"That was for your own good!" I insisted, remembering the horrified expression on Leigh's face when I gave the order – and then stayed to make sure he followed it.
"But...but if you'd sold it you'd have been set for life! You know, I've got some contacts..." Shorty began. He was definitely on the same page as Leigh.
"Selling drugs is an automatic death sentence!" I shot back at him. "And don't get me started on how they can totally mess up your life."
"Custodians are a confounded waste of space, can't they find something useful to do with their lives apart from ruining ours?" Leigh moaned. "Hey Jones, let's introduce 'em to some real Skel today. Bet they soil themselves and go runnin' home to mummy."
"Yeah, that's the ticket! Do it, Jones, do it!" Shorty bounced in his seat.
"As attractive as that sounds, I wouldn't wish Skel on anyone, not even Custodians. We are supposed to be on the same side, remember?"
"Yeah, but do they know that?" David asked.
"Pipe it down guys, the gates are ahead," Michal announced as the massive metal gates loomed before us. A twelve-foot high, outwardly curving concrete wall, topped with spikes and barbed wire, ran the perimeter of the entire town. There were only three exits, each with two tall metal gates that rarely opened. The only people permitted to leave the town were foragers and Custodians, and the latter rarely did so. There were also man-high secret exits with concrete doors that became flush with the walls when shut. I saw the Custodians using one when I was snooping with my binoculars one night.
We stopped at the gates so Michal could show the guards our papers. They examined them carefully and then strolled down to talk with the Custodian squad following us. Using the rear-view mirror, I watched them talk with Sergeant King for a few minutes, before they returned our papers to us. The gates swung slowly open on well-oiled hinges and Michal finally drove out of Newhome with the Custodians' G-Wagon close behind. We crossed the 250-metre wide no-man's land that surrounded Newhome. All of the buildings surrounding the town were demolished so that no one could approach without being seen from the guard towers on the walls.
Heading to Victoria Street, we entered North Melbourne’s eerily quiet and empty streets. Slowly decaying buildings were in the process of being overgrown by shrubs, creepers, trees and wild grass. Wrecks of rusting vehicles littered the roads as well, but not in great numbers. Most of the city folk who survived the bomb fled to the country after the water, gas and electricity cut out. Sadly, most of them died of starvation, malnutrition and disease. The country towns that had not been bombed were unable to cope with the influx of over two million people.
The buildings in this part of the city were relatively intact, though for the most part their windows had been either blown out by the bomb, or smashed by vandals or foragers. The nuke that hit Melbourne a century ago must have had the wrong co-ordinates, because it came down in the southeastern suburbs, leaving the city's Central Business District mostly untouched. I could see it now, dominating the skyline ahead of us, a motley assortment of skyscrapers of varying heights and designs. We’d only ventured in there a few times, for many of the buildings looked structurally unsafe. Not to mention there were 'things' in there. Things I hesitated to call people – they made the Skel seem friendly. Besides, there were still plenty of resources to scrounge up from the suburbs.
As we drove I pondered what Shorty said; that the Custodians were with us to curb the only freedom we had left. I wondered if he was right. Perhaps Michal and I were being paranoid. Yet if he was right, that meant I had spent years downplaying my intellect and abilities in school so I could flunk out and get a job as a forager – all for naught. Only foragers were allowed out of Newhome on a regular basis, and I needed that freedom. Foraging was the only time I felt free and alive. It was only out here that I could use my special abilities without the danger of getting caught. Alas, thanks to the Custodians, that was no longer the case.
Perhaps it was time to re-examine my original plan of going AWOL during one of these foraging outings, never to return. However, the situation that caused me to shelve the plan in the first place was still in effect – my kid sister was ill and I was the only one in our family willing to buck the system to help her. I was convinced her health would continue to decline if I didn’t keep slipping nutritious lunches to her when the others weren’t looking. Well, that’s what I kept telling myself. The fact was she didn’t eat much of what I brought her. She didn’t eat much of anything, period.
With our truck in the lead, we eventually reached Victoria Street and headed east through a ghost city of eerily silent shops, hotels, and office blocks. We finally entered Carlton, where we found the ten story apartment building we raided yesterday. Michal drove around the rusting shell of a semi-trailer and turned into and parked in an extremely picturesque side street. Trees flourished down its length, casting it into shade. Sparrows fluttered about the ground and twittered in the branches, while crows cawed from rooftops. It was one of the most peaceful and tranquil spots we had encountered, though sadly, it was in appearance only. Skel could turn up anywhere in the ruins of Melbourne.
The G-Wagon pulled up beside our truck. Sergeant King and two of his goons climbed out, leaving the driver inside the vehicle. As they glanced about nervously at the trees and high-rise buildings that crowded around us, their typical arrogance was absent. In fact, they weren’t just uncomfortable, but nervous as well, and that gave me a great deal of pleasure. This trip was quite probably their first time outside the town.
"What next, Jones?" the sergeant demanded.
I picked up a crowbar and pointed at the ten-story apartment block to our right. "We worked the first two floors yesterday, so we'll be hitting the third and fourth today.”
“Right.”
“Will you be coming in with us?" I asked, and then as an afterthought added, "Hopefully we won't run across any Skel today."
King's eyes widened ever so slightly. "Ah, no, it is imperative that we remain out here to guard the vehicles."
Guard the vehicles?
What a convenient excuse to stay outside where they felt safer – so much for their claims that they were here to protect us. Their choice to remain outside actually revealed their true intention, which was to determine which one of us was the mutant. I presumed there was a monitoring device in the G-Wagon that would squawk like a stuck pig if I used my ability.
Pondering the Custodians attempts to catch me out reminded me of the first time I saw them apprehend a mutant. It was my second day in first grade. I was in Class A with twenty-nine boys – Class B had thirty. I heard the Custodians standing outside the classroom, arguing amongst themselves. One asked why they couldn’t just drag every kid in the school down to the hospital to have an MRI scan and physical examination to check for mutations. Another replied that there would be widespread protests from the parents if they took 700 plus boys to the hospital without parental consent.
A moment later, they entered the classroom and told our teacher not to mind them because they were just running a routine test. I noticed they were carrying some kind of audio device, but all the same, I was taken completely by surprise when they switched it on and a painfully loud ultrasonic noise stabbed through my head. All I wanted to do was press my fingers into my ears and scream in agony, but I recalled the Chinese gentleman’s instructions to hide my ability. So I bit the inside of my cheek until I bled to distract me from the pain.
Little Scotty White wasn’t so quick, though. As soon as the ultrasonic sound blasted out, he screamed and doubled over, pressing his hands over his ears. The rest of the kids looked at him in surprise. They hadn’t heard the sound, of course. After that, the Custodians switched off the device, grabbed Scotty, and marched him out of the room.
We never saw him again.
Letting my mind return to the present, I found myself resenting these blasted Custodians and their endless attempts to uncover mutants like poor Scotty and myself.
Well, they could go take a long walk off a short pier. I was not going to play into their hands by using my ability today. On the other hand, knowing I couldn’t use it left me feeling naked and exposed. If the Custodians hadn’t been here, I would have already scoped out the immediate area for any Skel waiting in ambush. I looked up at the ominously dark apartment building that reached up to blot out the overcast sky, and at the trees and bushes that ran wild throughout the street – all perfect Skel hiding spots. I shivered. Today we’d have to do it the hard way.
"You ready, Ethan?" Michal asked as he hefted a sledgehammer over his shoulder.
"Coming." I turned to say one last thing to our valiant Custodian leader. "Oh, Sergeant, try not to stand too close to the building, because we'll be tossing all the copper we find straight out the window, and we don't want a stray piece striking one of you guys on the head."
King glared at me, aware I was both warning and mocking him. "Point taken." He sneered.
I hurried after the others, who were already tramping into the darkened foyer of the apartment building. Bringing up the rear, I walked carefully over a floor covered with shattered glass and caked with windblown dirt. I hesitated a moment for my eyes to adjust. I could see weak light coming in through the windows, but the far end of the foyer, elevator shaft and stairwell were shrouded in darkness.
Shorty moved to the fore and switched on his powerful torch, casting its beam over the room. I reached out a hand to stay him and then clicked my tongue on the roof of my mouth. I’d never used flash sonar, more commonly known as echolocation, in such a mundane manner outside Newhome before. However, with the Custodians waiting outside, I wasn’t gonna do it the way I normally did as they could have an ultrasonic detector in the G-Wagon.
"Whatever are you doing, Jones?" Leigh asked.
"Shh, I can't hear nothing if you keep yabbering," I snapped, and went on clicking.
"Hear what?"
By listening to the echoes of my tongue-clicks with my abnormally sensitive hearing, I quickly ascertained there were no Skel in the room; however, a metallic object that had not been there yesterday was near the elevators. I grabbed Shorty's hand and moved the torch beam over to the object I’d detected. It was concealed by a dirty, torn rag, but the thin metal wire than ran from the object to the other side of the room twinkled in the torchlight.
David took a few steps forward, his face alight with excitement. "A Skel booby trap?"
"That's my guess." I resisted the urge to flee the room as fast as I could. I hated Skel booby traps.
"That means Skel are here – we gotta go!" Leigh said in panic as he backed towards the door.
"Not necessarily. It just means they could be in the general vicinity," I said.
"That bomb wasn't there yesterday, which means they saw us and put it there on the off chance we'd be back. And here we are, so let's go!" Leigh wailed. Sometimes he really got on my nerves, always whinging and carrying on. Sometimes I wondered if he had some of Shorty’s father’s DNA in him.
"I reckon they'll be laying low with those armed Custodians out there," Michal mused.
"David, is it easy to disarm? Or should we just step over the tripwire?" I asked.
“I ain’t stepping over no wire,” Leigh declared.
"It looks simple enough – keep the torch on it, will you Shorty?" David picked his way slowly over to the rag-covered bomb.
"And we're just gonna stand here while he pokes at it?" Leigh’s voice rose an octave higher.
"Relax Leigh." David laughed. "There's nothing to worry about with this one."
"That's what you said with that spring-loaded spear gun..." Leigh said as he backed quickly towards the doorway.
The Skel were ingenious with their booby traps. Once we’d blundered right into one when we were about to move a threadbare sofa aside that was blocking our access to a house. I’d detected the booby trapped spring-loaded spear gun and told everyone to freeze while I studied the trap and tried to work out which members of our party were in danger, and how to get them out of it. At that point, David rushed in and assured us there was nothing to worry about – he’d have the booby trap disabled in a jiffy. Instead, he accidentally set it off. My quick reflexes saved Leigh from getting skewered by the spear gun, but it still grazed his leg on the way past. Twelve stitches later...
"Done!" David announced. In that impossibly small amount of time he had removed the trip wire, pulled the bomb apart and even removed its detonator.
"You’re a miracle worker, Mister Chen!" I said as I stepped forward and clapped him on the back. "I knew there was a reason we brought you along."
"Ha ha."
I took the detonator from him and stuffed it in my pocket. Never knew when something like that might come in handy. "Right, up we go!" I announced as I strode without hesitation towards the stairwell.
Leigh was beside me in a moment. "Just keep doing that clicking thing, okay, Jones? I'd rather not get blown up today."
"Just today?" I asked as I pushed open the door to the stairwell and let Shorty take the lead, his torch panning left and right. "Okay guys, ninja mode." I had spent many hours teaching the guys how to move silently through any environment. It was something I worked on throughout my school years – trying to walk so quietly that I couldn’t hear my own footsteps – a task that had proven impossible due to my extremely sensitive hearing, but it was great training all the same.
Shorty led the way up the stairs while I followed, clicking at random intervals in the silence of our passage. To our relief, no more booby traps awaited us.
We exited the stairwell on the third floor and entered a long corridor with apartment doors on either side. Those on the right overlooked the side street where the truck and G-wagon were parked. I checked out the first two rooms with tongue-clicks to see if there were any more Skel surprises. Finding none, we set to work.
Shorty, David and Leigh took the first apartment, while Michal and I took the second. The door was already hanging off its hinges, so getting in was a cinch. The foyer, lounge and dining rooms were combined into one large open space. Muted sunlight filtered in through aluminium window frames devoid of glass. And as to be expected, the place was an absolute mess. Plaster panels were hanging from the walls and ceilings, exposing rotting wooden beams. Threadbare sofas that revealed more of their rusting skeletal frames than their original forms were tipped over; and dirt and leaves covered everything.
Michal switched on a battery-powered lamp, led us to the bathroom, and put the lamp on the floor. We set to removing what was left of the plastic and plaster walls with a sledgehammer and crowbar, and then got stuck into the copper plumbing. After a century of neglect, there was no point trying to separate the pipes from their couplings, nuts and unions. Instead, we cut them with a hacksaw, or in Michal's case, smashed them apart with his sledgehammer – brute strength had a subtlety all of its own.
As we worked, I reflected on the unlikely friendship that had blossomed between Michal and me. When he graduated from primary school and started attending high school, Michal was so messed up that I went out of my way to avoid him. That was in spite of my being his senior by one year. On his first day, Michal beat the daylights out of several year niners. It became quickly apparent that he was not only taller than all the other boys, but stronger and more vicious too. We all learned to steer clear of him during recess or lunchbreak. He’d thump just about anyone for even looking at him.
Turned out there was a reason for his violent behaviour – his home life was hell, something I found out after we become close friends by some miracle. Some days he’d come to school with a limp, others he’d struggle doing the woodwork class because one of his arms was too badly bruised to hold the saw. And then there was the time he favoured his ribs for six weeks, causing me to conclude that several had been fractured.
Michal never let on where he got these injuries, but when I considered his refusal to discuss his home life and his insistence that we never visit him at home, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. When I tentatively broached my suspicions with him one day, he surprised me by admitting what I suspected – his father was a violent alcoholic. He frequently came home drunk and beat up Michal or his mother. He never touched the younger sister and brother though – probably because Michal always kept them away from his father when he was in one of his alcohol-fuelled rages. He chose to present himself as a target to save his younger siblings the same treatment.
I tried to talk Michal into reporting his father to the authorities, but as fathers in Newhome were considered authority figures second only to the Custodians, he wouldn’t hear of it. So I tried to help him in any way I could: a supportive word here, an encouraging word there, and more practically, I’d sneak bandages and healing ointments from home to dress his bruises and fractures.
When he left school at seventeen, Michal was so big that his father stopped hitting him when he was drunk. From then on, his attacks took the form of verbal rather than physical abuse. That was an improvement, but abuse is still abuse.
An hour of strenuous activity passed and Michal and I finally had all the copper on the floor. We scooped it up and headed over to the lounge room windows. Looking down, I saw Sergeant King and two Custodians standing beside the G-Wagon. The other private was still in the vehicle. A smile creased my lips as I imagined myself 'accidentally' tossing the pipes so far out the window that they hit the sergeant on the head.
"You thinking what I think you're thinking?" Michal asked, the corners of his mouth twisting into a smile.
"Absolutely, and you know, it just may be worth dying for," I laughed, before I turned and shouted to the Custodians below. "Incoming!"