Stung - By Bethany Wiggins Page 0,52
street, or playing games with Jonah, I was sitting at the piano, filling myself with music—with joy. Or sorrow, depending on the piece. On that day, right before I turned thirteen, it was foreboding that overwhelmed me as I learned Beethoven’s Seventh. I’d studied the piece the night before, memorized the translated words of a poem that had been sung to the tune, the words of “Figlio Perduto”—“Lost Son”—about a boy and his father going home, but the boy keeps hearing things and seeing things that his father cannot. And then the Erl King—a fairy king—comes to steal the boy away into another world. Only, the father couldn’t see the king.
“MY FATHER, MY FATHER, HE SEIZES ME FAST,
FOR SORELY THE ERL KING HAS HURT ME AT LAST.”
THE FATHER NOW GALLOPS, WITH TERROR HALF WILD,
HE HOLDS IN HIS ARMS THE SHUDDERING CHILD;
HE REACHES HIS FARMSTEAD WITH TOIL AND DREAD,
THE CHILD IN HIS ARMS LIES MOTIONLESS, DEAD.
My fingers pounded the keys, the song consuming me, haunting me, making me feel as if I were the one being stolen away by the Erl King’s magic.
Dad’s voice bellowed into the music room, military fierce. “Quiet!”
My hands jerked off the keys, my toe released the pedal, and I stood from the glossy black bench, shocked.
The television boomed from the other room, turned so loud the windows rattled. I closed the piano, pushed the bench in, and followed the noise.
Jonah and Lis sat on the sofa, leaning toward the television, their eyes wide. Dad sat in his wheelchair beside the sofa, square hands resting on the wheels, attention glued to the TV screen.
I glared at my family. No one had ever yelled at me to be quiet before. I was a prodigy, after all. “Why can’t I play the—”
“Shhhh!” they hissed as one. Lis glanced at me, and without speaking a word, I knew something was wrong. She held up her hand and I clasped it and stared at the television, too. And the more I heard, the closer to the television I leaned.
“Because of the direness of the situation, we thought it best to speed matters along,” said a man in a gray suit. He stood alone at a podium in front of a group of reporters. The reporters wore white masks over their mouths: the kind doctors and surgeons wore to avoid spreading disease. “If we didn’t step in, bees would already be extinct and that would potentially lead to worldwide famine, possibly even the extinction of the human race.”
“So, you’re saying you fixed the bee problem? Honeybees are no longer on the endangered species list?” a woman from the crowd asked the man in the suit.
The man looked away from her, straightened his red tie, and looked right at the camera and stared, as if staring directly into our family room, staring into every room in America. “Yes. We found a solution,” he said, his eyes fastened to mine through the plasma screen. “We have already genetically modified honeybees.”
On the bottom of the screen, words zipped by. Flu death toll at a new high. Over fourteen thousand known deaths with thousands more expected. Hospitals too full to admit new cases. Entire East Coast advised to stay indoors. West Coast predicted to follow.
“So, you’re saying, in the midst of this monumental flu epidemic, we finally have something to celebrate?” another masked reporter asked.
The man in the suit tugged at the collar of his white shirt, swallowed, and looked down. Slowly, he placed his hands, palms down, on the podium. “No,” he said, unable to meet the camera with his eyes. “We modified the bees. But the GenMod bees … they killed the other bees. All of them.”
Another reporter chimed in, “Well, that’s okay, right? As long as they reprod—”
“They’re the cause of the flu,” the man blurted.
“What?” Lis said, dropping my hand. “How can bees be causing the flu?”
The reporters burst into a flood of questions, raising their hands, trying to be heard over each other.
The man in the gray suit coughed into his balled fist before saying, “We genetically modified the bees’ sting to be more powerful, more deadly to its predators. Unfortunately, we discovered that when a human being is stung, the bee’s venom causes flu-like symptoms, followed by aggressive behavior and then death. The bee flu is highly contagious, spreading through bodily fluids—something as simple as a cough makes the germs airborne.”
Jonah’s face drained of color. “The bees? That’s why so many people have died? Because of your stupid bees?” he