Thrown Away- The Complete series Box Set

by Glynn James

  A few minutes later, after a lot of noise from above, there was a thud on the ground outside and the sound of something moving away quickly across the dirt.

  The crew – all of them awake now – sat in silence for a long time until Tyler spoke.

  “What are the bets the top compartment is all scratched up?” he asked. The other men nodded in return.

  “I’d say that was pretty much a done deal,” said Higgins, looking up at the ceiling. “Guess you better file another one of your reports.”

  Tyler chuckled. “Not that that is going to do any good. I don’t think they believe me.”

  “Must do,” said Rick. “They see the scratches every time.”

  “Until maintenance covers them up again like they were never there.”

  Rick shook his head. “I don’t get that.”

  “What you mean?” asked Higgins.

  Rick pointed at the ceiling. “Maintenance always hammer the panel back out and sand it off until the marks aren’t there and the panel is shiny and new again, only for the scratches to turn up on a different spot the next time. They don’t bother with all the rust holes and cracks in the outer plating of the rest of the vehicle, why bother with a few scratches?”

  “I have no idea,” said Tyler. “But it’s really starting to bug the hell out me. I want to know why something keeps fiddling around up there.”

  “Or someone,” said Higgins.

  Tyler looked at him. “Or someone. Whatever or whoever it is only seems to like messing with us. No one else reports it, unless we just don’t find out.”

  “Which also makes me wonder,” said Rick. “If it’s always us, then how the hell does it know where we are every single time? I mean, we travel for miles onto the next zone, but it always seems to track us down.”

  “Could be something stuck in that compartment that it can smell for miles and miles,” said Higgins. “Like it’s an animal or summit. Maybe something is dead in there.”

  “Enough dead things out here for a critter to smell without having to track down our carrier,” said Tyler.

  “Hmm, still don’t make much sense,” muttered Higgins

  “We could try and prise the compartment open,” said Rick. “Have a little nose at what’s in there.”

  “We don’t have the gear to open it,” said Tyler. “It’s at least and inch thick, I reckon, and none of us have the tools to bust it open. At least not without some alarm going off. You wanna be the one to explain that to those that we must obey?”

  Rick shrugged. “No, I guess not.”

  “Hey,” said Boots, a man who rarely had anything to say. “May we should set up a trap for the critter.”

  Tyler frowned. “What kind of trap?”

  Boots frowned and then shrugged. “Don’t know, just thought it might be an idea.”

  Tyler looked down at the ground, squinting. A trap, he thought. Well, maybe not a trap, but some way to record who was out there or to scare them off. Something.

  That was worth thinking about.

  Trapped

  Jack looked up and coughed as the dust settled in the room. He could see Ryan through the gloom, standing a few feet away.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The boy nodded and brushed some crumbling pieces of rubble from his shoulder. Above them the floor groaned. Jack heard the hiss of the radio.

  “Jack, you there?” came the voice of FirstMan.

  He grabbed the radio and pressed the button on the side. “I’m here. What's going on?” There was a moment of silence, then some crackling, then another voice.

  “We found a bug nest,” came RightHand's voice.

  “Stay right where you are,” said FirstMan.

  Jack looked over to the entrance where they had entered and saw that beyond the archway a pile of debris had collapsed into the large room. “We’re trapped down here,” he said. He stared at the fallen pile of junk and rubble, thinking that he and Ryan only just managed to avoid being crushed by running through the double doors. That had been too close.

  Ryan turned to him, frowning, and stood up, taking two steps towards the entrance.

  “Don't go any closer,” said Jack. “Just in case it collapses any more.”

  The boy stopped. Jack looked at the ceiling, noting the steel girders that crisscrossed above them and the metal plating the lay on top of that. Someone had wanted to keep whatever was in this room safe, he thought. What was it that was in here? Was it what he came to look for? There was a lot junk in the room, piled up in boxes around the outside, and in the centre of the room stood half a dozen tables pushed together. Upon the tables there was an assortment of circuit boards, wires, tools, cables and smaller boxes.

  Jack grabbed the nearest box and peered inside it. Nuts, bolts, clips – all manner of small junk that was mostly metal. Still a treasure trove, though.

  “We may as well get comfy in here,” he said as the first sounds of gunfire rattled from above them. He thought that among the snaps of shots from the assault rifles the soldiers carried, he heard clicking noises. Mr Clicky's friends, he thought.

  “Jack, you still there?” came FirstMan’s voice on the radio.

  Jack paused, but then pressed the button. “We’re still here,” he replied. “And still stuck. Looks like a lot of crap just caved into the room next to us, but were fine. We’re trapped in a vault down here. Room is full of junk and gear.”

  “Good,” said FirstMan. “It’ll take us a while to clear out these bugs. There’s a lot of them—” The radio crackled once more and Jack missed the words that followed. “—gave you. Over.”

  “Okay,” Jack replied, guessing the general message. He turned to Ryan and located the boy on the other side of the room. He was holding a box from underneath one of the tables and peering inside it.

  “There’s all kinds of good stuff in these boxes,” said Ryan, as he held up a rusted wrench. With a good clean the tool would be serviceable, Jack thought, and he started to search through the items collected on the tables. He had a feeling about this room. This was where they were meant to end up, but maybe not quite in the circumstances that they got there, trapped underneath who knew how much collapsed rubble, with a nest of Mr Clickys above them.

  The gap underneath the debris didn't look big enough for Mr Clicky to get through, so Jack relaxed a little and turned to look at the pile of boxes lined along the far wall.

  “Look what I found,” called Ryan, a second or so later. Jack turned and found that Ryan was holding up what appeared to be a large handgun. Jack walked around the tables and took the weapon from the boy. He brushed the dust off it. It was old, and the magazine seemed to be missing, but Jack hadn't seen a weapon like it before. It was made from some sort of dense plastic, or another synthetic material that wasn’t metal, with two square holes at the end of the short barrel. He put it down on the table. “See if you can find some of the ammo magazines that go with it,” he said. “But don’t mess with it until I’ve given it a good clean up.”

  Ryan nodded. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, and began shorting through another box. “There’s two more of them here.”

  Jack nodded. “Nice find,” he said. “They’re for us. Call it payment for services rendered.”

  Ryan grinned at this and placed the other two guns on the table next to the first. “Let’s just hope there’s some ammo for them in here.”

  Jack turned to the wall where the boxes were stacked up, his gaze drifting over the unreadable letters that had worn away over time, but he stopped at a box with a yellow label still stuck to one side. Squinting in the dim light, Jack moved over to where the box was, nestled among the others, and started lifting some of the boxes off, coughing as dust wafted everywhere. “Damn,” he cursed. “This stuff really hasn’t been messed with in a long time.” Something small, with a lot of legs, scuttled over the top of the yellow label box and dropped down into the gap behind. A bug of some sort, maybe even Mr Clicky's babies, thought Jack, but he ignore
d it and concentrated on the yellow label box.

  All of the boxes were made of plastic, Jack noticed. He hadn't seen something like that for a long time. If left sealed shut, the boxes down in this cellar would keep their contents safe from the ravages of time. He swept a space on the nearest table clear, then hauled the yellow labelled box out of the stack and plopped it down. The top was stiff, but eventually there was a hiss and a pop as the plastic lid came away in Jack’s hands. Jack dropped the lid and peered inside.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  “You found it?” asked Ryan. “Damn. I was hoping to beat you.” But then he held up a six inch knife that was still in its holder. “But I got this. And this box here looks like the magazines for those guns. There must be forty clips or something like that.”

  “I think your find is better than mine.” Jack smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm. “We’re going to be down here a while,” he said. “So we may as well keep searching. You, know, for anything of interest. We do, after all, get first claim on this. Especially since we already found what FirstMan wants.”

  Ryan’s grin widened.

  Jack looked around the room. It had been a long time since he had seen so much stuff in one place that wasn’t on its way through the Recycling Facility. Maybe that place in The Crossing, old Racket’s place.

  Drogan would have loved all this, Jack thought.

  Don’t Eat That

  Jack waited at the entrance to the hovel, watching the bustling road outside while still keeping an eye on Drogan’s back. Inside the building was a mess of old electronic junk that Jack had seen dozens of times over the last few years, ever since he first hooked up with the older man at the junction outside the remains of the New Stadium settlement. That had been the day he gained a new friend, a shotgun, and also saw the fall of a settlement that had barely begun to thrive.

  Hunched over on the other side of Drogan was Racket, an old man with only one eye over which he wore a large round lens attached to a leather strap. Jack always thought the strap looked much too tight. The lens made Racket’s one remaining eye seem five times bigger than it really was, and Jack had often wondered if he could see at all without it.

  Drogan was a man who knew just where to trade for most things – especially anything that even vaguely resembled old tech. From circuit-boards out of the back of old TV sets to the guts of a rusting, rotten computer, he would insist on taking them to Racket, and Jack had to admit that the old man would certainly pay top coin if the object happened to be of value to him for one of his projects. What those projects were, Jack had no idea. He had never seen beyond the entrance room of Racket’s building, but knew that the rest of the building, considering its size, could hide quite a lot.

  Racket had a lot of resources at his disposal to pay for anything they found. Enough, Jack mused, to cover the costs of employing a thug to stand outside all day, and few could do that.

  “What do you mean, you can't give me a good price?” Drogan’s voice bellowed from the room behind him. Jack glanced over at the thug, standing a few feet away, and the man looked back. They both shrugged. This was usual, Jack thought.

  Drogan knew what he was doing, and Jack had been in the other room a number of times to witness the conversation between his friend and the old man as it got a little heated, but Drogan was used to getting what he wanted, and persistence was his middle name. He’d keep on and on, and eventually Racket would give him a little more. They all knew that Racket was bound to try his luck with at least one thing that Drogan was trying to sell him.

  Drogan and Racket were old friends and Jack had learned that this was the way they spoke to each other. The anger was only feigned, pretend.

  Ten minutes later, Drogan came out with a grin on his face. We won this time, thought Jack.

  “We ready?” Jack asked.

  Drogan nodded. “Sure. Let's go get some food.”

  They wandered through the market, Drogan walking a few feet ahead of Jack, occasionally stopping to glance at something on one of the stalls, but mostly leaving things alone.

  The pedlars were almost as persistent as Drogan, constantly waving things in Jack's face as he walked by. He was used to this, keeping his hands by his sides and shaking his head as continued on his way.

  They eventually made their way to the east side of the market where the food places were. “What’s it to be?” asked Drogan. “Rat roasted, rat fried, rat soup?”

  “Fat lot of choice,” said Jack. He’d rather not touch any of it, but he was hungry and they had few supplies after their last expedition. Drogan stopped at one of the stalls where small rodents of some kind – probably still rats, Jack thought – were skewered and roasted over a fire pit. He had to admit, the smell was pretty good when you were that hungry.

  Drogan started haggling with the seller, so Jack stood back, watching those around him, and he noticed someone out the back of the tent. The chef had his back to them, preparing more of their catch. The man wore a long smock, stained with blood, and it turned Jack's stomach. But it wasn't until the man reached out for another skewer that Jack noticed the purple mark on his arm. It was only small, no bigger than a fingernail in size, but it was there – a purple mark surrounded by slightly grey skin and a black spider mark, trailing away along the man's forearm. The man must have sensed Jack’s scrutiny, because he glanced up and pulled down his sleeve, looked at Jack once, then turned back to his cooking.

  Jack put his hand on Drogan’s shoulder. “Let’s leave these,” he said. Drogan frowned but then he saw the serious expression on Jack's face and nodded.

  The food pedlar frowned. “What? You don't want anything now? I was doing you a bargain.”

  They walked away, ignoring the curses from the man behind them.

  No Time to Bug Out

  FirstMan took a deep breath and lowered his assault rifle, watching as the last bug kicked and writhed on the ground a few feet away before finally lying still. There must have been a hundred dead bugs littering the ground outside the front of the building and in the foyer by the time RightHand and the rest of the troopers had finished wiping out the nest. He shook his head.

  I’ve never seen so many in one place before, he thought, but then, no one really comes here, do they?

  At least none of his people did.

  The industrial complex was too far out, and too near The Crags. FirstMan wondered for a moment if the crag tribes visited this place. But then, he thought, no nest such as this would have grown to such a size, and remain undiscovered, if it had been near the Junktown. And the crag folk would have eaten them.

  He grabbed his radio, coughed to clear the dust from his chest, and spoke. “Jack, you still okay down there?”

  “Sure. We’re good. Still stuck down here and not going anywhere soon,” came the reply. “But I think we may have found what you’re looking for.”

  “Really?” asked FirstMan, as he walked back towards the building. “That’s good news. Bad news is I think you're buried under a quite a lot of debris.”

  “Yeah, figured as much from the mess down here,” replied Jack.

  “Seems that it was a large nest, and it collapsed from above,” said FirstMan. “It took out a couple of floors. May take us a while to get you out of there.”

  “We’ll be okay,” said Jack. “But don't take too long.”

  FirstMan turned to RightHand, who was standing a few feet away, looking around at the dead bugs and then at the collapsed rubble. It now filled the area where the stairs and the lift shaft had been. “I guess we better get digging,” he said.

  They’re Back

  Corporal Lisa Markell stood staring at the scratches on the side of the carrier, puzzled and a little amused. It had been over a month since she had watched Jack running off into the junk, and several weeks since she had spied the Governor poking around the vehicle bay, and in that time she had almost forgotten about the scratches and the compartments that had been tampered with.

  Thankfully, she
had badgered Mechanical to sort out a key fob that opened pretty much all of the compartments on any of the vehicles in the bay, and she had managed to do it – as far as she knew – without Jackson finding out. That, she thought, would be that last thing she wanted. She’d seen the report the last time they were sent to the facility. Hayley had dug it up for her.

  Even though Jackson didn’t bother with the normal formalities of talking to each trooper about their performance levels, as was usually required, he also didn’t bother removing the officers’ report summaries from the batch that she used to rate her troops. If she kept up her current performance level she could be reassigned within months, maybe just a couple, back to the Inner Zone or at least a closer facility.

  No, alerting Jackson to her suspicions was the last thing she wanted. Better to investigate, take notes, and make a full report when she was moved on and out of his clutches and ability to harm her career.

  But here were those very same markings on – and it seemed even more unlikely – the same carrier. E2 crew. And they had been reported by the crew leader, Tyler, as they had before.

  Except this time she’d been looking at Tyler’s report on the screen when it had been deleted. She’d watched as the entry disappeared from the screen less than two hours after it had been put there.

  Lisa coughed, wiped the sweat from her face, and swiped the key fob over the panel next to the compartment. There was a slight click and a beeping noise from the fob, and the compartment popped open.

  Hayley, standing next to her, grinned and gave a quiet “Yes,” as the door swung open slowly. “We’re in.”

  Lisa pulled the door open, glanced around to make sure than no one but she and Hayley were nearby, and pulled out the small package stuffed inside the compartment. She placed it on the ground, pulled her scanner out and swiped it over the package.