dominance.

Squeaks vs. Coos.

The Black Plague? An attempted rat uprising. The fall of the Roman Empire? A pigeon revolution. World War I? World War II? Both of them working under a tenuous treaty that P-Day had just destroyed.

At first, I was treated, not as an equal, but as a prisoner (Truth be told, I was just happy to be un-pecked and breathing). They kept me with the other survivors that had found their way under the manhole covers. Say one thing for the rats, they believe a society should be judged based on how they treat their prisoners. A surprising moral code for creatures of squalor and shadow – though I suppose underestimation is how humanity ended up here in the first place. We were fed three square scraps a day and were given cardboard to chew on while passing the time.

Each day, a new survivor was added to the pile to tell us stories from the world above and, each day, we became surer and surer that saving it was a lost cause…

How can we save our breadcrumbs and park benches from the gray wings of death and white guano?

The answer? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Being one of the first that the rats had captured and making a name for myself as a well-behaved prisoner, I began to earn trust. More importantly, I began to learn. Learn their language. Learn their ways. Learn how to be… rat. The scurrying and gnawing took a bit of time to master, but the hatred of pigeons, I already had in abundance.

Either adapt or die.

I relinquished my life as a human and evolved into a rat.

My aims were simple. Provide value, sow discord amongst the rat loyalists, and align a contract between my old species and theirs.

It was a tall order, but I kept one thing from my time as a human: My resolve.

I wasn’t doing this for just myself. I was doing this for all of humanity and even the rats, themselves. The pigeons did not deserve the surface world. They took it without reason, but that… that is what gave me my reason.

Something clicked in my brain, and I foresaw…

Down with the rats-with-wings and up with the rats… er, without wings!

Squeak!

Squeak, squeak, squeak!

Squeak! Squeak!

As I write this, it has been four years since the events of P-Day. Four years in the darkness and filth. Four years of planning and four years of hoping. Finally, after all this time, my ambitions might come to fruition. Three nights ago, the compact between rat and man was ratified (no pun intended). Our colonies spread throughout the city like a disease. I have squeaked so hard to rally a united rebellion, it hardly feels real, but the garbage cans have been left without lids, as the rats like to say. Opportunity awaits.

The pigeons have grown fat upon their plunder. They do not suspect a thing.

We strike at dawn.

Time to change history.