The Territory, Escape Read online

  Then Mum properly broke down. ‘They told me Noa, the Ministry officials who came here and gave me THIS,’ her hands gave a violent tremor. ‘They told me they were informing me because I hadn’t helped her. Because I hadn’t helped my own SISTER.’

  I rushed over to comfort her. ‘You can’t feel guilty, Mum. You did it for us. For me. To keep us all safe. You had no choice.’

  ‘No Noa, you don’t understand [gut wrenching sob]. They knew.’

  I looked blank. I didn’t get it. ‘But how … how could they know?’

  Deep breath.

  ‘Aunty Vicki told them.’

  I sat/collapsed down.

  ‘What…?’ tears were streaming down my face before I’d even registered it in my brain. They’d caught them. We hadn’t helped them and now they’d been caught.

  No answer.

  ‘So they’re Fish now. Oh God, Oh God.’ I couldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘Ella is.’ Three deep breaths. ‘Aunty Vicki didn’t survivequestioning. The evil, evil BASTARDS.’ Mum shouted this last bit and my eyes fled to the door. Please, please don’t let anyone be listening. I think Mum’s outburst even shocked her, so she pulled herself together a bit and lowered her voice. ‘They’re letting me get any belongings I want from her house, because I’ve proved myself to be a “loyal citizen”. And look…’ Mum uncurled a shaking fist ‘…they’ve even given me a medal.’

  And there it sat in the palm of her hand. A flat silver disc with the symbol of the Territory embossed in it. Apparently gold was reserved for families that went one step further and actually called in to inform on their fleeing relatives.

  Mum and I got to Aunty Vicki’s house just before 9am. We’d got up when it was still dark and driven through the dawn. There was something therapeutic about seeing the world come alive.

  I know it was just in my head but the house seemed different, even from a distance – emptier and smaller too.

  Mum pushed open the door – Auntie Vicki never locked it, I don’t even know if she had a key – and we entered. I was practically glued to Mum’s side the whole time as I knew she couldn’t face doing this alone.

  Everything was as they’d left it – from the pans upside down on the draining rack to the open book propped up on the table. The house even still smelt of them. Not like a stench or anything, but in the way that other people’s houses always smell a certain way and only yours smells normal. Apart from a thin layer of dust, you’d imagine Aunty Vicki and Ella were just out back, about to come in and get on with their lives. I guess that’s what they wanted everyone to think. In case anyone came snooping round. So no one would report them gone immediately.

  Mum had brought a box and started putting stuff in – the photo from the mantelpiece of them as girls, a photo album of Ella growing up, any left-over dried food from the cupboard. Mum looked guiltily at me when she was packing up the food, but with rations and everything it was the right thing to do – anyone would have done it, right? It’d be dense not to.

  When the boxes were full, Mum spent hours just drifting. Taking remaining clothes out of drawers and holding them, looking at the failing vegetables in the garden that Aunty Vicki could never get to grow right because of the salt. Her mouth would move every now and then but she wouldn’t be speaking to me. She was talking to herself – or maybe to Aunty Vicki. In any event, she was away somewhere intensely private in her head and it seemed rude to ask anything about it.

  To give her space, I went to sit in Ella’s room and, without really thinking about it, started going through the same sort of ritual. Ella’s favourite skirt was draped over the back of the chair – black, short and puffball. I guess not that suitable for trekking cross-country. Fighting back the tears, I sat at her desk, running my hand over the rough wood. The desk was empty apart from a clear pencil case with pen, pencil, protractor, compass, rubber – all ready for the exams she never sat.

  We were spending the night there, Mum and me, and as the light started to fade I fetched our sleeping bags in from the car. It didn’t seem right to sleep in their beds. They seemed sacred somehow – like a memorial. Or a tomb.

  Mum found a bottle of whiskey amongst Aunty Vicki’s food supplies and solemnly poured us each an inch. We clinked glasses. ‘To Vicki – may she rest in peace. To Ella – God be with her.’ Mum doesn’t believe in God. Not unless everything is so, so awful that nothing she does believe in can help. Mum downed her glass in one and quickly poured herself another while I nearly choked on my first and only sip. Whiskey’s rank.

  Mum fell asleep quite quickly, but it clearly wasn’t peaceful. She’d twist and her face would contort and once this short scream and the word ‘Sorry’ just burst out.

  I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t have the help of the whiskey, I guess. I don’t think my mind could have switched off anyway. All I kept thinking about was Jack. How I’d nearly forgotten my promise to him already. How instead I’d wanted to make a fake lie of a life in the Territory – a place that sent kids to die and tortured people who tried to run.

  Selfish. Selfish. Selfish.

  No more.

  I needed to make sure I never forgot again. Was never weak again. I crept into Ella’s room, not wanting to wake Mum, although her level of snoring meant that was pretty unlikely anyway. Sitting at Ella’s desk I reached into her pencil case and removed the compass. I pulled up my left sleeve and, trying not to shake, pushed the point in until I saw the blood flow. Swallowing my screams and tears, I kept going, only stopping when my crude carving had finished. The pain was so much that I kept nearly fainting or puking or both, but I tried to fight it back and focus. Whiskey. Not to numb the pain or anything, but to sterilise the cut. The sting from the whiskey was almost worse that the actual cutting had been. I let out one massive scream and I heard Mum stir but then fall back asleep.

  The adrenaline pulsing through me meant I couldn’t just sit there. I needed to do something – there and then. Take the first step to rescuing my best friend. Pulling on my sweater, I headed into the warm night air. The air’s never not warm now. I thought this’d be a good opportunity to scout the Fence. Look for a weak point to break out. Raf and I had debated – in the early days, before our commitment waned – how best to get into the Wetlands. Obviously, I’m sure if we approached some Ministry bod and said we were volunteering to be resettled to free up land for others, they’d have sent us, gladly. But that wasn’t the aim. We needed to get in, find Jack, and get BACK. With no one being any the wiser. Without destroying our parents’ lives and putting them on the list of most suspicious people ever. What happened next, how we’d bring the system down we hadn’t figured out yet. But it had to be easier to have only one of us in hiding than all three. So we had to breach the Fence, the question was where?

  ‘By Ella’s house,’ had been my suggestion. Very few people live round here and the land is so infertile that I thought security would be lax at best. That’s as far as our thoughts had gone. We’d just assumed that breaking out would be pretty do-able.

  But I guess if people could break out then Fish could break in.

  It was about a mile’s walk from Ella’s back garden. I knew the general direction as Aunty Vicki had pointed it out before – down a grooved track and through gorse that tore at my trousers and drew more blood. I thought I’d struggle to see, but I’d forgotten that the Fence is lit. Always. And so I followed the eerie glow until I was just two roads’ widths away and at the edge of the floodlit zone. This was the closest I’d ever been. My eyes took it in: tough interlocking wire the height of a two-storey building, with glaring floodlights and brick towers raised at regular intervals along its length.

  The Fence.

  I swallowed, trying not to be defeated by it. By its sheer size. By its embodiment of cruelty. There must be a way over. I scanned left and right, up and down. Could I scale it? It was doubtful. And then on top of the Fence itself rose the towering mosquito grids. Like some denser I’d totally forgotten about these. B
efore I could fall into a deeper despair, my thoughts were interrupted by a quiet, regular beating sound. Feet on dry mud. People, running.

  They came into the lit zone on the other side of the Fence and I could make out their faces. A woman, so thin she was little more than an animated skeleton, hands clasping her young son, was sprinting towards the wire. She was fast, running for her life, running for her son’s life. Letting go of her son, she took a flying leap, one hand grasping the wire, ready to climb, the other extending downwards to scoop up her waiting child. That’s when the electricity first entered her body. There was a short, inhuman scream as her limbs jerked wildly on the wires like an epileptic puppet, followed by stillness and the sickly sweet smell of cooking meat. I gagged. To make it even worse, the little boy wouldn’t leave. He just stood there, looking at his mother’s body and wailing.

  It didn’t last long.

  As if to make some kind of sick point, a machine gun, it must have been from the tower, started firing, ripping through the air, making the woman’s body dance again. ‘She’s dead. She’s already dead,’ I started shouting. I couldn’t stop shouting. ‘Stop it, she’s already dead.’

  And now her boy was too.

  Mum went mental when she saw my arm.

  I’d stumbled back from the Fence and was halfway through a shower before she was up. I emerged, eyes swollen from crying and my left arm a bloody mess, to see her face collapse in horror.

  She started going off on one about the horrific infections she’d seen what she calls ‘troubled girls’ get who’d harmed themselves like this. Did I know how many bacteria were just about everywhere? Had I seen someone with septicaemia? Seen someone who had to have their arm amputated? How she thought I was smarter than this. Then I shouted back that I couldn’t take it, not now and she finally shut up. I told her about the Fence and she hugged me around my neck. Staple like.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said weakly. ‘It was a stupid thing to do. I sterilised it though.’

  Mum clearly didn’t trust that me and the whiskey had done a good-enough job and went to get Aunty Vicki’s first-aid kit from the bathroom. She swabbed and swabbed the cut with iodine, balanced cotton wool pads on it and then wrapped it with a gauze bandage.

  ‘It’s a “J” isn’t it?’ Mum said quietly.

  I nodded.

  And then she hugged me again, even tighter than before.

  Mum dropped me at Raf’s straight from Aunty Vicki’s. I had to see him. Like a junkie fix. I snuggled into his arms and then winced as my arm was crushed by his body weight. His eyes narrowed into slits of concern, and then he shifted his weight again and I cried out.

  ‘Noa, let me see,’ he commanded.

  I rolled up my sleeve and he took a sharp breath when he saw the bloodied bandage. ‘What? How did this happen? Who did this to you?’ Raf’s eyes flashed and his body tensed as if he was preparing to protect me from some invisible danger.

  ‘It’s not like that … I did it to me.’

  I knew he had to know more, to see it all, so I peeled back the bandage to expose the now dried black blood of the J. His face was impossible to read and the light in his eyes had dimmed. Flat pools of green and blue. Shaded, cold.

  I wanted something from him. Pity, anger, jealousy – for him to punch a wall even – but he wasn’t Jack. He was Raf. And his weapon was control.

  I tried to put my arm round him, but his body remained tight. It was like hugging a statue.

  ‘So the rescue mission’s back on then.’ It was a statement rather than a question, his voice calm. Too calm.

  I nodded. ‘But you don’t have to come, Raf. If you’re having any second thoughts I get it. You don’t have to risk your life too. I know you guys weren’t like the best of friends.’

  ‘But he clearly means everything to you.’

  Long awkward pause.

  ‘Do you want me with you, Noa?’ Raf’s voice was gentle now and more vulnerable. The control was loosening.

  I nodded. ‘More than anything.’

  ‘Well then there’s no way I’m not coming. We’re climbing over the Fence together.’

  And then he forgot all about my arm and squeeze hugged me again until I shouted out and we ended up both rolling off the sofa in hysterics.

  But we were still no closer to solving our first big problem. The Fence. I told Raf about seeing the woman electrocuted.

  ‘So we can’t climb it – we dig under it.’

  I told Raf about the machine guns. How I’d figured they must be automated, fitted with some sort of motion detector, as there was no way they’d have enough guards to man each and every tower. If we so much as touched the Fence or moved the ground, they’d mow us down.

  ‘So how does anyone get in and out?’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘Well they do. They’ve taken Jack and the other kids who failed there.’

  ‘But that’s once a year and we’ve kind of missed that.’

  I tried to focus, to channel all my energies into super-concentration mode in order to spark some new ideas, but none came. Approaching something like despair we sat on the sofa and turned on the telly. It was lunchtime so Mum and Dad were at work. They say ideas can creep into your mind when you’re relaxed. That your subconscious is somehow busy working it out and then they pop out and reveal themselves like a weirdly welcome flasher.

  We were watching a rerun of Astronaut Tyrone, which just seemed rubbish rather than malcly funny as it does when me and Dad watch it together. Halfway through, the programme was interrupted by yet another bulletin. The Ministry’s favourite rat man was announcing the ‘successful’ start of prisoners being shipped to the Wetlands ‘removing the need for courts and prisons and thereby freeing more precious land for loyal citizens’.

  ‘What about the need for a fair trial?’ Raf half-snorted.

  But I wasn’t really listening. I was staring at the footage of the trucks leaving for the Wetlands with the dodgiest ever-looking criminals in them (where did they find these guys?) On the side of the truck was the image of a huge wheel with an ‘H’ stamped over it.

  ‘That’s it!’ I shouted, pointing at the screen.

  ‘What?’ said Raf. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Those trucks – they’re Hicks Transport trucks. Remember I told you that Jack’s stepdad owns some big trucking company? Well that’s his emblem – those are his trucks. That’s how we’ll get out.’

  In autumn you see these squirrels in People’s Park. Not many, but a few round the oldest oak and chestnut trees. They’re always busy burying acorns and conkers. They look around massively suspiciously, like they’re Opposition members about to attend a meeting or something, and then dig a hole and in goes another tasty morsel for the winter.

  Raf and I have turned into squirrels. We’ve got a master list of stuff we definitely need in order to survive in the Wetlands. So far there’s iodine, bandages, mosquito repellent and nets, a knife, water purification tablets, dried food, permanent markers, matches, gloves with those grippy bobbles on the fingers and palms for climbing, a compass and a torch.

  The medical stuff isn’t too much of an issue as Mum’s got loads in a cupboard in the bathroom. She gets extra supplies for free from the Laboratory so I don’t think she’d notice if some went. Nets and repellent we can get too as all households are given them in case the mosquito grids fail. The markers we’ve both got at home. I looked at Raf really weirdly when he first suggested it. I’d only ever used them to draw temporary tattoos on my arms with Daisy. I once did a dolphin that I had to turn into a massive tulip as I’d done its nose so out of proportion. But then he explained – to make marks to keep track of the days. So we didn’t lose count. So we made it back in time. It was a pretty good suggestion.

  Dried food takes longer. We’re trying to take little bits slowly over days – the five days we have left – so it’s not too obvious, but I still feel really guilty. Stealing from Mum and Dad. Taking food from them when everythi
ng’s so tightly rationed anyway. I try and justify it – say that that’s what they’d want me to do. But I know it’s not true. What they’d want is for me to be leaving for the Third City, to be leaving to study and not on a probable suicide mission that puts them in danger too.

  Raf said that we didn’t need that much, dried food that is, as we could catch our own food out there. I tried not to laugh. Raf’s not normally one of those overly manly guys so when he does go a bit caveman it’s pretty hilarious.

  ‘You don’t think I could, do you?’ He acted all mock hurt.

  I couldn’t answer him as I was still trying to swallow my laughter.

  ‘OK, come with me right now.’

  Raf dragged me to People’s Park to – wait for it – show me ‘how to catch a pigeon’. It was brilliant. He was the worst!! Creeping up on them like a malc cat and then pouncing at totally the wrong time. The pigeons wouldn’t even bother to fly away particularly fast. Like they were more embarrassed by him than scared of him. In the end Raf gave up chasing pigeons and started chasing me instead.

  We need lots of dried food.

  Raf provided the grippy gloves. His stepdad’s into climbing and Raf figured we might need them, I don’t know – to climb a tree quickly or scale a cliff or get over the Fence if we somehow manage to disable it or something. We don’t really know what we’re up against.

  I got a compass from Dad. He’s really into ancient technology, maybe it makes him feel closer to Uncle Max or something, and he seemed properly keen on the idea of me learning to navigate. I told him that Raf and I might need it to go hiking in the Woods some time. The idea that we might be planning to use it to get by in the Wetlands didn’t even cross his mind. He just trusts me. Oh, Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He even dug out a book on navigating by stars. Maybe he thought if Raf and I spent our evenings together orienteering we were less likely to be doing … other things. He also taught me the basics of Morse code. Which is pretty interesting but since no one else in the world knows it, probably not the most useful.