Push (Beat series Book 2)

by Jared Garrett

  “Maybe next time,” Tasha said. The two hunters spun and disappeared into the forest at a run, following the same faint path we’d been using as a guide.

  How had they gotten out of sight so fast? We needed to learn to do that.

  “Okay, people,” Scott said. “Let’s spread out some. Keep under trees. Do what you can to hide your heat.”

  The Wanderers set their packs down near trees and rested in groups. I followed Scott and sat near him. “So where do you get your tek?”

  Scott smiled and laid a finger alongside his nose. “We have our sources.”

  Melisa and James had joined us. Their faces mirrored my confusion. “What?”

  “We have our sources,” Scott repeated. “And that, frankly, is all I will say about that.”

  Okay. I pulled some moss off the ground near me. Everybody had secrets. What a lovely world.

  “Something you said back at the cavern,” James said. “Something about flooding in San Francisco?”

  Scott looked up, obviously confused. “Yes. Flooding. What about it?”

  “Is the whole city flooded?” James asked.

  Scott’s eyes went from James to Melisa to me, and then back. “Of course it is.” He scanned the forest, watching the rest of the group settling in to wait. “I sometimes forget how sheltered your cities are. Why the Prime Perpetrator does that, I may never know.”

  “Sheltered?” Melisa said. “What do you mean?”

  “A better word would be controlled. Controlled and guarded.” Scott settled onto a fallen tree. “You truly have no accurate knowledge of the world around you.”

  “Well, fill us in,” I said. “Why’s San Francisco flooded?”

  “The question you mean to ask is ‘Why is the entire West Coast flooded?’” Scott said.

  “The whole thing?” James asked.

  “Yes.” Scott took a long, slow breath. “Since we have nothing better to do, let me remove some of your ignorance.”

  Feeling strangely insulted, I waved at Pol and Lexi. They saw me and came over. It’s not our fault we don’t know. The New Chapter was our life.

  "Hey guys,” I said as my friends arrived. “Scott’s going to…” I shook my head. “. . . talk about the real world, I guess.”

  “Okay,” Lexi said. She dropped to the ground and leaned on a tree. “Talk away.”

  Pol sat next to James and looked expectantly at Scott.

  “All right,” Scott said. “I’ll start at the beginning.” His face tilted up as he thought for a moment.

  I dug my fingers into the dirt, enjoying the sensation. Scott was right. This moment right here was more real than anything I’d ever done in New Frisko.

  “I do not know why your Prime Perpetrator chose to never tell you the truth of the world. Let’s start with this: Perhaps 150 kilometers from here, over a hundred years ago, lived several million people.”

  Several million? That was impossible.

  “How?” Pol asked. “There’s no way there’s enough space for that many people.”

  “That is incorrect,” Scott said. “And please, let me tell the story.

  “The truth is that at its height, the country that used to exist here, extending thousands of kilometers in either direction, had over 300 million people in it.” He raised a hand, stopping our questions. “I am telling the truth.”

  He continued. “Several billion people populated the earth at the time. And this part of the world was in serious trouble.” Scott picked up a stick and drew on the ground. “Did your schooling teach about the country we used to be a part of?” He pointed at the shape he’d drawn.

  I recognized it. “Yeah. The United States of America. Part of North America.”

  “Precisely. The western part of the country, perhaps a hundred and ten years ago, underwent significant transformations. He jabbed the stick into that region of his drawing. “It started with widespread drought.”

  “What’s that?” Pol asked.

  “It is when an area does not get enough water. Plants and crops start to fail.” Scott gestured with one arm. “From the north to the south, from the coast to several hundred kilometers in, drought spread across the land.”

  “Because the people were so bad at managing it, right?” Melisa asked. “We learned about how much they ruined the land, polluting the water and air and killing off animals.”

  Scott nodded. “Perhaps. Today, without sufficient data, it is hard to say why the drought happened. We can assume that it was a combination of poor management and other things. The main point is that it’s hard to survive in a drought. Food sources deplete rather quickly when there’s not enough water.”

  “How did the people eat?” Pol sounded impatient.

  “Let me tell the story,” Scott said. He tasted his mustache with the tip of his tongue. “The land couldn’t sustain so many people—there were millions of people in countless cities up and down the coast. So people started leaving.” He drew lines from the West Coast across the country in his drawing. “Then the fires came, driving millions more from their homes. People moved both east” —He drew another line— “and across the ocean.” He dragged the stick the other direction.

  “And it was lucky they did so. Because some kind of deity must have had it in for the West Coast.” Scott laughed.

  “Deity?” Pol asked.

  “A god,” Scott answered.

  The other Pushers and I exchanged a confused look. “A god?” I’d never heard the word.

  Scott’s brow drew down. He cocked his head to the side. He sat like that for a moment, regarding my friends and me silently. His next words were silent, almost to himself. “Everything. He was everything to you.”

  “Who?” Melisa asked.

  “Holland. The Prime Perpetrator. He was the source of everything for you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what happened next? From what you’re saying, there should be less water and no flooding.”

  Scott sat up straighter. “As I was saying. Nature didn’t stop at drought and fires. An enormous earthquake devastated the lower half of this region.” He drew a deep line in the now-messy drawing. “This is several hundred kilometers south of us. By this time, the largest population centers were pretty much all that remained. But the earthquake killed thousands and drove many of the rest of the people away.”

  He stabbed the stick farther north on the West Coast now. “And then the big one hit. It was probably triggered by the first one.” He gouged the earth with the stick. “A massive earthquake completely changed the land from here” —He stood the stick up, then dragged it from the northernmost part of his drawing all the way to the southern end— “to here.

  “Combined with sudden storms and countless floods, the land seemed to be rejecting humanity. Nearly everybody fled. Again, to the east and across the ocean. Some to the north.” Scott drew a few lines upward. “Add more massive wildfires to the mix, and the entire West Coast, plus several hundred kilometers of land inward, was abandoned.”

  “We were told tsunamis drove people farther inland,” I said.

  “There were tsunamis,” Scott said. “Not enough to drive large numbers of people away.”

  “But why would Holland lie about that?” Melisa said.

  “He’s evil.” Pol jabbed a stick into the dark dirt. “Lying comes naturally to him.”

  “A fair assessment,” Scott said. He circled a large portion inland of the coast in the drawing he’d now completely destroyed. “This region is what we call the Blight. Empty of resources and people. Only massive stretches of nearly lifeless sand and rock remain.” His eyes settled on mine. “Nobody has crossed that blight and returned. It’s entirely possible that nobody has successfully crossed it in decades.”

  Scott let out a long breath. “And then the Bug came. From all reports, most of humanity was killed. Some were fortunate enough to be immune. Others just got lucky and never got their heart rate up.” He scrubbed the stick furiously through his drawing. “Humani
ty was in shambles. Technology still existed, but the infrastructure failed completely except for a few pockets here and there.”

  “You know where the Bug came from, right?” I asked.

  Scott pursed his lips. “No, I do not. Our assumption is that somehow the Prime Perpetrator was involved, given that he still lives despite there being a hundred-year-old photo of him in that building in San Francisco.”

  Melisa and I exchanged a glance. “Well, he did it. I have no idea how he’s still alive, but somehow, Adam Holland made the Bug.” I thought back to the few conversations I’d had with Holland in Prime One. “He said something about how humanity needed help—or guidance, I think he said—in its evolution.”

  “Yeah, so he did it. He put the Bug in the air and killed off everyone,” Melisa said. “But that’s not all.”

  Scott’s mouth had dropped open. “You are telling me that this one man is responsible for the death of billions?”

  I sat back. That was crazy. But true. “Yes. He told me.”

  “But that’s where the Papas came in,” Melisa said. “He forced everyone to wear them, saying the Bug was still in the air. But the truth was that the Bug was in the knockout, so every time we got the knockout, we got—”

  “You got your own murderer injected into you,” Scott said. “Wanderers have always known the Bug was not in the air. Our very existence was proof of that. What you’ve told me explains why this Holland fellow controls his cities so tightly. It is a house of lies that would not be able to stand were one truth to enter in.”

  “Which is why he wants to kill us,” Pol said. “If we got the word to Anjeltown or Mento, his whole thing would collapse.”

  “Surely you’ve tried,” Scott said. “Those people deserve to know. I have friends in Mento and its surroundings that believe their Personal Assistant is their savior. People still die from the Bug, obviously by Holland’s design. A fear tactic to keep the people cowed.”

  “Yes,” James said. “We’ve tried.” His voice grew hoarse on the last word. “I lost all of my friends when we tried to fly a pod into Mento.”

  Scott fixed James with a sympathetic look. “Will you tell me what happened?”

  James nodded. “We knew we had to tell everyone. Nik and his friends had shown the truth to New Frisko, which is why we had to escape. Why Holland tried to kill us before we could get away.”

  “He dropped some kind of nerve gas into different parts of the city,” Pol said. “The bombs landed right after the truth was exposed. It was like Holland had planned for something like that. The bombs impacted the ground and that activated these compartments that had some kind of nerve agent. When the nerve agent mixed with the air—”

  “He doesn’t care if we live or die, obviously,” Lexi broke in. “He just wants to control everyone.” Pol glared at her. We ignored him.

  “Anyway,” James said. The beard he was growing glinted in the light of the forest. “We should have been more careful. But we were so new to this fight.” He got quiet for a moment. “I stayed behind to guard the babies, while the rest of my squad tried to get into Mento. But I heard every second. Every scream.”

  Melisa put a hand on his arm and picked up the story. “There were some kind of flying robots, way too small for people to fit in them, patrolling a few kilometers from the city. We found out later that these drones or whatever are all around the city.”

  “They shot the Enforser pod down,” I said. “It took some drones with it. And some of the Enforsers survived the crash. But then something was in the trees shooting at them right away. They couldn’t see what it—or they—was, but they had no chance. The Enforsers, I mean.”

  “I heard some of the Enforsers shout about Ranjers, too,” James said. “So to answer your question, yes we tried to tell the people in Mento. But there is no way to get in there.”

  “This is true,” Scott said. “Wanderers who have passed by have found that security near the city is much tighter lately. It used to be that some careful souls could get in and out if necessary.” He rubbed his face with one hand. “Not the case anymore.”

  “As far as we can tell,” James said, “there are at least three layers of security: airborne, tree-based, and then Ranjers. You can’t get past them. We gave up on telling the people there the truth. We’ve checked and found that no signal or transmission can be found coming out of Mento either. We can’t break into their broadcast system—so there’s no way to tell them. And we don’t know if Anjeltown is in the same situation. I assume it is.”

  “A fair assumption.” Scott leaned back against his tree and regarded the gathered group as if waiting for more comments. When none were offered, he continued. “I have little left to tell. After the disasters, only a few thousand people remained on the West Coast, as far as I know now. Some clustered together, and before anybody knew it, three new cities had emerged. They were guarded well and only let a few people in. And never let anyone out. But they grew. I’ve heard that Anjeltown is the biggest of the three. And that was all we knew about them. Wanderers multiplied slowly and carefully, since we soon learned that the Prime Perpetrator did not like us.”

  “Because you were proof the Bug was a lie,” I said.

  “Indeed,” Scott said.

  We fell into silence. I stared at the messy drawing Scott had created in the dirt. All of those awful things, followed by the Bug. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so good to live back in those earlier days—like I’d wanted to for so much of my life.

  Exhaustion ached in my bones. We’d had so little sleep the night before. I leaned back on my tree and let my head drop a little, when I caught sight of Scott’s drawing again. My eyes were drawn to the east part of the country, past the Blight. Nobody had made it there and come back? So nobody knew what was out there?

  What if there were people out there? How different was the world on the far side of the Blight?

  Could we build a pod that had enough power and fuel to cross the dead land?

  Chapter 12

  Juices from the roasting meat sizzled and splattered on the hot ring of rocks around the big blazing fire. I’d never smelled anything so amazing in my life.

  Lily and Tasha had shown up while I was taking a nap. They’d killed a deer, and by the time I woke up, they’d cut big slabs of dripping meat off the body. The raw flesh made my stomach churn for a moment, but that had been replaced by hunger not long after the deer meat had started cooking.

  I’d wanted to get going as soon as the meat was cut, but Scott had smiled irritatingly at me. “Raw meat will not keep. It must be cooked immediately or it will rot and be useless to us. More work now will keep us fed and safe down the road.”

  Now I just wanted to eat. We’d wasted a day for the hunters to bring in food, but after what we’d learned, it didn’t feel like such a waste. Looking north over the roasting meat, I imagined I could see a huge gash in the land far in that direction. How much different would this area have been if there were still millions of people living here?

  One of the Wanderer kids slowly rotated the big chunks of meat skewered on the stick above the fire. Other Wanderers set up camp, while James, Lexi, and Melisa put up the thermal shield cloth.

  “Is it ready yet?” I glanced at the Wanderer kid.

  Lily walked up to the fire. In its red glow, her face looked even brighter. She looked so strong. It was like light spread out from her. “The outside is. Want some?”

  My mouth watered. I nodded.

  “Got a knife?” Lily asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She pursed her lips and patted her jacket pockets, then pulled out a small knife in a deerskin sheath. “Here. If you’re going to be hunting and stuff, you’ll need one.”

  The knife felt surprisingly heavy in my hand. “Thanks.” She was probably right. “Where do you get these? I’ll need one after you guys are gone.”

  Lily’s brows drew down. “You can keep it. No big deal.”

  “What? No, I can’t.” I
held it out to her.

  “No, keep it. I’ve got plenty.”

  I met her intense gaze. She was my height, but somehow it felt like I was looking up. “Really?”

  “Really.” She pulled out a long knife and a fork, quickly slicing a dripping piece of meat from one of the skewered chunks.

  I pulled the knife from its sheath. The blade was wide and tapered, sharp on both sides, about ten centimeters long. Red and orange light glinted off the shiny metal.

  “Here,” Lily said. She had put the sizzling piece of venison on a plasteel plate and sliced it into chunks. She popped a chunk into her mouth. I stabbed one and did the same.

  Warm, rich, deliciousness filled my mouth. It was soft and easy to chew. After I swallowed, my mouth and stomach felt emptier than before. I craved more.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “There’s nothing like fresh venison off the skewer,” Lily said. She pointed at the plasteel plate.

  “I need to learn how to hunt.” I stuck another piece in my mouth. “And to do all this stuff.”

  She nodded. “I’ll teach you.”

  Wow, was she serious? “Really?”

  “Sure. We’ve got a long way to go. What else are we going to do?” Lily lifted her voice. “Come and eat, everyone.”

  She turned back to the fire and sliced more meat off the huge chunks. People jostled around me, trying to get at the delicious stuff. I imagined days spent tracking deer next to the Wanderers, Lily and the others teaching me how to shoot a bow. What could be better?

  “You’re staring again.” Melisa bumped me with an elbow.

  “What?” I pulled myself together. “Did you get some food?”

  Melisa indicated the crowd. “Maybe when everybody else has had enough.”

  “It’s really good,” I said.

  “It smells great.”

  “It is.” I used my shirt to wipe my new knife clean. The red and orange glints crawled up and down the blade, reflecting the dancing flames.

  “Hey, where’d that come from?” Melisa asked.

  “Lily gave it to me.”

  “She gave it to you? As in give, not lend?”