A Dark Evolution (Book 2): Deranged Read Online Free PDF

drunkenly through a bright landscape of hyper realistic colors. Her five eyes, compounded for maximum coverage, took in every facet of her surroundings, from the most obscure of ultraviolets on the petals of flowers, guiding insects to their sweet nectar, to the deep greens of the grasses below, lush, full of water, and life. She saw all of this wonder, but did not see any of it. It was like white noise, or a background that moved too fast to focus on. She coursed aimlessly for miles, much farther than even her strongest sisters would fly.
    At last, when fatigue threatened to cause her to collapse, she hovered low to the ground. She landed on a long, rectangular-shaped piece of wood, a board, in a playground. Her six legs moved her forward, then turned, then forward again. Finally, they propelled her over the edge of the board. This time there was no flutter of tiny translucent wings. Her small body crashed silently into the dark pine wood chips below. With no thoughts of why or how, the tiny western honey bee died. She was far from her home and her many sisters. She would not be mourned but she would be missed, for the structure of the colony changed with each death, and now the young mouths she was supposed to be feeding would not be fed. Now her body could not be used to help warm the brood on cold nights. She was just detritus on the ground. Throughout the state of Kentucky, some twenty million honey bees, lost for purpose, confused, and listless, wandered away from their homes. A few seconds later, one of their sisters. A few seconds later, another.
     
    *****
     
    “This is a complete disaster.” Rosa Kaopyn leaned back at his desk, wishing he was comfortable. It wasn't just the pains in his back, it was his head and his heart and his stomach as well. The last ninety days had done their best to kill him.
    “I think disaster is an accurate assessment.” His colleague, an entomology and ecology PhD from Stanford University, sat across the desk from him. Rosa didn't have the luxury of many of these one-on-one meetings, so while Jason Carpenter was an old friend, he had to talk shop.
    “You know, of course, why you are here, right?”
    Jason nodded, “I may spend most of my time with bugs, but I’ve managed to retain some of my human forethought,” he said it with a sad smile.
    “Rosa, I’ve been kept out of the official loop. I’m only a civilian. Can you break down the numbers for me? How many human cases are we talking about right now?”
    Rosa sighed, his big chest heaving. Then he let his large black hands rest atop his substantial belly. “I only have U.S. data, and dammit, it changes so rapidly that anything I tell you now will be worthless in a few minutes.”
    “Do try, please. I’d like to know so that we can get to the bigger problem.”
    “The bigger problem?” Rosa asked, his eyebrows rising up.
    “Rosa, you didn’t advance to the head of the American CDC because you were foolish. You took the same entomology courses I did; you just chose a different path after the first two years of school.”
    Rosa let out a sigh. “The United States’ current population is three hundred fifty million souls. The data I have suggests that there are between five and seven million active infections. Now, that's not taking into account the people these things have killed, and that's not taking into account the number of people who have died on their own.”
    “Survival time is still one to four days?”
    “Most of them keel over after about thirty hours. The heart works harder and there's nothing regulating body temperature, so the person just burns up like an engine without coolant.”
    “Lovely way to go.”
    “All told, between active infections and all other related casualties, we’re looking at twelve million. That's on the conservative side.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I wish He was on our side. At the moment, it doesn’t appear so.”
    Jason shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So a little less than five