Survival (2 page)

They had two minutes before the
bulls began the slaughter.

The crowd emitted a dim roar as
it surged through the open gate and men from all facets of life surged toward
the grand ideal of fatherhood. Accountants and mechanics and school teachers
and landscapers raced across the open expanse, seeking cover in the distant
forest. United by their desire to raise a family, they sprinted into the future.

Bryan and Fausto went with the
flow of the crowd, warily trotting into the engineered environment of the great
test.

There were five Labor fields in
Oregon: Eugene, Salem, Bend, Klamath Falls and Portland. In the middle of the
twenty-first century, when the world’s population had exceeded eleven billion
and the misery of a warm and congested Earth had made life nearly intolerable,
the Darwin Initiative had gained traction.

Major American cities cleared
space within their borders for immense, wooded Labor fields. In Portland, the
field stretched from the banks of the Willamette River up to the university’s
border and the Park Blocks—eleven square miles of treacherous terrain patrolled
by 500 bulls intent on thinning the population.

If it weren’t so horrible, the
irony would be humorous. The influences of man had inalterably shifted the
future of the natural world. Now, man was aiding nature in restoring a balance.

They passed through the gates and
onto an apron of compacted dirt. A battalion of a couple hundred bulls, clad in
brown military fatigues, their automatic weapons hugged tightly to their
chests, stood before a dense forest. The trees were immense, the forest a thick
tangle of towering conifers and hardwoods.

Men began to sprint in earnest,
Fausto and Bryan among them, for the forest as the clock ticked under a minute.
Fifty-eight seconds until the culling.

“There!” Fausto shouted, pointing
to the left flank of the bulls. “Pick ‘em up, Bryan! It’s going to be close!”

300 yards—maybe a little less. Men
scattered, a majority sprinting directly through the columns of bulls, trying
to disappear into the womb of forest. Fausto selected a spot and began to
separate, running in a straight line for his goal.

The man could scoot. Bryan pumped
his arms, pulling even as the voice intoned
thirty seconds
over the loud
speaker.

They reached the line of
soldiers, Bryan glancing into the eyes of the closest. The bull didn’t flinch,
his gaze trained forward, staring at nothing at all. He was a machine, a simple
machine without an ounce of compassion, designed to exterminate those who would
dare to compound the Authority’s population problem.

To rid the world of another set
of lungs—of another mouth to feed, another source of procreation. 

“We’re close!” Fausto gasped as
they reached the first copse of trees. There were paths in the woods, worn
routes that snaked through thickets of fern and blackberry brush. A carpet of
pine needles and maple leaves crunched beneath their feet.

Twenty seconds.

Bryan thought it was impossible
to go any faster, but they found yet another gear. Every second was precious,
and in each unit of time was a glimpse at what
could
be. A son or a
daughter. A future. A life.

They angled through trees, a
smattering of others sprinting through the woods near them, though Bryan sensed
that most had chosen the densest portion of the forest, directly beyond that
first battery of bulls.

Lungs searing, quads stretched to
capacity, Ruiz and Norton strained across the terrain, leaping logs, darting
from tree to tree, hurtling brush.

Ten seconds.

“There!” Fausto shouted. Sixty
yards away, a gentle hill was peppered with enormous, wispy ferns. There were
few trees—few places to take shelter.

Labor…has…begun!
echoed the robotic voice,
signaling the start of the test. The din of automatic gunfire instantly ripped
into the air, a ruckus of destruction and ruin that arced fresh pangs of fear
through Bryan Norton’s heart.

Fausto hit the hill, began to
scramble up it, rolled to the ground and simply vanished.

It happened that fast.

“Fausto!” Bryan shouted, lurching
up the bank. A hand shot out from beneath a fern.

“Down, damn it! Move!” the man
hissed, and Bryan hit the deck, rolling beneath a canopy of fronds. Fausto was
furiously scooping leaves and soil over himself, smearing dirt onto his face,
smashing it into his hair.

Bryan followed suit, petrified
that they hadn’t created enough separation. Here was their first test; they
would hide in plain view.

“Quiet now,” Fausto whispered,
his tone moderating. “We are nothing—nothing more than
mushrooms
, Bryan.
We exist in the soil, beneath the protection of these ferns. We are safe,
secure down here in the earth.”

Streaked with grime, watching the
forest from between the shifting slats of gently waving fronds, Bryan felt a
stillness welling inside himself. He willed himself down, deep down into the
soil, pressing himself into the earth.

They were still.

Periodic gunfire echoed in the
forest, but it was dimming, growing faint. Bryan could faintly detect men
scampering all around them.

Many minutes passed before he
glimpsed the first bulls. In that time, he had learned a few things. Mushrooms
are, indeed,
extremely
still.

Mushrooms breathe through every
surface of their being, and so did Bryan, feeling himself alive no longer just
in the expansion of his lungs, but throughout every region of his body. He drew
air through his eyelids, through the backs of his hands, through the skin atop
his ankles.

Bryan Norton learned that
mushrooms dream, and he fell into his own—dreams not of Maggie and Eli, but of
the beauty of the woods, of the green vitality of wild places.

He learned that mushrooms were
small, and he too became small.

He learned all of these things as
the bulls advanced on the hill. His right eye cracked a centimeter wide, he
watched as about a dozen bulls advanced slowly on their position, rifles at the
ready. The soldiers picked their way carefully across the terrain, scanning
trees for climbers, using the muzzles of their weapons to probe the trunks of
enormous rotting trees.

Soon the bulls were beyond
ascending the hill; Bryan clamped his eyes shut tight.

Footsteps stippled the ground
inches from his face. He felt the tremor in the soil, the way a mushroom would
feel the passage of a woodland creature.

The bull passed him, leaves
crackling underfoot.

When the sound of their passage
grew faint, Bryan sipped the air. He did not move, and neither did Fausto, and
in that way the men passed the first seventy-eight minutes of Labor.

“Bryan,” Fausto finally whispered.
“We need to move. We have three more hours of daylight. If we mean to find our
angel, we have to get going.”

Bryan took a deep breath. He
tried to move his hand to swipe a leaf from his forehead and realized he
couldn’t move. “I can’t...”

“Flex your fingers. Do it
gradually. It’ll come back to you.”

Bryan made a fist, the pads of
his fingers exploding in a rush of pin pricks as blood rushed into his hand. He
awoke in stages, the agony of disuse powerful in his extremities.

Damn, but life could be hard as a
mushroom.

“I’m going to take a look.
Wait...don’t move,” Fausto said. He parted the fronds and glanced into the
woods. Slowly, he rose and scanned up the hill.

 “Ok,” Fausto said, rubbing his
biceps and forearms. Bryan joined him and they crouched there, considering
their first violent minutes in the throes of Labor.

“Where did you learn that trick?”
Bryan asked.

They were hunched, scampering
from tree to tree, Fausto looking ahead while Bryan watched their flank.

“I read about it in a book.
The
Struggle
. It was written decades ago by one of the Labor pioneers—a fellow
named Bic Trenton. He survived
televised
Labor in Miami, back when the
Authority was publicly executing dissidents.”

Bryan had never heard of the
title. Media on surviving Labor was so scarce—the penalty for trafficking it so
steep—that the spectacle had managed to sustain its macabre mystery through the
long centuries.

They fell into a rhythm,
scampering from tree to tree, pausing periodically as fresh gunfire crackled in
the distance. They trudged up hills and descended into ravines.

It was in the bottom of one of
these ravines that they encountered Derek Gorman.

He sat on a hunk of granite, a
look of dazed complacency in his blue eyes, while a cloud of bacteria
methodically devoured his left arm. There was nothing left below the elbow and
the bacteria were just beginning to digest the flesh of his bicep.

Another batch chewed at the
muscle of his right shoulder.

Gorman slowly raised his head at
the sound of the men skittering down the steep ravine.

“Oh, shit,” Fausto said when he
reached the man. “Oh, no.”

Gorman offered a weak smile.
“Digital obstacle. My advice: don’t touch anything.”

“What was it?” Fausto asked.

Gorman laughed, the sound a
rattle in his chest. “A fucking gun—a prop, of course. I’m so stupid,” he
replied, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking, you know? I saw
it... and I just reached for it without thinking. I slung it over my shoulder.
Instant pain.”

“And now?” Bryan asked.

Gorman shook his head. “Can’t
feel a thing. I guess they secrete a chemical or something. Industrious little
boogers, ain’t they?” He lifted the nub of his arm, a portion of gleaming bone
terminating in the ragged meat of his shoulder. “Won’t be long now.”

Fausto sighed. He bit his lip.
“You want...you want me to help?”

Gorman looked at him, a mixture
of confusion and gratitude in his eyes. “You’d do that?”

Fausto nodded. “Quick as I can.”

Gorman blinked up at the gray
sky. He was crying. “What’s your name?”

“Fausto Ruiz.”

“My name is Derek Gorman. My
wife’s name is Annabelle. We’re having a little girl named Rachel. I want
you...I want you to tell them how much I love them. Tell them I’m so sorry that
I let them down.” His words ended in a little sob. “Tell them I’ll wait for
them—that I’ll be watching over them. Tell them that I love them.”

Fausto nodded. “I will, Derek. I
will, I promise.”

He slipped behind the man and, in
one efficient motion, snapped his neck. Gorman’s body slumped off the rock and
Bryan watched as Ruiz turned and plunged into the creek, fording it quickly and
scaling the far banks.

Who
was
this man?

Bryan followed, and they slipped
back into their routine. “Biology. Technology,” Fausto said. “The Authority has
no scruples. They’ll take any advantage to execute their policies. We need to
do the same. This angel—his name is Fornoy. He will be
our
advantage—
our
equalizer.”

“You know his name?” Bryan said.
He studied the sky—a thick blanket of gray clouds—and guessed it was after
3:00. They’d made it to their first goal.

Ruiz nodded. “He’s a legend. The
Authority has been tracking him for almost twenty years. They’d just as soon
have him out of the Portland Labor field and be done with him, but he won’t
go—won’t accept amnesty. He’s like a shadow—a subterranean ghost. He
believes
in our cause.”

“Our cause?”

Ruiz glanced over his shoulder,
surprised. “Yeah, our cause. He believes in fatherhood.”

Time compressed and the light
dimmed. A dull excitement kindled in Bryan’s belly. He knew that many had
already died—victims of gunfire and, like Derek Gorman, digital obstacles. He
estimated they’d covered two or three miles in their methodical fashion. After
a time they found themselves on the outskirts of a lush meadow. In the center
of the field five bulls, weapons at the ready, surrounded a trio of potential
fathers. The prisoners knelt on the ground, hands locked behind their heads.

“Shit,” Fausto whispered. He
swiped at his brow. “Ok, this is it, Bryan. This is our line in the sand.”

“What are talking about?”

“It’s just another test,” he
replied, his sleepy eyes now wide open. “Do we help these men? With our
assistance, the numbers are even—five of them and five of us.”

“Fausto,” Bryan said,
incredulous, “those bulls have
guns
. Are you serious?”

“Of course I am,” Ruiz replied.
“Put yourself in their shoes.”

Bryan did. He thought of himself
in the center of that meadow and then pictured Maggie; he conjured the images
of his father and his mother. He sighed. “Ok, Fausto. I trust you.”

While Norton had been lost in
thought, Ruiz had scoured their environment. There were things they could use.