Kill Switch: Chapter 19

A Helmet Full of Bees

“Bees!” X’s voice echoes cavernously. “Watch out!”

And then I see them, a whole swarm of, like, real fucking bees, the likes of which I’ve only ever read about at prep. And they’re all buzzing around me, real mad like, battering into my jumpsuit.

“Fuck!” I yell.

But I can barely hear my own voice, the buzzing has grown to such an absurd and disconcerting volume.

The rope ladder swings, grows taut.

I try to take it one rung at a time.

But it’s all darkness surround, except for maybe a few inches around me, and those few inches are full of buzzing bees. Through a crease in a wave of bees, I see the muddy wall surround. All the little crevices of mud and root and worms. And it’s nauseating, all this earth. It makes my stomach turn. But it also excites me, somehow. Lights me up, as it were. Almost like a pharma.

My skin tingles beneath my jumpsuit. Like a tickle.

I take a few more rungs, and then I see a circle of light. Shadowy heads dip in and out at the edges. A hand reaches down, and then dissipates.

“Come on!” A voice yells. “Almost there!”

I take a couple more rungs.

And then I feel it, the sting, and then another sting, and another. I yelp. I swing, trying to brush off the bees. And the pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. The way the stingers just keep coming, one after another, jabbing into my abdomen.

And then, inexplicably, I say, “don’t forget to support a young content creator,” before realizing that my gaze isn’t live. For all my followers know, I’m still in my persy, playing Derrick 9.

Which is a hella vibekill, because my gaze of this be attack would go hella viral if it were streaming.

The rope rasps.

And Yide is all, like, “stop swinging, Vonn! You’re going to throw us both off!”

And I look down, and we’re, like, hella high. I mean, I can’t even see the ground.

But the stinging won’t stop.

I scale another rung, which is hella brave, I know.

And I can see that I’m just three, maybe four more rungs away from the top.

I take another rung.

And then another.

The rope rasps again.

And that’s when I hear it, the ping ping ping of a laser, and I look down and see, through the darkness below, these red lasers shooting up at us.

“Simul Cops!” Yide yells. “Go!”

So now, like, I have bees and lasers to contend with.

I reach out for the last rung, my glove gripping the wood just as a series of stings dig into my neck, and then, somehow, the buzzing grows louder and louder, deafening almost, like the bees are right in my ear, and then I realize that the bees are right in my ear.

My helmet is a colony.

I feel the furry shoulders of a bee skirt over my eyelid. Wings are beating against my cheek. I close my eyes. The adrenaline is, like, ten doses of safeUp, without the safe. Just straight up upness is what it is.

Ping, ping.

Sizzle, sizzle.

The rope beside my right hand frays, and then breaks, and the rung I’m holding onto comes loose, and before I know it, I’m dangling in midair, and I feel my legs slam into something solid. And then something else solid. I’m certain that I’m going to fall to my death. My head crooks upward. I open my eyes, praying that a bee doesn’t lodge its stinger into my pupil. The circle of light is so close. The hands are reaching down. But there’s nothing for me to grab onto. And I can’t hear a damn thing with all the buzzing in my helmet.

A stinger digs into my ear lobe.

My hand clutches the wooden rung, which is literally hanging by a thread, and it’s almost like I’m standing on solid ground, the way my feet won’t fully dangle, and I’m hanging there, like, this is how it ends, Vonn. Two inches away from The Without, with a helmet full of bees.

And I’m certain that I’m dead because there’s, like, this floating sensation pushing me upward, and a series of visions fill my gaze. The light. The hands. The ground. I turn over. I see Yide surface from the hole, like a child being born in the olden times. And then some Withouter I’ve never seen before places a steel cover over the hole just as a red streak of laser soars to the sky and dissipates.

Someone is jostling me.

Tugging at my helmet.

And the stinging is incessant.

And the buzzing is so hella loud that I can’t hear myself scream.

But I know I’m alive.

Because it hurts like hell.

And I never thought I’d be so happy to be in so much pain.

I close my eyes once again. And sink into oblivion.