The Hive

The soil was soft under his boots. He wished he could take them off and feel it with his bare feet. He wish he could get rid of his helmet, and admire the sunset across city's skyline, unhindered by the net. Yet he still had work to do.

"The rooftops. That is where we are loosing our battle.", he thought. "All that surface, going to waste. Wasting energy, wasting space". He knew humankind is not the only social species that builds cities; nor is it the most successful one. The insects have been far more successful than the humans and their twisted notion of individuality. He hesitantly approached his second beehive. In the first one every bee had been dead, attacked by the Japanese wasps that had migrated in the region and decimated the bee population. Things were not any different at the second one. He felt sad to see their decapitated bodies, heaped into a little mount at the feet of the hive. They had tried to protect their queen. They had fought back. Ineffectively, but still; they had fought.


He brushed the dead bodies off the hive's entrance, onto the soil with which he had covered the rooftop. The dead should enable new life. The pumpkins would be tastier this year. He collected the honey and the wax, not daring to leave those in the hive over the night, now that this hive was dead.

He felt hot in the bee-keeper's suit. There were still bees flying in alarmed patterns, patrolling the rooftop for any sign of aggression. For the briefest moment he wished that the other hives had died already, no need to prolong their misery. Their demise from their superior predator was inevitable. And he would have been able to take of the suit. Shaking his head, he moved onwards to check the next hive.

What he found in the next hive startled him. There were 3 dead Japanese wasps in front of it. They were left there, beheaded. It looked lika an act of intimidation to any other wasps invader wannabes. He knew that Japanese bees has found a way to kill the wasps, but no hive in the rest of the world had been able to survive a wasp attack before. He crouched, bringing his face to level with the dead bodies. Something felt wrong. Ignoring his gut feeling, he extended a gloved finger to touch a wasp, only to fall backwards in surprise, as all bees erupted from the remaining hives with a dizzying sound. Durring his fall, he noticed that the bees were fleeing towards the setting sun. Then his head struck a watering can.

Moments. Seconds? Minutes? Unimportant. They passed.

He got up. The sky was now quite a bit darker, and his mouth felt numb. He could still hear the buzzing, although there was no sign of bees in the air. Another sound, one of metal under huge amounts of stress superimposed itself with the buzzing. An instant later the door of the rooftop exit on the next rooftop, a sold iron door, was air-bound along with its hinges. It span the entire roof, crossed the empty space between the two buildings, and crashed on the hive in from of him.

The shock only lasted an instant. Self-preservation instincts kicking in, he run away, towards his own building's door, barely chancing a glance towards the other building. A huge creature was on the other roof, no, not a creature, a man, it had to be a man, and it was running towards him. Surely this bestial man could not be contemplating jumping the distance! It was over 20 meters.

The bee-keeper tried to open the door of his building. It wouldn't bulge.

Again he turned to see the man, the huge, enormous man, leap. It seemed to him that time was freezing. He could see the beastman in his tattered grey overalls stepping on the curb at the roof's edge, pressing down and leaping in the air. Behind the huge frame of the beastman about to leap, he noticed, in that moment of frozen in time, that four regular-sized persons, four pursuers had emerged.

Before he was able to fully take in the details of these pursuers, time seemed to resume as the feet of the beastman left the roof, and he projected himself in the air. The sound of a gunshot reached his ears.

One of the pursuers had fired a gun, and apparently hit the beastman. The next shots were just as true, and blood sprayed forth from the beast's chest, a small crimson cloud flying ahead of him towards the bee-keeper's roof. The only sound for the following moments were those of the beastman's uncushioned fall and his uncontrollable rolling on the floor. When the beastman came to a halt at the feet of the bee-keeper, there was silence.

In situations like that, when you encounter unexplainable situations, when a beastman is bleeding in front of you, your brain either shuts down, or it does not. It did not. "This cannot be happening. But it is. Ok. Now what?".

The beekeeper tried once more to open the door. The beastman at his feet groaned. "So he is still alive". A small puddle of crimson blood was starting to form, leaking towards his boots. He looked at the other side of the expanse, to the other building. The four pursuers were standing aligned at the edge of the roof, eerily still. He could now focus on them.

A bearded hobo, a dry housewife, in her sixties with her apron on, an goth-teenager, with his lips and nails painted black and a heavy built man in his forties, in a grey suit. The latter held the gun. All of them wore blank facial expressions, a lost, far away look.

Then the housewife's eyes focused on him, with intent, with purpose. He had never felt so afraid in his life. The four figures opened their mouths and a buzzing sound, far too low for them to be making without spraining their vocal cords. The bee-keeper's eyes started to water. Through the haze of tears he saw the guy in the suit, slowly raising his gun, in absent minded kind of way, to the housewife's temple. He then pulled the trigger.

The bang reached the bee-keeper's ears moments before he lost control of his mind.

In a now glassy stare he saw the housewife collapsing into a heap on the other building's edge.
Then he kicked her off the edge of the building using his hobo body.
The hobo body and its two other remaining bodies on that building went back inside the rooftop exit. They would join his new bee-keeper body in a moment.

He turned his attention, or rather it turned its attention, gender identity being meaningless now, its being encompassing so much more than a body, it turned its attention to its sagging pray. The pray was trying to get up. Five bullets through its back, two in the lungs, and still trying to getting up. What a wonderful pray this beastman was. It would feast well tonight.