A Dark Evolution (Book 2): Deranged (19 page)

“They’re going to ram it!” James cried.

Then the gunship opened up with 30 mil cannons. The cannon fire was twice as loud as the chopper, roaring through the hills over them. The Jeep lit up in a fury of sparks before exploding into a twenty foot tall geyser of flames. Kala’s mouth was hanging open. No one leapt from the burning vehicle, there was no escape. The flames raged for two minutes, then, its fuel spent, the fire burned out quickly and the Jeep rolled to a stop, so close to its salvation. The helicopter banked hard and flew back off to the west.

“My god,” James said, breathing hard.

Kala could smell the burning fuel from the Jeep, and the tang of gunpowder. Dylan’s words popped into her head again, and she finally comprehended.
The fox will always chase a rabbit.

“We need a rabbit, James, we need a damn rabbit!”

Nolan shook his head in disgust. “They’ve got it all wrong, this is, this is just ludicrous, it’s ridiculous.”

Even Bruce Dempsey, the usually cynical biology scientist, seemed surprised by Fox News’ report. “This is a sad abuse of journalistic powers,” he said. Bruce didn’t think they could save everyone, in fact, he was an admitted pessimist about their situation, but Jason thought that like many, he still had hope. Even so, this report was a slap in the face.

Jason watched the ticker tape style banner moving across the bottom of the screen. “Bee Deaths Will Not Cause Apocalypse.” He felt like crying, or punching someone, preferably the round-faced reporter that was speaking on screen. For ten minutes they had ‘debunked’ the global food shortage crisis, being dubbed the bee apocalypse, that Nolan had been fastidiously educating the public on. After another two minutes, Jason finally spoke. “Do you think they don’t understand, or do they just not care?”

Nolan blew out a breath. The usually handsome, even dapper, man had transformed considerably during their stay in the Upper Peninsula. He drummed his fingers on the table in front of them. “I remember the research they’re citing. It’s old, and more to the point, it isn’t applicable in this situation. Remember in the 1990s, even a little in the eighties, when colony collapse disorder was making the news?”

“I remember,” Bruce said. “It was actually a decent public awareness campaign.”

“It was until it was over-sensationalized, then the skeptics came out and the public grew disenchanted with the plight of the pollinators,” Nolan said. He was an expert at public relations and had lead many global campaigns in his years as an ecologist and conservationist. “The commercial honey bees were dying off en masse and nobody knew why, so this whole movement to educate people started, but then there were a few overzealous people who said that if the honey bees died off, the world would end.”

“Well, it frightened a lot of people,” Dempsey said, “and rightly so, the honey bee is a big part of the world, but -”

“But, it isn’t the keystone of our global ecology. In fact, there isn’t one single species I can think of that is, though if I had to venture a guess, it would be some type of nitrogen-binding bacteria,” Jason said.

“Probably, but anyhow, the hype was huge about the honey bee, in fact, there was a quote from Albert Einstein saying, ‘if the honey bee disappears, then man will follow within four years,’ or something like that.”

“Ridiculous,” Nolan snapped. “Einstein was a physicist. A genius, yes, but he had no interest in biology whatsoever. It's a clever quote, but made up. If the honey bee disappeared, millions of jobs would be lost, honey production would stop, and the price of fruits would skyrocket. But life would go on. It would take a few years, but wild bees would start to take over, not nearly at the same rate mind you, but the world would move on. Once that came out, people lost interest. It wasn’t immediate and catastrophic anymore. And really, who the hell uses honey anyway?”

“This is distracting. And it’s exactly what’s happening in the news right now, distraction. They're recycling this old information that makes it seem like this is not a big deal. The truth is, we aren’t talking about the elimination of the honey bee, which isn’t even native to the U.S. anyway, we’re talking about the total annihilation of insect life. All the pollinators, wild and domestic, gone. Most ground and leaf-dwelling insects are completely gone. What do we still have?”

Dempsey chuckled and pulled up a long, ever-changing statistic form being cultivated from hundreds of researchers around the world. The die-off database, it was called. “We have head lice, ticks, South American termites, cockroaches, and of course, mosquitoes. And whatever we can’t find in the rainforests, they’re feeling the fallout but they were largely untreated, so I’ll presume that there are many more species that have taken refuge there.”

“Your Africanized bees, Jason?” Nolan asked, eyebrows raised.

Bruce chuckled and Jason shot him a menacing look, to which he shut up right away.

“It doesn’t look like they’re going to make it. We have no solid data, but it looks like the level of pesticides in the plant material and earth was so high that when they ingested nectar it drove them insane.”

“Really? Insane?”

Jason cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable with his failure. “They were cannibalizing their own queens.”

“My god.”

“Yep. Some of them are going to make it, but not enough to really make a difference. It could take years for the surviving queens to reproduce enough to start repopulation of the country.”

“Well, it wasn’t going to fix the problem anyway, was it? I would have liked to see them take hold though, at least give a little bit of hope,” Nolan said.

“Me too,” Bruce admitted. “I knew it wouldn’t work though. We now have no pollinators, and we also have no ground-dwelling insects, which are necessary to make the soil livable for plants. On the plus side, nobody is spraying insecticides anymore, at least not from the air; the no-fly mandate has been effective so far.”

“That happens when they start shooting planes out of the sky,” Nolan said disapprovingly.

“It had to be done,” Jason countered. “They weren’t taking it seriously, no one ever does, until there are consequences. As a whole, the general population behaves more like toddlers than educated adults.”

“How’s your border coming along?” Bruce asked. It was the only idea Jason had since being here that Bruce approved of.

“Surprisingly fast, we’re working in a line from east to west and in only a week we’ve covered Virginia and are moving into Kentucky. Bruce, what is our best bet for food production? Now that we’re building this border, we’re going to have to feed the people inside it.”

“Corn,” Bruce and Nolan responded together. They glanced at each other, and Bruce held out his hand for Nolan to continue.

“Of all the wind-pollinated plants we can grow in our climate, corn is going to produce the greatest food yield for humans. Also, any surpluses can be fed to livestock to help keep them going as long as possible.”

“Is the soil going to be too toxic to grow corn?” Jason asked.

Nolan cleared his throat. “Well, okay, so I’ve actually been looking at this. The corn will grow, it’s an incredibly hardy plant. But the fruit is going to pull up toxins from the ground, so we’ll be eating it.”

“Will the levels be high enough to kill?”

“I - we have no idea yet. Pesticides stay in the soil and then get taken up by plants. The amounts in the plants might actually be small, but when they get into our livers and other fatty tissues, they amplify. So, best case scenario, some long-term liver disease, possibly failures.”

“That’s best case?” Jason asked.

“Unfortunately yes,” Bruce answered, “probably better than starving though.”

“What would fix it, hypothetically? I mean, what would ‘ideal’ be?”

“Honestly?” Noland asked. “Honestly, the ideal thing would be if agriculture could be ditched altogether. Dial back the clock a couple hundred years. Every family has a small farm plot and grows their own food, providing most of what they need, then they trade with other families for what they don’t have. Of course, without natural pollinators, this would still be difficult to achieve, but think about it, if we were all growing our own food, there would be no global food shortage. Even before this newest crisis, there was hardly enough to feed the world.”

“That would have also prevented the overpopulation of our planet. When communities are forced to actually provide for their offspring themselves, they are much less likely to overproduce children,” Bruce said, his hands folded on his lap.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, here in America especially, you get hungry, you swing through the fast food joint and eat for three dollars. If you don’t have money, government programs will help you eat. Those type of things didn’t exist in primitive cultures, and they tended to only reproduce if they could actually care for their children. The children that weren’t nourished, perished, and life moved forward, just as it does everywhere else in the natural world. Some say that’s a cruel way to look at things, but it is not, it’s the way nature intended. We are a country full of soft-bodied, lazy, carbohydrate addicts.”

“Well, good luck selling that to the country,” Nolan said with a chuckle. “It may be true, but it will never happen.”

“Obviously not, but Jason asked what
ideal
would be, and in my opinion, ‘ideal’ is ditching this overproduced, overindulged modern way of life. Going back to a subsistence-based lifestyle would solve nearly all of our problems.”

“I wonder what Dr. Schwartz is doing back there,” Jason said, glancing across the office to wear he just saw Schwartz disappearing through the door of his private office.

“Doctor death?” Bruce chuckled. “I’ve no idea, but that guy scares me. It’s like he’s got a dark cloud following him around.”

“Gives you chills?” Nolan asked playfully. “Like a dementor?”

Bruce raised an eyebrow, then Jason cut in. “Why did you call him doctor death?”

Bruce cleared his throat. “Just rumors really.”

“And..” Nolan urged him on.

“Well, he has two assistants back there with him. I heard one of them say he came over from Germany after the war.”

“Like, World War Two?” Jason sputtered. “He’d be ancient.”

“He
is
ancient,” Bruce replied with a smirk.

“What was he doing in Germany, some kind of experiments for the Nazis or something?” Nolan asked, very intrigued.

“No idea, but it’s my thinking that scientists in Germany during WWII were up to no good.”

Jason frowned at this, but didn’t put a whole lot of weight on Bruce’s theory’s, there just wasn’t any evidence to suggest Schwartz had been doing the Nazi’s bidding.

There was a commotion in the room and Jason, Bruce, and Nolan all looked to see the source. Two white-jacketed men were rushing through the room toward the security wing. Nolan shrugged and followed behind them. They overheard one saying, “It’s wandering around in the woods less than a mile from here, they’ve got it on the video feed!”

Intrigued, Jason and Bruce followed as well, until everyone was crowded around the large room which housed the building’s surveillance hub, three walls of large screens each displaying a different part of the compound. Clint was sitting in the room, and with a few clicks on his tablet, he brought one image up on the largest monitor, a sixty-inch display so crisp it almost hurt Jason’s eyes to watch.

*****

“The bear, no contest,” Nolan said, his eyes wide on the giant flat screen in front of them. Almost all of the center’s residents were in the security hub, watching what was sure to be an epic battle.

“I don’t know, Peterman,” Lance Ogulin said. Lance was a clinical psychologist, whose primary function here was to try to anticipate the reaction of the nation’s masses to new crises and the techniques they used to deal with them. “I’ve read that a human’s physical prowess is hindered only by our minds. Look at people like Usain Bolt, the fastest man on earth, able to sprint twice as fast as ninety percent of the human population of this planet.”

“And you think that’s because he’s been able to tap into a part of his brain that allows him to move faster than the rest of us?” Jason asked.

“Not necessarily, what I think is that athletes like him have been able to actually break down the part of their brain that limits the majority of us, those limits are there to protect us from injuring ourselves.”

“Interesting,” Jason murmured, watching the teenage girl on the screen. Of course she wasn’t really a teenage girl, not any more. Her existence as a normal human had been changed forever by the arachnid parasite, the creature they saw now was what many would consider a zombie, a nearly mindless being of muscle and rage.

“Still,” Peterman argued, “she’s a petite girl, and
that’s
a black bear!”

The psychologist smiled weakly. “Well, this will be interesting. Humans don’t have the same natural predatory adaptations, no, but she will be very fast, and with no higher brain functions to get in the way, her savagery will be, well, remarkable.”

“Quiet,” Clint said, hushing them from behind the monitor. “It’s about to get real.”

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, bears are abundant, a part of the natural ecosystem. What was happening here was anything but natural. The compound’s video detection system picked up an infected girl wandering out into the woods less than a mile from their camp. Where she came from they did not know, but from the way she moved, scenting the air as she walked, she was tracking something. That something was an American black bear. It hadn’t seen her yet. The bear was nosing through the thin snow on the ground, eating what berries it could before the throes of winter forced it into hibernation. Now the community of scientists working here was watching with perverse anticipation as the girl closed in on the bear.

The view was crisp, and Jason noted almost with pity, the girl’s ragged state. She must have been sixteen or seventeen when she got infected. Her face was still smooth, half of it anyway. Part of her cheek had been sliced open, and a ragged piece of flesh was flapping in the cold air as she walked. Long since congealed blood hung from her injured face, where likely she had survived an encounter with a human, probably killing whoever she had fought.