by Greg Dragon
Jack had no idea where they would find new footwear for the boy, and he had nothing of a value even close to the cost of shoes to trade, but he did have some old sack cloth, which he cut and wrapped around the boy’s feet. They both slept after a meagre meal of salted rat meat which Jack had traded back at The Crossing, but it took a while for Jack to drift off.
Instead he lay there, watching his new companion, listening to the boy snoring, and wondered what the hell he was going to do with the child. This was the first time in his entire life that Jack had the responsibility of another person on his shoulders, and if he was honest with himself, he didn’t have the slightest idea how to behave. Was he supposed to teach the kid? Help him learn how to survive out here, like the old man had done for him? Obviously the boy hadn’t done so well by himself, but then, when Jack thought back to his own childhood living rough, he hadn’t always been lucky himself. Sometimes he had barely scratched his way through, nearly dying at least a dozen times that he could recollect. Probably more, if he actually tried to remember them all.
Maybe he should take the kid back to The Crossing? Maybe he should try to find someone there to take him in… no, that was utterly pointless. There wasn’t a single soul in that place that wouldn’t use the boy for some low purpose. Sure, there were folks there that were less terrible than most – some even showed concern for other people occasionally – but Jack could count on one hand the number of people he thought may actually try to help the kid, and not even one of those was a guarantee. The boy was his to watch over, whether he liked it or not. He could always tell Ryan to scram, to leave, but he knew that wouldn’t happen, either. He’d already made the mistake of starting to warm to the boy.
It was with these troubling thoughts that sleep finally took him, drifting in on the howling wind and muffling the worry of what to do next.
In the end it turned out that he wasn’t going to need to do anything. Only a few days in the boy’s company and Jack had already gotten used to him being around. Before Jack had even realised, an entire month had passed as they moved from place to place, each time finding a good camp spot that was well hidden and then scavenging among the ruins nearby.
The boy turned out to be one of the keenest scavengers Jack had ever met, even if his first impressions of the boy’s abilities were all disappointments. The kid was clumsy to begin with, not really knowing how or where to start looking, how to search a place and spot the signs of possible buried treasure. He constantly walked straight past obvious places to check, and was always surprised when Jack pointed them out. But that soon passed, and after the fourth day, while staying overnight in one of Jack’s regular hideouts on the way to The Crossing to find a trader for a rubber tyre that Jack had hauled out from under a pile of collapsed masonry, Ryan crawled out from a hole underneath a smashed up kitchen unit, with a can opener in his hand.
A real, working, not even slightly rusty, can opener. The damn thing was a rare treasure, and Jack stood there for a full five minutes, turning it in his hands, inspecting the clasp joint and the circular blade. It was in perfect working condition.
“You found this… down there?” he asked, with an incredulous expression.
“Yes. Just down there,” said Ryan, pointing at the hole in the floorboards that Jack wouldn’t have even considered trying to squeeze into – hadn’t considered investigating the few dozen times he had holed up in the very same room.
They were on the third floor of a derelict apartment building not too far from where Jack had seen the Hunters for the first time, an area that had been picked clean over centuries. Most days it was impossible enough to find decent salvage of any kind so close to The Crossing, and this place was less than two miles away. Collecting enough wood for a fire was a hopeless task in such a populated and over-picked area, and finding stuff like this just didn’t happen.
And yet here he was, holding something that was impossible to find anymore, ever. A relic from an era that was three centuries dead.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
Jack looked at the can opener, turning it over in his hands, checking for rust spots. There weren’t any.
“This should be rusty,” he said, frowning, and then glancing at the boy. “Just lying around in a dark, probably wet place, all this time. I mean years and years. It should be rusty.”
“It was in this bag,” said Ryan, reaching for a clear, plastic bag lying on the floor. The bag had been ripped open, and a guilty expression crossed the boy’s face. “It was in this bag, but I opened it. Sorry. I found it in the box in the wall.”
Jack’s eyes widened.
“What box?”
“Well. Not a box,” Ryan backtracked, looking a little flustered or even embarrassed.
The boy thinks he’s done wrong, Jack thought, frowning, but he let the boy continue.
“It’s like a big square hole in the wall. You can’t see it from the floor below. I looked. But under there,” Ryan pointed at the hole in the boards, “you can crawl to the bit above the wall, and the top of the box is a bit open. The wall is cracked. I think there’s more stuff in there but I can’t reach any further in.”
“What do you mean, there’s nothing in the room where the box is?”
“I’ll show you,” said Ryan.
Jack followed the boy down the stairs, avoiding the piles of trash. Underneath the kitchen, on the floor below, was a large open room that Jack had walked through many times. There were two entrances, one to the stairs and the other to the front foyer of the building. But the walls were completely bare apart from occasional scraps of faded but colourful plaster.
Ryan stopped in the middle of the room and pointed at the north wall. “Right there,” he said.
Jack walked over to the small hole that the boy was indicating, and peered up into the kitchen above. The same rotten and faded green cabinets could be seen through it.
“This hole wasn’t here before,” said Jack. “I would have seen it.”
“Ah,” said Ryan, looking sheepish.”It kinda gave way when I first climbed inside”. The child walked over to the wall below the hole, reached up, and tapped the plaster. “The box is right here, I think.”
“It’s hidden?” asked Jack.
“Yeah. You can check both sides. If you go under the stairs the wall is bare there as well. But the box is there. I felt it. The top had cracked open, I think, but only a little bit.” The boy held up his hand, using two fingers to indicate a three inch gap. A gap just big enough for a child’s hand to squeeze through. “I felt inside and it was all dry, but I couldn’t pull any of the other stuff out.”
Jack took out his machete and tapped the wall with the back of the blade. The sound was dull. He tapped the area a foot away, and the sound changed.
It was hollow.
“My god. There must be a safe hidden in there.”
And there was. After five minutes of hacking at the aged and softened plaster, which crumbled and fell away in large chunks, Jack took a step back and stared at the secure door of a metal safe, his mouth open. He didn’t know what to say, and was utterly dumbfounded. No one found stuff like this anymore.
Ten minutes later and they had used Jack’s wrench to pull the kitchen cabinets from the wall on the floor above, and pull up the floorboards, then prised open the top of the safe. The metal was a colour that Jack had rarely seen before. New metal. And worth a lot to trade for. It might take a while for him to pull the damn thing out of the wall and break it up, but metal that wasn’t rusty was valuable.
The safe turned out to be mostly full of paper. Currency from centuries ago that was absolutely worthless now, except for the material it was made of. But inside they also found boxes of marker pens that still worked, a bunch of wax crayons, and some faded photographs. But on top of the pile of paper, pinning everything down, was a box of tools. Screwdrivers, cutting knives, a hammer, a chisel set, and more – all of them in immaculate condition. Jack sat in the middle of the room, the tools i
n his hands, speechless once more. This hoard of treasure was the most valuable he had ever found.
That night they moved camps again, away from the place that they had made so much noise when Jack first hauled the safe out of the wall and then broke it apart. They hid in the cellar storeroom of a collapsed shop two blocks up, hoping that it was far enough away that if someone went looking and even found the recent disturbance, they wouldn’t be able to track who had made it.
When Jack awoke the next morning, there were scrawled crayon pictures across the back wall of the cellar, near where Ryan was sleeping – stick men of various colours, and there in the middle was one tall figure and a smaller figure, holding hands.
Hunted
The thought of those pictures stirred something, a hurt that hadn’t gone away even after nearly two years. He couldn’t wait any longer, and quickly struggled out of the pile of rags, pushed aside the wardrobe doors and fell out onto the floor. He smashed his shoulder on the ground and winced with pain, but then ignored it as he lay there, staring across the room at the corner where the magazines should be, at the spot that was now empty. He stumbled forward, scrambling in the darkness, hunting for anything that may have been left behind, but the corner was empty, the magazines gone – including the one that Ryan had drawn his stick men in the day that they had taken him.
Jack had always worried – back then, when he had been travelling with the boy – that one day they would be caught in a raid. He’d worried about how the boy would react, if he would cry out in fear and give them both away.
And he’d tried to explain to the boy.
If They Come
Two years before...
Months before, during the cold season when they were sitting around a low burning campfire in a warehouse in the old docklands, he had told the boy how to behave if the Hunters came and found them. It was bitter cold on that night, and they were both wrapped up in dusty, mould-riddled chunks of carpet, stripped from an office two floors above. The carpet stank of the ages, but it kept the chilling breeze, which gusted in through the massive holes in the building, at bay.
The fire was barely alive, smouldering, but still managing a visible glow that lit the interior of the tiny loading bay area that Jack had chosen. Lighting a fire anywhere else would alert passersby that they were there, but the overhang of the bay, and the metal stairs that they were huddled under, hid the light of the fire well enough. Jack still barely slept through the night, unhappy that they hadn’t found somewhere to barricade themselves away, but he had to admit the warmth of the fire was a rare gift during the winter months.
He didn’t know why he chose to speak of the Hunters for the first time on that occasion. The boy had been with him for nearly a year and the subject hadn’t come up at all. But then – they hadn’t seen Hunters in all that time. Moving from place to place in search of salvage or food further out in the outer zone did have its benefits, even though they were often weighted against dangers.
“If they come,” he had said, and paused for a minute, wondering if the boy even knew about the raids. “If the Hunters ever find us, you are to stay hidden, and quiet.”
Jack didn’t look at the boy as he spoke, but he could sense his gaze upon him. Even after nearly a year he was still a quiet child. Sometimes he would talk, but it was always about what they had unearthed that day, or what they could make out of the things that they found, even though the boy knew that their goal was mostly to trade the stuff in for supplies. When he did get going he would chatter non-stop for a while, and big plans of constructing flying ships or boats, or fortresses, would spill out.
But most of the time he was quiet.
“Do you understand?” Jack asked, finally looking up at Ryan.
Ryan nodded, but didn’t speak. His gaze shifted between Jack and the wavering glow of the fire.
“Do you know who I am speaking of?” Jack asked. “The Hunters. The soldiers that come in the great ships and take people away. Do you know of those?”
“Yes,” Ryan finally replied. “I’ve seen them.”
“You have?” He was curious. The boy had never spoken of where he had come from before, even though he had asked questions. Ryan always clammed up, stopped talking, and Jack had taken the hint after a few attempts to at prising the information from the child.
Ryan smiled, but it wasn’t a cheerful one. “Before the people who took my shoes,” he said, “I hid from the soldiers in the street, but they weren’t in a big ship. They were in a truck. I don’t know who they were looking for, but they found someone and took them away. I was hiding over the street and they saw me. I ran and ran, and that’s when I ran into the people who took my shoes.”
He looked down at the boots that they had traded for. After finding the stash in the safe, Jack had made it a priority to get the boy new shoes, and it had cost dearly, but had been worth it.
“These are much betterer boots,” said Ryan. “They keep my feet warm.”
“Better. Not betterer,” Jack said, with a grin.
“Better,” Ryan echoed.
“Well, then you know what they do. The Hunters? They hunt people down and take them. And if they find us – find me – you are to stay hidden and quiet. Do you get that?”
Another nod.
“You can’t give yourself away, or cry out. If you do that then they will find you, too.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Then I would be alone,” Ryan said, which took Jack by surprise. He hadn’t considered that a child so young could think of such things.
“Well, you’ll be alone one day anyway,” Jack replied before even thinking about how morbid and pessimistic it would sound. “I’m much older than you, and I will get very old, one day. Too old to travel any longer.”
More silence.
“You hide,” Jack repeated. “And you stay hidden if they come. No noise, and maybe they won’t find you.”
Hunted
After two years, Jack still preferred betterer to better.
He sat in the dust and mould of the apartment, staring at the blank space where the magazines had been just a few minutes before, and listened to the distant sounds of the Hunters heading back to their vehicles. He could feel anger building up, burning in his gut.
An urge to follow the Hunters and take back what was his.
But what good would he achieve? he thought. They will just take you. He knew that no matter how angry he felt, how vengeful, he wouldn’t get up and follow them. He wouldn’t because he hadn’t done it before. He knew that he was a coward, just as he had been that night.
Lost
Two years before...
Jack stood over the boy, towering above him, his voice raised, as he let the anger flood out. He didn’t hit the kid, even though for the briefest of moments that urge surfaced. How dare he? This child that I’ve taken in and fed, and kept alive? How dare he draw his damn stick men in one of my magazines?
Jack looked down at the magazine, at the colourful pictures of the streets of the city whose glory was three centuries dead, and at the stick men that now stood in the street, crayon drawings that Ryan had probably thought would make the place look more real.
And he shouted, not even trying to be wary of others nearby, and the risk of drawing attention.
But then, after a few minutes, he stopped. The boy was staring at the ground, his face flushed bright red with shame. Jack didn’t know what had possessed the child with the idea of drawing in his magazine, but he could see clearly that the boy regretted it. As the flush of anger passed, Jack suddenly felt foolish. What was he doing? Why was he shouting at the one person in the world that trusted him and would follow him anywhere? All over a damn magazine? Hell, it was the latest in his collection, and the damn boy had found it for him. He had come running out of the ruin of the old shop with a huge grin on his face.
And there he was, scolding the child. Suddenly the foolish feeling turned to shame, much stronger shame than the boy mus
t have been feeling. He put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder and spoke just two words...
“Sorry... I...”
...before the roar of the Dropship engines cut the air around them, and the whump of the boosters almost rocked the building they were standing in as it hit the ground nearby.
Jack remembered panicking and darting for the darkened room behind them, heading for their makeshift bolt-hole to hide, expecting the boy to be right behind him. But as he heard the crashing of the doors on the floor below them as they were kicked in, and the smashing of the one remaining window, Jack turned and saw that the boy was not there.
Where the hell had he gone? Where was the damn boy? Jack panicked, looking around, but then he heard the thud of boots on the stairs and realised that the Hunters were upon them, and that in just seconds they would both be caught.
He turned and ran for the bolt-hole, hoping that Ryan had found cover and was already hiding, but Jack didn’t make it to the hole in the floor of the small side-room as the door to the main room crashed open and grey-clad Hunters burst in. Jack darted to the side and crouched behind the rotten and torn sofa at the back of the room, knowing even then, as his hands went to his side, ready to draw his machetes, that the Hunters would find him.
But seconds passed, and the Hunters didn’t come into the side-room. Jack could see around the edge of the sofa that they had moved into the back rooms, where the old pantry and kitchen were, where Ryan must have run.
Don’t let them find the boy, he thought. Please don’t let them find...
