Forager (Forager - A Dystopian Trilogy)

by Peter R Stone

  “I will be there as arranged, Sir,” I assured him.

  “You’d better be. Now hop in your truck and let’s go.”

  As I walked over to my teammates, Michal saw my dour expression and raised an eyebrow, but I just shrugged in response; I wasn’t going to say anything in front of the others.

  “Ok scavengers, pack them behinds into the truck,” Cooper ordered as he reached for the driver’s door.

  “We’re foragers, not scavengers,” Shorty protested.

  “A kettle by any other name is still a kettle, Shorty. We go out into a dead, ruined city and scavenge amongst the decaying ruins for scrap metal. Calling us ‘foragers’ is just some drongo’s attempt to make us think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Now, let’s go.”

  On a normal day, I would have taken issue with Cooper’s deriding comments, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I climbed in next to him and we set off for the town gates, the Bushmaster roaring after us.

  There was no sign of Nanako, just as I expected.

  Once out of the town, Cooper drove us east, following exactly the same route he took yesterday. We drove slowly down Dryburgh Street and then towards the CBD itself, past rusted out cars and trucks, through shrubbery and wild grasses that flourished in every crack in the roads and sidewalks, until we reached the restaurant we had worked on yesterday.

  Cooper backed the truck up to the restaurant’s concrete steps and we clambered out and put on our utility belts. The Custodians parked the Bushmaster in the middle of the street, one private popping out the roof hatch to operate the machine gun, while King and another private exited the vehicle by its rear door. They glanced about the street once, announced their thorough investigation was complete, and gave us the go-head to begin work.

  “David, you’re upstairs with me,” Cooper snapped, “You other three finish tearing out the lead sheeting from the kitchen floor.”

  With Michal wielding his sledgehammer and Shorty and I our crowbars, we traipsed up the concrete steps and into the shell of the restaurants foyer. All the windows were gone and the customer-service counter's wooden frame had rotted away, leaving the plastic top lying on the floor amidst a carpet of leaves, twigs, dirt, and plaster that had peeled from what was left of the ceiling. We threaded our way across the restaurant's dining room, which was an even greater mess than the foyer. The wooden tables had rotted quite badly - most of their legs had collapsed, and the chairs had fared no better. Chunks of plaster had fallen on everything, and the place stank of mildew and mould.

  Switching on his torch, Shorty led us to the large kitchen out the back, where we paused and surveyed our previous day's handiwork. After moving aside the ovens and benches we could shift, we had ripped up most of the disgustingly filthy linoleum floor tiles and had begun to pull out the grimy, thin lead sheets beneath - a common waterproofing system used in commercial kitchens. Several kilos of lead had already been removed and rolled up, but we were only part of the way through.

  I grabbed Shorty’s torch and panned it back and forth as I considered which section of the floor to tackle first, when an uneasy feeling rose in my gut. "Hold up, guys," I said quietly, examining our surroundings with more than casual interest now, for if I wasn't mistaken, the room had been tampered with ever so slightly. "I don't recall the freezer door being open yesterday, and I’m sure we put those rolls of lead in front of it, not beside it."

  Michal hefted his sledgehammer and we approached the walk-in freezer as quietly as we could, when Cooper suddenly started screaming “Skel!” at the top of his voice, followed by the sound of his heavy boots thumping on the floorboards above.

  At the exact same instant, the walk-in freezer door swung open and a horrifying, skeletal apparition burst into the room, made all the more terrifying due to the flickering torchlight and the cow horns protruding from the sides of the skull-helmet – the Skel looked like a demon from the depths of hell. He was also one of the biggest I had seen. He charged us while yelling obscenities and brandishing a converted axe. Shorty and Michal fell back in shock, but I noticed he was timing his swing to hit Michal, not me. So I did the last thing the Skel expected - I charged inside his swing and swung my crowbar at his throat. Unfortunately, his arms collided with me and threw off my aim so that my blow only glanced off his skull-protected face.

  The good news was that my attack had given Michal time to recover his balance, step forward and deliver a mighty swing of his sledgehammer to the Skel's head. The cow horn-adorned human skull he wore as a helmet exploded and he went down with a massive thud.

  However, before we could breathe a sigh of relief, the door at the back of the kitchen smashed open, allowing brilliant sunlight - and two more Skel - into the room.

  "Run!" I shouted.

  Shorty and Michal didn't need any convincing and sprinted out the kitchen while I brought up the rear. The Skel, one small and one large, gave pursuit - two more nightmarish ghouls to haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

  As I darted out of the kitchen and into the dining room, a crossbow bolt missed my head by inches and imbedded itself into the far wall. I glanced back and cried out when I saw that the smaller Skel was only a step behind, hands reaching out to grab me. I threw myself to the right while I twisted to the left and brought down the crowbar. It connected with my pursuer’s right arm, breaking the bone armour and possibly their arm as well.

  To my surprise, a woman yelled in pain and uttered a stream of four letter words that would have made me blush had I not been in such dire circumstances - the smaller Skel was female!

  Refusing to let this astonishing find distract me, I regained my balance and rammed her with my shoulder, sending her reeling into a half-collapsed table. I would have followed this up with another crowbar strike but decided against that particular plan of action when the larger Skel barged out of the kitchen.

  I turned and raced after Shorty and Michal, glancing back a couple of times to make sure he wasn’t gaining on me.

  My teammates and I sprinted out of the darkened restaurant and into the sunlit street, while at the same time, the Custodian operating the Bushmaster's roof mounted machine gun opened fire upon a target on the far side of the street.

  King rushed over to us, gun at the ready, "Forget the truck - get in the Bushmaster!"

  "Keep your eyes open," I shouted to Shorty and Michal as we ran around the truck to reach the Custodian's vehicle, "they've got us surrounded!"

  Hearing a machine gun fire a short burst behind us, I glanced back and sighed with relief when I saw that King had gunned down the Skel who had pursued us in the restaurant.

  We hurried to the back of the Bushmaster, where a Custodian held the door open with one hand while keeping his Austeyr assault-rifle ready with the other. Shorty and Michal clambered in and sat down next to Cooper, who was sitting at the front behind the driver’s position.

  “Where’s David?” I demanded as I put one foot into the Bushmaster and safety.

  Cooper refused to meet my gaze, “I don’t know, one minute he was behind me, the next he wasn’t.”

  “You left him behind?” I asked incredulously, not believing what I was hearing.

  Cooper glanced at me, guilt and fear etched on his face.

  I think I hesitated for all of a second, and then the enormity of what he was saying exploded into my mind – the Skel had David! My teammate and friend had been caught by those abominations, who were even now no doubt carting him away to a fate far, far worse than death.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I backed away from the Bushmaster and accosted King, who had just come up behind me. “What are you doing, Jones, get in the vehicle!” he shouted.

  “They’ve got David!”

  “That’s unfortunate, now get in.”

  “We have to save him!” I barked back.

  King glanced quickly about, taking in the buildings, wrecked vehicles, shrubs and weeds that surrounded us, and shook his head. “We have no idea where they’ve
taken him, and it’s far too dangerous to go rooting around trying to find out. We have to get out of here.”

  As if to emphasize his point, a crossbow bolt hit the Bushmaster’s door right beside King’s head with a loud bang. The Custodian with the roof-mounted machine gun fired back at where he thought the bolt had come from, bullets shattering bricks beside a second story window in the building across the road.

  Without thinking, I struck a pressure point on King’s right forearm with a knife-hand blow, ripped the Austeyr assault-rifle from his hands, and darted back towards the restaurant. I couched the gun against my shoulder as I ran, and noticed that King had set the gun on fully automatic fire. That was no good, as I could empty the gun’s thirty-round magazine in seconds, so I flicked the automatic lockout back to the exposed position so that the gun would fire in semi-automatic mode. I don’t know how I knew this feature of the gun, but as soon as it was in my hands, I knew what to do, almost like instinct.

  I glanced about as I ran, letting rip with ultrasonic shout after shout, the flash sonar enhancing my vision so that I could ‘see’ into every shadow and darkened room, and through every shrub and bush. If the Custodians were somehow monitoring the sound frequencies and spotted me using flash sonar and it cost me my life, then so be it. I had to save David. Period.

  I figured the Skel would have taken him out of the restaurant through the kitchen, so I would have to find a way to get behind the restaurant’s back yard. However, before I could do that I had to do something about what the flash sonar had revealed – the entire area was crawling with Skel. Many of the buildings around us had Skel crossbowmen hiding in them, using shadows to remain concealed. Three more of the degenerate nomads, armed with Molotov cocktails, were scurrying towards the Bushmaster from the other side of the road, using wrecked cars, shrubs and wild grass as cover.

  And to top it all off, two hundred meters back down the road we had used to get here, several Skel were setting up several bombs which would immobilise or destroy our vehicles if we retreated back the way we came.

  As much as I wanted to go straight to David’s rescue, those three with the Molotovs had to be dealt with first. So instead of continuing towards the restaurant, I ran across the road instead, ducking two bolts fired at me from second story windows. When I got behind the wrecked cars, I ran quietly back towards the Bushmaster and the three Skel stalking it. I found them as they were preparing to lob their nasty weapons – the Custodian operating the Bushmaster’s machine gun had no idea they were there and that he was about to be doused with burning petrol. I opened up on the three skeleton-encased warriors before they could throw, and put them down with three shots to the back of their unarmoured necks. That done, I ran back towards the restaurant, where I was almost shot by the Custodian, who thought I was a Skel. He jerked the machine gun away at the last second, sending a stream of bullets whizzing past my head.

  My flash sonar detected two Skel hiding in the restaurant’s darkened foyer. Rather than trying to take them on frontally, I ran to the adjacent fast food joint and leapt inside. I dashed past the smashed service-counter and then popped silently through a gaping hole in the wall adjoining the restaurant, and found myself back in the restaurant’s dining room and behind the two Skel. Two more shots and they were down - one dropped soundlessly but the other held his neck and screamed ceaselessly while thrashing about on the floor.

  My line of retreat now secure, I went back into the fast food joint through the hole in the wall and hurried through its narrow kitchen, then into the empty room behind it. But when I tried to push open the aluminium back door, I found it stuck fast. I turned to the window beside the door and as quietly as I could, shifted aside the window frame's head jamb, which had collapsed, and after checking there were no Skel on the other side, slithered through the gap.

  The back of the fast food shop was a jungle of trees, bushes, and weeds jostling to get the most exposure to sunlight. I paused, quietened my breathing, and focused on what I could hear. I immediately heard several gruff Skel voices coming from the restaurant’s back yard beside me. Three were discussing setting up a trap to ambush whoever was pursuing them, for they had heard my gunshots, and the fourth appeared to be reporting their situation, though to whom I had no idea.

  I threaded my way through the trees, bushes and weeds until I reached what was left of the chain-link fence that marked the back of the property. Forcing my way through the fence brought me into the backyard of another building. I ran to my left and scaled a crumbling brick fence so that I was now directly behind the restaurant's rusty chain-link fence and backyard.

  I could see four Skel - and - David!

  The Skel closest to me was holding David upright with his left arm, using him as a human shield, while his right hand held a knife near his throat. Another Skel was over near the restaurant’s back door to the right, and the other two were on my left, hiding in the bushes. The good news was that they all had their backs to me, as I had expected.

  I had to disable the Skel holding David first, so I climbed slowly and quietly up a tree over-hanging the chain-link fence and braced myself in its lower branches. I steadied the assault-rifle against a branch, took aim, and then fired a shot through the Skel's right wrist and then his throat. The nomad bellowed in pain and dropped both the knife and David, and then collapsed. Next, I put a shot through the neck of the Skel over near the restaurant's back door, and then jumped from the tree.

  The other two chose that moment to burst from where they had been hiding. I put down the closest skeleton-armoured brute first, but the second one fired his crossbow at the same time that I fired a shot through his throat.

  The crossbow bolt struck me just below the left collarbone with the force of a sledgehammer, sending me staggering back to collide with a pile of rotting wooden pallets, where I slid slowly to the ground. Seeing the bolt sticking out of my chest felt surreal, but the truth sunk in - I had been shot! I wanted to surrender to the waves of pain washing through me and fall unconscious, but remembering that David was at my feet helped keep me focused.

  I reached a hand out to David’s neck, and was relieved to find a healthy pulse. Hopefully they had only knocked him out, for I could not see any wounds on his person.

  I also spotted a shiny black, palm-sized plastic object next to the Skel who had been holding David, so I grabbed it and popped it into my pocket.

  I could hear more Skel approaching me from other buildings, but even closer were two pairs of footsteps rushing towards me through the restaurant’s kitchen – footsteps that I instantly recognised. They belonged to King and Michal.

  Knowing that help was nigh, I tried to stand, but the movement caused agonising pain to tear through my torso thanks to the crossbow bolt.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  "Jones, wake up!"

  I jerked awake to see King's ugly face two inches from mine. To say he was angry would have been an understatement – he was ropeable. I looked around frantically for a moment, wondering where I was. Then it came flooding back – I had rescued David but had been shot in the process. The four Skel I had despatched lay sprawled about me, but Lieutenant King and Michal had found me at last. Michal was picking up David and slinging him carefully over his shoulder in a fireman's lift.

  "David...?" I asked.

  "He’ll live, but we've got to get back before more Skel find us," King snapped as he grabbed my right arm and hauled me roughly to my feet. The pain from being jerked upright so brutally almost caused me to black out again. “I’m sorry, did that hurt?” he mocked as he pointed to the crossbow bolt wound. I saw that he had removed the bolt and placed a sterile gauze pad over the wound, and bound up the shoulder with bandages. "Press here - I don't want you flaking on us on the way back, ‘cause then I’d have to carry your sorry backside."

  With Michal leading the way back through the restaurant towards the Bushmaster and our comrades, it took all my strength to keep putting one foot in fr
ont of the other, and that was with King practically dragging me along with him. He was armed with a pistol; his reappropriated assault-rifle was slung over his back.

  As we left the restaurant’s dark kitchen we heard voices of several Skel who had entered the kitchen behind us.

  "Faster!" King snarled.

  Somehow, we made it through the restaurant and safely back to the street, but had to give our faithful truck a wide berth as angry flames were devouring it.

  “Cover us!” King shouted to the Custodian operating the machine gun on top of the Bushmaster. The private immediately began firing short bursts at the restaurant over the top of the burning truck - and just in time too - for a group of Skel had begun to charge out of the building behind us. The machine gun fire soon had them scampering for cover.

  With Shorty helping from inside the vehicle, Michal carried David carefully through the Bushmaster's rear door.

  After that, Shorty reached out and helped me onto a seat. “Thanks for saving David, Jones, you're a legend.”

  I gave Shorty a weak smile.

  King climbed into the vehicle, slammed and locked the door behind us.

  The Custodian operating the machine gun suddenly dropped back inside the vehicle moaning in pain and with a crossbow bolt embedded in his shoulder. A Custodian private grabbed a med kit, carefully removed the bolt, and bound up the wound.

  King bellowed at the driver, “Go, go!”

  Remembering the roadside bombs the Skel had placed on the route we had come, I grabbed King's arm feebly. "Don't go back the way we came, keep going east and then circle back using a different route."

  "Belay that order!" King shouted to the driver. And then to me, "Why Jones?"

  "This was a meticulously laid trap, King. You think they're not expecting us to flee back the way we came?"

  He glared at me for a moment, and then told the driver to do what I suggested. The Bushmaster's idling engine roared into life and it quickly picked up speed at it surged eastwards down the street.