Author: Alison Ferguson

Here’s the beginning of something that might grow up one day! I’ve been polishing it for a while now–perhaps I need to keep writing?

Recruited

Kyle squinted through a rusted hole in the corrugated iron. The street lay empty in the predawn darkness. Trucks rumbled like distant thunder. Perhaps the Recruiters had met their quota and would go past them.

‘See anything?’ Kegan leant on his shovel; his face hidden in the flickering light from the candle stub. The trench he was digging lay deep in darkness.

Kyle shook his head. ‘Nothing yet.’ He took hold of the shovel, intending to help.

‘Get out of it.’ His father tossed a hessian sack at him. ‘You’d as well use a teaspoon for all the good you’d do digging. Get rid of all this.’ He nodded to the pile of excavated dirt before starting to dig again. He resumed his muttered chant with each thrust into the soil–‘Not my son, they won’t take him, not my son‘–a mantra, lest harm should befall his precious Kegan, whose digging kept pace alongside.

Only a year older than Kyle, Kegan looked to be a man grown. But Kyle’s build came from their sparrow of a mother and, like her, he’d been a victim of the first wave of the Canker. Unlike her, he’d survived, though not untouched. Kyle didn’t need to wonder if his father would go to such lengths to save him from the Recruiters if he was the elder of his sons. He knew the answer.

Shoulders aching, he scooped the loose dirt into the sack on the ground. He carted it out the back, stumbling under its weight. He scattered the dirt in caches among the rusted wire, in between the lumps of broken concrete, desperately trying not to disturb the silence. Every neighbour posed a threat when information was the only currency.

(“Shanty town in Soweto” by eugene is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If the Recruiters found Kegan and took him–Kyle’s breath caught in his throat and his head spun–then it would be just him and his father. He didn’t know which he feared more–his father abandoning him, as he almost certainly would without Kegan to look after him, or his father staying with him.

He shut his eyes, feeling the cold damp of morning dew on his skin. Slowly, his chest relaxed and the air slid gently down into his lungs. He savoured the sensation, knowing how hard it would be to recall the coolness once the day began its relentless climb into baking heat.

‘Where’s that idiot?’

Jolted back to awareness by his father’s voice, Kyle checked the rubble and dirt one last time in the dim grey of the dawn. The noise of the Recruiters’ trucks growled only streets away.

Back inside, Kegan lay in the trench, his arms crossed corpse-like, and slipped him a wink. Kyle tried to grin back as best he could. The Canker had a vicious sense of humour. Its scars left Kyle’s face a rigid mask, incapable of smiling.

Kegan gave the thumbs-up sign to their father who nodded grimly and slid a flimsy piece of fibro over the top. As fast as his father shovelled on a thin layer of dirt, Kyle frantically patted the earth down. Staggering back to his feet, Kyle threw over their thread-bare rug. The approaching trucks reverberated in the next block.

It was a poor hiding place but it was all they could do. Their hut had only the one room so, if the Recruiters looked in from the doorway, then maybe that would be enough to satisfy them that Kegan had done a runner. He wouldn’t be the first to evade Service. They must be used to it by now.

Kyle stationed himself back at his peep-hole. His father paced.

Seconds later, the trucks turned into their street. Like a bee-hive facing invading wasps, the street instantly swarmed with people rushing from shanty to shanty. Everyone knew the Recruiters preferred dawn raids, but it always came as a shock when the harvesting of eldest sons began.

The engines roared closer. The packed earth beneath Kyle’s bare feet shuddered. A screech and the hiss of pneumatic brakes–only metres from their door.

The back doors of the truck flew open and a ramp thudded to the ground. Helmeted men stamped their way down and fanned out in military formation. The Recruiters’ uniforms were as patched as the city they patrolled. Their headgear was still full faced to hide their identity, even though many of them now resorted to using motorbike helmets.

One of them raised a megaphone, though he could have spoken without it and still been heard through the flimsy walls of the huts lining the street.

‘By order of the Provincial Government, and under the Ordinances of the Recruitment Act of 2063, all people turning 18, are instructed to report for Service. Anyone known to have failed to report will be placed on the Register of Treasonous Persons and, when found, will be shot without trial. Those eligible for Service are hereby called for duty immediately.’ With these last words, the Recruiter tossed the megaphone into the truck. This gesture, more than any words he said, communicated that there would be no second chances.

‘J.M. Abrams,’ he barked, looking at his list.

There came a scraping as a hingeless door was hefted open, and the sound of a woman weeping. From up the street came Jimmy, a scrawny beanpole of a young man wearing only a ragged pair of shorts. He’d left behind his shirt and shoes for his younger brothers, Kyle surmised.

‘D. A. Meecham.’

The tap of Debbie’s stick came down the alley, as she used the soundings to find her way between the rows of shacks into the street. Like Kyle, she was one of the few to survive the Canker, but her eyes had been eaten away.

Kyle almost expected the Recruiters to reject her. When he was younger, they only recruited the fit but, for the last few years, it seemed that they’d take anyone.

Two of the other Recruiters conferred over a list on a clipboard. Kyle drew back from his spy-hole as one of them approached the door.

‘K.G. Zimmer,’ he called out, reading from his list.

Inside the stifling hut, Kyle’s father stared at him. Normally, his father’s gaze skimmed over him as if he were one of the mangy dogs that slunk along the alleyways for scraps. For one mad moment, he thought that his father was asking Kyle what he should do.

As it turned out, his father knew exactly what he was about to do. Without uttering a word, in one long reach of his arm, his father grabbed him, manhandling him toward the door.

‘No,’ Kyle whispered hoarsely, digging his heels into the dirt floor. He glanced back to where Kegan lay imprisoned, unable to help him–as no doubt his father had planned. ‘No,’ he gasped.

‘Yes,’ his father said through gritted teeth.

Kyle’s mind seethed with outrage and fear. ‘It won’t work. What will you do next year when they come looking for me?’

‘That’s next year, son,’ he said.

It would come to him, years later, that was the first and last time his father had called him son.

_____