Hellstrom

My name is Allen. Don't bother asking me about my last name...I don't think I ever had one. I was born in a breeding farm out in Essex County and, as soon as I was born, I was taken and placed in a school called Hellstrom Academy.

I had nurses taking care of me all day and all night. That I learned from some of the other kids but what I saw when I got older it was the perfect place for a baby to be raised. They played classical music all of the time and those nurses made sure that no baby cried more than thirty seconds before they took care of any need the baby wanted. When I saw that I realized how lucky I was to be raised in such a place.

The first thing that I really remember was the year of my fifth birthday. Everyone born that year was removed from the dorms we shared while we were younger. I was one of the first to go. I remember being taken to a room with a nurse who came over and comforted me. She played with me for a little while and then I was taken into a room filled with doctors and other nurses. “Allen,” one said, “just relax and you'll be done in a few minutes.”

I was relaxed. Why shouldn't I be I was always treated well why would this be any different. Another nurse came and removed my trousers and laid me on a small bed. She came over with a needle and told that I would feel a little pain and then I wouldn't feel anything. She placed the tip of the needle against my groin and slid it into mt skin very gently. She was right, there was no real pain. Then a doctor came over and a few seconds later I was walked out of the room and into another where I was told to rest. But, before I was allowed to lay down the nurse came over and injected something into my wrist. That hurt worse than whatever it was that they did before but I was a big boy and didn't cry...even though I really wanted to.

All of the time we were at Hellstrom we were ostracized by a lot of the kids who went to school there. I found out when I was sixteen why. Most of the students attending were from the upper-crust families of the area. Their parents paid about 60,000 pounds a year for their kids to attend school there. We, on the on the other hand were clones created from drug addicts, homeless people and prostitutes from around the country. They were paid fifty pounds for their cells and then sent packing. That bothered some of us but there wasn't anything we could do about it so I just accepted it and went on with my life.

Now, I had two friends back then...Jessica was one of them and Stew was the other. They were both brought into the room within a couple minutes after I was and they both got the same shot that I did. We rested for a couple hours before Stew and I were taken to a room we were going to share until we turned eighteen. Jessica was taken to another building. Stew and I assumed that she was placed with the girls but we weren't sure.

Occasionally they would let us go into town once we got a little older and it was there where Stew and Jessica started building a relationship. It was something but above all...the three of us stuck together.

Now, going back a bit we were separated when we hit our eighteenth year. I was sent to Southampton, Stew went to Embelton and Jessica went to St. Ives but before we left we were told why we were born and what purpose we had in life and that was to become a cara...short for carrier. We were to travel the country, making sure to visit the farm communities and become infected with any and all diseases we could find and then we were to be used as organ donors for the upper classes in the major cities...especially royalty during our 20th year.

We were given stipends from the government to live on. Mine was a little over 500 pounds a month which meant that I was poor but better off than a lot of others who were jailed for living on the streets.

I heard stories of caras living through two or three donations. By that time they were usually drained and barely alive. I thought that they looked like zombies but they were alive and that was good enough. There were a few who died during their first donations and a rare few who lived long enough to make it to their fourth donation. By that time they were not released...none of us were ever released...they were locked into a room and starved to death which wasn't hard because they were nothing but walking skeletons anyway.

Stew was the first to make a donation. If I remember right he donated his right lung to some rich woman who was 57 years old and spent her entire life smoking pot and drinking. Stew's lung was her fourth transplant. The big thing was that Stew came through it fine and was back to normal in just a couple weeks.

Jessica got the next call. Her first “job” was to donate her fallopian tubes and uterus some 25 year old who was unable to have kids. I guess that the doctors either forgot or didn't know that we were sterilized when we were kids but she was told that she had to do it so she did as she was told.

Me, for some reason I wasn't getting the message for me to take my place. Yeah, I gave blood on a fairly regular basis so that the antibodies I developed when I was a kid could cure some really nasty diseases. Thinking back I remember being with dying people who suffered from things like plague, AIDS and so many other diseases that I could not remember all of them. For some reason, unlike the people I was with, I never caught and of the diseases I was exposed to and neither did any of the others I was with. Jessica one time caught the flu from someone she was with and they treated her like a leper until she recovered but, for those two weeks Stew and I spent every moment with her including sleeping in beds that were pushed next to hers. We got the germs alright but we never got sick...not in the least.

I heard that Stew had his second donation. It was one of his kidneys this time, It went to a woman who should have died. She was 70 years old and was living on tubes but her husband paid for the kidney so Stew gave it up. He had trouble after that one. He had to use a walker and had a tank of oxygen with him at all times. That lasted a little over a month until he had his third donation.
 

I was there as the doctors put him to sleep. He looked at me and smiled just before he went under. They removed half of his liver. I didn't know who it was for and I didn't really care. They made the initial incision and two minutes later the liver was on its way to the next room. Suddenly, every alarm in the room started going off at the same time. Stew started waking up. The first thing he did was look at me. There was a tear running down his cheek as he took a deep breath and his soul left his body. The doctors didn't try to revive him. They just turned off the machines and walked out of the room. Stew was there uncovered and all alone but, for him, the torture of making donations was over.

Me and Jessica got together a couple weeks later. She hadn't heard about Stew. She broke down crying and she was crying hard. I didn't know it at the time but, despite the fact that I was in love with her, she had strong feelings of love for Stew and they had since they were friends when they were kids. I know it was bad time but I told her how I felt about her and she smiled. She was actually happy about it and of course that made me happy. Then she told me why.

There were always rumors that floated around Hellstrom but 99% of them weren't true but she told me that one she heard was true and was that if two caras got married they would be given a few extra years together just to be able to spend some time together before they started giving donations. “That would for for us,” she said with a smile so we went into town the next day and got a marriage license and got married. The next day we headed off to Hellstrom to get our forbearance.

It took use three days to get to Hellstrom by train and bus. When we got there we saw so many young people who were just like we were...learning that their lives would be in total service to the upper class. They all smiled at us as we walked by. We smiled back but inside our hearts were breaking for them...especially the littlest ones.

We had called ahead so the director of Hellstrom was waiting for us at the entrance to the building. She hugged us and gave a welcome that we never expected..she was crying as she wrapped her arms around us but before we said a word she told us what we didn't want to hear. The forbearance was just a myth and that we were being sent back to the places that they has assigned us. That moment we just thanked her and left. Yes, we were disappointed but we weren't done yet.

I thought for a moment. I remembered that I saw people coming and going to France on a regular basis. “Jessica,” I said, “Don't ask questions just come with me. She did as I said and we headed to Southampton where we boarded a ship to the mainland. I heard that the French didn't have the caras program there so we could live out our lives happy and free from donations.
 

We lived in a little town on the French coast for more than twenty years. We ran into a few Hellstorm “graduates.” I guess they had heard about how we got away. After a while we ran into a 19 year old girl who told us the best new we ever thought we could hear...Hellstrom was closed by the British government because of the cruelty they were inflicting on kids in the caras program after there was a rash of deaths in the complex. All of the rest of the kids were adopted to good families and were living happy lives.

We sat and cried and we both said the same thing...”It was too bad Stew didn't live to see this.” We both know that he is happy at the news no matter where he was and that he would have been holding a party to celebrate. That was just the kind of guy he was and we both loved, and missed, him for it.