Sins of the Father (21 page)

She was hunted; a fugitive from the inhuman decrees of Judges who had so lost sight of their own humanity they now cared little for concepts of pity or mercy. If she was a criminal, she was a criminal of conscience, compelled to break the law simply because the law was wrong. Still, at least in some regards, the odds were in her favour. The Judges were hardly likely to make it a priority to track her down. In a city with a population in the hundreds of millions, it was easier than most people thought for a person to simply disappear.

In the end, her greatest difficulties had been financial. First, there had been the cost of buying a new identity. Then, the expenses of finding a doctor who was willing to help deliver her baby without alerting the Judges to his birth. Together, they had used up her resources. Her savings and the money from her husband's insurance were gone: without the safety net of social security her new identity had brought her, she would have been destitute even without the added costs of raising a child. Social security paid her two hundred and ninety-nine credits a week. It was enough to sustain one person, but there were two of them and she could not risk trying to claim additional benefits on her son's behalf. His birth had never been registered: if she tried to claim social security for him it would have led the Judges right to them.

In its place, she was forced to live frugally. She lived in a tiny, poorly heated apartment in a cheap housing block in what was considered a bad neighbourhood. In everything, she put her son's welfare first. If money was tight in any given week, she neglected herself in favour of her child. She wore the same set of clothes until they were threadbare and little better than rags. She owned only one pair of shoes, walking barefoot inside the apartment to avoid wearing them out. When times were hard, she even went without food. Anything to ensure her son Leonard received the best care she could give him. She had sacrificed so much for the boy already; it would not have been right to damn him by half-measures now.

If she had one fear, beyond the recurring nightmare that one day the Judges would come for them, it was that Leonard might fall ill. The doctor who had delivered the boy had made it clear he did not wish to see them again; yet, even if she could have found another doctor willing to deal with mutants, she would have been unable to afford any treatment. Thankfully, Leonard seemed strong and healthy. He seemed immune to the colds and sniffles that afflicted other infants, and given he had not been inoculated against the common childhood illnesses she could only hope he would prove immune to them as well.

At times, she worried about the effect their life might have on his development. Leonard had never been outside. He did not know what it was to feel sunlight on his face or breathe in clean fresh air. On those brief occasions when she left the apartment, she always went alone. Her son's appearance was distinctive. His skin was leathery and grey; bony ridges jutted from his forehead and across his cheeks; his nose was broad and oddly shaped, with an open fissure in its centre. No one could look at him without instantly realising he was a mutant. Wary of the consequences if someone saw him, she kept him inside the apartment, keeping the curtains on the windows closed at all times. It broke her heart to do it. It felt as though she was keeping her son a prisoner; as though he had committed some crime, when in fact the sins he suffered for were the sins of an uncaring world. Still, she had no choice. At least if there was one advantage to living in a bad neighbourhood it was that people tended to mind their own business.

Snug in the nook of her arms, Leonard had finally stopped crying. Careful not to wake him, she eased him gently back into the crib and pulled a blanket over him to keep him warm. Where others might recoil from him and see him as a monster, she looked down at her son and saw something different. In sleep, his face was so beautiful. Admittedly, Leonard took after neither of his parents when it came to his appearance, but she saw in him the continuation of all that had been good in his father. The continuation of all, she hoped, that was good within her. Others might hate him and call him a mutant, but to her Leonard would always be her perfect, special angel.

In his crib Leonard stirred briefly in his sleep as though he was dreaming. She found herself wishing it would be within her power to see to it that all his dreams came true. The future lay before them both, its pathways obscure and uncertain, but she reiterated the promise she had made to herself that day in the doctor's office when she had named him. She would live and breathe to protect him, giving freely of her own life if need be to ensure no harm would befall him. If called upon she would sacrifice everything to keep him safe. She had already sacrificed her old life; her family; her name. She had given up so much, but the well of her love would never run dry. He was her son, and until the day she died he would be her first thought in the morning and her last thought at night. Her love for him transcended every boundary. It was locked within her heart forever; written fiercely in every fibre of her being; imprinted into her soul. Again, she promised herself she would never let them take him from her. It felt like a prayer.

She could only hope someone was listening.

III: Apartment 39-B, Anne Frank Block, Mega-City One, 2106

She was asleep when they kicked in her door.

Hearing the sound, she had awoken from sleep with a start. A thousand frantic thoughts whirled within her mind, but one lay paramount above the rest. A thought that brought with it a chill to her heart.

The Judges had found them.

"Grace Truli, you are under arrest!" Someone shone a flashlight into her face, blinding her. A woman's voice barked out orders. "Don't move! Keep your hands where I can see them!"

Grace Truli. They knew her name. Her real name. She felt a sinking feeling of despair as the last of her desperate hopes was extinguished. This was no random crime swoop or case of mistaken identity. They knew exactly who they were looking for. They had come to take Leonard away.

"Where's the mutie, Truli?" the woman's voice said. "Give him up now and maybe we'll go easy on you."

"I found him," she heard another voice call out. A male Judge. "Grud, but he's one ugly little drokker."

Still blinded by the beam of the flashlight, she heard the clump of the male Judge's boots as he moved towards Leonard's bed. Frightened, Leonard was crying. Then, as the Judge grabbed him, she heard her son call to her.

"Momma!"

"Leave him alone!" Her mother's instincts outweighing her fear of the Judges, she leapt from the bed towards them. "He's my son! You can't take him away-"

Someone hit her with a daystick. Then, everything went black.

IV: Mutant Detention Area 21, The West Wall, Mega-City One, 2106

"Let me see if I got this right," the mutant said. His face looked normal, but he had a series of gill-like wattles either side of his neck that opened and closed in time with his breathing. "You're saying you want to give me a child?"

"Think of it as an adoption," Judge Isabel Ruiz replied. She gazed back at him coolly, trying hard not to be distracted by the distaste she felt at the creature's deformities. "The kid's a mutie and the Law says he has to be deported to the Cursed Earth with the rest of you. But he's three and a half years old. He wouldn't last an hour alone out there. He needs someone to look out for him."

They were standing by the holding pens, where mutie wall-hoppers caught trying to cross the West Wall into the city were held in temporary detention pending deportation back to the Cursed Earth. As she stood talking to the mutant outside the pens, Ruiz could feel thousands of eyes sullenly glaring at her from the detainees on the other side of the las-mesh fence. It was raining slightly, and she could hear the tiny droplets of water sizzle as they hit the mesh.

"Why me?" the mutant asked. His expression indicated the question was born of curiosity rather than belligerence, but Ruiz experienced a brief sensation of annoyance all the same. She wanted the interview to be over. She had always been sickened by the sight of mutants; to be standing close to so many of them was enough to make her feel queasy.

"I talked to the guards on Wall Watch," Ruiz told him. "They say you came over the wall with a woman. The kid needs parents. You seemed to fit the bill."

"You picked me just 'cause I got a wife?" The mutant raised an eyebrow. "Glad to see you put so much thought into this, Judge. Wouldn't want you going off half-cocked, after all, handing the kid over to the first mutant you saw that you didn't think might eat him." As the mutant shook his head in disbelief, Ruiz heard a whistling noise come from his neck wattles. "Hnn. You Judges sure do take the biscuit. First, you halfway beat the crap outta me and the wife 'cause we tried to cross into the city. Then, you pen us up like we was animals. Now, you want we should take this boy just so it don't have to trouble your conscience when you kick him out into the wastelands. Yup, I've know some sorry sons-a-bitches. But, beat me like a rad-mule if you ain't the sorriest one I ever met by a good Cursed Earth mile."

"You want another taste of daystick, mutie?" As Ruiz's hand went to the handle of the slim club held in her belt loop, she spat the last word out like a curse. "If so, just keep on talking the way you have been. Now, if you're finished with the speeches, I'm still waiting for an answer to my original question. Are you going to take the kid?"

A handful of seconds passed in silence as the mutant stood watching her. Despite her threat, he did not drop his eyes or avoid her gaze. Instead, he stared at her with what might almost have been a look of sadness. It made her feel uncomfortable. It was as though the mutant had judged her somehow, and now found her only worthy of pity.

"I have to ask the missus," the mutant said finally, breaking the silence. He nodded towards the pens, where a woman with three arms stood among the other mutants crowded up against the mesh. "But, so long as she ain't against it, I guess we'll take him. I wouldn't be right, leaving a kid to die in the Cursed Earth."

V: The Peterson Farm, The Cursed Earth, 2118

It had been a long, hard day; a day little different from the thousands of others he had experienced before it. Rising from bed just before dawn, Leonard had joined Pa Peterson and the twins - Billy and Zeke - in working the fields. It had been a day spent in back-breaking labour; shouldering between them the heavy burdens that came with trying to farm the thin, arid soils of the Cursed Earth. They worked well together: Billy and Zeke were Pa's real sons while Leonard was only adopted, but Pa treated them all equally. As a family they had gone into the fields, and as a family they returned - exhausted after a day spent tending crops in a place where, at times, it seemed as though nature was always against them. Whether in the shape of drought or locusts, dust storms or blight, some new hardship lurked around every corner. In the Cursed Earth, the hardships never truly ended.

Now, his chores behind him, Leonard sat on the ramshackle porch out in front of the Peterson homestead. It was sunset. In the west, the sun was falling slowly towards the horizon. The sky was painted in shades of burning crimson and flaring scarlet. It was a beautiful sight. But, as ever when night-time approached, Leonard's eyes inevitably turned to the east.

"Leonard?" He heard Pa Peterson's voice as the door to the farmhouse opened behind him. "Dinner's nearly ready. Ma said to make sure you washed up." Stepping out onto the porch, Pa looked down at Leonard in concern. "Are you all right, son? You seem kind of sad?"

"I'm fine, Pa," Leonard answered. His eyes did not waver from the eastern horizon. There was a mountain range off in the distance, blocking his line of sight: he stared at it as though he hoped to wear the mountains down in time so as to reveal the landscape hidden beyond them. "I'm just taking a breather. That's all."

"A breather, huh?" Setting himself down on the porch, Pa sat beside him. "That's how come you sit here every night, looking toward them mountains? Don't take no genius to see what's on your mind, son. East is the direction to the city. You're thinking about your momma, ain't you? Your real momma, I mean."

"I miss her, Pa," Leonard said, shifting uneasily on the porch as he struggled to put his thoughts into words. "I know you and Ma Peterson have been good to me. But I miss her. I miss my mother."

"Sure you do," Pa's voice was gentle. "There ain't no shame in that. You know me and the missus have raised you as our own, but we don't take no offence that you miss your real momma. She's your blood kin. Your flesh and blood. Stands to reason you'd want to see her. But I'm guessing there's more than just that in your head, Leonard. I'm right, ain't I?"

"Yeah." Leonard shifted awkwardly again. This was something he had been considering for months, but it seemed almost wrong to say it out loud. It was like he was being ungrateful to the Petersons after all they had done for him. "I've been thinking about going to the city. I was thinking, if I went there, maybe I could find her."

"Hnn. I figured it was something like that," Pa said, nodding his head slowly. Scratching distractedly at the wattles on his neck, he fell silent for a moment as Leonard waited anxiously for his reaction. Until, his face deep in thought as though he was choosing his words carefully, Pa spoke once more.

"You know what folks mean when they talk about looking for a needle in a haystack?" he said. Seeing Leonard nod his head, he continued. "Well, looking for your momma in the city would be like that, son. 'Cept, the haystack would be bigger than those mountains over there if you was standing right by 'em. The city's an awful big place, Leonard. And we don't even know what your momma's name is. The Judge who gave you to us, she never told us. You remember we talked about all this before?"

"I remember, Pa," Leonard replied. Crestfallen, he lowered his head, his eyes downcast as he stared into the dirt at his feet.

"And that ain't all there is to it, either," Pa said. "City folk ain't like us, Leonard. Granted, some of 'em must be all right, but for the most part they're meaner than Gila Munjas, the whole lot of 'em. And they don't like mutants - me and the missus got a taste of that when we got caught trying to sneak in over the wall. The Big Meg ain't kind to mutants, Leonard. Now, I ain't saying you can't look after yourself. Lord knows, you're already taller than most full-grown men and you ain't even stopped growing yet. You got a lot going for you. You're strong, and you don't hurt easy. You can hunt and track better than I could at your age. Hell, you can even see in the dark. But, the problem is, none of them things are likely to count for much if you go to the city. The city ain't like the Cursed Earth, Leonard. Living there is a whole different bucket of worms. And - much as it pains me to say it, son - I don't reckon you got what it takes to get by in the city on your own."