by Greg Dragon
A Hunter emerged from the room, pushing Ryan ahead of him. The boy was hustled into the middle of the room as the four Hunters encircled him.
Now, thought Jack. Go now, while they aren’t looking. Attack them from behind. You’ll get the drop on them, and there’s a chance, isn’t there? There’s a chance that you could take one of them out, grab his gun, and shoot the others.
But you don’t know how to fire the gun, do you? he thought. You won’t be able to fight them all off.
He watched, hesitating, hopelessly not acting at the one moment that he knew he should.
But then the boy was shaking his head.
They’re talking to him, he thought. They’re asking him something. What are they asking him?
He heard a voice, low, one of the Hunters. “No one else here? Are you sure?”
The boy shook his head again.
And then it was too late. The Hunters ushered Ryan out of the room and into the hall, and were gone.
Seconds too late, Jack jumped from his hiding place behind the ruined sofa and ran through the rooms of their hideout, rushing down the hall as he drew his machetes, hurrying out into the street only to see the windowless vehicle heading away at an incredible speed, then turning a corner a block away.
Then it was gone. And so was Ryan.
Time to go
And the boy did exactly as you told him, didn’t he? He didn’t give you up, he kept quiet. When all along you thought that your instructions might keep him alive if ever you were caught, that he would stay silent and hide, you never expected it to be the other way round, did you?
You didn’t act that night because you were a coward, Jack told himself. You didn’t act and the boy was taken – Ryan was gone – leaving you to stew over it again and again, every night for two years, to wake up sweating, crying like a fool.
What were you expecting after he was gone? That you could get over it?
In the darkness of the room, in the spot where the magazines had been, Jack finally realised what it was he must do. He’d waited too long – much too long – even though he’d always known what his only real option was. Two years ago the boy had been taken by the Hunters, and for two years Jack had tried to reason with himself, screwed his head up with thoughts of what he could have done – should have done – on that night, but he had never, until that moment, accepted that there was a choice he could make that might give him a chance to get back what was lost.
Jack Avery stood up and walked towards the door.
Pickup
Corporal Markell stood watch at the rear of the Armoured Personnel Vehicle as the last of the new workforce recruits were pushed inside. The corporal then nodded at the last squad as they passed by with no new prisoners in tow. They wouldn’t be berated for not bringing someone back this time. This whole trip out had been low-yield, as her superior officer, Lieutenant Cray had suggested it would be.
It was pointless going back to the same area after such a short amount of time, and Cray had said as much when the target location had been announced an hour before. But they all knew that disputing the target was pointless, and even if they did it would be them that would catch the blame for the lack of worker harvest.
Markell closed the back door and turned to head for the side of the vehicle, glad that the day’s fiasco was over and that they could all go back to their dorms and watch TV, and maybe get drunk.
But there was a figure standing just feet away, in the middle of the street – a man that shouldn’t have been there. Markell frowned, and slowly raised the Assault Rifle.
The man lifted two machetes from his belt, held his hands out, and just as Markell was about to fire, the man – who looked tired and weak – dropped the machetes to the ground.
The man was giving himself up. It was a ridiculous notion, Markell thought. No one ever gave themselves up.
“We have another prisoner,” stammered Markell into the radio, still not quite accepting the man’s actions. Was he mad? He must be – had to be – to make such a stupid choice. It just wasn’t done. Seconds later, the last squad rushed around the truck and encircled the man as Markell opened the back of the vehicle and watched, stunned, as the man voluntarily walked forward, heading for the open maw of the truck.
Markell frowned again as the man stopped at the back of the truck and turned. The man said something, but Markell couldn’t hear him clearly. The words were muffled by the helmet’s padding.
No one ever gave themselves up willingly, Markell thought again. Why would they? Even life out here in the ruins was better than the short life of a work slave, Markell knew that. Yet, here was this man doing just that, the first to do so in seven years of Markell’s military career.
Markell felt a sudden urge to speak to the man, and it was uncontrollable.
I must know why.
Into Darkness
Jack stood at the back of the prison vehicle, about to step up into the open door, but then he turned to the nearest Hunter, the one who had been at the back of the truck as he had approached. He looked at the Hunter directly where his eyes should be – or Jack’s nearest guess – and asked. “Who are you people?”
Then, to his shock, the Hunter reached up and tapped the side of his helmet, which immediately gave a hiss of compressed air before the entire front visor opened upwards.
Staring back at him, from within the armour of a Hunter, was the face of a young woman. He couldn’t guess her age exactly, but thought she could be no older than twenty-five, thirty at most.
Then the Hunter spoke, and she sounded as he had expected, just like a young woman. This wasn’t a robot, or something worse. Hunters were just people.
“Why give yourself up?” asked Corporal Lisa Markell, ignoring the furious chatter on the radio, and the orders to raise her protective mask, immediately.
Jack hesitated, and then looked at the woman. “I have to find a boy that you took from me,” he said, just before he was pushed into the vehicle by one of the other Hunters.
The back doors of the prison vehicle closed and he was plunged into darkness.
I was right, thought Jack. You can’t see out of these things. Shame I can’t tell anyone that.
Why
The vehicle sped through the streets, rapidly heading towards the Dropship, and in the middle compartment – the section of each vehicle that contained the recruitment squad and their equipment – Lisa pulled off her helmet and threw it to the floor.
“Are you mad?” asked Johnson, another corporal in her section. “You never take your helmet off. 101, man!”
“I had to know why,” answered Lisa.
Johnson looked confused. “You’ll be lucky if they don’t demote you for it,” he said.
“I had to know why he gave himself up,” Lisa continued. “It just didn’t make any sense. No one does that. Ever.”
“Of course not,” said Johnson. “Even the irradiated scum out here isn’t that stupid.”
Johnson paused for a moment. “Why did he do it, anyway?” he asked.
Lisa looked over at Johnson, and smiled. “He wants to find a boy that was captured.”
“Oh. Well, tough luck on that one,” said Johnson, shuffling in his seat and then roughly snapping the safety belt into place. “They all die within a month or two, anyway.”
PART TWO
INTO THE JUNKLANDS
Caught
Complete darkness surrounded Jack as he sat on the hard ground inside the back of the prison vehicle. Around him he could hear movement, and a soft whimpering came from somewhere nearby.
Over near the back of the compartment, he thought.
Other prisoners.
Some of them afraid like you are.
All of them afraid like you are.
Jack took a few deep, rhythmic breaths, calming his nerves and attempting to steady himself as the vehicle tore along the streets, leaving behind everything he had known.
He wondered if he would ever see the ruins again, e
ver visit The Crossing, and he realised that he didn’t really care if he did. The life he was leaving behind held nothing for him anymore, probably never had. It had been a life and that was all it amounted to.
Survival.
Except some parts, and all of that was either gone forever, dead, or somewhere, he hoped, in his future.
This.
This was all that was left.
His search for Ryan had resumed. After two long years of wondering, he had finally given up and actually done something. He’d taken a step towards the unknown but he knew this was where Ryan had gone and where he needed to go, even if he never found the boy again. If this turned out to be a journey that ended only in his death, then at least he would know something, wouldn’t he? At least he could die knowing that he had tried, even if it had taken him two years to commit himself to act.
Jack sat in the darkness, listening to the noises around him, and swore that as long as he lived he would task himself with two things only – he would find Ryan, and somehow he would make up for failing the boy when he had been needed most. Jack knew that he could have done little when the Hunters took Ryan, and he knew that he would probably have died in the attempt, but somehow that seemed to him to be better than sitting there and just letting them take him.
This was what he went through, back then. What Ryan went through after he was taken, and you were left standing in the road, just watching the vehicles speed away.
The darkness, the frightened noises made by the other prisoners, and the not knowing where the truck was heading to.
Now you know this much.
The vehicle turned a corner, violently throwing everyone stuck in the dark prison at the back onto the floor. They sprawled over each other, grasping out at nothing, at anything, just trying to steady themselves. Hands pushed into faces and feet kicked up as people struggled desperately. There were cries of fear as the vehicle swerved again, skidded and then continued on a straight path. For a few seconds the heaving mass of bodies writhed over each other until finally everyone had settled back on the floor again.
Jack tried to picture the streets outside in his mind, playing back the turns they had made, and the directions they were travelling in, and estimated that they were now four blocks from his hideout, four entire blocks in what? A minute? The confusion as the vehicle had turned the corner had thrown his orientation out for a moment, but his mind raced to catch up, to estimate their location.
The roar of the engine brought more cries of fear from the other passengers around him. He tried to guess how many people were in the back with him but it was impossible. The darkness inside the armoured truck was absolute. There was not even the slightest glimmer of light that might allow his eyes to adjust. He could see no shadows or other figures but he could smell them, and that wasn’t very pleasant.
Most people living in the Outer Zone, in the ruins of the old city, didn’t get to bathe very often. Some of them never. Fresh water was a rare commodity and was more than often used for drinking. There were water springs in various places, but they were guarded by gangs, or were in the centre of one of the hovels that littered the ruins, and never out in the open or in a place that was accessible to just anyone. Of all the things that were considered valuable in the Outer Zone, clean water was among the highest.
And right then Jack would do anything for a drink.
He thought of Ryan again, and how the boy must have felt making this journey. This was frightening even to Jack, who wasn’t disturbed by many things after such a long time in the ruins. But to a boy, this must have been terrifying.
Someone shoved him onto his back and Jack felt a large figure move past him, as whoever it was struggled to their feet, and then there was a roar of annoyance.
“Where the hell am I?” boomed the gruff voice of a man Jack figured must have been unconscious for the journey so far. Jack couldn’t place it, but way back and hidden in his mind somewhere, that voice was familiar.
When no answer came, the man pushed forward, and though Jack couldn’t see what was going on, he heard others crying out as the man unleashed his fury on them. Jack was just sitting up when a heavy weight landed upon him. Another man – or a woman – struggled and rolled over him as Jack pushed them off, trying not to push so hard that he would injure the person. It wasn’t a courtesy that most would give but he saw no reason to increase the suffering of those around him. It was as bad for them as it was for him. Worse even.
At least he had volunteered.
“Let me out you—“ the man bellowed, but he was cut off as the vehicle swerved sharply around another corner. Jack heard a loud thud on the side of the vehicle, and then another loud thud, a grunt, and then silence. Jack thought that in the second impact he had heard a cracking noise, like small bones breaking.
Unconscious again, thought Jack, as the vehicle quickly swerved, this time to the left. The fool, whoever this man with the familiar voice was, had been standing with nothing to hold on to, and nothing to counter the gravity of the swerving vehicle. At least he wouldn’t beat on anyone else for a while.
He went back to the movement and speed of the vehicle. Trying to adjust his bearings once more.
We’re into 342nd Street. And now we’re passing the old rail station.
And still the vehicle sped onwards.
We’re getting close to the old pits and the open ground not far from the rail station.
And that was where once, when Jack had been much younger, the slave baron Jagan had kept his camp. It had been where the pit fights, a dark time in Jack’s life, had taken place. A time he tried hard to forget about.
The vehicle slowed, then almost halted, but then Jack’s stomach lurched as it shot upwards, as though climbing a hill.
No hills here. So where were they going now? Had he missed something?
But he wasn’t sure. His mind scrambled over the terrain, recalling everything in the area, searching for a section of high ground. But he knew there was nothing for the vehicle to climb up like this, unless...
We’re going into the dropship.
We must be. There are no hills in this area, only pits. Pits full of the bones of Jagan’s Gladiators. That would be a good place for something as large as the dropship to land.
All that open space.
The vehicle moved slowly now, as though navigating narrow lanes with care, turning left, then right, and then finally stopping. There were more cries of fear from the other passengers, but Jack sat in silence, thinking only of Ryan.
If the boy could survive this, get through it all, then I can. All I need to do is keep my nerves steady, stay calm.
Breathe.
Whatever happens next, none of it matters if it means I end up in the place where Ryan is, or at least where he was two years ago.
They won’t kill us, surely?
Would they? It was possible, wasn’t it? But that would be ridiculous. Why would they go to so much trouble to round up people only to kill them?
Unless they did kill people, maybe the weak ones, he thought. That was also a possibility.
But you’re not weak, are you? Maybe some of these others are, and they will die, but you’re still strong. Getting older, and prone to coughs in bad weather, but still strong. And the boy had been strong, always had been, even though he was slight of build. Ryan had proven time and again that he wasn’t as weak as Jack had first thought when he saw him sitting on the sidewalk the day they met. As soon as the boy had been fed a few times he’d started to become less gaunt and more human. And even though he was still thin, there had been a grittiness to him, a stubbornness that wasn’t just in his attitude.
A thought cut through the silence.
Ryan would be nine years old now. He wouldn’t be as small as he had been back then. He could even be a foot taller. He’d surely be more lean and muscular. He always was a strong kid.
As a hissing noise filled the darkness around him, and a faint mustard smell entered his nostrils, Jack’s
mind went back once more looking for somewhere to hide, to a time when they had been together.
Like a father and son. That’s also what he had thought the day they celebrated Ryan’s birthday that first time.
Ant Soup
Two Years Before
They’d celebrated Ryan’s birthday on the anniversary of the day that Jack found him. It was the only day that Jack could use, because Ryan couldn’t remember when his birthday was.
“My parents always told me when my birthday was,” Ryan had said when Jack first asked him as they sat on the flat edge of a warehouse loading bay. “I never thought about it.”
It seemed that an even colder winter than usual was on its way. At least that was how it appeared to Jack. The bitter, cold wind was early by several weeks, and although they had supplies stashed it wouldn’t be enough to last the entire three months of bad weather to come. Jack had known then that they would have to resort to trading something that he didn’t want to part with or they’d be hunting rats. But it wasn’t turning just yet, not quite.
He thought, as they sat there looking out over the expanse of ruins that was the Far Reaches, a place further out from the middle of the city than Jack liked to go, that they’d manage, they would get by, and he was determined to enjoy the last of the fading summer before the snow drifts came.
Every year, when the weather was just turning cold after the blistering weeks of heat that marked the summer months, the ants came out. It always happened at the same time of year. They’d come bursting from the ground, spewing tiny piles of dirt along the gutters and out of the cracks in the broken roads. And there were millions of them. For a day or so the air was filled with flying ants. They got everywhere, even in his clothes and his hair.
Their arrival marked the end of the hot weather and the creeping in of the autumn and the long winter that would bring about the deaths of so many. With little fuel, and nowhere to hide from the chilling winds and the unforgiving snow that would follow, many in the outer areas of the city would perish. Two days before he’d found the boy, he’d been heating a pan of squashed ants over a fire. It had been that time.
