Deadout

by Jon McGoran

  Moose was trying to keep cool, but his eyes were wide with fear. I hoped my own efforts to fake it were more successful.

  He took out his phone and checked the GPS. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Still looking at his phone, he turned to lead the way, then tripped and went sprawling. I reached out to grab him but missed, and he tumbled over a fallen tree and down into a slight gully.

  Almost immediately, a scream tore through the forest, loud and high and chilling. I jumped over the downed tree after him, and when I landed, I saw Moose, on his hands and knees, his face inches away from what was left of Benjy’s.

  It was bad. Worse than the deer. Benjy was slumped against an old tree trunk. His flesh was bloated, but it was also swollen beyond that, misshapen and covered with stingers. His beard was a tangle of dead bees.

  The scream shut off, and I thought he was done, but he was just catching his breath. When he resumed it was less high-pitched surprise and more ragged horror and anguish. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to the other side of the gully, stumbling backward until we fell onto the roots of another tree several yards away.

  I held him until he stopped screaming, trying to calm him down. But when he finally stopped, through the sound of his sobs and my soothing whispers, I heard another sound.

  Looking up, I saw a branch hanging low under the weight of a large papery hive with thousands of bees pouring out, filling the air above us. When Moose looked up and saw them, he started screaming again.

  I pulled him to his feet, but he didn’t need any more coaxing. He took off like a jack rabbit through the woods. I trusted he was going in the right direction, because I was following him. The old joke went through my head about how you don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than your friend. I felt an unreasonable resentment against Moose, now fifteen feet ahead of me.

  I had just spied his truck, maybe sixty feet away, when the first bee got me in the back of the neck. I swatted it and crushed it and threw it to the side. I slowed a step when I did, but the pain inspired my legs, and I made it to the truck at the same time as Moose.

  A couple of bees followed us into the truck. The first one was no match for my frantic freak-out jujitsu. But the second one was—penetrating my defenses while I was dispatching its cousin. It stung me on the shoulder.

  Between the fact that Moose had outrun me and the fact that we weren’t driving away at a high rate of speed, I was almost annoyed with him. But when I killed the second bee and turned to ask him if perhaps we could leave, I saw that his face was a silent mask of anguish, and I remembered he had just come face-to-face with a dead friend.

  I patted him on the shoulder and tried not to panic as the cloud of bees outside the car thickened. Moose’s sobs entered the audible range, and we sat there for a few more awkward seconds. Then he opened his eyes and saw the bees crawling on the windshield. “Oh, shit,” he said. He fumbled for the keys, and we were off.

  70

  When we walked through the front door, Nola took one look at Moose and wrapped him in a hug. I could have used a hug myself, but when you’re supposed to be a tough guy, sometimes you have to wait. Annalisa looked at me, concerned, but she stayed where she was. Jimmy came over and slapped my shoulder.

  “You okay?” he said. “You look a little freaked out.”

  I guess that would have to do.

  “We found Benjy,” I said.

  “He’s dead,” Moose blurted out.

  “We also found a big hive of angry bees.”

  “A feral hive?” Annalisa asked. “Of Bee-Plus? Then the queens aren’t flightless.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I thought the old queen and the old bees left the hive to the new queen and the new bees. So the bees that left should be the less aggressive ones, right?”

  She bit her knuckle, thinking. “That is true, usually. Although it’s possible for a single hive to send out multiple swarms, even over the course of a couple of days. All but one of those are going to be the next generation. It’s rare, but with these bees, who knows?”

  Moose got himself together enough to pull away from Nola and shake his head. “I don’t know if they’re the Bee-Plus bees, the next generation, or what. They’re very aggressive.” He started losing it again. “They killed Benjy.”

  “I think he followed the same data we did and went looking for them,” I said, now pretty much just talking to Jimmy. “I guess he found them.”

  “So are these bees all over the island now?” Jimmy asked, anger mixing with the alarm in his voice. He looked down at Annalisa, then over at me. “We’re not going to make any friends, and I don’t know if it will do any good, but if these bees are killing people, it’s time to kick this thing upstairs.”

  * * *

  Jimmy drove with his arm locked and his jaw set, the muscles in his temple visibly throbbing.

  “This is going to get me in all sorts of shit with people who already don’t like me,” he said, “so I need to know that you’re not going to get cute. I need to know you’re going to tell what you know, and play it straight. Don’t give them any reasons to blow us off. Are you ready for that?”

  I did a quick mental calculation of all I had done, what I could bend the truth about, and which parts of it could get me in trouble. “Yeah, okay. What’s this guy like?”

  “Chief Wilks is a tool,” he said. “The worst kind of simpering kiss-up political animal. Everything he does is calculated, every decision based on how it impacts his career objectives. And frankly, I hope it works out for him. I hope he gets whatever job is next on his ladder of success, so at least he’ll be out of my hair.”

  Wilks’s office was in the same building as Jimmy’s, across from the ferry terminal in Vineyard Haven. Wilks sighed when he saw Jimmy, and he frowned when he saw me.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” he said with a big, insincere smile. “Thought I told you to go home and get some sleep.”

  “There’s some shit going on we need to talk about.”

  Wilks winced at the expletive, and I almost did, too. Not in front of the children, I thought.

  “Who’s your friend?” Wilks asked, looking at me.

  “Doyle Carrick. He’s with Philly P.D. He’s involved in some of this, so I brought him along.”

  I didn’t like the way he said I was involved in it. Sounded guilty.

  Wilks put down his pen. “You were involved in that home invasion, right?”

  I nodded.

  “This is about the bees,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice.

  Wilks grimaced and closed his eyes. “What have I told you about the bees?” he snapped.

  “But this—”

  “What have I told you about the bees?”

  “There’s a body.”

  “What?”

  “In the woods. One of the bee researchers, Benjy Hazelton, stung to death by the bees, from a hive there.” He put a slip of paper on the desk. “Here are the GPS coordinates.”

  Wilks gave me the same smile he’d given Jimmy when we walked in. “I’m sorry. Could you please excuse us for a few moments?”

  As soon as I was out in the hallway, Wilks started in on Jimmy. I could hear the whole thing.

  “This is exactly what I didn’t want to hear about, Sergeant Frank. This is big, these people are big. And sometimes, you got to let the big kids play and stay out of the way so you don’t get hurt. Have you not been listening to me? I thought I’d made myself very clear.”

  “A body, Wilks. Are you listening to me?”

  “And how did this body die?”

  “Looks like it was stung to death.”

  “Well, that sounds like an awful way to go, but hardly a police matter. Sounds like you need to call animal control, and the medical examiner.”

  “I guess I’ll do that, then.”

  “Good. And now you better get home and rest up. You know I need you back in Katama first thing.”

  Jimmy flashed me a look as he stormed out of the office
. He was too angry to speak. He might have been too angry to drive, too, but at least we were getting where we were going in a hurry.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “If it’s any consolation, my lieutenant’s an asshole, too.”

  Jimmy took out his phone and dialed as he drove. Sitting in the passenger seat, I had my foot jammed on the imaginary brake pedal. I wondered if this was how Nola felt when I was driving “impatiently.”

  “Hi, Letitia,” he said, cradling the phone between his jaw and his shoulder while he pulled out the piece of paper I’d given him. The car veered perilously close to the edge of the road as we bounced up the winding hill. “I need to report a body.… It’s just west of the state forest. I got GPS coordinates for you … appears to be natural causes … No, I’m not a doctor, but apparently Wilks is, and he assures me this is not a police matter and I should just report it to you. Looks like he was attacked by bees.… That’s right, and you need to tell whoever is going out there they should be prepared for very aggressive bees, make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them. You ready?”

  He read her the numbers, holding his phone in one hand and the paper in the other. I resisted the urge to grab the wheel, knowing I did much worse on a regular basis. We pulled up to the house, and he killed the engine but didn’t move to get out.

  “Wilks isn’t just an asshole,” he said, eyes front, like he was thinking it through. “He’s sleazy and stupid, a political animal whose every instinct is geared toward ladder-climbing instead of crime-solving. I wouldn’t expect anything better from him, but there was something else going on back there.” He paused and looked at me. “He was scared.”

  71

  When we walked in, Annalisa was staring intently at the computer. She didn’t even look up at first, but when she did, she hurried over to us. “Are you okay?”

  I was about to answer when I realized she was talking to Jimmy. He gave her a smile and nodded. “My boss is a first-class asshole is all.”

  Nola came down the steps and gave me a wry smile, like maybe she had heard that line somewhere else before.

  Annalisa put her hand on Jimmy’s arm. Her eyes met mine for a fraction of a second, then locked on his. “Did you learn anything new?”

  “Just that the political pressure around this thing is intense. How about you?”

  She looked around the room and nodded.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m still digging through the data, but the fragment analysis is done. The mites from last summer are typical varroa destructor, but the samples from March have the same anomaly, the same marker, as the new ones, two months before the Bee-Plus bees were supposedly introduced.”

  “So does that mean they brought in the Bee-Plus bees before they said?” I asked.

  “Actually, I don’t think so,” Annalisa said. “I may have been looking at this wrong. Those matching gene sequences may have been incidental, the vector or bridge material they used to get the splice to stick. The sequence between them doesn’t match anything, as far as I can tell.”

  “So what does that mean?” Nola asked.

  Annalisa took a deep breath. “I think it means the mites have a totally different splice, just using the same technique. They have been genetically engineered as well.”

  “For what?” Nola asked.

  I had already been wondering, and it came to me just as she asked. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “How do you create demand if you’ve got a supply of bees that are immune to mites?”

  Nola got there before I finished, her face twisting into the same combination of loathing and admiration that I was feeling. “Bastards,” she whispered.

  “What?” Annalisa asked.

  “What’s the best way to sell bees that are juiced up to resist the mites that may or may not be wiping out all the regular bees?” I asked. “Juice up the mites as well, so you know they’re wiping out the regular bees.”

  Annalisa was quiet for a second, stunned. “They did this on purpose.”

  Nola looked scared and angry. “There’s bees dying all around the planet, and these bastards see it as a niche, a new market.” I moved closer and put my arm around her. “They didn’t do all this so they could corner the bee market on the tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard. They’re going to try to take it global.”

  “But what about the aggression?” Moose asked. “They can’t just put these bees out there knowing they’re killing people.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past Sumner,” Annalisa said. “It sounds insane, but he’s working on a newer iteration of the Bee-Plus bees, a ‘two-point-oh’ or whatever. He’s probably trying to fix the aggression and the swarming. It doesn’t seem to be ready yet, and it doesn’t seem like he’s shared it with Stoma. But with the kind of pressure he’s under from Pearce, I wouldn’t put it past him to release them even when he knows they’re not ready. And the Bee-Plus licensing agreements are even more ironclad than the GMO seed licenses. Maybe he thinks that since only the Bee-Plus workers will be handling the bees, they’ll be able to keep them under control.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Moose said. “They’re already getting out, and this is just a few hives on the island.”

  “I know,” Annalisa said. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Nola looked up at me. “What are we going to do?”

  “If Stoma doesn’t know,” Annalisa said quietly. “Maybe we could tell them.”

  Moose made a strange snorting, hiccupping sound. “Tell Stoma? Really? Sumner might not have told them everything, but a company like Stoma, they’ve got to know.”

  Annalisa looked at the server and bit her lip. “There’s something else,” she said. “I’ve been poking around on that server. There are mentions of an advance team working on the special exemption on the mainland, but there’s something else, too. It’s heavily encrypted, but there is something big going down, and it is happening tomorrow. I could get through the encryption, but it will take a while.”

  “I’ve got to remind you,” Jimmy said, pointing at the computer. “That computer is stolen, so anything you get off of there is going to be inadmissible in a court of law. That could be the difference between whoever is responsible spending a long time in jail and getting off scot-free.”

  “A court of law?” Nola laughed, rolling her eyes. “Are you kidding me? I’m sorry, people as rich as Archie Pearce don’t go to jail.”

  “Sumner’s not rich,” Annalisa said. “He acts like it, and he used to be, but he’s not. He’s in hock up to his eyeballs so he could retain a share of the company. If he gets away with this, maybe he’ll be rich again.” She shook her head. “Anyway, something big is happening tomorrow. It’s like, their end date.” She looked around at us. “I think they’re planning on taking the bees off island tomorrow.”

  “They can’t,” Jimmy said, shaking his head. “They’re not allowed to. The provisional approval that let them bring Bee-Plus bees onto the island isn’t even up for review for another month.”

  “People!” Nola clapped her hands loudly, like a school teacher trying to get a class’s attention. “They. Don’t. Care. About any of that stuff. None of it. They’re not going to jail. They don’t care about ‘provisional approvals.’ They are going to do exactly what they want to do, and then later, when their genetically modified Frankenbees have killed off all the regular bees—and a whole bunch of people—they’ll say, ‘Oops, sorry. My bad.’ And not a goddamned thing is going to happen to them. Maybe they’ll pay a big fine and see a two-percent dip on their quarterly profits, but you know what? It won’t even be that.”

  I turned to Jimmy Frank. “She’s got a point. So what do we do?”

  “I still think we need to go through proper channels.”

  Just as he said it, his phone buzzed. He looked at it, then looked at us, then he answered it.

  “Hey … What’s that? Pretty sure, yeah. Hold on.” He pulled out the paper with the GPS coordinates. “Ye
p. That’s them. So what do you mean, are you guys sure? I’m not saying they’re idiots, I’m asking if they’re sure.… No, I wasn’t talking about a dead deer.” He looked at me.

  “The body was in a gully ten feet from the deer,” I whispered.

  “Let me talk to Chuck,” he said. “Hey, Chuck, Jimmy Frank here. I’m told the body was in a gully ten feet away from that deer.… You saw the gully, huh?… No, I’m not saying you don’t know how to do your job, I’m just making sure is all. Did you see any bees?… It’s a simple goddamned question, Chuck, did you see any bees? Yeah, well you, too.” He thumbed off the phone. “Asshole.” He shook his head. “There was no sign of a body when they got there. Except for the deer.”

  “We need to tell the authorities,” Annalisa said. “And I don’t mean animal control or the local medical examiner.”

  Nola snorted. “The authorities know, and they immediately tipped off Stoma, and that’s why Benjy’s body is gone. And don’t think for a moment you’re ever going to see it again.” Her bottom lip was trembling. “Benjy’s gone. He’s wherever they put Claudia Osterman and your friend Lynne.”

  “She’s right,” Jimmy said. “Wilks wasn’t talking about pressure from the town board of selectmen. He’s talking serious, heavy-duty pressure from way up high, the feds, you name it.”

  The room was silent, then Benjy’s computer chimed loudly. Moose went over to it. “I ran an analysis of data from some of the other monitoring stations,” he said, tapping a few keys. The screen showed a jumble of bee lines, including the familiar spokes indicating a colony laid over a satellite image of the island. He put his finger over the spot where the lines converged, then he looked around the room. “Johnny Blue’s berry farm.”

  72

  The sign at the front of Blue’s farm was a mess, parts of it splintered, parts burned, half of it covered with eggs. The gate was propped closed but it was easy to see that at some point someone had busted it in.