Diary of the Displaced Box Set

by Glynn James

  :: Record Date 05:05:4775 12:34

  (Woman’s voice)

  Conman. This is your mum.

  I don’t have much time. They’re coming, so I have to go, now.

  I hope that this gets to you, so you will know that I didn’t just go off and leave you. I can’t take you with me. It’s too dangerous. This way you’ll be safe. I don’t know any other way to do this. If I don’t go, they will arrest me anyway, because I went too far. I looked where I shouldn’t have.

  (Muffled sobbing)

  I found something. A clue about my parents – your grandparents – and also James, your great-grandfather.

  Something.

  I haven’t seen them for so long. I have to go and find out if it’s true. I have no choice now, anyway. If they catch me they will arrest me, and I’ll be locked up.

  I don’t know if I will ever see you again, but I have to leave you here. It’s where you will be safest. I just can’t take you where I’m going. It’s much too dangerous for you.

  Oh boy. I’m so going to miss you, my little guy.

  You have to remember this. No matter what they tell you, and no matter what you come to believe later in your life, I want you to remember that I always loved you and that I will think of you every moment for the rest of my life.

  Be safe, my little soldier.

  (Distant sounds of banging, and shouting can be heard)

  :: Accessing Menu

  :: Note Functions Selected

  :: Note Saved

  :: Powering off

  :: Record Date 03:04:4787 17:20

  (Low, softly spoken man’s voice)

  This is Connor Halldon, and it’s the third of April, 4787.

  It’s been twelve years since I used this thing.

  I have no idea what to say about what I just listened to.

  I remember this recorder, and I remember when I found it, so many years ago.

  I even remember leaving it on the shelf in my room and then forgetting to go back and use it. I was so busy back then that the next new and exciting thing always distracted me and this thing just got forgotten.

  I’ve not seen my mother since the day after I found the recorder, and that would be twelve years ago, give or take a few weeks. I remember going to school, and I very clearly remember being bored in my maths lesson and staring at the wall. I think I got scolded by the teacher a few times that day. It was in the afternoon and we were doing physics – something about water flow and air flow and suction dynamics, or something like that – and then there was knock on the classroom door. I was taken out of class half way through. They sat me down on a bench outside school, four of them – all Outriders, including a guy I recognised as a senior officer in my mother’s unit. He wasn’t her immediate superior but even higher, I think. I’d met them all before, many times, anyway, at gatherings where all the Outriders’ families would get together and cook out or something. My mother loved those get-togethers.

  Well, they told me there was a problem with my mother. There had been a violent encounter and she had fallen during the battle.

  And I didn’t find this recorder until now, over a decade later.

  They emptied the house we used to live in the next day, when they moved me to digs in a children’s refuge. I didn’t understand at the time why I was being put where the parentless kids lived, but after a while I came to understand that my mother wasn’t coming back.

  The Outriders had told me my mother had fallen, but they didn’t use the word dead. I thought she was in hospital, and I carried on believing that for weeks. She was coming back. She’d be fine. I think I even told the orphanage manager that, and he just nodded at me.

  (Short pause)

  I would imagine he must hear that a lot.

  Eventually, I came to accept that she wasn’t coming back. I was one of the parentless kids.

  I can’t believe that was over a decade ago and that my mother left me a message on this thing, way back then, and I didn’t even know about it. The last time I spoke to her was when she said goodbye in the morning, just as I headed to school. You, know, now I think about it, I vaguely remember her hugging me for a long time that morning when she said goodbye. It felt stupid at the time, but then any kind of hugging or affection seems stupid when you are nine years old, doesn’t it? Maybe the hugging part is all in my imagination, but I don’t think so.

  I’ve spent the last twelve years believing that she was killed in combat, while out on duty, on the day she disappeared. I never saw her body, and now I wonder what was in the casket that was lowered into the ground a week later, at her memorial. They don’t usually show the body of a fallen trooper. It can upset the family too much to see wounds or whatever it was that killed them.

  My mother was Eleanor Halldon, a captain in the Fifth Division Outriders, and in charge of some pretty major operations. She was in combat on a regular basis, sometimes on huge operations directly facing Horde remnants, but mostly just on operations on post-Horde worlds. Dangerous stuff. For her to die how they said wasn’t unbelievable.

  It was unbearable, though. It broke me. Back then, I was a seriously messed up kid and got into a lot of trouble before I eventually calmed down and accepted what had happened to her.

  What I thought happened to her.

  It took a couple of years, in fact. And if it wasn’t for Colonel Samlin, the guy in charge of most of the entire West Division of the Outriders, I don’t think I would have turned back.

  I remember I was caught stealing from the market. I thought I was good at stealing – well, good at sneaking – and I think somehow I wanted to be caught, wanted the thrill of other people knowing I was misbehaving, though I didn’t care what they thought. Well, as it turned out, I may have been good at getting away, but I was not as sneaky as I thought. I was spotted multiple times and eventually hauled in front of a local magistrate.

  If it hadn’t been for Colonel Samlin turning up at my hearing, I would have been put straight into the work gangs in the quarry, and that would have been it. Once you’re in there the choices are simple and limited – escape and run into the wilderness, volunteer for Vigilant Blue Company, or keep digging. The first two are pretty much suicide.

  But he turned up for me and even the magistrate – this tall guy who looked like he had as much empathy as a rock – did not dare to question the colonel.

  “Misdemeanours aside, Mr Halldon is exactly fitting the Outrider specification – skills, attitude, everything. You will give him the option of signing up and then finishing his schooling, under compulsory enlistment after his schooling, or I will make sure you lose that comfortable seat and its privileges,” is what Samlin said to the magistrate.

  Cold and straight to the point.

  So I was given that option, and I took it. I’d have been stupid not to. Even if I was rebellious and angry, I wasn’t a total idiot.

  All that time I believed that my mother was dead, and had no reason to think otherwise.

  But she left me this message, and now a lot of things don’t make sense anymore. A huge part of my life, up until this point, has been based around knowing that my mother was a KIA combat veteran. Killed in action.

  Now I don’t know how much of it I can trust, and how much of what I’ve been told is true.

  Can I trust anyone? All the people I know, and have known, even some of the other Outriders from her crew who told me the whole story and described the incident to me later.

  Lies? Was it all lies?

  :: Record Date 04:04:4787 02:24

  I can’t sleep. Can’t clear my head.

  Why would they say that she was dead if she wasn’t? It doesn’t make any sense. And who was it that was coming for her in her message? If she left, if she went away, then she may still be alive. Somewhere.

  Unless whoever she was running from caught her? That was possible. But surely I would have found out if they had arrested her? Wouldn’t I?

  But how did she know they were coming? Was s
he already prepared for it when we said goodbye that morning? Did she know it was the last time we would see each other?

  I don’t know. I suppose that would depend on just what it was she had gotten into and how deep it went. Would they lock her away and tell me she was dead?

  :: Record Date 06:04:4787 21:16

  I guess I have to start somewhere.

  I grew up in the shadow of a man that changed the fates of worlds, and yet I never met him.

  I think I was about five years old when my mother first told me about her grandfather – my great-grandfather. I think. It's hard to recall. My life back then was so confusing, and it’s so long ago that I barely remember any of it.

  It still is confusing, I guess.

  JH. I think I called him that for years after I found the recorder. I still do.

  The great JH.

  My grandparents, Chione and Andre Halldon, and my great-grandfather, JH, and great-grandmother, Abegail, all disappeared at the end of the period that The Resistance calls The Long Trail, the beginning of The Talisman War. I'll get round to explaining all of those things eventually, I hope, but right now I'm just getting used to using this voice recorder, and I'm probably going to waffle on a bit.

  I think I need to clean out some of the buttons on this thing. They keep getting stuck. Dust, probably. This thing was in a box for years.

  My great-grandfather, James Halldon, wrote diaries as he travelled; at least he did for a period of time when he was mostly alone, trying to get his memories back and figure out who he was. I think that is what inspired me to do something similar myself. When the idea popped into my head a week or so ago, I remembered the recorder and started hunting through my old stuff for it. I gave up a few times, but eventually I found it in a box at the back of my storage cupboard, one with childish scrawls of dogs and other things all over it. I remembered the box and sat down, smiling, remembering, somehow both sad and happy at the same time. I opened it to find all manner of things – playing cards, small trinkets, toys from when I was a kid, and there, at the bottom, was the recorder.

  No, I'm not big-headed or vain enough to think that people will read – or listen to – what I have to say, like they do my great-grandfather's diaries, but deep down, I think he wrote his journals not for others to read, but to try and get some kind of grasp of his situation during those months. You know, get his head straight and figure things out. I think they were more a way for him to voice his thoughts than record them for others.

  They actually still print copies of those diaries now, using the same reclaimed printing machine that was found when I was very young. I think he'd find it funny that they use the diaries he wrote to teach in the schools in Evac City. My great-grandfather is actually part of the history curriculum.

  I wonder if he ever knew about me. I doubt it. In fact, it seems stupid to even think of that. He disappeared when my mother was what...five or six years old? She never saw him or her parents after that, even though she spent years trying to find them. So, no. He wouldn't even have known that I exist.

  I was about seven years old when our class teacher dumped a copy of the diaries on the desks of everyone in the class and told us all to start studying. I remember looking at the front of the book, seeing my last name there, and wondering what it was all about. Later, when I was deeply into the story – and yes, I thought it was just that, a story – I realised that I already knew the book in front of me.

  In a box, in my small room, was a tatty pile of papers, bundled together with a dozen elastic bands and covered over with a cartoon book cover that I think dates back to a long time before I was born, centuries even. It has a picture of young boy and his dog on it, and the boy is shining a torch on the ground where a hole has opened up, but the cover has nothing to do with the written work inside; someone just tore the cover off an old book and used it to keep the papers safe.

  It took me a long time to realise what it was that was bundled in with my sack of meagre belongings that the authorities took from our house when I became an orphan.

  The original diaries. The actual original papers that JH wrote.

  It wasn't a work of fiction I had been reading at school. It was all real.

  I have no idea where I got the original journals from, but I suspect that my mother left it around the house and I probably picked it up and took it, thinking it was a comic book. The thing is a relic, and probably worth more than my life, but I'm damned if I'm telling anyone. It’s mine now.

  Yeah, I'm waffling.

  When I was younger, after I had read my great- grandfather's diaries a dozen times from cover to cover, I used to go and play in the Junklands, pretending that I had my own DogThing and that the place was crawling with Shamblers and Kre'esh. They don't let kids in there now, and haven't for a few of years, but folks with a military pass can come and go as they choose, so I still get to poke around whenever I want. I remember that my mother didn't like me going there when I was little, but she was always pleased, in that over-exaggerated way that mothers are, when I brought back a piece of junk that I thought was cool.

  I miss her, you know.

  She was all I had. No. That sounds wrong. I miss her because we were a team, she and I – just the two of us – not just because she was the only person in my life. She just was everything.

  Anyway, the further into the Junklands you go, the older the junk is. Honestly, there is stuff in there that has been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years, and the place is absolutely huge. I've nearly got lost a couple of times.

  I was out there just a few days ago, looking for old batteries to clean out and refill. It’s kind of a regular haunt for me, a place to go and think.

  Thought for the day – I feel kinda stupid talking to this thing. It's a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be.

  Second thought for the day – saying my great- grandfather every time is too long winded. So, from now on, he is back to being called JH.

  :: Record Date 07:04:4787 09:45

  This thing actually doesn't record too badly. I listened back to what I recorded yesterday, and even though it's just me going on and on, and voicing mostly random thoughts, the audio recording is quite clear. Sometimes the recording crackles, and I’ve not yet figured out why it does that, but most of the recording is very clean.

  I've taken the recorder apart a couple of times, and tried to figure out how it works and where the recordings are stored, but there is no tape, only a small fingernail sized flat piece of plastic that pops in and out of the side, and two other slots that are empty. A storage card, maybe?

  The recording node itself is tiny, much smaller than I thought it would need to be, and after a thorough cleaning, with some oil and a piece of scrap cloth, it's nice and clear with hardly any background hum like all the old recordings on disks that I've found over the years.

  It's still weird not having a larger object to hold, though, like the disks that go into the old music and movie players. I have discovered that the thing doesn't record without the little chip of plastic in it, though, so that must be what stores it all.

  I wonder how much it can hold.

  I'm waffling again.

  Signing off for today. I need to sleep. We've got a post-recovery tech salvage operation starting tomorrow, and I need to be up very early.

  I need to explain that better, I guess. You'll have no idea what I'm talking about.

  You know, I think I might take this with me on the operation. It’s keeping my mind off the confusion of the message my mother left me.

  Thought for the day – I have a real craving for mushrooms and no idea why. I haven’t eaten them for years, not since my mother used to harvest them. Must remember to ask next time I’m at the supply depot.

  :: Record Date 12:04:4787 09:32

  So, I took the recorder with me but didn’t get to record anything while I was on the salvage run. It was way too crazy. We were dropped into the place – a city that had been trashed at least a
hundred years ago, one that had already been checked out by a Vigilant crew a few months back – and pretty quickly we discovered we weren’t alone.

  It works like that sometimes, and you can’t really complain that they didn’t spot the signs. The Vigilants are heavy combat troops, not Scouts or Recon, and they are pretty focused on just that area. An experienced Outrider or Recon squad would have spotted the signs within minutes, as we did, but, to most Vigilants, I would imagine the scratch marks and breakages could have appeared decades old.

  Of course, they weren’t. We had at least ten clusters of Shamblers in different pockets across the city, and at one point, Crew Five – that’s my team, well, the team I’m in, since I’m not an officer – ran a retreating battle for half an hour or so before we could take them all down. We even had Crew Eight – our nearest neighbouring team – on the way over to help out.

  Damn, that was one big pocket. It probably built up in one of the buildings or at bottom of a collapse. Shamblers are kind of stupid and become focused on one thing, ignoring everything else. I’ve seen it numerous times. You find a group of them, huddled against a closed door, or bottlenecked in some corridor, and they’ve got themselves stuck. If they thought for one moment – something that Shamblers don’t have the capacity to do – they could just turn around and walk out the other way, but they don’t. They just keep on being stuck, or banging against the wall with no obvious way to pass through or around it, until something comes along and draws their attention – like an unwary traveller or a squad of Resistance troops – and then the smell of living blood wakes them up.

  Troops can actually get taken out like that if there are enough of the things.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the message my mother left me and wondering what the hell I can do. I don’t even know where to start.

  Maybe there are records on the computer system in the Admin building.

  I wonder if my password is still on the system.

  Probably not. But Aaron works there. Maybe he would be able to help. I haven’t seen him for a long time, though.