by Glynn James
27, 334.
She narrowed the search, selecting filters for juvenile, and male.
5,723.
Lisa stared at the number and frowned. Had there really been so many captured? More than five thousand? Lisa narrowed the search again, selecting only those still alive.
2341.
More than half of them were dead.
Again she questioned what she was doing. There was no way she was going to find the boy that the man was looking for. Stupid, she thought. I don’t even have a name or age.
The door at the other end of the ready room opened and several of the troops in her squad filed in. Lisa tapped the screen, quickly logging off, stood up and hit the button on the wall that would tuck the console and the seat back into the wall.
As the noise of her fellow RAD members resounded off the walls, she thought about the numbers again.
More than half were dead.
Caught
The huge man hit the ground with a grunt, kicking up a cloud of sand and dust from the dry earth. And then he lay there, twitching, as three of the Hunters circled him and then began to drag him away.
Jack squinted, his eyes trying to adjust to the bright sunlight while still attempting to take in the utter chaos around him. Hundreds of captives were standing in groups dotted around the massive yard, most of them, like him, still groggy from the gas, and most of them still and placid. But the huge man in his group, the one Jack thought had become rowdy in the back of the carrier, was now sporting a smashed nose, which looked like someone had hit him with a hammer, and was not co-operating at all. No sooner had he come round, just after Jack, than he was up, roaring and bellowing, and charging towards the nearest Hunter.
Must be an ex-slaver.
The man was smaller than Jack had estimated, probably only a few inches taller than he was, but he was broader in the shoulders and far more muscular. Jack was impressed. The man even managed to get a hit in on one of the Hunters, smashing his fist into the side of the trooper’s helmet and knocking him down, before the buzz of stun sticks cut through the air and three other Hunters descended on him, jabbing at him with the crackling weapons.
As Jack’s eyes began to re-adjust to the bright sunlight, he managed to take in his surroundings. They were in some kind of port facility. Huge, grey concrete buildings rose around them on all sides, and the ground was mostly dry dirt apart from the concrete platform that the dropship had landed upon.
Jack looked back at the armoured vehicle they had just been dragged from and along the line of other vehicles. There were a lot more of them than he had expected, and he estimated that at least thirty of the armoured carriers had driven off the dropship.
And so many Hunters, he thought. There had to be hundreds of them.
He watched as other groups of captives were dragged, unconscious, from the backs of the carriers and unceremoniously dumped on the dry dirt. Some of the other captives were starting to come round, easing slowly out of their drugged state and standing up, looking around and appearing as confused as he felt.
Jack’s gaze drifted back to the huge angry guy being dragged away. The three Hunters hauled him a hundred yards across the hard ground and then dumped him onto some kind of moving, metal platform. The unconscious body lay still as the moving platform carried it away into one of the buildings. He looked up at the sign at the front of the building, which read Conversion Screening Facility, and wondered what that meant.
Then Jack noticed the Hunter watching him from ten yards away and he lowered his head, staring down at the barren ground.
Don’t give them any trouble. Just stay silent and still, unassuming. But he glanced up one last time at the building where the big guy had been taken. He didn’t like the sound of conversion, even though he had no idea what that meant.
The Hunter was still watching him intently, and Jack felt himself involuntarily clenching his hands together, shifting uncomfortably, and looking around at the other people in the same group. He recognised only two of them, an older man and woman that he had seen several times entering or leaving the same building that he had been staying in when he had surrendered to the Hunters. They were a couple, he thought, and lived somewhere on the upper floors of the building. Dozens of others had lived there, each staking their own claim on one of the floors in some corner where no one else was, but just like everywhere else, they tended to keep to themselves and protect what was theirs. Apart from places like The Crossing, where he often went to trade, there were very few communities in the Outer Zone.
No one trusted anyone else.
“Everybody up,” said a metallic sounding voice from a few feet away. Jack turned and saw that it was the Hunter that had been watching him. At that command, several other Hunters approached and encircled the group, which Jack could now see was actually only made up of twenty or so people. The Hunters were waving their stun sticks and pointing in the direction of another large building directly ahead of them. As they started walking forward, guided by the rough hands of the Hunters, Jack noticed the other groups lined up in the yard were also being told to stand. But his group was the first.
It wasn’t the Conversion Facility that they were heading for, and Jack was grateful for that, but as the troop of bedraggled refugees was ushered through the massive concrete doors of the building and into a large open space with white painted markings on the floor, Jack began to feel uneasy.
There were twenty or more entrances leading off one side of the room, and every one of the led into a tunnel that was lit with bright lighting. In front of each entrance was a booth with another Hunter sat in it, and next to that, some kind of metal platform roughly three feet across. The Hunter that had been watching Jack pushed him forward so that he was the third in the queue that was now forming.
In front of him were the old couple, and as Jack watched, one of the Hunters urged the man forward. The old guy was hesitant at first, but the Hunter pointed at the platform and, with a flick of his wrist, the stun stick in his hand hummed to life. Next to Jack, the old woman cried out, telling the old man to go, but the man looked back at her, worried.
“Go,” she said, her voice shrill. “Or they’ll hurt you.”
The man stepped up onto the platform and stood still, looking around at the hundreds of captives now being forced to stand in lines in front of the booths and platforms.
A flash of light almost blinded Jack as the platform flickered to life. Blue lights flowed around the base of the metal panel, swirling clockwise around it until, a few seconds later, the lights turned green. From nearby came a buzzing sound, and Jack looked over to the tunnels that led out of the huge hall. Two tunnels along from where they were queued, a tunnel had lit up green, matching the colour on the platform.
The old man still stood on the platform, confused, and Jack could empathise with him. What the hell did all this mean? What were the platforms for? His heart jumped as the old man was pushed off the platform. The old guy looked at the Hunter that had pushed him, both fear and a hint of anger, maybe even defiance, crossing his face, but the Hunter pointed at the green-lit tunnel, and the old man looked back at the old lady once more and then started to trudge towards the tunnel.
Next, the old woman stepped up onto the platform, and no sooner had the blue lights started flickering than they changed to a flashing red. At this, the Hunter nearest the old woman pointed towards the corridor next to the one the old man had walked down. The old woman stepped off the platform and started to walk towards the second corridor, but as she approached, she looked back and then quickly headed towards the same corridor that the old man had taken. Two Hunters rushed forward and blocked her path, pointing her to the red corridor. She hesitated, but in the end she complied and started to walk down the red corridor.
As Jack stepped forward, heading towards the platform, he glanced across the line of corridor entrances, and saw that they alternated in colour - green, red, green, red and so on. People were being led into a corridor dep
ending on which colour the platform indicated. As he stepped up onto the platform, Jack noticed a young man being directed down the green corridor, and on the next booth another older man, who could barely walk, was being sent down the red.
Jack heard a buzzing noise and felt the platform under his feet vibrate for a moment, and he looked down.
A young man and an old man had gone down the green corridor. The old woman and a nearly crippled man had gone down the red. This had to mean something, thought Jack. Was the platform some kind of decision maker? A technology that could somehow choose who went where? And what were the criteria? Two healthy people down one corridor, and two unhealthy ones down the next.
As Jack looked down, he hoped that the platform would be lit up green and was relieved when it was. He stepped off the platform and started walking towards the corridor with the green archway, and since none of the Hunters tried to stop him, or guide him the other way, he thought that he must have guessed correctly.
The corridor went on for roughly a hundred yards, and was lit on both sides by bright fluorescent lights spaced ten feet apart. The ground was smooth and worn, like many feet had trodden the path that Jack now walked, and he only looked back once as he headed along it. Ahead of him, roughly fifty feet away, was the old man who had gone into the tunnel first and beyond that, near the end of the corridor, he saw the back of the young man moving swiftly away. He had stopped and was leaning against the wall. As Jack approached, he slowed down and stopped next to the man.
“You okay?” he asked. He found it strange to be asking after someone else’s wellbeing for what seemed the first time in years. Other than when he met the boy, Ryan, Jack hadn’t given much thought to others. After all, no one ever did for him.
The old man was breathing heavily and clutching his chest. My...chest.” said the man, his voice strained. “It hurts.”
Jack stood there for a moment and then looked down the corridor in the direction that they had been heading. It ended roughly forty feet away, at a metal gate. Two Hunters were standing the other side of the gate, watching them. Neither moved to help the old man.
I guess I’m not the only one not used to helping folks, he thought. Then leaned forward, about to help the man. But then he caught sight of something that made him hesitate.
Blisters and pustules on the man’s skin. Bright yellow sores surrounded by red, peeling skin.
Plague, he thought. That’s Ratters Plague.
Over the years, Jack had seen many types of illnesses. In the Outer Zone there were few people who could heal, and even fewer who were willing. At The Crossing was an apothecary who sold herbs and salves that could help, but for serious illnesses such as Coughing Fever, Sweats, and Ratters Plague, there was no help. You either died from it or you lived.
Most died.
But Ratter’s Plague was contagious. And Jack had seen just what it was capable of doing when he was barely twenty five years old.
This Old Town
Many Years Before
Just twenty miles from The Crossing, out near the ruins of the Great Stadium, there had once been a small, growing community. Over the years, Jack had seen it expand from the first few settlers, who struggled to fight off bandits, wild animals, and night creatures, to dozens more who started to build defensive walls. They had a water source there, or so it was said, and had even started to run their own market. Then, one summer, just after the cold weather had abated and Jack had found a particularly good haul of junk, Jack realised he was in that area of the new community and decided to go there to trade instead of travelling further to get to The Crossing or Dartston. Both were roughly equal distance away and would take a whole day, maybe more, to reach. But the new place, which folks were now calling New Stadium, was only a couple of miles away and he realised he could be there before dark. He’d been there a number of times before but only because he had been passing. This time he had a reason to head directly there.
But he’d noticed the change even before he got near the outer wall. It was dusk, and the sun was barely a slither on the horizon, and yet the gates were wide open - a thing unknown with all the dangers lurking outside.
And there were no sentries atop the wall.
Jack remembered standing outside the gates, just ten yards from the wall, and staring at the utterly lifeless street beyond.
“You don’t wanna go in there,” said a voice from a short distance away. The wind was howling heavily, a stark contrast to the early breeze he had experienced during the day, and he only just heard the warning. Jack had turned to see a stranger - a man - sitting at the side of the road, outside a shop front on the corner of the street just beyond the gates to the new but now seemingly abandoned settlement. He noticed that he man was wearing a cloth around his mouth, and he also noticed that he carried an axe.
Jack had slowly reached to his side, to touch his machete, but the man had seen it.
“I’ve no bone to pick with you, if you don’t wanna go that way.”
And Jack hadn’t. His hand lingered at the machete for a moment, but then he took it away and started walking over the broken ground to the stranger.
“What happened?” he’d asked as he got closer. He stopped twenty feet away, judging that if the man changed his mind and leapt for him, he’d still have time to draw and be ready.
“Plague,” said the man. “Someone in there, guy called Harris, took to ratting just before I last came by here, bout two weeks ago. Well, I bin in there just now and seen them. It seems they all done caught themselves a nasty rash.”
Jack stood silently for a moment, just staring at the gates.
“Just a rash?”
The man shook his head.
“Much more than a rash.”
“Is there no one left in there at all?”
The man nodded.
“Sure,” he said, placing his axe on the floor and reaching for a pouch on his belt. He started rolling a cigarette. “Three, maybe four left. They’re all infected. So I left them. I asked if they wanted me to, you know, end it, but none of them even recognised that I was there. Only one crazy guy throwing stones. Reckon I should have put them out of their misery, but they didn’t answer me, so I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
The man finished rolling his smoke, and then, surprisingly, held out the pouch.
“Take one if you want, just go easy on the weed, okay?”
Jack had accepted and a few minutes later the two men were sitting at the side of the road, smoking their cigarettes.
As Jack sat there, slowly smoking the harsh, dry tobacco, his gaze drifted over to the gates once more. He didn’t know if it was some form of morbid curiosity, or just a random uncontrollable urge, but he found himself struggling to resist going into the town even with the stranger’s warning.
He stood up, nodded at the man and then started to make his way over the road towards the gates.
“You’ll regret it,” the stranger called after him, but said nothing more. The man must have realised that there was little point trying to stop somebody when their mind was made up, or maybe he just didn’t care.
The gates were built from sheets of hammered car body parts, and as Jack approached he could clearly see the outline of several car doors, a roof, and dozens of hood panels, all hammered flat and then secured together with bolts. The wall itself was mostly more cars, turned on their side and propped up by piles of broken up masonry. Even though it had been centuries, there was still an abundance of abandoned vehicles littering the streets if you went far enough out, away from the sealed off city. The people who built this town had laboured for many months to collect the materials for the wall, Jack thought, realising that he had never considered it before. Scrap metal was low on the list of items he searched for when scavenging.
As he passed through the open gates, Jack looked to his left, to where a rusty old caravan was propped up on bricks just a few yards from the gate. The town folk used it as a gatehouse of sorts, and on the few time
s that Jack had visited there had always been a guard or two sitting outside the caravan, watching the entrance. Now the spot was devoid of life, and the door to the caravan was wide open.
He looked down the long street that was the main part of the settlement and saw no one, not a single person moving around. The settlement was quite small, and comprised of one long main street and a few alleyways that had been blocked up. Most of the buildings had their windows boarded up on the outside, and the alleyways were built up with salvaged bricks from other nearby buildings so that the outer buildings along the street also made up part of the defensive wall that surrounded the place on all sides. There were probably twenty houses in total, all facing into the street apart from the few farm buildings at the far end.
As Jack moved towards the first house, he noticed something at the end of the street that hadn’t been there the last time he had visited. He walked half way along the street, stepping over cracks and weeds, but then stopped a hundred yards from what looked like a huge pile of dirt. Next to it was a hole, and even from the distance he was at he could see something that made him think twice about going any further.
The people from the settlement had dug a large hole just a few dozen yards from the farm plot, and there, sticking up from among the weeds and grass, was a foot. From where Jack was, that was all he could see, but his own imagination had told him far more than was visible.
It was a mass grave, just like the ones that had been dug on the outskirts of 342nd Street during the reign of Jagan and his pit slavers.
Jack stopped, took a step back, and was about to leave when he heard a noise to his right. Adrenaline kicked in, and Jack turned quickly, both hands going to the machetes on his belt, ready to draw and fight if need be, cursing himself for not just carrying them ready in the first place. But he didn’t draw.
He didn’t have to. The man that had made the noise wasn’t going anywhere fast.