Run (2 page)

Since we were at the back of the house, he led me through the kitchen into the dining area, which opened out into the living room. Even though the house was clearly run down, I could tell that it had once been beautiful. Some rich dude must have lived here.

A crystal chandelier hung over the long wooden dining table, although it was covered in dust. The living room floor was expensive marble that felt cool under my bare feet and the walls were covered in a flowery wallpaper. A plush sofa set was positioned in front of a humongous flat-screen multi-viewer TV, one that covered the entire wall. But it wasn't turned on.

“A wall-to-wall MV. Cool,” I commented. Now we were talking. At least this dump had entertainment, I thought.

“We don't have electricity,” Jae said, following my gaze. “No one has.”

Great. So, no MV. Sigh.

My eyes were drawn back to the dining table where some of the kids were laying out the food. I was so hungry. Everything came out of tins, and everything seemed like it should be eaten from tins. There was a huge tin of sardines in the middle of the table. There were also tinned sausages, tinned chicken curry, tinned tuna and tinned lychees. Jae handed me a fork and an empty sardine tin to use as a bowl.

“We don't use plates because we don't want to waste water washing them. This way, we simply throw away the tins. Keep that fork and don't lose it. You'll need it for every meal. Plus I'm not sharing mine with you,” he said.

He was suddenly very curt and cold. I rolled my eyes. Whatever. Boys could be so strange.

Something told me I hated tinned food, but I was so hungry I didn't care. I tried every “dish” and went back for seconds. All the other kids joined in. Despite the weirdness of the situation, we were soon joking and kidding around. We were kids, after all.

There weren't enough seats, so we all sat on the floor. Everyone introduced themselves, but – surprise, surprise – I couldn't remember them all. It was not a case of memory loss this time. There were simply too many faces and names to remember.

But some kids stood out, mostly because they were closer to my own age. There were 15 of us in all, me included. The youngest child there was 10. The oldest were Kyl and Jae, who were 16.

There was Eryn, who was 13. I liked her straightaway because she reminded me of an inquisitive mouse. She was small for her age and very quiet, but had bright intelligent eyes and a ready smile.

There was Brion, who was 15, like me. He seemed to be the joker in the group, constantly cracking jokes to get the other kids laughing. Actually, he looked really geeky with his pale skin and neat slicked-back hair. Had short-sightedness not been genetically eradicated, I bet he would have been wearing super thick glasses.

There was a tough-looking girl called Dyanne, also 15. I caught her staring at me, a strange look in her eyes. Her best friend Shulin sat next to her. Or maybe they were sisters because they looked so similar. They both had blue eyes and orangey-red hair chopped really short. They were both tall and thin.

I couldn't tell what race any of these kids were. But that was not so surprising. With all the genetic experimenting that had been going on, and the ridiculous choices parents had been making, it was no longer possible to tell a person's race by looking at them.

I wonder what Dyanne and Shulin's parents had been thinking when they picked blue eyes and red hair. At least my parents had good taste, I mused. Black hair and violet eyes was an awesome combination.

Then it struck me that Kyl looked the most Asian. He was the only one with black hair and black eyes. Either his parents were one of those purists who refused to modify – or “mod” – their babies, or they were simply too poor to pay for the genetic procedures.

“Okay,” I finally said, through a mouthful of tuna. “I'm ready to talk. What's going on? Who's in charge of this place? And what happened to all the grown-ups?”

That was a conversation stopper. Everyone grew silent and looked uncomfortably at one another.

“What?” I said, stupidly ignorant.

Kyl sounded grim. “No one's in charge. Don't you remember anything? We've all been abandoned. So far, this is the safest place we have found in the last few weeks.”

“Abandoned?” I said. “What do you mean? Why did your parents abandon you? My parents would never do that to me!”

Kyl looked awkward. “I hate to tell you this way, and I'm really sorry, but it is true. All the adults are gone. We have been left to die.”

“What?” My mind reeled. Here we were, a bunch of kids sitting in an abandoned house, eating dinner from tins. And if that wasn't bad enough, this boy, this stranger, had to dump this nasty bombshell on me – we had been left to die?

“What are you talking about? Why?” I demanded.

Kyl took a deep breath. “Okay. Let's go right back to the start. Do you remember when we were kids – I mean when we were really little – the Green Movement was really strong? All that stuff about recycling everything, and wasting nothing?”

I nodded, so he continued.

“About two years ago, a new movement called TNI or The Nature Initiative became really popular. They were concerned about the way food was produced around the world. People were campaigning against genetically-modified vegetables and fruits. They were protesting against the way animals were injected with antibiotics in commercial farms. They warned that one day, all this human meddling with nature would bring unintended consequences. Do you remember any of this?”

I nodded again. It all sounded kind of familiar.

“Do you recall protests that were held at feedlots around the world, where they showed us places where animals were crammed together and bred in filthy conditions and stuffed with food?” Kyl carried on. “They said we were being sold meat from animals that were sick or dying. And that sooner or later, humans would be affected in terrible ways?”

I had only vague memories.

“And do you remember cloning?” Kyl said. “Many farmers had begun to breed cows, lamb, poultry and other animals through cloning. But the problem with the new animal variants was, they could not reproduce. Try as they might, scientists and farmers could not make cloned females reproduce. So they tried inter-breeding cloned animals with normal animals.

“But that made things worse because now, the normal healthy animals could not reproduce either! So that's what you get for messing with nature, said the TNI. They warned of terrible consequences again, that all animals and maybe humans too were going to become sterile.”

“Don't forget the thing about genetically-modified vegetables and fruit,” Jae said, continuing for Kyl. Scientists had by now perfected such oddities as giant potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables weighing as much as 10kg each. There were also rot-resistant berries, leafy vegetables that stayed crisp for months and even new varieties of fruit created in a lab like the skinless orange and the blue apple.

“Do you remember the Duya?” It was a cross between the durian and the papaya; a durian without the prickly shell. Singaporeans loved it, he said. But small pockets of people started developing allergies to these new types of food, and of course, TNI warned of yet another doomsday scenario – we would die from eating these “fake” foods.

To Kyl, I said, “To be honest, I never really paid much attention to what they said.” “Neither did most of us,”

Jae agreed, “until their warnings started to come true.”

Suddenly, Dyanne spoke up, “Don't you understand? It all really did come true. Look around you. Everything's dead. Everything!”

The kids around her patted her sympathetically. They all looked glum now. Some kids were crying silently.

“Tell me how it happened,” I urged Jae to continue.

“It started with the animals in the farms, labs and feedlots. They started dying off really quickly. No one had time to react. The same thing happened in every country. Almost overnight, there was no meat left. The organic farmers, those that stuck to farming naturally, were the only ones with live animals. There was a rush to save those animals, but it was too late. Those animals died too.”

“When was this?” I interrupted.

“About five months ago,” Kyl said softly, his voice tinged with sadness.

“I have no memory of all this,” I said pathetically.

“Lucky you,” Shulin said, rather meanly, I thought. But she had tears in her eyes, so I bit back the retort that threatened to escape my lips.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

Jae continued the horrible story. “It started happening to the plants and vegetation too. Everything was dying. TNI had been proven right. Governments all over the world were scrambling to find answers. Some were denying anything was amiss. Until the babies started dying. Old people too. Do you notice that there are no young kids here?”

I looked around, horrified. Death sounded like such a foreign idea to me. It felt so unreal. How could this have happened? I wanted Jae to stop right then. I didn't want to know anymore. But he went on anyway.

“We don't know what it was. Was it a virus that killed them? Or was it from all the bad food? No one told us. To cut a long story short, many people have died. Those that are left have no more food to eat. There is no more food left on earth. No more live food, at least, which explains this,” he said, holding up an empty sardine tin.

“This is what you mean when you said the adults have abandoned us? They've all died?” I said, a lump rising in my throat. Even though I couldn't remember my parents, I felt a sense of loss.

This time, it was Kyl who cut in. “No, they are alive. Well, not many, but the ones that survived decided to save themselves and not us,” he said grimly.

“My mom would never abandon me!” I said. I believed it too. I felt it in my heart. Even though I couldn't remember her face, I remembered being loved and treasured by my mother.

To my outburst, Jae only grunted cynically. “Some adults didn't agree, but they didn't have a choice. If they disagreed, they would simply have been left on the outside, like us.”

“Outside what?” I asked, not really wanting to know. I just wanted the whole thing to go away, like a bad dream.

“Outside Camp Zero,” Jae said.

I woke up the next day and found myself on the floor, packed in tight with a whole roomful of sleeping girls. For one minute, I was completely disorientated and confused. Where was I?

Then I remembered.

Unfortunately, I only remembered what had happened the day before. I still had no memory of what got me here. I sighed. I felt exhausted. I felt as if there was a big weight sitting on my shoulders, one I could not shake off.

I looked around the room again. Apart from me, there were seven girls, all lined up side by side. The room was quite big and there were two small beds pushed against the wall. Dyanne was sleeping on one of the beds and another girl, I think it was Shulin, was sleeping on the other. The rest of us were sleeping on mattresses, blankets, cushions and pillows.

I thought about what had happened the day before. Jae and the other kids had started telling me about Camp Zero, and what they thought went on in there. But it was so unreal and horrible that I couldn't take it anymore and ran upstairs to explore the house instead.

Although I had been too distracted to really pay attention, I did take in the fact that there were four bedrooms upstairs – two on each side of an open landing that looked like it had once been a children's toy area. Colourful children's cabinets lined one wall and broken, dirty toys were strewn everywhere.

The toilets were all marble – marble bathtubs, marble basins and marble floors. You could tell that the previous owners had abandoned their home in a hurry. There were still shampoo bottles and toothbrushes lying around. The kids had explained that there were homes like this all over Singapore, homes that were still usable. Over the last two months or so, they had been wandering all over, moving from house to house, surviving on whatever food that had been left behind.

This current house was a terrace house, flanked on both sides by other houses. They had chosen it completely by chance. Kyl had liked the fact that it was surrounded by a high wall. To their amazement, the house had produced a rare treasure – an entire pantry filled with food.

The owners must have planned to weather the disaster at home, judging from all the food they had stored. There were cartons of instant noodles, sacks of rice, shelves and shelves of canned food and huge bottles of water. There was also a hydro-powered radio receiver, several torches and spare batteries as well as a huge cache of candles.

“Why didn't you just stay in one place?” I had asked.

“If you haven't noticed, the toilets aren't working,” Dyanne said, rolling her eyes.

“Oh,” I replied lamely.

The kids moved to a new house every time the toilets started getting seriously backed up, or the mess became too much, whichever came first. They were kids, and kids with no grown-ups around meant that no one did any cleaning. Garbage was simply thrown out of windows or shoved into corners. The only things each kid had with them at all times were a pillow, a blanket, a set of cutlery and one set of clothes. They seemed pretty organised, I thought.

The shoes – it was finally explained to me – were always kept safe and dry on a high shelf because shoes were hard to find. While clothes could be found in any house, shoes in the right size were much harder to come by. So they had to be preserved as much as possible and the kids went about barefoot whenever they could.

It was still dark, and I had no idea what time it was. Everyone was still sleeping soundly, so I decided I might as well go back to sleep. I lay my head down on a musty but comfortable pillow and closed my eyes. But sleep didn't come.

Instead, I found myself thinking about Camp Zero. Even though I didn't believe what the kids said at first, it was starting to make sense, in an awful sort of way.