The Surge Trilogy (Book 3): We, The Final Few

by P. S. Lurie

  “Enough. If we survive this then we’ll come back and tell you when it’s over.”

  “Works for me,” the boy says. “By the way, no flood?”

  “Nope,” I reply.

  “Thought not.” He pulls a face as he works through what that means for everything that’s happened in his life. It turns from satisfaction in knowing the truth to abject horror to numbness and then sadness.

  “Wow,” the girl says, experiencing the same level of defeat. “Seriously? No flood?”

  I wonder if I should tell them about the surviving Middlelanders, who may be the girl’s family, but if they haven’t explored that possibility then I guess they have their reasons for living in no man’s land; and until today works itself through, there seems little point to build their hopes up. “What are your names?”

  “Tim and Beth.”

  “Well, Tim and Beth, I’m sorry.”

  “That there was no flood?”

  “That it doesn’t get any easier.”

  I know this because I think of my parents’ unnecessary deaths and it’s still painful to recall, especially when I consider how they died. I shake the thought away and contemplate consoling the couple but there’s nothing I could say that would make it any better so I leave the room without another word. It’s a sour note but there’s no positive spin to give to what the Upperlanders have done to us.

  Despite Samuel imploring Tess to stay back, the five of us leave the hospital with only the young couple staying behind. It’s easier to move fast now that Ronan is back on track and we burst into the fresh air, not letting the fact that we’re heading towards potential danger hold us back. The train is out of action and the roads are impossible to navigate by car so we’ll have to run along the track as far as we can. I check my watch; we have just under half an hour to make it back to the others and await the next hurdle, whatever that will be.

  Theia

  “What is this place?” The setup, the contents, everything about what is in front of me is astonishing.

  “I came here on a school trip a few months ago,” Zeke says, not as taken aback as I am but near enough incredulous. “Everyone must have left for lunch. Good timing, hey?”

  “I guess.” It does avoid having to come into contact with other Upperlanders but considering what is here I’m not sure which the more terrifying option is.

  “Didn’t know it existed until we came to the fortress. Explains the smell, right?”

  Something slams into the door behind us but it doesn’t budge. All the same I pick up the keyboard on the desk to our side and whack it into the identification panel; it has the same effect as when I used the porcelain chip to trap the man in the prison cell but is more of a refined weapon this time around. “Should hold them off for a while at least,” I say, thinking that the guards could shoot their way through but they might be under instructions to avoid harming me, and turn my attention back to the room.

  Hundreds of cages packed with animals fill up the space, with enough distance in the aisles in between to keep predators from prey, which I assume also means the zookeepers or veterinarians or whatever jobs the people who come here have. I look as far I can see; the warehouse carries on through open hangar doors, overflowing with more beasts. As I walk through, I feel the temperature and humidity change by way of some clever filtrating systems.

  “My father,” Zeke says, as he passes an air vent that blows cool air into his hair and eventually reaches a small pen that homes some fluffy sheep-like animals with long necks that I have never seen before. “He knew about this long before I did. He designed a way to provide suitable environments for all of the species.”

  I turn three-hundred and sixty degrees and take in the amount of variety in the habitats that have no right to co-exist but seem to be working steadily. In one corner, two polar bears take it in turns to jump off a raised, icy ledge and splash into a deep pool. Next door there’s marshland, home to at least one visible hippopotamus. Next to this, lush shades of greenery making up a tropical forest border on gravelly, dry mounds. I can’t make out animals in either but there are hundreds of species in other cages that I do recognise from textbooks although I’d been told they were all extinct.

  “Henry,” I whisper, the word escaping my mouth. Either Zeke doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore it but I can’t help but think about Henry’s passion for books about animal behaviour. He would have loved to witness this. He may even have given the Upperlanders’ credence for setting this up.

  Other than wild birds soaring above the drowning land and fish and water-based mammals in the seas, I had assumed that there were a few pets but that was it. Then something occurs to me: the Upperlanders ate meat and drank milk but I had never seen a farm. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Had they? Or were they so accustomed to the supply of beef and other meats that they decided it didn’t matter?

  I should be panicked at the guards trying to find us but I am overcome by the spectrum of beasts, by the colours and markings of animals I could only dream of and not even know all of their names. Elephants, crocodiles, lions and giraffes are the first that come to mind of the ones I can see but I continue on and notice smaller cages tucked away housing things I have no idea about.

  “Why?” Zeke says.

  “Sorry?”

  “Don’t you want to know why President Callister has organised this?”

  “A collection,” I say, distractedly.

  “Don’t say the Upperlanders don’t have a heart,” Zeke says. “They’re keeping them alive. For the new world. For when the planet is safe again.”

  “Ok. Why?”

  “President Callister decreed only humans deserved to be culled. This is her way of maintaining every kind.”

  The idea strikes something familiar in my mind, of a story I heard as a child. “A flood. Two of every kind.”

  “Only the world wasn’t wiped out after all.”

  “President Callister didn’t care,” I say, feeling the fury return to me of vengeful anger that has always been present since I’ve been in the fortress but I needed to keep locked up for self-preservation. “She hurried the extinction of some communities along. A new world.”

  “Resetting all the evils of man: laziness, maliciousness. Giving the world a chance to grow prosperous.”

  I say it for what it is. “A self-inflicted Noah’s Ark?”

  “President Callister must have jumped at the chance. This has been a plan decades in the making, ever since the first signs of the polar caps started melting beyond anything imaginable. You don’t organise a shelter like this overnight.”

  “And that includes a group of people deemed worthy of living through the flood?”

  “The day we were moved to the fortress President Callister gave us a welcoming speech. Any thoughts of those who died on the Utopia were brushed aside as we were congratulated on being worthy of continuing human existence. I only knew about the flood and about no one needing to die for a lack of space and resources when I was here. I told others today as I escaped. I wonder what effect that has had.”

  I nod slowly as it finally dawns on me that every time I thought I’d outlived a cull or some atrocity it was of little importance to the Upperlanders. “I was wrong. We weren’t just unimportant. We were insignificant. To them our lives were nothing more than pieces of a board game. We survived so that we could be slaves. Then, when they moved up to the fortress, we were expendable. We never stood a chance. It was never about us. You were the lucky few.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zeke says, bowing his head. Then he realises something. “But you are important. President Callister wants you alive. She’s spent so much time on you there has to be some reason. It can’t just be a game to her anymore.”

  I don’t know.” Learning about this place doesn’t explain what President Callister wants with me but it has bought me some time and I’m not giving up now. “We need an exit.” I don’t wait for Zeke’s reply and hurry past even more enclosures cramm
ed with locked-up animals, unhappy in their false environments, not aware that despite being prisoners, it is for their own good and not at all how like we were treated. I rush through two more hangars including farmyard animals and a whole host of cows hooked up to milking devices but come up empty until I spot a sealed pair of doors at the far end. “I don’t suppose on your trip you were shown any outdoors area for the animals to roam?”

  Zeke nods in the same direction as the doors. “Yes, but don’t get your hopes up just yet. Are you ready to see the outside?”

  I don’t need asking twice. I go over to the doors and begin to slide one of them open.

  Ruskin

  Cal and Francine navigate us a different way back to the meeting point, better acquainted with the Upperlands than we are, but we have a little bit of time before we’re supposed to reconvene and we talk about our experiences of the prison and how we came to learn about the lack of the sea. I include the fact that my parents died below where we stood earlier that day and everything we tell them makes them gasp in astonishment. It’s still mind-blowing that the flood stopped long before we thought it had but telling two people our story, just as when we met Travis and Claire, makes me realise how much we’ve been through as if only now, speaking out the words, I can stop and take it all in.

  In return, they recall what happened once they were taken the morning after the great cull from the arena, separated from the rest of the Middlelanders when they had already lost their families one way or another. They were immediately marched to the fortress, bypassing even the chance to rest in the Upperlands. There they were housed in dorms and their lives consisted of a heavy routine, alternating between physical training and being brainwashed into adopting the enemy as their saviours and avowing to protect them in return.

  The worst is when Francine tells us how the numbers have dwindled, in line with what Ronan said earlier. “At first it wasn’t obvious but then children, especially the younger ones, were notably absent. I had suspicions that it was those who weren’t strong enough but then I started hearing less crying and screaming from nightmares from within the fortress and figured that the doctors were picking off those whose minds couldn’t be wiped. That’s when I realised I needed to keep my head down. I hid messages to myself after they stripped us of photos and mementoes of our families. They couldn’t break me.”

  “Took us a while but the three of us figured out what we all thought,” Cal adds.

  I want to ask them about Theia or even my brother but I doubt they know anything and I decide it’s better to pretend right now that there’s a chance they’re both alive rather than hear anything that could disappoint me.

  “Nearly there,” says Cal.

  Jack and I fall back to speak as they pace on to scout the area. “Doing ok?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I’ve tried to pretend that this army of children were just the enemy. Everyone has a story. It’s so messed up.”

  “I know. But we might have to fight some of them if it comes to it. We’re lucky we encountered these two.”

  “Let’s hope others are as forgiving of our presence. How about you?”

  “Other than feeling bad about what I did to Ronan? I’m alright. I don’t know what it was. It’s just that I’m so scared of something happening to you. I’m so angry with what they did to us.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

  “You don’t understand. I want to kill them all. They deserve to die.” It feels like a relief to tell him even though I’m ashamed that he knows what I’ve truly become.

  Francine throws a look to say we’re being too loud this close to the fortress entrance and that we could be drawing attention to ourselves. It’s not like we did a great job of being covert at the arena. Regardless, Jack lowers his voice but carries on and I’m worried about what he’ll say or that he’ll reject me.

  “Tell me about the rowboat.”

  I smile, thankful that Jack knows exactly what to say to deter me from becoming riled, and I picture the scene. “I didn’t mention one detail. The sun’s shining and you need to cool off.”

  “Oh yeah? What happens next?”

  “I push you off the boat.”

  He laughs. “Charming.”

  “Cools you down though. But then you drag me in and we splash about.” Part of my brain hates that we’re joking about enjoying the water, the thing that has always proven so dangerous to us, either from there being too much or a lack of it, but the part that settles my nerves wins through.

  “Promise?” he asks.

  “Promise.”

  “It’s up ahead,” Cal says. “Two blocks north from here.”

  I take Jack’s hand and squeeze it for encouragement, equally for me as for him.

  We were fortunate that Ronan’s two friends found us and I have to hope that everyone else has been as lucky avoiding detection since we left them. I also have to hope that there’s an explanation for Jason’s disappearance, that Theia and Leda are alive, and that one day Jack and I can live out the whimsical fantasy that kept us going every day in the prison and ever since.

  Once more, hope returns to me because up against what’s in store for Jack and me, hope is the only thing keeping me going.

  Selene

  I circle the broken chair and sit on the couch in the living room to steady myself as Dr Penn stands in the kitchen doorway, illuminated in the light from the freezer, ready to reveal the truth about my past. Hearing his words are all I’m focused on as if I’m hypnotised rather than focusing on what he’s planning next because there must be a reason he has found me. He must have waited for me to return and now I’m his eager audience, his willing victim.

  “You don’t remember your early childhood, do you?”

  I crease my eyebrows, concerned that he’s bringing this up. So much of growing up and becoming an adolescent is a blur; mostly it is memories of my mother shouting, accusing me of ruining her life and hitting me. Just my mother and me. My father, apparently dead. Apparently.

  I’ve never given it a second thought but now that word hangs over me.

  “We were, believe it or not, happy. Me and Selma.”

  I lurch forward to vomit but nothing comes up.

  “Selene?”

  “I’m listening,” I bark at him. Hit me with it, I want to say but instead I sneer through the darkness, uncertain whether I want to hear a single word more.

  “Despite our take on the world flooding, we loved one another.”

  “You... you were a Middlelander?” There are so many other questions that occupy my thoughts but I have to start small.

  He nods. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d seen. Tall, strong, defiant. Sounds familiar? She wouldn’t let anything stand in our way, not even the rising sea. Stubborn. You recognise that trait too I’m sure.”

  I don’t reply.

  “I told her we shouldn’t have children. Because of the pact our community had made, that it was unfair to bring them into a drowning world.”

  I think about Henry and all of the other parents with similar thoughts and then I remember something my mother used to throw at me in her most furious of moments: “You were a mistake. You ruined my happiness.”

  “She thought she could have a child against my wishes and against everyone else’s too. Not because she wanted one but because she was told she couldn’t. Really, Selene, I know this sounds odd but can you picture her as a mother? She was many things but maternal? I hated her for what she allowed to happen. I begged her not to go ahead with the pregnancy, that we were happy without needing anything else. But, well, you know the rest.”

  Dr Penn, my supposed father pauses as if to bring himself to deal with the next part of the story. As if he’s also suffering by retelling it, not that I’m likely to extend him any sympathy because I think far enough ahead to what he did to me for a whole year.

  “You were bor
n and it didn’t take long for her to realise how unhappy a screaming baby made her. The water kept rising and your mother became more unstable. But I loved her. I loved her so much Selene.

  “The Fence had still not been built by then but there were border crossings into the Upperlands and the security controls were growing more severe with each passing day. I could see the friction between our communities with the backdrop of the mounting oceans. There would be an uprising; an impenetrable barrier was the obvious solution so I took my chances and I convinced your mother to leave with me. My job as a hypnotherapist had enough credence to offer me a visa but by then all migration was halted. Still, I had enough money to smuggle us over.”

  “Why didn’t she go?”

  “I could lie and pretend she was rebellious.”

  “The truth.”

  “The truth was that I wanted to leave you behind and for us to start again. I didn’t love you. I didn’t have any feelings towards you other than resentment. Your mother had little more than that but...”

  “Stop,” I say, as my head pounds and I need a break. In the last few minutes I have learnt that Dr Penn is my father, he and my mother loved one another and somehow I was the reason they separated. I gesture for him to continue.

  “She refused. She stayed behind with you whilst I built a new life in the Upperlands.”

  “But she hated me,” I blurt out.

  “She might have resented you. But she always loved you. She chose you over me. She thought Total Flood would kill her but she couldn’t leave you behind.”

  My eyes widen with the revelation that my mother had sacrificed herself for me long before she died last year trying to save my life. “Why didn’t she tell me the truth earlier?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was easier to pretend I never existed. I guess she messed up because she took it out on you anyway. Then the Great Cull happened and I had to step in and protect you. I hadn’t given you much before then but I had to step up. I thought you should know.”