ILLUSIONS AND LIES: Chapter 10

We hardly got in the door of the tactic building when Abigail looked up and asked me where the map was.

“Map? Oh, yeah. I had completely forgotten.” I pulled the folded paper from my bra and walked across the expansive room to Abigail. “Here. I stuck it down my shirt when I was watching the soul-seekers try to kill you. After that so much happened, I forgot I even had it.”

“Ah, yes,” Andy reflected. “I hear you have a most powerful talent. I don’t believe we’ve seen anything quite like what you can do, young Charlie.”

“It’s no big deal. I just did what I had to, to save your daughter. She would’ve done the same for me.”

“Perhaps,” he mused, with a hand on his chin as he walked away from us to sit down at the table.

“What is the map for, anyway?”

“Come, Charlie, sit. Let me tell you a story.”

Richard grinned and nudged me to go to the table and sit with the Colonel. I settled in a chair opposite Andy and waited to be regaled.

“I was working my way up in the Army, while Ruth climbed the corporate ladder. We were in our early twenties, newly married, and wanted desperately to start a family. However, we had a lot of trouble getting pregnant –the doctors said there was nothing we could do. We should adopt or give up on the dream.”

Ruth had come to stand by her husband’s side while he spoke. “Andy blamed himself. But it’s just the way of nature sometimes, no one was to blame. Besides, the folly was with my body, not his.” Her hand was on his shoulder as she spoke.

“Ruth came home from work one day overwhelmed with joy,” Andy continued. “The company she worked for had taken their research in fertility out of the lab and were beginning human testing. She told me she’d volunteered us to join the testing program.”

“You worked for the NDU?” I looked at Ruth with too much shock on my face. She blushed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“It’s okay, love,” she said, and took the seat beside her husband. “I’m not proud of my involvement, but some good may come out of it yet.”

“Shall I continue, ladies?” Andy glanced between Ruth and I, and I asked him to, please go on.

“Despite Ruth’s involvement in the company, we didn’t really know what we were getting into. We were young and desperate for a child of our own. The NDU made grand promises of children free from illness, and smarter than any child born before them. We believed them eagerly.

“When Abigail was six, however, she started to display considerable talents –our dog was hit by a car, Abigail put her hands on him and he got up and walked off as if nothing had happened. That’s when Ruth approached Gavin. Gavin was head of the science team, in charge of experiments and such. She told him what Abigail could do and that she was scared for her daughter. She asked Gavin not to tell the department and Gavin understood her fear but he had to put a stop to the tests until they had determined the implications of Abigail’s abilities. So Gavin told the head of the science department and that’s when they started hunting us. Well, shortly thereafter.

“They had us bring Abigail in to be examined first, and when they saw what she could do they freaked out a little, insisting we keep at their facility until they knew the extent of her power. We refused, of course. And Ruth threatened to go to the authorities. They fired her and made it quite clear that we would keep our mouths shut should we want to live.

“Two years later… it was two years, wasn’t it, Love?” He looked to his wife who nodded. “Yes, two years later Gavin turned up on our doorstep in the wee hours of the morning and told us we needed to leave. The NDU had captured one of the other children within weeks of firing Ruth, and had spent months experimenting on him. They killed his family, Charlie. But still Gavin stayed put. He never condoned what they were doing, but was scared for his own family if he spoke out against them.

“Anyway, once they were done with poor boy they tried to do away with him –he was only four. They couldn’t kill him, though. When they tried to poison him, it had no effect; when they tried to injure him, he healed himself. That’s when they realised they had a bigger problem –they couldn’t eliminate the children they had created if the children couldn’t die.

“They knew they had to keep the boy if they had any hope of finding a way to kill the rest. They began a program dubbed the criminal compliance early release program –they offered early release to long-term prisoners from around the country in exchange for them signing up for a medical trial.”

“What did they do to them?” I asked, completely engrossed in his story.

“They pumped them full of a performance-enhancing cocktail and removed the part of their brain which allows free thought.”

“Like a lobotomy?”

“Almost. And now they are unable to think for themselves and they have the ability to kill anything and anyone. But they are programmed to kill the gifted, and anyone else who stands in their way.”

“The soul-seekers?”

“Yes. They are the soul-seekers. After they successfully created the first soul-seeker, that’s when Gavin left. He found us and brought us here. A few others from the NDU defected shortly after, and joined Gavin in his crusade to save all the gifted children and their families.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Andy, I’m glad you told me all this. But what does any of it have to with the map?”

“Ah, the map. That, my dear, is a map of the entire NDU complex. It will make it much easier to take them down if we know where everything is.”

“Excuse me, Sir, but your daughter almost died for the sake of that map. Wouldn’t your wife, and Gavin and his merry men have been able to redraw it from memory?”

“You have to understand, it is a massive complex, over two-hundred square metres. And that’s only the main facility. They could have drawn parts of it, but even those parts would be out of date. A lot has changed in twenty-six years.”

“Even still, Abigail could have died.”

“That is not a sacrifice I would have been willing to make, but Abigail knows what’s at stake, and she chose to take the risk. Something I’m not entirely happy with, mind you.”

“Excuse me again, Sir,” I felt like a kid talking to the principal. “You’re talking like the fate of the world is in the balance.”

“It is, Charlie. It is.”

“How so?”

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Here it comes.”

“Here what comes?”

“Colonel Andrew Robert Davies’ famous speech. It’s the speech he gives all the newcomers when they ask why we need to take action rather than just staying here and keeping ourselves safe.”

“You know it’s all true, though, Love.”

“Yes, Dear, I know.”

“Let’s hear it then,” I said, rather intrigued.

“We’re led to believe we’re free. But nothing could be further from the truth –the zombie apocalypse is already upon us and we are the zombies. We’re brainwashed by government and corporations. And at the head of it is the NDU. The freedom we so eagerly lay claim to is a farce. We are no more free than is a rat in a maze. Every facet of our society, of our lives, is controlled by those who set the status quo.

“They watch over us with self-interested curiosity while we busy ourselves trying to find the cheese in a maze of their making. Never be fooled about your choices, Charlie –every choice you make is only one of the limited paths they have built into their grand design. We have been conditioned to see only the choices they give us, and to believe we can’t live without the things they tell us we need.

“They tell us to work, we work and pay taxes. They tell us to consume, we spend our money on flat-screen TVs and fancy cars. They tell us we have to send our children to their schools, we send them like herding sheep, to create the next generation of workers and consumers. They tell us to behave a certain way, to spend a certain way, to learn a certain way, to live a certain way. Their way. All so they can sit in their towers feasting on the sweat of the masses, their pockets growing ever fatter, all the while we toil in the trenches hoping to catch the scraps which may fall from their plates.

“But what if it were all gone, Charlie? What if we could take away the rules, change the status quo?

“Everyone loves the idea of a utopian society, and we have the ability to make it happen, Charlie. We just need to create the opportunity.”

“Create the opportunity, how do you suggest we do that?”

“The NDU controls the world through the power of money. If we take away the money, we eliminate the hold they have over the rest of human kind.”

“And how do we take away the money?”

“By reminding the people of the difference between desire and necessity.”

“You’re planning on telling the entire world, all at once, that they should strip back to basics, and what, live off the land? Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea, I just don’t see how it can be done.”

“It can be done with the powers they inadvertently bestowed upon you and the others. You have the power to influence minds. To unwash them, so to speak.”

“If we’re telling people what to think, doesn’t that make us just like them?”

“Not at all. We’re not telling them what to think, we’re only going to clear the junk from their minds, like wiping a window clean of filth so they can see again. Don’t you get it, Charlie? The NDU controls every corporation, every government. They are responsible for the consumerist society, poverty, even war. They designed it this way so that the people are too busy concerning themselves with these things to see behind the veil.

“So, you see, Charlie, we are indeed a society of zombies. We just haven’t resorted to eating each other’s flesh. Instead we swallow their propaganda with dumbstruck ignorance and allow one another to be destroyed by the architecture of our so-called freedom. But you have the cure.”

Andy saw me shuffle in my seat uncomfortably.

“I can see you’re still a little sceptical. I don’t blame you, it’s a lot to take in. I’ll let you think about it for a couple of days. Any questions you have, feel free to ask. You can speak freely to anyone here. And please, stop calling me Sir. We’re all equal here. I am not your superior.”

“Thank you… Andy. I’m not so much sceptical as dumbfounded. I mean, everyone knows the people have no say anymore, I just never realised how blatantly and completely they were controlling us. And I certainly never thought a single organisation could be governing the entire world’s social and political climates.”

“Not for long, my dear. Not for long.”

“That’s enough revolution talk for now.” Ruth got up from her seat.

“Hang on. I still don’t know how you plan on doing this unwashing the brains of the masses thing.” I almost yelled the words.

“We’re still working on that, dear,” Ruth said. “Technology has finally advanced enough to make it possible, but we’re still in the planning stages. Now, I said enough of that. Let’s go get your kids and find you lot something to eat.” She turned to where Abigail was busy working on something with Sherry. “Come on, Abby, it’s time for supper. You need to eat something. You’re as thin as a rake.”

“Still mothering me?” Abigail called from across the room.

“And I will never stop.”

“Okay, you go ahead. Sherry and I will catch up.”