The Culling Read online

  Clementine took a deep breath. She looked up at the sky. It was deep blue and not obscured by a veil of yellow-gray smog. There were sounds around them; birds singing and the rustle of small animals moving through the trees.

  “It is beautiful,” she said.

  After putting out the fire, they set out north, keeping the river to their left.

  The trees and undergrowth grew thicker as they moved farther north, and the land rose slightly. At some places, they were in valleys surrounded on all sides by towering trees that clung to the slopes, at others they crossed vast undulating plains covered in chest-high grass. At one point, as the sun was high in the sky, they came out of a stand of trees onto a wide ledge with the hill rising on their right and a view out over a valley to the left, with the river a winding silver ribbon far below. The land to the right rolled gently out to the horizon, disappearing in a slight haze. Hiroshi had seen pictures of such scenes, but in the books, there had been houses and towns here and there. So far, except for a few rotting slabs of concrete that marked where there had once been highways, they saw no indication of human habitation.

  From the ledge they made their way down until they reached the river again, at a point where it was only a few yards wide with massive rocks around which the water flowed. Stepping from one flat rock to another, they made their way across to the west bank.

  As they turned southwest, the terrain became hillier, with less dense vegetation on the higher parts of the slopes. They now also saw more animals, including small animals like squirrels and raccoons, and larger deer and elk. The animals watched them warily as they passed, darting away if they came near. Clementine, who had never even seen pictures of such creatures, laughed and clapped her hands each time, sometimes running ahead of Hiroshi to see what was around the next turn.

  “Don’t run so far ahead,” Hiroshi warned her. “Not all the animals out here will run from you.”

  “Oh, Hiroshi, don’t be such a scaredy-cat. It’s all so wondrous. I never knew there could be anything like this.”

  She was enjoying herself so much, he didn’t want to discourage her, so when she darted ahead, he just picked up his pace to try and keep her in sight. At the same time, he was keeping his eye out for a place to stop for the night.

  He was mentally reviewing what would be needed in a camp site, including a properly secluded area for Clementine’s toilet needs, so he lost sight of her for a moment. When he realized that she was out of view, he walked faster, so fast that, when he came around the bend in the trail, he crashed into her.

  She was standing in the center of the trail, her body rigid, her arms stiffly at her side.

  As Hiroshi looked past her, he saw what had brought her to a halt. He felt his heartbeat in his throat.

  About fifty feet ahead of Clementine, standing in the center of the trail, was a black bear. It stood nearly six feet at the massive shoulders, making it six inches taller than Hiroshi. Its head was larger than his chest, and when it opened its mouth, Hiroshi saw teeth, one of which looked as thick as his wrist. The bear was standing on all fours, its massive claws dug into the gray earth. It swayed its head from side to side, and made snuffing noises as it looked at them.

  Hiroshi placed his hands gently on Clementine’s shoulders and pressed his body against her back. He could feel her trembling.

  “W-what is that?” she whispered.

  “It’s a bear,” he said.

  “What do we do?”

  Hiroshi did a quick search of his memory. He recalled reading that bears didn’t normally attack humans unless they felt threatened or cornered, or the humans seemed to pose a threat to the bear’s young. Since Apocalypse, though, with the greatly reduced human population, he doubted this animal had ever even encountered humans. The animal didn’t seem to be preparing to charge them. In fact, it only seemed vaguely aware of their presence. Then he remembered that bears had bad eyesight, so if they made no sudden moves toward it, they might be safe.

  “Back up slowly,” he said quietly. “And, try not to make any noise.”

  Slowly, Hiroshi inched backwards, keeping his hands on Clementine’s shoulders. She moved back with him, maintaining contact. The bear lifted its head and loudly sniffed the air. Hiroshi froze in place. He could hear the thumping of his heart, and his face felt cold.

  Time seemed to stand still. The bear continued to bar the way ahead, although its attention seemed focused on something off to its left and up the hill where the trees grew thick and lush. Hiroshi tried to slow his breathing and put a damper in the quivers of fear to avoid spooking Clementine. He looked around to see if there were any trees nearby that they might be able to slowly move to and climb. He knew, though, that if they provoked a charge, they would never be able to outrun the bear. His only hope was to direct Clementine to a tree and hope that he would be able to distract the animal long enough for her to climb it. He did the odds of success in his mind, and wasn’t satisfied with the outcomes.

  A new emotion began to compete with fear – anger. It was just so unfair, he thought. They’d beaten the monitors, gotten past the fence and avoided detection by the monitors patrolling the border, and survived an encounter with the forbidden river, only to be eaten by a dumb bear. No, he chided himself; not eaten yet. “Always remember.” His father’s voice was a comforting presence in his mind. “Where there is life, there’s hope.” A quote from one of the books his father loved to read, the thick book with the pebbled binding and the gold-edged pages, that his father told him had been a book revered by many people.

  Hiroshi spotted two beech trees with limbs about four feet from the earth. It would be easy for them to scale the trunk fairly rapidly, and the bear, which must, he thought, weigh several hundred pounds, wouldn’t be able to go as high as they could. He began easing Clementine slowly to the right toward the trees.

  They were almost off the trail when the bear suddenly wheeled left, and grunting loudly, dashed off into the trees. Hiroshi let his breath out slowly as the sound of the bear crashing through the brush came from farther and farther away.

  “Is it gone?” Clementine asked.

  Hiroshi turned and saw that she had her eyes clenched shut.

  “Yes, it’s gone. You can open your eyes now.”

  For the rest of their journey up the slope she stayed close to him, no longer interested in exploring their surroundings.

  The sun was beginning to slide down toward the hilltops by the time the land leveled off. Ahead of them was a stand of trees, mostly evergreen, that Hiroshi thought would make a good camp site. Several yards past the tree line, he found a semi-circular clearing that rose slightly in the center. After building a small fire, he set Clementine to gathering pine cones from which he planned to extract the seeds, which were edible, while he gathered medium size branches and twigs to build a shelter. While he was searching for shelter material he found a small stream a bit downslope from their camp site, where they could get water.

  They had eaten, gone to the stream to drink, and relieved themselves in a small clearing on the edge of the stream downstream from where they drank, and were sitting in the makeshift shelter watching the dying embers of their fire by the time the sun was down and the sky had turned a dark purple.

  They sat for a while, gazing at the stars through the openings between the trees, a sight Clementine said she could never get enough of. When the fire was finally reduced to nothing but smoldering ash, they crawled into the shelter and burrowed beneath the pine straw with which Hiroshi had lined it, and were soon fast asleep.

  Unlike the first night, Hiroshi dreamed. He dreamed of his parents, and the times they spent together, his mother mending his clothes and talking quietly with his father while he worked at writing or mathematics on a black slate they’d found in a pile of junk near where the books were hidden.

  The sky was beginning to lighten when Hiroshi awakened. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he had a sense of foreboding. It was quiet. He could only hear the so
und of his and Clementine’s breathing. And then, it struck him. It was too quiet. There should have been the sounds of insects and the birds that are up early seeking food, calling back and forth to each other. The quiet was unnatural, but nothing he’d read told him why it should be so.

  Slowly, he eased out of the shelter, and, crouching, he turned in a circle, taking in his surroundings as far as he could see.

  At first, he saw nothing. But, as he continued to look, little inconsistencies revealed themselves to him. Here, a bush moving slightly despite the lack of wind. There, a dark green shape that wasn’t of nature.

  Hiroshi stood and faced a large bush, behind which he’d seen one of the unnatural shapes.

  “I see you there,” he said. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  Suddenly, his breath caught in his throat. In front of him, several figures stood. They were men. Dressed in furs and assorted colors of cloth, they were armed with bows and spears. Some looked no older than him, but others looked ancient to his young eyes. Some were clean faced, but a few had various configurations of facial hair.

  None of them were smiling.

  A tall man, with a black beard that reached to his chest, and shaggy hair that was held in check by a brown band around his brow, stepped from the bushes. He fitted an arrow in his bow and aimed it at Hiroshi’s chest.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” the man asked in a deep, rumbling voice.

  13.

  The two older monitors were farther from the border fence than they’d ever been. And worse, they had a rookie with them who had never been outside before.

  The monitor in charge was Hargrove-10. He was in the last week of his tour of duty outside the wire, and looking forward to going back to watching proles at a factory, or standing sentry duty outside the power plant. Out here, with the danger of a group of Wild Ones attacking you at any time, having to traipse around the booneys with an inexperienced man, he felt as if he had a large target painted on his back.

  “Okay,” he said. “I think we’ve gone far enough. Let’s go back to the wire.”

  “But, the trail is leading toward the river,” Leland-27 said. “Shouldn’t we check it out? Maybe they fell in the river and drowned.”

  “If they fell in, they’d have washed up against the wire by now, idiot.”

  “Well, we should check that out, shouldn’t we?”

  Hargrove-10 sighed deeply. He turned to the third man, Alexander-12.

  “How about this rookie, eh?” He laughed. “Can you believe him? He sounds like he’s bucking for promotion to grade five or something.”

  “He stays out here, only thing he’ll get is an arrow in his neck from one of the wild ones,” Alexander-12 said. “I’m with you; let’s go back.”

  “Hear that, rookie? Now, Alexander-12 here understands the chain of command. He knows that as a ten, when I say something, the thing to do is comply.”

  Leland-27 couldn’t see the man’s face behind the visor, but he knew he was smirking at him. He’d been the butt of every joke, and the target of every insult, some veiled, some direct, since Gravius-One had dropped him off at the gate. When the others learned that he’d been part of the elite guard at The Committee, the hazing only intensified. When the senior monitor on the gate was told that two proles had killed monitors and were probably going to try and get through the fence, Leland had been assigned with two monitors who had reputations as goof-offs to look for them.

  They’d set out at first light, first going north along the fence, and after twenty miles without picking up a sign, had turned back south. They found the tracks along the bank of the river, and followed them along the river until they lost them in the forest.

  They had been stumbling around in the trees for several hours, without knowing that they’d circled Hiroshi and Clementine’s camp site three times. At that time, they’d been only a few hours behind the two fugitives.

  “You’re in charge,” Leland-27 said. “But, the powers that be aren’t going to be happy when we come back empty handed.”

  “Yeah, so what are they going to do, assign us to external patrol?”

  Alexander-12 laughed. “External patrol, that’s funny.”

  Leland-27 shrugged. The man had a point. Those in charge wouldn’t be happy that they hadn’t been able to find the fugitives, but they couldn’t find what they couldn’t find. The criminals were likely attacked and eaten by wild animals anyway, and if not that, the wild ones would kill them – or so every man on external patrol believed. That none of them had ever seen a wild one was completely irrelevant; they believed in them. It was also a good excuse for limiting the range of their patrols.

  “I suppose you have a point,” he said. “Shit, let’s get back to base. The bugs out here are driving me crazy.”

  14.

  Hiroshi froze in place, staring at the apparition before him. Like everyone else in New Liberty, he’d heard stories of the wild ones, the people who lived in the forest and refused to join the community, but until now had thought it a mere tale to frighten people and dissuade them from trying to escape. Now, he knew them to be real, and from the sharp looking points of the arrows that were all aimed at him and Clementine, just as dangerous and deadly as the stories said. Along with the weapons, their dress added to their imposing appearance. Many were wearing jackets made from what looked like the pelts of animals, while others wore multicolored shirts over tan or blue pants. Except for a couple who looked not much older than Hiroshi, all had facial hair, ranging from thin mustaches to bushy beards. They looked to Hiroshi like the pictures he remembered of ancient barbarian warriors like the Gauls or Huns.

  “I asked you a question. Who are you, and where are you coming from?” the bearded man demanded.

  The circle of men had tightened. Clementine huddled against Hiroshi, her eyes wide with fright, and her body quivering like leaves in the wind.

  “I – I am Hiroshi Jackson,” he said. “This is Clementine Adams. We came from New Liberty.”

  There was a general murmuring from the men. Some brandished their weapons menacingly.

  “I say we kill ‘em and be done with it,” a skinny man with a wispy mustache said.

  The bearded man waved the group to silence.

  “That’s not the way of Freelanders,” he said. “No one can be deprived of life without a chance to defend or explain themselves.” He turned back to Hiroshi. “So, Hiroshi Jackson, you’re from New Liberty, is it? How is it the two of you come to be way out here?”

  The story poured out. Hiroshi told of being informed that he’d been selected for culling, and how the monitors had come for him on the roof of the crèche. There was more murmuring when he described slaying the monitors and the wild journey he and Clementine had taken.

  “Abraham, you ain’t believin’ that story, are you?” the skinny man said. “I bet these two are monitors sent out to infiltrate us.”

  The bearded man shook his head.

  “I have to admit, Reuben,” he said. “You make a good point. I’ve never heard of any of the slaves of New Liberty fighting back against the monitors and their weapons.”

  “But, we did,” Clementine said. “Hiroshi broke one’s neck, and I shot the other one with the gun I took from the one he killed. He was about to shoot Hiroshi, and I couldn’t let him do that.”

  This brought laughter from most of the group. Had he not been so frightened, Hiroshi would have laughed himself. Tiny little Clementine, hands on hips, staring up at this intimidating looking group of armed men and describing how she’d killed someone threatening Hiroshi – describing it with such passion – was an amusing sight.

  “You’re quite the hellion, little girl,” the bearded man said. “I’d hate to get on the wrong side of you.”

  The men laughed more. But, the wicked points of their arrows remained steady.

  Hiroshi decided to take a big chance, knowing their lives depended on convincing this band of rough looking men that they wer
e no threat.

  “We brought their guns with us,” he said. “We have them in our pockets. You can have them.”

  He raised his hands to his shoulders, nodding at Clementine to do the same.

  The bearded man lowered his bow and approached slowly. He patted Hiroshi’s side, feeling the flechette gun in his pocket. Gingerly, he withdrew it and put it in his belt, and then repeated the process with Clementine. Hiroshi slowly lowered his hands and removed the spare clips, first from his pockets and then from Clementine’s, and offered them to the bearded man, who took them and put them into a pocket of the tan colored pants he wore.

  “You’re either telling the truth,” he said to Hiroshi. “Or, you’re pretty clever. You want to tell me how two unarmed kids defeated two armed monitors?”

  “When they came for me, they didn’t think I would cause any trouble,” Hiroshi said. “They didn’t even draw their weapons. I think they thought I would just meekly go with them. I remembered reading in a book about using the strength of your opponent against him.” There was a collective gasp from the men who now surrounded him.

  “You can read?” the man, Reuben asked.

  “Yes,” Hiroshi said. “My father taught me.”

  “You have to come up with a better story than that, son,” the bearded man said. “I happen to know that children in New Liberty are taken from their parents when they’re born, and the only books allowed are instruction manuals.”

  “That’s true, but my father knew where many books were hidden. He showed me, and taught me to read from them when I was small.”

  “And, Hiroshi wasn’t brought to the crèche until he was seven,” Clementine added.

  The bearded man’s eyes narrowed.

  “Your folks kept you hidden for seven years?”