The Bees

Prose today, as requested by a friend.  Not sure if this works, and I think it may spawn some sequels, so I'll tag it as such. Anyway... enjoy and feel free to comment...


The Bees

Nobody knew where they came from, and for a time, nobody cared.

Of course, they weren’t actually bees. Not wasps either. truth be told, it wasn’t even known if they were actually insects. But if it looks like a bee, swarms like a bee and stings like a bee then people tend to assume that’s what they are.

The first swarms appeared late last summer. They made the local papers, warranted a bit of a buzz on the Internet. That was all. Mostly the stories ran positive, tales of people enveloped by these swarms but walking away unharmed.

Nobody died.

It seemed they stung, but unlike bees, weren’t venomous. And also, unlike bees, they did not die afterwards. Few bees were found on the ground, nor tangled in clothes. The bee mortality was very low, the odd one may have been slapped by an irate palm, or trampled if they flew too close to their victims’ feet but in general, the bees swarmed, stung and then left.

A few specimens made the news. Blown up pictures of creatures that looked very much like certain types of bee, but could also have been wasps, or hornets or some sort of striped fly for all the general public could see. A few insect experts gave their opinions. They said the bees were not bees. They said they were unsure what species they were. Not a great deal was gleaned from these interviews. Or not a lot was passed on through the news, that’s for sure.

Of course, the Internet lit up. A new species of bee? A particularly belligerent but ultimately harmless sort of bee. Or so it seemed. The theories were batted around the web. They were genetically modified. They were alien. They were nano-technology. They were a mystery.

But no-one had died and eventually a new Royal baby was born, another scandal rocked the newspapers and a top talkshow host committed suicide on national TV and the conspiracy theorists found new fodder to chew. Such is the way of the world.

A couple of weeks after the first swarms came the epidemic.

It wasn’t noticeable at first. And, to be fair, it wasn’t a particularly memorable epidemic. Sufferers came down with a bit of a temperature, a headache, a snotty nose and running eyes. In short, it looked like every other winter cold; just enough to make a person feel rotten, not bad enough to be worth a few days off work. The only remarkable symptom at all was a vibrant blotchy red rash that started on the trunk and spread to the limbs. Over the course of the virus all the blotches merged and the rash faded away. Spectacular, but a mere annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

And nobody died, so who really cared? So half the population was walking around sneezing, looking like they had chess-board sunburn, but nobody was dead. Things carried on.

Until the swarms came again.

Again they massed, in city parks and crowded streets,  school playgrounds and outside shopping centres. And people marvelled as the insects flew among the flashing lights of the Christmas decorations and lit upon the branches of the towering town fir. And again they stung, but people stood and watched; knowing them to be painless stings, knowing they would walk away. Enjoying the spectacle of being a single unit in a dark swirling mass of tiny insects. People danced, can you imagine that? they watched and they danced and accepted the bees as a wondrous quirk.

And then these people went home and died.

Thousands of people. The memories of dancing still fresh in their brains, the last residues of snot still drying on binned tissues. They died.

And then people cared. At least, those still alive.

The others, the snotty and the stung, they may have cared, but they got up and walked around and it seemed nothing was on their minds but motion and food.

And, as you know, that’s when we became food.