A Dark Evolution (Book 2): Deranged by Jason N. LaVelle

phenomenal, leaned over and responded sharply. “We were never weak, Jason. The strong of mind are always the strong.” It was like he could read his mind. Jason nodded.
    Nolan cleared his throat. “So, my estimates are for a worldwide societal collapse within the next six months. Within a year, I predict the last Great War will begin. What are your thoughts?”
    “My calendar is more like ten months. Some of it varies based on political response, but yes, within the year, the collapse of our civilization will be well under way.”
    “All because of some damn mosquitoes,” Nolan said with a cruel chuckle.
    Jason snorted, “That's an interesting way to look at it. If we want to be that simple, we could say it was the spiders those idiots brought back to Florida.”
    “Or the ship that carried them,” Nolan continued. “It doesn’t really matter. The ecological collapse has already started.”
    “Indeed it has. When the Florida crop dusters association took up the flag for the FBI to try to stop the spread of the infection, they sent hundreds of planes into the air. They were loaded with DDT, imidacloprid, and various out-of-date organophosphates. While the monsters were still just tearing apart the streets and homes of lower Florida, these dusters blanketed everything with pesticides, and I don't believe for a minute that they even tried to reach the proper dilution rate. From the Everglades all the way up into the orange groves, they fogged everything, all to try to eliminate the mosquito population.”
    Jason took a breather and sighed. “Spraying for airborne pests is just so -”
    “Retarded?” Nolan suggested.
    “Don’t say that, that's not cool. It’s stupid. The chances of a liquid particle dispersed into the air hitting a flying insect is one in a billion. The chances of that same droplet hitting the ground, a plant, a tree, guaranteed. It's going to land somewhere, and where it lands it will make an impact. Don’t get me wrong, they knocked down the Florida mosquito population by eighty-seven percent, an incredible feat. But that came at a steep price. Before anyone could react and before any of us could object, the southern states all began this same aerial bombardment of their waterways and swamps, and anywhere with a little bit of humidity.”
    “And then it was too late to stop,” Noland said. “People were panicking, several cases popped up in Albuquerque, near the airport, eighteen hundred miles from where it started. I think that's about when Great Britain took notice. I gave a press conference urging them to stop, that the consequences were going to be ghastly, far worse than the disease.”
    “I saw it; it was on CNN.”
    “But that didn’t stop the panic. People were dumping their old pesticides: chlordane, DDT, aldrin, sodium arsenite, anything that looked and smelled strong, into their ponds and small rivers. I read an article that authorities caught a tanker purposefully purging fuel oil into a lake, all in an attempt to kill off mosquitoes and their larvae.”
    “So now the mosquito has survived, though admirably depleted,” Jason said, picking up where Noland stopped. “They will regenerate quickly, as long as there is an avian or mammalian food source. The mosquito is about all that survived though. Almost all ground-dwelling insects have been wiped out in the southern United States, close to ninety percent, and that number will rise and hit one hundred percent by the end of the year. The northern states are still spraying too, but the panic isn't as strong, and we estimate a sixty percent loss of all ground-dwelling insects. No one realizes that it is these insects, bacteria, and earthworms that create the rich soil we need to grow food. No one understands that soil is an endangered resource, that we already do not have enough to feed the planet! Eclipsing the momentous genocide of the land-dwelling insects is the decimation of the pollinators.”
    Jason and Nolan both shook