Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  “They take these goddamn photos and then expect us to recognise these people after months in the dirt,” he scoffed. “Yeah, sure, he’ll do.”

  The female trooper grinned behind her breathing mask.

  “Go into the compound, through the main doors, then turn left. Find room E2, that’s your new assignment group,” she said. “There’s an empty bunk in there. Dump your stuff and get straight out here. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes, and I presume you know what happens if you’re not on the truck when we go?”

  “A long walk,” said Jack, nodding.

  “A very long walk,” she said, then she saw how he was frowning and must have read his expression. “Your stuff will still be here when you come back,” she said. “Now get.”

  Room E2 was smaller than he had imagined, containing only six sleeping cots, five of which were ruffled and looked slept in. The sixth, right at the back of the room, was stripped of bedding, and even missing a pillow. Jack presumed that this was his, and dumped his sack on the empty frame and glanced around the room. There was a lot more stuff in there than the sleeping compound at the warehouse. Boxes and cases were piled up in corners, all of them shut, and bags of various sizes were stuffed underneath the cots.

  These guys get to keep stuff, he thought, and he considered this unusual, considering how little the workers that slept in the main compound were allowed to own.

  The room smelt like wet dog and was warmer than Jack expected. There was a window at the far end – furthest from his cot, he noticed – and several air vents in the ceiling, again something more than what he was used to. There was also a large metal box in the middle of the room with what looked like half of a door lying on top of it. The surface of the makeshift table was littered with empty cans and bottles, and a deck of cards that looked well used. Half a dozen crates surrounded the table.

  I don’t have time for this, he thought, and turned to leave, ignoring his natural instinct to investigate. He was curious about the contents of every box and bag in the room, and wondered why his bunk was completely bare. The dead man, or woman, must have had possessions, surely. They would in the least have had some bedding.

  He hurried out of the room, shutting the door behind him, and headed back out into the courtyard where the carriers stood. The engines were humming now, and dozens of scabs were jumping into the backs of the vehicles through the open doors. He glanced around, wondering which of the dozen or so trucks was the one he should be on, and then saw the female trooper standing a few carriers away, beckoning him towards her.

  Jack hurried over, moving between the hurried lines of people jumping into the trucks.

  “Get in and buckle up,” shouted the trooper, her voice barely audible over the roar of engine. Jack heard the slamming of heavy, metal doors as the trucks were closed up, locking in their passengers.

  He stepped forward, grabbed the overhead bar just inside the back of the truck, and squinted in the dim light. As he stepped up and into the back of the truck, he heard a creak and a bang as the doors behind him slammed shut. The engine roared even louder, and Jack’s heart jumped a beat as he tried to find an empty seat.

  “Over here,” a voice said, cutting through the noise of the engine, and as Jack’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he saw five faces looking back at him, and there, just to his left, an empty seat. He stepped forward, turned, and plopped down into the seat just as the truck lurched forward, almost throwing him onto the floor, but he managed to grab hold of the seat as the truck started to move away, his hands searching around him for the safety belt. He thought he could hear laughter from nearby, but ignored it.

  “The buckle’s near your head, you eejit,” said a voice, this one different from the first. Jack reached up and found the belt, and feeling a little stupid, he pulled it down and snapped it into place.

  Then he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Well,” said a voice next to him. “Talk about a dramatic entrance.”

  There was more laughter, this time from multiple directions.

  “You certainly cut that a bit fine,” said another voice, this one right next to him. It was deeper than the other voices.

  Jack looked around, and found that his eyes had begun to adjust to the light. There were no windows in the compartment, just a trio of dim, blue lights at the front, and they cast a cold light across the faces that he now saw watching him from the darkness.

  Sitting to his right was a very large man, with dark skin and long, dirty, plaited hair that Jack recalled were called dreadlocks. He wasn’t sure where he had heard the term, maybe it was something Drogan had said. The man had a burn scar across one side of his face, and Jack could see that one eye was covered with a small patch made of some kind of plastic.

  Directly across from Jack was a much older, frailer man, who Jack thought wouldn’t have even been as tall as his own shoulders. The man also had long hair, but his was grey, almost white in places, and he had a beard that almost reached his waist. The man was grinning at him, and Jack could see that he had just four teeth, two on top, and two on the bottom, and the humour in that grin made Jack smile.

  There were three others in the back of the truck. A heavy-set of about Jack’s age, or so he thought, who wore a furry hat with long flaps that covered his ears and looked as though it was meant for winter rather than the heat of the Salvage Zone. Another man was entirely bald, with piercing grey eyes and thin, almost chiselled features, and lastly, a man with the strangest face that Jack had ever seen. Everything about the man was disproportioned in so many ways. One of his eyes seemed larger than the other, his bent and crooked nose sat too low down on his face, and his chin appeared to be wider than his forehead.

  “So, what’s your name?” asked the dark skinned man with the dreadlocks.

  Jack was quiet for a moment, still considering his new companions, and presuming that these were the men that he would be sharing a room with.

  “I’m Jack,” he said.

  The dreadlocked man nodded, and smiled. “I’m Tyler,” he said. “This fellow over from you is Higgins, the oldest damn scab alive.” At that several of the men laughed.

  “Old as the junk around us,” said the man wearing the winter hat.

  “You can laugh,” said the bearded old man, “But I’ll be here when you’re all gone, and who will be laughing when I get divvies on your gear?”

  That brought even more laughter.

  “Fellow over there,” Tyler indicated the man with the winter hat, “is Locks, and not because he has fine hair.”

  “Nothing wrong with my hair,” said Locks.

  “Apart from you ain’t got much of it under that damn hat,” said Higgins. The old man started to chuckle to himself.

  “That over there is Rick,” Tyler said, indicating the gaunt, hairless man at the far end of the cabin. “He’s our watchman. And, lastly, that’s Boots over here. And don’t mind that he looks like he’s been smacked around more times than a pit fighter.”

  “Meet ya,” said Boots, twitching his head to one side several times then, almost immediately, his head fell forward and he fell fast asleep.

  “He does that a lot,” said Tyler, sighing loudly. “Damage to the brain. So. Seems like you’ll be joining our little band of freaks. At least for a while.”

  Jack frowned. “A while?”

  Tyler laughed. “Well, we’ll see if you can last it out salvaging. Not everyone can.”

  Jack was silent for a moment, while he tried to take it all in.

  “What happens to those who don’t?”

  Tyler’s cheerful expression turned cold, the smile gone in an instant. “They become a vacancy,” he said, then the grin was back, and he burst into laughter.

  Jack sighed, feeling a little out of his depth among these new people. He had not been outside of the facility in the entire six months since he stepped from the transport, and had no idea what to expect. All he had seen so far was the rolling hills of junk and the smog-producing
towers in the distance. Now he was in the back of a truck with five strangers, heading out of the facility and miles into The Junklands.

  He looked around at the other men.

  Strangers.

  Strange was certainly the key here.

  A View from the Top

  A Week Before

  First Corporal Lisa Markell blinked in the bright sunlight and looked back through the viewfinder. From the platform on top of the armoured carrier, perched high upon a mound of debris and junk, she could see for miles. Not that it gave her much of an advantage.

  She could see even more trash, and that was about it. Endless huge piles of the damn stuff, stretching out into the distance.

  It still amazed her, nearly six months after arriving in the Salvage Zone, just how much trash had been dumped out there. Centuries of the stuff, most of it broken machinery, the remains of torn down buildings. A lot of it was rusted metal, dumped there by the civilised world back when there was one. Now that world was long gone and the production of new resources was at a historical low. The Inner Zone officials had decided that it was time to salvage what mankind had scrapped. She’d been told all about the Salvage Zone, and how that entire area of the world had been sectioned off many centuries ago and used as a dumping ground. She had nearly nodded off in the briefing.

  She knew that the ark ships, which launched once a year, sending tens of thousands of new resettlers on their fifty year cryo journey to New Earth, needed mountains of metal to construct, and so here she was, overseeing the salvaging operations that made it possible.

  Dotted across the landscape were more armoured vehicles, just like the one she now commanded this particular expedition from, and as she watched, one of the vehicles stopped, unloaded its crew of troopers, and then sat waiting for them to return.

  Scans, scans and more scans, she thought. The flyby scan had covered an area nearly ten miles across, and had come up with no life signs, but she knew that meant there could still be some. So they had to do it again on the ground, in person, just to make sure. The Junkers were out there somewhere, probably even watching her right now from within their hidden nests, and she had to do whatever was necessary to secure the area before the salvagers arrived.

  About a quarter mile away, Lisa spotted a vehicle with its hatch still down, even though the troops had been dropped minutes before. She squinted and frowned, wondering why the hatch wasn’t shut.

  “A3, this is Markel, what is your status? Over.”

  There was a moment of silence as she waited. And then just as she was about to ask again, a voice replied.

  “This is A3. We have a mechanical problem with the door hydraulics. Over.”

  “Received, A3. Is the rest of the vehicle functional? Over.”

  “Yes, ma’am. All other functions nominal. Over.”

  “Okay then, just keep an eye on your entrance, A3. I don’t want any unwelcome visitors. As soon as you are all hands on-board, get back to the service truck and get that sorted out. Over.”

  “Affirmative, ma’am. We have two of the squad in the back of the truck keeping watch. Over.”

  “Acknowledged, A3. Keep it tight. Out.”

  Damn inferior machinery, she thought. It had been something she’d noticed almost within a minute of stepping off the Trans into the Recycling Facility. The equipment sent to them from the Inner Zone was almost always the most decrepit, the cast off trash that had most likely been replaced with something shiny and new. And the vehicles weren’t even the same reinforced armoured craft that they used on the Outer Zone raids. No, these things were Inner Zone standard, and would be unlikely to withstand a hit from an automatic weapon without the crew inside being peppered.

  Thankfully the only ones with automatic weapons of any kind around here were her people.

  Lisa turned to Reece, her second in command, who was standing just a few feet away, staring out at the vast expanse behind them.

  “Are we secure?” she asked.

  Reece nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We had some movement a few miles out, which was picked up by the drone, but whatever it was scattered soon after. Thermal scanning hasn’t picked anything up.”

  Lisa nodded and looked back out at the vehicle with the faulty door mechanism. The troopers were back, and getting into the vehicle. A few seconds later the last trooper jumped on board and the door swung clumsily before slamming shut.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s get the hauler in and clear a staging area. We’ve got a dozen cans of salvagers due in about four hours and I want this ready.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Reece.

  “And get that APV with the crappy door booked in with the maintenance crew.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Reece.

  Lisa turned to head towards the hatch in the middle of the platform, but stopped. “Where are we next, anyway?”

  “Ahhh…let me check.” Reece took a hand-held, touchscreen device from his utility belt, turned it away from the bright glare of the sun, and tapped it a couple of times.

  “Facility reclamation mission,” he said. “The Picking Factory that was raided by Junkers about ten months ago, over near the blast crater.”

  Lisa looked relieved. “Nice. We might actually get some activity for once.”

  Junk

  As far out as you can go.

  Jack sneezed as the cloud of dust hit him in the face. He squinted, straining against the bright glare of the sun, as he jumped down from the back of the transport vehicle. Even though he was near the back, he was the last one out, after struggling with his safety belt for more than half a minute. As he’d tugged, and tried to reach for the clip, the others filed past and jumped out into the bright sunlight.

  Now he found himself standing on dry, dusty ground in a large clearing, maybe two hundred yards across. Where the clearing ended, the flat dry ground finished abruptly at a wall of junk. All around them, piled tens of feet high in some places, was a mass of trash. Most of it was rubble from broken buildings and large sheets of rusty metal, but as his eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun, even from fifty yards away Jack could see all manner of other things. Rotten wood, decomposing paper and magazines, machinery parts, torn metal structures, and animal bones.

  At one section of the junk it looked like whatever cleared the area – probably a digger of some kind, Jack thought – had torn the trash pile away to reveal an open cavity under a huge pile of trash. Inside the cavity were the rusty remains of an old refrigerator, some smashed up cupboards, and what appeared to be a sleeping cot.

  Someone had actually lived there. Hidden right underneath the junk. It must have been a long time ago, had to be. Everything looked so old.

  Next to him, the armoured carrier shuddered for a moment and then fell silent as the engines switched off. But the surrounding noise was no less deafening, as no sooner had the vehicle’s engine stopped roaring, than a second, much larger vehicle appeared through the roadway carved into the trash. It was a dumper truck, or so Jack thought. It looked like one of the ones used to deliver salvage to the facility, though as it pulled into the middle of the clearing, Jack realised that he had never seen one this close up. The dumpers usually tipped their finds onto the moving platforms outside of the Goods In warehouse, some two hundred yards away from where he worked, and the larger pieces would be sorted and removed before anything even reached the sorting hall.

  “Daunting, isn’t it?” asked a voice nearby. Jack turned to see Tyler standing just a few feet away. He had tied back his mass of dreadlocks so that they hung down his back through a hole in his jacket, and he’d also pulled a hood over his head. “We have to fill that thing before the end of each day,” he said.

  Jack looked at the massive dumper, with its huge open – and very empty – back. You could fit the armoured vehicle that they had travelled inside, probably twice, he thought.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tyler, moving to stand next to him. “It’ll fill up quicker than you think.”


  “I don’t see how,” said Jack.

  Tyler laughed and pointed at the back of the armoured carrier. He hadn’t noticed the large contraption hooked onto the side of the carrier. “We got a digger,” he said. “Boots drives it and drops the heavier stuff in there, while we sift through the crap, looking for the good stuff.”

  They stood watching Boots and Rick unstrap the one-man digger from the carrier vehicle. As the digger hit the dirt, Jack wondered if Boots would even fit into the thing. It didn’t look much bigger than a small car, and it certainly didn’t look like it would be able to haul much weight. But Boots squeezed into the tiny compartment at the centre the digger, and Jack heard some clicking sounds followed by the whir of a small engine, and the thing sprang to life. It was compacted for travel, thought Jack, as the contraption seemed to unfold, changing from a strange upright column into something almost spider-like.

  “We’ll be out here for about a week,” said Tyler. “That’s how long we usually stay in one spot before being given a half day out, back at the facility, and then off to the next location.”

  “A week?” asked Jack. “We stay out here for that long?”

  He’d thought that the expedition groups came back every night, but now he thought of the four hour journey to get to this place and realised that there would be no time to work if they spent most of it travelling.

  “But where do we sleep?” he asked.

  “In the carrier,” said Higgins, appearing next to them. He had two rucksacks thrown over his shoulders, and dropped one of them at Jack’s feet.

  “That’s some basic gear for ya,” he said. “Mostly left over by Brody…erm… Your predecessor.”

  Jack looked down at the rucksack lying in the dirt.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It ain’t much,” said Higgins. “We could have kept it all, you know. It’s traditional for the dead’s gear to get shared out, but we dint need what’s in there so you can have it.”

  “You’ll pick up gear along the way,” said Tyler. “And anything that the facility don’t need that you find out here is your dibs first.”