The Hum of a Desert, Dawning

Chapter 1

The alarm blared twice. The dust had settled, covering our bodies. All around me, people are cracking their bones and getting up. I groan getting up, and shuffle into line, dusting off my ashy pants away from the pile of cloth and scraps from which everyone had just awoken. The hum of bees is ever-present. Their chubby little bodies drift and create minuscule blind spots in the air. They seem sluggish, and peaceful. The glare bouncing through the dim smog that constantly drifts in the city blinds us momentarily as we are corralled through the metal doors at the side of our enclosure. The hastily formed cement walls around our quarter enclose us. We break out of line for some stale breakfast. We eat on the dusty ground. I walk to my post.

I am a designator this week. I'm in charge of people's check ins, check outs, and number of transactions at the gate. I remain posted with a flaking clipboard all day, right by the only exit of a dilapidated, repurposed parking garage and ask the questions "Name? Age? Gender?" as well as inform them all, "You are in section __ today. Have a safe and productive day." An exciting job, for sure.

At least it's safe.

I stay before that rusty chain-link fence that lets out select workers. Right now, workers are being used as a crew that's 'building homes' for clean people. In reality it's making airtight and resistant walls and ceilings that surround a new town, so that the men, women, children, and military personnelle can live without the fear of swarms. Apparently, according to someone, they will even grow their own food in there and never need to leave. It is very spacious, I'm told.

The morning groups are shipped off. My role as designator is done for the morning. I am offered up to aid some traveling citizens. I can go outside the camp for a bit. We 'get to serve' our fellow people because we don't get attacked after being stung. We've been called Survis. Survis is a stupid name in my opinion. It's shortened from survivors, and because surviving a bee attack is 'special' enough to make you a permanent ward of the state; we have to be addressed as such. And on top of that, Survis sounds like service, which is what we've been told we provide to the good citizens of Los Angeles and beyond.

But it's more like slavery. At this point there's nothing we can do.

Today I merely have to follow a clean group to their destination. Then come back. Guards usually harass us when we return. They'll hunt us if we don't.

A family of three appears just outside the parking lot fencing. A thin looking mother and son, and a surly father, all dressed in fresh and colorful clothing. The mother is in a pattered sundress more lime green than a slushee, and the father and son are in matching black pressed pants with crisp white button downs, tucked in of course. And matching dazzling leather shoes. They don't look like they belong here, their candy colored clothes are strikingly artificial against the dusty cement surroundings. They are roaming from Adeline Acres, their housing, to a local reclaimed mall, which has been a popular marketplace recently. It is only a few blocks, but the safety of their son is important, I guess. We begin our walk.

Meandering behind this brightly colored circus, and taking moment to enjoy the outside, I take a deep breath. The air is always tinted orange. Or brown. But the smoke and pollution do little to wreck my meditative breaths.

The family doesn't even notice me, but it's no bother now. They've adapted fast, like a lot of clean families. The little boy has already been taught not to acknowledge me or anyone else who has survived an attack. This mother and father could have been my neighbor, or parents of my friends. Crazy how people change so fast. But it's not hard to remember the fear and absolute anarchy that year caused for the world.

If it hasn't yet been understood, I was attacked by a swarm of bees, and I survived. Bees were dying. We need bees. Scientists found ways to make our bees stronger and more resilient. And then we couldn't stop them.

They were released too early, and turns out bees that have stingers like wasps and attitudes like mobs really can fuck up ecosystems, not to mention people. To boot, they were apparently bred with potent stingers to increase their chances of survival. I guess no one checked the human survival rate on that. Surprise... it's low.

It was summer when the news first hit. It's not hard to imagine the amount of kids infected and killed in the first couple of months. Swarms love to make hives on kiddy plastic. And they defend those nests. Most of the time too well.

Then exterminators were called in, and surprise surprise, these bees were too tough for the normal tactics. In fact, gassing them or irritating them triggered the next batch of larvae to hatch as queens, as we later found out, and they'd spread swarms and hives like hydra heads.

The news did their best to keep us informed. Unfortunately it invited terror.

My meditation ends suddenly because the boy, who was holding his mothers hand, looked back at me and stared, for a long time.

I gave him an apathetic, closed lip grin, but instead of turning back around, he tugged on his mothers arm and asked "why isn't she talking?" to the parents who had been jabbering the whole walk. The mother didn't even look at me, and just pulled the boy forward so I was hidden from his view.

So much for civility I guess.

We reached the mall with ease. The boy's little blond head bobbed into the open sliding doors. A cool breeze of clean air conditioning smothered me for a second. The family faded from my view. The doors closed. The smog hung low in the sky. I return to my quarter for dinner.

...

I resume my shift, a beacon of bureaucracy, except I don't assign anything to anyone. Sometimes I have to demand a person goes to the infirmary, but mostly I just wave them in, checking that they returned.

Across the entrance, on the opposite sidewalk is a man. About 35 years old. I think. He gazes into our camp. There are only about 600 of us. Total. In all of Los Angeles. The man has no assistant Servis, but usually men don't. He slinks away quickly.

I think about telling my friend Samuel about the man, but I forget too quickly. Samuel has been gone on a job anyway. I skip dinner and fall asleep on cold sheets.