by Glynn James
“Where do we look?” asked Ryan. The boy was picking at a pile of broken wood and plastic a few feet away, where Jack imagined a desk of some sort would once have been. Ryan picked out a long pole of plastic, turned it over and then dropped it back into the pile. He stood up and frowned at Jack.
“We need to go down,” Jack said.
Ryan glanced around, checking first the lack of a way down the stairs and then at the few doors that lined the back of the hall. “Through there?” he asked.
Jack nodded. “Has to be,” he said. “I don’t see any other way.”
Ryan didn’t look convinced. “Are you even sure there is a down? Doesn’t look like one to me. No stairs.”
Jack walked over to the nearest lift shaft and peered down. Darkness below and more rubble. He could vaguely see what he thought was the bottom, some thirty feet below, and what looked like the top of the lift itself. There was a large pile of metal cable collapsed on top of it and a small hatch that was already open, revealing darkness inside.
“The lift goes down further,” he said, and then noticed that Ryan and FirstMan were already next to him, also looking into the darkness. “But why would they build a level that only the lift accessed?
FirstMan shrugged. “I’ve seen worse designs,” he said. “You should see the conversion facility over at the RAD grounds.” He shook his head and looked puzzled. “Utter mad chaos.”
Jack turned to face him. “I saw that place, or at least the entrance to it, when I was captured,” he said. “What do they do there?”
FirstMan looked back down the shaft and then upwards. “You really want to know?”
“I’m just curious,” said Jack. “I saw someone causing trouble and they got dragged off that way.”
FirstMan smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Well that person is about the unluckiest you ever met,” he said. “They…recondition people who are a problem, mostly violent criminals and troublesome captives from the Outer Zone. Brainwashing, or should I say, Resetting.”
“They actually do that?” asked Ryan.
FirstMan turned to the boy, seemed to consider whether he should be telling the youngster such things, but then continued. “They do indeed. And if you ever happen to be unlucky enough to bump into the HAC – that’s Heavy Assault Corps, then you’ll be looking at the results of that…facility. They stew up their minds. They don’t get rid of violent tendencies, in fact I’d say they increase those, but they make them like obedient dogs.”
“Nice,” said Jack.
“Absolutely,” said FirstMan. “I had the unfortunate pleasure of having to escort a detachment to a drop off at a clearance zone, once. Not a single one of them spoke, the whole two hour journey. They just sat there, looking straight ahead into empty space.”
Jack looked back down the shaft and finally noticed the set of rungs studding the wall at one foot intervals. They seemed to lead both up and down, and he could see that they went all the way to the bottom.
“That’s our way down,” he said, pointing.
FirstMan frowned, but then saw what Jack was pointing at. “You want me to send my guys down there?” he asked.
Jack shook his head. “No, me and Ryan can handle this. Better off without a lot of heavy boots stomping around down there. Also, I don’t know if those rungs will take the weight of that armour you guys are wearing.”
FirstMan nodded, reached to his waist and pulled away a radio handset. “Well this is my spare, if you know how to use it? Yell if you need us.”
Jack took the radio, clipped it onto his belt and then turned to Ryan. “Want me to go first?”
“No way,” Ryan said as he sat down, swung his legs over the edge of the shaft, and shuffled towards the ladder. “I’m gonna find the loot way before you can sniff it out.”
What Lies Beneath
Jack followed the boy down the shaft, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the darkness below. He could just make out Ryan, about fifteen feet below him, as the boy dropped down onto the top of the lift. A quiet, dull thud echoed faintly up the shaft as he landed. Jack thought he heard something else, a clattering noise of some sort from far above them, and wondered what RightHand and the others were doing up there.
He glanced upwards to see that the shaft rose high into the building and then darkness, and thought for a moment that now would not be a good time for something to drop down from that height. With this he sped up, taking the rungs two at a time and hoping none of them would break. Finally he hopped onto the top of the lift and looked down the hole that he had just seen Ryan disappear into.
“It’s okay down here,” said Ryan, looking up at him from inside the lift. “There’s…ah…the remains of someone down here in the corner, at least I think it was a person, but it’s really old and dusty, so try not to step on it. I nearly did.”
Jack started to lower himself and then peered down into the hole once more. He saw the boy kneeling on the ground, and a moment later there was a spark and a flicker of flame as Ryan lit a makeshift torch made from a scrap of wood with some cloth tied to it.
Good lad, Jack thought. You haven’t forgotten the things I taught you, even if you haven’t gotten rid of that reckless adventurer streak. Not a bad thing, really.
Jack dropped down into the lift, felt the structure shudder and then settle once more, and watched as Ryan stepped out into the opening outside the lift. Jack stepped forward, moving beyond where the boy stood. “Okay, now I go first,” he said, grinning as Ryan frowned with annoyance. “Just in case something is down here.”
In answer to that, Ryan flashed his knife in the torchlight. He held it tightly in his other hand and smiled back. “I’m ready for that too,” he said.
Jack nodded and took out his own knife, thinking again that he was glad the FirstMan had put his gear aside instead of sharing it out among the Junkers. He knelt down next to the lift. “Can you shine that over here?” he asked.
Ryan knelt beside him and lowered the torch to the bottom of the lift, peering and trying to spot whatever it was that had caught Jack’s interest. The torchlight was dim, maybe lighting up twenty feet from the spot with a yellow, flickering glow, but it was enough for the two of them to see underneath the lift, and to see there was nothing underneath it but a concrete floor, half a foot lower than the floor inside the lift.
“What?” asked Ryan.
“Bottom floor,” said Jack, standing back up and looking around the room outside the lift. “Means unless we find a stairway or something, this is the lowest level and we don’t need to search any lower down. Also means that with the open shaft and decent ventilation its ok to leave that flame lit.”
Ryan looked confused for a moment, looked at his torch burning in the darkness, then he seemed to realise what Jack meant. Gas below ground. His mouth turned to a silent oh and he nodded.
Jack already suspected that what they were looking for was not far away. Glancing around the large room, he saw piles and piles of boxes and crates, all seemingly filled with cables and rusted gadgets, some of which looked similar to the thing that FirstMan had described. But he knew it had to be a sealed package that he took back up with him, or the circuit board would be useless after so many years exposed to the elements.
He stood in the darkness, watching as Ryan walked around the room, uncovering more boxes as the light from the torch explored the unknown. There was a set of double doors at the other end of the room, a single corridor with three doors leading off it, and another door in the far corner.
But which of them leads to what we want? he thought. Where does the trail lead us?
Jack looked at the smaller corner door, thinking. That it was probably a storage room for cleaning materials. Seemed to be the obvious choice. He glanced at the three doors. One of those, maybe? But, no. The double doors led somewhere else, maybe into a larger storage room. He judged a direct line from the lift opening to the double door, envisioning someone wheeling a trolley out of the lift and directly across t
he room. He glanced at the floor, peering through the scattered pieces of debris and broken plaster that had fallen from the ceiling and onto the worn concrete. The paint marks had worn away over the centuries, but there was still a trace of them. Deep lines crossing the gap between the lift and double doors, those painted in yellow. The other lines, three of them and much thinner, heading to the corridor and the three doors, and then a blue line weaving its way across the floor towards the smaller door.
He tried to twist his brain around the image on the floor and closed his eyes for a second. In the darkness inside his mind he saw an image of the Sorting Room, where he had been sent down one corridor along with some of the other captives, and others had been sent down different corridors. Coloured lights marked the different destinations and this was somehow similar to that. Then the image was gone, and he saw an automated factory, with small metal robots making their way around the different machines, delivering parts and picking up new ones. This was an image of the Picking Factory, he thought, but one from long ago. Where the image had come from he didn’t know, maybe one of his old magazines, but as he opened his eyes he saw, just for a moment, a ghost superimposed on the cluttered and dusty room in front of him. A large robot with a trolley following behind it moved out of the lift and drifted forward, its wheels skittering over the flat, unobstructed floor and ignoring the real debris that was there now. It rolled forwards, heading across the room towards the double doors, following the painted line. It slowed until the doors opened and then sped through them into the interior of the next room. Then the ghost was gone.
“That way,” Jack said, pointing to the double doors, and Ryan turned from the box over by the smaller door, which he was peering into, and looked towards the doors. The boy’s mouth opened a little, and Jack waited for the questions, but then Ryan just nodded, accepting Jack’s intuition. He dropped the box and started forward, holding the torch aloft to light the way.
And that was when the loud crashing noise came from far above.
Intruder
RightHand peered into the darkness of the third floor, aiming his assault rifle high into the rafters. As he had discovered on the second floor, after he and his men negotiated the crumbling stairway, the levels of the building were built with an odd ceiling cavity, maybe four feet thick, that was filled with rusty cables and piping. Many of the pipes had cracked and fallen, and were probably the cause of the collapsed ceiling, most of which now lay on the floor of the large open space at the top of the stairs, but much of the cabling still hung down from above like some crazy plastic and metal spider web.
This probably isn’t going to take very long, he thought, as he looked out across the rubble covered floor.
There weren’t any side rooms or corridors on this floor or the one below, just a large open space, and he also thought that by the state of the stairs they would only be able to access two more levels, possibly just one. He glanced among the rubble, which was mostly broken masonry and rusted metal, and decided there was nothing worth risking going out into the room for.
It would probably collapse if you did, he thought.
Across from him, fifty feet away, there was movement, and he watched as one of his men came up the other set of stairs, glanced around the room without leaving the safety of the stairs, and nodded once at him.
“Move to the next floor,” he said into the microphone balanced near his chin. The other trooper nodded, looked up and then moved away, heading up the stairs to the next floor.
But the next floor wasn’t like the previous ones at all, and RightHand frowned as he looked out of the stairway entrance into the vast room. Here, much of the ceiling and probably most of the upper floors had collapsed downwards and was now piled up, filling more than half of the space of the original room.
He took one step forward, signalling for the men in the opposite stairway to stay where they were, and edged into the room to look upwards.
There was something too regular about the debris, he thought. He didn’t know what it was, but the cabling, panels and masonry weren’t stacked up as though they had just fallen there. Some of it, he mused, almost looked as though someone had put it there, exactly as it was, maybe as some form of barricade.
And he kept thinking that right until the bug crawled out of the gaping hole in the ceiling above and dropped down to the ground, chittering and clicking at him.
Before the thing moved more than a few paces, RightHand fired his weapon, a single shot into the front of the creature that tore away a large chunk of its carapace and imploded its face.
Damn bugs, he thought, Let just hope there’s only one of the—
Another bug dropped from the hole in the ceiling, and then another, and another.
What Lies Above
FirstMan’s eyes went wide and he stepped back from the lift shaft, snapping his gaze upwards and then to the stairwell. The rifle shot had pierced the air with a muffled snap that he heard even a few floors below where RightHand was. The assault rifles were silenced, almost, but if you were only twenty or thirty yards away, or inside a building, they still made an audible noise.
“What’s up?” he asked, tapping the microphone attached to his collar, just below his chin.
“We got a few bugs up here,” came the reply from RightHand. Then a moment later there was aloud thud from above and then RightHand was cursing.
“Damn it,” came the voice over the microphone. “Back up. Down the stairs. Get the hell out of here!”
FirstMan reached to his waist, instinctively grabbing the assault rifle that hung from his shoulder strap.
“What’s going on?” he asked, the microphone still active.
“Bug nest!” came the reply. “Damn thing just fell from the ceiling.”
FirstMan glanced back down the lift shaft, wondering how far into the building Jack and Ryan had gone. “Jack, you there?” he asked as he moved to the bottom of the stairwell and readied his weapon, waiting for RightHand and the others to get down the stairs and pass him.
They won’t be able to get out if there’s a lot of bugs, FirstMan thought. No way will they be able to get back up here in time. There was a lot of noise above him. Gunfire, running boots on hard stairs, falling debris, clicking monsters, and then the sounds of something heavy falling with a crash, and brickwork crumbling, bouncing off rusted metal floor panelling.
Oh damn, he thought, as he heard the upper floor begin to collapse.
He moved quickly towards the open doorway as the troopers reached the bottom of the stairs. “Jack, can you hear me?”
No reply.
Visitors Revisited
Tyler turned over the smashed up pipe and peered inside. It was starting to get dark, and he thought about turning in but knew that if they didn’t fill the dumper that they’d hear about it when they got back to the facility in two days. But the pipe was empty, as he’d expected. He cursed, dropped the pipe, and looked across the clearing to where the other crew members worked.
It had been over four weeks since Jack had gone off into the Junk and they still hadn’t replaced him with a new member of the crew, and it was showing. Tyler told himself that it wasn’t Jack’s unnatural ability to hunt down the good stuff, but it sort of was. But with one man down on the crew it meant a larger share of the dumper to fill for each of them, and dammit if they hadn’t been posted out into the deep north scavenging field, where the junk mountains were smaller and there were definitely less pickings to be had. Why they even bothered to send anyone out there was beyond him.
And why change their next location at such short notice? wondered Tyler.
Jack’s disappearance puzzled him the most. The man had never given any indication that he was a runner, and that he planned to take off, though Tyler had noticed the change after the conversation in their bunkhouse about the people that had been taken from the Picking Factory, and he had certainly thought Jack was particularly quiet when they actually got to searching and reclaiming the place. Quiet a
nd preoccupied, somehow. Had it been his fault for sending Jack up to the top floor of the workhouse? No, he didn’t think so. Guards should have been on the wall and would have spotted Jack making a run for it. How that had happened was puzzling.
He stood back up, groaned at the ache in the bottom of his spine, turned, and decided the grief of a scolding when they got back would be worth it. He was done for the day. As he crossed the open space towards the carrier, he saw Higgins turn and peer at him.
“We done?” called the old man.
Tyler nodded and called to the others to stop before he climbed into the back of the carrier and slumped down on his chair. His back was throbbing, right down deep at the base, near his ass. Old age, he thought, though he wasn’t really that old. Working out in the Junklands aged a man faster, he thought. Unless you were Higgins. He tried to ignore the niggling pain, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
The other crew members climbed into the carrier over the next few minutes, each one clattering the door as they came in and making even louder noises as they dumped their stuff and dropped into their own seats. Finally he heard the door clunk shut, followed by a series of clicks as the bolts were pulled over.
Time to rest, he thought. He was hungry, but food could wait. First just a few winks.
He sat up, startling himself, and looked around, glancing immediately to Higgins. The old man was sitting up, looking towards the roof, but gave Tyler a quick glance and touched his finger to his lips to indicate silence. He had slept for a while, he was sure of it. That hadn’t been just a minute or two.
And there it was, that familiar sound up on the roof. Tyler frowned and listened intently, trying to judge what could be making the noise. So far, they’d only found the scratches left behind and never anything else, and without staying outside when the carrier door was shut there was no way for them to watch their visitors. No one was willing to do that.
