by Pamela Jekel
Immediately, the commentators began to discuss her message. “Well, it’s about what we expected to hear, nonetheless it’s small comfort to hear it,” one news anchor said.
“At least we still have a government,” another answered. “Of sorts.”
“And what about the latest Advisor message? She never mentioned it once. They’re clearly offering—“
“They’re not offering, they’re demanding—“ the second reporter interrupted.
“Okay, but let’s look at the options. They’ve said all along they’ve come to help us save this planet. We can’t do it individually; we have to work together under some sort of direction. Who’s going to provide that direction? The government? What’s left of it? Local governments? We’ll be lucky if they can keep the power on. Within a few days, we’ll have food and water shortages, rioting, roving bands of looters taking what they need by force—“
Jack turned it off. “How much food do we have?”
She looked down at the floor and sighed. “Probably about two months, if the power stays on, and you can catch some fish. I can cook on the woodstove; we can keep ourselves warm, but with no power, some of the supplies won’t make it.”
“With no power, the well pump won’t work,” he said. “So then we’ll have to boil water from the river.”
She looked up at him, her eyes bleak. “It’s too late to put in a garden. I have some seeds, but I can’t get them in the ground until April. I can plant some potato eyes and onions, once it’s cooler.” She glanced out the window. “Miranda needs good nutrition. So does Chase, if he’s going to do physical labor like this.”
“Maybe we can barter wood for food. Eggs, milk, these farms around here’ll have extra.”
“And likely all the wood they need and relatives crammed into every spare bed.”
He nodded. “If I were trying to coerce every living human being to collect in one place, first thing I’d do is close down the grocery stores, and the second thing I’d do is offer food. So do we push the button?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Let’s talk about this more. Don’t tell the kids.”
That night, they lay in bed and discussed their options over and over. They blamed themselves for not being better prepared, for not having the foresight to stock more food, fuel, ammunition, medical supplies, for not putting solar panels on the well shed, for not putting up a water-catch system under the gutters, for not moving to Australia, and finally exhausted, they stared at the ceiling in silence.
“Once we press that button, they’ll know we’re alive,” he said.
“I think they do anyway. They seem to know everything else.”
“Satellites, cable, ATM’s, cell phones, Onstar in both cars, they’ve got so many ways to find us. They probably knew where we were the minute the cars were parked.”
“Now, you’re being paranoid,” she said. “Surely, we’re not that important.”
“Well, there’re a lot fewer of us to watch now.” After awhile he said, “Let’s do this. I’ll go into Watkinsville tomorrow, check out what’s happening at the store, what the locals are doing. Then, we’ll know more before we decide.”
“Should we go with you?”
“It’s probably safer for the kids here.”
Jack left Chase with chores, slipped the shotgun back in the car, and drove to town after breakfast.
He was gone for several hours, and the longer he took, the more anxious Skylar became. Any strong truck bumper could take out that gate. Without him there, she knew that if a strange car or a mob came down the dirt road, all she could do was take the kids and run to the ravine, hoping to hide there until the danger was past. She could not defend them or their supplies. Finally she heard a car approaching, looked out between the trees, and saw the familiar glint of Jack’s truck. She ran to meet him before he could get to the cabin. She saw instantly that he had no cans of food on the seat beside him.
“It was closed,” he said. “Closed permanently.”
“Oh no,” she moaned.
“I did find one other little store, but it’s only open one day a week, the sign says, next Thursday. I did get some rope, some nails, a few other things at Ace. They’re closing, too. There’s almost nothing on the shelves. Everybody seems to be talking about the next message that comes up once you press the button on the first message.” He got out of the car and opened the trunk, loading his arms with what he bought. He waved to the kids, and he said, “They’re calling it the Children Transfer Program. Some children are being selected to go to places where the alien ships aren’t based, where the population is so low that they’re sorta off the radar screen, I guess. Like Iceland and New Zealand, remote countries nobody cares about. If your kid is chosen, you can send them off to a foster family someplace like that. If your kid isn’t chosen, then they go with you to the training.”
“That’s what they’re calling it, the training?”
“Well, they’re not going to call it brainwashing,” he said, his mouth twisted. “The thing is, you don’t know if your kid is chosen if you don’t push the button.”
“Who cares if your kid is chosen! We’ve just lost our son. No way would I send my other children away!”
“Let’s not talk about this now,” he said as they got close enough to the cabin to be overheard. “Hey, Miranda, how you feeling today?”
“Okay.” She sounded tired. “Mom, can I have another lemonade?”
“’Course, honey,” Sky said. “Chase!” She called to him way down by the riverbank. “Lunch in thirty!”
He nodded and waved.
That night was another sleepless night, as they sat up late considering their new choice. After calm discussion, angry interchange, and eventually weeping in each other’s arms, Jack finally said, “the bottom line is that we’re not going to even know what our options are until we push the button. And if the only reason we’re not pushing the button is that we’re afraid they’ll know where we are, I think it’s moot. If they have the technology to control every computer and every TV on the planet, they have the technology to find anybody they want to find. This isn’t about visitations from aliens; this is about a control system for the human race. I don’t believe they’re here to heal us; they’re here because they want something, and I don’t know if it’s to help us or wipe us out. It might not even be about us at all. But what choices do we have? I don’t see us getting through the winter. Do you?”
“Do you think we should think about it some more?”
“Maybe. But they’re only taking so many kids.”
Finally, Skylar opened the laptop and shoved it at him. “Okay. Push the button.”
He shook his head. “This has to be a mutual decision.”
She glared at the screen and pushed the “Next” button and the “I have read and understood” button. The screen instantly changed to a new message which read,
“John Eric Cummings, DOB 6/28/1979, male, Doctorate, Mechanical Engineering, Skylar Kenia Cummings, DOB 1/4/1983, female, MS, Management, Human Resources. Reporting Station is Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, GA. Assigned reporting date is August 21st, 2024. If there is a ‘Next’ button on your screen, click it to continue for information about offspring. If there is no ‘Next’ button on your screen, bring every family member and all pets with you to your Reporting Station on your reporting date. You will receive further information about what personal items to bring with you to your Reporting Station.”
Down in the middle of the page was a “Next” button.
Skylar glanced at Jack, who nodded. She clicked the “Next” button, and the new screen said,
“Offspring of John E. Cummings, Ph.D and Skylar K. Cummings, M.S.: Chase Canaan Cummings, DOB 1/6/2012, male, selected for Children Transfer Program. Miranda Jane Cummings, DOB 10/21/2017, female, selected for Children Transfer Program. Click the ‘Next’ button to continue.”
“They’ve both been selected,” Skylar murmured.
“Click it,” he said.
She clicked the “Next” button. The screen again changed to a new message which read,
“As offspring of educated parents, your child/children have been selected for the Children Transfer Program. Your child’s participation is strongly encouraged and optional. No child may participate who has not been selected. Children will assemble at local Collection Stations, with required identification, boarding pass, and limited personal effects. Children will be transported by rail to the closest evacuation harbor and will journey by ship to volunteer foster families. No parent may accompany a child, however adult escorts will be provided on all portions of transport. Parents are encouraged to involve their children in family decisions, to communicate with their children during transport and after arrival, and to communicate with the foster family selected for their child. Parents may state a preferred destination but may not state a preferred foster family or families. Any child refusing selection must accompany his/her parents to the Reporting Station at the place and date assigned to his/her family. Families will be reunited after training is completed. Click ‘Next’ to continue.”
“’Offspring’,” Skylar groaned, “like we’re lab rats. They seem to have control over everything. To know everything.”
Jack nodded. “Did you notice? Moses isn’t listed.”
* * *
On the edge of the woods, a honeybee colony had a nest in an old maple tree. It was not a native honeybee colony, but one formed by an escaped Eastern honeybee queen from an apiary farm twelve miles downriver. The beekeeper there had experimented with Apis mellifer scutellata or Africanized bees, as well as Apis cerana japonica, Eastern bees, attempting to find that perfect mix of high honey production and weak aggression. Their cousin, the European honeybee brought to America by the colonists, was the most docile of bees, attacking only individually with a sting defense, but the European bee had been weakened by fungal diseases, and the beekeeper was tired of losing his colonies. He had hoped that by introducing other bee species, he could keep his hives strong.
One spring day, however, a certain Eastern queen with half of her hive had swarmed, and now her offspring lived in a large open crack in the dying maple. Like all bee colonies, this one was strictly divided into ranks for bees are eusocial, or caste-forming insects. After two years, this swarm was now a hive of more than forty-thousand bees, with about one hundred male drones, twenty-thousand young female workers who rarely left the hive, and almost twenty-thousand foragers or older female workers, each of whom would fly three to six miles each day, visiting a hundred flowers in a single trip until they died from exhaustion or were predated. Of one mind and collective effort, their sole purpose was to keep the Queen producing the brood, which consisted that summer of seven-thousand eggs, eleven-thousand larvae, and twenty-thousand pupae.
The hive had many predators, and most of them could be driven off with stinging defense, but one dangerous enemy could not be defeated by stings at all. The Eastern Queen had passed along in her DNA a group defense mechanism which made her hive far less vulnerable to the dreaded foe, and this particular summer day, the deadliest season, her siblings, super sisters (those offspring who shared the same drone father), full sisters (those with fathers who were brothers), and half-sisters (those with unrelated fathers), would be called upon to work together to defend the hive and its brood within.
A giant hornet scout was searching for food for her own colony, and she found the hive. She hovered outside the crack, observing the bees going to and fro from the tree. The workers near the hive entry heard the distinctive buzz of the hornet, and a rapid signal went through them that a dangerous predator was near. If the hornet managed to land on the edges of the hive and leave her scout pheromones, then her sister hornets would follow. She was the advance guard of an attack which the bees could not survive.
Quickly, about a hundred bees gathered at the hive entry, saw the hornet, let themselves be seen, and then retreated back inside the darkness of the hive. Within, hundreds of workers were now hurrying along the bee space, a three-eight inch walkway kept open for moving bees, towards the hive entry. The hornet, sensing large numbers, knew that the colony was likely a healthy and productive one with many larvae and pupae which would feed her own meat-eating brood. She landed at the edge of the hive and followed the sentry bees within, knowing that she need only leave a few drops of secreted hunting signals for her sisters to find.
It was a trap. As she stepped further into the hive, the bees whipped their abdomens back and forth, signaling their strategy to each other. They held off until the last possible moment, as the hornet moved further into the hive. One worker bee stepped forward to accept swift decapitation and death from the hornet’s jaws. In that instant, five-hundred workers jumped the hornet, quickly covering her with their bodies.
The hornet struggled to move, but the sheer weight of the worker bees engulfed her and kept her immobile. They began to vibrate their flight muscles, swarming over her until she could see nothing, feel nothing but the heat of their bodies. In moments, the hornet was so hot, so suffocated by the increased carbon dioxide the bees produced, that she collapsed beneath them. As the workers’ vibrations raised the temperature of the bee ball to 117 degrees, the hottest they themselves could tolerate, the heat exceeded the 115 degrees that the hornet could survive, and she was swiftly baked alive, smothered in the airless furnace produced by the bees upon her.
A few workers also succumbed, of course, particularly some of the youngest, who had not learned to move from the inside to the outside of the bee ball, but the loss was insignificant compared to the hive loss if the other hornets had found them, since each hornet could kill more than forty bees a minute.
The Queen, deep within the hive, continued to lay her eggs. She had been aware of the intruder, of course, for the alarm pheromones within the hive signaled danger to her as well, but the continuation of the brood must go on relentless and regardless, and so she accepted the directions of the workers who helped her position herself over the egg cells, just as she had accepted the mounting of the drones in flight the spring before. Each drone had found her, mounted her, expelled his semen from his barbed sexual organ into her spermatheca, and pulled away abruptly, leaving breeding apparatus within her and also severing most of his insides from his body. He fell dead to the ground while another drone, in midflight, removed the previous drone’s sex organ, inserted his own, and so she was mated over and over until she could fly no more. When she had returned to the colony, full of the sperm she would need for the next laying season, the workers gently removed the pieces of the last drone from her sternum, cleaned her antennae, fed her a drop of royal jelly, and groomed her legs with their mandibles. Now she would lay eggs until she died or became weak, and then the workers would kill her and replace her with another queen, one of her own daughters. The hive would live on.
Chapter Two
Jomo and Asha Maathai
Nyeri, Kenya
2024
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
Dylan Thomas, “Death Shall Have No Dominion”
The Cessna Caravan banked over the eastern half of the Great Rift Valley, following the darker line of cypress half-way up the western slopes of Delamere Peak, and Desta Maathai pointed out a herd of elephants moving towards the Tana River, outside the Meru Reserve. “Looks like Old Mama took them through another dry season. The herd’s larger than last year.” she said.
“Well, at least they’re moving in the right direction,” her brother, Baako, sa
id. “Away from our fields.”
“Count on it, they’ll be back again when we’re in bloom,” their father said.
Jomo Maathai increased his speed to 150 knots, and rose over the slopes of the mountain, away from their home in Nyeri towards the town of Kinajai and Adisa Farm where the wedding would be. It was early October, the short rains had ended, and the land was verdant and lush.
“I hope they’re serving that brilliant trifle again,” Desta said to her mother. “Kimu needs to teach Jata how to make it.”
“I’m very much afraid Jata could not reproduce Kimu’s trifle if Holy Mother herself came down and instructed her,” Asha said with a wry smile. “Jata is a loyal and lovely person, but I cannot say she’ll ever be the cook Kimu is, even if she lives to be twice his age. I daresay Baako could do a better job.”
They all laughed at the idea of Baako, the first-born male as a kitchen toto, and Desta thumped the back of his seat to add a tease to the gentle taunt of her mother.
The Maathai family was traveling to the wedding of the eldest daughter of their dear friends, the Odingos, who owned Adisa Farm outside Kinajai. Adisa, Kiswahili for “that which makes its meaning clear”, had been a successful tea farm but lately, Lawence Odingo was experimenting with genetically-improved maize, and Jomo was looking forward to discussing the results with his old friend. Baako would get the chance to brag about his football triumphs with his chums, and Desta would frolic with the other young girls, eating her fill of wedding cake and dancing to the band. Asha was curious to see the performance of Susan Wamucil Kung-u, the storyteller from the Sigana International Storytelling Festival. Everyone would enjoy the entertainment provided by the nearby Samburu clan, one of the few Maasai tribes which would still sing and dance for hire. Such spectacles were rare treats for those whose farms were distant from any good-size towns. They all needed the comfort of their friends now, with such terrible news from the outside.
