The Wanted
Authors: Lauren Nicolle Taylor
LAUREN NICOLLE TAYLOR
Clean Teen Publishing
THIS book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors' imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Wanted
Copyright ©2014 Lauren Nicolle Taylor
All rights reserved.
Cover Design by: Marya Heiman
Typography by: Courtney Nuckels
Editing by: Cynthia Shepp
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This is for you.
2023
NADIR
I was eleven years old when they decided to save the world.
I stood pressed close to my mother, my sticky-with-sweets hand in her dry, calm one. Before the bombings, this wasn’t how things were done, but now the safest place for the prime minister’s son was under the watchful eye of the prime minister herself.
Four leaders crowded around a mahogany table, sweaty hands making vapory prints on the rich brown surface, fading in and out. Bottles of valuable, pure water glistened, slick with tears of condensation. I licked my lips as I stood close enough to touch one. The other first families lined the wall, probably all thinking the same thing—what would our fate be, and should we place our faith in the strange man dancing around the table? Unfamiliar faces wore recognizable expressions. Masks of restrained fear.
They listened to a man making big arcs with his arms speak in a grating twang. He gripped each and every one of them with his penetrating gaze and, I have to admit, I became entranced by his intensity. His deep blue eyes shone like sapphires. I broke from my mother’s grasp and crept toward the table, the music of his speech drawing me closer like the pied piper.
“You see. It’s perfect! It’s the perfect opportunity. We have the chance to restructure society, all of it. Start fresh and stop all of this—” the man swung around quickly, “from happening again. Aren’t you tired of worrying someone will kill you in your sleep?” People nodded. “Aren’t you tired of worrying who you can trust?” They started to mutter.
I took a step closer to the blueprints they were taking turns examining. It looked like a maze. No, there was no way out. It was a prison.
“But why circles?” the black man asked, his deep voice rumbling like a marble in a barrel.
“Circles, squares, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the gates and the understructure that are important. Imagine if you knew there was a disturbance in one ring or section? You could shut it down, like that.” The man clicked his fingers. “The perpetrators would be dealt with easily. No muss, no fuss. We will keep life above simple and keep all the messy, complicated stuff below.” He wiggled his finger as he pointed to the levels underneath the ground. “Each ring can run independently, so even if there are issues in one, a lockdown will not affect the others’ ability to run smoothly.”
The complicated structure reminded me of plates spinning on narrow pieces of bamboo but on a much grander scale, rings balancing on long, metal supports, straddling the wide underground river that ran in loopy swirls underneath every town. “And see here, constant fresh water and easy waste disposal,” he finished with a wink.
“I can’t imagine the need for such a complicated facility. It will cost too much to build.” The black man stepped forward, pointing at the various levels below the towns.
The American almost galloped over to the African president. “Oh, you’ll want it. The population will grow, and waste disposal as well as the ability to isolate and control any disturbances will be an important aspect of this system. Besides, Sekimbo, money means nothing. Money is no object. This is about recreating civilization as we know it. Money is irrelevant.” He leaned in, and the black man backed away. “I can’t believe you even mentioned it.”
Sekimbo grunted, stepping back from the table, and grabbed a precious bottle, taking a large sip.
“Can you taste it?” the American asked. “That is the sweet taste of change.”
My mother cleared her throat, holding up one of the bottles and shaking it. Usually a flutter of silt would rise to the surface, but not this time. “So you’re going to pollute what looks like one of very few pristine water sources left in this world?” She pursed her lips, a sign that she was unsure.
He pressed his hands to his forehead like he was frustrated. “No, no, no. We will ensure that everything is biodegradable or recyclable. We will process the human waste here.” He pointed to a series of tanks hidden under the ground level. “These are details, details I’ve gone over, perfected and finalized. You don’t need to worry about them; you only need to worry about your own survival.”
My mother removed her glasses and cleaned them with her sleeve, giving herself a second to ponder what he’d just said.
The American paused for a few moments and then sprung into another speech, his eyes sparkling as if he were in love. “The rings, the circles, the Woodlands, it’s beautiful, it’s simple. It’s a symbol of growth and change. The towns of the Woodlands will be set out like the rings of a tree trunk. And like a great redwood, we will become strong and unyielding.” He made a fist with his pale hand.
I wanted to point out to him that there was no ‘American Redwoodtown’. There were very few of his kind left.
“And this manifesto, this All Kind philosophy, do you think it will work?” my mother asked.
“Of course it’s not the whole solution, but I think we can all agree it’s a start. It’s a new way of thinking that takes race out of the equation.” He swiped his palms across each other, as if he were slapping dirt from them.
It sounded earnest, but it was too simple to even an eleven-year-old. Could we really leave all the prejudice behind?
“See, if we embed people with ID, we can always keep track of them. We can control where they go and when. No one would get through a gate to the next ring without us knowing, without us specifically
okayin
g it. And if we shuffle the races between each town, we can start healing the human genome. Slowly start to rid this world of the racial markers that only cause fighting.”
I started to wonder if he was a scientist. He certainly tried to talk like one, albeit a lazy one who used buzzwords to get people interested but didn’t know much about the specifics.
“I already have the go ahead from Este and Poltinov; I just need your signatures…” He looked to my mother and the black man. “And then we can get out of this hell hole.”
I remember thinking I didn’t like the way he spoke to my mother, like they were friends, when really, they had been fighting each other for years. Killing each other’s citizens. But I also knew everyone was tired of the death.
The American was energized, his hope and enthusiasm intoxicating.
The black man spoke again. “So, who has control?”
“That’s the beauty of it, we all do. We remove the notion of countries and races… and we rule it together.”
The word ‘rule’ stuck in my mind long after the American had stopped talking. I knew that word. That word did away with democracy.
The ground trembled, and people steadied themselves on furniture or each other. They didn’t pause their meeting. Even though a ceasefire had been negotiated specifically for this gathering, some renegade groups had ignored it and were carrying on. The window was a view to sunlight trying to penetrate clouds of dust. The pictures of a green, fresh world were tantalizing, almost impossible to resist.
“How will you get people to come?” my mother asked distractedly as she held up a glossy photo of a stream running over rocks covered in moss, and giant trees shooting to the sky. I wanted to step into the picture and never look back.
The American nodded solemnly but it was overly dramatic. You could tell his excitement outweighed any seriousness.
“Well, you’ve all read the reports. Our planet can no longer support the current population. I’m sorry. I wish we hadn’t made such a mess of things, but now we have to think about the survival of the species. It’s too late to save everyone. We must look to the future.” He didn’t seem sorry, but he was right—the damage was done.
My mother flicked through the report, running her finger along the black text until she found the part she was looking for and stopped.
“But this number, President Grant, eighty thousand, can’t be right. Is that really all we can take? And how can we possibly select those people?”
To think the world’s population had been in the billions. Now we were down to a few million, and he was asking us to reduce it further.
“We don’t make the decision; they will be randomly selected. And as for your first question, if you were given a choice between life and death, what would you choose?” His mocking laugh made me angry, and I squeezed my toy until one of the side mirrors broke off.
With that statement, everyone started arguing. The noise in the room was deafening as desperate voices collided with one another. I crouched down on the floor and played with my toy Transformer, running Optimus Prime into my mother’s advisor’s foot repeatedly. He didn’t seem to notice. I was used to the arguing. For months, they had been debating what to do. Then the American showed up in Brazil a couple of months back after escaping the Chinese bombing of the US. Now, they were just arguing about something different.
They went on and on and round and round in circles, trying to push their own agenda, trying to say their people had more of a right to exist, to go on, than the others did. Finally, the American stood on a chair and told them to be quiet. And for some reason, they did. He seemed to have magnetism that made everyone listen to him.
“People. People. I don’t mean to push you, but the decision’s already been made. We are going. Construction has begun. You can stay here, but I guarantee you won’t last a year. The world as we know it is over. The Woodlands embodies hope, a way forward. Join me, join us.”
He spun a stack of papers towards my mother and President Sekimbo. And I watched as, with a deep sigh, my mother signed the death sentences of hundreds of thousands of people. All to save me. To save her family.
We didn’t realize at the time that it was too late for us, and for most of our population. Radiation killed. Insipid, it ate at you from the inside out. My mother and father went first, my sister died shortly after, and now I was all that was left. The sickly and the dying were not permitted to migrate to the Woodlands. As I had been at a remote boarding school for most of the war, I escaped their fate.
President Grant flapped the papers in front of my face, urging me to hand over control to him. Although he wasn’t really president anymore, his country was gone and he wanted to adopt mine. He promised me he would take care of my people, but I didn’t believe him. There was no ‘my people’ or ‘his people’, that was the point of the Woodlands. But I was only seventeen. I would do as I was told because, although it broke my heart to do it, I couldn’t lead. I couldn’t do anything.