by Glynn James
And apart from some formalities, that had been it. After two minutes of listening to Alderton, she had been dismissed and told to go and wait in her quarters for her new assignment.
That had been just two hours ago, and her new assignment was waiting for her on the system when she got back to the barracks, with instructions to be packed up and waiting at the Trans terminal in twenty five minutes.
Twenty five minutes. That was all they had given her. And the rest of her squad were out of the barracks and on duty, not to return for at least six more hours. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. Instead, she had quickly packed her few personal belongings and hurried out of her room, heading to the terminal and arriving with just five minutes to spare.
Guard duties at the NE7 Resource Recycling Facility.
She’d heard of the place before. It was where they sent a huge number of captives after they were sorted into possible abilities at the terminal. In fact, Lisa knew that on the very Trans she was on, there would be fifty or more new workers heading for that very facility.
Resource Recycling Facility. That was a joke. The place was a rubbish dump, far, far out into the Ashlands across the dead waters. It was a place that killed most of the workers sent to work there. There were stories from many years before, from a long time before Lisa was born, that said the NE7 zone was used as a rubbish tip for the city, a place so far away that it wouldn’t matter what they dumped there. And yet it was now used as a salvage area, where captured workers would sift through the rubbish to find anything of use.
A promotion, the assignment had been called in her note from Alderton. She was now promoted to First Corporal, and would be in charge of expedition security.
And what the hell was that anyway? Expeditionary? It was a damn demotion is what it was, she thought. Bastard decided to get rid of me, send me out into the far away, into the ashes. And probably only because firing a trooper was not the done thing.
Lisa sighed again and wondered what her parents would think when they found out, or her brothers. Her position and pay were the mainstay of her family’s tickets on the next transport off-world. She hoped to hell this wouldn’t damage their chances.
Her thoughts were snapped back to the Trans as a light went on at the far end of the carriage, followed by a repetitive buzzing noise that grated at her nerves. She had been alone in the large, spacious compartment for over two hours, for most of the journey, but now the far doors hissed open and two Trans staff stepped swiftly into the room and sat down in the nearest seats.
“All passengers please be seated for deceleration,” came a metallic voice from the speakers above her head. The voice echoed somehow, or maybe it was just her imagination. The message repeated a dozen times and then stopped. Then there was a loud sound of rushing air from all around her. Lisa felt her stomach lurching, as though it didn’t want to stay where the rest of her was.
The display panel to her left switched off for few seconds, the beautiful forest scene vanishing from view, and Lisa felt a strange pang of regret. But there was no time for her to mourn the loss of a fake scene, for the screen flickered - as did the others in the carriage - and then an image of a very different place appeared, this one very real.
And First Corporal Lisa Markell got her first glimpse of a place that she wished she had never had to visit.
Caught
Jack forced his hands up to the wall, trying to prop himself up as the Trans began to slow down. There had been no warning. One moment he had been sitting in the middle of the room, staring at the blank wall, and the next his stomach had heaved and he slid across the polished floor to bump into the wall. Realising that raising his arms to sit himself up was only going to make him feel worse, he lay flat on the ground and waited for the motion sickness to abate.
Had Ryan laid on the cold metal floor when he travelled here? If he travelled here. That had bothered Jack from the moment he’d watched the huge man being dragged off to the Conversion Facility, to a different place. And then the sorting of people, and the different corridors that led to...wherever they all led. He’d presumed that all captives went to the same place. But the possibility that he would be sent somewhere completely different had become very real.
But maybe he was wrong to think so, maybe Ryan had sat in the very same chamber, wondering where he was going. Jack lifted his hand and traced the outline of a stickman and then a smaller stickman next to it.
All you managed to get the boy for his birthday was a pair of crayons. Sure, they were colours he didn’t have, but it wasn’t much, was it? Had Ryan sat here and drawn his stickmen on these walls?
It was foolish to think that, of course. He knew that. Whatever reasons the Hunters captured people, they would be different for each person, surely? Grown adults who were healthy would be sent to work somewhere, and the sick would be...well...he didn’t know where they would go.
He estimated that it took two minutes for the Trans to stop. Jack had presumed that the other corridor, where the limping man and the old woman had gone, would lead to the place where they dealt with that, but he’d been sent down the same damn corridor as a man sick with Ratter’s Plague. As for children, they would surely go somewhere else.
Jack sighed and tried not to dry heave, but his stomach wrenched with spasms as the motion of the slowing Trans reached its most violent. For a moment, he thought that he would actually be sick, or maybe pass out, but then the feeling was gone. The Trans had stopped.
He lay there for a few seconds, his head spinning, before taking a deep breath and sitting up. His stomach growled loudly enough for him to hear it.
How long is it since you ate, anyway? Three days at least. Has to be. The wheat bread you traded for with those nails, wasn’t it? Damn that stuff had tasted nasty. And that had to be three days, unless you’ve been out cold for longer.
And how fast had the Trans been travelling for it to take so long to stop?
Stupidly fast.
Jack sighed, and sat there in the dim light, wondering how long he would have to wait before the door opened and they ushered him off to somewhere else.
Almost as though someone was listening to his thoughts, the door at the other end of the tiny compartment hissed open and a green light flickered on above it. Jack hadn’t noticed the tiny panel above the frame of the door and cursed himself for it.
Years ago you would have spotted something like that. But he wasn’t given long enough to properly berate himself before a metallic voice spoke from the panel.
“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right.”
Jack frowned.
No guards?
He waited a moment, wondering just what would happen if he sat there and ignored the voice.
“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right,” repeated the voice, and as Jack watched, one of the other captives shuffled past the doorway. The man looked confused and more than a little dazed.
Pretty much how you feel.
Jack rose to his feet, deciding that he wasn’t really so keen on finding out what would happen if he didn’t do as the voice said, and then started to walk towards the door. The old man passing by the door glanced at him.
I know him. That’s the guy with Ratter’s Plague.
Jack stopped, watching the man from the middle of the room. He’d expected to never see the guy again, expected them to cart him off to somewhere, wherever they dealt with nasty diseased people.
Probably a pit.
But then he noticed that the man’s skin was no longer mottled with red pock marks.
Jack frowned, and looked the man in the eyes.
“I’m not sick no more,” said the old man, raising his hands to look at them, his expression that of a child seeing something unknown for the first time. Then he touched his chest. “It don’t hurt here no more,” he said, a grin spreading across his grizzled and scarred face.
“Immediately exit the compartment and turn right,” repeated the metallic voice, but
this time it continued. “Ten seconds to purge.”
Purge? What the hell is purge? That does not sound good.
Jack hurried forward. Ratter’s Plague or not, purge sounded a lot worse. He stepped out of the room and stood next to the old man, who although apparently clear of the nasty blotches that came with the disease, still stank like a three-week-dead dog.
The corridor was filled with people now, a few of whom Jack recognised from their brief gathering in the landing area, and as he looked up and down the corridor he saw dozens of open doors spaced a few feet apart.
Then he heard the protests.
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Whoever the man was, he was a few doors up from Jack’s compartment, and on the other side of the carriage. In front of the door, a woman stood frowning at the open door.
“Get out of there, you idiot,” she said, and gestured to the space in front of her.
“Five seconds to purge,” said the metallic voice.
“I said...I’m not going anywhere.”
The woman looked around at the other captives, and then back at the door. No one responded, and Jack could see that she was hesitating.
Was she actually considering going in there after the guy? He hoped not.
And she didn’t, but she wasn’t giving up. “Don’t be a fool. Get out of there.”
But it was too late.
“Purge commencing,” said the metallic voice. And in response, every door along the corridor hissed closed.
“What the hell kinda joke is this anyway?” came the muffled voice of the man now trapped in his compartment.
A second hissing sound filled the corridor, but Jack didn’t see any doors opening. What he did see was a thin wisp of smoke, or steam, coming from under the doorway of the room that he had just left.
There was a short, loud scream from the compartment with the man trapped in it, but that was cut off barely half a second later, and then silence. The captives looked round at each other, none of them – including Jack – knowing what to say. All of them terrified.
No kinda joke is what this is.
Light flooded the corridor, and the sound of more doors hissing open, and the metallic voice was speaking again, urging everyone to exit the Trans through the open doors.
A Trans. That’s what it was called.
Jack trundled along with the others, not sure if he was looking forward to being back outside or if he was dreading what he would see there.
This is the place they take them to. This is where it starts. If they brought Ryan here, then this is where you get to begin looking for him.
Jack stepped out of the Trans and headed down a long ramp, his eyes fighting to adjust to the bright glow of daylight, straining to focus on his surroundings. And when he finally did, he wondered if he would have been better off just staying in his compartment and dying like the other fool.
End of the Earth
Lisa stood on the platform, almost oblivious to the crowd of people being ushered from the prison compartments just twenty yards away, and stared, drop jawed, at what was in front of her.
The facility itself was probably a square mile in size, the Trans station rose from the ground, higher up than the rest of the facility by maybe fifty feet, and that elevation was enough to see beyond the outer walls. Because it wasn’t the rows of prefab buildings that caught her attention. They were common enough in the work facilities across The City and she had seen enough of those in military camps before, including the camps outside of the barrier wall.
It also wasn’t the massive warehouses on the far side of the facility, though she hadn’t expected to see anything quite so big out here. She knew she was being posted out in the middle of nowhere, but the Outer Zone was as far as she had ever gone, and the sprawl of ruins outside of the barrier was familiar to her now but this place was something almost alien.
Outside of the perimeter fence, which was a thirty foot high wall with solid concrete towers and barbed wire that looked like it was maybe three separate fences rather than just one, was an endless mass of junk.
An endless mass that went on and on to the very horizon.
Instead of rolling burned grey hills, like she had seen at the edge of the Ashlands, this landscape was made of trash. Ruined buildings stuck up from the junk here and there, dotting the landscape every few miles like broken teeth inside a rotten mouth, but they were few and scattered randomly.
This was where she had been posted. To watch over mountains of trash.
The histories and rumours that she had heard had been right. It had to have been a dumping ground of some kind, maybe centuries back, but how was there so much of it? This wasn’t just a few square miles of junk. No, this was endless miles of it, and most of it looked like it had just been dropped from a great height to fall in piles that now sculpted the hills on the landscape.
As she stood watching, she became aware of movement around her. Troopers were forcefully guiding prisoners from the other compartments near the back of the Trans and pushing them in droves down the slope towards the first building, a hundred yards across the dusty ground.
And then she noticed a single figure nearby, on the edge of the crowd. The man wasn’t moving. Instead he stood looking out at the junk landscape with an expression of hopelessness.
And she recognised him.
It was him. The man she had picked up just hours before. The damn fool that had walked up to the back of her truck and spoken to her. The one she had lifted her helmet to reply to, cursing herself to be sent out here in the process.
He was here with her.
Both of them sentenced to live at the end of the Earth.
PART THREE
Recycled
Junk
Six Months Later…
“Avery!” called an impatient voice.
Most of the workers ignored the tall, stocky trooper dressed in grey, ablative armour as he paced across the dirty floor of the warehouse. They were all too busy keeping their heads down and hoping to be ignored, and busy sifting through the massive piles of junk that littered the huge open space, sorting out the recyclable bits from the trash that needed to be thrown away.
And there was a lot of it to wade through. The warehouse was the biggest building in the NE7 Resource Recycling Facility, and easily stood seventy feet high and several hundred feet across in both directions, and it was probably the only original structure that was still standing. If standing was what you could call it. Every fifty feet or so a thick stone pillar jutted up from the floor, and they certainly weren’t part of the old building, but constructed to stop the rusted and cracked roof from collapsing in on everyone.
The rest of the buildings in the two square mile Recycling Facility were prefabricated, and looked a lot newer, even if they were just as dirty. The original settlement teams had salvaged what they could of the surrounding buildings, but most of them had been smashed into the ground and new prefabs brought in and built on-site. Most of those were enclosed, and some even had air conditioning, but the Goods In building was open to the elements and the polluted air.
The thousands of square metres of cracked concrete ground inside the Goods In building were overflowing with piles of junk delivered from the transport dock at the other end of the building - where the dumpers that made the journey out to the salvager camps each day would deliver whatever they had recovered. There were ten delivery bays and every evening, just as the sun was setting, the trucks would come roaring through the gate, pull up at the back of their designated bay, and unceremoniously drop their contents onto the ground. The next morning, new piles of scrap greeted the weary workers of the sorting crews.
The guard paced around a pile of rubber tires, glared at the worker hauling another tire over to the pile, and called out a second time.
“Avery! Where the hell are you?”
The worker dropped the tire on the pile and pointed down the far end of the warehouse. The trooper glanced in the direction that
the worker indicated, seeing only darkness in the corner and piles upon piles of scrap. He frowned, but started over towards the corner. As he rounded a particularly large pile of scrap metal, he spotted a man hunched over what appeared to be a trolley of some kind.
“Avery,” he said, the irritation in his voice obvious.
The man stopped what he was doing, turned, and stood up, scratching his head. The trooper grinned as he noticed the man’s expression turn from one of puzzlement to that of nervousness. He could almost smell the fear and he thought that was good.
Let the scum be frightened, the trooper thought. He’ll be more frightened soon. Look at him. He’s a wretch anyway, covered in dirt and crap like the rest of them.
“You Avery?” asked the trooper, glancing down at the card in his hand that bore the man’s name and designation.
Jack nodded. “Yes…yes, sir,” he stuttered, wondering what the hell one of the guards wanted with him. He’d learned a lot in the last few months that he had been a worker at the Recycling Facility, and one of the most important things was to remain unnoticed, to just get on with what you had to do, and keep out from under the eyes of the guards. People who drew attention tended to disappear and not re-appear.
“Got your re-assignment card here,” said the trooper, holding out the card.
Jack felt a further twinge of fear creep up his back. Re-assignment. That wasn’t good. Where he was, in the sorting plant, he was relatively safe. The area was radiation free – well, low radiation anyway – and he was fed and had a place to sleep. It wasn’t the easiest of jobs, hauling the scrap that came back from the expeditions each day, it was hard work, and he often went to bed at night exhausted beyond that which a normal man could cope with. But at least he wasn’t gradually rotting from poisoning, or out in The Junklands, avoiding a million deadly insects and vermin.