The Bees: Interlude

 Interlude

The young man beside me was no more than twenty years old. Rake thin, his black hair in tight rows on his head. He was dressed in sports clothing, inadequate for the weather,and bright white trainers. They seemed incongruent.

“Never seen nothing like this,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this,” I answered. “Do you know any of... anyone here?”

The young man pointed into the crowd. “My mum, dad... grandma.”  I followed the line of his finger, spotted the family group. His relatives were standing together, all smartly dressed. His father was wearing a tie. As out of place as his son’s footwear.

We fell into silence, the young man and I, sitting almost companionably on the bench. The people standing did nothing. We watched them for over an hour. They took no notice of us, not even when the young man took out a tobacco tin and began to roll. He licked the cigarette paper and sealed the roll-up with a flourish. Then he offered it to me. It had been years since I smoked, but I took it. He handed over a lighter.

The smoke curled up into the air, above the heads of the mob. It didn’t seem to bother them.

I wondered how many of the mob were smokers. Whether the scent of cigarette smoke was reaching their nicotine receptors, awakening the craving. I wondered if any of them felt the hunger that must be gnawing, or the thirst. Did they feel pain?

Impulsively I leaned forward, towards the nearest dead-eyed person. A middle-aged woman, barely five feet tall and slender. I pinched her, grabbing the flesh of her forearm between my finger and thumb, squeezing hard. The flesh took a few seconds to settle back into place, it reddened a little. The woman blinked slowly. Did not turn.

“What did you do that for?”

“Just an experiment, I wanted to see what she’d do.”

“It don’t seem to matter what you do,” he said, “they’re dead from the neck up. Living zombies.”

“I’m not sure if they are dead or not. They were dead last night.”

The young guy seemed to consider this. “For real, definitely dead? Because, like there’s some things that look like dead, but ain’t, y’know?”

“I used to be a hospital porter,” I confided. “I know dead.”

“I’m a student,” he replied.

Welcome to the university of life, I thought, Post-apocalyptic studies. the post-post-modern era. ”What were you studying?”

“Media studies.”

Nothing of use then. It was going to be a long time before media was relevant again. If ever. Maybe I was being pessimistic. Maybe all this was some sort of group hysteria thing. Maybe they would all wake up and wonder what the hell had happened. Somehow, I doubted it.

“Can you hear that?”

“What?” I listened. All I could hear was the eerie whispering breathing of a thousand people. For the first time, I realised they were breathing in sync.

“Buzzing.”

I saw them before I heard them. Over the glass dome of the shopping centre roof, the grey sky darkened to black and the sound of millions of tiny, almost inaudible thuds as the bees hit the roof. Like rain, but fleshier. The mall grew dim, dark.

Then a strange scraping noise. Not metallic, but the sound of teeth on glass.

We didn’t wait for the bees to chew their way through the glass. We took to our heels and fled.