by Greg Dragon
“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.
“We have a new vacancy on the north side salvage expeditionary, and lucky you, your number came up.”
The guard stepped forward, stuffed the card into Jack’s hand, and turned to leave, but he stopped few feet away and turned back, grinning. Jack thought there was zero friendliness in that smile.
“Report to the bay in five minutes. They leave soon, and if you aren’t on the truck you can follow them on foot. You’ll need to pack down your gear from your bunk and take it with you. No sleeping in the main compound for you anymore. Good luck with the scabs,” said the trooper, and then turned and walked away, leaving Jack staring down at a card that he suspected might be a death sentence.
He’d seen the condition of most of the scabs. They were the ones who went out on the trucks each week, the ones whose job it was to search among the mountains of trash and debris outside of the facility, trash that had been dumped there over centuries by not only the protected central city, but the cities and people that lived even before the world started dying. The scabs were tasked with bringing back resources, which meant salvage, and because of that they spent most of their time outside of the facility, out in the wastes where radiation could easily spike up and be unnoticed until, well, until it was too late to do anything about it. They were mostly quite sick individuals, covered in scabs, scars and burns, with their hair and teeth quite often falling out. He been told many times by other workers that when the scabs died, the body would be left out in The Junklands, discarded to rot wherever the poor individual fell, and then someone from elsewhere in the facility would be required to replace them.
No one wanted to be a replacement, but there had been at least twenty replacements made in the six months that Jack had been at the facility, and he was also convinced that some of those who replaced the fallen had also gone on to die of sickness.
He rubbed some of the oil from his hands onto his tatty jeans, glanced at the trolley full of machine parts salvaged the day before, and thought of the drying blood he’d found on one of the parts. It had sharp edges, and looked like some sort of blade for a large machine. Whoever had salvaged it had cut themselves, maybe. Was that the drying blood of his predecessor?
Five minutes was all he had, and he had to go fetch his stuff from his bunk or lose it. He headed across the warehouse, towards the western entrance to the sleeping compound. He could see the guard already exiting the warehouse at the other end and followed.
As he walked across the building, he tried not to take notice of the glances that were cast in his direction by the other workers. He knew they all meant well. They felt sorry for him but were thankful at the same time. If he was going, they were off the hook for maybe one more week before another scab died. He’d felt the same. He tried not to think about it and just kept his head up and walked quickly across the open ground.
Jack squinted in the bright sunlight as he stepped out of Goods In and onto the roadway that led around the perimeter of the facility. Across the dirt track was the compound, and he made his way there, stepping around the deeper puddles.
Two minutes later he stepped back out into the light with his sack over his shoulder. It was every possession he still had, though most of what he’d carried with him when he originally surrendered to the Hunters six months ago had been taken away from him, and he knew he wouldn’t see any of it ever again.
Breathing heavily, he took off at a jog towards the expedition building, which was three hundred yards along the dirt track, past the repair centre. Now that would have been the job to get, he thought as he passed the repair centre. The workers in the mechanical department were treated far better than anyone else, and Jack had heard that they even had their own rooms. But, of course, the workers in there, as few of them as there were, were highly skilled, and were able to fix just about any problem with vehicles or machines, and they were also responsible for the upkeep of the entire facility’s electric and water, even the air conditioning in the admin building and the troop barracks. Meaning that the troopers and admin needed them.
Scabs, of course, were treated like what they were – dead men walking.
Five minutes, he thought, probably about two now. And if you don’t get your ass over there they’ll make you walk the road. And that was basically sending you out to die. Everyone knew from talking to the scabs that the trucks travelled ten, twenty or more miles out of the facility each time, and there was no knowing exactly where they were going until the truck stopped. If he didn’t make it, and the guards made him go on foot…well, he didn’t want to think about it. He picked up pace, jogging along the centre of the roadway, and arrived at the expedition compound just as the garage doors of the truck bays were opening.
Six months before, when Jack had stepped off the train and out into the open air of The Junklands, he’d been horrified at the sight. Even the Outer Zone of the city had looked more inviting than the tall, fume-spewing towers that lined the horizon, the sprawl of dirty buildings, and the lines of workers moving to and fro. It had looked like a slave camp, and effectively that was what it was. One of many slave camps in the Salvage Zone. All of those tall, filth-spitting towers were processing plants of some kind, or power stations, or other machine facilities. Everything that the city didn’t want happening near them was out here, manned by armed troopers and worked by kidnapped Outer Zone prisoners. Back in the Outer Zone, no one knew where they took people, and that was because it was thousands of miles away, in a place that no one from the Outer Zone could ever get to, and no one was coming back. Not even when they died.
They’re better off not knowing, Jack thought.
Now he ignored all the sights and ignored the fact that the sky was dark and filled with fumes. It wasn’t worth the worry. He was alive, at least for now. And he hadn’t seen a single sign of Ryan in the six months he’d been at the facility, so maybe that was a good thing. That was what Jack told himself. Maybe being sent out of the place was a good thing.
Jack approached the compound, watching the garage doors open and the trucks being driven ou
t onto the gravel courtyard. A group of four troopers came out of the small office next to the building, and Jack turned and headed in their direction. As Jack got closer, one of them stepped forward and held up his hand.
“Identify yourself,” she said, her voice slightly muffled. Unlike the Hunters that had stalked the Outer Zone, the troopers in the Recycling Facility didn’t wear full helmets that covered their faces. Instead, they wore breathing masks. This meant that you could see their faces, and even after six months Jack still struggled to get used to it.
“Jack Avery,” mumbled Jack. “I’ve been re-assigned.”
The guard lifted her hand to her ear, tapped something on the side of her communicator, spoke a few words, waited, and then stepped towards Jack.
“Arms out straight. I have to check you,” she said, waiting for him to comply. Jack did as he was told, and stood there, bemused, as the guard took a small device from her utility belt, switched it on and started to move the gadget over his chest and down his arms. The device bleeped when it reached his waist.
“What is that?” the guard asked.
Jack frowned, and then looked down. “Oh,” he said, and then unclipped a small wrench from his belt, holding it out. “Just tools.”
“Take it off and dump it in your sack,” said the guard.
When he had dropped the belt to the floor the guard nodded at him.
“You got your assignment card?” she asked, her expression impatient. As he stood there, searching his pockets for the card he had been given, he thought for a moment that the trooper was sizing him up somehow.
Jack held out the card, and the woman took it, glanced at it, and then turned to the trooper standing next to her. He was a tall man, easily half a head above Jack, and he had to stoop down to peer at the card. The man read the details, then glanced at Jack, his eyes squinting.