When Bees Die: When Bees Die, #1

By Cynthia Washburn

Life changes drastically in the Pacific Northwest when terrorists launch a series of viruses that kill off the bee population. The vegetation is decimated and the food supply, destroyed.  A repressive government emerges that deals harshly with any dissent and rigorously controls the lives of its citizens.

With the death of all bees, the government takes young children from their parents and forces them to work in the endless pollen farms. Facing separation, hunger, and suffocating control, a diverse group of unlikely rebels come together and risk death to fight this oppression.

First book in trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cynthia Washburn
• Release date: May 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497704022

Book preview

Cynthia Washburn

This is a work of fiction.  All persons mentioned are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is strictly co-incidental.

Copyright 2012. Cynthia Washburn. All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means whatsoever without written permission of the author except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Volume 1

To  John

If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!

-  attributed to Albert Einstein

Chapter  1    

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Another hot and humid day, like a lot of days that month.     Students were allowed to have water bottles at their desks but with the electrical restrictions and brownouts, many came to school with lukewarm water that only got warmer sitting on their desks all day.   How could students learn in this environment, Faye griped to herself, and not for the first time.

Mrs. Marsh . . .

Faye looked up.   Sarah, again.  The girl had been twirling her red hair around her finger, gazing into space, for the past ten minutes.

Mrs. Marsh, I think I’m going to faint.  It’s so hot in here.

She was exaggerating, but if Sarah did faint, Faye would have to call someone and then make out a report and explain it all to Edna, the principal.  There was now doubt that the air was stifling.  Okay, Sarah, go to the washroom and splash some water on your face.    Take your time.  The young girl got up slowly and walked out, taking her water bottle with her.  She was a sweet child, always twirling around the room whenever she had the chance.  Too bad she wasn’t much of student.

The classroom consisted of desks and chairs arranged in rows of four, five rows altogether.  It was large room, never designed as a school classroom.  Faye had heard it had been a knitting factory before.  The cavernous room had likely been the factory floor.

There were no assigned seats; Faye had decided that this was one small daily choice her Grade five students should be allowed to make.  But she had found that they tended to pick seats the first day and stick with them.  Except for the students who disappeared.  By some agreement those seats were left unoccupied, at least until a new student came who hadn’t attended before the disappearance and didn’t realize one of their number had been taken away.

Faye had tried at first to say something when a student didn’t show up.  Usually, she never received any notice that a student had been removed by the pollination guards.  She had thought about pretending to the other students that the family had moved away and their classmate was attending school in another part of the District but she realized quickly that students saw through an untruth like that. 

There were twenty students in each cohort; the ten year olds formed their own clan. Faye had thought at first that students would become competitive, considering the consequences, maybe try to sabotage each other.  They discovered early in their academic career  that cheating on examinations was impossible.  Standardized tests were given monthly, on-line and multiple choice, easily marked by the Scantron system.  Three failing marks after age ten and that was it.  No appeal, no re-do, no adaptations or modifications, nothing.  Their little hands could be made useful in the pollen fields and greenhouses, keeping food production going.

Usually children were picked up by the guards at home but the guards weren’t paid over-time so if the child wasn’t available at home after a couple of attempted pick-ups, they knew where to find them.  Some of the lazier guards went to the school first.  Edmonds Elementary School was a large grey brick building.  At present, about twelve hundred students attended, although the numbers varied.  The secondary school was on the other side of an enormous gravel field.  Since student numbers decreased after age ten, for different reasons, the Secondary school was actually smaller and enrolled up to a thousand students at a time.

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Someone, somewhere, somehow had determined that age ten was the cut-off age for children to demonstrate not just intelligence but achievement.  Failure after that age meant that there weren’t sufficient resources for the government to invest further in their education.  Faye had tried telling the principal how demoralizing the system was, how demeaning, how discouraging . . . it had been brushed off.  They might as well know the truth was what the old crone had said.  She was probably bitter that she didn’t have any influence with any decision-makers, Faye concluded.

Another hand was waving in the air.    That was the trouble with letting one student go; before long there’s a sea of hands.  Yes, Yvonne, what is it?

I'm really hot, too.

We’re all hot, Yvonne; there’s nothing I can do about it.  You know that.  It will be cooler in a few weeks when the rains start.

Can I go to the washroom?   Students didn't have the ‘get a drink’ excuse any longer since they were required to bring water bottles to school.

Wait until Sarah gets back.   That was the rule, only one student out at a time.  No break for the teacher, of course.  

Faye felt a surge of rebellion rising in her.   This wasn’t what she signed up for.   At the beginning of her teaching career, thirteen years earlier, she had been a member of a union with protections.   Okay, the pay wasn’t great but at least there were some benefits and rules even.   Since the bio-engineered terrorist attacks in 2018, everything had started to decline until teaching today had no resemblance to teaching in the past.   Why was she still there then,  Faye asked herself?   She answered her own question.   It was something to do.   And there was still a financial benefit.  But it wasn’t the teaching she had signed up for, the work she had trained for during five years of university.

Next year it would be her husband Dave’s turn to work.  He had trained as an engineer.  Only one job per family; that was the rule. Not enough jobs to go around;  someone decided on the solution.  It solved the daycare problem although in the beginning a lot of men had complained they didn’t like staying home with their infants and children.  After a while, fewer children were born, whether for that reason or some other.  Faye had heard that in the past couple of years, District police guards had been permitted to apply to extend their term past the year.  Whether that was because more guards were needed was not known.  Unlike teachers and principals, guards had some influence with the government.  They needed each other.

Faye had eighty students this term, down from almost a hundred before Christmas.   She didn’t always find out why a student was no longer in her class unless a friend of theirs had some information.   She knew some had died from one of the periodic plagues that occurred, or sometimes families relocated without notice, especially if one or both of the parents had been identified undesirable in some way or had committed a crime.  The entire family would be ostracized from the community for the latter, but how or where they went or were sent was never made clear.  Rumours abounded.

The government solution to the unreasonableness of providing only one teacher for a hundred students had been resolved, at least to the government’s satisfaction, by the use of computer educational programs.   Four days of the week students were required to stay in a study carrel and work through various educational programs.   One day each week, twenty students were assigned to come to Faye for review and assistance.   

‘Buzzzzzz’

The classroom door opened and a pair of uniformed guards entered, a man and a woman, boots clomping on the linoleum floor.   Oh, no, who was it today?   Sarah, it had to be Sarah.   She had the lowest scores and had been consistently low for months.  She’d failed two recent tests; had she failed the third?    Faye had tried to talk to her and reminded her of the consequences of inattention and lack of effort but somehow Sarah hadn’t taken it seriously.   She called herself a dancer, as if there were any jobs for that these days.  She’d told Faye that she wasn’t interested in the lessons in the program for her grade level—as though that mattered.   And now Sarah was out having a long visit to the washroom.   She’d get a shock when she came back, or maybe she didn't care.   How much could a ten year old care about something that she couldn't imagine?  

Faye decided on impulse to take a chance and see if anything could be done to avoid the inevitable. There was something endearing about the redheaded girl.  We have to fight back somehow, she’d told her husband just the other night, for the sake of our son, if nothing else.    He’d shrugged his shoulders.

Yvonne, Faye hurried to speak before the two guards approached her desk.  You can go to the washroom now.   She stared hard at the girl and nodded, hoping that somehow Yvonne would be able to warn Sarah.  Yvonne was definitely smarter than her friend, not that it would help much.  Sarah’s signal would be picked up eventually.

Yvonne got up, looking grateful.  I need to refill my water bottle, too, Mrs. Marsh.   

No, Yvonne had no idea that it was her friend, Sarah who would be leaving and she wouldn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to her friend.  Faye could see that the students had all stopped working and were sitting, tensely waiting.  It wasn’t the first time for most of them.  A couple of the students who were weaker academically looked worried.  

The two guards, a man with an overhanging belly and a younger woman, her fair hair tucked under the regulation cap, now stood in front of her desk and flashed their identification badges.   Yes, can I help you?   Faye made herself turn up her lips slightly and willed herself to look cooperative.  The female guard took out a document with a stamped seal on the bottom.   We’ve got orders to remove a Sarah Donless for unsatisfactory performance.

A couple of girls, Lisbeth and Gurjit, friends of Sarah’s, looked stunned.   Gurjit put her head down on her desk and began to weep, silently.  A puddle formed under Lisbeth’s seat.   Faye was sure that the other students would pretend not to notice.   They had their petty squabbles, but somehow they were all united against this.

Faye took the paper and forced herself to pretend to read it. A photo of Sarah, smiling happily at the camera was affixed to the top right corner.   Maybe, just maybe Yvonne had somehow managed to give the message to Sarah, who really should have been back by now.   But taking any more than ten seconds to scan the pre-printed form would be pushing it; Faye knew that.

Of course, it all seems to be in order.   How could it be in order, a voice inside her argued.   You’re talking about taking a ten year old child away from her home to work in a pollination field or greenhouse somewhere far away.  How is that any part of what ‘in order’ means?   Faye pretended to scan the classroom.

Ah, that’s right, she went to the washroom just a few minutes ago.   Would you like to wait or will you go get her yourself?   The look on the faces of the guards showed Faye that this wasn’t the first time this gambit had been tried.  But she’d had no way of knowing they had come for Sarah.  The classroom teacher never received any notice just for that reason:  so that the child and the family wouldn’t be warned.  Faye decided that she had to see it through. 

I’ll go, if you like.  That’s it, Faye, act cooperative, she reminded herself.   She started to rise from her chair from behind the desk, the back of her legs sticking painfully to the plastic seat.  You know, perhaps you could send a notice early in the morning and we could have the student ready for you.  They’d never do that.

Don’t bother, she can’t get away from us for long.   The voice was curt.  No response to her suggestion, of course.  The two guards turned to go, the man hitching up his regulation trousers with the dark stripe along the side.  He turned back after a few meters.  "We may have to recommend Neuro for you if it