The Territory Truth Read online

  The Ministry.

  It had to be. No one else had helicopters.

  They’d found us.

  My stomach shrank to a tight knot and the breath caught in my throat. Trapped. I’d known this moment would come, the showdown inevitable. But I’d thought it’d be on the other side of the Fence. That we were safe from their reach here.

  We all instinctively dropped to the floor, bellies touching earth, and swivelled our necks in the direction of the noise. Yoga pose for Totally Screwed. The sound waves were an advance party – the helicopter itself was still only a black speck on the horizon. If you chose to, you could even have pretended it was a toy. That there was a kid out there somewhere with a remote control, playing at being a pilot.

  There was no time to pretend.

  Lee was first to spring into action.

  ‘Grab everything. Hurry. To the bushes.’

  No one minded the commands. Authority, in itself, was comforting. Someone was in charge. Someone would protect us. We scrambled up, filling and grabbing bags, untying mosquito nets, staying low, a cluster of crabs in convoy to the protection offered by a low row of bramble bushes. We squatted behind them but it wasn’t going to be cover enough. We had to get under them, inside.

  Biting back a scream as thorns claimed flesh, I led the way, crawling underneath the central bush, only stopping when I was as far under as I could go. Ella, Nell, Raf and Lee followed. Soon all of us were crouched in a line, watching events unfold through a network of snaking green stems.

  Then it struck me – there were only five of us. Where was Jack?

  Thuck-whop, thuck-whop. The sound was growing louder and louder. I scanned left and right. A kilometre or so away the trees and bushes were already starting to bend and wave wildly, caught in the air currents.

  I spotted him. Jack. At the camp, crouched by the fire.

  ‘Come on!’ I called.

  If he heard, he didn’t register.

  The sand around him began to rise and dance.

  ‘Jack!’ This time I was screaming.

  I made to go after him, but Raf pulled me back. ‘They’ll see you.’

  Ella’s arm was tightly wrapped round Nell’s thin frame, the other hand reached up to her face. It had red marks on it where she’d been gnawing at the knuckles. Nell wasn’t saying anything, no words at least. Her face was hidden in Ella’s top and she was making this tiny low-pitched humming noise. Like a faulty dimmer switch.

  ‘How do they know we’re here?’ whispered Ella, the whites of her eyes magnified by fear.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lee whispered back. ‘It makes no sense.’

  Maybe they’d noticed all the fires – the settlements left burning by the Raiders, I thought. Maybe they’d come to investigate. Or maybe – a horrific thought burrowed into my brain – maybe Megan hadn’t been paranoid when she’d accused me and Raf of being spies. She’d just accused the wrong people. Maybe there was a spy at the Fort. A spy who’d fed our plans back to the Ministry. Which was now coming to wipe us out.

  Thuck-whop, thuck-whop. The helicopter came closer and closer, making the cells in our bodies vibrate, dancing to its tune.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. Jack was still out there. I closed my eyes. I think I must have stopped breathing as well, as I felt Raf’s arms catch round my ribcage. I hadn’t even realised I was falling.

  I came round to see Jack throw himself into the bush next to me.

  I punched him hard in the arm. Over and over. ‘What were you thinking?’

  Raf didn’t even try and disguise his anger. ‘If you’re on some sort of suicide mission, you’re doing it on your own, not taking us down with you.’

  ‘I was scattering the fire. Burying it. So it didn’t give away our position.’

  ‘And a person, out in the open, that wouldn’t?’ A muscle in Raf’s left cheek was beginning to twitch.

  ‘Not now.’ I managed to inject enough steel into my tone to cut them both off before it escalated any further.

  Thuck-whop, thuck-whop. The sound reached maximum volume and we all instinctively flattened our bodies as much as we could. Begging the ground for sanctuary.

  Then the noise receded slightly and our bodies stopped shaking quite so much. A few seconds later it stopped altogether. The helicopter had landed. Some distance away, in a dip.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lee this time. ‘Why land there? The land’s flat and dry here. Why not come closer?’

  ‘Maybe they’re giving us a head start,’ Jack replied. ‘Maybe the sick bastards like a chase?’

  We stayed frozen in position, getting weird pins and needles in cramped legs, torn between running and revealing our position or staying put and waiting for the Ministry to come and get us. We stayed put and it was the right decision. An endless hour later the helicopter rose back into the sky and flew away.

  Thuck-whop, thuck-whop fading back to silence.

  We found what they’d been after just as the sun was at its highest point in the sky. We were rounding a mound we’d had to detour past to continue north-west when we came across the crater. It wasn’t particularly huge or deep – about the size of the pool that used to be in the middle of People’s Park. The one we used to push model sailing boats about in as kids in the summer before the water went all diseased and they filled it in to make a lavender garden. Bees replacing boats.

  The crater’s sandy edges were patterned with footprints – Ministry boots – and off to the left was a flattened disc of earth where the helicopter must have landed. The crater itself was partly filled with water, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Nothing to explain our slack jaws and bulging eyes. No, it was what lay inside the crater, what floated on the water or protruded from it, that injected adrenalin into our bloodstreams. Scattered across its diameter was a series of large, shiny metal pieces. Part of a silvery cylinder lay on its side, already the perching place for a family of ducks. To its right lay several bits of thin rectangular something that caught the sun and glinted like solar panels and behind them, directly facing us, was a huge curved dish, a pupil-less eye, staring.

  ‘Is it?’ Nell began, stuttering.

  ‘Yes?’ Ella, coaxing, patient as ever.

  ‘Is it a UFO?’ Her voice was excitement distilled.

  I began to let out a laugh, when Ella touched my arm and shot me a warning glare.

  ‘No, Nell, no I’m afraid it’s not, love.’

  Ella let Nell down in the gentlest of ways but still Nell’s face deflated as if she’d thought that aliens were going to be the solution to all our problems. Apparently she’d heard about UFOs from one of the other Cells who had been held hostage, one who’d come from some weird cult settlement, and had fixated on them ever since. No room on Earth? Don’t worry. We’ll beam you up to our planet and all live in peace.

  Raf had been silent, staring intently at the crater below. Finally he opened his mouth.

  ‘It looks like a sort of communications satellite. An old one I think. Maybe a spy one. No country’s been launching these for a while. Well, that’s the official message anyway.’

  He caught me staring at him.

  ‘What?’ He flashed me a lopsided grin. ‘So, I like space. Kill me.’

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. Raf had this thirst for knowledge, this need to know more and to understand everything. It was this same thirst that had stopped him from uploading, made him realise the personality change that would happen if he did.

  ‘I wonder when it fell?’ Lee added. ‘It would have been quite a sight. The best shooting star ever.’

  His words started a memory retrieval in my brain. Click click whirr.

  ‘Three nights ago,’ I said. I explained about the unnaturally bright shooting star I’d seen that night.

  Raf shot me a look. Nothing too obvious, but I could still read the disappointment in it. Disappointment that I hadn’t shared something with him.

  A smile attacked Lee’s face.

  ‘What is it?
’ I asked.

  ‘If you’re right then maybe we’re not too late. Maybe some of the parts are still salvageable. Won’t have rusted or been corroded by the water yet. We could use them! Communications you say, Raf?’

  Raf nodded.

  ‘This is amazing!’ Lee crowed. He was totally buzzing. ‘Isn’t this amazing?!’

  ‘But…’ Five pairs of eyes swivelled to look at me. I hated to be the negative voice, but someone had to say it. ‘If it was that important, wouldn’t the Ministry people have taken it away with them?’

  ‘Depends why they were looking,’ Lee replied. ‘Maybe they were checking it wasn’t a missile or a spy satellite. Maybe this is one of their own. In any event, it might have something we can use that’s irrelevant to them.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘A transmitter.’ Lee’s eyes were aglow. ‘Something we might be able to adapt to trigger the system controlling the Fence. Something we could use to turn a section of the Fence off!’

  Knowing a big fat zero about how computers work or what a transmitter is, taking parts from a crashed satellite to hack a system that controls a massive electric fence didn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but I nodded sagely as if I totally got it all and, without any more discussion, we were all clambering down the mound and across the flat to get a closer look.

  It was kind of awe inspiring seeing the pieces of metal just lying there. A satellite grave. And realising, knowing, that these not-particularly-special-looking pieces had been up there – in space – circling our world. Gazing down on Earth and viewing it as a cloudy marble. I remember when I first saw the image of Earth like that. Daisy had thought it looked beautiful, like a jewel, but I’d thought it looked so fragile and lost. Colour drowning in a sea of black.

  Raf and Lee squatted by the main cylinder, Raf’s hand tracing the metal as if he could absorb knowledge of the universe from it by osmosis. His brain swelling with understanding like potato tubers in a beaker of distilled water.

  Jack sat down by himself at the edge of the crater, the toe of his boot kicking the sandy earth, his face a black hole, ready to suck in any joy that dared approach.

  It was a shock to see him like this as he’s been becoming himself again. He’s been walking as part of the group, and talking again. Not loads or anything, but then he was never what you’d call a chatty guy. And he’s let his sweetness shine through again. Slowly lowering the barriers. Nell was tired for the last stretch of yesterday’s walk and Jack caught her up and swung her onto his shoulders. Her thin, ghostly white legs dangling down, beating a soft rhythm against his chest. She had this massive grin, like a little girl whose normally workaholic dad has finally pulled a sickie for the day to play with her.

  This was the Jack I knew and liked. OK, I can admit it now, loved, in a way. This was the Jack I wanted to keep. I hated seeing bitter, sad Jack. An imposter in his skin.

  I decided to risk it and walked over.

  ‘Penny for them?’

  ‘I was just thinking how absurd it all is, you know?’

  ‘No, but try me.’

  ‘That we, that people, humans have achieved so much – we’ve populated every country on Earth, we’ve explored space, we’ve developed crazily complex ways of spying on other countries, as if that’s where the danger lay – but we couldn’t do something loads simpler: we couldn’t just live in a way that didn’t destroy our planet, that didn’t mess up everything for everyone for ever.’

  I sat down by him, quiet. The satellite discovery didn’t seem quite so fun anymore.

  ‘Here, Jack, mate, I need you,’ Lee’s voice came from the right and shook us from our thoughts. Jack saw Lee struggling with the cylinder part of the satellite and dragged himself up and over. His strides were so long that I was always a step and a splash behind.

  ‘See this door here?’ Lee pointed to a square panel. We need to open this. It’s stuck firm. If it’s been welded shut in the heat of re-entry we don’t stand a chance.’

  Lee stood aside and Jack examined the hatch.

  ‘It’s not welded – you can see this crack. The one there – like a piece of black string? Yes, that’s the one. It just needs force.’

  Jack’s no scientist, but he gets stuff. He’s practical but in some kind of wise way. It’s like he looks at things and just gets how they work. Intuitive if you like. Once when our toaster had stopped working he mended it by giving it a sharp rap on one side and then blowing on it. Seriously.

  Jack wandered off for several minutes and then returned with a sharp pointed stone and a heavy rock. He held the point of the stone to the crack and then just started to hammer relentlessly with the rock. His muscles rippled and sweat poured down his forehead from exertion. I felt… No … forget what I felt.

  Finally he did it, the door cracked open and Lee was free to root around inside the cylinder where all the circuitry was.

  The rest of us had gathered round at a respectful distance, disciples waiting for news of a miracle.

  Waiting.

  We knew the moment Lee lifted his face again. Gone was the face-splitting grin and palpable excitement.

  ‘No joy, I’m afraid,’ he said, trying to keep his voice light and failing. ‘We’ll take the circuitry and memory chips in case we can analyse them later, but there’s nothing we can use now. The electronics have all short circuited in the water.’

  Some things are only scary if you let them be. They only have power by association. Like the hoverfly in wasp’s clothing. Or the rope round an adult elephant’s foot that can’t actually restrain the animal, the elephant just thinks it can as it held it back as a baby.

  The Fence is nothing like this. It isn’t just a symbol. It’s designed to keep us out. To kill. And it’s never failed. Of all the hundreds and thousands of people who’ve been shipped off to the Wetlands, there’s not one known case of someone making it back.

  I gagged as I remembered standing at the end of the path near Aunty Vicki’s house, watching as a skeletal woman attempted to scale the Fence with her son. She was shaking as the electricity coursed through her, an epileptic puppet. And then came the sweet smell of cooking meat. Her boy’s hand never reached the Fence, but the automated machine guns made his body dance inches from the wire.

  Seeing the Fence for third time didn’t make it any less horrifying. We approached it just before dusk. A thick fog was swirling in from the sea, clinging to our ankles and turning the air opaque. The sort of evening you’d never enter a graveyard even if you didn’t believe in ghosts, because it’d make you realise that a tiny bit of your brain wasn’t so sure.

  Rising out of the fog, higher and higher, the Fence climbed skyward – a floodlit towering electrified web with the mosquito grids above. An eerie glowing line across the horizon, punctuated at regular intervals by the dark shapes of the motion-detector machine-gun towers. They say you can see the Great Wall of China from space. If that’s true you must be able to see the Fence too. I wonder what it’d look like? A pale scratch across the land.

  It must have been a trick of the eye caused by the spiralling fog, but the Fence seemed to pulse slightly. As if it were living. Breathing. Waiting. For us.

  No one spoke. Everyone lost in their own private nightmare. Well, everyone apart from Nell, who started to whimper quietly into the folds of Ella’s clothes. It hit me – she’d been born out here. Deep in the Wetlands. She’d never have seen the Fence before and had had no clue what we were up against. I wanted to protect her from it. To turn her head and wipe the image but I didn’t know how. Luckily someone else did.

  ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m starving!’ Jack spoke with exaggerated enthusiasm, spinning Nell up on to his shoulders, pointing her away from the horror. Ella mouthed her thanks but Jack didn’t see, he was already off in the other direction.

  ‘Let’s go catch some food!’ he called and started galloping back to camp, bouncing Nell around until she stopped crying and, instead, muffled peals of laughter
floated back towards us.

  We’ve set up camp about a mile away from the Fence. We couldn’t risk our base being any closer, not knowing what the Ministry has here in terms of surveillance. Not knowing if any of the machine-gun towers are actually manned. And, anyway, the land ahead of us is pock-marked with craters, an acne casualty of bombing designed to destroy any houses that had been near the Fence, to prevent any Fish, the poor souls living here, setting up home or massing at the border.

  With the transmitter option raised and dashed we’re back to Lee’s original plan. Sure the logic is sound(ish): the Fence is too long to be electrified on a single circuit. It must be broken into sections, each on their own circuit. Sections that need to be tested independently to check that they’re still working. And, during these tests, one section of the Fence won’t be live – the sensors won’t be working. It will be reduced to a high wire wall that we can cut our way through.

  ‘So?’ Jack asked, as we were draping mosquito nets over stick frames. ‘How do we know if the Fence is on or not?’

  This was it. The biggie.

  Lee paused and looked up, not quite meeting anyone’s eye.

  ‘Well, if it’s live, it will fr … electrocute … objects.’

  ‘Objects?’ Me this time. Lee was swallowing his words and dancing round the issue. I wanted to pin him down.

  ‘Creatures,’ he clarified, quietly.

  ‘No.’ Ella’s voice was firm. A resounding gong sound. Come in from the playground now or you’re in serious trouble. ‘You’re not actually suggesting that we’re going to hurl small animals at the Fence to see if they fry?’

  Lee just swallowed again and said nothing. He had clearly been suggesting just that. A vision of a rabbit shaking and cooking on the wire attacked my head and left me feeling a bit sick.

  ‘We eat animals anyway,’ Raf weighed in on Lee’s side. ‘All of us. This isn’t different. And wouldn’t you prefer to sacrifice a few rabbits and mice than risk us frying? Failing in the mission that we’ve been entrusted with? Letting the Ministry continue as it is?’