Truancy Origins

by Isamu Fukui

  Umasi shut his eyes, and the pastel sunlight crept over him. As it did, he felt his heart lighten. Slowly drawing a small plastic card out from his pocket, Umasi did not wince but smiled. District 19 could not have been a home for long to any vagrant, but unlike the vagrants Umasi had all the resources he could possibly need, and all the time in the world to use them.

  Umasi now understood that he was home. There was no school here, no teachers, no father. He had fallen through the cracks of society to escape the grasp of education. Here, the world was serene and beautiful, as though it had never known the chaos of civilization. Here, there was no life to interrupt his own.

  With that thought, Umasi heard the echoes of old words that he had once been told seemingly ages ago.

  On a whim, they can teach us a fabricated history, or even a new reality.

  A district devoid of life . . .

  Here, life is whatever they tell us it is.

  And yet more alive than any other in the City.

  Okay, I’ll ask again. Is this one of the vagrants that you saw loot that truck?”

  “I don’t know, sir. He might be. Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at all of them.”

  “Listen, this vagrant was found in possession of food stolen from that supermarket. The stickers were still on the damn things. Now, I didn’t bring you all the way down here to give me some pathetic excuses about not having gotten a ‘good look.’ ”

  “What exactly do you want from me, sir?”

  “It’s about time you asked. I want you to tell me that you recognize this kid, and then get the hell out of my sight!”

  “Well . . . now that you mention it, the boy does look kind of familiar . . . .”

  “That’s good enough for me. Now get going, I have a prisoner to interrogate.”

  The Enforcer obligingly left the room, looking slightly scandalized. Rothenberg paid him no attention. Instead, he glared through the one-way mirror into the dimly lit room where the captive vagrant sat handcuffed to a chair. An Enforcer patrol had apprehended the boy in District 22, apparently fleeing from the abandoned District 25.

  Rothenberg snorted. He’d thought that all the vagrants knew better than to travel straight through inhabited districts. But then again, these children were the ones that had trouble learning lessons.

  With that in mind, Rothenberg opened the door to the secluded room. If the child was difficult enough, he might even enjoy this. After all, the hardest lessons were always the ones most worth teaching.

  “Our witness just identified you, boy,” Rothenberg growled. “He saw you loot that produce truck with all those other vagrants.”

  The boy paled. Rothenberg frowned. So, this one was a coward after all.

  “Th-that’s impossible!” the boy sputtered. “That can’t be right, man, I bought these in a store!”

  “Oh really?” Rothenberg said skeptically. “Where?”

  “Some market somewhere, I don’t remember exactly!”

  Rothenberg slowly rubbed his temples. As entertaining as it sometimes was, he really wasn’t in the mood for this brand of stupidity right now.

  A second later, Rothenberg’s bricklike fist slammed into the boy’s face, knocking him and the chair to which he was still handcuffed to the floor. Rothenberg crouched down to examine his handiwork. The boy’s nose was bleeding, and his eyes were wide with shock. Rothenberg smiled. So, he was still so fast they never saw it coming.

  “I’ll ask just once more,” Rothenberg said, bending down so that his head hung mere inches above from the boy’s face. “I’m getting tired of repeating myself today, and if I have to ask again, I promise that it’ll hurt a lot worse than what you just got. Now, if you want to come out of this with all your limbs intact, you’ll tell me where you got those vegetables.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll talk,” the boy said. “Look, I just traded with this kid for ’em. I gave him some old socks, he gave me the food, I didn’t do nuthin’ wrong!”

  “What was his name?” Rothenberg demanded.

  “I dunno, we vagrants ain’t exactly big on names,” the boy said. “But I know that he was part of Chris’ gang!”

  “Oh?” Rothenberg said. “And who’s Chris?”

  “Just some slimeball, I don’t want nuthin’ to do with ’em, but food’s food and one of his guys had some!”

  “How big is this gang?”

  “Dunno, you Enforcers keep killing bunches of those guys, don’t ya?”

  At that, Rothenberg’s eyes narrowed. The only gangs that the Enforcers were able to cull on a regular basis were the ones with informants in them. As the implications of that began to dawn on Rothenberg, he noticed the vagrant looking at him shrewdly.

  “Is that helpful or sumthin’?”

  “It might be,” Rothenberg conceded as he stood up. “Very well. If your information pays off, you’ll be keeping your limbs after all. Until then, you will continue to enjoy the . . . hospitality . . . of the Enforcers.”

  And with that, Rothenberg left the room, ignoring the child’s declarations of thanks. His subordinates had mentioned that they raided the grocery store because of an informant, hadn’t they? But Rothenberg hadn’t known that it was a gang behind that robbery. He still wasn’t sure if the Mayor’s brats had joined up with the gang, or if they just happened to be robbing the same place at the same time, but Rothenberg now had a feeling that if he found that gang he’d find the boys.

  All Rothenberg had to do now was wait for the right informant to make contact . . . or hunt down this “Chris” and his gang by himself.

  It was a depressed group of vagrants that gathered around a bonfire that evening. The sky had just begun to darken, allowing the massive flames to cast long, flickering shadows over the filthy ground. A few of them were lucky to be alive, having narrowly escaped the grocery store to rejoin the rest of the gang in District 15. Many had not been so lucky, and now, because they were leaderless again, morale had hit rock bottom. One of the vagrants had wrapped himself in a dirty blanket and sat next to the fire, glumly feeding it planks torn from a nearby building. For a while the crackle of the fire was the only sound. Then a vagrant sitting under a broken streetlamp addressed the boy with the planks.

  “We shouldn’t let the fire burn that high, someone might notice the smoke.”

  “Shut up, Frank, I’m cold.”

  “He’s right,” another vagrant said. “Glick would never have let you make it that big in the first place.”

  “Yeah, well Glick’s dead now, isn’t he?”

  “Just stop feeding the damn fire!”

  “You gonna try to make me?”

  “Guys, cut it out!” Frank shouted. “You gonna let us fall apart just ’cause Glick stopped a bullet? You gonna let Chris’ gang win?”

  “You wanna be the leader, Frank? Chris’ gang was right; the way things are going you’d be dead in a week.”

  “If you think they’re so right, why don’t you go run off and join ’em?” Frank said, firing up at once.

  “Maybe I will!”

  “Yeah? Well I don’t think they take dead members!”

  Frank and the other vagrant were now on the verge of blows. Before violence could break out, however, an unfamiliar voice spoke up.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the voice, slick as oil. “As fascinating as your little drama is, I have an urgent matter that requires your attention.”

  The vagrants all spun around. A strange figure walked towards them, clothed all in black with a windbreaker jacket billowing behind him like a cape. At his side walked a thin girl wearing a winter coat, a black scarf wrapped firmly around the lower half of her face. The vagrants immediately avoided eye contact with her; something about that icy stare was highly disconcerting.

  “Who the hell are you?” the vagrant with the blanket demanded.

  “You may call me Z, and this is my assistant, Noni,” Zen said, gesturing at the rigid girl beside him. “Where is your leader?”

  For a
few moments the vagrants boggled at the pair, unable to believe their suicidal foolishness. Then the silence was broken by the same boy as before.

  “I dunno where you get off, askin’ questions like that,” the vagrant snarled, casting his blanket aside. “But you look kinda rich, and that means coming here was the worst mistake of your life!”

  With that, the vagrant lunged at Zen with outstretched hands, grinning with yellow teeth. Zen seized the boy’s arm, turned, and hurled the vagrant over his shoulder. The vagrant hit the ground hard, swearing loudly. The other vagrants all sprang up, preparing to rush the intruders. But at that moment, dark shapes emerged from all sides, and the vagrants realized that they weren’t alone.

  As the figures approached the bonfire, the firelight threw their features into sharp relief. They all appeared clean and organized, but of more immediate interest to the vagrants were the weapons that they all held in their hands. Most of the newcomers wielded sharp knives that reflected the dancing flames, and a few even bore pistols. The vagrants quickly chose to sit back down, realizing that they were at the mercy of these strangers.

  “Where is your leader?” Zen repeated.

  There was silence.

  “Surely someone can shed some light on the subject,” Zen said, a note of impatience entering his voice.

  “He got killed,” the vagrant named Frank explained at last.

  “How fortuitous.” Zen smiled grimly. “Well then, since the position of leader appears to be vacant, I nominate myself. Any questions?”

  There was another brief silence. Then a bold vagrant crouched in a corner stood up.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “That’s a fair question,” Zen admitted. “I have already given you my name, but what I am called matters much less than who I am. I am the leader of the Truancy.”

  “The Truancy?” the boy repeated. “What’s that?”

  “Us,” Zen said, spreading his arms to encompass everyone present. “We are the Truancy, and we have precisely three things in common. We are all children, we all fight the Educators, and we are all determined to set things right in this City.”

  “What’s wrong with the City?” one of the vagrants by the fire demanded.

  “Take a look at your situation and you’ll have your answer,” Zen said. “No matter what your reason for being here is, I highly doubt that it was by your own choice.”

  A few of the vagrants nodded at that, and all of them now seemed to be paying close attention.

  “You are here because the Educators want you to be here; you are here by their design,” Zen continued. “You were not compatible with their system. Therefore, you are a liability to them, and must be hidden from view or else made example of. Your fate has been tragic, and students throughout the City are warned that they must obey or else end up like you.”

  “So why’re you here?” the first boy demanded.

  “To offer you a choice,” Zen said. “You can accept the fate the Educators have condemned you to, or you can defy it, as we have. I can give you the means to fight back, food to stave off hunger, and warm shelter to return to. Make no mistake, you will be fighting a war, but I do not believe that it will be any less dangerous than your lives are now—and you will no longer be outcasts, but proud Truants. And should we prove victorious, we will cast down the Educators and you will be revered and admired throughout the City.”

  Firelight glinted in many vagrants’ eyes. Zen almost smiled, but knew that any celebration would still be premature. Sure enough, one of the vagrants then spoke up.

  “Fighting the Educators? That’s crazy talk, man. There’s thousands of Enforcers, we’d be up against the entire City! There ain’t no way you can take on the entire City!”

  “To the contrary, my friend,” Zen responded, “there may be thousands of Enforcers, but there are a million students and vagrants in this City. The Educators are only the masters of the City because those children consent to be ruled. I do not intend to take on the entire City—I believe that the entire City will take on the Educators. It doesn’t take much to start an avalanche. If you join us, others will follow, and together we will bury our enemies.”

  “Having a ton of people won’t do you no good if all you got is a few pistols and knives,” another vagrant said, snapping his fingers. “Them Enforcers won’t even notice you if that’s all you got.”

  In response, Zen calmly drew what looked like a TV remote from a pocket of his windbreaker. Pointing the remote outwards, he pressed the power button with his thumb. For a moment, no one knew what to expect. Then chaos erupted all around them.

  An abandoned car was flipped over by the force of one explosion, and the first-floor windows of a nearby building were shattered by another, sending glass flying like hail. Water spouted into the air as a fire hydrant was blown from the sidewalk, and a number of trash cans clanged noisily as they were bent out of shape and slammed against the walls of an ally. Vagrants screamed, and a few tried to run, but were shoved to the ground by perfectly calm Truants. Soon the dust settled, and everyone present realized that the explosions, while close enough to be very noticeable, had not been close enough to do them any harm.

  “I counted four blasts, Aaron,” Zen said calmly to one of the nearby Truants. “If I am not mistaken, that would mean that two of the bombs failed to go off.”

  “Sorry, Z, could be that the other two are out of range,” Aaron said, scratching the back of his neck. “Should I try it at a shorter distance?”

  “That would be appreciated,” Zen said, handing the remote over.

  As Aaron vanished down an alley, Zen turned back to the vagrants, who were all gaping at him, dumbfounded.

  “The noise will likely have attracted attention,” Zen said. “So I hope that you are satisfied concerning our arsenal.”

  By now some of the vagrants had recovered their wits, and the one named Frank actually got up and approached Zen with a shrewd look on his face.

  “Things that go boom are good and all, and we got a glimpse of that fancy fighting of yours,” Frank said. “But how do you students do in a real battle? We’re as tough a group as you’ll find in this City, but even we’ve been having trouble with another gang. It’s ’cause of them that we’re in this mess. The bastards are led by a kid named Chris. If you can take care of them, I’ll follow you to hell and back.”

  A number of the vagrants murmured in approval of this idea, and some of the Truants shifted uncomfortably. Zen however, remained impassive.

  “Essentially, you’re trying to bargain with me,” Zen observed. “I, however, do not make compromises. That said, with or without you, I will be offering your current rivals the same opportunity that I have offered you. Should you both accept, I will expect you to get over your little feud.”

  “And if they refuse?” Frank demanded. “They’d sooner kill than cooperate with anyone.”

  “Should that be the case, I will destroy them,” Zen said in tones of steel.

  As if to punctuate the statement, some distance away two more explosions shook the ground. Noni folded her arms and glared at Frank, who looked somewhat perturbed by the latest blasts and the girl’s frigid gaze.

  “The Truancy is only just getting started, gentlemen,” Zen said. “Food, shelter, a cause to live for, these are the things it has to offer. You can pledge your loyalty to the Truancy and fight the Educators for control of the City . . . or you can remain vagrants and fight each other for scraps. I have nothing more to add. Follow me as you wish.”

  With that, Zen spun around and began walking away. The other Truants fell in line behind him. For a moment the vagrants stared at their receding backs. Then, as one, they leapt up to follow, forming another line beside the veteran Truants. As they walked, Zen was pleased to hear snippets of conversation floating up from between the two columns.

  “The guy’s kind of strange, but he’s dead serious, you’ll see.”

  “When do we get to eat? I ain’t had anything in da
ys.”

  “He actually killed an Enforcer with just a knife! That’s how we got our first guns, see?”

  “The other vagrants call me a liar, but I’m telling you, I saw the ghost with my own eyes just a few days ago! She’s as real as they say!”

  “I never got expelled myself, but I was getting there. Another year, maybe, and I might’ve been one of you.”

  “So ya joined this bunch ’cause you got caught copying? Funny, I got kicked outta school for the same thing!”

  “My old teacher used to say you guys killed people and ate them, but he was just full of it, right?”

  “You,” Zen said suddenly, pointing back at a vagrant in the column, “come here for a moment.”

  Realizing that he had been summoned, Frank rushed forward to march at Zen’s right. Noni glanced at him with icy eyes from the left.

  “What’s your name?” Zen asked.

  “Frank.”

  “Well then, Frank,” Zen said, turning to his new recruit, “where do you think we might be able to find that rival gang you mentioned?”

  17

  THE COLOR OF BLOOD

  We got the worst luck in the City, guys, the worst.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Walker. We’re lucky this many of us got outta that mess.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, don’t lecture me.”

  “Hey, anyone seen Raphael today?”

  “Yeah, Chris, he went out scrounging early this morn.”

  “Good, thought he might’ve run off or something.”

  “Who, Raphael? Nah.”

  Red sighed and huddled closer around the fireplace, uninterested in participating in the conversation. One benefit of the hotel lobby they’d been hiding in for a while now was that it actually had a real fireplace, so they had something with which to cook their stolen food. In total, ten of them had survived to regroup. Red considered it a small miracle that even that many had gotten away from that slaughterhouse. Red glanced over at a corner, where Chris was still talking animatedly with some of the other survivors.