Stung - By Bethany Wiggins Page 0,53

yelled at the television. Lis grabbed my hand once more, holding it tight.

The man, his face turning a sickly shade of green, tugged on the collar of his shirt again and pointed to a reporter who stood frantically waving his hand. The reporter tore the surgical mask from his mouth. “So kill them! Exterminate them!” he cried, his voice rising to near panic.

“We tried,” the man muttered, eyes full of misery, shoulders slumped.

“And?”

He looked right into the camera again. Right into the eyes of America. “We modified them to withstand all known pesticides. We have come up with a new pesticide that kills them, but it is worse than the bee flu—a last resort. We’re not sure if anything will survive its effects.”

“They’re going to kill the whole country,” Dad whispered, knuckles white from his grip on his wheelchair wheels.

“Use the pesticide!” a reporter yelled. More join in, chanting, “Pest-i-cide! Pest-i-cide!”

“Wait!” The man at the podium raised his hands over his head. “There’s hope. We’ve manufactured a vaccine, a sort of antivenin derived from the bees. There’s only a limited supply, so …”

Chapter 23

“Fo?” Bowen is in front of me, his hand shaking my arm. “Are you all right?”

I blink away the memory and look at him. “The bees?” I whisper.

“Bees? What about them?”

“Are they dead?”

Bowen nods. “Yeah. They used some newly invented heavy-duty pesticide after they realized the vaccine was worse than the flu. Only problem was, it killed everything—bugs, birds, cattle, small animals, trees, grass, crops, even some people. That’s why everything is dead.”

My brain starts to freak out and I begin to tremble. My eyes search for a distraction, anything to take my mind off the bees, and lock on the piano. “I played the piano,” I whisper, staring at the grand piano, swaying with the remembered pulse of music.

“I know,” Bowen says, his voice drawing my gaze to his face. His eyes grow far away, clouded over with memory. “I could hear you from my bedroom if I opened the window. That’s why I was always sick in the winter. My window was always open. And on summer nights when my dad was home yelling at my mom, I’d get my sleeping bag and pillow and put them on top of his semi, so I could fall asleep to your music. Remember in third grade? You hit me in the face with your backpack when we were walking home from school?”

A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. “Yeah. I remember you called me Fotard and said playing the piano was stupid. So I stomped on your foot and then hit you.”

He smiles. “Your mom made you write an apology letter to me, but you were too scared to deliver it, so you had Jonah bring it to my house. It said something like, ‘I’m sorry I hit you, but if you don’t stop teasing me about piano, I’ll hit you again.’ Did you know that when Jonah delivered the note he told me if I ever talked to you again, he and his friends would beat the crap out of me?”

My mouth falls open in surprise. “My brother stood up for me? Is that why you never talked to me again? Because of Jonah?”

He shrugs. “That and you were always walking around with your nose in the air, always acting better than everyone else.”

“I was not!” I snap, indignant.

He takes a step closer to me, so that there are only a couple of inches of air separating us. “The only reason I teased you in the first place …” He pauses, brushes my bangs out of my eyes, and I am painfully aware of the lack of space between us. “I teased you because I didn’t know how else to talk to you.”

“Oh,” I whisper, at a loss for words.

He grins and puts a finger to his lips, nods toward a door at the far end of the lobby.

We pass the piano, and I reach toward the dusty keys.

Bowen’s hand clamps around my wrist. “No. We don’t know if this place is safe. Come on.” He slides his fingers from my wrist to my hand and loops them in mine.

With my hand in his, held safe, it seems like everything will be okay. I tighten my fingers in his, and we cross the silent lobby to a stairwell filled with sunlit windows and littered with dead mice and bugs, which crunch beneath my shoes. We go up and up and up, my legs growing