by Greg Dragon
Two huge towers rose on either side of the main entrance, and a massive board with bright white lettering stood as a bold centrepiece. There were hundreds of people queuing outside the entrance, just yards from a cordoned off area patrolled by men in uniforms. All of those people were waiting to be allowed admittance into the vast building that he knew was now, centuries later, just an empty shell.
Jack had been in there before he discovered the offices nearby, and wondered in awe what the huge room, with the cracked and weathered carpets, was for. In the magazine there was a picture of the interior, with rows upon rows of seats, all filled with smiling people as they waited for whatever spectacle happened at The Grand Theatre. He had presumed that it was some kind of meeting place, and that the stage at one end of the room – now just a hollow hole in the ground with a twisted set of metal stairs leading up to nothing – was where someone important would stand.
So much was hidden away, waiting to be found by those with an eye for searching. So much still left behind but unnoticed. A keen eye could spot the clues that many had missed, and Jack had collected a few almost intact magazines over the years – something considered valuable just for the paper. And as he sat in the wardrobe, watching the figure of the Hunter move through the room, his gaze stopped on the small pile of magazines across the room in the corner, where he had left them, and when one of the tracer lights passed over them, stopped and went back to settle on the top magazine, his heart started to thump harder.
Stupid.
He had left them out in full view, an obvious sign of at least recent occupancy.
The dark shape of the Hunter moved across the room, rifle sweeping backwards and forwards, covering the door, the windows, and the dark recesses as the soldier approached the corner. The figure moved out of Jack’s slice of vision, but he could hear the rustle of paper, pages being flicked through, being disturbed. And then the sound of the same boots again, thudding across the boards, the shadow moving swiftly out of the room and then heading away. They were leaving, treading heavily on creaking floorboards as they moved off down the corridor.
Jack breathed again, still keeping as quiet as he could, but his lungs had been close to forcing the breath out of him, screaming to inhale more air, and it was a relief to exhale and fill them again. Stupid, he thought. Part way through the raid he had stopped regulating his breathing and held it. And he’d held it so long that it was too late to exhale without making a loud noise. If the soldiers had been there for a minute longer he wouldn’t have been able to keep his breath in, and right now he’d be in the back of their vehicle, on his way to wherever they went.
The urge to look out was almost overwhelming. He needed to see if they had taken his magazines. They were his most prized belongings, picked up here and there from various hidden treasure troves across the city – at least a dozen of them, including the one that the boy had left behind. The one the boy had drawn pictures in.
Now Jack felt the ache in his chest, a pain that he had tried to keep at bay for two years, but sometimes it crept over him at the most unexpected moment. He couldn’t think of that right now, mustn’t drift back into self-loathing and thoughts of the past that was lost.
He just stayed there, still, impatience burning in his guts, the urge to burst from his hiding place and scramble across the room almost unbearable, knowing that any noise could bring the soldiers back. He cursed his own foolishness. Why had he not just put them in his rucksack? That was where he normally kept them. He had taken them out to look at, and to add his newest finds to the leather sleeve that he kept them in to protect them from damage. Three new magazines to add, and yet he hadn’t put them away afterwards. Instead he had drifted off to sleep, leaving them in a pile, and only waking at the tremendous noise of the approaching Dropship. In his panic to hide he had forgotten about the magazines and had just run for the wardrobe.
Now he couldn’t see if they were still there, and couldn’t see if the Hunter had taken any of them. The paper was worth money to the right buyer, but not as much as their sentimental value to Jack, and nowhere near as much as that magazine with the boy’s drawings.
There was no price on that one. Could never be. He had scolded the boy, told him off for defacing what was precious to him, and yet, now, the one with the drawings in it was the most valuable thing to him.
The Right Choice
Three years before...
The boy had no shoes on the day Jack met him, and kept repeating that fact as Jack stood there, considering what to do next.
This isn’t my problem, he thought. This is just stupid of me, staying here in full view for too long. I’m an open target. I need to move on.
But what about the child?
I could help him if I chose to, if I was willing to take the burden. Or maybe I could at least take him to The Crossing, and find someone who would want a boy to work for them.
There was no one who could be trusted. Jack sighed. Finally, he decided to just walk away. This was a problem that he didn’t need. But then a memory from his own childhood came to him, because Jack had lived on the inside of the barrier once, but that was so very long ago.
Only Two Tickets
Many years before...
Jack could only have been six or seven years old – he couldn’t recall exactly – and all of his memories of those days were remembered like a small child would remember them. He was very young when he stopped living on the inside of the barrier and found himself walking in a line, following other children. He wore no shoes and they were walking over the hard, gravelled ground, out of the security gates and into the crumbling ruins that was the outside.
The day before he had been at home, in the warmth, playing with his toys and reading his books. His parents had been packing up everything in the house, or at least most of it. He had peered into his parent’s bedroom and saw his mother putting things into a large plastic container that looked like an over-sized suitcase. It wasn’t one of their normal suitcases, the purple ones under their bed. This was different. His mother was putting things into it, and then taking them out, and he thought that she seemed to be choosing what to take with her.
They had gone on what his father called vacations, sometimes. It meant leaving, and it meant travelling on the sub-train for a long time, and then arriving at a place where there was sand and lots of water. They would stay there for a few days and then go home again. But this time had been different. All the furniture was covered with plastic sheeting, and the cupboards – which were normally filled with food – were now empty.
He’d gone back to his toys, not paying attention, preferring to use his crayons to draw stick men with guns shooting monsters, or huge dinosaurs eating helpless victims. But then he heard raised voices from his parent’s room. They were arguing, he’d thought. It wasn’t a frequent thing. His parents were both quiet people, prone to long periods of silence. He couldn’t hear what the argument was about, but vividly recalled one phrase that his mother said.
“But there are only two tickets.”
Those were the only words of the conversation that he’d caught, and it was the last thing he ever heard his mother say. A short while later he heard the front door open, and then shut, and then two men were in the room with him, ushering him out of the house.
Jack knew now that his parents had made some kind of decision that day, all those years ago, and the choice meant that he would go somewhere else. He’d figured that much out for himself. There were only two tickets to whatever journey his parents had gone on, and therefore, he couldn’t go with them. Forty years must have passed, and he still didn’t know where they’d gone. He always thought that you came back from a vacation.
As he’d walked in line with the other children, fear building in his chest as he saw the massive walls that protected the inner city – which had been his home for the entirety of his life – becoming more distant, further behind them with every step that they took out into the ruins. He remembered that his
feet hurt on the gravel, and they bled, just like the feet of the boy as he sat at the side of the road that day.
A choice had been made a very long time ago that led to Jack walking barefoot away from every comfort he’d ever known, into a life much more precarious, harsh, and dangerous.
Let’s Get Moving
Two years before...
Why had he made a decision, right then, to not leave the boy without first offering to help? Had he seen something of himself there, sitting on the side of the road? Had he seen that the boy was like him?
“Come on,” Jack said, looking around, scoping the streets and the abandoned buildings for movement. If the boy had been bait, the attack would already have been upon him.
But that didn’t mean they were safe.
Jack started to walk along the sidewalk, his machetes still drawn, eyes flickering over every possible hiding place. But when he stopped at the intersection and glanced back, the boy hadn’t followed him. The child was standing, but not walking. He was just standing there, his tiny, round face screwed up with indecision.
The kid is terrified, he thought, and can’t trust me. He couldn’t blame the child for being cautious or afraid, but alive was always better than dead, and if the boy stayed where he was, he would be dead before morning. Maybe the kid didn’t realise that?
He sighed, impatient but reluctant to leave the boy to his fate.
“I’ve got food,” Jack shouted. “And… we’ll try to find something for your feet.”
The boy’s expression changed at that, a flicker of hope removing the wide-eyed fear from his eyes.
“New shoes?” the boy asked as he took a single, tentative step forward.
“Yes!” Jack said, already beginning to regret what this offer would cost him. “But let’s get moving.” He waved his arm, indicating the buildings around them. “You think losing your shoes is bad? There are worse things that folks will do to you if you stay here too long.”
Jack headed off down the street, deciding if the boy followed him he would help him, at least for a while. But if he didn’t follow, then it was his choice, his life. Jack was already putting himself out, he thought. If the boy didn’t come, then fate would decide what would happen to him.
But the boy did follow, and was soon jogging along beside him, not complaining even once. If his feet hurt him as they travelled away from The Crossing, the child didn’t make it apparent.
Jack’s hideout at the time was a long walk away, at least four miles from The Crossing, and he didn’t stop to rest. It would be dark in a few hours and he wanted to be barricaded in by then, hidden away from what prowled the streets at night.
As they walked, he glanced over at the boy, realising for the first time just how small the child was. He couldn’t have been older than six years old, about the age that Jack had been when he had escaped from the workhouse.
The Workhouse
Many years before...
Even considering all the difficulties of life on the outside, among the ruins of the outer zone with the dangerous things that haunted that skeletal landscape and the gangs of vicious and cold-hearted folk that prowled and picked at the debris for anything edible or salvageable, Jack’s short time in the workhouse near the border had been worse.
After the long walk through the ruins, following the other kids in the chain gang led by a dozen armed and rough looking men, they had arrived at what would be his home for six months.
It was a sprawl of several buildings, most of them crumbling and dangerously unstable, housing over a hundred kids and their captors. For Jack, the place was a shock beyond anything he had experienced in his short life. There was little care taken for those that were held captive and made to work in the derelict warehouse and machine facility, barely a mile from the pulsing barrier that protected the wealthy and the fortunate. Most days were spent working on huge machines, the purpose of which Jack had never really known, and most nights were spent on the cold, hard ground, trying to sleep through nightmares and wondering when the next meal would come.
Jack remembered spending hours upon hours shovelling dirty, black rocks called coal, from the mountainous piles that the delivery ships would dump on the open grounds outside of the main building, into rickety wheelbarrows that were then rushed away by other children. There were no adults working the dumping ground. A few sat around the outside fence, their arms folded, watching intently for a child that wasn’t working as hard as the rest.
He remembered aching constantly from the strain of the work. The small muscles of a child were never meant to haul the loads that they were forced to manage every day for almost the entire time that the sun was in the sky. And on top of the muscle-draining work of lifting shovel after shovel, there was the panicked and rushed moment when a new Dropship would arrive and no one on the ground knew where it was going to dump its next delivery load. For a frantic couple of minutes, the hundred or so children in the yard would stand and watch the sky, waiting as the ship slowed to a halt. And when it released its load, those underneath would run as fast as they could.
Why had it been that way? he wondered, as he always did when memories of the workhouse came back to him. Surely the guards could have called the kids away from the open area while the ship had delivered the next mountain of coal? Surely it would have made much more sense to do that? Then there wouldn’t have been the accidents. People could be cold and uncaring in the outer district, and many were cruel, but none as bad as the men who made the yard workers stay out in the open when the coal was delivered.
He had seen them, the guards, making bets, and had heard names mentioned, though fortunately never his own. Who would be the next to go? – had been the subject of the money exchanged. Who would be the next child killed by falling coal?
The day that he escaped, along with many others, had been one of the times that someone had died under the avalanche of the black rocks. Except on that day it hadn’t been a child that was killed, but one of the guards. No one planned for it to work out how it had, and he thought that not a single kid in the yard had expected the ship to drop early, and so close to the edge of the yard. Maybe it had been a mistake by the pilot, or the crew in the cargo chamber of the ship. Someone could have pulled the lever before they were supposed to and whoosh, away went the entire contents of the cargo hold, plummeting to the ground a hundred feet below.
One moment the guard had been sitting there, smiling, watching the fear in the children’s eyes as they stood, dotted about over the open ground in the yard, looking up at the huge ship approaching, their shovels in hand, waiting to run. The next moment the ship had stopped, and the smiling guard had vanished under a hundred tonnes of black rock which hit the ground and churned out a cloud of thick dust that spewed for yards in every direction. Then the guards were shouting and running towards the fence where their co-worker had been.
That was when he had looked back at the other children around him. Some were looking at him, and some were glancing at the fence, just yards away.
Jack remembered the realisation that crept far too slowly into his mind. No one was watching them. Thirty yards away, the dozen or so guards were either shouting at each other, or pointlessly trying to move some of the coal, even though Jack knew – everybody knew – that the man underneath was dead. Very dead. He’d seen the mess left behind when someone had been crushed.
Among the yard workers was a one-eyed girl that everyone called Squint, though not to her face. She was older than most by maybe two or three years, and had a temper that would spark and explode at the slightest thing. Jack had seen a fair few younger kids hit the ground after a swift slap from Squint, and often for something trivial. You didn’t mess with her, you didn’t cross her, and if she told you to do something then you sure as hell did it.
On that day, Squint yelled just one word at the top of her shrill voice.
“RUN!”
And then she took off in the direction of the fence, a second or so before every oth
er kid. Even before Jack started to run, she was going full tilt, sprinting as fast as she could, and when Jack got to the bottom of the fence and started climbing, she was already over the top and running for the ruins.
The memory of what happened after that day was fuzzy, a blur of starved, feverish moments and nightmares, but Jack clearly remembered the last time he saw Squint alive. She turned back, just before running into an alleyway, grinned at him, and shouted. “Good luck, kiddo!”
Kiddo. She’d called everyone kiddo.
Jack still wondered what had happened to Squint, wondered if she was still alive somewhere in the outer zone.
Talented
Three years before...
As the distant memory of his escape faded, Jack glanced over to the boy once more, and wondered if the child had also escaped the workhouses. There had once been a few of them dotted around the landscape not too far from the barrier, but they were all gone now, so if the boy was from a workhouse it had to be somewhere else. Jack had been back to the workhouse that he’d escaped from, many years later, only to find it deserted, though the open ground at the back of the compound was still, after years, covered in a thick black stain from the coal.
He’d often wondered why the workhouses disappeared, and thought that maybe someone had decided to move them after the mass escape that he had been involved in happened.
The boy could still have been from a workhouse, though, maybe one much further away, Jack thought, and he almost asked the child if he was an escapee, but figured that the kid would probably rather not talk about it.
The boy was called Ryan, Jack discovered that first night, as they sat opposite each other, huddled around a small campfire built from the broken remains of a door that had fallen from its hinges and lay in the middle of the floor, not far from the entrance of their new, and possibly temporary, camp. They’d moved on a dozen blocks away from Jack’s old camp, as he had insisted. He liked to move regularly, but the building they found wasn’t ideal, with at least three entrances open to the wind. Thankfully, the room at the back still had a door that could be shut, which allowed him to light a fire without the light being visible out on the street.
