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

by Peter R Stone

  The smaller man made to intercept him, but before he could, Mehmet stepped between them.

  “A divided house cannot stand, boy,” Tori snapped at the Turkish lad.

  Standing right in front of me now, Ryan suddenly grabbed the hand Isaac had around my throat and twisted it with such force that the boy let go and went sprawling to the ground, crying out in pain.

  “Run!” Ryan shouted in my face.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. Spinning about, I leaped over Isaac’s prone form and darted for the fence.

  “Get her!” Tori shouted.

  Dylan darted after me, but Mehmet tackled him and brought him crashing to the ground.

  “Must I do everything myself?” Tori shouted as he sprinted after me.

  Risking a glance over my shoulder as I climbed the fence, I witnessed Mehmet attempt to waylay Tori now that Dylan was out of the way. But all he got for his efforts was a roundhouse kick in the side of the head. As he fell back cradling his cheek, Tori kept coming for me. However, he had taken only a few steps when Ryan caught up to him, using a wrist-hold to drive the smaller man to the ground.

  The last thing I saw as I dropped over the fence was Tori trying to break free from Ryan, striking him repeatedly with his free hand.

  My mind was a swirling mess of conflicting thoughts as I hightailed it back to North End. The prevailing thought was that I had Ryan’s answer as to whether he was willing to sacrifice the movement for me. And that meant my suspicions about him were wrong. He wasn’t using me as a tool like I feared. Yet at the same time, he had betrayed my trust by telling his group I had been brainwashed and that I was genetically enhanced – my deepest secret.

  I sighed as I continued towards North End, realising that even after all that, I still didn’t know who tried to kill me. I tended to believe Dylan, Mehmet, and Mr. Li when they said they didn’t do it, though. Which meant Jazza or one of his boys were the most likely culprits – unless there was someone else who knew about me – another player in the game.

  There was something else too. I had found another friend in Mehmet. He had sided with Ryan in helping me escape. Friends like that were hard to come by, and I hoped he didn’t get in much trouble for going up against Tori, their leader. On the topic of Patrick Tori, I wished I knew more about him. He was small in stature but charismatic, clearly well educated, a martial artist, and ruthless. He wanted to imprison me somewhere for the rest of my life! I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of Ryan working for him. On the other hand, I guessed it was preferable to him working for the alternative – the Patriot. A possible psychopath who would use all and any means to achieve his goal.

  Then again, their group would probably disband or at least expel Ryan and Mehmet after what happened tonight.

  When I got to the lab, I went straight to the communal bathroom and took a hot shower, squatting on the floor beneath the soothing jet of hot water, my forehead resting on my knees. I thought this could bring some clarity to my mind, but my thoughts and emotions remained in a state of disarray.

  When I was finished, I patted myself dry and changed into an ankle length dress. Hanging my towel on the rack, I strode for the exit, only to pause when I spied another scrap of green paper.

  Go to the audio-visual room, it said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  This was new. All the other messages asked questions about the Founders and their purported actions, this one told me to go somewhere. Perhaps I would finally meet the one penning these notes. So thinking, I made my way inconspicuously to the audio-visual room, which was plunged in darkness. I turned on the lights and slipped inside. The room had three rows of desks, each containing a laptop computer, hundred-year-old relics restored or refurbished by Newhome’s computer technicians. The town’s manufacturies were only able to build white goods from scratch, such as washing machines, refrigerators, and microwaves.

  My spirits fell when I saw the room was empty. My curiosity was peaked, however, when I spotted another slip of green paper, this one lying in front of one of the newer looking laptops.

  Turn it on, was all the note said.

  I pressed the power button and the screen flashed on. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a file in the centre of the screen labelled Brandon Thomas. I clicked on the file, which activated the video player, and I was confronted with a recording of an extremely well equipped hospital operating room. Several doctors clustered around the operating table, on which lay the body of a young man – a young man with gunshot wounds to his stomach.

  My hands flew to my mouth and I gasped in dismay when I realised I was looking at the body of my twin brother, Brandon.

  I watched, too horrified to move, as the doctors slowly dissected my brother’s corpse, removing his throat, inner and middle ears, and finally brain, placing each in a jar of fluid. Then, even as I tried to process the atrocities of what I just saw, the movie switched to a different operating theatre, with a timestamp in the corner identifying it as 2107 – fifteen years ago. This time the team of doctors were not dissecting a corpse but a small boy, surely no more than five years old. And going by the monitors attached to him, he was still alive...

  I only just managed to get to the room’s waste paper bin in time, after which I was violently ill, and continued to wretch long after I had emptied the contents of my stomach.

  Rage and grief beyond anything I had experienced before consumed me. They had dissected my brother, removing his biologically engineered organs before they buried him. That was if Ryan was even telling the truth about Brandon receiving a decent burial. Those organs were stored somewhere in this lab in glass jars! Who gave those reprehensible geneticists permission to treat his body like that? What happened to our time honoured beliefs in respecting the dead?

  And then there was the second part of the movie, the part where they dissected a young echolocator boy while he was still alive. I recalled the warning Brandon and I were given by the geneticist who created us.

  “They also take away children like you – children with special abilities. They take you away to the Genetics Laboratory to be cut up like a frog,” he said. Turned out he was telling the truth and Mr. Cho was lying. That made me wonder what else he was lying about.

  There was something else about the videos that disturbed me, something I couldn’t quite place. Regaining my feet, I glanced at the laptop. It had shut down, but just the sight of it caused me to relive the horrors I just watched on its screen. And then I had it. I recognised one of the doctor’s doing the dissections – it was Dr. Jeong.

  “That murderous creep! How about I cut his brain out and stick it in a jar. Let see how much he likes it?” I hissed, shaking from a combination of fury and shock.

  I staggered towards the door, intent on forcing my way to the third floor and having it out with the geneticists right there and then. They were going to turn over my brother’s body parts so they could be buried along with the rest of him, or things were going to get really ugly, really fast. Those murderers didn’t deserve to live!

  At that moment, the door swung open and a dark skinned girl ducked quickly and lithely into the room, closing the door after her.

  “B-B-Bhagya?” I stammered.

  “You don’t look well,” she said without emotion as she came over to me, the hem of her long blue dress dragging on the floor. She held up a closed hand and opened it slowly, like a flower unfolding in the morning sunlight. Lying in her palm was a slip of green paper.

  I studied her, barely comprehending what was happening, but tentatively took the note and read it.

  You thrown off the Round Room’s reprogramming now?

  The penny dropped. “The message scrawled in the dust in the Round Room, the green notes, they’re all from you?”

  She nodded. “Considering your background, age, and determination, I figured I had a good chance of helping you throw off your reprogramming.”

  “Reprogramming?”

  “When they stuck you in the Roun
d Room, they put a drug in the water to keep you awake. That’s what caused you to hallucinate, have blackouts, become disorientated, and eventually become susceptible to suggestion. In other words, they brainwashed you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you come out of there thinking you were responsible for the death or capture of the foragers and their families that you helped escape two years ago? Didn’t you think you had to redeem yourself for that transgression by serving the chancellor for the rest of your life?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Do you still think that? Now that you’ve seen the ugly truth about the chancellor, councillors and geneticists?”

  “I don’t owe the chancellor a blasted thing. If he didn’t run the town like a prison camp those foragers and their families wouldn’t have wanted to escape in the first place. I still feel guilty if those people did really die, but deep down I know it’s his fault, not mine.”

  Bhagya nodded. “There, you see?”

  “How come the reprogramming didn’t work on you?” I asked.

  “Because they totally underestimated the power of the extended family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just lived with your parents and siblings, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Several generations of Indians live in the same home – great grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, and sometimes the parents’ siblings and families as well. The whole extended family gets together at mealtimes, we all work together, and every member helps and supports the others. Family loyalty and unity create a sense of intergenerational family harmony you ‘Aussies’ have never experienced. They took me from that wonderful, nurturing environment when I was five. So I rejected Mr. Cho’s stupid reprogramming attempts in the Round Room even while they were being shoved down my throat.”

  “And they never realised?”

  “I never show what I’m thinking.”

  “So I’ve noticed. But, ah–” I let my words trail off, too afraid to ask the question I wanted to ask.

  “Why do I never show any emotion?”

  I nodded. “Initially, because I missed my family. And then, because from a young age I sneaked into the air conditioning ducts and spied on the geneticists. My heart shattered the first time I watched them dissect one of the echolocator boys. It withered up and died during the subsequent dissections. Such trusting, innocent little things, and those monsters cut them apart while they were still alive.”

  “You never told any of the other girls about this?”

  “No point, they’d never believe me, their reprogramming is too deep. They’d just turn me in.”

  “Did you learn anything else about the geneticists or the chancellor? Stuff they want to keep secret?”

  Bhagya nodded, and taking me by the hand, led me to the back of the room, where we sat on the floor behind a desk, hidden from view should anyone open the door and peer in.

  “A submarine from the United Democratic Republic of Korea was sent to Australia when the Third World War broke out,” she began. “It dropped a large nuke on Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, leaving the city’s central business district intact. Other nukes were dropped all over Australia, striking power stations, major cities and large towns. Don’t know who fired them, but my guess is Korea and their allies.

  “After most of Melbourne’s surviving population left the city, the Korean submarine docked in the Maribyrnong River. Under the captain’s orders, the crew established a town, calling it Newhome. They populated it with locals who survived the nuke they fired. This wasn’t done out of the goodness of the captain’s heart, but because he needed an instant workforce and army, two things the Korean submarine crew needed to survive in a ruined city full of hostiles when they numbered only sixty-four.

  “The reason the Koreans only nuked the south-eastern suburbs was so they could plunder the hospitals and universities in and around the Central Business District. The gathered equipment and knowledge, the two things they needed to train up the geneticists and scientists required to carry out their long-term plan. Melbourne also had a virtually inexhaustible supply of recyclables.

  “This long term strategy was set in motion by the submarine captain – the first chancellor – one hundred years ago. They call it the Plan. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out what it entails; only that it has something to do with their endless pursuit of human genetic modification.”

  “Human genetic modification? I don’t understand. Doesn’t that contradict the Founders law that no aberrations of the human genome are permitted, that it has to be kept pure at all costs?” I pointed out.

  “You’d think so, yet when Dr. Zhao – the geneticist who created us – destroyed his work and committed suicide rather than let it fall into the chancellor’s hands, the chancellor instructed the geneticists to do whatever it took to reverse engineer it. That’s why they dissected the biologically engineered boys,” Bhagya said.

  “Have they worked out how he did it?”

  “To my understanding, yes.”

  “What are they planning to do with the information?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We fell silent for a while, Bhagya observing me impassively while I mulled over what she told me.

  “What happened to you today?” she asked at last.

  “Huh?”

  “Your body language was practically screaming when you came into the lab this evening.”

  I filled her in on everything that happened to me recently, from Jazza and his friends ambushing me, to the attempted murder this afternoon, the mysterious Patriot, and the Freehome resistance group’s attempt to catch and imprison me indefinitely.

  “Stirred up the proverbial hornet’s nest, didn’t you?” Bhagya said when I finished.

  “More than one, I think.”

  “Have you told Mr. Cho about the attempt on your life?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, get on with it. This isn’t something to take lightly. Someone tried to kill you, Chelsea, and they’ll probably try again.”

  “I’ll tell him soon, just want to do some more digging around first,” I said.

  “Make sure it’s real soon.”

  I nodded.

  She fell silent for a moment, and then took my hand in hers. “We need to join this Freehome group.”

  “What, the group that just tried to lock me up?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “That was just a misunderstanding, and you know it,” Bhagya said. “So go to your friend Ryan Hill and tell him how I helped you throw off the reprogramming. Convince him you’re back to your old self and that you and I will be indispensible assets to their group.”

  Images of Dr. Jeong and the other geneticists dissecting my brother and the little boy flashed into my mind, sending waves of anger coursing through me. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have a question, too, if you don’t mind. Why did you go to all this effort to free me of the Round Room’s reprogramming?”

  “I did it because I need your help stopping the chancellor before the Plan is implemented.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you could be the most capable, resourceful person I’ve met, something you amply demonstrated by avoiding detection for so long, successfully masquerading as your brother, and by instigating the breakout–”

  “Even if it resulted in the deaths of those people?”

  “You really believe those Custodian-spread rumours?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “I’ll tell you this. I’ve spent weeks working undercover in the Custodian barracks, and I’ve never once heard them talk about it. Don’t you think it’d be the centrepiece of conversation if they really did find those people butchered by the side of the road?”

  “You’d think so, but that’s still not proof,” I said.

  “No, it’s not, but
it is food for thought.”

  After we sat together in silence for a while, I decided to ask her a question that was ever burning in my mind these days.

  “What are we going to do about these pregnancies?”

  “Don’t know about you, but I won’t be carrying the fetus to term,” she said, staring impassively into my eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll find a way to trigger a miscarriage if it doesn’t occur naturally.”

  “But that’ll kill the baby!”

  “Better than live through what they’ve got planned for it.”

  “What do you mean?” A horrific thought lurked at the back of my mind, so terrible I refused to even acknowledge its existence, let alone look at it.

  “Come on Chelsea, think! The whole point of his experiment is to find out whether we can pass our genetically enhanced genes onto our children. That’s the extent of it. Do you think they want another generation of children like us?”

  The horrific fear began to solidify. “You think they’ll force us to have abortions once they have the answer to their question?”

  “No. They’ll wait for the babies to be born and then they’ll experiment on them.”

  “You don’t know that!” I protested, but inwardly, I feared she was right. The fear became a living, pulsating thing that settled in my mind and stayed there.

  Bhagya watched me, a knowing expression on her face.

  “There’s no way I’m going to let them do that to my baby,” I said.

  “How are you going to stop them?”

  “I’ll escape Newhome before the baby is born.”

  “Is that right? And how are you going to manage that? They doubled the guards on the gates, thanks to the breakout two years ago. And there’s no other way out.”

  “I’ll find a way. Will you come with me when I do? So your baby can be saved?”

  “No. I will not leave Newhome until the chancellor and all the geneticists are in prison or dead. Preferably the latter.”