Thrown Away- The Complete series Box Set

by Glynn James

  And then Jack was panting, his chest heaving with exertion as he tried to breathe, but Drogan was on the ground in front of him, and Jack could see there was nothing at all that he could do to help his friend.

  So he’d turned and run that night, not even stopping to pick up any of the gear that had once been his friend’s.

  Someone else could have that if they dared.

  Someone else could find Drogan’s equipment if they really wanted to face the creatures out in the Ashlands. Because Jack vowed that he would never return.

  Junk

  No. The Junkers couldn’t be like the Night Ones, Jack thought. He hoped. They couldn’t be. Night Ones would never have known how to use a weapon to kill the troopers left behind at the Picking Factory. The things he’d seen that night were no more human than a rabid rat. They had been things twisted beyond recognition, dead but not dead, pale skinned and gaunt, their eyes hollow black pits that were lifeless.

  And if there were Night Ones out here in The Junklands, then the people running the Recycling Facility surely wouldn’t have left so many people out here unguarded.

  But that doesn’t answer your question does it?

  Why had they left all those kids and women out here? It didn’t make much sense to him. It was almost like asking for them to be taken. It had to be…what? Five hours from the main facility. And from what he had heard from Tyler and the others, they had only manned this place with a single detachment of troopers.

  And the bugs? Nasty long-legged things that darted over the junk like it’s a flat path, and very fast, or crawling beetle-like things, hidden away deep inside the piles of debris, nesting and waiting to be uncovered. That’s how Higgins had described them, and Jack hoped never to meet either of those.

  All these things went through his mind as he stood there in the blazing sun, looking out across the massive facility that they now had to clear. Rows of huge monolithic buildings lined the centre of the vast, dry, open space, and beyond that, where the perimeter wall stood crumbling, with huge gaps collapsed to the ground, smaller buildings stood.

  There has to be a hundred buildings here. How are you possibly going to find any trace of Ryan? Had he been out here when the place was attacked? It sounds likely, doesn’t it? This is the place to start looking, after six months of finding nothing in the Recycling Facility. A place to start.

  But what if you do find something? What then?

  “Okay, listen up,” came the deep boom of Tyler’s voice, drawing him from his daze and snapping him back into the present. “We got dealt the far compound, where the big machines are, and after that we have the living quarters and the outer buildings on the far side. That’s us for the next five days.” Tyler squinted in the bright sun and scratched his chin. “Usual drill, though we’re being told that the carrier will be moving over there.” He turned and pointed at the large open space between the huge central buildings and what looked to be some kind of hangar.

  “Five days here?” snapped Higgins. “That long just to clear out a few machines?”

  Tyler shrugged. “What do you know?” he said. “I guess there’s more here than I expected. More than just a couple of machines, anyway. Maybe we’ll find something sweet in all the rot? Never know. Let’s get back on board and wait.”

  They headed back over to the carrier and Jack stood at the end of the line, waiting to climb on-board. Higgins was muttering something to himself about wasting time, but Jack didn’t catch all of it. He was too busy looking past the crew, over to where the officer and the other troopers were standing.

  The officer was watching him again.

  You Again

  It was definitely him, Lisa thought. He’s less scruffy than he was when he gave himself up, speaking to her that day at the back of the armoured carrier in the middle of the Outer Zone ruins. But she recognised him instantly. He was tall, though not as tall as some of her men, and he was built well. Strong, even though most of the prisoners were underfed.

  Now she had found him again, she was unsure of what difference it made. She’d hoped for something, whatever it might be, when she caught up with him again, but she didn’t know what. And it wasn’t like she could just initiate a conversation with him, ask him the questions that were bugging her. It wasn’t the done thing.

  I have to just watch and wait, she thought. Watch and wait for the right moment.

  The man probably didn’t even know it was me, that I’m the same one he surrendered to. Lifting her visor would have solved that, but she remembered that doing just that was exactly what had landed her this wonderful job out in The Junklands in the first place.

  And what about that? She thought that she would be angry with the man when she finally met him again, thought that she would blame him for everything that had happened to her since then. Why had she shown her face in the first place? Why make any form of contact? It didn’t make sense, not to her, anyway.

  And now, having met him again, she didn’t feel angry at all. The guy was in a much worse situation than she was. She’d sleep in an air conditioned armoured transport with a bunk tonight, and he would be bunked down with a bunch of stinking scabs.

  He won’t have found his boy, either, will he? She thought. All this time, and he has probably found nothing. There were no kids at the main Facility, they never took them there. Most of the ones that came out here were sent to the Picking Factories, like the one they stood in right now.

  Had the boy been here?

  Damn it, she cursed silently. Why the hell should she care about a boy she’d never met? There were hundreds here when the raid happened, she knew that much. Hundreds taken by the Junkers. And what had happened to them? Dead? Were they killers, these things that lived out in the waste? They’d killed troopers - that much she knew - but children and women? Were those things even human enough to know the difference?

  It annoyed her immensely every time she thought about it. Governor Jackson had sent them all out here with just one squad of security, just twelve troopers, and they had been taken, captured by the Junkers. The troopers were either killed or also taken, and that foul creature, Jackson, shrugged it off as unfortunate.

  No, he didn’t actually say this incident was unfortunate, she thought. That had been the disappearance of three squads, months before. But she could bet that it would be his reply if she’d asked.

  Maybe I can find some clues out here, she thought. Maybe those people are retrievable.

  That would be an achievement.

  Junk

  The Past Comes Back.

  He found it on the second floor of the last workshop and just stood there, staring at it.

  Three days ago they had entered the first warehouse. As Tyler had said, E2 crew was to do the last three warehouses and then all of the outbuildings on the north side of the facility, and that included a number of workshops and smaller factory buildings as well as the area that had been used as a dormitory.

  They’d entered the first warehouse, Jack at the back of the crew, carrying a heavy shoulder load of cutters and some matt sheeting. Tyler was up front with Higgins next to him, the other men following. They’d all stood there for a few minutes, gazing around the massive interior of the dilapidated old building, just looking, in awe of the massive installation that they were apparently supposed to take apart.

  The floor was flat concrete and, apart from a few crumbling bits of masonry in the corners, was well swept and barely cracked. The ground was worn and looked like it had been well trodden over the years, and in some spots the bare ground even appeared smooth. If there had been doors on the building then there was no evidence of them now. Huge open spaces, looking out onto the dusty ground outside, let the sun blaze into the interior, and Jack had been surprised that the ground wasn’t covered in sand and dirt from outside. But somehow it wasn’t.

  And the sprawling array that was the picking plant sat smack in the middle of the wide open space. Large hoppers lined one wall, with belt-fed conveyors co
ming out of the bottom and leading across the open ground, splitting in several places before passing raised platforms that lined long stretches of belt.

  Where the kids would have stood and sorted stuff, Jack thought.

  The raised platforms were rusted and cracked, and behind them, stacked up high, were metal bins with wheels on the bottom. Mini dumping trucks for whatever the kids must have been taking off the conveyors lines.

  He stood there, the dry wind buffeting his back and the heat of the sun burning his bare arms, and imagined what the place had been like when it was active, when it was busy with dozens of children sorting through the crap that must have been sent there. In his mind, the conveyors were moving, making a clunk clunk noise as each section bumped over the supporting joists. And he imagined a row of young children, from the very small right up to teenage years, lined along the platforms, poking around in the junk that passed and throwing what they found into the metals bins behind them.

  He saw other children, two at a time, pushing the metal bins away to one corner of the warehouse and then pushing another empty into its place.

  They were dirty kids, filthy and covered in the grime that rubbed off onto their hands from the junk passing along the conveyors, and their faces were smeared with dust and sand that blew in from the outside.

  “Well, we better get started,” said Tyler. Jack looked up, snapping out of his daydream and saw the tall man had turned and was looking back at his crew. “We got to take all this down, cut it up and get it hauled out to the dumper.”

  “Dumper isn’t even here yet,” said Rick, coughing into his hand and then wiping it on his shirt.

  “No,” said Tyler. “But we may as well get on the go anyway.”

  Jack spent most of the three days, until they moved into the workshops along the north side, cutting up the conveyors’ parts and snipping down the sides of the bins, stacking them up near the main entranceway when the dumpster truck wasn’t there. By the time they left the three warehouses, and moved into the workshops, his hands were sore, even through his gloves.

  On the third day they moved out of the warehouses and started with the outbuildings, and he was relieved. The heat inside the warehouses was almost unbearable, and the temperature dropped significantly when they entered the smaller, stone-built buildings.

  And so it was that, just an hour before the sun went down and they would be due to head back to the carrier and rest up for the night, he climbed the six flights of stairs to the top floor of the workshop that they were emptying.

  The building was filled with work benches, lines and lines of them in every room, and on each bench was a mess of mechanical and electronics parts. Wound up spools of wires, cutting tools, knives, snippers, hammers, all manner of tools – a lot of which he knew would never make it into the dumpster and would instead be hidden away inside the personal bags of many of his crew. There was just too much treasure lying around all over the place for it not to.

  They’d cleared the bottom floor, moved up to the second, and the rest of the guys, led by Higgins, were busy hauling the contents down to the ground floor with ropes and buckets.

  “Why don’t you go check up top?” Tyler had suggested. “Give us a scoop on what’s up on the last floor, ready for tomorrow. Then come down to bottom and grab a smoke.”

  Jack had nodded. “No problem,” he’d said.

  And so he headed up the stairs and onto the raised gantry that led along all of the north side buildings. It looked like an outer defence platform that spanned most of the north side of the facility, with metal stairwells in between the buildings. He wondered for a moment if they would need to take that down as well. It was, after all, made of metal, and that was the resource most wanted by the Recycling Facility. Metal and electronics.

  He shrugged and stepped out of the bright sun and into the huge open interior of the top floor and looked straight at it.

  There was an old stairwell at the side of the big room, though it had long since crumbled and collapsed. Inside the stairwell the floor opened up into a drop that went all the way down to the bottom floor, but that wasn’t what Jack saw.

  I Need Answers

  Lisa watched as the man fell to his knees, but she didn’t rush forward to help him. Instead she stood there, watching, as she had the whole time.

  He hadn’t noticed her as he had come up the stairs and out onto the gantry, and she hadn’t expected him to. She was a hundred yards away, near the next building, watching out over the sprawling landscape of junk that began fifty feet from the outer wall, and she was tucked inside an alcove away from the heat of the sun.

  Her combat armour protected her from the rigours of the hot sun, from most weather in fact, but only if she was fully suited. And she hadn’t wanted to be at that moment. Sitting up there on the gantry, watching out for movement far away, she preferred to take her helmet off.

  And so she’d seen him enter the workshop and realised he was alone.

  She glanced down and counted the crew members on the ground in the yard below. It was a full crew except for him. No one else up there. He was alone.

  What Jack Saw

  There was some flooring inside the stairwell. Pieces of wood that had probably once been the top of the stairs jutted out from the wall like broken and rotten teeth. Just far out enough, he thought, for someone to step round if they didn’t weigh too much. He would have collapsed them with his weight, but a boy, maybe one only six, seven, or eight years old, and thin, would have been able to walk around them like a ledge to the small platform at the back that would have been the eave over the stairs, a spot most likely unnoticed by most people.

  But this also wasn’t really what Jack had noticed. That was all small, peripheral detail that flooded in as he stared at the top wall over the hole that would have been the stairs. The wall was a pale colour, and he thought that it was coated in paint that somehow still remained after so many years. It was, after all, tucked away inside a building and away from the wind. And it was a light coloured paint, cracked and dry near the corners and edges of the wall, but the paint covering most of the flat surface was still smooth and clear, even if it was somewhat stained.

  Covering most of the surface of the wall were drawings. He didn’t know what they had been drawn with, maybe a piece of charcoal, or something else dark in colour. Even a charred piece of wood could have been used. The figures were all stick men, and they were busy little stick men. Two of them were sitting on a step of some kind with bowls in their hands.

  Eating ant soup, he thought.

  Another two stickmen were rifling through a pile of trash, and the smallest of the stickmen was throwing bits over its head.

  Scavenging in the ruins.

  And then there were another two, walking and pushing a cart of some kind, the smallest riding on the front of the cart and the larger one pushing with its back hunched over.

  Off to The Crossing to sell the finds.

  And there, smack in the middle of the dozens of similar, tiny scenes that were scrawled all over the wall, were the same two stick people.

  One tall and one small, standing holding hands.

  And that was when Jack’s knees went from under him.

  Finally, he thought. Finally I found where you went.

  PART FOUR

  Reconditioned

  Into Nowhere

  Middle of the Night.

  Jack crouched in the darkness, feeling the wet drip of rainfall tapping his shoulders and the top of his head. It was a thing he had never expected to experience in such a barren place. He hadn’t seen rain at all since leaving the Outer Zone, and he’d presumed that The Junklands were as dry as they were desolate.

  But there he was, hunkered down in the dark, underneath a pile of half-crushed piping and what appeared to be the remains of a vehicle of some kind. A truck, he thought. They were once called trucks. Water ran down his back and seeped into his clothes. And there was that drip, drip, drip on the top of his head. That w
as getting annoying.

  Even though he felt miserable, Jack still managed a smile – the first humour he had felt in a very long time. The junk was cluttered around him, encasing him and hiding him from the thing that now lurked just a few yards away. The metal scrap that cocooned him alone would have been a good find, when he was working the salvage crew and even more so when he was a free man, but his time with Tyler’s crew was three days since and there was no returning to that.

  Not now.

  The creature – and that was the best that he could think of to call it – was unlike anything he had seen before. It was roughly the size of a feral dog, he thought, maybe two feet high at the back where a smooth carapace deflected the pouring rain. In the darkness, he could barely make out what colour it was –he guessed green, but maybe brown. Moonlight was all that he had to see by and it was a dim light at that. It partially lit the creature but not clearly enough for him to see all the details.

  What he could see had terrified him a few hours before. He had been making his way between two large piles of trash, following the muddy footprints left by those he now trailed. It hadn’t started getting dark yet but he had begun looking for a likely spot to hide for the night when the thing just appeared, rising over the top of one of the piles of trash some twenty feet away, up the slope. It spotted him and began making the most bizarre clicking noises that he had ever heard. And it was loud.

  But then, with a pair of pincers as big as his arms sticking out in front of its maw, he could understand how it made such a racket. Now that it was just a few feet away, he could smell it. It gave off a stench that was like rotting vegetation, and it assaulted his senses. He was relieved that he had managed to crawl into the small space that he now occupied.

  The only problem was the thing didn’t seem to be going away. He’d hoped it would get bored, or forget about him, but instead it had been sitting there for maybe three hours, probing the hole that was far too small for it to get through, and Jack knew that the creature sensed he was still there. Whether it was smell, hearing, or some other sense that was alien to him, he didn’t know, but every time he moved the thing chirped and clicked again, sometimes shuffling around and banging at the trash with a frustrated claw or two.