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This is a fan fiction from Children of Men. For those who haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it.
I was trapped. Trapped in this city, this refugee camp. I’ve been here for three months. I was from Italy, Rome in fact. But Rome fell into the hands of the mobs and into chaos. I was among the last of the humans to be born. Not exactly the last one though. I forgot that person’s name. But for about twenty years, not a single baby was born. Being the youngest in the family, I was treated with a sense of reverence while I was in Italy. Growing up, all I heard was riots, wars, terrorist attacks, news of terrible atrocities. No peace or calm in the air. Only violence. When my family realized that staying in Italy was not safe and the best plan was to go to the United Kingdom, which was the last country that had order, I was only 23. Twenty years ago, going to United Kingdom was easy. Just catch a plane and fly across France and Switzerland and the English Channel and you were there. But this wasn’t twenty years ago. This was 2027, when the United Kingdom completely shut down her borders to any immigrant, legal or not. We had to cross the heavy snows of Switzerland, myself, my parents, my two older brothers and an older sister, and my grandmother whom I lost after she slipped and broke her leg. We were forced to leave her behind in the cold. Then we crossed the entire country of France, narrowly avoiding death at every turn. Wherever we went, all I smelled was the rotting flesh of the dead and the burning smell of ashes. Finally we reached the coast of France, but there was still the Channel. The Chunnel was completely destroyed, or so we heard from the terrified French people. We were forced to cross it by a stolen boat, daring terrible seas. I lost my big brother to the merciless waves when he fell overboard. But finally we made it to the blessed English shore. But it was not the end of our terror.
The British government hunted illegal immigrants like roaches. They searched every city, every town, every village, every house, every building, everywhere. We were caught when my remaining brother was off, scavenging for food. When the British came bursting in our door, we were all seized and forced into the car. Well, almost all of us. One of them noticed my sister and took her away with him. We never saw her again. During the car ride, I had no idea where we were being taken to. Images of prisons, concentration camps, and locked facilities loomed in my hide during the entire trip. After endless driving, we stopped to be transferred to a bus where there were twenty other unfortunate souls like us. During the transfer, my last remaining sibling fought with the guard that was escorting him. He nearly killed him but another guard simply took out his gun and shot my last brother in the head. If the car ride was bad, then the bus ride was extremely horrific. Every now and then, you would hear the wails of a passenger or the sickening cough of an ill immigrant. I had heard one of the guards say that we were going to Bexhill but I had no idea what would be waiting for us in Bexhill.
That curiosity was soon answered when we arrived. Columns of refugees being stripped naked, beaten into inches of life, forced into cramped quarters and uncomfortable positions, terrified by ravenous dogs, and other unspeakable horrors. When the bus stopped, a guard with a terrifying dog entered in and grabbed a couple of passengers out…including my mother. She was forced out of the bus by the guard who was oblivious to our cries and pleads to stand among the endless rows. Now only my father remained. My grandmother told us ever since I was born that nothing mattered as long as we had our family. But our family was now broken and splintered.
As we entered Bexhill, we saw what it was really like. Chaos. There was no government, no police, no army, nothing. Nothing but the rule of starving and desperate people, trapped in a foreign city miles from their homes. And people do dark and terrible things when they were starving and desperate. After managing to survive off rats and filthy water for a month, my father was killed in a brawl over a piece of bread. Now I was truly alone. My grandmother was taken by the cold, my brother by the waters, my sister by the British police, my other brother and my mother by the British guards, and my father by the starving mob. I managed to survive in a building shared by Arabs, blacks, Asians, and many other different people.
When I was a boy, I was raised as a Catholic, just like my family. During the entire ordeal, though, I began to lose my faith in God. Why would God allow so much evil to happen? People said that God was angry at us and decided to take away our greatest gift, the gift of life. Amidst the dark cloud of depression in Bexhill, there was a tiny ray of hope that spread ever so weakly in the city. The Human Project. Destined to cure humanity from its inability to have babies. But like God, I did not believe in it. It doesn’t matter. The entire world is going to end, one way or another. After the second month of surviving day by day, I realized that my family was lucky. They weren’t forced to walk along the dragging ends of life. They all died…while I continued to live.
The third month came when something happened. News of a bombing in Bexhill reached us. They say it was the Fishes who were coming in. They say they were in to liberate us from the British. But when the Fishes came into the building with the British army at their heels, they didn’t care about us. They all seemed to care about a black girl that they brought in with them. She was carrying a bundle of clothes, clinging on to them as if it was the most precious thing she had in her life. The British army, determined to flush out the terrorists, began bombarding the building with their tanks and their guns. And the Fishes fought back until soon, all I could hear now was the roar of guns, the cries of soldiers, the screams of the dead, and the wails of the mourning. And then I heard a different sound. Someting I haven’t heard for twenty years. The cry of a baby.
It was the baby of the black girl I saw them carrying into the building. She was now being helped out by someone, someone that wasn’t one of the Fishes, an Englishman. As they passed, everyone began to pray or bow or reached out their hands to touch the new life. The new symbol of hope. I was completely at awe. As if in a trance, I stepped out of the corner that I had cowered into during the battle and towards the baby. Bullets continued to fly into the building but I didn’t care. I didn’t see them. All I saw was the crying baby held by her mother. For the first time in two months, I began to pray as I walked closer to the baby. Just as my finger touched her tiny foot, a bullet hit me in the head. As I crumbled on to the ground in the last few minutes of life, the last thing I heard before darkness took me was the sound of the crying baby.
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I was cured all right.
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