Killer Bees

I was going to use this old excerpt as the intro to my novel, but since it doesn’t really make sense given the content, so…here it is for your pleasure:

I was outside a small house in Midnight Hill when a single bee landed on the ground near me. I wonder if it was attracted to the nauseating scent, not of garbage, but the Dogwood trees around me. Then several others came along, as if it were gathering at a club.

It didn’t matter what neighborhood a person went to, there was the bitter smell of the white leaf trees. Nature was undergoing quite a bipolar trip; it could be thirty four in the morning and seventy nine by noon. But the great sign things had changed was the slow return of the insects. When the bees came, I became a bit apprehensive. It was a pity, I wasn’t afraid of death…but a damn bee made me raise my guard a little. But maybe it was the memories.

Three years ago, I was in ninth grade and my biology teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, lectured us on scientific classification. The way it worked was that every living thing had a series of classes they belonged to and the higher you went on the chain, the more you’d see many animals were under the same umbrella.

“Consider the Africanized Killer Bee,” she said, “one of the most dangerous creations of mankind. An insanely territorial creation, classification: Animal, Arthropod, Insect Class.”

“Why does it have such a long name?” I asked.

“It’s a Latin name, but the issue, Rocco, is that it’s all connected. It all means something and it all separates one thing from the other.”

Her point was that every life could be broken down into component parts and each part, while miniscule to some and anal-retentive to others, had an importance; as if it were the tiniest cog. The specific species name Apis mellifera scutellata made the Africanized bee different from Apis mellifera, or the regular honey bee. That little name was the screw that held together the great machine of this winged species.

But one cannot forget that some ambitious man changed the original type.

The scary thing was that the killer bees didn’t take any anything from anyone. They were among nature’s ultimate stealth weapons. You couldn’t even tell the freaking killer bees apart from the regular honey bees! They would soon kill you for breathing in their general direction. It wasn’t hard to figure out.

The woman that took me in after my mother’s death just happened to be wandering around the California Desert. There was just a percentage of the Unites States population that just happened to wander around when things went wrong. It didn’t matter if you were white or black, Hispanic or Indian.

Imagine this, a story goes that years ago, two college age Caucasian Homo Sapiens went into the Mojave Desert with nothing more some mescaline and acid pills, as if they were trying to resurrect the seventies. One of the women, part Anglo Saxon, part Dutch, encountered the Apis mellifera scutellata while under the influence. It did not end well.

Crazy people were a dime a dozen and they came in all kinds. Believe me, I knew plenty of crazy people, and a third of them were in my high school. But it was with these people I found an identity. I didn’t criticize them, I only pointed out their oddities. It was because I was just as strange as them.