synesthesia (preview)

An echo down a long hallway, music notes skipping towards the end of the chamber, hand in hand. dischordant and yet harmonic, as if children bounding towards an endless summer afternoon, smelling of grass stains and boredom, fantastic-no, that's not the word-monastic? Chronosynclastic? Myopic? Those didn't fit either. Four fingered hands playing six fingered games, cheating just to lose, a ruse, a bruise, somewhere here there are the proper clues to unlock... something. Something not lost, but buried, X marked the spot but it's no longer there, the cross-stitched fabric torn for its thread, stitches first in the earth, next in cloth, end in flesh. Haptic? Optic? Cryptic? No, none of these, but getting closer, I believe. Mesh and bone, flesh and tone, born and grown, yet noone's home. Empty vessels, vassals, voices marching in time, apologies, explanations, some with rythm, some just broken rattles on an empty sidewalk, marking empty lives with empty steps and empty thoughts. Neurotic? Pathetic? Synaptic... no, wait, yes! Synaptic, a rolling wave, a gunshot of electricity boiling through fibrous waves, Synaptic, chemical ones and zeros. Synaptic! that was the rope to climb, scale, Synaptic, the thread dangling, grasped, Synaptic, until-SNAP.

zzzzzzeig heil!

This is my entry for Chuck Wendig's Friday Flash Fiction Challenge, feel free to comment, leave feedback, or go to Chucks blog and write your own story!

     The first time I saw a six-foot bee stand upright on two legs, and give the 'heil' motion with two more, it was downright hilarious. The first time I saw it was also the last time I found it funny. When I watched that same bee pull out what can best be described as a barbed machete and start tearing through the surrounding throng of people in a blood-soaked fury, my reactions could then be cataloged, in chronological order, as: disbelief, shock, dismay, bemused, amused, and finally-as I realized that these images on the television were, in fact, real-abject terror.

     There's a minute, but incredibly visible difference between special effects and real life these days, and it was perfectly evident in what I was seeing now. Watching an army of mutant bees dismembering a crowd of tens of thousands without hesitation is something I don't believe any CG designer could make look as visceral and gut-wrenching as what was broadcasting live before my eyes.

     Obviously, I did whatever any sane person would do in this situation. I got in my car, and I fucking ran.

     We've all heard the stories. Hitler's Olympics speech being the first TV broadcast into space. Apparently, somebody saw. They listened. They kept listening. They came, and they did their research. They liked Hitler's idea of a master race. They just didn't think he picked the right race. As in: not the human race. Flash forward to the last five years, and the disappearance of bees throughout the world, particularly in the US. It turns out they weren't disappearing; they were being recruited.

     This is the best we can guess, at least. It's not like any of us got time to parse it out, or sit down and talk to them (a silly idea, talking to bees.) All we know is what we saw: something clearly not from this world, speaking through floating screens all over the globe, in a guttural language we couldn't begin to comprehend, in front of a swastika banner, to several unimaginably large armies of genetically modified bees. And then: slaughter. Methodical, merciless, take-no-prisoners, leave-no-survivors shit. The world was ending, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a monotonous and terrifying buzz.

     So we kept to the back roads, traveled in small groups, and did our best to survive. I can't even remember how I met up with this particular caravan, but from the few other groups we ran into, it seemed like everyone was doing the same thing. The problem is, nobody knew which direction to go, we were all just running. The more people you saw, the farther you had to go, because the bees had an ability to hone in on large groups. They take no prisoners, they just leave corpses.

     Things changed fast. After a few days, we had to stop using cars, and I still can't get the image out of my my mind. Like lightning, a huge soldier dropped out of the sky as if from nowhere, and lifted the car in front of me. I was far enough behind to get off the road, amazingly without flipping my Jeep. I looked forward again in time to see the soldier drop the car upside-down. It slammed its entire weight back down, smashing what was left of the roof into the road. Sliding off, it used two of its legs to flip the car back over, and in the same fluid motion, used two more to rip the doors off.

     It pulled out all of the bodies one by one, pausing only to make sure each passenger was dead before flinging them lifelessly out onto the road. Satisfied that it had done its job, it floated up a few inches into the air, shook for a moment to get the blood off, and left. The whole process took less than 30 seconds.

     Within a week, we started seeing the luftwaffles. I'm not sure who coined it, but it's what everyone began calling them, even people in the other groups we came across. Massive, towering honeycombs, hundreds of feet high. Some that we passed even had Swastikas emblazoned on them, or a modified version of the eagle, looking, of course, like a bee. I'm not sure what part of the mutation process filled them with the need for these aesthetics, but the message was always clear: We're not just winning, we've won. Give up. Surrender, die quickly, the master race has finally arrived.

     A week after that, their tactics changed. They stopped patrolling in groups, and started scattering. We saw bees everywhere, but now it was in singles or in pairs. We started hearing stories of people actually killing them, sneaking up on the singletons and smashing through their exoskeleton with a rock, or a hammer, or a bat, and tearing them apart. Stories were all I took them for though. Nobody I met was able to produce any evidence of their exploits, and we never saw any scattered carapaces or torn wings, never saw soldiers with any more damage on them then a few cosmetic scratches on their thoraxes or bullet holes in their wings. The damned things were invulnerable.

     In a day or two, we should be coming down out of the mountains into Spokane, against my better judgment. I feel like it's easier to hide here, but we all feel that need to keep moving, because if you hide, you can be found. We figured the best place we could go was the Northwest. We haven't seen anybody coming east from there, and it rains a lot. Only a few of them fly in the rain, as if in all the modification, avoiding rain was something in the hive-psyche they were unable to weed out. All I can hope for is that soon I can sleep without hearing that buzz. That constant, nearly subliminal buzz. And, of course, hope I'm alive to wake up in the morning.