Forager - the Complete Trilogy (A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Trilogy)

by Peter R Stone

  We found a relatively clean, dry patch of floor near the back windows, which by some miracle were still intact, though no longer transparent.

  I sat with my back against the wall. Nanako lay curled up on the floor beside me with her head on my lap. I stroked her hair, and smiled at the sight of her 3D photo-viewer goggles, which she was wearing on her head like when I first met her. I got the feeling she may never take them off again. She had ditched the ankle length black funeral dress and was wearing her clothes from Hamamachi again. I'd popped into our apartment after we'd left the Courthouse. I figured it would be safe, as just about every Custodian in the town was down trying to prevent Skel getting into the town through the hole we blew in the wall. I guess we'd well and truly earned the title of terrorists now.

  Nanako was extremely weak and still suffering from depression, but she'd come a long way since I'd rescued her at midday – her perspective on the things that had troubled her had been completely transformed.

  Leigh lay on the floor on my left, pale and weakened from the effort to walk here, and David and Shorty sat beside him.

  I know Michal wasn't with us, but there was a sense of solidarity among us now that we were back together again.

  "What did the captain's message mean – 'Don't forget us?'" Shorty asked.

  "He wants me, or us, rather, to save Newhome from the Skel," I replied.

  "What? Forget that! Why don't we find some quite little spot out in the country and settle down, away from these two stupid feuding towns?" David shot back.

  "That ain't gonna work, David, you doofus, because you know, it's just the five of us," Shorty replied. "And the boy-girl ratio ain't too hot, in case you didn't notice."

  "And just how are we supposed to save Newhome from the Skel?" David ignored Shorty.

  "The Rangers are the problem, not the Skel," Nanako said, surprising us, because we thought she was asleep. "If we can remove the Rangers from the equation, the feud between our towns will stop. Without the Ranger's support, the Skel will grow bored of besieging Newhome and will go back to their old way of life."

  "I ain't going up against no Rangers, not never," Shorty declared adamantly. "Look what the blighters did to my nose!"

  "It's an improvement," I said with a chuckle.

  Shorty stuck out his tongue and sneered at me.

  "Do I have to join you on this lunatic quest?" Leigh scowled.

  "Of course not," I replied without hesitation. "And that goes for all of you. But think of what's at stake – if Newhome falls, our families go with it."

  "Thought you'd say something like that," Leigh moaned. "Fine, I'll come."

  "Hey, have the Rangers been behind the Skel attacks on Newhome from the beginning?" David asked.

  "That's what I think, but Newhome wasn't their first target," I replied.

  "Really, then who was?"

  "Councillor Okada."

  "You mean the Skel attack on Councillor Okada and Nanako wasn't random?" Leigh asked.

  Nanako sat up. "Can't have been – the Rangers gave us the route we took to Newhome."

  "And they gave that route to the Skel and asked them to kill you? Those scum!" Shorty said, genuinely angry.

  "Any idea why the Rangers wanted Okada dead?" David asked.

  "I haven't the slightest idea," Nanako. She reached out and ran her fingers over the scars on the left side of my head – scars from the bullet wound and subsequent operations. "Any ideas about who shot you, Ethan? If you can remember who did it, it may help us put the pieces of this puzzle together."

  "Only that it was a guy, and that he was the one who asked me to infiltrate the Rangers to find out what they were up to."

  "We need to know who he is," she said. "Can you try to remember now?"

  I nodded, and focused on the memory I had in the dream. I saw myself sitting on that fence with my assault-rifle on my lap as the man approached and sat beside me. But as I tried to remember who he was, my senses began to reel up, down, and inside out, and I felt as though a seizure was about to trigger, and not just a complex partial seizure, but something more powerful. "I can't...I can't see who he is." I gasped for breath and backed away from the memory.

  "Okay, don't force it," she said, taking my hands in hers. "I wish we had a phone so we could call Councillor Okada. Maybe he can work out who this man is."

  "We'll have to add a phone to our shopping list," I suggested.

  "Works for me," she laughed.

  It was so good to see Nanako slowly returning to her old self. Now that she knew the truth about the past, she was set free from those fears and doubts. And her fears that I'd leave her if I found what had happened to her two years ago were going too.

  And next year, when the anniversary of her miscarriage came around, I'd be there beside her and we'd get through it together.

  "So it's decided then. We're going up against the Rangers?" Shorty asked, looking at each of us in turn. "'Cause if you ask me, I'd rather take on the Custodians or the Skel, or the Custodians and the Skel."

  "We wouldn't have to go up against the Rangers directly," I answered. "The Rangers have gone rogue – they aren't acting under the auspices of the Hamamachi Council. All I want to do is gather evidence on their activities and present it to the Council – then they can shut them down."

  "Jones," Leigh said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Haven't you learned anything yet? Nothing ever goes the way you expect or want it to," he grumbled.

  "Yeah, I know what you mean," I agreed.

  "So when do we set off on this insane mission against these psycho-killer Rangers?" Shorty asked.

  "Not for a while," I answered. "Leigh and Nanako need to rest and recover before we start making plans."

  Nanako tapped me gently over my never-healing chest wound. "We’re not the only ones who need to rest and recover, Mister."

  With the threat of Newhome using its nuclear bomb against Hamamachi gone, we could afford to sit back to rest and recover from our recent ordeals. And we could do so away from all the dramas and persecutions that had befallen us in Newhome. On one hand I was glad Nanako was finally free of Sienna's hate campaign and Major Harris' endless harassment, but I was also sad. Her dreams and hopes for a fulfilling life with me in Newhome had been crushed. There was no way we could ever return to Newhome and see my family again, and the same applied to Hamamachi and her family. We were expatriates, exiled from our respective hometowns. But we were together again, and that was what mattered. After we dealt with the Rangers, I'd find somewhere that Nanako and I could live in peace and eventually raise a family.

  But in the meantime, Leigh's words kept ringing in my mind like a village church bell warning its inhabitants of an approaching calamity. "Nothing ever goes the way you expect or want it to."

  Love endures through every circumstance.

  (1 Corinthians 13:7)

  New Living Translation Bible

  Copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007, Tyndale House Foundation

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you, Lord Jesus, for being my very life.

  Thanks also to:

  Alice Kurata, the beautiful model pictured on the book's cover to represent Nanako.

  Juliet Lauser, for her fantastic critique and helpful suggestions.

  Gordon Long, for his invaluable critique and editing.

  Faith Blum, for her editing, and encouraging feedback.

  Hannah Stone, for all the priceless chats we had while reading the book to her.

  Tim Steen, for spotting a whole bunch of typos.

  David Caldwell, for spotting typos the rest of us had missed.

  Expatriate

  Forager Series, Book Three

  Copyright © 2014 Peter R Stone

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  I woke up i
n a hospital ward, feeling completely disoriented. The single window was shuttered and a floor-to-ceiling curtain provided privacy from the occupant of the adjacent bed. I felt disoriented and terrible, both physically and mentally. I tried to work out where I was, but my mind was sluggish and I struggled just to form a coherent thought. I ran my hands over my head and found that it was shaved close to my scalp. There was also a mass of scar tissue above my left ear. The left side of my head ached intolerably.

  I began to panic. Where was I? What happened to me? I could remember foraging with my team out in Melbourne’s ruins, but the memories felt vague, as though I was trying to access them from the Murray River's murky depths.

  The door opposite my bed slid back and a male nurse and an oddly dressed Asian girl in her late-teens entered.

  "And how are you feeling this morning, Ethan Jones?" the nurse asked as he came over and cranked the bed up to a sitting position.

  "I feel…awful," I croaked, my words slurring together.

  The girl – what was with the way she dressed – rushed to the other side of the bed and took my hand in hers as she studied me anxiously. Her face was round and she wore her thick black hair in a bob-cut. But her clothes! I'd never seen their like before. She wore a black-and-blue zebra-stripe-patterned jacket, black skirt, a rather too-revealing black top and torn pink tights. How come the Custodians let her parade about dressed like that?

  I pulled my hand from hers and glared at her with undisguised annoyance. Why was she taking such liberties with me?

  "Where am I?" I asked the nurse.

  "You’re in Newhome general Hospital," the girl answered in a broad Aussie accent. Why did they let her in here?

  "How come – what happened to me?" I asked the nurse as I ran my fingers over the scars on my head again.

  The nurse fitted the cuff of a blood-pressure gauge to my upper arm and began pumping it up.

  "I...I brought you back here," the girl replied, glancing between the nurse and me as she spoke. "To get you the proper help you needed for your injury."

  Newhome General Hospital? Injury? Then where were my father and mother – why weren’t they here? I looked at the girl, and she stared back with dark-brown eyes wide with apprehension.

  "You brought me?" I asked as my head began to swim, and it felt like my senses were flipping up and down, inside and out. "Who are you? Why are you here? Where is my family?"

  She was even more worried now. Tears slipped down her cheeks and caused her thick black eyeliner to run. "It’s me, Ethan. It's Nanako. I’m your…"

  Just the sight of her, and the familiarity she took with me, caused something to shift inside me. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu tore through my mind, trying to convince me that this situation, right down to the final, minute detail, had happened before. But while I tried to process what that could possibly mean, an image of an Asian soldier lying dead on a dusty road flashed into my mind. Then a most horrible sensation began to tear through my mind and body, twisting, writhing, and building towards some unknown, frightening climax.

  "...wife," the girl finished.

  The sensation exploded, overloading every nerve ending in my body, and then my mind was sucked down, down towards a well of unconsciousness...

  …and I jerked awake with a cry, my heart racing furiously. Thanks to the dream/memory, I had no idea where I was. The fact it was pitch-black didn't help.

  I realised I was sitting up with my back against a smooth metallic surface. A familiar weight rested on my thighs. I reached out, and then breathed a massive sigh of relief when my fingers identified the object as Nanako. She'd fallen asleep with her head on my lap, using me as her pillow.

  It was only a dream-memory. It wasn't happening now. I did know who Nanako was. She was my wife, and she was the most wondrous, delightful person in the whole wide world. True, my memories of our times together before I'd been shot still eluded me, but we were back together again, and that was enough for me.

  I leaned my head back and ran my fingers through Nanako's thick hair while I waited for my heart to come back to earth. It slowly dawned on me that we were hiding in the back of a ruined Asian grocery store in Footscray. We'd fled Newhome yesterday after rescuing Nanako, who was going to be executed on the trumped-up charge of spying for Hamamachi. In the process, my three forager friends and I had well and truly earned the title of terrorists. We'd blown a massive hole in the eastern wall of Newhome to provide the distraction we needed to rescue Nanako. Stupid Custodians. It served the gits right. After all I'd done for them, saving their collective behinds from the Skel and the Rangers, and they still tried to arrest us all as spies and terrorists.

  Though to be honest, David did let the Rangers into the town, and they'd killed quite a few Custodians. But you couldn't blame David for that since they'd blackmailed him with Leigh’s life to get him to let them inside the walls.

  Nanako shifted in the dark and threw an arm over my legs, groaning in her sleep. I continued to caress her head and spoke reassuring words to lull her into a deeper sleep.

  I reflected on the dream-memory was from my missing year. From what Nanako told me, I had woken in that condition every morning for weeks after I'd come out of the coma. Poor Nana-chan, the absolute hell she must have gone through every day when I woke with no memory of her or the wonderful months we'd spent together after we got married.

  And things hadn't gotten any easier after that, either, with my father arranging for her to be deported from Newhome, and her subsequent miscarriage and descent into severe depression. But she'd clawed her way back from those setbacks. And now, two years later, we were finally together again.

  I still marvelled that she was mine. She was the most courageous, compassionate, and wonderful person I knew, not to mention the cutest girl I'd ever laid eyes on.

  And I'd never ever, for any reason whatsoever, let anything separate us again.

  As I began to gently massage her shoulders to help her to slip into a deeper, trouble-free sleep, I echolocated with my voice at an ultrasonic pitch so I could see my surroundings and my other friends.

  The store’s interior lit up as bright as day, though in a kind of surreal, almost ghostly manner. I saw that I was leaning against the side of a century old, busted-up fridge, with the glass doors smashed and sides dented. We were at the back of the store near grime-encrusted windows, which miraculously were still intact. The shelves, stripped of any products decades ago, were covered with dirt, leaves, and mildew. Plaster panels and air-conditioning ducting had collapsed from the ceiling here and there, and the walls were so filthy I had no idea what colour they used to be.

  Leigh lay on the dirty linoleum floor on my left, his breathing shallow and his eyes moving rapidly under his eyelids, deep in REM sleep. David was to my right, sleeping on his back, and Shorty was at my feet, curled into a ball and using his arm as a pillow.

  I ceased echolocating and let the darkness swallow me again, as I let snatches of our discussion last night play through my mind.

  "...so what exactly do you want us to do about the Rangers?" Leigh had asked.

  "I wanna get proof that they’re delivering refugees to the Skel to be their slaves in return for the Skel keeping off Hamamachi lands and away from its people," I’d replied.

  That was Nanako's idea – expose the Ranger's nefarious activities to the Hamamachi Council so they’d shut 'em down. Doing that would remove the Ranger's influence on the Skel, who'd then soon lose interest in besieging Newhome, and that would set the town free from both adversaries with one stone.

  And it was a nice theory, but when I admitted this meant we'd have to go into the heart of Skel territory to obtain the proof, the others were none too pleased.

  "You want us to walk into the middle of Skel territory of our own free will?" David had asked.

  "We just escaped that hell-hole three weeks ago." Shorty sighed. "Now you want us to go back?"

  "...I know I said I'd join you in exposing the Rangers, b
ut if that's your plan, you can count me out. Sorry," Leigh had said. And I couldn’t blame him, especially considering his poor health. He hadn't fully recovered from his gunshot wound from three weeks ago.

  "Even if we do go back to the Skel lands, what's the odds of finding that community centre again? We can't exactly go barging around the whole place trying to find it, not with who knows how many Skel running around," David had protested.

  "I know where it is," I'd assured them. "It's in Police Road, in Mulgrave."

  That comment, as expected, brought a round of comments.

  "How could you possibly know that?" David asked.

  "Yeah, weren’t you, like, running a high fever at the time?" Shorty said.

  So I explained that I’d been there before, two years ago when the Ranger squad I was part of tried to deliver a load of refugees to the Skel.

  I joined the Rangers to infiltrate their ranks and find out what they were up to. Someone in Hamamachi, I couldn’t remember who yet, had asked me to do this. I’d tried to stop the handover, but a fight followed in which I was forced to take out my squad mates in order to rescue the refugees and get them safely out of Skel territory.

  When I finished explaining all that, Leigh popped the million-dollar question that was burning in all their minds. "Ethan, if you knew what the Rangers were up to two years ago, why the blazes didn’t you report them to the Hamamachi council back then? We wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d done the job properly the first time."

  "Oh, for goodness sakes, Leigh!" Nanako had interrupted angrily. "That's how Ethan got shot. Someone – we don’t know who – shot him to keep him from doing exactly that."

  "Ohhhh," Leigh said. "Sorry, mate, I didn't know."

  "And that's how you got amnesia and epilepsy," David had concluded. "So this is your second attempt to expose the Rangers?"