Wandering Wilderness: When Bees Die, #2

By Cynthia Washburn

SEQUEL   TO 

'WHEN BEES DIE'

Escape from the oppressive and depressive life behind the fences in Rossville  was the dream, but now what?

Are they each prepared for the hardships they will encounter?   Did they bring what they will need to start a new life?   Will they die in the barren wilderness, unknown to those left behind?

The Resistance  may be small, insignificant really, but they know that somehow they must   do  more  than survive, they must prevail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cynthia Washburn
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497737167

Book preview

Cynthia Washburn

This book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Copyright 2013

ISBN-13:  978-1492717959

ISBN-10:  1492717959

Books in this series:

When Bees Die

Wandering Wilderness

TO  FIONA

CHAPTER 1

In that half asleep world Lisa was a young child back home in Rossville.  Her mother and father were there as well as her brother, Kaston, and her baby sister, Sarah.  They were all sitting around the kitchen table but one of the chairs was occupied by a giant bee.  Something was cooking on the stove but it was starting to burn.  Lisa was trying to tell her mother about it but the bee was waving one of her legs, the front right one, and somehow they all knew that meant they had to pay attention.  The words were frozen in her throat, even as smoke started to curl around the sides of the pot.

Something was wrong, but what? The dream faded away and Lisa sat up and looked around the small one room cabin.  She was in the only single bed; a dozen bunk beds lined the other three walls.  Smoke.  Something was burning somewhere close by.  She leapt out of bed, grabbed a sweater and took the few steps to look out a grimy window. 

Fires were not an uncommon occurrence.  Heaters and bright lights were kept going twenty-hours a day to maximize growth in the greenhouses and short-circuits and spot fires broke out regularly.  This one seemed close.

Get up!  Get up!  Everybody, get out of bed.  Now!

How many girls were in her cabin now?  Lisa struggled to remember.  Someone was always coming or going.  That was how the bosses liked it; kept everyone off guard.  Not for the first time she wondered why she was still here.  Why hadn’t she left? 

Eighteen girls, there were eighteen now, she reminded herself.  Some were sharing a bunk.  Not that there weren’t sufficient beds for each to have their own but the younger ones seemed to find comfort in sharing and Lisa didn’t mind; it seemed to limit the bedwetting.  That helped with morale.  Lisa felt her mind clearing.  The cabin was relatively new and mostly bug-free; that was important for morale, too, she had found.  The youngest two were ten years old—Charlotte and Stephanie.  They were still in shock at how their lives had turned out, wondering what was going to happen and crying, crying all the time for their home, their families, their mother.  Lisa was supposed to make up for all that somehow.  In the past two years, after she had finished her own five year stint, Lisa had tried first one approach and then another.  If she stopped to think about, she supposed she was getting better at it.

Just grab a sweater and line-up at the door.  Quick!  Count them:  one two . . . seventeen, eighteen.  Okay, open the door.  Damn, this fire was close; thick dark smoke was coming from a greenhouse less than a hundred meters away and the breeze was blowing it their way.  Down to the creek, or what remained of the creek.

What’s happening, Lisa?  I’m scared.  Tanya’s teeth were chattering as she spoke.  This fire seems close.

I can hardly breathe.  What are we going to do? 

Keep them from panicking; that would be the main thing.  Sirens had started up now; everyone would be awake.  She looked back at the straggling line behind her.  The older ones at the back, the younger ones in the middle.  Everyone coughing.  Should she stop and count them again? 

Keep up, everyone, come on!  Jog down to the banks of the creek and further away from the smoke.  The rainy season had started last week and the creek actually had some water in it.  Lisa stopped and looked back at the greenhouse.  The smoke was turning grey now; the flames must have been doused by now.  No more sleep tonight, though.  By the time the all clear came, it would be dawn or past it.

Lisa made up her mind.  She’d insist that they all get half a half day off. Wallace better not argue with her about that.  Another day at Pollination Camp #53, another day of endless, boring work for the kids and a day for her to try to keep them safe, keep them going, keep them alive.  You wouldn’t think that someone as dumb as she had been told she was would be able to do all that, she thought, not for the first time.  She’d believed them for a while, a long while, but not any more.

She counted the girls again.  Eighteen.  Just sit tight, girls.  Everything’s okay.  Lisa relaxed a little.  Maybe it was time to leave, to go somewhere else.  For once she had nothing to do and sleep was impossible; she had some precious time to try to figure things out.  Lisa raked her fingers through her long dark red hair and looked for a ponytail holder on her wrist to tie it back with.  Not that it mattered.  Guys her age were few and far between.  She’d met a few guys at the training session but the truth was, they had scared her.  Whereas the girls seemed to become saggy and sad, for the most part, the boys here became tough and mean.  The ones that survived.

But where to go?  Back home to Rossville?  Was that place still there?  For all Lisa knew it had fallen into the river that ran behind it and been swept out to sea. Anyway, official policy now stipulated return to another location, far from the worker’s hometown.  Wallace had explained that to her once.  Lisa would be on her own if she tried to return home.

Lisa had a quick look at her charges.  The girls had arranged themselves around her, huddled together, some lying, some sitting, most too tired to watch the fire team work their hoses.  After a quick word of instruction to stay put, Lisa crawled up the embankment, her curiousity driving her.  She also wanted to make sure the cabin that had been her home for the past two years was still standing.  The notes she had been keeping hidden under a floorboard were too valuable to go up in smoke.  She should really find a better hiding place.  Why she had started to scribble down random information and observations, she couldn’t say but now, threatened with their potential loss, she suddenly felt their value. 

As a group supervisor, she was sufficiently known that she could walk around without being questioned as to her name, number or base camp.  She had learned to keep a determined but bored look on her face that seemed to indicate to others that she wasn’t worth questioning.  Unless that jerk, Jerome, came around.  He was a maintenance worker in the area and liked to creep up on her and put his hands on her shoulders while he brought up some made up reason for talking to her.  She was sure she’d seen him skulking around yesterday, trying to get her on her own.  Lisa made sure everyone went in pairs to the latrine, including herself.  Lisa was fully prepared to fight him but the reality was that Jerome easily outweighed her.  She brushed the thought away; six months from now she would be gone and far away from guys like Jerome.

She allowed herself to think back to her family for a few moments, straining to recall the details of their faces and their speech.  Big brother Kas was two years older; he’d be a man now, although that was hard to believe.  Little sister Sarah would still have her mop of red hair but she’d only been three when Lisa had left—or been taken—no way Lisa could recognize her now. 

Lisa felt her resolve stiffen.  She had to get back to them—before they forgot her completely.  Could that happen?  Yes, it could.  Weeks went by without her thinking of those she had left behind in Rossville.  There was always something happening here to distract her. 

Lisa looked back at the smoldering greenhouse.  Good, the fire hadn’t spread past the nearest greenhouse and it looked like only half of that was gone.  Their cabin was untouched except for some blackening on the side nearest to the fire.  Where could she put those notes that would be safe?  Lisa had learned a lot; enough to be a problem to someone.  This was a business and it wasn’t a survival business.  There was profit, lots of profit although it hadn’t translated into better living quarters or better food for the girls she supervised.

Everything and everyone was kept segregated.  Nobody really knew, and certainly no one was told, what happened outside their small area.  Bits of overheard conversation; that was what most of her knowledge amounted to.  That and the written agenda she had picked out of a wastebasket the one time she had been sent to a central location in Spokane for training.  That had been after her own five year term of service had passed, now two years ago.  She’d survived; she’d almost thrived.  The crummy food, the isolation, the degradation, the loneliness that made some kids fade until they disappeared or were transferred out as the lingo went, had made her strong.  Lisa could almost feel the steel rod in her spine that she had grown day by day that helped her to survive.  She might be stupid, like they said, but she was tough.  No, she’d long since cast off the stupid label.  Lisa defined herself now.

Her immediate supervisor, a middle aged man named Wallace, was stomping around now, giving orders to the fire crew.  He’d be the one who would have to explain how a fire started in the middle of the night and destroyed half a greenhouse and all the product inside.  The smoke would have killed of whatever fragile seedlings weren’t burned outright.  Good thing she could say that when she woke, before the siren and lined up her girls, everyone was accounted for.

There had been instances of sabotage.  In one gruesome case that the bosses hadn’t been able to keep quiet, an entire cabin of boys had deliberately set their greenhouse on fire, with themselves in it.  There had been some changes made after that.  Some sports equipment, games and even some books were delivered to each cabin.  A new policy limiting the number of hours of work was to be strictly enforced.  Before, because there were certain quotas that were impossible to reach, to avoid trouble—and the transferring out of some of her charges—Lisa had kept them going up to an hour past time. 

She had complained about that at an area meeting she had been sent to, especially as other, copycat suicides, had followed the first, even though they had been on smaller scales.  When she had been driven to the area head office at night, Lisa couldn’t help but realize the enormity of the greenhouse production area.  If the entire southern half of the state was being cultivated in the same way that was an enormous amount of product.  She had a vague recollection of a family camping trip to Oregon the year she had turned eight.  They had driven through kilometers of forest interspersed with open fields in Washington State.  No one would recognize the area here now.  Nothing but endless greenhouses and some open fields randomly scattered.  Almost no trees anywhere.  What had happened to the vast forests?

The all-clear siren wailed.  Come on, girls, let’s head back.  It was still full dark; probably three o’clock in the morning.  Dousing the fire hadn’t taken as long as Lisa had thought it would.  The girls would sleep again, for a few hours at least, but Lisa knew that she wouldn’t.  Something was going to happen, quite soon, she felt, but whether it would be something that she initiated or something that was from the outside, she couldn’t tell.  When Lisa had first been offered the job of supervisor of the group she worked with that year, her one thought had been of the responsibility.  She could help the younger girls survive, waiting for the day when things would change.  They already looked to her, clung to her, even though she had been only fifteen years old, that last official year of her service.  They’d never seen her cry; she made sure of that.

The last time she’d cried had been that awful day when she had been taken from her home.  She hadn’t been making a success of school.  There would be no work for her in the future in Rossville; she was needed at the pollination farms.  That was what her family was told.  Children’s hands, especially girls’ hands, were ideal for the fiddly work of pollinating endless acres of blossoms to ensure they turned into fruits or vegetables.  After five years—only five years they had said—she’d be sent back and guaranteed a job, a good job.  She was needed to help her family and other families survive.  After the bees started dying off, stopped pollinating and then the following year when trees turned black and died, everyone felt scared and desperate.  Food was scarce; crime was everywhere.  Her parents were promised that she would be well fed;  after all they were growing food in the newly set up pollen fields.

She’d held that promise close over the first few years but at some point Lisa had heard that the policy had changed and workers weren’t being sent back to their hometowns.  Something to do with security, the safety of the residents; that had been the official reason.  After that, Lisa figured she might as well stay put as go to a strange town at the other end of the state.  When she went to the training sessions—which were mostly about keeping the charges under her healthy enough to keep working—there had been snippets of rumours.  Some said that the workers who went home told of the vast quantities and varieties of products that they had worked on  items that never made their way to their hometown.  Others described how many deaths there had been, even in their own cohort.  Some of the children had been locals and the parents were shocked to hear of the details—inevitably they didn’t jive with official reports.

One boy Lisa had spoken to at the meeting seemed especially knowledgeable.  They send the exiting ones to Neuro now—to dampen the memories and make them not want to talk about it; was what he had said.  Horrible as it had been to hear that, it made sense.  Lisa had heard vague reports of Neuro—the thought re-alignment process that the government had started using for what they termed ‘misfits’.  Everyone was agreed that it wasn’t painful, so that reassured some, but it was said to be effective in re-wiring the subject’s brain.  The word came from neuro-plasticity, a process by which the brain was re-organized in some way, some painless but boring way.  No one was sure of the details.

All the girls in her first group had moved on, a few at a time.  Some had finished their five year term and Lisa fervently hoped they had been sent to a place where they could somehow start a new life, somewhere where things were surely better than what she had left behind in Rossville.  Other girls were moved to different sectors annually in accordance with what someone who was in charge determined were the requirements of the agricultural program.  Personally, Lisa thought it was to keep relationships from turning into organized resistance.  Since everyone knew that no friendships would last, most girls, if they were to survive, developed a shell around their feelings.  After experiencing the departure