Hungry (43 page)

A short, round girl with frizzy brown hair cautiously steps onto the stage. I squint at her because she looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place her until Gaia says, “Haza, meet your new family!”

I draw in a quick and unexpected breath as I try to puzzle through how Haza has gotten from Dr. Demeter’s rehab center to this place. If there was anyone who seemed to buy into his method, it was this girl. I wonder if she escaped the same night as Zara and me and has been making her way here ever since. I have to admit, that I’m kind of impressed. I didn’t think she had it in her, but I wish that I could have warned her to stay away.

As Gaia’s busy spouting her nonsense about how Haza will be able to live freely now that she’s on the Farm, I slip through the crowd, looking for Basil. I try to stay far away from anyone on my squad, but so far I haven’t recognized a single person that I know. The next time I glance up at the stage, Gaia is walking slowly in a circle muttering to the sky. After a few seconds of her strange one-woman parade, she stands in the center and lifts her arms overhead.

“Oh mighty Mother Nature,” she calls out. “Giver of all life, bestower of all gifts, have you planted seeds in our garden?” She waits, as if expecting an answer to come down from the sky, and she must get it because suddenly she smiles and cries out, “Yes! You have.” She spins, arms up, happily twirling like a blue-and-white whirlwind under the morning sun. “Reveal to us, through me, your humble human conduit, the carrier of these seeds that we will harvest today!”

Gaia stops spinning and opens her eyes. “Tia Lee,” she says. “Tia Lee will bestow her gift today.”

A gasp and cry of happiness erupts from the crowd. People shuffle around, a wall of bodies split, and a young girl, probably fifteen or sixteen runs up the stairs of the stage. She is overwhelmed. Half laughing and half crying. Gaia opens her arms to the girl who falls into her embrace. “Blessed be are you, Tia!” Gaia shouts. “Mother Nature has made you strong. Today you will bestow upon us a gift to ensure our future!” Tia nods, reverent of Gaia’s words.

Gaia begins her spinning routine again. This time when she opens her eyes she calls, “Ester Jacobi!”

Another cry. More shuffling and an older girl, probably well into her twenties runs onto the stage. “Blessed be! Blessed be am I!” she shouts and flings herself toward Gaia, who catches her and laughs.

“Yes, yes, my dear Ester. Blessed be are you. What number will this be? How many gifts have you bestowed since you came to live on the Farm?”

“This will be my fourth!” Ester shouts, excitedly.

“A worthy woman if ever there was one,” Gaia tells her then blesses her the same way she did Tia and gives her a gentle push toward two domestics who lead her to a bench where the first girl sits. Gaia continues to spin, shouting names, blessing girls who run up onstage. I recognize each of the twelve girls from the daily belly jabbing. They sit hand in hand, nervously smiling like giddy winners from One World Super Celebrity competitions.

“Next, we shall welcome our donors,” says Gaia. “These brave and worthy brothers of ours have been chosen for their superior intellects, able bodies, and compassionate souls. Today we will harvest their most sacred seed so that our garden shall be strong.”

I’ve woven my way nearly to the front of the crowd, but still haven’t caught site of Basil. Then I turn and see a dozen men marching up the steps to the stage, led by Carrick and flanked by Basil. “Oh no,” I gasp as my stomach sours.

“Let the seeds prosper,” Gaia says, beaming proudly at her flock.

“So we shall prosper, too,” the group answers.

Then together, everyone says, “Blessed be are we.”

I’m dizzy and near tears as I watch Basil standing placidly onstage. How will I ever get to him now? Then Gaia says, “Our most esteemed and dear doctor would like to greet you before we have the harvest.” She sweeps her arm to the side to present a man who walks up the steps waving to his crowd of ardent admirers, clapping, whistling, hooting, and hollering.

His shirt is crisp, his wing tips flash, not a single steel-colored hair is out of place on his head. I stumble back, bumping into people who stand on tiptoe to get a look at Dr. Darius Demeter.

*   *   *

I stand, mouth open, staring at Dr. Demeter beside Gaia. My brain cannot compute how this could happen. It seems more likely that she would be squished by a falling meteor than he would show up here. Isn’t this the guy who spends his life trying to stop people from eating? Quickly, I look to Basil, expecting him to be as slack-jawed and flabbergasted as I am, but he’s barely flinched. Just a shadow of concern quickly passes over his face, then he stands up straight and tall, looking on as if everything is completely normal.

“I come with news of what’s happening in the Loops,” Dr. Demeter says once the crowd has settled down. “As Gaia has always predicted, an uprising has begun.”

The crowd roars their approval of this news. The people around me slap one another on the backs and throw their arms around each other’s shoulders. Again, I’m caught off guard. If they have no ties to other resistance groups, why are they so happy?

“There is much unrest,” Dr. Demeter reports. “Riots and protests. Workers are striking. The privies are scared that One World will crumble. The entire economy is on the brink.”

I’m not sure how much of this to believe coming from Dr. Demeter and filtered through the crazy scope of the Farm, but given what Ella whispered to me last night, I assume some of it is true.

Gaia steps forward, smiling smugly. “I told you, my dear ones, I told you this would happen. Once word reached the Loops about our society here, the masses would rise up and revolt, demanding that they too have an existence as pure as ours!”

“Liar!” I scream, but the ovation that erupts from the crowd is so loud that it covers my shouts. “She’s a liar!” I can’t believe she’s taking credit for what’s happened in the Loops. Nobody has ever even heard of this lunatic, but she’s convinced these idiots that she’s causing the unrest! Unbelievable. I look to Basil, certain that by now he’ll be flustered, but he’s not. He stands stiff, staring straight ahead. The only thing that moves is a muscle twitching in his jaw, and for the first time I realize how tightly he must be wrapped around Gaia’s crooked finger. If Gaia taking credit for what’s happening in the Loops doesn’t faze him, then it’s possible that nothing will. And that scares me more than everything I’ve seen or heard yet.

Gaia lifts her arms to quiet the crowd. They are reluctant to settle down, and even when they are quiet, the excitement is still palpable in their fidgeting. “Mother Nature has chosen us, my dear ones, to carry on. We shall wait here in our Eden while the others perish, then we shall prosper because we and we alone have the answer to humankind’s dilemma. Mother Nature will protect us in her infinite wisdom as we are the only ones who will be truly ready for the new world that is to come.”

After Gaia’s delusional proclamation of world domination, she dismisses the workers to the fields while Dr. Demeter leads Basil and the others from the stage to the front door of the hospital. As the crowd disperses, I steal around to the back of the building and slowly open the rear door then slip inside. Sticking close to the wall, I watch girls in scrubs carry trays past the line of men all with their backs to me. Quietly, I hop across the hallway and disappear inside the dressing room.

From the neat stacks of blue scrubs, I grab a shirt and pants then whip off my dress. The bottle of Synthamil falls out of my pocket and rolls toward the door, where it makes a dull thonk. “Oh crap, oh crap,” I whisper and skitter after it. As I crouch, half dressed, trying not to breathe, a muffled argument breaks out in the hallway.

“I won’t…” I hear someone say followed by deep angry voices, then a scuffle and the sound of people running. I close my eyes and duck my head, waiting for the door to fly open. But it doesn’t. Instead, I hear the back door thud and Gaia yell, “Let him go. I’ll deal with him later.”

It takes a moment for my heart to stop pounding in my ears, and I feel sorry for whoever just bolted, because he’s going to get it after the harvest is over. I finish dressing and stuff my pockets with the Synthamil bottle and knife then tuck my hair under a cap. As quietly as I entered the dressing room, I leave.

Keeping my head down but my eyes up, I inch along the hall toward the front of the building. I see Leeda handing out small plastic cups to the line of men slithering through the open door of a lab. My heart pounds in my ears as I search the line for Basil, trying to find the one thing that distinguishes him from all the other bearded men in identical brown uniforms.
Surely
, I think,
I will know him
, but like the other times, I can’t distinguish him from the crowd. With Leeda so close, I can’t linger and gawk so I pass by, cutting my eyes to the right to look inside the room where I see Gaia, reclining on a bed, her blue robe wrapped tight around her body with one bare leg sticking out. She eyes the men hungrily as they line up in front of her, tiny cups in hand.

“Hey,” someone says, and I jump. A girl I’ve never seen before shoves a tray of syringes at me. “Take these in. He’s waiting.” My hands shake as I take the tray, making the syringes rattle. “What’s wrong with you?” she hisses. “Be careful!”

“Sorry,” I mutter, panicking because I can’t go in that room with Dr. Demeter.

“And where’s your surgical mask?” she asks.

“I … I … I…”

She shakes her head, annoyed. “Take this one.” She pulls a strip of blue fabric from her pocket and hands it to me. “I’ll get another.”

I hook the straps of the mask behind my ears and find the lab with Dr. Demeter. He’s changed into scrubs and a mask, too, so only his eyes show. He glances at the tray in my hands and says, “Thank you, dear. You can put those right over there.” I pass by the twelve women, including Tia and Ester, who were chosen by Gaia outside. They lay on gurneys, their flat bellies exposed to the bright lights overhead. Their arms are attached by thin tubes to IV bags marked meperidine and diazepam hanging on poles behind them. Bex and Ella are on the far side of the room labeling petri dishes with numbers.

“Now then,” Dr. Demeter says as he snaps on a pair of sterile gloves. “If you could kindly swab the girls, we can begin.”

I mimic another girl in scrubs and a mask who starts at one end of the row while I go to the other. We pull on gloves then rip open antiseptic wipes and work our way down the line. When I rub the area around Ester’s belly button, she sucks in air. “Sorry,” I whisper. “Is it cold?” She looks at me with bleary eyes then seems to drift away.

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Demeter says cheerily. “They won’t feel a thing, especially when we top them off with a local anesthetic.”

Bex follows him down the line with the tray of syringes that I brought in. I move away from her and pretend to busy myself cleaning up so that she won’t see me. Dr. Demeter quickly pokes each girl in the belly, saying, “That should numb you up in no time.” Then he goes back to the beginning of the row. “And now we’ll begin the extraction.”

The other girl pushes a cart of equipment over to him. He attaches a light to his forehead and puts on strong magnifying glasses then takes some small instruments from a tray. “First we’ll just clip this off.” He attaches two small clamps to either side of the Tia’s belly button. “Raise those up ever so slightly then insert the laparoscope.” He lifts the clips with one hand as he slides a long thin needle into her navel.

I have to look away because I feel faint. I lean against a stainless steel table, breathing deeply as snippets of his quiet narration float by. “When I reach the ovary, which has become enlarged … we being to aspirate … this one looks quite full … now I can extract the oocytes.” I hear a sucking noise and think that I might vomit.

I excuse myself and run across the hall into an empty lab, panting for air, trying to wrap my mind around the truth of the situation. Haza was not insane. Dr. Demeter is harvesting human eggs! When I understand this, I think I know what could be happening to poor Basil and the other men in the room with Gaia. But I can’t understand why there are so many children running around already. I know the people on my squad were having sex in the woods and since they’re ingesting Arousatral in their Synthamil, they would be fertile. Surely all the girls who are pregnant got that way naturally. So why would he need the lab?

I pull the mask and cap off and wipe my clammy face as I swallow the sour taste in my mouth. Then I realize that I’m inside the one room that’s been locked all week. The hum of electric generators and the eerie glow of soft light come from long tables holding rows and rows of small shallow glass dishes. Inside each dish is a thin pinkish film growing in a clear solution, which looks vaguely familiar. I try to remember where I’ve seen this before. Was it something online I was reading? Or in the Relics? Maybe in my mother’s lab? Then it hits me. At the rehab center on the second floor. I took a picture of it with my Gizmo. I can’t figure it out though. These aren’t babies being grown. It looks more like human tissue. Similar to Just-Like-Skin, only not synthetic.

As I’m pondering what these lunatics could possibly be doing, the door opens. “Yes, I’ll be just a moment,” Dr. Demeter says. “I think I have a spare laparoscope in here.” He walks into the lab muttering, “Everything breaks in this godforsaken place.…” Then he sees me, pressed against the back wall. “What is it?” he asks. “What are you doing in here?”

I’m too stunned to think of a quick response or to run away. Part of my brain is screaming at me to get out, but some other part of me takes over and says, “Dr. Demeter, what are you growing?”

I catch him off guard. I don’t think anyone has ever asked him before because he actually smiles. “I love a good curious mind,” he says. “I’ve been telling Gaia for years that we should groom some lab technicians who could help me.” He opens a closet near me and rummages around, chatting easily. “It’s not hard you know. Just follow the recipe really. And I could use help tending to these crops while I’m away.” He takes a long flexible tube from the closet.