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

by Peter R Stone

  I was kneeling on the ground behind Nanako, holding my bow and two arrows in my right hand, while Councillor Okada and Ken stood behind me.

  Nanako stood before us in line with other archers. I watched, mesmerised, as she drew an arrow, fitted it to the bowstring, and raised both arms above her head. As she lowered them, her left arm extended to its full length while her right hand drew the arrow back behind her ear. She loosed the arrow in formation with the other archers, and her arrow smacked dead centre in the straw target.

  She broke form then, to flash me a beautiful smile, which I returned shamelessly like a love-struck puppy. Nanako was so beautiful, with her silky black hair and round face, her narrow waist and broad hips – and all in a petite, five-foot package. And the hakama and traditional clothes she wore did everything for her figure.

  I continued to watch as she prepared to fire her second arrow, but my attention was temporarily drawn to Councillor Okada, who was giving Ken quite the verbal tongue-lashing. He was whispering, but he may have been shouting it out thanks to my enhanced hearing. My Japanese was still basic, but I could pick up pretty much everything the councillor said.

  "You cannot afford to think only of yourself, Ken," the councillor was saying. "As my nephew – as my chauffeur – you are very much in the public eye. Every word you speak, every action you take, will be observed, and associated back to me and to Hamamachi itself. You are, in effect, an ambassador for the town."

  "But Uncle," Ken protested.

  "No! No protestations, Ken. Your behaviour last night was reprehensible – getting drunk and staggering about bereft of your wits in the small morning hours. We were fortunate a Militia squad found you and quietly brought you home before any members of the press witnessed your shameful behaviour."

  "I wasn't that drunk! Uncle, the Militia exaggerated the whole thing..." Ken said.

  "My honour, and the town's honour, cannot be tarnished by your actions, Nephew. Do you understand? Honour is everything. If you want to drink, do it from the privacy of your own home. Never again can you behave in such a way in public. Never again can you risk sullying the town's honour. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

  "Yes, Uncle," Ken sighed in defeat.

  The sound of Nanako's second arrow impacting the target drew my attention back to her just in time to see her flash me another smile. I also felt a thrill surge through me. Now that Nanako had fired her two arrows, I was up next.

  Beginning the weekend after he'd met me, the councillor had brought Nanako and me to the archery range every Saturday, and it had quickly become one of my favourite pastimes.

  Nanako stepped down from the archery platform, and laid her right hand affectionately on my arm as I stood and stepped past her. Touched and yet a little embarrassed by her public display of affection – I'd never seen my parents so much as touch each other – I sent a furtive glance in the councillor and Ken's direction. I was slightly unnerved by the open display of jealously that framed Ken's face. He clearly resented the friendship that was budding between Nanako and me...

  ...I emerged from the vividly recalled memory to see Nanako pulling her five recently fired arrows out of the makeshift target. She put the arrows back her quiver and strode over to me. "Okay, Mister, that’s five in the bull's eye. See if you can match that."

  "You’re on." I took up my bow and arrows. While I stretched my left arm to loosen it up, I reflected on the memory that had just resurfaced. I was delighted to have another memory of my times with Nanako, but I was also moved that Councillor Okada had gone out of his way to spend time with us. My father had never spent time with me; he’d never taken me anywhere. Sure, he did things for me, but that wasn’t the same. I’d wanted a father who’d do things with me, as the councillor had done.

  And Ken – what a doofus.

  Chapter Eleven

  I knew something was wrong the moment I woke at dawn the following morning. I was in our makeshift bed beneath the window, but Nanako wasn't with me, and that was a first. I always woke up before her.

  She was, however, still in the room. She was sitting in the gloom of the far corner, hugging her knees to her chest with her head down, and bouncing her heels up and down at a frantic pace. It looked like she was in the early stages of a panic attack.

  I scooted over and knelt beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. "What’s up, Nana-chan?"

  She didn’t reply, just kept on bouncing her heels up and down.

  "Come on, out with it. What’s troubling you?"

  Her left hand moved over to grip the hand I’d placed on her shoulder, but she still didn’t speak. I wracked my brain, trying to think what could have triggered the attack, but she was fine when we hit the sack last night. I had nothing.

  "Are you having doubts about Sergeant Tamura’s false accusation that I’d tried to kill myself?"

  She shook her head slightly, but stayed mute. So I shuffled in closer, wrapped my arms around her, and just held her. I watched as the sky grew slowly brighter, the sun’s rays forcing their way past the ruined blind that partly obscured the view outside our window. I could hear a kookaburra laughing raucously, and the occasional crow cawing.

  Half an hour crawled by and there was still no improvement, so I gently but firmly pulled Nanako to her feet. "Okay, Ma’am, we’re gonna go for a walk, you and me."

  She made it halfway to the door before she sagged to a squatting position. I pulled her back to her feet, and for the next five minutes, kept her moving until we were outside in the street and the early-morning air. Apart from the birds and their symphony, it was dead quiet – our companions were still asleep upstairs.

  I considered ushering her towards the Catani Gardens, but by her despondent expression, I didn’t think she’d manage to walk that far.

  "Stay here," I said, and ducked quickly back into the restaurant. I grabbed a small, rusty metal bin, and rushed back to her.

  Nanako had dropped down to a squatting position again, so I plopped the bin down and knelt opposite her. I picked up one of the countless shards of glass that was half-buried in the muck that covered the sidewalk and pressed it into her right hand. "Put it in the bin," I said.

  With barely conscious thought, she did what I said, and then fell motionless again.

  "Well?" I prompted.

  She flicked her eyes in my direction.

  I scooped up several more glass shards and popped them in the bin, and indicated for her to join me with a flick of my head.

  Slowly at first, but then with more deliberate movements, Nanako helped me collect the broken pieces of glass and put them in the bin.

  After we’d been at it for fifteen minutes, and her pulse rate had returned to normal, I tried to initiate conversation again. "You wanna tell me what’s going on?"

  "It’s January 23rd," she said softly, speaking as though from a great distance.

  "Okay, help me out a bit. What’s significant about January 23rd?"

  "It’s the anniversary of when my father passed away," she admitted as she continued to put shards of glass in the bin.

  I reached out and took her hand in mine. "I wasn’t with you when you went through this the last two times, but this time I am. So we’re gonna get through this together, okay?"

  Her nod was barely perceptible, but it was there.

  "Can you tell me what it is about your father’s death that causes you to react this way every time the anniversary of his death comes around?" I didn’t know much about how he died, only what I’d remembered in one of my recently retrieved memories of me helping her through another such anniversary not long after I’d met her. On that occasion, I’d encouraged her to join me in weeding the garden. The constructive activity and my company eventually helped pull her out of the recurring anxiety attacks that had afflicted her all day. Just like they were now.

  "Don’t want to talk about it," she whispered.

  We continued working for a few more minutes, and then I asked, "Your father died of cance
r, yeah?"

  She nodded.

  "How long after he was diagnosed did he pass away?"

  Nanako didn’t reply. She just kept gathering glass fragments and sticking them in the bin.

  "Come on, Nana-chan, we need to talk about this. I mean, you had plenty of warning before he died, right?"

  "No, no warning."

  "What, he didn’t tell you he was ill?"

  She froze for a moment while she appeared to work through some monumental decision, and then continued. "We knew he had cancer. And that it was incurable. But he…he…"

  "Yes?" I encouraged softly.

  "He took his own life when it got bad." She turned to look at me then as her tears began to flow. "He didn’t say goodbye; he didn’t give any indication of what he was about to do. He acted all normal one minute, and was gone the next."

  "I’m so sorry." I sat beside her and put an arm around her slim shoulders. Suddenly, the events of the recent weeks fell into place. No wonder she’d slipped so rapidly into the pits of severe depression when the Ranger sergeant claimed I’d shot myself after killing my teammates. After that, she told me that if I had attempted suicide, it meant I didn’t love her as she loved me. That it meant I’d been willing to leave her. That must be what she thought of her father too, that his suicide meant he didn’t care for or love her.

  "You were close to your father, weren’t you?" I asked.

  She nodded. "We were inseparable." She looked away, so I pulled her face around until our eyes met. "That he took his life when the cancer got too much doesn’t mean he didn’t love you. It doesn’t mean you weren’t just as special to him as he was to you."

  "No? So what does it mean, then?" she demanded, sniffing her tears back.

  "It means he was in such a dark place he wasn’t able to think rationally anymore."

  "But I thought…"

  "Yes?"

  "I thought I meant more to him than that!" she sobbed.

  "Nana-chan, you gotta listen to me. It doesn't work like that when someone is as sick as your father was. You have to remind yourself that the illness just got too much for him at the end. It got so bad he couldn’t see anything else; he wasn't capable of rational thought anymore. But his feelings for you and your family, they didn’t change, not one iota, okay? Don’t interpret all your wonderful memories of your father through this fearful perspective, that he didn’t love you like you thought he did."

  My words must have slowly reached through to her, for she nodded slowly.

  "That's what you've been doing on the anniversaries of his death, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, I have these terrible anxiety attacks," she admitted quietly. "Where I work through all my memories of my times with him, trying to find proof, trying to convince myself, that he loved me like I loved him. And it normally takes me a whole day to pull myself out of it. Except for that time in '20 when you got me doing gardening with you. And again today." She suddenly flashed me a warming smile. "Thanks, Ethan. I don't know what I'd do without you."

  "Nor I, you." I kissed her affectionately on the forehead, though not without feeling a pang of guilt. If we couldn't have kids and got divorced, it would be her future husband who comforted her, while I'd have no one.

  Nanako was quiet for the rest of the day, but I kept her mind productively occupied by getting her to help me forage for food, including bagging a wallaby, which she prepped and cooked for our dinner. The others noticed she was off colour, but had the sense not to ask probing questions.

  I went out for half-an-hour before dusk that evening, and then popped back upstairs to the bedroom, where Nanako was sitting by the window, listening to the white-and-yellow cockatoos that flitted about in a tree outside.

  "Where've you been?" she asked.

  I sat beside her and pulled out a bowl I'd been hiding behind my back. It was full of the juiciest blackberries I could find.

  "Fetching supper." I smiled.

  "Yum," Nanako laughed, and we tucked into them.

  When they were all gone, I pulled a ripe, red-skinned quandong from my pocket. "This is for you too."

  "What about you?"

  "I could only find one."

  "Okay, let's share it then."

  "Deal."

  Quandongs have rather large pips, so it didn't prove to be much of a meal, but it was tasty all the same.

  "I've got one more thing for you." I ducked out of the room and brought back a bunch of Australian wildflowers from where I’d placed them just outside the door.

  It was a small bunch, but rich in colours that were still visible in the waning light. There were purple-tinted bluebells, a red-and-orange pincushion that was the centrepiece of the bunch, and green-and-red correas.

  "They're beautiful!" Nanako exclaimed softly, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek.

  "You're not to go arranging them, okay?" I said playfully, remembering her obsessive compulsion to make professional-looking Japanese-style arrangements of any flowers I gave her.

  "Haha," she laughed, and clutched them close to her chest. Then she added, "What did I do to get someone like you?"

  "You've got it all wrong," I replied solemnly while I tried to ignore the stab of guilt. (Madison could be wrong!)

  "Oh?"

  "Yep, it's not 'what did you do to get me,' it's 'what did I do to get someone like you?'"

  "Flatterer," she replied, but snuggled closer to me all the same.

  The next morning Nanako was much improved, which brought me a massive sense of relief. I didn't want to see her back in that horrible place again. Enough was enough.

  The six of us went for a walk in the Catani Gardens together to look for berries to supplement our breakfast. Madison, who was walking beside me, suddenly held out her hands, which were still bound, as usual.

  "I'm in," she said.

  I stared at her, dumbfounded, as did Nanako and the lads.

  "In?" I asked, though I knew what she meant.

  "I will join your stupid mission to expose the Rangers, but on one condition – that we leave at once. You lot have had ample time to rest and recuperate. The longer we delay, the greater the likelihood of the Skel and Rangers working out how to destroy Newhome."

  I drew my Custodian combat knife and placed the sharp blade against the cloth-strip that bound her hands, but looked her in the eye before I cut it. "Fine, condition accepted. But I have one of my own."

  "Oh?"

  "I am the leader of this mission, and you will do exactly, and I mean exactly, as I say."

  Madison shrugged, as though my words meant nothing to her either way. "Fine." She shook her hands at me again.

  "Don't do it!" David warned.

  "Don't trust her!" Leigh added.

  I ignored them and cut her bonds. Madison shook off the cords, rubbed her wrists, and then gingerly flexed her right bicep.

  "One more thing," I added.

  "What?"

  "I need to teach you stealth techniques – you're as noisy as an elephant."

  "I am not!"

  "Sorry, but you are," Nanako chipped in. "Even I heard you when you tried to sneak up on us when we were in the truck."

  "And you think you know better?" she demanded as she stuck her freckled face in mine.

  "I do." I smiled broadly. "Would you like me to demonstrate?"

  "Go ahead," she said arrogantly.

  "Okay, try to approach me without making a sound." I took ten steps back from her.

  "What, right here?"

  "Yep."

  "Very well," Madison said, and walked towards me, doing her absolute best to make no sound. And failed dismally, to my ears, at any rate.

  "Okay, now take ten steps back and compare the sound I make as I approach you, to the sound you made just now when you approached me."

  Madison moved back with an arrogant smirk plastered on her face. She watched and listened as I moved quietly towards her. By my second step, her arrogant look was gone. By the tenth, she was looking at me with awe. />
  "Okay! You've convinced me – now teach me."

  And so there, in the Catani Gardens, I taught Madison stealth techniques. I showed her how to recognise what to step on and what to avoid, how to keep her weight on her back leg until the raised foot was in position; how to step so that the footfall itself did not make a sound, and how to mask unavoidably noisy footfalls by creating simultaneous inconspicuous sounds with her hands. I showed her how to utilise her surroundings, such as shadows and nearby objects to lessen the chance she might be observed, and which types of terrain created more noise than others.

  After we'd spent some time in the Catani Gardens, we retired back to the street and I continued the lesson there, so that she'd be experienced in all types of environments. And finally, I taught her how to use her flash sonar to check for Skel ambushes, looking inside darkened windows and doorways, in bushes, hedges, and behind trees, even in or behind cars.

  Seeing that Madison wasn't going to attack us, but was genuinely trying to learn stealth techniques, the lads had soon grew bored and went gone off searching for food. Finally, Nanako left as well, though she seemed none too pleased I was spending all this time with Madison. It wasn't jealousy in her eyes, though, merely mistrust.

  Madison was a quick learner; picking it up faster than the others had.

  We were heading slowly up Fitzoy Street practicing moving without making obvious sounds, when Madison suddenly turned and looked at me.

  "You got a real bargain with her, didn't you?"

  "What are you talking about?" My hackles went up.

  "Your wife. You could've done a lot better."

  Chapter Twelve

  I straightened to my full height and glared down at her. "Nanako's the most amazing, courageous person I've ever met."

  "And mentally ill to boot."

  "How dare..." I began.

  "Did you think I would not notice?" she pressed, taking a step closer. "All the furtive conversations you two have been having about her problems and history: her racing heartbeat when she's anxious, not to mention her condition yesterday."