by Greg Dragon
Jack frowned. “We get to keep stuff? I mean, they let us keep things?”
Higgins laughed, almost coughing with the effort. “No, of course they don’t let you keep stuff, not if it’s useful to them, anyway. But if we don’t put it in the back of the dumper, they don’t ever knows about it, get it?”
Tyler picked up the rucksack and handed it to Jack.
“What Higgins is saying, is what they don’t know about, they don’t want. And out here, it’s just us.”
Jack looked at the digger, and then the carrier.
“But the drivers of the vehicles, surely they see if you take stuff?”
Tyler grinned. “What drivers?”
Jack frowned again.
“Ah,” said Tyler. “I get it. Come on,” he said. “Come look at this.”
Tyler made his way around to the front of the carrier vehicle, and Jack, confused, hurried behind him, trying to fit his new rucksack over his shoulders.
No wonder none of them wants this damn thing. The straps are both ripped.
“There,” said Tyler, pointing at the cab of the carrier. “You see the door?”
Jack looked at the side of the cab, and then tried to peer over the top.
“No,” he said.
“No, indeed,” said Tyler. “That’s because there isn’t one.”
Jack walked around the front of the carrier, peering at the far side, but found it just the same. A sheer metal wall that ended at the front screen. The screen itself was opaque, but Jack had thought they were just designed that way to block visibility of the driver and the rest of the cab crew from the outside.
“It’s automated,” said Tyler. “They all are.” He pointed at the dumper truck. “They can get at them from underneath, to maintain them, but there’s no person in there, or even room for one, from what I’ve heard. It also means no one can steal the damn thing, on account of there being no controls for a human to use.”
“You mean that there are no facility staff with us?” asked Jack. “Just us? We’re the only ones out here?”
Tyler nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “They remote pilot them, or pre-program them, or something. The carrier will remain right there for five days, and then it just goes back, on its own, after the alarm sounds. And it goes with or without us in it. And the dumper goes back every day and comes back before morning, empty.”
“Not even guards?”
“Yes, there are guards, but they stay at a central camp about half a mile away from here. That’s how they do it. They set up in an area, then they carve out a hole for each of the crews. Now, you see that beacon on top of the carrier? If that starts making one God-almighty noise, you run like hell and get in the back of the carrier, because it seals shut after a couple of minutes whether you’re in there or not.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that something uninvited has moved into our sector.”
“Like a creature?”
“Like predators, sure, sometimes. Plenty of those out here, but the radar doesn’t look for them and they mostly leave us alone. See, the predators learn faster than people. Usually the siren means that Junkers just got picked up on the radar.”
“I see,” said Jack. “So, what happens if someone wants to just run off?”
Tyler smiled. “Yeah, sure. We’ve all thought about it, at one time or another, until we find what’s left of someone who did run off.”
“Oh. People do, then?”
“Sometimes,” said Tyler. “Even had a guy with us about five years ago, ran with us for six months. Before Rick joined us, this guy was part of my crew. Then he decided to make a run for it and took off into the trash. Didn’t even bother that we were all watching as he went. Course, he also didn’t try to take any gear with him, or we would have stopped him.”
“And what happened to him?”
“We found him about three months later, when we cycled back round to the same spot, after Rick had taken his place. Higgins dug him up while we were salvaging. Found him trapped under a pile of crap with both his legs chewed off. He’d got about two hundred yards.”
“Damn.”
“Oh, yeah. Damn all right. That wasn’t the only thing eaten. He had no hands and no face. The only way we identified him was his tags. Thought it was a dead Junker until Rick spotted the chain still hanging from his neck. Well, what was left of his neck.”
Jack shuddered, and involuntarily reached into his shirt to touch the dog tags that hung there.
“You see, out here,” continued Tyler. “You either have the bugs, or you have the Junkers. Both of which will kill you. And no food. Nothing grows out here, it’s all lifeless and poisoned. We find bodies every now and then, among the junk. I’m guessing some of them are escapees, but who knows.”
Jack nodded, his mind still stuck on an image of a body with no legs sticking out of the junk.
Tyler shrugged. “What I’m saying is. You wanna run for it, no one is going to stop you, but don’t expect to take anything with you. We don’t waste good gear here.”
“I wasn’t planning to run,” said Jack, but wondered if he really was considering it. Six months was a long time to find no trace of Ryan, and he’d looked everywhere he could at the Facility. Maybe out here, he could search, but where would he even begin?
You have to start somewhere, though. Don’t you? But dead isn’t a start.
“Anyways, as I was saying,” said Tyler. “If you hear the siren you run back to the carrier, and don’t stop for nothing.”
“And then?” asked Jack.
Tyler frowned “Hmm?”
“Then what happens?” asked Jack.
“Nothing. We just wait in the carrier until the drone or the troops arrive to remove the problem. Or until it just goes away.”
“What if you’re not inside the carrier when they get here?”
Tyler’s expression turned from amused to grim.
“Then you become a vacancy.”
You Again
Expedition Control Centre
Lisa Markell wiped the sweat from her face and stared up at the mass of twisted metal in front of her. The huge Drover vehicle had arrived just an hour before, trundling along slowly, as they always did after being left behind to catch up. By the time it had arrived, the salvage groups had already left for their individual areas and the camp had gone into overwatch.
“Can it be repaired in the field?” she asked, looking at the aged mechanic standing just a few feet away, and then at the young trooper standing next to her. Hailey Simmons had been assigned to her expedition just a few weeks before, and Lisa hadn’t liked her at first but the young trooper’s can-do attitude soon stopped being irritating, and now Lisa kept her at her side constantly. The girl got things done, or brought things to Lisa’s attention much sooner than they otherwise would have been.
Take this drover, Lisa thought. The driver would have dumped this in the parking ground and walked away, leaving it for what? A day? Two days? Probably three days from now, when I’d want the damn thing hauling along the old roadway and clearing it for us, and we would have been delayed for repairs. Now we get the problem sorted before it’s needed.
“Ah, maybe. Yeah,” said the mechanic, rubbing his stubbled chin and looking at the debris jammed into the Drovers cutter. Drovers were originally designed for cutting tunnels in the earth, or even in rock, but they weren’t the most robust of contraptions, and when one became no longer of use to the mining sector, they were turned into road clearance trucks, and sent out to make long gouges in the hills and mountains of junk out in the Salvage Zone.
“Maybe?” asked Lisa. “Really?”
“No problem,” continued the mechanic, now looking flustered. “I can just cut that out and then we can get in to free the mechanism. Maybe a day?”
Lisa smiled. “Good. Very good. See to it, then. I need this three days from now, to clear a road to an abandoned facility we need to access.”
She turned and hea
ded back to the main control centre, a large construction built from a dozen large trucks that could just park next to each other, lower their sides and become one enclosed building. She was relieved to step out of the blistering heat and back into air conditioned rooms. She headed for the control room, right at the heart of the building, and sat down at her desk.
“Did we manage to re-fill all the group vacancies before we left?” she asked, not even looking round to see if Hailey was with her. Lisa knew she would be.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Hailey. “I saw to it myself, as you asked. I picked out some healthy candidates and wrote out the cards last week. It took them a while to process, but we got the replacements just as we were leaving for this trip.”
Lisa looked out across the control room, which she always thought was surprisingly large considering it only took up the compartments in three of the trucks. A few yards away was a bank of two dozen LCD monitors, watched by two troopers, all showing different views of the various areas currently being worked by the salvage crews in her expedition group.
“Did you want to review the new replacements?” asked Hailey. “I have them right here.”
Lisa was about to say no, but then chuckled quietly. The new recruit was certainly keen to please, she thought, and after how much of a relief she was proving to be, Lisa thought she should at least show interest in the girl’s work.
“Sure,” she said. “Throw them over here.” Then she turned back to the screens again. The screen at the top right corner was flickering, and that would annoy her very quickly.
Lisa took the thin pile of cards that Hailey handed her. There were a dozen. Had she really lost that many scabs in the last few months? It was hard to tell. There were more than enough accidents out there and, of course, the occasional escapee. It couldn’t be helped. But a dozen? That seemed a little high.
She flicked through the cards, checking that the current health status of each individual was marked over ninety out of a possible hundred. Healthy ones, well done again, Hailey, she thought.
It wasn’t until Lisa flicked to the second to last card that she stopped and actually paid some attention to the details. Something had triggered a thought, or a recognition, and it was something on the card before, just as she looked at the last one. Lisa flipped the last card back to the top of the pile and peered at it, curious. What was it about that card that brought back a memory? For a moment she sat there, brow furrowed, just staring at the card, trying to spot what it was about it, or about the individual whose tiny photo stared back at her, that reminded her of something.
The name. Jack Avery. That wasn’t familiar, or was it? She’d heard it before. But why was it so important?
Then she recognised the face. It looked cleaner, less pale, and was shaved, but there was the scar above the eyes, just as she remembered.
Well, well. So that’s what happened to you, she thought.
“Is everything okay?” asked Hailey.
“Yes,” said Lisa. “Fine. Absolutely fine.” She handed the cards back to the young recruit. “Good choices, there.”
Hailey smiled, and inside Lisa also grinned. The girl was genuinely pleased to be helpful, but that wasn’t what made Lisa smile. Jack Avery, the man who had asked who she was, who they were, the man who had given himself up – a thing that no one ever did – and had caused her to remove her visor to speak to him – causing her to be demoted out into this dirty outback – was under her command.
He was one of her salvagers.
I never got answers, Lisa thought. But now I will have them.
Junk
Not Alone.
Jack stepped back from the wall of junk and took a deep breath. If it weren’t for the hood that he’d managed to fashion the night before, from a scrap of dirty cloth that he found in among the trash, he’d have been even hotter. The first day had been fine for about an hour, and then the heat had started to get the better of him.
That was why they all wore hoods, he told himself that evening as he sat in his seat in the back of the carrier, his face and neck red and his head throbbing.
Not one of the other members of the crew had mentioned anything to him, but they were watching him that night as they sat around eating, talking and playing cards on a crate that they hauled out from behind one of the seats.
A rite of passage, maybe? That could be it. That they would put him at risk of heat exhaustion annoyed him a little, but he couldn’t deny that these men owed him nothing, and the junk that was in the rucksack – a few spare items of clothing, a utility belt with a bunch of empty pouches on it, a crude knife and fork – they hadn’t been obliged to give him them, even if they were what remained of his predecessor’s gear.
It didn’t matter. He’d fixed it that first night and hadn’t said a word to any of them about it, and the following few days had rolled by, hard as the work was, with relative ease. Jack even thought that he caught Tyler smiling to himself when Jack stepped out into the relentless heat the next morning with a hood over his head. It wasn’t great, and didn’t really keep any of the heat away, but it stopped the sun from burning his already sore scalp.
Now, on the fifth day, after filling the damn dumper truck four times already, he was starting to get past the tiredness that followed in the evening, and even the aches and stiffness in the morning.
And he’d found the entire crew something rare that very morning, only twenty minutes into the start of the day. It was at the back of the caved in dwelling that had been uncovered when they had first arrived. That had been the first spot that the crew descended on the minute they started work, obviously spotting the potential that the ancient and abandoned abode could hide, and now, having found the old box behind the wall, he understood why.
He’d followed the rest of the crew over, climbed the ten or so feet up into the open cavity, and joined them in their search, but Tyler was cursing their luck within a few minutes and claiming that the makeshift home had been abandoned decades ago. Jack had picked up the half-torn and rotten remains of an old magazine that lay in the corner of the dwelling, but the pages were stuck together and most of the paper started to crumble away the second he picked it up.
“The new guy can have this spot,” Tyler had mumbled, and Jack had taken his cue from that as the crew left the cavity one by one and took up positions around the clearing.
He’d stood there after they’d left, just looking at the strange cavern that had been carved into the junk, and marvelled at how long the piles of trash had been just sitting there. Centuries. And whoever lived in this dwelling twenty, thirty or even a hundred years ago, had meticulously removed and reinforced the outer walls of the cocoon inside the trash. There was no entrance, and Jack presumed that any way in or out must have been in the section of the hideaway that the diggers had already cleared. Along the walls, scrap metal had been almost woven together and reinforced with plastic covered cables and wires. The floor was constructed from sheets of metal hammered flat – probably car or machine body parts – and then, he presumed, covered in scrap cloth and pieces of carpet. The floor was covered in a mashup of something that must have been cloth or carpet but now, after all this time, it had rotted away into a brown, furry mush.
He moved away, climbing back out of the cavity and down onto the dirt ground below, and looked up at the wall of junk that was now his prospect area.
And he realised he didn’t really have much of a clue what he was doing.
I can find stuff, he’d thought. Sure. I can find value junk inside this mountain of crap, but what am I looking for? Well, if what got delivered to the sorting area that had had previously worked in was anything to go by, metal and electronics were the thing. So that was where he started, hoping that they didn’t send something more valuable that he didn’t know about elsewhere.
Two entire days he’d ploughed through the masses of junk, avoiding broken masonry and larger chunks of rubble, relentlessly looking for things made of metal and anything that loo
ked like electronic circuitry. That was their job, it seemed, to crawl among the debris and haul out anything made of metal that could be recycled. It was mindless, and Jack couldn’t help but wonder why the hell the city didn’t just send out huge automated diggers to haul the stuff away. Surely that would have been more efficient? A half a dozen men, picking away by hand, seemed a slow way to achieve what a digger could do in minutes.
On the third day, Jack had to fling himself away from the edge of the junk as the cavity, and what remained of the uncovered dwelling, collapsed. He’d been picking away at the junk wall in the area surrounding the cavernous hole all that time, pulling bits out, discarding some and keeping others, and gradually the wall had weakened. The cloud of arid dust that spewed out nearly filled the entire clearing, and as he stood up and patted himself down, he heard curses.
But then as the dust began to settle he spotted the box, now newly uncovered where it had been hidden underneath the floor near the back wall of the dwelling for whoever knew how long.
But he’d somehow known it was there. He’d sensed it, like he used to sense lost or concealed things in the ruins of the Outer Zone. He’d felt it from the moment he first saw the dark and open maw of the dwelling. There was something secret in that old place, a precious thing that someone had tucked away and covered over and not wanted anyone to ever find. Even after they were long dead.
He looked around, checking that none of the other crew members had seen it, but the dust still hadn’t cleared further across the open ground away from where he stood, and he knew that the nearest to him was Higgins, at least fifty feet away. He hauled the box out from the trash that had compacted underneath the hidden dwelling, looked for a catch of some kind, found it already broken, and slowly, cautiously, lifted the lid.
There was a faint hiss, followed by a musty smell wafting out of the box, and Jack cringed and moved back a short distance, wondering what could make such a stink, but then he peered in, and instead of some nasty, rotten thing in the bottom of the box, Jack spotted a pile of small boxes, each wrapped in a clear plastic jacket and measuring about four inches across.
