Forager (Forager - A Dystopian Trilogy)

by Peter R Stone

  Bullets whizzed past and ricocheted off the Bushmaster in all directions as a new Militia squad rushed out of the TTC's doors, but they were mercilessly gunned down by the Custodian on top of the Bushmaster. The remaining Militia in the courtyard kept firing at the Bushmaster, but so far without any effect.

  I watched King hurry over to the fake refrigeration-maturation unit, unlock it and flip the lid open. He scooped out arm loads of small plastic and metal containers that contained the dead chick embryos, and removed the metal shelf beneath them. Still holding to my aching chest, I clambered to my feet to see what he was doing, and was alarmed to see he was attempting to change the timer on the detonator. It was set on three hours, but he was no doubt trying to make it blow sooner. No wonder he wanted to drop off, pick up, and leave straight away.

  Stepping behind the lieutenant, I pulled a small, sharp knife I had hidden in my boot and tried to stab him in the back of the neck. Unfortunately, he sensed my movement and spun towards me so the knife plunged into his right shoulder instead.

  Still, it was enough to distract him from the bomb. He flinched off the next blow I aimed at his bull-like neck and booted me in the stomach, driving me back a few steps. I made to rush back at him but he grabbed his pistol with his left hand from where he had put it on the bomb casing and aimed it at my head.

  That would have been the end of me except for Michal, who suddenly appeared behind King and put him in a crushing neck hold, which spoiled his aim as he fired. The bullet went wide but still glanced off the right side of my forehead.

  Everything went black.

  I can't have been out for more than a few seconds, for I when I came to, I was laying on my side, facing King and Michal, who were still struggling back and forth. In what felt like a dream, I watched King's face go red and the veins on his neck bulge - he had a couple of seconds before Michal's neck hold rendered him unconscious. But to my horror, King shoved the pistol behind him, pressed it against Michal's stomach, and fired three shots.

  A strange expression crossed Michal's face as he slid slowly to his knees and slumped to the ground, his life fading away before my very eyes.

  "No!" I shrieked as I reached a hand towards him. Michal glanced at me and then fell still.

  I rolled over to my knees, and with blood pouring down the side of my face and into my eye, crawled over to Michal while King went back to the bomb. I checked Michal's pulse, but there was none. He was gone, and a part of my heart withered and died with his passing. I rested my hands and forehead on his shoulder and lamented the loss of a friend who had always been there for me, who had helped me in my moments of inexplicable melancholy, and whom I had comforted when his family life sapped him of the will to live. No longer would he join us when we got together on the roof to goof around, no longer would he be the brawn behind our foraging efforts, and no longer could his younger brother and sister look up to him, as he set them a role model worth following.

  I couldn't believe this had happened. Today was supposed to be a simple delivery run, with the only potential danger being from the person in Hamamachi who had shot me two years ago. We weren't supposed to be going up against our own Custodians!

  Sitting back on my haunches, I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and pressed it against the bullet graze on my forehead in an attempt to staunch the blood flow. As I did, Leigh popped up from behind the G-Wagon's trailer, an arrow fitted to his bow. But before he could shoot at King, the gunner on the Bushmaster sent a hail of bullets at him. The arrow went wide and Leigh went down with blood spraying from his chest.

  "No!" I screamed - not Leigh too!

  Hearing my shout, the Custodian on top of the Bushmaster swivelled the machine gun around and lined me up in his crosshairs, but before he could shoot, he clutched at his throat and then gurgling and choking, collapsed over his weapon with an arrow through his neck. By facing me he had exposed his back to my lads on the far side of the Bushmaster, and one of them had made the most of the opportunity.

  The blood flow from my head wound slowed down, so I rose and staggered over to King and tried to stop him changing the detonator's timer. But I was so feeble that he fended me off with his right arm, even though weakened by the knife wound.

  And then, as though in slow motion, I watched him complete changing the timer to five minutes and activate it. That done, King turned to me and sent me sprawling to the ground with a strong push.

  He grabbed his pistol with his left hand and aimed it at me. "You've no idea how much pleasure I'm going to get from killing you personally, Jones," he snarled.

  "Nooooo!" Nanako shouted in rage, for she had just stood from behind the forklift truck and saw him aiming his pistol at me.

  Distracted by her shout, King hesitated for only a moment, but it was a moment too long.

  Armed with a Militia assault-rifle she must have found on the ground, Nanako charged the lieutenant and unloaded the gun's entire clip into him, jerking him about like a puppet on strings.

  As King collapsed, bleeding from a dozen places, Nanako dropped the gun, ran to my side and knelt down beside me, her eyes wide with horror as she took in the sight of my bloody head. "Oh no, Ethan, please, no, not again!"

  I reached out and grabbed her hands. "I'm gonna be okay, Nanako, it looks worse than it is."

  "But you've been shot in the head again," she panicked.

  "It's not like last time, it's only a graze," I assured her, "But quickly, help me to my feet, we've got to deactivate the bomb or its lights out for us all in five minutes."

  As my wife helped me to my feet, King grabbed my foot weakly. "I win, Jones," he whispered, smiling feebly.

  "Not yet," I replied as I kicked his hand away and staggered towards the bomb. And in dramatic contrast to the deafening clatter of the machine guns and ricocheting bullets, the dock had fallen deathly quiet. Another Custodian had an arrow through his throat, and the last one had been taken down by Militia gunfire.

  "David! Grab your toolkit and get here pronto!" I shouted as loudly as I could manage as Nanako helped me to the bomb.

  "But I'm with Leigh, he's been hit," he shouted back.

  "I'm sorry, but I need you here," I replied.

  David left Leigh's side reluctantly and ran over to us carrying his toolkit, which he had fetched from the G-Wagon.

  "What just happened, Jones? Why did the Custodians go berserk?" he demanded.

  I pointed to the fake refrigeration-maturation unit and said softly, "David, tell me you know how to deactivate a hydrogen bomb."

  David's eyes widened further than I thought humanly possible. "The Custodians brought a...?"

  I clapped my hand over his mouth before he finished blurting out his question. The last thing we needed was mass hysteria. "David, we've got less than five minutes - how do we disarm it?"

  "We can remove the IHE from the physics package or..."

  "The what from the what?"

  "Sorry, we can remove the insensitive high explosives from the warhead, or we can remove the exploding bridge-wire detonator from the IHE, sorry, the insensitive high explosives," he said, his voice shaking.

  "I have no idea what you just said, but can you just do it already?"

  David stuck his head in the box and looked inside, "Okay, okay, this is doable. They've put just the warhead and detonator in here. It shouldn't be too hard to get to the IHE if we work quickly." He pulled his head out of the box and reached quickly for his bag.

  "Don’t move!" commanded a very, very agitated Japanese Militia captain. "Drop your weapons, put your hands on your heads, and lie face down on the ground, or we will shoot!"

  Looking up I saw that we were surrounded by several very irate squads of Japanese Militia, some which had just arrived.

  "We've got less than four minutes to deactivate this bomb or we all die," I shouted back in Japanese.

  "Do as I say or we shoot!" he shouted back. Several of them raised their guns, their fingers already beginning to depress the triggers.


  "Stop, Captain! These men are on our side!" Nanako tried to explain, but a squad of Militia aimed their weapons at her as well.

  I watched the detonator's timer counting down the seconds with an almost morbid fascination, barely aware of the Militia captain shouting at me to lie down.

  It was over. For all of us. King had won.

  Chapter Thirty

  "Stand down!" Councillor Okada bellowed to the Militia as he rushed over to us from where he had been hiding. All the Militia lowered their weapons slightly, some bowing deferentially to Councillor Okada as he took charge.

  "What happened - why did the Custodians attack us? What is in that box?" the councillor demanded when he joined us.

  "The Custodians brought a bomb," and I whispered the next part so that only he could hear me, "a nuclear bomb, and it's set to go off in less than four minutes. You must let David and me disarm it right now."

  "A what?" Councillor Okada asked in sheer disbelief. And then, in seeing that our serious expressions didn't change, he added, "No, absolutely not. I will get in the bomb disposal unit. And we must evacuate the town immediately!"

  "There's no time to wait for your team, nor any point in evacuating, for no one could get far enough away from the blast radius," David replied.

  I grabbed Councillor Okada's arm with a bloody hand. "You cannot get a better bomb disposal team than David and I, Councillor. Trust, me, we can disarm this."

  Councillor Okada stared at me for what felt like eternity but in reality was only a couple of seconds, and then reluctantly nodded his consent. All the same, as David and I rushed to the bomb, he instructed the Militia captain to call in the bomb disposal unit. The rest of the Militia and TTC personnel moved quickly back from us.

  "Right, I reckon removing the exploding-bridge-wire detonator is the best bet," said David, "but there's a lid screwed over the top that we have to take off first. We'll need to get the bomb out of the box so that I can see where the screws are - it's too dark in there for me to see them."

  There wasn't time for that, so I leaned on the unit's casing, made a few ultrasonic shouts, and then pulled David to me. "Don't argue, just listen. Put your fingers down here, and here. There are two screws there, and two on the other side. Remove them and the lid will come off."

  "Three minutes," Nanako announced quietly with a calm I didn't feel.

  David nodded and set to work and quickly removed the four screws with a combination of touch and his electric screwdriver. That done, we lifted off the aluminium lid, exposing the exploding-bridge-wire detonator.

  "Two minutes," came Nanako's countdown to doom.

  Armed with the tools he needed, David lay half inside the fake refrigeration-maturation unit and attacked the exploding-bridge-wire detonator wires one by one. Using echolocation I watched him work and marvelled how his fingers could work so deftly considering what was at stake if he failed.

  Finally, he pushed himself off the bomb and slid to the ground, breathing heavily. "It's done."

  "The clock's still counting down," Nanako pointed out, panicking. Councillor Okada had noticed too, his face white with fear.

  "Don't worry, the wires are no longer connected to the explosives or the timer, so it's counting down to a non-event," David assured us.

  Nevertheless, we all held our breaths and watched the counter tick down to zero, and although we flinched, nothing happened.

  "Now do you believe me?" David asked.

  I wanted to give David a crushing hug, but didn't have the strength plus the throbbing pain from my head and chest were taking their toll, so I just sat on the ground beside him and leaned against the trailer.

  The councillor congratulated us for disarming the bomb, as did several of the Militia. None of them, however, knew what sort of bomb we had just disarmed.

  "David, where on earth did you learn how to deactivate a thermonuclear bomb?" I asked, completely in awe of his abilities.

  David was staring at me as though it was the first time we had met. "From books and manuals I found in the ruins and smuggled home," he replied. "But Jones, you wanna tell me how you can see through metal?"

  Nanako placed a finger against David's lips. "Such questions are best not answered, David."

  He nodded and said no more.

  The threat of the bomb gone, reality came crashing back to me. "Michal, Leigh!"

  "I'll check on Leigh," Nanako said, and she darted away with David at her side.

  I staggered over to Michal's prone form and checked for a pulse again, even though I knew it was a futile exercise. He was gone.

  Nanako ran back and knelt beside me. "Leigh's pretty bad, but I think he's going to make it. Shorty and two Militia are looking after him."

  I nodded, despair that we had lost Leigh turning into a sliver of hope. I don't know what I would have done if I had lost both of them.

  We heard the approach of screeching sirens and several ambulances drove into the loading dock's yard. Paramedics swarmed out and rushed to treat the many wounded. I was struck by the thought that Hamamachi's peaceful trading centre had been turned into a battlefield. I would never forgive Newhome’s ruling council for this, not ever.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Although Councillor Okada had stopped the militia from shooting us while trying to disarm the bomb, once Militia Command found out what had happened - that there was a nuclear bomb involved - we foragers were whisked away to be questioned, rather 'interrogated,' in Militia Headquarters' Spartan, bleak interrogation rooms.

  Paramedics had treated my wound at the Town Trade Centre; they washed it, covered it with a sterile gauze pad and wrapped my head in bandages. After that they gave me pain killers and declared me fit for questioning. The bullet had apparently glanced off my skull, causing a rather painful flesh wound, a thumping headache, and a lot of blood, but that was all. And my chest was in so much pain from King hitting the crossbow-bolt wound with his gun that it hurt to breathe.

  The room I had been taken to was small, having two chairs, a flimsy wooden table between them, and a large one-way observation window to my right. My interrogator was a stocky, middle-aged Militia major. To lend him some muscle should I become violent, an extremely well built private stood behind my chair.

  The major thumped his fists on the flimsy wooden table that separated us. "Let's go back to the beginning – why were you trying to destroy Hamamachi, Ethan Jones?"

  "As I’ve told you many times, Major, I didn't know about the bomb."

  "That answer doesn't work for me. You see, I suggest it was you and your foragers who loaded it onto the trailer, knowing full well what it was and its intended purpose."

  I looked into his scowling, darkly tanned face, and wished he would drop these pointless questions and let me lie down somewhere - even on the floor in here. "The Custodians loaded the trailer, Major. The G-Wagon and trailer are Custodian vehicles; we had nothing to do with them apart from driving them here."

  "So you say. Okay, next question. Let us reconsider your claim that you didn't know about the bomb, yet expect us to believe you suddenly realised it was in the refrigeration-maturation unit because it seemed too heavy to you?"

  "It's the truth – I’m a forager and therefore have a pretty good head for judging how much things weigh. That refrigeration-maturation unit clearly weighed over two-hundred kilos."

  "Very well, let’s assume for a moment that you did realise the unit was heavier than it should have been. However, that could not have tipped you off that there was a thermonuclear device in it. So this in itself is proof that you knew the bomb was in the unit, and that you had a sudden change of heart when the enormity of what you Newhomers were about to do hit you."

  "If I'd known the bomb was there before hand, Major, I would have done everything I could have done to stop the Custodians bringing it here. The proof of that is that my foraging team and wife took down three of the Custodians, and that David and I disarmed the bomb," I said wearily. The mention of my fo
raging team instantly brought back the painful memories of Michal’s loss and Leigh's fearful injuries. I wanted to go somewhere quiet and mourn in peace, not sit here being interrogated for something I didn’t do.

  "I find it interesting that you mentioned you disarmed the bomb, for my next point was the matter of you and David knowing exactly how to do so. I put it to you, Ethan Jones, that you knew how to disarm it because you were Lieutenant King's backup plan in case something went wrong - except your conscience got in the way, didn't it?" the major accused.

  "To be honest, we didn't actually disarm it; we had to dismantle the detonator to stop it going off. If I had been in cahoots with King I would have known the activation/deactivation codes, don't you think?" I shot back at him.

  "You honestly expect me to believe a couple of middle-school drop-outs knew how to dismantle a thermonuclear device?"

  The throbbing pain in my head was becoming steadily worse. "Firstly, David and I deliberately dropped out of school because we didn't want our futures mapped out for us by pompous North End officials. Secondly, I have a gift for finding out how things are put together, and David is a genius when it comes to pulling them apart."

  "You've been in Hamamachi before, haven't you, Ethan?" the major said, suddenly changing tack.

  "Yes."

  "And you joined the Militia and then the Rangers, correct?"

  "Yeah, so?" I asked.

  "And during your last mission, your fellow Rangers were all mysteriously killed and you were badly injured. From that you apparently developed epilepsy and amnesia, and were consequently taken back to Newhome by your wife to be treated in their hospital," he continued.

  "What are you trying to say?" I demanded irritably.

  "I put it to you, Ethan Jones, that you are a Custodian spy and were sent here to infiltrate our military, learn everything you could, and then feigned the epilepsy and amnesia so you could be taken back to Newhome without suspicion. And today you came back, bringing with you a weapon with which to destroy us."