The Desert War

There is a saying that goes, "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to witness it, does it make a sound?" or at least something along those lines. The tree doesn't make an impact according to humans because it has no effect on them, but what humans don't know is that everyone and everything is deeply, deeply connected...

A deep rumbling shook the land, the leaves on trees shaking, the ears of rabbits pricked up, and the hairs on every single persons' forearms standing up, not to mention also the hair that they have or don't have on top of their heads, also standing up. It was like an earth wave, not quite an earthquake that swept through the suburban Arizona neighborhood, and it was the most unsettling thing anyone had ever experienced.

"What was that?" one neighbor whispered, although he had no idea why he was doing so.

"I don't know, but I didn't like the feeling of that."

At the local news station 10 miles away, after a brief pause, everyone scrambled over each other and papers flying up into the air and onto the ground. Bosses were barking out orders but were drowned out by staff angrily replying back that they were madly scrambling and calling other news stations and dispatching reporters to every possible location where they thought that the epicenter of the earth wave could've originated from.

Some television broadcast stations were contacting professors who were experts in seismic activity and giving them live interviews, asking them what their take on the whole situation was. All of this was happening in the course of under one hour, but it was frustrating because it seemed that no-one knew the answer to the strange phenomenon and some people even swore they felt small trembles under their feet ever since experiencing that first earth wave.

However, this was only the first of the peoples' worries.

It came from the desert.

It was 2 in the afternoon when the strange phenomenon first occurred and then at 3pm, right on the dot, there was a sudden boom.

Then another. Boom. Then a third. Boom.

They weren't loud at all, barely audible you could even say, but it was unsettling. And then the bright Arizona sun suddenly got dimmer. And dimmer. People started coming out of their homes, and out of their cars, their office buildings to see if it was a rare eclipse that no one knew about. But no, it was no eclipse. What a little kid of six first pointed out on the horizon as a dark cloud, signifying the possibility of rain, was no rain cloud at all. It was black, but it was approaching the small suburban town at an alarming rate. That's when the adults started to panic and scream to their children to go back inside the house and for people to quickly shut themselves back into their cars and then drive off.

It was indeed no cloud at all, unless you can count over A HUNDRED THOUSAND BATS as a cloud. They were menacing and bigger, much bigger than the usual bats that people were accustomed to. No, these were bats that no one had ever seen before. Cars were turning on their bright lights and trying to drive away from the chaos that was enveloping the town but to no avail. The cloud swarmed all over the place, causing people to panic and they were even smashing into office windows and broken glass was everywhere. The one thing no one noticed because of the chaos was that amidst all of this, there was a single white bird watching on an outcrop.

That bird was a barn owl.