by Glynn James
I probably should have tried to rig it up before I set off.
:: Record Date 16:05:4787 08:15
I’m just heading into the Dustlands now.
I got a lot further over the last couple of hours than I thought I would, but it’s mostly flat and open ground that stretches for miles. I guess that’s why they built Evac where it is. Plenty of ground to expand into, and even though it’s dead ground, it’s not too far from the river, where they can actually grow crops. No crops out here, though.
There is a strange change as you head into the Dustlands. Even the atmosphere appears to alter. I don’t think it’s colder, just less humid. The dirt also has a grey tint to it, rather than a healthy brown.
When I was at school, about ten years old, I think, the teacher tried to explain to us how Dustland spots were caused. Back in the days when this world was invaded, a long time before The Resistance settled here, some of the creatures in The Horde opened portals to bring yet more creatures through. From what I remember of the teacher’s explanation, unlike Resistance technology, which uses electrical power to generate a shifting field to open a doorway, the Horde summoners used life. Any creatures or plants within a few miles would be turned to ash and their energies would create the portal. I always wondered how they didn’t die themselves – the summoners, I mean. It killed everything around them, so why not them?
It’s kinda creepy, and I’m glad I have a kerchief. The idea that all that dust swirling around could actually be the remains of plants, animals, or even people, makes me shudder. Though isn’t that what dirt is anyway? I should have paid more attention in class.
:: Record Date 16:05:4787 22:35
So, the recorder doesn’t work so well attached to my headset, though some of the recordings came out okay and I cleared the rest of them. A lot of what I said after I hit the ridge near the industrial complex just sounded like mumbled garbage. Too much background noise. So I guess I’m down to using this to record when I stop, kinda like JH did.
I arrived near the coordinates about half an hour earlier than I’d expected. It would seem that although the dust from the ground kicks up and make a mass of swirling mist, most of it is left drifting behind the Roughrider, and as long as I kept the speed up it didn’t slow me down. I found the ground to be pretty solid to ride over as long as I kept good pace. The moment I stopped, or eased off the throttle, the swirls of dust made visibility almost nil for a few minutes, until it settled once more or was blown away.
Anyway, I would say it was around 12:45 in the afternoon when I cleared the ridge and saw the buildings. I was stunned. What I saw was not what I had been expecting. A pile of ruins, maybe, or the odd building still standing, but not what lay in the valley below. It was massive, a huge industrial complex. Easily fifty or more buildings spread out over an area that was about a quarter of a square mile. A lot of the buildings were crumbling or collapsed, and all of them were run down, but some of the sturdier structures, like the central row of six warehouses, were still mostly intact.
I must remember to put this place up for salvage. The buildings are mostly made of concrete, but the warehouses are sheet metal, and that stuff is a major find. They could take them apart and put it back together no problem. Quite how this place could have been left alone, even though it’s only a hundred and fifty miles from the city, is beyond me. We haul torn-down metal buildings for miles to get them through portals and back to Evac to be reused. That this is only a day’s travel away, and is mostly intact and uninhabited, seems crazy.
I should probably have thought about that before just riding down into the place, but I was lucky. It was uninhabited. No bugs and no bandits.
Outside of Evac City there are dozens – maybe hundreds – of other settlements that spread out and built up over the years. Not everyone wanted to stay in the sprawling city. There were also farming communities, but as far as I knew, no one bothered to try and settle out in the Dustlands. It would be pointless, I think. Nothing grows there and there’s barely any water.
I drove down the ridge and headed towards what looked like it may once have been an office building. The place was right next to the row of warehouses, and seemed to be the most intact building on the site. As far as I could tell, from a distance, it was likely to be the best place to set up camp.
If I had to, I would sleep inside the Roughrider, but there isn’t a lot of room inside the cab. I decided that if the office building had a room on the ground floor that I could access and barricade up, while still able to get the Roughrider in there, then that’s where I’d make my basecamp.
I found exactly what I’d hoped for at the side of the building. A garage.
The front of the office complex was smashed in. I presume the harsh wind had taken its toll over time, but around the side, the metal garage doors were still hanging on the mechanism. It was shut, and took a lot of force, and more oil than I really wanted to spare, just to loosen it up. After a few minutes the door swung upwards, screeching as it went, and I was rewarded with an open space inside that was easily big enough to fit the Roughrider in and allow me to set up a makeshift camp.
The garage door even opens and closes, now I’ve messed with it. Good job, really. I didn’t really want to have to blow my way out of there.
Anyway, I figured I may as well get started, and after setting myself up in the garage, I switched on the tracker. I’d already keyed in the coordinates that my mother left me, after I converted them into a grid reference. The tracker doesn’t know what to do with longitude and latitude, so I had to convert the numbers. The tracker doesn’t have much battery life in it, so I’ve kept it mostly switched off, but I was relieved when the screen buzzed and flickered to life. I didn’t need to haul out and set up the solar panel until later, though I ought not leave that too long. No daylight left but it would be good to have it already set up when the sun rose in the morning.
I was hoping the coordinates would lead me to something obvious, but what I wasn’t expecting was the tracker to show that I was standing just thirty feet from the target location.
The coordinates were inside the office building.
I looked to roughly where they should be, but it would place them inside the wall at the back of the garage, about two feet through, to be precise. But wouldn’t that place it right inside the wall? That was odd.
I switched the tracker off and walked to the back of the room. The wall didn’t sound hollow when I knocked it, so I searched, hoping to find some sort of hidden slit, or an opening. Of course, I have no real idea of what it is that I’m looking for here, just the coordinates that my mother put into the voice recorder. Maybe what I’m looking for is on the other side of the wall, inside the office complex itself?
I searched all of the walls, and at the same time rifled through a lot of the trash and junk piled up at the back of the room. There was nothing of value, which to me meant that someone had already done exactly that at some time in the past. Maybe it had even been my mother?
The door from the garage into the building was blocked. I could see through a hole that part of the room beyond had collapsed at some point and the rubble was three quarters of the way up the height of the door. No getting through there without a lot of heavy hauling, and I wasn’t going to do that if I could find another way in. The door was built to open inwards, right into where the rubble was piles, so I was going to have to go in the front of the building.
I got kitted up, something that I really should have done before I drove down into the ruins, but I was damned if I was going to start strapping on body armour out in a dust storm. I figured that the chances that something actually lived out here, like wild animals or Horde remnants, was pretty remote. At just a hundred and fifty miles from Evac City, there was no way that any Horde cells could remain, not after this long. Unless they were Shamblers and stuck inside somewhere, hidden where no one could find them. Still, the chances of even that were pretty slim.
As I started to put on my c
ombat armour, I began to wonder again why the place hadn’t already been completely stripped. Those metal warehouses, by all rights, should have been taken down and reused long ago. It didn’t make much sense. Unless, of course, someone had lived here for a while? That could explain it. Evac City would leave it alone if it was in use. But that would mean that someone had settled in a dust ball.
I stepped out into the bright, glaring sun about ten minutes later, armour strapped down, my handguns in their holsters, knife in hand. I thought about taking Snap with me. Yeah, sure it’s not the most original name for a sniper rifle, but it stuck and I couldn’t think of anything better. The thing deserved a name, having travelled with me all the way through training, and I still used it as my main long range shot. I’ve fixed that thing up so it’s more accurate than most rifles, and the range is easily fifty yards further than standard issue. It’s not much good to me inside a building, though. The damn thing is as tall as I am, if I stand it next to me, and you just can’t manoeuvre around a building and still hope to use it.
The wind seemed to have calmed now that it was midday, and the ground was as flat as concrete. It was strange, moving around to the front of the building, trudging through the settled dust. If anyone else was moving around out here during the night, I’d spot it straight away. It was like walking through snow. But, if you left it a day or so, the dust would cover up all tracks and there would be no trace of passage.
The front of the building was open to the elements, with nearly all of the windows smashed in and a lot of the masonry crumbling. I peered through one of the open windows for a few seconds, switched on my headlamp, and then stepped into the darkness.
It had once been some kind of reception area, and a lot of the fittings and furniture were still there, even if they were trashed. I took note of the collapsed counter at the far end. I was pretty sure it was made of wood and would be dry in this climate. If I could smash it up I could get a fire going later, though I’d have to make sure the floor in the garage was clear of anything flammable. I didn’t expect that to be a problem.
Plastic chairs were scattered across the floor, most of them half buried in dust, and there was a lot of broken glass on the floor. Surprisingly, the large entrance room wasn’t as damaged as I’d expected, and even though I could see the west side of the building had collapsed, the other two entrances led into corridors with intact open doorways.
No signs of rubbish or other debris that might suggest any kind of inhabitancy – at least not recently. If this really was a place that my mother had visited, some twelve years ago, she had probably been the last.
I switched on the tracker, found my bearings, and then headed into the darkness beyond the reception room.
The corridor I stepped into was about thirty feet long, and the floor in there was much the same as the reception. About three or four inches of dust had gathered, and more piled up in corners, but no large debris blocked my way as I followed the tracker to the back wall that split the offices from the garage.
All I found was a plain wall, just like on the other side. Nothing. There had been nothing in the garage, either. I even checked the ground, hoping for a hidden floor panel or something – anything that could conceal what it was that I was here to find. Nothing.
After an hour of hunting around the ground floor of the office complex, and finding nothing, I headed back out into the bright sun, disappointed. The upper floor looked mostly collapsed, and dangerous, and the stairs had caved in, so there was little chance my mother had gone up there.
Maybe I hadn’t worked out the grid reference accurately? That could be it. If I’d calculated it wrong, the actual coordinates could be anywhere inside the industrial complex. But I’d checked them several times. I was sure of that.
I went back around to the garage, grabbed Snap – I could use the rifle out in the open if needed – and then started off towards the first warehouse. I still had at least ten hours of daylight, and I was going to use it.
Then I spotted it.
I was standing in the huge gaping entrance to the first warehouse, looking inside the vast empty space. The place was barren and empty; the only thing of any value or interest was the structure itself. I don’t know what the complex had been built for, but when it had been abandoned, nothing was left behind. Often, when we check out places like this, there would be old vehicles, or stacks of abandoned parts or goods. A lot of it would be useless, having sat there for sometimes years, decades, or even longer, but huge buildings like this were hardly ever completely empty. But this one was. I wasn’t going to presume that it was the same in the other buildings, but decided I was hungry and turned back to the garage. The other warehouses could wait.
There it was, right up on the outer wall, two floors above the garage. I could barely see it, and could understand how most people would miss it, but I lifted my rifle and sighted in on it. I’d only noticed it because the bright, glaring sun had flashed across it, making me squint as the reflection flared my vision for a moment. Something shiny, metallic.
It was a metal grate built into the wall above the garage, and if I was guessing correctly, it was directly above where the tracker had marked the grid spot.
And scratched into the top of the metal, in small markings that I could only just make out, even looking through the sniper rifle sights, was a single word.
Conman.
My name.
The nickname my mother always used.
I nearly tripped over my own feet running back to the garage, and then I stood there, looking up to where the rusted and rickety metal fire escape jutted out from the side of the building.
There was no easy way to climb up from the ground. The stairs had broken off years ago, leaving the bottom step, which itself was barely hanging on, fifteen feet off the ground, far beyond my reach. I stepped back again, looking up across the wall, trying to figure out a way to get up there, but then it occurred to me. The vent, or grate, or whatever the thing was, had to lead inside somewhere. That vent would come out on the top floor. There were two gaping, open holes where windows had once been on either side of the vent, and I thought that if I could get up there, I may be able to hop out onto the fire escape. Or, hopefully, I could get at the vent from the inside.
I had only ventured into the building on the ground floor and had ignored the upper floors, so far, because they looked like they would fall in if I so much as coughed. Now I needed to go back inside and somehow make my way up there.
I glanced around, sizing up the upper floors of the building, and noticed that much of the opposite side of the building was collapsed, but there had to be a way up.
I didn’t leave the rifle behind this time, instead, I slung it over my shoulder, drew one of my handguns, and went round to the reception area.
There had been two sets of stairs leading upwards, and both of them had been partially collapsed and far too dangerous to risk climbing. I’d seen metal and masonry hanging down from above, and the last thing that I wanted was to have the whole lot come collapsing down on me.
I made my way back to the wall at the rear of the garage and searched around the two rooms adjacent to the dead end. There, in the second room, was my way up.
A lot of the room was still intact, unlike the first room where the ceiling was now on the floor and the patchwork metal frame above looked as though it could collapse with even the slightest weight. But in the second room there was a small opening in one corner. I stood underneath the hole, shining my headlamp up into the darkness above to get a better look, and saw that there was a desk half hanging over the hole.
Plastic chairs, a dozen of them, hauled out from the dust in the reception area and stacked up neatly, gave me my ladder. I leaned the stack against the wall, tested them to make sure they wouldn’t fall out from under me, and then carefully climbed up into the gap. It was pitch black up there, and I remembered that there were no windows on the side of the building above the garage, at least not on that floor.
The gaping windows were a floor higher. I hauled myself up and glanced around the room, finding one open doorway and no holes in the ceiling, and then edged around the desk – which was much bigger than I’d first thought – and crept out into the hall.
The stairway that had collapsed on the bottom floor was still intact on the second, and even though I could see a few glimmers of sunlight creeping in through holes in the walls, the only bright light seemed to come from the top of the stairs, up on the third floor.
Every step that I took up those stairs creaked and complained, and a couple of times I had to side step as I felt the stair start to give under my weight.
Finally, I made it up to the second floor and crept over the rickety boarding to the room at the front. And, yes, I found that it was just one big room.
I always get a thrill when it comes to searching out new places – or old places, as it were. There’s an adrenaline buzz that always comes with the excitement of possibilities. A lot of the time I would be treading where no one had been for decades, sometimes much longer, and the thought that there could be something incredible hidden away, untouched by people for so long, was what I think always made my job as an Outrider so exciting. I guess it was part of what made you an Outrider. It was in the blood.
Like the time we found the computer system that Admin now uses, and the times when we’ve discovered outposts of people, hidden away where no one thought there was a living soul. Once, we found a sealed bunker filled to the brim with ancient but high tech weaponry and batteries, and another time, just a year ago now, we found an entire library of books, thousands and thousands of them, sealed in airtight plastic containers.
That feeling always seems to come when I start to think I’m getting close to something, and as I stepped into the large room two floors above the garage, where the vent should come out, squinting against the brightness of the sunlight, that feeling was stronger than any time before.