Population Zero

Chapter One

I was one of the lucky ones. I figured this out pretty early on, probably close to the age of 4 when I wandered through a corridor by mistake at the edge of the compound after I got separated from my youth officer. See, I was sick at the time, although I was always sick in those days, this time it was different. I came down with a pretty bad case of meningitis so they had to rush me out of the boarding houses with several other youths, hence why I was at the very edge of the compound to begin with. I was rushing to keep up with the group and trying to go as fast as my 4 year old little legs would push me but I fell behind. The sun was blinding and I got so disoriented that I stumbled into an unfamiliar building thinking it was the hospital. I opened the door and made my way down a narrow path and quickly realized this was no hospital. A swift glance revealed cells row by row and aisle by aisle by the hundreds. I didn't realize this at the time but it must have been a prison. I'll never forget the cold metal smell or the low moaning of the lost souls that resided there. I imagined it was filled with youth boys who had gotten themselves into trouble somehow and were being temporarily housed as punishment but I'll never really know for sure. I don't know if it was my illness or the stench but I began retching loudly and was promptly spotted and carried out within moments. I went on to recover from that experience although my memory is a bit fuzzy and my hearing has been severely impaired. But like I said, I was one of the lucky ones.

Now, I live on the east wing with the Preadolescent boys and it's been hell since I got here close to my tenth birthday. I don't have many friends here and the ones I get along with all right seem to turn on me when it most benefits them. The youth officers are a lot harder here than they were in the west wing, too. I don't know how they would have treated me if I had fallen ill over here but I imagine I would probably be dead instead of nearly deaf. Most of the boys from the outbreak were preadolescence and teenagers and they all died that day. The only children that survived were from the west wing and even then it was only a few of us. Not a day goes by that I don't remind myself of how lucky I was to survive. Now that I find myself in the East Wing I try to keep my head low and my mouth shut because I am weaker than most the boys here and I know if it came down to it, I wouldn't survive the next outbreak.

I do have a few potential allies here but I would have to say my best friend out of all the boys is Elijah although he is a year younger than me. He looks up to me a lot and it kind of gives me a sense of purpose to try to give him a good role model. He is a small kid much like myself and an easy target for getting pranked on and it reminds me of my first year here a lot. I learned very quickly to stay out of everyone's way and keep quiet but Elijah just isn't learning that lesson at all although I have so much respect for him for that reason. He's so much braver than me in that way. What I really like best about him is that he is always asking so many questions. I've never met someone who asked so many questions, seriously, even when it's obvious there is no answer. It has definitely got me questioning a lot for the first time in my life and if I could just get these boys to stop hounding each other and start paying attention to what was going on all around them, I think we could find some serious answers.

One of the advantages of being in the East Wing was that there were some very skillful boys who were able to smuggle and sneak things past the youth officers and were often in the sharing spirit. Once, Benjamin an older boy who had yet to be switched to the teenage wing smuggled in a video of nude girls and a pack of cigarettes after lights out. He passed a cigarette out to each boy in our cottage and played the video projector style on our wall. There were no lighters or matches or anything so the boys mostly just chewed on the cigarettes and held them in between their fingers and pretended to take a puff every now and again. There was no sound on the video and while some boys spoke in hushed voices, it was mostly silent all around. The video lit up the entire wall with blurry images but I could still make out several females laying across a big bed piled on top of each other with no clothes on. A couple of the boys broke out in laughter but most of us just sat there wide eyed and stunned. After the video finished it was Elijah, the youngest, who spoke first.

"Do you think we will ever get to meet the females?" He asked earnestly.

"Maybe in the teenage wing." Benjamin responded with a suspiciously raspy voice. I hate to think of what he may have been doing. I hate to think of what most of the boys were doing while the video played.
I was still in a stage where I was grossed out by the whole thing so I had taken my hearing aid out in the middle of the video and thankfully I remained unaware of any other sounds that were being made.

"Not that I care, but has anyone ever asked why we never see them? Like, why don't we at least see them during our monthly meetings?" I was referring to the meetings where a group of boys from each wing get together and work on what the youth officers call "life skills".

"You know they'd never bring girls to the monthly meetings. The whole point of those meetings is to suppress our urges. How can we do that with hot chicks staring us down?" Benjamin had a point. The life skills that they taught us were ingrained into each of us as early as any of us can remember. We were not meant to procreate. The earth is so overpopulated now that it is our duty to ensure the destruction of the human race. It's what's best for the earth and we have to find ways to suppress our urges. I reckon they thought it'd be a lot easier for us to do that without any girls around to distract us from our mission.

"I still think it could be beneficial for us to get to meet up with the girls once a month. So we can all talk about it together openly, you know? About how to fight our urges together.." a boy called Asher trailed off. He was tall, scrawny and had big thick black glasses that sat down just on the edge of his nose and I honestly wondered what on earth he thought he would talk to a female about. Not that I'm much better. I'm much shorter than him but I have thick dark curly hair which is a very unique trait and I am constantly being complemented on it by the youth officers. I've been told numerous times by my elders that I was a "cute" kid, too and I always took that to heart. But what was the point of being a cute kid? It got quiet for a moment and I suspected the other boys were thinking the same thing I was thinking. We were never going to get to meet a female. We would probably die before the youth officers ever let us into the other compounds. It was clear to everyone that it was in our best interest just to stay away and forget about it. And yet, I think every single one of us craved that more than anything in the world. We were hard wired for intimacy and something just felt empty and wrong without them, even for me.

After a long silence Elijah spoke up again. "They probably keep the females in the adult wing with the youth officers. The babies have to come from somewhere, don't they?"

Everyone nodded. We all understood basic anatomy so it made sense for the females to be close to the nursery where the babies were and that's closest to the adult wing. Youth officers were assigned to work in the nursery caring for the babies on alternating weeks and occasionally they would bring youth to do the dirty work of changing diapers and bottle feeding. I know this because I've spent many tortuous hours there in my earlier years but I never once saw a female. I was always suspicious but I never asked questions. I remember once I was working there and they brought in a new baby boy wrapped up in a blanket and handed him straight to me. I held him tight up to my chest and sniffed his fresh newborn head. That's the closest I've ever felt to being near a female. It was in that moment that I knew I would have to meet one, whatever it takes.