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11:17 Monday 2 October 2090
The internment camps were starting to swell as more and more people turned on their families, friends, and neighbours, denouncing them to One Life and watching, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, as the Recarn suspects were taken off to be identified, registered, and processed. Many of those accused were innocent and previous friendships and relationships were fatally wounded, but Recarns were caught in sufficient numbers for the denunciation campaign to be deemed a success.
Communities became distrustful of everyone. People were scared to have even a minor disagreement with each other for fear of being hauled away by a One Life Recarn Response teams. From the outside, these communities looked peaceful happy places with never a cross word spoken – virtual paradises – but within, they were a collection of individuals walking on eggshells.
In fact, Garcia’s campaign was becoming too successful. New internment camps were created daily and those camps started to fill up rapidly. Something had to be done. To Garcia, the solution was obvious. To continually create new camps would cost both time and money, so why not simply accelerate the rate of neutralisations and consequently make space for the new arrivals? This had been part of the plan all along but now, instead of just being talked about, the time had arrived to make phase three a reality.
Huddling together in their container, John and Susan Fleetwood struggled to keep warm. The biting cold of the last day of autumn seared into their bones. They were still dressed in the clothes that they had been wearing three weeks earlier when they had arrived in the camp, and it seemed that every square inch of their clothing was now grafted onto their skin. They were eternally hungry, being given just enough food and water to keep them alive, no more. John had suggested trying to catch one of the many rats that flitted between the containers so that they could gain some protein, but Susan had said that she wasn’t at the point where she felt she could eat a rat just yet.
Of course, the couple was also worried about their children. The poor things must be out of their minds with worry, wondering when they would see their parents again. Jenny was normal, not a Recarn, so they knew that they’d be ok, that they wouldn’t suddenly wake up one morning and find themselves all alone, having to fend for themselves. Some normals got caught up in the house to house sweeps, but they were soon identified as normals and sent home with profuse apologies.
A group of three militiamen peered into the container.
“Come on. Everybody out.”
The twenty occupants of the container looked at one another. What was happening?
The leader of the trio, a young red-haired lad, about seventeen years old, barked orders as if he’d been born to his new found position of authority.
“Come on. I said out. The sooner you come out the sooner we can get warm. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey today.”
The inhabitants of the container shuffled slowly out of the container and stood to face the three militia men. John spoke up.
“Where are you taking us? What are you going to do to us?”
The militia man gave him a steely gaze, or at least as steely a gaze that a seventeen-year-old boy who hadn’t even started shaving yet could give.
“That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Suffice to say, you won’t be cold anymore.”
Susan gripped her husband’s arm tighter.
“Maybe we’re being taken to a building, a proper building, with windows and a door. That would be wonderful.”
John didn’t like the way that this was going. They had been treated like street dogs for the last three weeks, feeding off the scraps that their captors tossed into the containers. Why would they be taken somewhere better now? He leaned in towards his wife and whispered.
“I don’t think that’s what they have in mind. I don’t know what they’re up to but I have a bad feeling about this. Keep hold of my hand and don’t let go. Don’t let go whatever happens.”
Susan nodded her agreement.
The group was loaded onto a truck and taken to a clearing in a local wood. The nearby trees would have looked beautiful in the spring and summer but provided a much more sinister ambience when stripped of their leaves. The captives were frogmarched towards the middle of the clearing and one of the militia men took a spray can out of his small rucksack. He started to spray white foam on the ground, marking a circle around the nervous prisoners, like a football referee, before squirting the foam onto the nose of an elderly woman who was at the front of the group. She took a tissue out of her handbag and wiped the offending mark off, muttering to herself.
“Cheeky young bastard!”
The young lad nodded to his colleagues and the three stepped back ten paces, all the while training their pulse guns on the shivering huddle inside the circle. John was thankful that he and Susan were at the back of the group. The youth reached into a pocket and took out a small round disc-shaped object. He calibrated the timer for two seconds and the kill-zone as five metres radius. Holding the dead-man’s switch down he grinned at the frightened prisoners who now realised what was to become of them.
“Miss you already.”
He tossed the disruptor grenade into the circle and watched as the occupants dissolved before his very eyes. He and the other two militia men ran quickly back to the truck, without even a backward glance. He patted one of his colleagues on the back.
“Thirsty work, waste disposal. Fancy a cuppa?”
Susan was running as best she could, considering that three of the toes of her left foot were missing. As the grenade had hit the ground she’d felt a violent jerk on her arm as John started to sprint away from the kill zone, his vice-like grip on her forearm taking her with him. The breeze had sprinkled a fine, warm, recently-human rain over the two escapees but they had ignored it and just kept running. They were both alive, but Susan’s left foot hadn’t quite made it clear of the kill-zone. Considering that she should be dead, three toes was a small price to pay for her life.