The Walker
The Giver
The Provider
By Season Gu
Chapter 1: The Walker
Who am I? And how will this story end?
The air in St. Chungus feels stale and stuffy, with a sharp smell of rotten eggs, boiled cabbage, and old, crusty toenails. I'm used to it—used to the creaking floors, used to the warped wood that seems to resist the weight of an old man sleeping nearby. Down the hallway, there's a faucet that drips slowly, slowly as if it were trying to erase the passing of time.
Don’t even get me started on the nightmare that is the dining hall.
It’s a dystopia of filth. Prune pits and peach bites sit abandoned, orange peels scattered like broken dreams. Globs of cold oatmeal cling to plates, pizza crusts, and withered greens whisper neglect.
The garbage is endless—a relentless tide of misery. Greasy napkins stick to shoes, cookie crumbs and blobs of gum hide in corners. Rubbery macaroni, sour milk, and crusts of pie rot beside shriveled melons. Eggs tangled with lemon custard, old fries, rancid meat, and mysterious yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat turn every step through the dining hall into an assault on the senses.
The room itself deepens the gloom. The walls peel like dead leaves, brittle with neglect. At night, wind slithers through cracked windows, whispering secrets you’d rather not hear. Overhead, flickering lights buzz like flies on rot, while shadows stretch across the room, twisting the darkness into a mirror of decay.
This forgotten orphanage is not just falling; let’s see who dies first.
Unlike my diminutive and dainty sister, I was tall and had wide shoulders. You know, if it weren’t cuz I’m in an orphanage, I would be ranked top 10 in the world’s most handsome men. But here, beauty is just another secret we bury beneath gray walls and chipped paint.
“Sister” doesn’t always have to go by blood; she arrived at the orphanage 2 winters ago. The girl was simply too stunning; no one could deny that angels carved her features. Many people saw this as a weakness, but this porcelain doll just refuses to shatter.
She’d smile at me like no one else would.
The world always has a way of despair. On a stormy night, the headmaster came to see her. Never with kindness, but with a cruelty that hid behind the closed door of that locked office. After the night, she never smiled again; her laugh turned into silence, with her eyes dulling like the rain on that Monday morning. After one morning, she was gone, she’d jumped from the attic window with her body shattered on the stone. Only for a slight second, the orphanage moved on like nothing had ever happened, but not me, I still see her in the shadow, I can still hear her voice in the hollow creaks of stairs.
Sometimes, when the tremors in my hands worsen, really badly. I would close my eyes. I would think, not on the orphanage, not about my taunts, but on the time before. Before, when the world was warm, when her voice was the only story the world needed.
“Milo,” she whispers. She tucked the blanket and pillows around me. “Once upon a time, there was a warrior called the Walker. They never sleep, never quit.” She would tap her fingers on my chest, and I would listen to my own heartbeat. ”When you find yourself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to you. She will speak words of wisdom, so let it be. And in your hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of you. So let it be, even when the road is dark, they will carry you forward. One step and another, then another, then another.”
I can still smell the scent of lavender on her wrists, hear the creaks of her rocking chair as she turns around, smiling softly, and turns on “Hey Jude” from the radio, and let the soft voice of the Beatles float through the air. “Hey Milo, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let it into your heart. Then you can start to make it better,” she’d say. “The walkers would see you going, and fighting.”
Back then, I would imagine the walkers, like knights. They would have swords that flow in the dark. But now, my legs betrayed me and woke me up from reality. “The Walkers are still marching, Milo, so you march too.”
But the thing is, my mom never told me the end of the story.
“What happens after the Walkers defeated the dragon?”
In the shadow of the pawn shop, under the bell jangling like a death knell as I stepped in, I pulled down my hood.
I quickly grabbed the book off the counter, an already battered “principles of molecular biology,” my mom’s faded name penciled inside the cover. I never meant to take it, but it was something in me, something that made me steal it.
The old man never stopped me, never said a word, never made a sound. Maybe he knew it all along, maybe he knew what I couldn’t.
The guilt will always hit me. I was never a thief, never like this. For a damnable textbook, but I ran out of options. I turned to leave, my eyes met with him one last time. His glare felt like a knife, the sadness. He knew exactly, I’m a kid, a broken, desperate, lost one.
Under the flickering light, I looked at the protein trekking down the microtubules. Biology confirmed her theory: life isn’t motionless, it’s walking. From cell division to heartbeat, everything and everywhere all at once, is walking. Existence is resistance; to stop is to surrender.
That day onward, I would put my palm on the page. I can feel the protein under my finger. Walkers don’t quit, and neither will I. One more step, just one more step to turn the page of this book, of my life.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, but the tremors had been really bad since this morning. Sister Chungus had left her office. I hid in the cabinet, just wide enough to see the desk where this orphanage keeps all its records. I needed to know if my mother’s letter was still in there.
“Transfer paperwork finalized. His ass is gonna be kicked to Berlin,” says Sister Chungus. Kanye West prays, “Oh dear god, please help him, that place is just another asylum of torture. God, hope he doesn’t get the treatments there. Just… wait until you are free for eternity.”
She paused. Chungus, much colder, said, ”She’s been wasting too much of our budget, I mean, he’s turning 18 soon, the age where I can’t torture him anymore, but you gotta admit this morning was fun though.”
Yes, I remember this morning. Chungus poured a little of the liquid on the back of my hand. She watched as white smoke rose, accompanied by the smell of burning flesh. An overwhelming sense of being on fire.
Remembering this again, my hand slipped on the wall. The tremor this time wasn’t from the disease.
Thanks god they didn’t hear me.
The guard scraped his chair as he stood up. I watch past the window of the closet they locked me in. I watched him amble down the hall toward the bathroom. I see his key swinging from his belt.
I shook my hands, not from the disease, but from the unexpected plan clawing its way out of my desperation. I already spent three nights in this gloomy box. I’ve been listening to the rhythms, the gaps in their attention. They think I’m weak? I’ll show them who’s the boss.
I began looking for cleaning supplies in the corner. Bleach and Ammonia—the perfect mixture. I remembered the warning from the book. However, warnings are for people with better options, so I poured them into a bucket. I backed away as fumes began to curl. Within seconds, a thick, choking smoke blew out the door.
The fire alarm screamed for its life.
Chungus shouted, and I could hear her footsteps pounding past me. When the hallway was clear, I escaped. The emergency exit loomed at the end of the corridor. Cold air hit my face as I stumbled into the night. I looked back, the orphanage in chaos. All I can hear are flashing lights and shouts of agony. When I turned my head, I saw the skeletal outlines of the city ruined in the dark.
The best plan is to have no plan. I ran, or to be honest, limped, but it was enough, more than enough.
Rain will always smell like bleach and ammonia.
The world was shattered, a pale reminder of how things used to be. Once blue, the sky now lay a flat, sullen grey, filled with ash and the traces of a thousand burning cities. There was a metallic taste to the air, all rust and rot. Blackened corpses of skyscrapers towered from the earth, windows destroyed, steel charred and twisted into broken forms as if the earth were ripped asunder in a final, painful breath.
Far in the distance, the remains of a shattered highway reached out into the horizon, riddled with fissures and wearing away in the embrace of an ever-advancing desert of dirt and soot. Fires were still burning stubborn and hot in the rubble, as if the earth could not exhale. The earth was charred– life had once been here and now it was nothing but a wasteland, scattered with broken cars, turned tanks and heaps of ash were what people once were.
There weren’t many left of mankind, who were no more than forgotten whispers in the wind. We had fought for power, for riches, for rule—greed that had brought us to the edge. And then, by the time the bombs fell, it was too late. The cities were char and the seas boiled and the very air was on fire with radiation, and the earth itself screamed with the pain of its own despair. The pride and pinnacle of civilization now lay as a carcass, stripped to the bone by the petty few that had survived.
Now, there were only the desperate—the scavengers, the survivors, cowering from the ghosts of their pasts and the rage of a world that had come to punish them. We wandered in the wilderness, longing for something to hold us in the rubble that would not be held. The remaining men were but shadows, clinging to the dying coals of the earth, drowned in their own orgies.
The greed that had driven the war had disappeared, supplanted by a baser instinct — that of simple survival. But even that, we knew, was temporary. The world would never recover. We were the last remnants, and we would die in the wreckage of our own devising, the ghosts of a forgotten time.
I sat in the ruins of the old Biotech institute. I see it in the ruins, the lawsuits, the whispers about what went wrong and what is wrong. But the power is still in the walls, who knows? Maybe it’s the emergency exit.
Dr. Anna Conda stood with her legacy. Her lab coat was more of a stain than a fabric. I can see her hair twisted between silver and black. She didn’t see me, or so I thought. She kept staring at the autopsy report in her hand.
“You are dead to me,” were her first words.
I flexed my right hand; the tremor had gotten much worse compared to years after I escaped that orphanage. “I was about to say that,” I said.
The report slid onto the counter. I can see my name bolded on the top in red ink… or maybe blood.
She tapped her finger on the file and said, ”They scrapped the trial after you vanished 15 years ago. Huh, they called it the 'termination.’” She paused and said, “But you’re still walking.”
Suddenly, the storm cracked. The lights were off, and everything was in shadows.
“So, Milo,” said Dr. Conda, ”Let’s talk about what’s been killing you.”
Conda slammed her hand on the file. “Why are you here?” She kept her face down. I can hear her voice, as weak as the frayed edges of her torn lab coat. “This isn’t a shelter, it’s like a graveyard for the living.”
I looked at my reflection on the cracked safety glass behind her. I see a ghost with dead eyes. 15 years on the street had carved away the boy who was once the walker. The tremor will always stay, and will always come.
“Bingo,” I said, and I draped my leg forward. “Cemetery is a party for the dead,” I said. “And this place still breathes.”
Conda turned, and I saw her reddish eyes behind her safety goggles. “What do you want?”
“Enough,” I said. I crouched to a monitor. I typed the broken keyboard until I saw a 3D model of a protein come to life. I can see the walkers carrying the cargo along microtubules. I can visualize my mother’s stories. “I see, you were studying axonal transport, that’s before they pulled your funding. Huh?”
A glass shattered somewhere. I can see Conda laughing with bitterness. “And what? You think that’ll make us survive? Are you gonna be my broken lab assistant?”
“No,” I said, confronting her stare. “I think you’ve been too alone here with your ghosts.”
Then, there’s a moment of silence. The silence stretched beyond the shadows and equipment. Conda took off her goggles. “You clean, you cook, and you don’t dare touch anything.” She threw me a mop and said, “And if you die in the hallway, don’t expect an ambulance.”
As I cleaned the bloody wall, I could sense Conda watching me. I can sense the feeling, the feeling not of pity, but something sharper. I can see the look of a scientist testing an anomaly.
“You’re blocking my light,” murmured Conda with her head down.
I moved. A journal slipped, and I can see the page with a black and white photo. I see rows of mice in cages with tags around them: “The giver subjects.”
The screwdriver in Conda’s hand suddenly dropped. For 15 consecutive seconds, there was only the sound of dripping water.
“A mistake,” she said. “A mistake to hijack the transport system. To deliver synthetic protein to dying neurons.”
I turned the page of the journal. I see curved graphs, then a sudden drop. On the last page, it says: ”Subjects exhibited unprecedented motor recovery followed by synthetic failure. Immediate termination.”
“They called it the Lazarus effect. Cells regenerate overnight.” Her finger pointed to a photo of a mouse in seizure. ”The walkers wouldn’t stop, they keep dividing, and mutating.”
I looked down and stared at the tremor of my hand. ” Makes them unstoppable.”
Conda laughed. ”Ah—kiddo, that’s the problem of being a god, everything we fix, we break in new ways.”
The tremor in my hands looked different under the microscope. Each subtle shake was like the fluttering of a leaf caught in the wind. I watched as my fingers twitched, as if my own body was betraying me. I stole a tiny slide from Conda’s private stock. I can see my blood, I can see the struggling motor proteins hauling their cargo through dying neurons. They stumble, they pause, but they never stop.
They don’t know whether or not they are supposed to quit; the proteins pushed forward, with their little legs binding and unbinding the microtubules. The cells are collapsing, the body in chaos, but they keep walking.
“Romanticizing biology won’t cure you,” shouted Conda as she slammed her coffee. I pointed at the screen, “You told me the project giver failed because the proteins won’t stop diving. But what if… What if that’s not a bug? What if that is the point?”
Silence broke once again. The only heater in the room broke off. I pulled out my notebook. I can see the margin, the proteins shaped like armored knights. Cargo transformed into shields.
“It’s willpower made physical; they don’t have brains, but they persist. Why can’t we?”
For the first time, Conda smiled. “You’re talking about more than therapy.”
“I’m talking about rewriting the future.” The tremor made my finger waver as I pointed at the data. ”You wanted to rebuild the walkers, but what if we build new ones that refused to fail?”
The wind blew the broken windows. Conda giggled. ”You’ll just die sooner.”
I stared at her dead in the eyes and said, ”Or live differently.”
The flickering screen started to power up suddenly, for the first time in forever. Conda smiled and said, ”Go get your blood tested, let’s see how stubborn you are.”
I can see the trembling syringe in Conda’s hand. I watched as the greenish liquid swirled in me.
“Last chance to back out, kiddo,” said Conda as she injected the needle. ”The new giver won’t just target your motor neurons, they’ll rewrite them, and the history of humanity.”
What’s the worst that could happen?
I feel the burn crawling up my arm. Heart rate spiking, machine screaming, the line zigzagging.
I see the proteins marching, I see them releasing their cargos. I see the armies in transport. I see the bridges across the tissues.
Conda pressed down on my shoulders. ”Breathe.”
I wished I could, but I couldn’t.
Chungus came down with a calm, viscous smile.
I spread my arms wide and shouted, ”Did you miss me?”
The last thing I saw wasn’t a syringe; it was my finger staying steadily on the floor.
The clock reads 3:20 AM, and the tremors are gone.
Conda almost broke down. I can see her lab coat stained by sweat and coffee. I grabbed the syringe, and I could move my hand smoothly and perfectly.
Then, I started bleeding from my nose. I wiped my face and said, “Run the test.” I can see the vitals dancing at the edge of normal. I can see my pulse drumming. Conda’s microscope shows the truth. The serum with the given proteins is replicating. They weren’t just repairing, they were evolving.
I finally laughed, along with a sign of relief on Conda’s face. Somewhere beyond the lab, a new world is awakening. And for the first time in forever, I couldn’t wait to meet it.
The light flickered once again as I rolled up my sleeve. “You are not a kid anymore; you need to understand the sacrifice,” said Conda. The dark circle has deepened over time. “You won’t just die, you’ll dissolve cell by cell.”
I can see the monitor showing the given protein swarming through the blood I took this morning. They are hungry for tissue. “How ironic,” I said, pressing my arm on the pad. ”Look at that disease.”
Conda looked at me, and she whispered something in Polish that’s probably a curse. “Final destination,” she said. I closed my eyes, and flashbacks popped about Saint Chungus. I remembered the knees were in pain for hours of kneeling. I can hear the laughter of the headmaster. Every time I fell, I would spend nights crying until there were no tears left to cry.
My brainwaves started to explode. “Cond—” I choked on the taste of iron. ”I can feel the—”
“It’s… It’s walking,” I shouted. The pain is beyond what I imagined.
The seizure came without a warning. My body stiffened, my legs jerking like a marionette string about to be cut loose. Muscle spasmed in the violent rhythm. I arched my back, with my teeth grounded together. Just for this split moment, I lost all sense of control.
I can hear the shouting from Conda. I can feel the pain as my body starts to curl.
They’re working a bit too well.
Now, no tremor, no weakness. Just a strange tension in my muscles. Conda pressed a stethoscope to my chest. She was in shock: ”Your heart… It’s beating… It’s being replaced by—”
“Give protein,” I said. I can feel the freezing feet. ”They are not fixing me, they are evolving.”
She grabbed my report, ”We need to end this before—”
“Before what?” I grabbed the report, “Before I become a better person? Before I finally become a normal human?”
At 2:40 AM, a black SUV broke through the lab gate.
I knew I recognized that sound; I could hear the roll of tires on the gravel. I knew it from St Chungus. It’s the provider, the people who would kidnap the kid once they grow up, for insurance.
Conda was out; she couldn’t be here, not yet.
The monitors told the story that my lips couldn’t. Giver replication, 218% beyond safety control, neural degradation: accelerating. “Conda,” My voice came out so steady, with no tremors left. “They’re here.”
She came back and understood the assignment.
The crash came as they breached the outer doors. “Containment protocol. Level 6 Hazard.” I grabbed the hard drive from Conda. The giver's data suddenly glowed. Her nails bit into my wrist. “You can’t—”
For the first time in my life, I’m not lying anymore. “They need me alive, that gives you 6 minutes.”
Footsteps getting closer. I can hear them battering the doorframe.
“They will burn bright, tell them about the walkers, the givers, the providers, and so on. Tell EVERYONE.”
The door exploded, and I turned myself in. I am no longer the stumbling boy from Saint Chungus. I am now a body for a single purpose.
I looked into Conda’s eyes one final time. A silent conversation only the two of us could understand.