The Hunted, page 5
The World’s Revenge
Nobody knew exactly why it had happened, but it had happened all the same. Maybe it was the Law of Unintended Consequences, maybe it was nature just keeping itself in balance.
The Law of Unintended Consequences more or less stated that you could do things for the best, and the worst would come out of it. Or, on the other hand, with bad intentions, you might accidentally do nothing but good – or then, on the other hand again, do far more evil than you had ever originally intended. There was really no knowing. And who could have guessed that the price of long life for some would be no life at all for others?
It had started by everybody living longer, with often simple and general improvements in health care. Then, little by little, the general improvements had grown more specific, as the common killers of the elderly – the heart attacks, the cancers, the strokes – had been pushed aside. People lived healthier lives for longer and longer, staying active, remaining spry. Then the Anti-Ageing pills had come along, which most people took at around the age of forty, when they were available free from the government. So forty was about as old as you got, at least in terms of appearance anyway.
All that was going to kill you after that was an accident of some kind, or some freak illness against which nobody had been immunized. Then finally, at what had once been regarded as some impossibly great age, your system would surrender to time and give up the ghost, and not even medical science or Anti-Ageing pills could help you then. Your body would give out on you and you would die at some ripe old age of one hundred and twenty plus.
Some individuals had lived for over two hundred years. But they had a strange look about them – not in the wrinkles in their foreheads or their stooped backs, no, nothing of that kind, they were straight and erect as a forty-year-old. It was in their eyes. They seemed like people who had travelled in space and who had looked upon the immensity of the universe; eternity had moved into them, and taken up residence inside.
Yes, those were the two major killers now – unavoidable accident or the final collapse of a human body that had lived far beyond its allotted span. Oh, and sometimes there was a third cause – when people put an end to themselves because they had simply had enough. They’d wrung out the cloth; they’d tilted the glass back and swallowed the dregs and there was nothing left at the party to stay for. Once that kind of spirit had gone from you, it was hard to get a refill.
‘Well, I’ll be getting out now, kid,’ Deet said. ‘Maybe you’d better do some studying.’
He threw an Edu-Pack down on to Tarrin’s bed in the cheap motel that was currently home. Tarrin saw that tonight it was geography.
‘I’d go through it with you but I haven’t got the time,’ Deet said. ‘So you’ll have to do it on your own. But you’re smart enough, kid, you’ll understand it and, if not, get online with the interactive tutor.’
He pointed to the screen in the room. Most motels had them now, for the convenience of the customers. The only thing that distinguished the set from an ordinary TV was the QWERTY keyboard next to it. You could watch any one of the 549 channels, or you could surf the Net, or you could watch your choice of about fifty thousand online films (a small charge will be added to your bill).
‘I’ll maybe ask you few test questions when I get back,’ he said.
But Tarrin knew he wouldn’t. By the time Deet got back to his room next door, Tarrin would be fast asleep, having gone to bed long since. Or if Tarrin was still awake, Deet would be too far gone to make any sense. He would be slow and sluggish, or unnaturally cheerful, or – worst of all – sad and melancholy. Those would be the times when he would put his arm about Tarrin’s shoulders and tell him that he loved him like a son and that he was a fine and wonderful substitute for his own flesh and blood.
It was all phoney, though no doubt he meant it sincerely enough at the time. It was the beer or the whisky talking. But really, it was no more than weeping at a sad film, and it wasn’t even Tarrin he was feeling sorry for. It was himself, and the idea of himself as a man without family or loved ones. But had Deet been given family or loved ones, he would soon have tired of them and the responsibility, and he would be looking at airline timetables and checking out motel rates and thinking of moving on.
It wasn’t as a son that he loved Tarrin, it was as a source of income. He loved him the way a miser loves his money in the bank, and he worried about him in the same way too – which is to say he worried that one day his source of income might vanish overnight, and then what would he do?
‘Yeah, learn some geography,’ Deet said. ‘Then use the self-tester, or I might ask you a few questions when I come back, like I said, just to make sure you’ve been learning. People want a kid for the afternoon, but they don’t want an uneducated one. So do some schooling.’
Tarrin often wished that he could have gone to school, but there were barely any left to go to. They were no longer an economic proposition, without the children to fill them. It was all individual tuition now or, for those who could not afford that, the Edu-Packs, which, if followed to the letter, brought you up to the required academic standard.
The schools stood empty now, ruined and derelict. Rats ran along the deserted corridors, spiders hung from the corners. The classrooms were quiet and eerie, with rows of empty chairs and desks facing a blank board.
One or two schools had been kept open as ‘living monuments’ and ‘museums of childhood’ and could be visited, just like any art gallery or stately home. Here was the sports hall, here was the chemistry lab, here was the assembly hall where five hundred children had once gathered every morning to hear the headmaster or headmistress make their announcements and speeches, trying to keep order as their listeners nudged each other and passed messages on scraps of paper and tried to make each other laugh, or fought the laughter back.
Venture outside and here was the sports field, the tennis court, the football pitches, the playground, where generations had learned to grow up, fighting their own personal battles on the way.
It was history.
‘I’ll see you then, kid.’
‘OK, Deet.’
‘And remember to keep the door locked and on the security chain and if anyone knocks, don’t you let them in. Not even if they speak to you in my voice. Only let them in if they know the special knock, kid . . .’
‘I know, Deet, I know.’
‘And even if they speak to you in my voice and know the special knock, you look at them real careful through the spyhole first . . .’
‘I know, Deet. I know what to do.’
‘And even then, if they speak to you in my voice and know the special knock and even if it looks like me when you look in the spyhole, and even if they’ve got a good reason as to why they’ve lost their key, well . . . you still put the door on the chain, kid, when you open it, because you never know . . .’
‘No, Deet, I know. You never know.’
‘You never know what lengths they’d go to, these damn Kiddernappers!’
‘Yes, Deet.’
‘They’re the worst of the worst, kid, and the lowest of the low. If you were to get lower than Kiddernappers, you’d be so low you’d never get back up again. You’d be crawling down there with the worms. You hear?’
‘Yes, Deet.’
But people who win other people’s children in card games, that’s all right, Deet, is it? Tarrin wanted to ask. Only Deet had his sore points and got into something of a temper when pressed upon them. So Tarrin didn’t ask him that question, not any more. But when he had asked him it in the past, he had never received a satisfactory answer beyond Deet getting angry and indignant and saying things like, ‘You should be more grateful, kid, things I’ve done for you.’
Once Tarrin had asked him the most important question of all.
‘Who did you win me from, Deet? Was it my dad?’
Deet had looked down at his shoes and had shaken his head. ‘No, no . . . guess not, no.’
Even Deet would have thought that beyond the pale – a man who had gambled his own son away. It would have been bad business. Why gamble away the goose? Better to hold on to it and count the golden eggs.
‘Who then, Deet, if it wasn’t my dad?’
‘Just somebody, kid, just somebody. I don’t really know. Just somebody.’
‘How old was I, Deet?’
‘You were young. You were just a kid, kid.’
‘Why don’t I remember?’
‘Told you, you were young.’
‘How young was I?’
‘Young.’
He’d never tell the whole story or even give anything away. But if it hadn’t been his father who had gambled him away, who had it been? And where was his father? And his mother? And his home?
‘Was I an orphan, Deet? Was that why the other person had me?’
‘Might have been, could have been, he didn’t say. I’m sorry, kid, I can’t help you. The past is past, you’ve got to let go of it. Maybe your parents didn’t want you or they needed the money and they let you go to another family, I don’t know. All I know is I won you fair and square and I’ve got all the papers here, for guardianship and possession. And that’s all you need to know.’
He did have the papers too. They’d been stopped quite regularly by the police, thinking maybe that Deet himself was a broad-daylight Kiddernapper. But once they’d checked the papers out, they had let him go.
‘Forget it, kid, don’t worry about it, don’t let it bother you. Put it outta your mind.’ Deet took a final look at himself in the mirror, and he seemed to like what he saw. ‘Well, I’m away now, kid. You think over what I said to you about the PP implant and you and me being in business together for all our lives. You think about that while I’m out. I’m serious. It’s a serious economic proposition. And remember to lock that door.’
But Tarrin didn’t want to think about the PP implant. Not ever.
When Deet closed the door behind him, Tarrin went and put the chain on it. He could hear Deet shuffling around in the corridor outside, waiting for the sound of the security chain being latched before he would go. He would return by the door to his own room, which interconnected with Tarrin’s.
‘I’ve done it, Deet!’ Tarrin called through the door
There was a muffled, vaguely embarrassed reply. ‘OK, right, kid. Just lacing my shoe up.’
As if.
Then at last he was truly gone.
Tarrin looked around the room. It was like every other motel room he had stayed in, and there must have been hundreds of those over the years. It was bland, anonymous and soulless. It was the accommodation equivalent of fast food. It was a burger, that was what it was. It was like living in a burger. He had lived on them and lived in them for years – burger meals, burger rooms. It was a burger room with fries and cola and a spot of salad. Deet was a burger too – a burger person. He was fast food, ready to go.
A house would have been nice. A real room in a real home. A slow, home-cooked room in a home-cooked home. A fresh-fruit room, a home-baked room. That would have been nice, that would have been wonderful. But all the days of his childhood had gone like this – acting the part, acting the child, one or two hours at a time, a child for the morning, a child for the afternoon, bringing a taste of what it was to have a family to those who had none themselves.
Yet neither did he. That was the irony. Neither did he. He was as lonely as they were. He had nobody either. Just Deet. And sometimes that was worse than nobody. Nobody would have been a much better option.
Tarrin sat and opened the geography pack and started to read through it. He was good at geography. He should be. He’d been to enough places. He went over to the keyboard next to the screen and went online. He tested himself on what he had just learned and a ‘Congratulations! 100%’ message came up, along with some dancing cartoon rabbits, leaping for joy at his success.
Then he typed his name in and did a search. But there was nothing. Just as there was always nothing. But what did he really expect? A message saying, ‘Tarrin – you are our long-lost son. Please contact us at this address so that we can take you home.’?
Fat chance. No chance at all.
He thought again of the DNA library. If he could just find the pattern of his own DNA, the fingerprint of his genetic being, and match that against all those in the national register, he might find a near and significant match. And a near and significant match might mean somebody close to him, a blood relative, a member of his own family, a brother, a sister, a father, a mother – anyone.
But he didn’t have the pattern of his own DNA, nor the likelihood of finding it. Deet preferred him not to know. All it needed was a blood or a saliva sample and a visit to the lab, but he had neither the money to pay for it nor the means of getting there. Deet watched him like a hawk, and the only times he didn’t watch him were like now, when it was dark, and too dangerous to go out – when the Kiddernappers were about. At this time of night most of the DNA labs would be closed anyway, except the late-nite pharmacy place in the centre.
‘It’s a question of demand and supply, kid,’ Deet had told him, when Tarrin had first asked about the Kiddernappers and why it wasn’t safe for him to go out on his own, not even in daylight to play in the park.
‘When a thing’s in short supply and high demand, its price and its value go up. And that’s how it is with children. They’re not being born like they used to be and no one really knows why. A few people can still have them – but they fetch high prices. So the temptation’s there, see – you snatch a kid, you take them out of town, or across a border, you find some rich man whose wife is desperate for the children she can’t have herself – and there you go. You’ve got yourself one of those well-paying, no-questions-asked deals. And the younger the kid, the better – no memory, see – won’t even realize it’s been taken. It’ll love those parents that paid for it just like they were its own. So the younger you are, the more you’re worth. Now, a freshly born babe in arms, kid, well, I tell you, you could get ten million for that, easy. Ten million and then some. A newborn babe’s a Mona Lisa, kid, it’s a work of art. It’s a collector’s item. Why, and if it was twins, you’d be walking so far down easy street you’d never need to turn back again for the rest of your long, long days. No eking it out from week to week, but living it high till the day you die. So you just be careful, kid. As long as there’s kids, there’ll be Kiddernappers. As long as there’s a chance of money to be made, people will be out there making it.’
One thing puzzled him still.
‘What about the papers though, Deet? How can even rich people pretend that kidnapped children are their own if they don’t have the papers?’
Deet had snorted in disgust – in fact, had they been outside at the time, he would probably have spat with it.
‘Papers! Kid, don’t be naive! You think you can’t buy papers? You think if you’d got the kind of money to buy a kid, that you can’t find yourself some legal on the take and buy yourself some papers? They’ll even issue you with a brand-new birth certificate in your own name and everything. They’ll falsify the DNA records, the lot. Papers! The only paper you need in this world is the folding kind – the kind you keep in your wallet. Get me?’
He snorted again. ‘Papers, kid, aren’t mostly worth the paper they’re printed on.’
Then he gave Tarrin a curious look, and he clammed up and wouldn’t say another word or answer any further questions on the subject. But it was too late by then. The damage had been done, the thought had already been implanted in Tarrin’s mind.
If you could buy papers and falsify records, then what about Deet’s papers? What about Tarrin himself?
Had he been kidnapped himself once? Years ago? And would that explain the memories? The flashes from the past, of faces, of light, of fields of corn and the sound of birds and a dog occasionally barking?
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born . . .
But were these real memories, or only the desire for memories, the longing for a recognizable past? Maybe they were things he had only invented, or random scenes taken from films he had once seen and had spliced back together in his mind to create the sort of past he would have wanted.
‘Papers, kid, aren’t mostly worth the paper they’re printed on.’
Deet had never attempted to pretend that he was his father, though. He had always told him that he was no more than his guardian. And then, one night, when he had come back full of beer and high spirits, he had begun to boast about how he had won Tarrin in a card game, from a man who was a bad gambler and who had no other way to settle his debt.
Maybe the man who had gambled him away had been a Kiddernapper himself. That would make sense. Yes, it would. It would make sense of an awful lot – though it still wouldn’t tell him where he had come from.
‘I won you and you were my meal ticket, kid. I could have sold you, but that’s not my way. Income and a steady living, that’s what I was looking for. And we’ve been good for each other, kid, haven’t we? Yes, we have, we have.’
Deet in one of his frank and friendly moods could be a mine of useful information. Even he occasionally seemed to feel the need to tell the truth, to offload the garbage.
For a long time there had been three of them – Tarrin and Deet and Miss Evangeline, who one day was going to be Mrs Deet, or so it was intended, at least so Deet kept saying, by way of hints and understandings, if not in so many words. But Miss Evangeline got tired of Deet and his hints, which never actually came to anything. Or perhaps he tired of her. Or maybe it was the motel rooms and the fast-food burger life she had tired of. She was replaced in time by Miss Sandra and then by Miss Barbara-Sue.
Tarrin had been fond of Miss Evangeline, but he wouldn’t let himself get fond of the others after that, for he knew that they too would stay their time and then be moving on, just like he and Deet were always doing – moving, moving, moving on.
