The Owners

by Tara Basi

  Mina led them out and across the Park, hacking a wide path through the rampant greenery till she reached their destination. The main hangar doors were rusted shut and completely overgrown. It was already late afternoon by the time they reached them and the sun was touching the tips of the tallest buildings.

  “These are great,” Pinkie shouted excitedly, teasing her robot into a little jig of joy.

  “Enough for today, let’s leave them up here on standby. We’ll start again early tomorrow,” Mina said. Her giant machine slowly settled into a crouched position and she exited her operator’s capsule. She watched everyone safely dismount and make their way back inside. Mina stayed behind. Tress hung back, too.

  The sun was setting behind the yellow robots, turning them orange. The three-metre-tall machines were roughly humanoid in shape with an operator’s glass and steel cockpit where a head might be expected. Each carried a range of fearsome looking tools stored inside their thick legs. They were capable of operating autonomously if the task was simple and repetitive; or they could be operated manually. Freeing the hangar doors was an unknown quantity. Mina didn’t know what it would take and they couldn’t risk any serious damage to the doors. She prayed their training was sufficient for the task. Mina would find out in the morning. She and Tress stood watching the setting sun in quiet reflection. It was the first time that she’d been able to relax in a while.

  “I never thought we’d actually do it. Work those machines for real,” Tress said staring at her robot.

  “Everyone’s done really well. Much better than I’d hoped.”

  Tress smiled. “You did it Mina, you got us this far. We’ll get everyone out.”

  “Thanks.” Mina looked at Tress. She seemed relaxed and happy. Maybe now was the right time. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure?”

  “I think it would help me if I knew how people were taken into the Blocks. Anton didn’t know and I’ve never been able to find any record of exactly what happened. I know you were only a little kid at the time. Do you remember anything?”

  Tress didn’t answer. She shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around her body and stared at her feet. Her smile was gone.

  “Look, if it’s too difficult Tress, you don’t have to talk about it. I understand.”

  Tress looked up, she was crying. “I can’t… talk about it. Once, when I was just a kid, I started a kind of diary. I kept changing it as I found out more. When the time came, I gave it to Battery Boy, when he was in a Block School waiting to be Banded. So he’d know the truth. When he understood I got him ready to run. It was too late for me; I was already Banded.”

  “I’m sorry Tress, I didn’t want to stir up terrible memories. Let’s forget about it.”

  Tress took Mina’s hand. “You need to know. It might be important. I’ll never forget. I’ll write it all down and leave it in your room. Afterwards, I don’t want to talk about it. Is that alright?”

  Mina felt terrible. Tress looked distraught. “I’ll never mention it again. If you decide not to do this. Don’t worry. Tress, I’m sorry for asking.”

  “Don’t be. This needs doing. When they get out. Everyone should know what the Blocks did to us.”

  Mina hugged Tress tightly. They stayed that way till the sun had set, the stars had come out and the night critters were making a hell of a racket before they decided to go back inside.

  When Mina went to bed later that night she found a bundle of pages under her pillow. She ate it up, hoping for answers or reasons or purpose in all the Block madness.

  Some of this story I remember myself but it’s mostly what my mum told me when I was a bit older. Mum was only sixteen and I was three years old when the Blocks came. I didn’t have a dad. Granny said Mum had been a bad girl and if I didn’t want to end up like her I should do good at school. Mum wasn’t bad. I didn’t like Granny. I don’t think Mum did either but we were both sad when she disappeared. Lots of people were disappearing. People we used to see all the time didn’t come around any more.

  One day Mum took me out of nursery and we went straight to the basement of our block of flats and hid in a dark empty storage locker. At first it was fun. We played lots of games, we had all my favourite things to eat and Mum read me lots of stories. We had to stay very quiet most of the time, which wasn’t always easy when I wanted to play. After a while I missed my teachers, my friends, the sun, ice cream and my own bedroom. Mum tried to smile a lot which made her look scary in the torchlight. Her eyes were awfully sad. It felt like we’d been down there for weeks when the census police came and led us back out into the sunlight. Mum was only allowed to pack one small suitcase to take with us and I had to choose just one toy to pack, so I cheated. Holding Snuggles the cat tightly in my fist I gave Mum Bob the Bat for packing. I knew he wouldn’t mind being in a dark suitcase for a while. When we left I was glad to be out of that damp stinky basement but Mum didn’t look any happier. A big old truck with its engine rumbling was waiting for us in the street in front of our tower block. The street was empty, no pushy crowd on the pavement, no cars rushing past like they usually did. Mum helped me climb into the back of the truck. It was already crowded with quiet and unhappy looking people. They shuffled around without saying anything and made a little space for us on the floor where we sat down and waited for the truck to leave. The other grown-ups had suitcases like us but I guessed we weren’t going on holiday. After a lot of bouncing about we arrived at a big rail yard, the cloth flap was flicked back and everyone climbed out. Hundreds of trucks were coming and going, arriving full and leaving empty. The place was noisy and smelled bad. There were lots of trains with coughing engines. A really long train with no windows was waiting for us. Lots of policemen were around directing the people getting out of the trucks towards the train. Mum lifted me into a wagon and climbed in after. An old man helped her. He didn’t say anything. Like the truck it was full of sad people who weren’t speaking, not even whispering. It smelled like the basement locker and it was just as dark when the door slid shut with a bang.

  A long time passed before the train stopped to let us out. I still wasn’t used to the light after living in the basement and being stuck in the dark train waggon. I was blinking quite hard for a while before I saw the Block for the first time. It didn’t look real. Maybe it was just the funny sunlight in the morning playing games with the rain clouds. Nothing could be that big. I shaded my eyes and stared. Everyone was looking. I don’t think anyone really believed what we were seeing. All the people jumped down from our wagon. Mum had to help me get down, and then we clambered aboard another truck. Hours later the back was opened up and we climbed out. The Block hadn’t moved. It looked exactly the same as I’d seen it at the train stop. It was as though we had gone in circles and been dropped off back where we’d started but we really had arrived at a very different place. The trains had gone, there were just nice fields where the train station had been.

  Sour policemen steered us towards a tall wire fence separating us from the Block which was directly ahead. I couldn’t see where the fence stopped even when I looked both ways. Behind the fence, squashed together people were standing with their backs to us looking at the Block, as though some sort of big church service was going on and they were all praying. There were lots and lots of people. Too many to count. Too many to imagine. None of them bothered to turn around to look at us.

  The policemen who told us to get out of the truck made us leave our cases and I started crying. Bob the Bat was going to be left behind but I kept a really tight grip on Snuggles. A policeman went ahead and opened a gate in the fence. Other policemen, behind us, made a kind of line holding their sticks. They herded us towards the opening, even though there was no room for any more people. They pushed us really hard until we were all inside and then slammed the gate shut. Mum lifted me up onto her shoulders. We were all squashed together by the gate behind us and two fences on either side that ran down towards the Block, like an alley. It was only ab
out ten people wide. Everyone was packed so tight you couldn’t even fall over. I could see endless lines of parallel fences on both sides and every fenced-in channel was crammed full of mostly silent people. Every few minutes we’d shuffle a couple of steps forward then stop again. I guessed we were queuing for something but no one looked excited or happy.

  A man told Mum the outer perimeter fence went all around the Block; he knew because he’d helped build it. Each of the runs like ours was twenty kilometres long and narrowed to almost single file when it reached the inner fence, about ten kilometres from the Block. The man didn’t know what was beyond that inner fence. He told us trucks dropped off more people day and night and they were being pushed through the gate behind us all the time. So, the people in front of us must be going somewhere at the other end. When he said that we all felt a forward surge as another truckload got shoved through the gate into our lane. Mum and the man worked out that it would take a day and a night to cover twenty kilometres at our shuffle speed. They started to add up how many people were in each run and how many runs there were but stopped counting when the numbers got very, very big.

  Sitting high up on Mum’s shoulders I escaped the worst. Some of the people were probably sick or even dead but got carried on anyway with no space to fall. The air and the people stank. After a few hours of suddenly lurching forward a few steps and stumbling back a bit, it started raining. I was really glad. I’d been very thirsty and the rain made everything feel a bit cleaner. Our lurching crawl between the fences went on and on. Only the Block, and now the flying black boxes I was beginning to notice, waited for us. Far ahead it was raining black boxes that tumbled out of the grey clouds around the Block to fall slowly to the Earth and then magically bounce back up to the top of the Block. It frightened me that Mum was carrying me straight towards that downpour of boxes. Not that she had a choice, not that anyone had any choice. Mum said I had to be brave when she took me from the nursery and I had tried but I’d been really scared for days and things just kept getting scarier. What was waiting for us at the end of our slow crawl? What if Mum tripped and fell?

  Mum was very brave and very strong, she didn’t fall and she didn’t drop me. Every time I felt so hungry that I wanted to cry, even though I was supposed to be brave, Mum found me something. It wasn’t much. A few nuts and pieces of old bread. It was enough. I never saw her eat anything. We kept going for a horribly long time and then our fenced area narrowed. It started to be covered on both sides with canvas and there was a roof over us that was made out of scaffolding and thick wire. It wasn’t dark, light was coming from another roof above the wire. Policemen were standing on our wire and plank roof watching us, not saying anything, not smiling. They looked funny because we could see their really big feet first and then the rest of them seemed so small. I wanted to ask Mum what we’d done to annoy the policemen but I never did. The walls were closing in but it was nice to be out of the rain. It had started to get very cold. And, I really didn’t mind that we couldn’t see the Block or the boxes any more. Everyone was getting squeezed into a narrower and narrower space. It made me think of Granny’s old egg timer and the little grains of falling sand but we didn’t know what we were falling into.

  Something was up ahead, something different. Not just the backs of people’s heads and the canvas funnel. It looked like a turnstile, a big one, like the kind they had at the airport. As we got closer there were so many policemen’s big feet standing right over us that they almost blocked out the light. There were three possible exits from the turnstile, only one opened up for each person who went through. Most went down the centre tunnel. Those who were too sick to stand, or already dead, were taken to the right. Waiting men, in dirty overalls and facemasks, dumped them into big open topped bins on tracks. As a full bin of people was noisily trundled away, an empty one replaced it. Everyone was supposed to go into the turnstile alone but Mum shouted and screamed and eventually the policemen let us go in together. The left-hand exit opened for us. Later Mum found out that happened very rarely, we’d been lucky. She also found out where the other exits led. If you went right, dead or not, you were tipped out of the bins into huge pits and eventually buried. The centre path led to another staging area where people got loaded into one of the flying boxes and taken up into the clouds around the Block.

  Except for Mum getting a Band straight away, we had it quite easy. We stayed locked up in an area between the inner fence and the Block. There weren’t many of us, maybe a few hundred, mainly really young girls like Mum and children like me or even younger. Mum and I lived in a pretty blue tent with another nice lady and her two babies. We had lots of space, plenty of food and a little console. We stayed there for a year, I think. That’s how long it took for all the people to be sent through a turnstile to one of the gates.

  Then it started raining monsters. Machines with long snaky arms fell from the Block like smoke. They were very scary but I couldn’t stop staring at the swarm. Every one ran out of their tents to watch the black metal jellyfish fly over our heads in every direction and disappear over the fence. There were so many I couldn’t see the sun. It was dark in the middle of the day, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when they came back. Everybody knew something bad was going to happen when a few hours after the machines flew away the boxes started falling out of the clouds and landing near the Block. We hadn’t seen them for such a long time I hoped they would never come back. I asked Mum if they’d come for us. She told me not to worry even though it was obvious she was. The boxes hadn’t come for us. When the jellyfish flew back they looked different. Their snake legs were coloured and lumpy. It was hard to see because they were so high up. I didn’t see anything, I just heard the screaming. Mum made me go back in the tent. And she wouldn’t let me out. There was a terrible noise. I hid under the blanket and wrapped a pillow around my head. It didn’t work. I could still hear the screams of thousands and thousands of people. Later on an older boy told me the jellyfish were carrying people by their ankles. They were put inside the boxes and flown up in to the clouds around the Block. It went on for days. There were fewer jellyfish flying out each day to bring back the screaming people. One day it stopped. They must have caught everybody.

  After a few weeks the jellyfish came back and everyone tried to run away. We thought they’d come for us. They hadn’t. They took down all the fences and scaffolding right up to the outer Block fence. The way they swept over the ground and devoured everything made me think about locusts. It only took the machines a couple of days. Then smaller groups of the jellyfish began building something different at lots of places all around the Block. Others worked on the outer fence making it bigger and stronger. We only knew because some of the older kids that didn’t have Bands walked out to the fence. They were looking for a way to escape. They didn’t find a way out and some of them didn’t come back. A boy told Mum the jellyfish had laid mines. After that no one went out to see what the jellyfish were up to. Me and Mum were just glad they stayed away from us.

  When the machines had finished you’d never have known there had ever been anybody waiting to be buried, Blocked or sent to a blue tent. Blocked is what we called anyone who was taken inside the Block in one of the boxes. We guessed they went inside. The clear-up and the finishing of whatever the jellyfish were building took a couple of months.

  It was sort of expected once the jellyfish had done with their building work that they’d be coming for us. That didn’t stop people crying and screaming and running off in every direction. Mum didn’t do those things. She held my hand and said it was time to be very brave again, that running away wasn’t going to work and we might get separated or injured.

  It didn’t exactly hurt being scooped up by one of their snaky arms. It just made me feel sick when it flew away with us. And I was lucky, Mum was right beside me all wrapped up in another tentacle and it wasn’t taking us to the Block, we were heading towards whatever the jellyfish had been making. Mum held my hand and tried to keep s
miling though she looked like she was going to be sick too. It took us to a school and that’s where we lived. We were probably the very first ones to do that.

  It was a little bit different at the start. I got to stay with Mum till I was about seven. Everything had been horrible since the Block came but at least Mum was always there, except when she had to go and make a baby. Or got too big and had to go somewhere to let the baby out. She always came back after a few days though she never brought any babies back with her. We lived in long wooden cabins with lots of other families. It wasn’t so bad. Better than the tents. The food was okay and there were lots of other kids to play with. Until they started getting taken away.

  Us kids could pretty much wander wherever we wanted. Mum and the other Banded stayed close to the cabins. There were some places the kids never went, like out towards the fence where there were mines and other stuff to stop you trying to get out. None of us wanted to get too close to the Block. Everything close to the Block was ruined and the weather was really bad. And we couldn’t get inside the special place. All anybody knew was that it was big and it was surrounded by really high wooden walls. And there was only the one door. Over the door was a sign I didn’t really understand. Not then. It said: ‘Tracy’s School, Number Eight’. I’d seen other little kids being taken through that door by the angry old boys. We called them hunters. They were like the new police. The hunters came back. I’d never seen any of the little ones come back. The black jellyfish brought older girls like my mum and they went inside and when it got dark they came back out and started living with us. Every day they went back through the door until they got too pregnant and then the jellyfish took them away. Sometimes we tried asking an old girl, that’s what we started calling them, old girls, what happened behind the wall. Usually they wouldn’t say. Lots had the dead eye look that most of the Banded got. Those ones never said very much about anything. Mum never got like that. Some just shrugged as if they didn’t know, even though they had to. A few of them told us it was a great place and we’d like it. More and more kids were disappearing inside so I guessed it would be my turn soon.