The Territory Truth Read online

  Seconds later Ella and Lee were through, too, and we were all on the other side, the Territory side, and beginning our descent. Going down was even harder than going up. Every move had to be made by feel, searching with fingers and then dropping down, hoping your feet would find a hold. Not only that but we were now facing the people from the settlement, who were about to start climbing. We were separated only by the interlocking wire. Animals and spectators at the zoo, unsure which was which.

  Three quarters of the way down another sound overtook the siren and caught our ears. Caught our ears and froze our limbs.

  Thuck-whop. Thuck-whop.

  The blades of a Ministry helicopter cresting the horizon and bearing straight at us. It was black. And big. Much bigger than the last one. Curved like a scythe with two sets of blades. They were sending in the troops.

  ‘Go, go, go!’ I shouted.

  We scrabbled down the last few metres, slipping and sliding. Lee lost his grip and tumbled to the ground and there were a horrific few seconds before he pulled himself up to standing and tested his legs, teetering forwards and backwards, a geriatric who’d lost his Zimmer frame. He straightened up and balanced. Weight evenly distributed. Nothing broken.

  The people from the other settlement were now swarming the Fence. They’d come so far. They weren’t going to turn back now.

  There was something about their bravery, their refusal to give up, that was magnetic. It caught your eyes and pulled.

  ‘Come on, hide!’ yelled Ella, grabbing my arm. We fell into crouch mode and ran for it, scuttling across the twenty or so metres of marram grass and then ducking into the Solar Fields as the helicopter came closer and closer. We were only about five rows in when we had to stop. Lee frantically signalling at us to get down. We flattened ourselves in a line behind and below the silver panels.

  Had they seen us? It was impossible to tell. My breathing was keeping time with the helicopter blades; and the ground, the ground was shaking and dust was spiralling, dancing into our eyes and down our throats. The helicopter must have been directly overhead. It didn’t land immediately. Didn’t have to.

  It was like a horror-show symphony. The staccato of gunfire punctuated by cries of pain, real bloodcurdling screams, and all the time the background siren continuing to wail. Lamenting the dead. I wanted to bury my fingers into my ears but I couldn’t. I had caused this with my big mouth. I was responsible. The least I could do was listen.

  The helicopter only landed once the firing had stopped.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered.

  No one replied. No one knew.

  ‘We need someone to go and see,’ I repeated. ‘We need to know if they’re coming for us.’

  No one volunteered until Ella volunteered Raf. She clearly hadn’t forgiven him for the whole ‘leave Nell to die’ thing, totally overlooking the fact that if he hadn’t gone back into the channel both she and I would be toast. One look at Raf’s face told me he wasn’t up for it. His skin had that greyish tinge again and his eyes weren’t totally there.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said, with a gulp, as if fear was something edible that could be swallowed and digested.

  The solar panels were arranged in long parallel rows. Fifteen or so attached to each other, then a small gap, then another fifteen and so on. I crept to the end of a row and peered out. Glimpse, retreat, glimpse. A nervous tortoise not sure whether to emerge from its shell. I saw the helicopter had touched down on the barren land right next to the Fence; then, as I watched, twenty pairs of boots jumped down. The siren stopped and the sudden quiet was almost unbearable. Normal noises: breathing, heartbeats, the scrape of toes across sand all suddenly audible. Magnified. It felt like a curtain had been whipped away and our position revealed with a cymbal crash. The commander, a guy with a messed-up nose and grey hair, was in the middle of the soldiers, shouting orders. There were ten or fifteen dead bodies strewn across the foot of the Fence on our side, the rest on the other. The ones in the Wetlands were left there, too much hassle to collect, or maybe as a message – a modern equivalent of heads on spikes; the ones on our side were thrown into the helicopter. There was nothing to do but watch as the bodies were being dragged along the ground by their feet, face down. I flinched as they bounced over pebbles or scraped against rocks and shuddered as it hit me that they couldn’t feel pain. Their faces could bash against a hundred rocks and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would matter to them again as they were dead. All dead.

  One soldier looked younger than the rest. He had blond hair, cropped tight to his skull highlighting ears that projected at right angles from his face. I’d noticed him because he seemed to avert his eyes when carrying the bodies, which he’d slung over his shoulder rather than dragged along the ground.

  The soldiers had walkie-talkies but they weren’t using them. They were shouting to each other instead.

  ‘Any walkers?’

  ‘Best do a sweep to be sure.’

  No! I yelled in my head. Don’t sweep. Go home. Go back.

  They fanned out and I stopped breathing and closed my eyes.

  We’d be okay unless they came straight at us. The marram grass meant there were no footprints, no breadcrumb trail to follow.

  I forced my eyes open again.

  No one was going in the direction of Raf and the others so if they stayed still they’d be fine, but the young blond soldier was walking towards me. Straight at me.

  There used to be this guy in the same block as us in the Territory who claimed he could bend spoons with his mind: focus all his energy on them and then kind of wilt them over. He said he’d been trained as a weapon by the army. He was a total nutter but right now I decided to believe. I’d bend the soldier’s path. Channelling every cell of my being, I willed him to divert. Go left. No, that might take him towards the others. Go right. Turn your feet right. But he didn’t. He came down the row. Slowly, steadily. Straight at me. I couldn’t run. That’d be worse. It’s the movement of prey that draws the predators. That’s why rabbits freeze. Sometimes it’s your best bet.

  He was so close I could hear his breathing.

  All it would take was for him to bend over the panel and I’d be exposed.

  He looked forward, off into the distance.

  Then he bent down.

  There was this retching sound. Over and over. His stomach contents emptied fifty centimetres to my right. He looked up. This was it. I thought I’d scream but I didn’t. This terrible sense of calm came over me. I was there but I wasn’t. The world didn’t really exist. Our eyes met. Locked. His were blue. Blue with yellow flecks. Mum used to have a dress like that. Buttercups against a summer sky. I’d tell him it was just me. I was the only one who’d made it. The others still had a chance.

  ‘Report in,’ came the yell from the grey-haired boss guy.

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Negative.’

  Reports were shouted back and I gave up a prayer of thanks that the others hadn’t been found. It was just me.

  The boy soldier stood up. My head swirled. I couldn’t feel my toes anymore.

  ‘Negative.’

  He walked away without glancing back and once he was back in the helicopter I started retching myself.

  Life’s messed up. Evil and good swimming round each other, often wearing each other’s clothes.

  The Solar Fields give me the creeps. Like a kind of alien futurescape. Row upon row of head-height, shining silver shields, sat at 45 degrees to the earth. Rising over hills, dipping into valleys. Harnessing and storing the sun’s energy. We were used to panels on top of buildings, obviously. Every south- or west-facing building in the First City had one. Had to by law. That glint that always caught the corner of your eye. But nothing like this. This was a regiment. An army. You had to shade your eyes and squint just to look at them. And the most alienating thing of all was there was nothing else. No trees, they’d all been cleared. No long grass. No animals. Just metal, panels and lig
ht. The only natural thing I could make out was a stream winding its way through the middle, coming from the higher ground to the west. A silver snake reflecting the panels above.

  The soldiers returned at dusk. We were already a few miles from the Fence, the aim at this point just being to get away, when we heard the blades once more. We hit the earth and lay there as the helicopters, two of them, approached.

  Nell lay shivering next to me, fear mirroring hypothermia.

  ‘They’ve come back for us, haven’t they?’

  I didn’t know what to say. All it would have taken was for the blond soldier, my soldier as I thought of him, to have broken down later during some sort of debrief. To have had a pang of guilt. To have told the others or his boss about me. They would be back. With reinforcements.

  ‘Noa?’ Nell again, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer her. Raf broke into the silence.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think they have.’

  If it had been lighter and my face hadn’t been buried into the ground, Raf would have seen my raised eyebrow.

  ‘The helicopters are a different colour – dark green not black.’

  Somewhere to my left, Jack snorted.

  ‘There’s more,’ Raf continued, a metallic note to his voice, raised now as the thuck-whop was getting louder and louder. ‘These have got lights on, obviously, as it’s getting dark, but not full-on search beams. They’re not looking for us. They’re not looking for anyone.’

  ‘Then why are they here?’ Ella this time.

  ‘To mend the hole!’ Lee said, with an audible exclamation mark. ‘Of course. They couldn’t leave the Fence down with the mosquito grids shredded. They’re not soldiers, they’re builders – engineers.’

  Still, we weren’t taking any chances. We went without dinner and curled up in a line under the panels. No one could sleep, not with the enemy so close, so instead we played stupid games until the helicopters left again. Ella suggested Never Have I Everwhich should have been ridiculous as the strongest thing we had to drink was stream water and there were so many topics that were a total no-go area. Still, somehow we played it. Instead of drinking you had to click your fingers if it applied to you. Turns out Jack can’t click his fingers, which was hilarious in itself. You’d just hear this weird scrape-thud sound through the dark. And instead of trying to catch people out, instead of trying to find out their dirty secrets, it turned into a weird kind of group bonding thing.

  Never have I ever taken part in a battle against psycho Raiders. Click, click, click, click, click, scrape-thud.

  Never have I ever scaled an electric fence. Click, click, click, click, click, scrape-thud.

  And so on.

  The hours passed and we weren’t afraid.

  We probably got no more than two hours sleep as the helicopters only left fractionally before dawn. Breakfast was a hastily devoured couple of dried rabbit strips that seemed to leave us hungrier than we started, but hunger’s kind of become our default setting so the cramps and rumbles are getting easier and easier to ignore. Once we were ‘fed’ and packed, all eyes turned to Ella.

  She was in charge now. Well, of directions anyway. It was Ella who’d seen the Server, the place where they stored and transmitted the uploads, even though she hadn’t known what it was at the time.

  We followed behind, walking when she walked and pausing when she paused, hoping to God she’d get us there. There was no plan B. It’s not like she had the Server’s GPS coordinates or anything, but there were things she knew. Stuff we could work with. The Fence had been visible but not close. Sat on the horizon like a play fence from a toy farm. So, step one, we headed inland until the Fence receded to the right sort of size. Ella and Aunty Vicki had been heading north towards the Arable Lands. It was on the third day of non-stop marching through the Solar Fields that they’d been caught, so it meant chances were that we were currently south of our destination. Step two, we marched north. Ella also said the Server hadn’t been the only building they’d passed. There were others, of a similar size, squat brick structures, where they probably stored spare parts or where the workers who kept the Solar Fields functioning were based. Something like that anyway. The difference about the Server, apart from the hum, which we’d probably only notice when we were reasonably close, was its tall, thin mast. Ella recalled it with a shudder. She said it was one of the reasons they’d stopped there. She’d been so exhausted she had to rest or she’d collapse and the mast with its high cross-like antenna had reminded her of a church, a spire, so she’d thought they’d be safe there. Protected. Her laugh had this brittle quality. A bark crossed with a swallowed sob.

  A mast made sense. They’d have to have some way of sending the uploads back to the Cities. And its height would help. We should be able to spot it from a way off.

  We set up camp before dusk, knowing we needed to find food while it was still light. We still had some dried meat and seaweed but supplies were getting low. Lower than anyone felt comfortable with. There was no open ground, no glade or circle of trees to shelter under. It was more a question of picking a row and putting our things down between some panels. I wanted to talk to Raf; I needed to. Last night, our malc game had distracted me, filled the void, but today I couldn’t get the images of the dead bodies out of my brain. Couldn’t block the sound of the machine guns mowing them down. My guilt was like superglue, clamping the pictures in position behind my eyelids, not to be dislodged. There was no getting away from them. Closing my eyes only heightened the colours, like a TV screen in the dark. Raf had wandered off, lying down a distance from the others. I followed him. His eyes were closed but I could tell that he wasn’t actually asleep. Deep breath in. I started trying to talk, but immediately got my head bitten off.

  ‘Not now, Noa. I need some space. You’re always here. Always bothering me.’

  Each word was like a blow dart. A poison-laced sting. Even his tone was different. Harsh, snappy. It was like he didn’t only dislike me, but he actually hated me a bit. And like ‘he’ wasn’t Raf anymore. Again. Like some bodysnatcher had stolen his skin and was hiding out there for a while. I couldn’t handle this now. The stress was already too much for me and I felt like I was breaking, cracking. I needed support not abuse.

  I bit my lip to stop myself from crying. Bit it hard until a metallic taste filled my mouth. If he was going to be a dick like this, I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. No. No way. Not even if it meant every swallow I took was tinged with blood.

  I stood up, unsteadily, and returned to the others, weaving, colliding twice with the sides of the panels on the way and bruising my hip in the process.

  I scanned the group for a friendly face, a confidant. Ella was out with Lee collecting water, but she wouldn’t have been my first choice anyway as she’s not exactly a pom-pom waving Raf fangirl. I could just imagine her saying: Well, what do you expect from a freakoid?

  Nell was sprawled out on the ground, her white skin and hair almost luminous amongst the silver. She looked otherworldly and, for once, at peace. It would have been cruel to disturb her and she was too young to have to deal with my boyfriend issues. To be honest, I was also a bit embarrassed that they would seem massively trivial to her. Hey, girl who had her parents die, was rejected by her settlement and then kept as a slave for a year, I’m having a really tough time of it as my boyfriend was mean to me…

  That left … well, that left Jack.

  Jack was leaving to forage for dinner and I ran to catch him up. He took one look at me and didn’t say anything. Guess he knows me so well he didn’t have to. He just looped his hand round my arm, gave me a bag to carry and told me not to scare the animals. We didn’t find any animals. Unsurprisingly they kept their distance from the rows of silver panels. Maybe there was a noise, a hum too low or high for human hearing, that freaked them out. I remember, back when there were farmers and actual sheep, there being all this stuff about the hum from solar panels and wind turbines driving animals mad. Milk yields falling, people a
cting a bit crazy. Or maybe this time it was simpler. I looked at the bare earth with its odd patchy tufts of thick, dry grass. Maybe there just wasn’t anything for animals to eat.

  So what were we going to do? I was beginning to despair when we rounded the end of the row and took a right.

  ‘Look!’ Jack’s voice low, excited.

  There in front of us were clusters of yellow and brown mushrooms sprouting under a panel, forcing their way through the soil to the surface – some bulbous, some umbrella shaped, some small, some huge, veined and spotted. Food sprouting through the earth into our fingers. It almost seemed too easy.

  ‘What do you think?’ Jack asked, still whispering. ‘Roast mushroom for dinner?’

  ‘Sure. It’s basically Mucor, right?’ I replied. ‘And we probably don’t need to whisper. Mushrooms aren’t like rabbits, you know, they don’t run away.’

  Jack flashed a grin and punched me in the arm. I laughed too and it was cathartic. A release. For a second things were easy. I could forget where I was, what I’d done, everything I’d seen. It was like I’d stumbled into a time machine with Jack and we were back to before the TAA. To before Raf even. I half-expected Daisy to pop out from behind a panel and have a go at me for quite how dirty and unattractive I looked.

  But she didn’t. ’Cos she was dead. My face fell again as the present came flooding back in.

  ‘What’s going on, Noa?’ Jack’s voice fought its way through the mess.

  ‘Nothing.’ I tried to smile, tried to fix the smile in place.

  Jack wasn’t fooled. Friends, real friends, know when you need to be silent and when you need to talk, even if you don’t know the difference yourself.