Will felt the blood drain from his face as he looked at the knife. And he watched the man reach for it. Nobody liked the people who did the jobs that he and Harry did, but nobody had ever threatened him in such a way before. All he knew about threats was theoretical, from stupid seminars that had been of absolutely no use to them so far. But now, now he and Harry were expected to get through this encounter.
A smart man probably would've ran for the door at that point but, before the Helpers changed everything, Will had seen enough horror movies to suggest that running in fear from an attacker was probably not the right thing to do. And, even after fictional movies became extinct, there were still house cats and he had watched plenty of them kill mice who bolted from them in terror.
So instead of running, Will traded a look with Harry, wondering if he had any bright ideas about what to do next. A seminar about dealing with irrational people who thought you were evil for spying on them probably would've come in handy right then. Maybe he would suggest such a training the next time he was forced to fill out an evaluation.
Harry opened his mouth to say something, maybe to suggest what they could do to save themselves, but he never got a chance to say anything. Because at that very moment the kitchen door slammed open, making everybody in the room jump. Three men wearing hazard gear rushed into the room, and before the man could do anything more than brandish the knife ineffectually at them, they tackled him, and two of them held them down while the third snapped handcuffs on him.
Within ninety seconds both the man and his wife were in handcuffs, and roughly yanked to their feet. The woman whimpered as one of hazard team prodded her to get her to walk in the right direction, and her husband struggled in the grips of the other two team members. The way he struggled implied that either he did not understand that he was making things worse for himself, or that he no longer cared. Either one of these possibilities was rather grim.
Will watch them leave the house, feeling sorrowful. He wasn't happy that the man had threatened them, and truly believed that he had brought everything that was going to happen to him and his wife upon himself, but still, it wasn't every day that you saw somebody be dragged away like that. They were going to be reprogrammed. Everyone feared that. And for this couple, it was going to happen soon.
Harry didn't seem to be as concerned with the couple's feet as he did. In fact, he just looked relieved when he turned to Will and said "well, I guess that's over with."
Will blinked. "Yeah, I guess."
To his mild surprise, Harry told him that he was going out to the truck to retrieve a replacement camera. When he noticed that Will hadn't expected that he smiled grimly and said "even if they're not going to come back here, someone will. I'd rather get replacing the camera over with now, instead of returning later. Right?"
"Sure, right." There was some merit to the idea, but it seemed a little bit wrong. Should they really be helping get the house ready like the couple was never going to come back? No one that Will knew who had been reprogrammed ever returned to where they had been living, but he supposed it could happen.
He wouldn't talk about it, but deep down Will didn't actually believe that anybody was reprogrammed. He thought that was just a way of telling people not to expect the troublemaker back. When they first arrived Helpers hadn't been too concerned about killing off those who were more trouble than they were worth, so it wasn't too hard to imagine that they continued to do so. They had fewer people to kill now, because most people were so worn down that they ended up doing whatever the hell they were told, but there still had to be a few that couldn't be bent to Their will. And what do you do with people like that? Sweep them under the rug, bury them in a pit, forget they ever existed. Forgetting was easier than rehabilitation.
"Be back in a minute," Harry told him.
When Harry brought in the camera, Will helped him put it up. He didn't take very long to install it, and they were able to test it out to make sure that they could see the feed at least. It wasn't their jobs to watch the feeds, and in fact other people in their building stayed there all day to do so, but all technicians have the power to hook into a test feed in order to troubleshoot camera issues.
Later, as they were sitting in the truck and driving back to the headquarters, Harry turned to him and said "Well, that was pretty exciting. I really hope we don't get that sort of excitement again anytime soon."
"I totally agree," Will replied in complete sincerity. "I wouldn't mind never having that sort of excitement again."
"I know what you mean."
Looking out the window, he wondered if Harry really did. Sometimes it felt like he worried more about what could happen than other people. That didn't seem to make any sense, but other people seem to be more accepting, or at least calmer, when it came to thoughts of what could happen. Somehow it seemed like everyone else was convinced that the worst had already happened. But he didn't think it had. He was terrified that it hadn't.
Will glanced at Harry, wondering what he would think if he knew that he had seen people dragged off in handcuffs before, before the invasion. It wasn't something that he talked about, even to Madison, so he had no inclination to tell Harry about what it had been like when he hadn't been completely divorced of the situation, when it hadn't just been like in the kitchen of the couple who had broken their camera.
Madison seemed like she had just a bad a day as he had, at least judging by her mood when he got home. The boys weren't any worse behaved than they usually were, but she snapped at them both several times each before they even sat down to dinner as a family. Will usually didn't mind that families were monitored to make sure that parents ate with their children but that evening he longed for the sort of night when people ate in their rooms or in front of the TV. Doing that too often got your family the sort of attention that no one wanted, so they ate together as usual.
Max didn't make things any easier because he paused mid-meal to ask, "Is it true that people need to have more babies? Some kids at school said that their parents said that they were going to have new brothers or sisters next year."
Madison's dish rattled when she got up from the table abruptly. Corrine called "Mama?" and gave her a concerned look but his wife didn't even look at their daughter on her way out of the room. For a second Will watched as she stalked off, but a whimper from the baby had him turning his attention to her instead.
He managed to pick her up while her lower lip was still quivering as she tried to decide if being ignored by her mother was a reason to cry. He smoothed her soft brown curls before looking over at the boys who were both staring at him. Daniel looked a little scared, but Will was more concerned that Max's expression was guilty.
"I'm sorry I upset Mom," Max mumbled, but it was clear that he had no idea what he'd done to make her react that way.
"Max..." Will sighed and rested his chin on the baby's head. "It's okay to have questions, but for now on I want you to ask me them if the topic is babies, okay?" He glanced at Daniel. "You too, huh?"
Both boys nodded. When they were little they'd both had curly hair like their sister, but regularly scheduled haircuts had seemed to cause those baby curls to give way to straight locks. Will had no idea if there really had been a connection, and it was things like that that made him wish that people could still look up anything they wanted to like they had been able to back before. Rumor had it that several people who ran Google and Wikipedia had been amongst those who had resisted so hard that they'd been eliminated within the first few months after the Helpers arrived. It was probably just a folk legend: there was no way to verify the story one way or the other, which was blackly ironic.
Corrine eventually calmed down enough for Will to put her back in her highchair and interest her in eating again. He looked up from cutting her food and addressed Max. "To answer your question, yes. If the parents are less than forty years old, They'll be having two more babies."
"Forty? That's way older than you and Mommy," Daniel noted.
"It sure is," Will said gloomily. When he was small his paternal grandmother told him not to wish his youth away, but these days he didn't find much appeal in being relatively young. If he and his wife were a decade and a year older, they wouldn't be expected to produce more children, which would have been a welcome exchange for thinning hair and the onset of aching joints.
"How come everyone decided to have new babies?" Daniel asked.
Will glanced around to make sure that Madison wasn't within earshot, before he told him. "You know how all the families you know have three kids?"
"Well, most of them. Some of them only have one or two, like Lacey's family."
Lacey was a twenty-year-old neighbor who occasionally babysat Will's children. Shaking his head, he said, "I actually was talking more about the kids you go to school with. But Lacey is very young. She and her husband will eventually have three children, you understand?"
Daniel thought this over for a moment. "Because… She and Tommy will have been married longer someday?"
"Exactly."
Will hoped this explanation would be enough, but Max looked up at them. "I don't get it."
It was hard not to sigh again. "Max, the reason everyone has three children is because that's the rule. The Helpers decided that long time ago, before you were born. So that's why everyone who has been married long enough to have three children has three."
"So why are a lot of people going have four now?" Max asked. "Is it because we still don't have as many people as we used to?"
Although people didn't dare to spend too much time complaining about the atrocities that had killed off so many humans, everyone still knew about it. Even children like Max who had been born years after it had happened. The Helpers might be able to control a lot of things, but they hadn't found a way to make it impossible to realize that the world had been built for more than twice as many people as now roamed it.
Will nodded reluctantly. "Well, that's part of it. But, the Helpers have changed their minds about everyone having three children, Max. Now everyone is supposed to have five."
"Huh."
"Dad, why did the Helpers decid-" Max started to ask, but Will shook his head. "Oh."
Daniel just looked confused but Max was old enough to understand that there were topics that were off limits, and it didn't surprise him that the boy glanced at the room's camera.
Do either of you have more questions?" Will hoped his face convey a 'that I can answer' message.
Max thought a moment and finally asked, "What's a donor?"
"A donor?" Will repeated uneasily.
"Yeah. Trevor's dad died a few years ago so his mom got a letter saying that the Helpers were going to pick a donor for her."
Being widowed was the only reason (abet a temporary one) besides being too old that a person was exempted from the family planning rules - people who had or were carriers for diseases were subjected to IVF to make sure their children would not, which Will supposed was a good thing considering what happened to babies with genetic mutations. But Will put that thought aside and focused on what Max had just said: if Trevor had been telling the truth, and there was little reason to think that he was making it up, then that rule about being a widowed had changed too. It didn't sound like the Helpers were going to take the time to find widows and widowers a new mate before reapplying the family planning rules to them.
Will tried not to let his upset show when he spoke again. "You know that making a baby requires both a man and a woman." Max nodded. "A donor gives the other cells a single person needs to make a baby."
His oldest son still looked confused. "Is that guy going to be Trevor's new dad?"
"I'm not sure but I don't think so." If the woman had been younger, maybe, but she'd have to have a baby every year for the next four years to meet the deadline and even marriages arranged by the Helpers managed to take time because the process was more involved than simply sticking two people in a house and declaring them married: somehow the Helpers seemed to realize that stress affected fertility, and making actual strangers move in together was stressful, so they allowed people time to get to know each other before they were married. In the case of himself and Madison, they'd been introduced two years before they married.
"Oh." Max seemed to finally exhaust his supply of questions, and both boys went back to eating.
Will, on the other hand, listlessly picked at his dinner when not busy trying to cajole Corrine into eating instead of playing with her food. His thoughts keep returning to what he privately deemed the beginning of the end: the night he'd first seen someone in handcuffs in person, not just on TV.
It was probably the couple they'd had to turn in earlier in the day making his thoughts so morbid, but surely the unwelcome news they'd gotten that week that had him dwelling on the night that could have made everything that happened after that completely different.