Forager - the Complete Six Book Series (A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Series)

by Peter R Stone

  And as if to remind us of the urgency of our mission, the Skel sniper resumed his reign of terror just after midday, targeting Custodians, factory workers, and civilians in the outer apartment blocks.

  We made plans to meet at the Recycling-Works after dark to begin our intensive training course, and then Nanako and I traipsed off to my parents' place for dinner - at my mother's insistence. I think she aged five years this morning when Nanako told her I'd been forced to join the Custodian attack on the Skel.

  I wondered if anyone had told my father. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to seeing him again - I hadn't seen him since we had dinner with them eleven days ago.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  We knew something was wrong even as we approached my parent's apartment, for we could hear my father bellowing angrily at someone. I tried not to snoop but he was going on about marriage.

  Nanako looked at me questioningly. "Perhaps we should forget about tonight?"

  I paused before the apartment door. "We've got nothing but some bread and cereal."

  "We can dig up some roots," she suggested humorously.

  "Not really my cup of tea."

  She shrugged at that, so I knocked on the door, causing my father's ranting to cease immediately. A moment later he opened the door, and I found myself faced with an older, filled out version of myself. A pained expression creased his face as he looked at me - he didn't even acknowledge Nanako's presence. "Come in, Son," he said eventually.

  My father returned to his seat at the head of the table and stared into space, clearly displeased about something. I sat at his right, as usual, and Nanako sat beside me. My younger sister sat across from us.

  When my mother and older sister came into the lounge room a moment later to serve a simple vegetable broth soup, I was astonished to see that my older sister's eyes were red and puffy, though from crying or anger, I couldn't tell.

  "Are you okay, Ruth?" Nanako asked gently when my sister laid a bowl of soup before her.

  Standing beside Nanako's chair, Ruth looked daggers in my father's direction but didn't answer. Wondering what was going down, I glanced at my mother and saw that she wanted to speak. "What is it, Mother? Or am I intruding?"

  "You are indeed," my father snapped.

  "Someone has asked for Elder Daughter's hand in marriage," my mother said quickly, earning a dark look from Father.

  "Why that's wonderful," I exclaimed excitedly.

  My sister fixed me with a withering stare. "It's not wonderful - it's a disaster!"

  "Why?"

  "Because we have to turn him down, of course, and without telling him why," she said, fuming.

  "We will do no such thing," my father said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  "I'm barren, remember, Father?" Elder Sister replied with a raised voice, "What man would wed a woman who can't bear him children."

  "As I said before, I will discuss the matter with him and he can retract his offer if he wishes," my father declared.

  "Well of course he'll retract it, Father. Please, don't humiliate me like this," my sister pleaded.

  "You don't know that, Elder Sister - at least give him the choice," I said hopefully.

  My sister tilted her head to the side. "Oh don’t be stupid."

  "This is not your choice, Elder Daughter, I will discuss the matter with him, and that's final," my father said.

  Elder Sister didn't respond this time, but her eyes were desperate, pleading.

  "Hey, who is the suitor - do we know him?" I asked suddenly.

  "He's your stupid boss, Trajan Barclay," my sister said.

  Recalling what my boss told me when he came over to fix my flat, an idiotic grin stretched across my face.

  "What are you smiling about?" my sister spat.

  "You can stop stressing about his marriage proposal and that you're barren - he already knows," I said.

  Elder Sister took a menacing step towards me. "What? How - did you tell him?"

  "No, you did."

  "Me - when?" she snapped, looking most bewildered.

  "Yeah, you kinda shouted it out in front of everyone when they came over to fix our flat," Nanako pointed out kindly.

  Elder Sister's hands flew to her face. "Then why does he want to marry me?"

  "His wife passed away two years ago and left him with two kids. All he wants is a wife and a mother for his kids."

  A stunned silence filled the house. All the fight went out of my sister and she rushed off to the kitchen with tears in her eyes.

  "So does this mean she's getting married?" Younger Sister asked excitedly.

  "I expect so," I replied, glancing at father.

  "If what Ethan says is true, then Elder Sister will marry Mr. Barclay, and," my father paused and looking pointedly at me and Nanako. "She'll be marrying one of our own."

  With that pointed barb, my hackles went up. I took Nanako's left hand in my right and gave it a squeeze to encourage her, and turned to my father. I was gonna have it out with him over his continued rejection of my wife, and this time I was gonna stay objective. "Father, why won't you accept Nanako into the family? Everyone else has."

  He didn't reply, or even acknowledge I'd spoken.

  "What exactly is your issue with her, Father? Good grief, she was just sixteen when I was wounded, and it's no wonder she was panicking, considering what she was going through. And don't go quoting the things I said to her then either - I was out of my mind."

  "It's because of her that you got shot!" my father answered heatedly.

  "You can't blame her for that - it had nothing to do with her."

  "Yes, I can," he snapped back. "If you hadn't met her, you wouldn't have gone to Hamamachi, you wouldn't have married her, and you wouldn't have been shot! Do you have any idea how close you came to dying? The neurologist told me it was a miracle you were still alive. Do you know how hard it was for me to see you in that condition? If you had come back here after you ran away instead of running off with her, none of that would have happened."

  "So your beef with Nanako isn't that she's a foreigner, but that you blame her for me getting shot? What about when I got shot by the Skel three weeks ago, then, when I was foraging?"

  "I told you from the beginning not to get a job as a forager, but you wouldn't listen, would you."

  "Did you know I was conscripted into the Custodians yesterday?" I asked him.

  "What?" he asked, the colour draining out of his face.

  "I was given the rank of a Custodian consultant and I went in with them this morning when they tried to catch the Skel sniper."

  I don't think I ever saw my father so shocked, so distressed, as he was at that moment. He looked at my mother, at Nanako, and then back at me. "That's not possible, Son, they can't do...wait, did you say you were out there this morning, in that battle? But no, you said a consultant, so you were out of harm's way, right?"

  "We got ambushed and had to fight our way clear, and I was right in the middle of it." I waited until my words sunk in, and then continued. "Can you see the point I'm trying to make? I got shot when I was in Hamamachi, I got shot when I was foraging, and now I'm a Custodian and got shot at again today. So it's time you stopped using the fact that I was shot in Hamamachi as the reason for rejecting my wife."

  I could see my reasoning getting through to him, but there was something else troubling him.

  "Why couldn’t you marry one of your own people?" he said, banging his hands noisily on the table. "Ethan, you are my only son - it's your responsibility to continue the Jones name, to continue our Anglo-Saxon Australian heritage. But now you're going to breed half-castes - you have destroyed our Anglo-Saxon line and family name!"

  So finally, after all this time, we got to the heart of the matter.

  I guess I wasn't surprised, considering how proud my father was of our heritage; still, the level of animosity he was revealing came as a bit of a shock. I breathed out slowly to calm myself, and then answered softly. "I think yo
u've forgotten something, Father. What were you, your father, and I, taught at school? 'Multiculturism leads to division.' Remember that? It's an unofficial tradition that we only marry our own race - and it's completely against the Founders' teachings. Newhome is supposed to be one people without division, remember?"

  Father averted his eyes, but remained quiet. Man, he was one stubborn git.

  I leaned forward in my chair. "The fact is, Father, Nanako is my wife, and you're gonna have to accept that. And you're gonna have to face up to the terrible things you did to her, and to me, when she brought me back here two years ago. And you're gonna apologise for it."

  My father stared at me long and hard, glanced at Nanako, and then turned to my mother. "Where is dinner, Wife? You trying to starve me or something?"

  Having listened to the entire conversation from the kitchen doorway, my mother bowed respectfully and disappeared into the kitchen. Nanako gave my hand a reassuring squeeze, so I turned to her and was relieved to see her give me an encouraging smile.

  At that point my mother and older sister brought in the main course, which due to the sniper threat having shut down the market, was a very simple affair of dry fruits, gravy on home cooked bread, and some vegetables.

  I reflected on the argument with my father and realised it was the first time I'd ever argued with him without losing my rag.

  * * *

  Nanako and I made our way back to our apartment after dinner, taking our time and savouring each other's company, for we both knew things could easily go pear shaped tomorrow night.

  "You did good tonight," she said, flashing me her cute upside down smile.

  "Thanks - maybe I got through to him."

  "I'm not counting my chickens yet."

  "Would you like to?"

  "Like to what?" she asked, genuinely confused.

  "Count some chickens - we have an awful lot of them over in the poultry shed," I pointed out.

  "Doofus," she said as she laughed and whacked my arm.

  We reached our apartment and then froze in disbelief and surprise, for a pile of rotting, stinking garbage had been dumped against our door. There were vegetable scraps, rotten fruit, used kitchen wipes, scrunched up papers, empty bottles, pieces of broken glass, and even bits of wood, dirt and leaves.

  And if that wasn’t enough, several notes spewing anti-Japanese racial slurs had been stuck on the door with tape or tacks.

  go home Jap

  go back to where you came from, Nip!

  Jap spy!

  Jap sympathiser

  And others.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I held my breath and ripped the offensive articles off the door, noticing that the notes were made up of several hand writing styles – this wasn’t the work of one person. Who else had Sienna conscripted to join her hate campaign? Had she pulled our neighbours into it too?

  Poor Nanako took a few steps back, her eyes brimming with tears. I could guess what she was thinking. For two years she had dreamt of coming back to Newhome and living a normal life with me, yet this endless harassment was what she got instead.

  "I’m so sorry," I said as I went over to join her and hold her hands.

  "How can one person be so consumed by hate?" Nanako said while sniffing back tears. "Hasn’t Sienna got anything better to do with her life?"

  "Shall I go and explain that to her? Dump the garbage back on her doorstep?"

  "What’s that gonna achieve except to lower us to her level. Besides, if you respond in kind to bullies, it only gets worse. I know, I tried."

  "When you were in school?" I asked.

  "Yeah," she said softly, looking down.

  "In Inverloch or Hamamachi?" If I remembered correctly, she went to primary school in Inverloch and secondary school in Hamamachi.

  She peered up at me from beneath her long bangs. "Hamamachi."

  "But why – why did they bully you?"

  "Because…because I had problems."

  "You mean like your anxiety attacks?" I asked gently. I was thrilled she was finally opening up about her past – even if we were standing on the walkway outside our door which was covered in stinking refuse.

  "Yeah, and because I took a year off school when everything was too hard. The bullying was much worse after that."

  "So what did you do?"

  "I just concentrated on my school work and my friends, and then quit school before my sixteenth birthday to become a forager." She paused and looked at the stinking pile of garbage at our door. "So do we begin training an hour early, or do we clean this up now?"

  "I don't want to come home to this in the small hours of the morning," I said.

  Nanako wrinkled up her pretty button nose. "Then let's get to it."

  * * *

  After we'd cleaned up Sienna's thoughtful gift and disposed of it, we dressed in the new clothes we purchased and made our way to the Recycling-Works. It was dusk, and the light was fading rapidly.

  One of the Recycling-Works gates was open, so we slipped into the yard and went up the stairs into the foyer, where we found the others already waiting for us. There were Captain Smithson, Sergeant Xiao and the two remaining men of his platoon, and David and Shorty. And not surprisingly, my boss as well - except he wasn't my boss any more. I guess they needed someone to unlock the joint since it was after hours. David and Shorty were still shooting visual daggers at me, well, Shorty was. David seemed mightily troubled, more so than I'd ever seen him before, which was justified, I guess.

  The boss hurried over to greet us. "I was so worried when I was told you'd been conscripted, Ethan, but now your wife, David, and Shorty too? And for some secret mission? What's going on?" he asked in a hushed voice as he glanced nervously over his shoulder at the Custodians.

  "Sorry, boss..."

  He held up his hands. "Call me Trajan, Ethan - I'm not your boss anymore."

  "Okay - Trajan." Man, did that feel weird or what? "And hey, nice move with my sister."

  "You don't object?"

  "Of course not," I said with a chuckle.

  "I'm not sure how good my chances are, though, your father didn't seem too enthusiastic when I approached him."

  "They're coming around," I assured him, "Just don't give up, okay?"

  "They are? Thanks, that's good to know."

  "Sergeant Jones, the night's not getting any younger," the captain shouted over to us.

  And so began a gruelling, eight hour training session as I put my team through everything I could think of to prepare us for tomorrow night.

  We took turns hunting and being hunted by Sergeant Xiao's squad in the Recycling-Works scrap metal yard, skulking about in the dark around piles of iron, twisted copper pipes, old stoves and rusting hot-water systems, car engines, and any other type of junk that had been stored in the yard.

  There was little competition, of course, for we managed to creep up on and ambush the noisy Custodians repeatedly, and they almost never found us when they were the hunters. But it was good practise, all the same. And I didn't cheat by using flash sonar - I relied entirely upon what little starlight came through the windows and skylights, and my hearing, of course.

  The modern recurve bows provided by Captain Smithson came from North End, where they'd been used for recreational purposes and competitions. They took a little getting used to since we had only used Japanese hankyu half-bows previously, but Nanako adjusted in next to no time and spent the hour instructing David and Shorty in their use.

  By 5am, having practised stealth manoeuvres and archery for nigh on eight hours, we called it a night and headed off to our respective homes to sleep.

  * * *

  The next twenty hours crawled by at a snail's pace. We snatched what sleep we could, did more archery practise, and ate to replenish our energy.

  * * *

  When midnight arrived we were gathered before one of the imposing, twelve foot high concrete walls that surrounded North End. Accompanied by two full platoons of Custodians, Ca
ptain Smithson led us to a secret door in the eastern wall that was about two hundred meters south of the town's northern most point.

  "Time to go," he said sternly.

  I readied my pistol while Nanako and the other two prepared their bows and arrows. David had sharpened the arrows in the Recycling-Works workshop, giving them a better chance of penetrating Skel armour.

  "We're ready," I assured him.

  "Speak for yourself," Shorty grumbled.

  The captain leaned close and gripped my arm. "You come back, okay, Jones? Take out that blasted Skel sniper and then you come back. And that applies to all of you. Custodian Command may not fully appreciate what you four are doing, but I do, okay?"

  We nodded, and then Sergeant Xiao cracked open the magnetically sealed secret door, revealing the darkened night-time landscape outside. The lights on the wall and in the guard towers had been turned off an hour ago so the Skel wouldn't see us when we came skulking out the secret door.

  "Let's do this," I said, and then I was through the doorway, loping smoothly and silently across the concrete sidewalk and onto the asphalt road and no-man's land that ringed the town, with Nanako, David and Shorty on my heals. We headed directly north to start with, for I didn't want to head straight for the ruined buildings directly opposite the town, for those'd be full of Skel.

  The partially clouded over sky meant visibility was poor, but not impossible, yet as soon as I heard the door swing shut behind us, I let rip with flash sonar and then quickly crouched down, drawing the others to crouch down beside me.

  "What is it?" Nanako whispered.

  "Three Skel, directly ahead, a hundred meters." I could see them clearly; the echoes of my ultrasonic shouts making them look ethereal and spectral, like the living dead with darkened eye sockets in gleaming skulls.