Chapter 1

Run. Run faster.

My legs would not move any faster, yet I kept accelerating, accelerating by my fear. They were following me, dead on my tracks. Dead, that’s what I’ll be if they catch me. Dead, what an awful concept�"your body here and your mind gone, not being able to do anything, see anything, not alive, not here on earth, but gone (only in spirit).

“No, you will run, and you will fight, and you will NOT think of death,” I heard myself huff out.

~~~~

Two days ago I would not have thought this could happen. It had been a typical day; getting up in the morning and going out to get water from a well, which sat in the middle of a meadow surrounded by various types of trees full of all shades of brown, yellow, orange, and red, yet some still full of the lively color of green in the spring. There was a stone path that led through a small opening into the meadow and down to the well. Although this day seemed ordinary, it wasn’t in the least. The meadow seemed a skew; there had been something there that day that had messed up its pleasant majestic quality: a man.

He stood there as if within his own home, his hand leaning on the small ledge of my beautiful well, yet he seemed to completely glorify the whole scene. I walked up to the well as he followed me slowly and deliberately with his blue eyes.

“Pardon me,” his voice sang the words like a beautiful swan swimming upon a lake, “but could I have a drink?”

I slowly lifted the water from the well and handed it to him. That was the last moment of peace I had in my meadow, my last memory of my meadow.

~~~~

I looked back; they were gaining on me, an inch, two inches. In a second or two they would have me, and I would take my last breath, and have my last memory of life, but not yet.

~~~~

I wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but it just did. Somehow after my encounter with the man from the meadow, I awoke from a short unwanted sleep, in the middle of a cabin. I had been laying on a couch with a blanket hanging over me. Unsure of where I was or how I got there, I sat up to observe my surroundings. The man from the meadow was sitting in a big armchair across from me, watching me intently.

He smiled, “You’re awake, good.” I stared at him dumbfounded as if he were an alien from another galaxy. “You know I imagined you would be much different,” he paused, “you know less girly.” He got up, “Anyways, would you like something to drink? I would imagine you would be extremely thirsty.” He didn’t wait for me to answer but went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

I finally had found my voice when he handed me the water, but the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “What happened to my well?” He chuckled and told me it was still where it had been the last time I saw it. “Oh,” I muttered, “well, I, umm… where am I now?”

His face became very stern at this question and he straightened up, as if he were preparing himself for a business interview “I guess I should probably tell you now, shouldn’t I?” He sighed, “You’re in my house on the outskirts of the country, hidden from them, and I intend to keep it that way.” He glared at me and continued, “It’s about dinner time on the same day that you met me in the meadow.”

I continued to stare at him slightly disoriented and confused. So I had been kidnapped?

“Don’t worry,” he said starring straight into my eyes, “I didn’t do anything to you, well besides bringing you here.” He explained as if reading my mind.

“Why did you bring me here?”

His answer was simple, “Because I was told to.” I crinkled my brow, trying to express my confusion. He saw this and continued, “I was told that you could help us, that you would be the answer.”

“Okay….” I said stupidly, confused at how on earth I would ever be a help at all, when I didn’t even know the slightest thing about what was going on here. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I searched the room to find what could have caused the feeling of being watched. In the corner of the room by a small wooden table, to which a doily and small glass lamp sat, there was a window with a beautiful robin sitting on the sill. It was looking at me; it had been listening to our conversation as if it could understand every word we were saying. How could a small creature of nature, a beautiful bird, understand and not me? The bird flew away and I looked at the man from the meadow, “Who are you?” I asked.

“That is irrelevant.”

~~~~

I wasn’t going to be able to keep running much longer, but I knew that I had to.

~~~~

He told me everything, well everything that he said I needed to know, but anything more and the answer was that it was irrelevant, although I didn’t know why his name was irrelevant.

He explained that he needed my help with a project, he wouldn’t explain to me what it was because he told me that someone else would, that the whole village(yes, village, it was a small gathering of rebels all living together for support) seemed to be overwhelmingly dependent on. I still couldn’t figure out how I would help or why there were rebels to begin with. He told me that they needed me because of the field of research I had done.

“I don’t understand,” I told him, “I haven’t done any research. You must have the wrong person, I am sorry to have wasted so much of your time, but could you bring me home now.” Although I didn’t really want to go home, because I had started to take a rather fancy to him, and there was another reason that I couldn’t quite put my finger on that allured me to stay without any complaints.

At that he merely said, “Right, he told me that would happen.” Then he made me follow him as I tried desperately to figure out who this person he spoke of was, yet he would not give me any insight.

He brought me to another house not far from his and right when we got to the door an old man answered, “I knew you would show up.” He smiled at me, “please come in.”

We went inside and sat down on some wooden chairs that surrounded a large table, there he discussed in a very hushed tone something about memory and possibly me with the man from the meadow. Then they both looked at me and the old man started talking.

“First thing’s first, I need to know who you think you are.” He waited for my response, but I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this question, so I answered, “My name is Ana Louise Stewart, and I live in a small home on the top of a hill surrounded by beautiful nature, where no one usually bothers me.” The man from the meadow and the old man looked at each other, and then the old man asked me what I did for a living. This question was particularly hard to answer, I truly had no idea, I knew I did something but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, I couldn’t remember. Yet every time I tried to think of what I did, all that would come to mind is that I lived on a hill and I lived there humbly. Not being able to express this feeling to them in words I stuttered out, “I… umm… I …..uh…..live….humbly on top of a hill.” But my face showed all the conflict that had been going on inside my mind at the time.

The old man smiled. “Good,” he said, “they didn’t do a very good job.” I gave him a confused glance but he continued on, “your real name is Annaliese Isobel Powell. You have your PhD in psychology and you did a great research project that the government did not like so much. They feared that you had found out the truth and that you would broadcast it to the world, so they took away some of your memory and replaced it to turn you into a humble citizen to whom bared no resemblance of the former Mrs. Powell.” The man from the meadow abruptly got up and excused himself from the table but the old man continued as I stared at him credulously. Why did that name sound so familiar? Maybe I read it somewhere. “The government feared you so much that they used your own research to wipe your brain of anything that connected you to your research, including your former life. Believe what you may, it is true and I am here to hopefully help bring back these repressed memories.

“To answer your question of whom I am: I am the old man, as many people actually call me,” he chuckled at this. “I have lived here since the problem began. When I was seventeen, my dad found out about the plans of the government and decided that they were completely immoral. However, knowing that he would not be able to get away with being against the plans, we fled the country gathering as many people as would listen to his story.” He coughed, “He wasn’t able to convince many people because the plan had already been executed, and the few he was able to save had been put through a lot.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but could you please tell me what exactly the plan had been?” I wasn’t quite sure why I was even considering what he was saying, this was crazy but for some reason I had a feeling that parts of it were true. I couldn’t help but think of the fact that some of my memories seemed incoherent and frazzled, which just wasn’t right. So instead of protesting that this wasn’t true I quietly sat there listening to his story.

He explained that the government’s plan had been to brain wash the people into thinking that their lives where simple; they had them work like little ants in an ant hill, not protesting, so that the people in charge would live life without having to do anything. “They felt that a good country was reliant on good compliant citizens.” He said “So they changed society without society’s knowledge, right under their noses. The first step of the plan was to convince the population to have a huge baby boom and sneakily kill off all the older people. For every baby that was born it was first tested to see how high of an intelligence it had, and if it did not meet the high expectation then the baby was put into a room with others just like it and given a certain operation to which they lost their ability to process complicated thoughts (creating the perfect new generation). After this process they would return the child back to the unknowing mother. Although, if the baby scored well on their intellectual test, just like you did, then they didn’t touch the baby’s mind and they let they baby grow up in a whole other world, simply telling the poor mother they died of a heart disease.

“There was a chance, though, for those lucky babies who were not born in a hospital and to whom the government never found out they existed, such as your friend over there.” He nodded in the direction the man from the meadow had walked off to. “Slowly after a few years, the government began to take control over the unsuspecting people.”

“How did your father find out about the plan?” I asked confused by that piece of detail.

“He had been in the board meeting when the plan was suggested, but at that moment he knew that he had to agree with everything they had said. He then fled for fear for my younger brother whom was in my mother’s stomach at the time.”

“What happened to your brother?”

“They didn’t make it on the journey out of the country; somehow a member of the board found out about my father’s plans and tried to ruin them, which resulted in well …great lives being lost.”

“Oh,” I said, a bit uncomfortable, “I’m sorry.”

I felt like I had been in this situation before except I was the person who had been explaining it, there had also been a gnawing at the back of my mind, I couldn’t figure out where but I swear I knew all of this but it just wasn’t coming back. “I’m sorry but I think you have the wrong person,” I said a bit disappointed that I couldn’t help these wonderful people. But when I said that all he did was smile, because he could tell that I didn’t completely mean it. He got up from the table and motioned for me to follow him, “I have someone for you to meet,” he announced, walking into the other room where the man from the meadow waited on a couch watching a little girl about the age of three with blond hair playing with some blocks. “This is Hope.”