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Shadow of the Pharm

by Damian Rentoule

The Pharm Burns

 

Above the sleeping bodies, the Pharm burned beautifully.

The inert forms on the military cot lay motionless for a full eighteen hours. Lord Henry and Hana had needed the rest. Escaping the Pharm had been hard work. They slept heavily in their tunnel hideaway, just a few miles away from the flames of the Pharm. It was a long time, a lifetime in fact, since they had felt completely safe, and now a new life awaited them. But what was this life to hold?

The Vice President pondered his new charges. The three fugitives had barely made it out of the Pharm alive. Lord Henry, formerly known as Donor 987, the organ donor whose expiration date had come and gone, had saved Chloe the Great from the slow death of the fatal addiction that came to all children on the Pharm. A rare unmedicated donor, Lord Henry had been spared the addiction because of an unusual request from his recipient. The man who was to harvest his neural tissue had considerable influence and arranged for his Donor, No. 987, to grow up without the brain numbing medications. When Lord Henry eventually escaped the processing facility shortly before his harvest, his only plan was the killing of his intended recipient. It was a simple plan until he met the man’s daughter, Chloe. Her eyes were all wrong. He had known instantly that she was an imposter, only pretending to take her daily medication, an act of defiance that would have had her instantly repurposed as a donor - a death sentence. Living longer than he had expected, heavily armed, the long-smoldering hate having fled his heart after meeting Chloe, Lord Henry had decided to save instead of kill. By saving the child, he had saved a little piece of himself, a deeply hidden humanity that he had yet to find. This moment changed everything, setting up a series of events that brought the Pharm to its knees.

Lord Henry rescued the little girl who was so impressed with his rather regal name that she adopted her new one, Chloe the Great, before leaving her parents’ house forever. She fled with him into an uncertain future, uncertain except for the fact that she knew it was going to be better than whatever had waited for her at home.

The Vice President shifted his gaze. Next to Lord Henry with an arm protectively over his chest slept the raven-haired midwife, Hana. She had saved the lives of Lord Henry and Chloe the Great when all was lost. A worker in the industry she despised above all else. Bringing children into the world for one purpose only - to stock the processing plants known as Pharm Sites. The Pharm needed its organs. Demand was great. Profits, beyond comprehension. Hana had joined Lord Henry and Chloe the Great in a series of dangerous escapades that had ultimately ended in the catastrophe that slowly burned above them on the other side of the wall. Yet, the Vice President knew the Pharm would rebuild itself. The economic clout of the Pharm was just too great. It hadn’t ended with their escape; it had just begun. He didn’t have the heart to break this to the two sleeping fugitives, at least not yet. He would let them sleep and try to be as honest as he could over breakfast.

Absent was Chloe the Great. Unfortunately, she had been shot in the leg during the escape so was being cared for in the infirmary. The Vice President’s heart ached that someone so young was involved in this deadly business. Luckily, from what he knew of his little charge, she was tough as nails. He had to keep reminding himself that she was only seven years old. Her short, hard, solitary life had matured her beyond her years, almost as if she had skipped the innocent simplicity of childhood altogether.  

Lord Henry and Hana woke while the Vice President maintained his silent vigil, protective over their sleeping forms. ‘Good morning,’ he announced with a smile at the first signs of movement, ‘you’ve been snoring so loudly the soldiers had to move into the tunnel for some peace and quiet.’ 

Lord Henry, rubbing his eyes sleepily was taken aback by the comment, not used to people making jokes. He was raised on the Pharm Site as a neural donor, the only person who wasn’t drugged. The pharmaceuticals didn’t do much for a person’s sense of humor.  Hana punched him in the arm and laughed. She had befriended a small network of unmedicated imposters in the city, so was used to the humor that they shared, hidden from the world. Humor would mark you as an imposter and get you killed on the Pharm. Lord Henry, growing up on a Pharm Site, had never met a person capable of a joke. He replied apologetically, ‘OK, I get it. Sorry, I’m getting used to people saying things that they don’t mean, and meaning things that they don’t say. It’s a bit confusing you know!’

The Vice President and Hana laughed even more. Lord Henry didn’t see what was so funny. He did, however, appreciate their light heartedness after the darkness of recent events. He was determined to understand humor, although he knew that if he told them this, they would laugh even more. It would come. While they got cleaned up, the Vice President prepared breakfast.

‘What’s it like off the Pharm?’ Hana asked the Vice President over a piece of heavily buttered toast with an ample spread of sweet, blackberry jam. Breakfast was oatmeal gruel on the Pharm, always. Less choice made life simpler. The Pharm was that sort of place. The jam seemed to be the most delicious thing Hana had ever tasted. Life off the Pharm was the question that they had been asking themselves their whole lives and the taste of jam seemed to be the start of an answer. They were the first residents of the Pharm, in recent history at least, who were actually going to find out, although they knew the Pharm’s reach was long and insidious so any joy they felt at their escape was cautious at best.

The Vice President answered, trying to be as honest as possible, ‘For most people, I think it’s not too bad. For you three, well, I’m not so sure.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’ asked Hana, wanting, but not really wanting to know. ‘Just tell us straight,’ she demanded, ‘no sugar coating. We’ve just got off the Pharm. I think we can handle it.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said, ‘it’s just that you three have finally escaped the horror of the Pharm and I don’t have the heart to tell you that you were probably safer inside the walls.’

‘Well, for someone who doesn’t have the heart to tell us, you’re certainly doing a good job of telling us,’ Hana chided him with a smile.

‘Who's going to be after us now?’ Lord Henry asked. ‘Surely the guards can’t operate outside the walls.’

‘Different dogs, same master,’ the Vice President answered cryptically. They all wanted to hear of the masters, or the dogs for that matter, but he didn’t elaborate. ‘Plenty of time to discuss the future. First, though, you need to know a thing or two of the past,’ he continued, hunched over his breakfast, looking down into the crunchy things in the bowl that he had poured milk onto.

Mirroring his body language, as we tend to do for those we are trying to empathize with, Hana looked into her bowl as well. She liked the simplicity of this new cereal, the sweetness of the crunchy bits, yet was unable to decipher the taste. To a mouth unused to sugar covered, over-processed foods, breakfast cereal was a mystery. What did it taste like? 

‘Outside the walls, things can seem less honest,’ the Vice President continued, ‘as at least on the Pharm, they look you in the eye and tell you that they plot your murder. They even give you the date. Tattoo it on your wrist and neck. That’s honesty,’ he replied, pulling Hana away from her wonderings at the genius of breakfast cereal.

Lord Henry had been listening carefully. ‘That kind of honesty is overrated. It’s the cruelest part of the Pharm, but only for the unmedicated. For the rest, the medicated donors, it doesn’t matter at all. They kill us all anyway. Sometimes I think it may be better to be drugged senseless before the slaughter.’  They all sat, eating in silence, processing the words that Lord Henry had just uttered. Was it better not to know?

Chloe the Great had finally risen, limping due to the stitches in her leg, drawn to the magic of the sweet cereal, standing quietly in the doorway, ‘Lovely conversation. You three really know how to brighten your morning meal. How about we leave the despair until at least we have woken up properly? The dark, dreary world will still be waiting for you to moan and groan about. What’s for breakfast?’ Chloe the Great definitely did not have the conversational ability of a regular seven year old. The Vice President had suspected that without anyone to talk to, her own internal dialogue while staring out her living room window, pretending to be sedated, in fear of her life, had been so intense that she had participated in many years worth of conversation with herself - serious conversations that a child her age would never have been exposed to; life and death questions. She had skipped childhood. Even knowing this, the nature of her conversations was often a surprise. Yet, she was just a little girl, albeit with an outlook on life well beyond her years.

Lord Henry and Hana moved over to hug their sassy little friend. Shot, yet full of life, she was limping. Fortunately the bullet hadn’t hit anything major in her skinny leg, grazing her thigh, causing a nasty gash. Fortunately, the initial stitches had stemmed the bleeding. It had been deep, but would heal well with no permanent damage, just a nice scar. Good news. She had rested soundly and was eating well. Although she was still deeply suspicious of any type of medication after a lifetime of people trying to drug her into submission, she took her antibiotics and actually swallowed them. This was progress. ‘So, what’s the plan?’ she asked in her not so seven year old, matter of fact manner.

‘You seem not to recall that we’re not great with plans,’ answered Hana, the three smiling at the understated truth. The Vice President also smiled, their good humor infectious, even for a man with too much on his mind.

‘What about the President that you two shamefully kidnapped? Is he going to help us, despite your rude treatment of him?’ The questions of Chloe the Great continued.

Lord Henry and Hana also looked at the man who had recently saved them from certain death in the tunnel. They trusted him for what he had done. They owed him their lives, but they also trusted him because they could sense a goodness they had not met on the Pharm. The kindness in his eyes betrayed a pain borne of sheltering others from the horror of the truth. A resident of the Pharm knew the true value of this. Their biggest problem was that they had spent their whole lives with medicated residents and donors on the Pharm, mere shells of people, with the emotional responses appropriate to their role. No more. No Less. The three escapees were slowly awakening emotions that for different reasons they had kept buried, or had not known they possessed. It was extremely difficult to judge these un-medicated off-Pharm enigmas like the Vice President and the kind, quietly spoken soldiers and nurses. Regardless, they put their trust in this person with the patient, troubled eyes because their instincts told them that he was a just man. They trusted their instincts. However, they had not been so impressed with the tight-lipped President whom they had briefly kidnapped to introduce him to the truth behind the Pharm’s organ transplants. They had forced him to watch the cold-blooded murder of a donor, but even then couldn’t read his true reaction. They hoped that the President too, was a just man.

The Vice President attempted to answer all of Chloe the Great’s questions. ‘The President is a good man, I believe, but it would be a mistake to think of him as the most powerful person in the world. He’s the most powerful puppet of the most powerful organization in the world. Puppets can be replaced. You say that his guards saved your life after you kidnapped him and showed him an organ transplant in action. I’d say that his guards always follow his orders, without question, so he could potentially be on our side, but right now I am assuming that he would be forced to have us all killed immediately if he knew what we were up to. Upsetting the political balance on the Pharm is a dangerous business. He may not even survive this himself. I have known him a long time. I believe that he’ll back us when we really need it.’

Lord Henry had been wondering about the Vice President’s choice of words. ‘Why did you say that he was a puppet for an organization rather than a nation? Isn’t he the US President?’

‘It’s a little hard to say sometimes where a nation begins and ends. Do corporations exist within nations, or the other way around? The Pharm has been around for about 80 years now as you know from the historical account that your Head Caregiver so meticulously prepared. The nation state started to replace kingdoms as political entities only a few hundred years ago. It was a relatively new concept; people being bound to the idea of a country, rather than a king, queen, sultan, empress or the like. Over the centuries, the monarch's’ power faded, while the power of presidents and prime ministers grew. People had attached their identity to the monarch. Then it was to their nation and the political leaders. Now, the President's’ power fades while the corporations’ power grows. Since the beginning of the Pharm, the corridors of the corporations have been where the real power has resided. The Pharm didn’t cause this, it’s symptomatic of the shift,’ the Vice President explained, while slowly eating his cereal. ‘Basically, for us, this means that the President may not be able to help us out, even if he wants to, at least not now. I’m guessing that he could be easily removed if the larger global corporations, who all have major shares in the Pharm, got wind of him doing anything to damage the Pharm’s stock prices. They wouldn’t thank him for that. We will have to do this alone, but I still have some friends, a few you have already met.’ He gestured to the foot that could be seen just outside the door, one of the soldiers who had rescued them two days before. ‘We all have something in common that may surprise you. There’s much to discuss.’

Chloe the Great, never one to wait, interrupted the lecture on modern politics, ‘That’s all well and good, but what’s the plan? Lord Henry hasn’t shot or blown up anything for days now. He must be getting bored. What do you want us to do?’

‘OK, Chloe the Great, the plan is very simple. I want to kidnap Pharm children and I need your help. That’s it,’ the Vice President answered her question, leaving her lost for words, an unusual state for Chloe the Great.

‘I may not be the most knowledgeable on societal niceties outside of the Pharm, but kidnapping kids? Isn’t that generally frowned upon?’ Hana asked, teasing. The Vice President remained serious.

‘It has to be children,’ the Vice President countered. ‘From your tale, it may be useless to try and take the adults, a lifetime of medication damaging their psychological development beyond repair, but if we could get our hands on the children, there may be hope.’

‘Hope of what?’ Lord Henry asked the Vice President.

‘Redemption. For the Pharm kids. Perhaps for us all.’

Chloe the Great closed her eyes tight, put her head down and slowly started sobbing at the mention of redemption. Her parents, after she had kidnapped them, given them the withdrawal antidote and held them until the drugs were out of their system, were left as mere shells of the people they should have been. The drugs were drained from their system, yet love, even for your child, was something a person needed to learn.  Her parents had betrayed her to the guards, not knowing any better. She understood, yet that hurt more than anything else they had done to her on the Pharm. She had not given up on them though, quietly planning to take them off the Pharm one day to teach them how to love. It had to be possible. The others would support her, she knew. Hers was an unconditional love and if it were possible for her parents to learn what it meant to feel this, Chloe the Great would find a way.

Lord Henry was wondering where the Vice President was going with the conversation. He took Chloe the Great onto his lap to finish her tears. They all knew the origin of the sadness. He asked ‘Are you talking about taking children off the Pharm?’

A silent nod from the Vice President in response. As much as it terrified them, the three escapees all liked the idea. Chloe the Great looked up from Lord Henry’s shoulder, the silent tears abating.

Lord Henry, with a worried expression on his face, a mix of fear and confusion, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving the children from the bone saw and the pigs, but we just barely got out with our lives, and you said that we were the first to escape the Pharm in eighty years. Can it be done?’

The Vice President smiled, almost to himself, as you do before revealing a secret that’s very close to your heart, wanting to tell, but afraid of releasing the knowledge into the light. He pulled up the cuff of his uniform to reveal a scar on his wrist where the three fugitives all had their own tattoos, a single date of birth for Chloe the Great and Hana, who had roles on the Pharm and were therefore residents. Lord Henry, as a donor, had an extra tattooed date, his expiration date - the date of his death by transplant. For donors, there was also an extra set on the back of the neck, just below the bottom part of the skull, just to be sure there were no mistakes before transplants. The organs of donors were too valuable to risk a mistake. Once removed, organs were tricky to put back. The expiration date had passed and yet Lord Henry was still very much alive, a rare occurrence indeed. From the size of the scar on the Vice President’s wrist, it looked like he may have had two dates as well. Chloe the Great stood up and walked behind the seated Vice President and pulled down his collar. Another scar. He had been a donor too. How could this be? Nobody escaped the Pharm.

‘Sam,’ the Vice President called to the guard stationed at the door, ‘do you mind having a seat? Little Chloe the Great would like to inspect you.’

‘Yes, Mr Vice President.’

Chloe the Great moved cautiously to the now seated soldier in her military fatigues and gently pulled up her sleeve to find a similar scar to the Vice President’s, but very faint, almost undetectable if you weren’t looking for it. Moving around behind her, Chloe the Great gently pulled down the soldier’s collar and peered inside. She nodded to her fellow escapees; the pretty soldier had been a donor.

‘How many of you are there?’ asked Hana and was surprised by the answer.

Smuggling Children

 

‘There are thirteen of us,’ the Vice President began. ‘There are no more. Every one of the eight soldiers that you’ve met in these tunnels has a similar scar. Four more are working in the government in various, convenient places. Every one of us was a donor. We didn’t escape ourselves as you did. We were released as children, smuggled out. I was the first. I’m sixty-six this year. It was on my seventh birthday that they gave me my second tattoo, marking me as a donor. A doctor who was in charge of my physical examinations smuggled me out. She had a brother who worked as a train driver, delivering corn to the outside through this very tunnel. He was an imposter, as was she, only pretending to take the daily medication. The doctor was in charge of her brother’s physical examinations, so he survived as an imposter for many years.  Management rotates doctors now to avoid the danger of this type of relationship. The Pharm learns fast, but this was nearly sixty years ago.’

‘The doctor’s brother, the train driver, hid me beneath a layer of corn and gave me a pipe to breathe through. They didn’t have the large-scale infrared scanners that they use nowadays. I was simply shipped out with the corn. I could see light through the thin layer of corn that covered me. He told me to wait until it went from light to dark and then to light again. The train would slow after a few minutes and that was the time to jump from the carriage before the train picked up its full speed. He told me to run and hide, my only instructions on how to survive in the outside world. That’s what I did. I ran for a week, drinking water from streams and stealing eggs at night, sleeping under trees. I don’t know why, but I always kept the Pharm wall within sight. Sixty feet of razor wire topped concrete is easy to keep in sight. It had no guns mounted on the walls in those days, but was an impregnable barrier nonetheless. I was so scared and it was the only thing I knew, the only familiarity in an alien world. On my seventh night, I hid in a barn, exhausted, but was found by the farmer. She recognized the tattoos on my wrist and neck and I found shelter. I can still remember the kindness, and sadness, in her eyes. She and her husband saw me, but also saw another child that had long been lost to them. Lost to the Pharm, of course. In these parts, in those days everyone had lost someone to the Pharm when the walls went up. The couple who carried with them a veil of sadness raised me as their own.’

‘In time, with some questionable legal documents, I was adopted. The farmers had lost a daughter who had married into a family within the Pharm walls before the walls had closed. They hadn’t seen her for twenty years, but had heard the stories from those early days. A doctor, friend of the family, burned the tattoos off me, which is why my scars are more noticeable than the others. Later, we removed the tattoos of the twelve escaped donors more delicately. I remember the smell of the searing flesh more than the incredible pain. It was one of the happiest moments of my short life.’

‘We could always see the Pharm walls from our farm, couldn’t escape the view, but wouldn’t have been able to tear ourselves away from it in any case. We were all obsessed with that wall for different reasons, trapped within its shadow. As I grew up, I could think of nothing else. I knew what the Pharm would have done to me, knew what would have happened if I had taken that first pill, if the doctor hadn’t taken pity on me, risking her life and that of her brother for a small scared boy.  On the outside, I learned everything that there was to learn about the Pharm, which wasn’t much besides lies and propaganda from official sources, and rumors and speculation from unofficial ones. Nobody really knew and only a small group, people like my parents, actually cared.’

‘I eventually left my family’s farm, but always spent as much time here with my parents as possible, constantly drawn back to this place over the years. There were times when my parents almost seemed happy, yet the Pharm wall with its sinister shadow in the distance seemed to taunt them. Even as a child, sensing their pain, I swore to myself to bring the wall down, to destroy that shadow for them. As I grew up, I realized that the wall was much more than the concrete structure looming on our horizon. The walls were held up by economics, by politics, by our ability to hide from unpleasant questions. The shadow was thrown by the brutality of those in power. It was thrown by the Pharm’s belief in its own indestructibility.  Yet, strength doesn’t exist without weakness. I’ve been searching for this all my life, and now you three may have just found the answer.’

‘What did we find?’ Chloe the Great asked, jumping up from her seat, racing around the table to confront the Vice President, as if she didn’t want to wait the thousandth of a second that his voice would take to travel across the length of the table.

With his hands up in a protective gesture, a smile on his lips, he asked her to be patient, for a tale needed to be told. She sat on the floor at his feet, a partial compromise.

‘As a child, the Pharm wall and its relentlessly shifting shadow constricted my life, consumed me, but it gave me a focus, a burning drive that those around me lacked. I focused, did well at school, entered the military, fought on both the Mexican and Canadian borders during the short-lived expansion incidents, entered politics and did well, as you can guess by my current title.’

The three listeners picked up a slight trace of irony in his last remarks, yet didn’t interrupt. They would find out about his political misgivings in due time.

‘There was a brief period of ‘unrest’ on the Pharm twenty years ago. I was a captain in the army by then and had volunteered for a Pharm support post, not a popular military station. Eventually, I was put in charge of a small company of 92 soldiers to protect the Pharm’s tunnel outside the three-mile limit. We were part of a battalion of over 5000 soldiers, which guarded the Pharm’s borders. It was much larger than a regular battalion, but this was not a regular operation. It was labor intensive, but had never been dangerous. Coordination was simple. The Pharm took a lot of watching, but it was a safe posting for a soldier, much safer than the Mexican and Canadian borders since the expansion. Within the battalion, the 92 soldiers of our company were charged with the security of the tunnel, housed within its damp walls. We all trained in the light, above ground, yet lived in the dark below with the constant passage of the train traveling back and forth, filled with the wealthy vultures that preyed on the organs of the donors within. Living in the dark with the constant rattle of the trains, it was not a popular posting. Within the Tunnel Company a specialized containment platoon of 24 soldiers were the only ones authorized to enter the walls and this is where I found myself.’

‘A bright yellow segment of the tunnel marked the section underneath the wall. As we were stationed on the eastern side of the Pharm, the wall was a massive structure following a straight line three miles to the west of the river, which in years past had marked the eastern borders of the former states of Kansas and Nebraska. In this way, a small three-mile wide sliver of these two states remained between the Pharm wall and the river. It was now officially part of the three-mile military zone separating the Pharm’s borders from the rest of the nation, and the rest of the world for that matter. This three-mile military zone encircled the entire Pharm, protected by the 5000 soldiers of the Pharm Battalion. The battalion occupying this zone is, as far as I know, the most expensive corporate security operation ever assembled. All paid for with taxpayers dollars, in the interest of national security of course.’

‘The Tunnel Company was a highly specialized unit, yet we didn’t see much action. Such is the life of a soldier, particularly one in the Pharm Battalion. Shoot to kill orders stood for anyone trying to either enter or leave the walls, technically enforced by the soldiers stationed around the perimeter, yet the only things actually shot were the local rabbits. The minefields inside the walls and the automatic armaments on top make it impossible to approach the wall from the inside. From the outside, no one in their right mind would try to get into the Pharm. If they did get in, they wouldn’t survive the kill-zone between the wall and the minefields. Below ground, in eighty years, not a single unauthorized person has tried to move through the tunnel beyond the three-mile limit and we don’t even have the rabbits down here to break the monotony. Soldiers bided their time until they could arrange to transfer out. It was that sort of place. No one gave much thought to what they were trying to keep in, or out. All we did was check the trains, full of passengers going in with old organs, coming out with new ones. There were also the freight trains, which we ran through massive scanning machines. Nothing alive could pass undetected. We weren’t worried about anything else. Just live bodies. Pharm Management did not want their organs running away. We weren’t encouraged to question why. ’

‘A year of rigorous training and tedious drills had passed since my initial arrival as captain of the company securing the tunnel and one day a simple order arrived. It gave coordinates for what was termed complete containment. In everyday language, that means to kill everything - every living thing, no exceptions. We wore combat HAZMAT suits and the explanation provided to the 24 troops going in was that a serious virus had broken out. All residents within the containment area were to be killed and bodies incinerated to prevent the contagion spreading throughout the Pharm’s general population and potentially outside the walls. We all suspected that there was something not quite right about this, an ulterior motive, something that the Pharm wanted kept quiet, but such thoughts could be extremely dangerous. You can contain without killing. That’s what we had all been trained for. However, a soldier is generally not afforded question time after receipt of orders, so the dissention was kept to grumblings within the ranks. A job was to be done, and we were to do it. Simple.’

‘We entered the Pharm via the same tunnel that we found you in, the train loaded with our containment equipment, which according to our orders, were instruments of death, not life. I had a team of 24 highly efficient killers. We would get the job done. A team of trucks housed in the US military section of the Enclave took us to the Pharm Site. It was No. 6024.’

Lord Henry stared at the Vice President, ‘My old home?’

‘Yes, but no longer,’ he simply said, ‘you are free now, and it was never your home. It was never anyone’s home.’

Lord Henry nodded at the truth in these words, inviting him to continue.

The Vice President continued, ‘A problem arose, however. There were children, seemingly healthy children. Not just anyone is able to put a gun to a child’s head and pull the trigger. It’s a weakness that has plagued armies for as long as people have waged war on each other, and that has been a long time. Although these soldiers were highly trained professionals, they weren’t cold-blooded killers and a ward of children was found within the contamination zone. They needed exterminating. The soldiers would have refused if I had asked them, so I took care of the children personally. Management was so impressed with my dedication that the incident later sparked a meteoric rise for me within the armed forces, and then into politics. These days, all you need to get ahead in the world is to be prepared to kill a ward of defenseless children. My Vice Presidency is largely due to this, I believe.’

Chloe the Great couldn’t bare this confession, ‘Tell us it’s not true. You couldn’t have killed them. You couldn’t have.’

Suddenly, he was on his feet, moving toward Chloe the Great who had been on the floor directly in front of him, but was now backing away. He made a placating gesture with his hands. ‘Don’t worry. I said I took care of them. It’s the truth. The guards that saved you last night are those same kids, a little older and wiser, much better trained for sure, slightly better behaved, but still the same kids, with all their own organs as well. I’ll let the Captain tell you the tale. I don’t like to think about it too much, or at least as little as I can. Even though I had known all my life that the Pharm had planned my murder, this ward full of children, earmarked for extermination was my first real glimpse of the horror of the place, just a glimpse, but it was enough to change my life forever. This is where our story starts, so you need to hear.’ 

Sam Angelis, now Captain of Tunnel Company, had been sitting at the table since Chloe the Great examined her wrist and neck for scars. She had a serious face, thought Chloe the Great. She didn’t smile much, except a polite upturn of the side of her lips, an almost imperceptible movement. Sam didn’t need to smile to show her kindness. She concentrated on you like you mattered, as if you were really there and this was important. For Hana, Lord Henry and Chloe the Great, growing up on the Pharm, this was extremely unusual, yet they enjoyed it immensely. It almost made them believe that they mattered. They wondered if everyone on the outside was like this.

‘I remember the first time I saw the Vice President,’ she began, smiling sadly at the recollection. ‘I was just a little girl, slightly older than you are now, Chloe the Great. He wasn’t dressed in black like the Pharm guards. He had a bright yellow suit on instead of the uniforms we were used to seeing.  Any alteration in routine on a Pharm Site was bad news. We all knew that. We hadn’t seen that strange uniform before and were all terrified.

More strangely though, we could see, through his plastic helmet, that he didn’t have the guards’ eyes. Back then, children under ten weren’t medicated and I was nine at the time. We were all between six and nine years old, just waiting for our medication to begin. It was thought to be a waste of their precious pharmaceuticals to drug us too early, and they got longer from our livers without the drugs.’

Captain Sam Angelis’s listeners were transfixed, even the Vice President who knew this story all too well.

She continued, ‘The guard in the yellow plastic uniform had eyes that were alive. We could tell, because ours were too. It was unusual, however that day was an unusual day. We had seen the adult donors being shot that morning, lined up in front of the pig pens and gunned down by regular guards in black, supervised by more men in the strange yellow uniforms and masks. The men in yellow looked as horrified as we all felt. The man in our room, the one holding the gun, stood and stared at us. As kids, we often talked about the black uniforms of the guards. We used to think that the black made it easier to get the blood out. The bright yellow plastic one must have been easy to wash blood from, a new invention perhaps, to make the killing easier. We knew this man in the murderers’ uniform was going to kill us all. We didn’t cry or yell, we just stood there by the wall, moving backwards as far from him as possible, and waited. I don’t know why. I guess we were just so used to being victims that it’s hard to see yourself any other way. We were only kids. We stood calmly, terrified, waiting to die.’

The three fugitives looked at the confident, heavily armed Company Captain who sat before them and couldn’t imagine her ever being a victim. She had their attention.

‘The man in the bright yellow murderer’s uniform stood there for the longest time, holding his gun. I actually thought that he was trying to decide which end of the line to start shooting first - you must have to make a decision like this, I had thought at the time. But he wasn’t looking at us. He was tense and seemed to be thinking hard, not what we were used to. He kept glancing at the door, as if he was going to shoot anything that came through. Even though I knew it was impossible, I could have sworn that he stood there as our protector, rather than our murderer. I will always remember that. How could I have known? Finally, he put down his gun and counted us. We were twelve in all, six boys and six girls all standing along a whitewashed brick wall. We didn’t know it, but we had actually assumed a firing squad line-up. We were making his job very easy. Well, he didn’t pick up his gun and finish us off, obviously,’ she indicated, with a small wave encompassing her very much alive body, sitting at the table telling the story.

‘He went to a corner and pushed a table off a large rug, peeled the rug back, revealing a trap door which led to a small storage room not big enough to be considered a true cellar, but big enough to fit ten frightened children. Out of his pocket emerged a handful of shiny wrappers. He placed one in each of our hands and placed his finger to his lips - quiet. We unwrapped the shiny material and placed the brown square into our mouths, almost in unison. Chocolate. None of us had ever tasted anything like it. We never had sweets. If they could transplant teeth, the Pharm would have made an even greater fortune. The taste was magic, melting into a sweet liquid in our hungry mouths. I didn’t want to swallow it, to lose that perfection. To this day, I associate chocolate with freedom, the sweet smell of kindness and life, an escape from cruelty and death. You can imagine that after this, he had our complete and undivided attention. We would have followed him anywhere. He told us all to go down the ladder and remain quiet. We were all good at following orders without question. Only ten went down. Two were leaving with him. I was one of those first two to go.’ 

‘He brought a white gurney into the room and asked us to climb into a large black zip-up bag, a body bag it’s called, we found out later. Before we could climb in, he had to take out several large plastic bags full of red liquid, lots of blood. He splattered it all over the white wall, bag after bag. It was a huge mess. He had it on his hands and across his uniform, even a smudge on his mask where his cheek would have been. He lifted his gun and fired a full clip into the wall about three feet from the ground - chest shots for a child. We later found out that all the other kids in the room thought that he had shot the two of us kids. They waited their own turn, hoping that at least he would give them another piece of the brown square in the shiny wrapper before he did it. Even now, many of them wake up at night in that little room. It never really leaves you. The Pharm always stays.’

‘We both climbed into the same black bag, very much alive, and he injected us with a heavy tranquilizer before gently rubbing some blood onto our clothes and zipping us into our new dark home. He strapped us onto the gurney with wide belts and told us not to move an inch, if we wanted to live. We wanted to live. More than anything, even enough to stand the sickening stench of the blood inside that bag.’

‘We were wheeled out and we could hear him telling the other soldiers that the job was done and that no one was to enter the room, for any reason. His tone scared us. Thinking back, I am sure that none of the soldiers would have wanted to see what had been done in that room. Blood had been smeared on the outside of one of the bags. The soldiers kept their distance. He had told them that the children all needed to be examined back in the tunnels for the pathogen that was affecting the children differently than the adults. Orders were given for our bodies to be taken into the contamination room in the tunnel bunker. The tranquilizer must have started working about then, as the next thing I saw was a worried face in a brightly lit room with six plastic bags laid out in a row. Six plastic sleeping bags for a macabre sleepover.’

‘The soldiers were told that there was an incinerator in the tunnels to dispose of the remains after the examination, so he filled up a transport car with six full gurneys and took them personally to the bunker. The soldiers did not protest when he offered to do this personally, sickened by what they had been party to, they accepted this without question. With the Pharm having eyes and ears in the military, the Vice President couldn’t trust anyone, not with this. In the eyes of his soldiers, former friends, he had become a monster and he shouldered this burden alone.’

‘Not one of the soldiers ever spoke to him again, all requesting transfer from his unit. He was to be shunned for the rest of his military career for what they thought he had done that day. Soon after this took place, the Pharm took over their own containment of outbreaks and the US military breathed a sigh of relief that their responsibilities would be confined to the outside of the wall. Stories of the Pharm were too unbelievable to be given much credence, however the soldiers were glad that they would never need to go back to inside that place.’

‘We were unzipped some time later in a white room, the room that Chloe the Great was just treated in. I was the first to awaken having received my injection first. We all woke up within the space of about half an hour, thinking that we must be already dead. We didn’t understand that we were off the Pharm. None of us had heard of fairy tales and wouldn’t have believed it even if he had told us. We were all grounded in a brutal reality, and this miraculous escape didn’t fit with any past experience. There was no hope on the Pharm. It only ever ended one way. We all stayed in his private quarters in the bunker, as the whole area was conveniently under strict quarantine. We were smuggled out into the daylight over a period of two weeks. Our new home was his adopted parents’ farm and over the course of a few weeks, we were all divided up among six surrounding farms, all within sight of the wall that separated our new and old lives. We had new homes, new families, new identities, and a new community, one with a sense of purpose and hope.’

Lord Henry asked the question that had been bothering him, as something about Sam’s story didn’t quite fit with his experience of the Pharm, ‘Why would they have ordered the murder of the donors without using the organs? What was the outbreak?’

‘It wasn’t an outbreak. It was a message; a very clear one,’ Sam replied.

‘To whom?’

‘Pharm Management calls them Lost Ones. They refer to themselves as Freeborn. It’s a distinction both sides take very seriously. They’re a quiet people that the Pharm has underestimated, hasn’t grown to fear nearly enough and it may well be the Pharm’s undoing.’

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