Run

by Gabby Tye

  I couldn’t tell what race any of these kids were. But that was not so surprising. With all the genetic experimenting that had been going on, and the ridiculous choices parents had been making, it was no longer possible to tell a person’s race by looking at them.

  I wonder what Dyanne and Shulin’s parents had been thinking when they picked blue eyes and red hair. At least my parents had good taste, I mused. Black hair and violet eyes was an awesome combination.

  Then it struck me that Kyl looked the most Asian. He was the only one with black hair and black eyes. Either his parents were one of those purists who refused to modify – or “mod” – their babies, or they were simply too poor to pay for the genetic procedures.

  “Okay,” I finally said, through a mouthful of tuna. “I’m ready to talk. What’s going on? Who’s in charge of this place? And what happened to all the grown-ups?”

  That was a conversation stopper. Everyone grew silent and looked uncomfortably at one another.

  “What?” I said, stupidly ignorant.

  Kyl sounded grim. “No one’s in charge. Don’t you remember anything? We’ve all been abandoned. So far, this is the safest place we have found in the last few weeks.”

  “Abandoned?” I said. “What do you mean? Why did your parents abandon you? My parents would never do that to me!”

  Kyl looked awkward. “I hate to tell you this way, and I’m really sorry, but it is true. All the adults are gone. We have been left to die.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “What?” My mind reeled. Here we were, a bunch of kids sitting in an abandoned house, eating dinner from tins. And if that wasn’t bad enough, this boy, this stranger, had to dump this nasty bombshell on me – we had been left to die?

  “What are you talking about? Why?” I demanded.

  Kyl took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go right back to the start. Do you remember when we were kids – I mean when we were really little – the Green Movement was really strong? All that stuff about recycling everything, and wasting nothing?”

  I nodded, so he continued.

  “About two years ago, a new movement called TNI or The Nature Initiative became really popular. They were concerned about the way food was produced around the world. People were campaigning against genetically-modified vegetables and fruits. They were protesting against the way animals were injected with antibiotics in commercial farms. They warned that one day, all this human meddling with nature would bring unintended consequences. Do you remember any of this?”

  I nodded again. It all sounded kind of familiar.

  “Do you recall protests that were held at feedlots around the world, where they showed us places where animals were crammed together and bred in filthy conditions and stuffed with food?” Kyl carried on. “They said we were being sold meat from animals that were sick or dying. And that sooner or later, humans would be affected in terrible ways?”

  I had only vague memories.

  “And do you remember cloning?” Kyl said. “Many farmers had begun to breed cows, lamb, poultry and other animals through cloning. But the problem with the new animal variants was, they could not reproduce. Try as they might, scientists and farmers could not make cloned females reproduce. So they tried inter-breeding cloned animals with normal animals.

  “But that made things worse because now, the normal healthy animals could not reproduce either! So that’s what you get for messing with nature, said the TNI. They warned of terrible consequences again, that all animals and maybe humans too were going to become sterile.”

  “Don’t forget the thing about genetically-modified vegetables and fruit,” Jae said, continuing for Kyl. Scientists had by now perfected such oddities as giant potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables weighing as much as 10kg each. There were also rot-resistant berries, leafy vegetables that stayed crisp for months and even new varieties of fruit created in a lab like the skinless orange and the blue apple.

  “Do you remember the Duya?” It was a cross between the durian and the papaya; a durian without the prickly shell. Singaporeans loved it, he said. But small pockets of people started developing allergies to these new types of food, and of course, TNI warned of yet another doomsday scenario – we would die from eating these “fake” foods.

  To Kyl, I said, “To be honest, I never really paid much attention to what they said.” “Neither did most of us,”

  Jae agreed, “until their warnings started to come true.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Suddenly, Dyanne spoke up, “Don’t you understand? It all really did come true. Look around you. Everything’s dead. Everything!”

  The kids around her patted her sympathetically. They all looked glum now. Some kids were crying silently.

  “Tell me how it happened,” I urged Jae to continue.

  “It started with the animals in the farms, labs and feedlots. They started dying off really quickly. No one had time to react. The same thing happened in every country. Almost overnight, there was no meat left. The organic farmers, those that stuck to farming naturally, were the only ones with live animals. There was a rush to save those animals, but it was too late. Those animals died too.”

  “When was this?” I interrupted.

  “About five months ago,” Kyl said softly, his voice tinged with sadness.

  “I have no memory of all this,” I said pathetically.

  “Lucky you,” Shulin said, rather meanly, I thought. But she had tears in her eyes, so I bit back the retort that threatened to escape my lips.

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  Jae continued the horrible story. “It started happening to the plants and vegetation too. Everything was dying. TNI had been proven right. Governments all over the world were scrambling to find answers. Some were denying anything was amiss. Until the babies started dying. Old people too. Do you notice that there are no young kids here?”

  I looked around, horrified. Death sounded like such a foreign idea to me. It felt so unreal. How could this have happened? I wanted Jae to stop right then. I didn’t want to know anymore. But he went on anyway.

  “We don’t know what it was. Was it a virus that killed them? Or was it from all the bad food? No one told us. To cut a long story short, many people have died. Those that are left have no more food to eat. There is no more food left on earth. No more live food, at least, which explains this,” he said, holding up an empty sardine tin.

  “This is what you mean when you said the adults have abandoned us? They’ve all died?” I said, a lump rising in my throat. Even though I couldn’t remember my parents, I felt a sense of loss.

  This time, it was Kyl who cut in. “No, they are alive. Well, not many, but the ones that survived decided to save themselves and not us,” he said grimly.

  “My mom would never abandon me!” I said. I believed it too. I felt it in my heart. Even though I couldn’t remember her face, I remembered being loved and treasured by my mother.

  To my outburst, Jae only grunted cynically. “Some adults didn’t agree, but they didn’t have a choice. If they disagreed, they would simply have been left on the outside, like us.”

  “Outside what?” I asked, not really wanting to know. I just wanted the whole thing to go away, like a bad dream.

  “Outside Camp Zero,” Jae said.

  CHAPTER 9

  I woke up the next day and found myself on the floor, packed in tight with a whole roomful of sleeping girls. For one minute, I was completely disorientated and confused. Where was I?

  Then I remembered.

  Unfortunately, I only remembered what had happened the day before. I still had no memory of what got me here. I sighed. I felt exhausted. I felt as if there was a big weight sitting on my shoulders, one I could not shake off.

  I looked around the room again. Apart from me, there were seven girls, all lined up side by side. The room was quite big and there were two small beds pushed against the wall. Dyanne was sleeping on one of the beds and another girl, I think it was Shulin, was
sleeping on the other. The rest of us were sleeping on mattresses, blankets, cushions and pillows.

  I thought about what had happened the day before. Jae and the other kids had started telling me about Camp Zero, and what they thought went on in there. But it was so unreal and horrible that I couldn’t take it anymore and ran upstairs to explore the house instead.

  Although I had been too distracted to really pay attention, I did take in the fact that there were four bedrooms upstairs – two on each side of an open landing that looked like it had once been a children’s toy area. Colourful children’s cabinets lined one wall and broken, dirty toys were strewn everywhere.

  The toilets were all marble – marble bathtubs, marble basins and marble floors. You could tell that the previous owners had abandoned their home in a hurry. There were still shampoo bottles and toothbrushes lying around. The kids had explained that there were homes like this all over Singapore, homes that were still usable. Over the last two months or so, they had been wandering all over, moving from house to house, surviving on whatever food that had been left behind.

  This current house was a terrace house, flanked on both sides by other houses. They had chosen it completely by chance. Kyl had liked the fact that it was surrounded by a high wall. To their amazement, the house had produced a rare treasure – an entire pantry filled with food.

  The owners must have planned to weather the disaster at home, judging from all the food they had stored. There were cartons of instant noodles, sacks of rice, shelves and shelves of canned food and huge bottles of water. There was also a hydro-powered radio receiver, several torches and spare batteries as well as a huge cache of candles.

  “Why didn’t you just stay in one place?” I had asked.

  “If you haven’t noticed, the toilets aren’t working,” Dyanne said, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh,” I replied lamely.

  The kids moved to a new house every time the toilets started getting seriously backed up, or the mess became too much, whichever came first. They were kids, and kids with no grown-ups around meant that no one did any cleaning. Garbage was simply thrown out of windows or shoved into corners. The only things each kid had with them at all times were a pillow, a blanket, a set of cutlery and one set of clothes. They seemed pretty organised, I thought.

  The shoes – it was finally explained to me – were always kept safe and dry on a high shelf because shoes were hard to find. While clothes could be found in any house, shoes in the right size were much harder to come by. So they had to be preserved as much as possible and the kids went about barefoot whenever they could.

  It was still dark, and I had no idea what time it was. Everyone was still sleeping soundly, so I decided I might as well go back to sleep. I lay my head down on a musty but comfortable pillow and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t come.

  Instead, I found myself thinking about Camp Zero. Even though I didn’t believe what the kids said at first, it was starting to make sense, in an awful sort of way.

  CHAPTER 10

  Camp Zero, they had explained, was located at Changi. The leaders of the country had planned to brave the looming disaster by building hundreds of emergency shelters at Camp Zero.

  Tons of supplies were trucked into the area – bedding, medicine, medical equipment, food, water, diesel-powered electric generators, solar-powered generators. The idea was to move everyone into that area when things got really bad.

  The police and military were the first to be moved into Camp Zero, because things were expected to be chaotic and someone needed to maintain order. But as the speed of the disaster took the whole world by surprise, it became clear that they simply didn’t have time to build enough shelters.

  Food was also a major worry. Even though the government had stockpiled huge amounts of rice and other basic food supplies, they estimated that they had only enough to feed two million people for six months. Or one million people for a year. Or half a million people for two years… You get the idea.

  For a while, people assumed that the government would simply build shelters faster and buy more food. What they didn’t realise was that worldwide, there wasn’t any more food to be bought – at any price. When selected families started getting letters to move into Camp Zero, people started getting suspicious. Rumours started going around that only a few “chosen” families and individuals would be invited to live at Camp Zero, while the rest would be left to fend for themselves on the outside.

  Fear set in. People started looting supermarkets and malls, grabbing everything and anything they could find – water, clothes, food. It was a real mess that ended in riots. Thousands of people were killed. But they were the lucky ones, because they didn’t live to suffer the hunger and desperation that was to follow. Hordes of people started showing up at the doors of Camp Zero, demanding to be let in, only to be turned away by armed soldiers.

  Within the first month, those on the outside slowly died off. Some of the stronger ones formed fierce roving gangs, gangs that would kill other gangs for food. Some were killed simply for the clothes or shoes they were wearing. The world was no longer a civilised place. It was a matter of survival.

  Military trucks still patrolled the roads every day, but if they came across any skirmishes, they didn’t intervene. The only thing the soldiers did was to pick up the bodies. This was still Singapore, after all, Jae had said with a cynical laugh. The leaders couldn’t bear to leave the bodies to rot where they were.

  I felt sad thinking about it. And weary. I started to drift back to sleep when something jarred me awake.

  From outside, I heard voices. They sounded angry. Curious, I crept out silently. The voices were coming from downstairs. I heard three separate voices. I slid myself into a crouch and looked down into the living room from the top of the stairs, careful not to be seen.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was Kyl, Jae and Brion. They were sitting on the floor facing each other. Kyl was shouting.

  “I hate you so much I hope you fall onto a fork.”

  “Well, I hate you so much I hope you fall into a fan and I get to turn it on!” Jae shouted back.

  “I hope a fridge falls on your head while you sleep,” Brion yelled.

  What? I shook my head, just in case I was dreaming. I was not.

  “I hope you choke on a candy cane and it gets stuck in your throat,” Kyl retorted. “Horizontally.”

  “I hope someone drops a pot of boiling hot pee on your head!” Jae said.

  “I hope that when the both of you parachute out of a plane, you land in a bowl of needles,” Brion snapped back.

  They glared at each other, fuming. Their faces were tight with anger.

  Brion broke the silence. “Why would anyone boil a pot of pee?”

  “So that it can be poured over you, lamebrain,” Jae said. “What about a bowl of needles? That makes even less sense. Where would you find a bowl that big?”

  “I hope your ass gets bitten off by a wolf,” Brion said, apparently moving the bizarre argument along.

  “Your ass is so gross, no wolf would want to bite it,” was Jae’s reply.

  “You two are so ugly, when you walk down the street, babies faint,” Kyl interjected.

  “You are so ugly, when your mother gave birth to you, the doctor vomited,” Brion said.

  “You’re so ugly, when you go to watch a comedy, people cry,” Jae shouted.

  Kyl’s mouth twitched. His shoulders shook. He burst out laughing. What on earth?

  I felt a tug at my elbow. I jumped in fright, then relaxed when I saw that it was only Eryn.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked.

  “Winning?”

  “Yup. The game. Face-Off. They made it up. They do this all the time. They sit and hurl insults at each other to relieve stress,” Eryn explained.

  “How does insulting each other relieve stress?” I asked.

  “They are the oldest here, and they feel responsible for all of us. It’s a big burden and they used to get into fig
hts with each other over what to do. That’s how Jae got that big wound on his arm. It was Kyl. It was then that they decided that fighting was not very useful. We don’t have medicine, so we can’t afford to hurt each other. So they started Face-Off,” she said.

  It made sense, sort of. I asked Eryn, “So how does a person win this game?”

  “The one who laughs first loses. The one who can keep a straight face the longest, wins.”

  I peered through the railing. Kyl was totally losing it. He was laughing quite hysterically. Brion and Jae sat stone-faced, staring at each other.

  “You are so stupid, the dust ball on the floor is smarter than you,” Brion said.

  “You are so stupid, your brain grew an arm so it could slap itself,” Jae replied.

  Eryn giggled softly. “Another thing,” she said, “no cussing allowed. That’s a rule. Because of the little kids.”

  “Okaaay,” I said.

  “They are getting better at this. I’ve caught almost all their shows,” she said, as if she was watching television. I guess there wasn’t much to do in terms of entertainment, so this would have to do.

  “I hope your brain shrivels up like a raisin and gets eaten by a donkey,” Brion said.

  “I hope your wee-wee shrivels up and falls off,” Jae said.

  “Wee-wee?” Eryn repeated. She clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud.

  “Shh!” I warned, but I too was stifling my laughter.

  By now, Kyl was rolling on the floor clutching his stomach. He laughed so hard he snorted.

  “I bet you don’t even have one,” Brion continued.

  “I bet you don’t have an asshole. Because you’re so full of shit,” Jae shot back.

  “Hey! No cussing!” Brion said.

  “Asshole is not cussing. It is a noun. So is shit,” Jae said, crossing his arms.

  Eryn and I clutched each other, laughing silently.

  Brion made a weird snort. He started to smile, but stopped himself. Jae’s lips twitched. He was trying hard not to smile too. Kyl’s laughter was too contagious. They both looked at him, then at each other. Soon, they exploded into laughter.