by Glynn James
"New shoes?" the boy asked as he took a single, tentative step forward.
"Yes!" Jack said, already beginning to regret what this offer would cost him. "But let's get moving." He waved his arm, indicating the buildings around them. "You think losing your shoes is bad? There are worse things that folks will do to you if you stay here too long."
Jack headed off down the street, deciding if the boy followed him he would help him, at least for a while. But if he didn't follow, then it was his choice, his life. Jack was already putting himself out, he thought. If the boy didn't come, then fate would decide what would happen to him.
But the boy did follow, and was soon jogging along beside him, not complaining even once. If his feet hurt him as they travelled away from The Crossing, the child didn't make it apparent.
Jack's hideout at the time was a long walk away, at least four miles from The Crossing, and he didn't stop to rest. It would be dark in a few hours and he wanted to be barricaded in by then, hidden away from what prowled the streets at night.
As they walked, he glanced over at the boy, realising for the first time just how small the child was. He couldn't have been older than six years old, about the age that Jack had been when he had escaped from the workhouse.
The workhouse
Many years before...
Even considering all the difficulties of life on the outside, among the ruins of the outer zone with the dangerous things that haunted that skeletal landscape and the gangs of vicious and cold-hearted folk that prowled and picked at the debris for anything edible or salvageable, Jack's short time in the workhouse near the border had been worse.
After the long walk through the ruins, following the other kids in the chain gang led by a dozen armed and rough looking men, they had arrived at what would be his home for six months.
It was a sprawl of several buildings, most of them crumbling and dangerously unstable, housing over a hundred kids and their captors. For Jack, the place was a shock beyond anything he had experienced in his short life. There was little care taken for those that were held captive and made to work in the derelict warehouse and machine facility, barely a mile from the pulsing barrier that protected the wealthy and the fortunate. Most days were spent working on huge machines, the purpose of which Jack had never really known, and most nights were spent on the cold, hard ground, trying to sleep through nightmares and wondering when the next meal would come.
Jack remembered spending hours upon hours shovelling dirty, black rocks called coal, from the mountainous piles that the delivery ships would dump on the open grounds outside of the main building, into rickety wheelbarrows that were then rushed away by other children. There were no adults working the dumping ground. A few sat around the outside fence, their arms folded, watching intently for a child that wasn't working as hard as the rest.
He remembered aching constantly from the strain of the work. The small muscles of a child were never meant to haul the loads that they were forced to manage every day for almost the entire time that the sun was in the sky. And on top of the muscle-draining work of lifting shovel after shovel, there was the panicked and rushed moment when a new Dropship would arrive and no one on the ground knew where it was going to dump its next delivery load. For a frantic couple of minutes, the hundred or so children in the yard would stand and watch the sky, waiting as the ship slowed to a halt. And when it released its load, those underneath would run as fast as they could.
Why had it been that way? he wondered, as he always did when memories of the workhouse came back to him. Surely the guards could have called the kids away from the open area while the ship had delivered the next mountain of coal? Surely it would have made much more sense to do that? Then there wouldn't have been the accidents. People could be cold and uncaring in the outer district, and many were cruel, but none as bad as the men who made the yard workers stay out in the open when the coal was delivered.
He had seen them, the guards, making bets, and had heard names mentioned, though fortunately never his own. Who would be the next to go? - had been the subject of the money exchanged. Who would be the next child killed by falling coal?
The day that he escaped, along with many others, had been one of the times that someone had died under the avalanche of the black rocks. Except on that day it hadn't been a child that was killed, but one of the guards. No one planned for it to work out how it had, and he thought that not a single kid in the yard had expected the ship to drop early, and so close to the edge of the yard. Maybe it had been a mistake by the pilot, or the crew in the cargo chamber of the ship. Someone could have pulled the lever before they were supposed to and whoosh, away went the entire contents of the cargo hold, plummeting to the ground a hundred feet below.
One moment the guard had been sitting there, smiling, watching the fear in the children's eyes as they stood, dotted about over the open ground in the yard, looking up at the huge ship approaching, their shovels in hand, waiting to run. The next moment the ship had stopped, and the smiling guard had vanished under a hundred tonnes of black rock which hit the ground and churned out a cloud of thick dust that spewed for yards in every direction. Then the guards were shouting and running towards the fence where their co-worker had been.
That was when he had looked back at the other children around him. Some were looking at him, and some were glancing at the fence, just yards away.
Jack remembered the realisation that crept far too slowly into his mind. No one was watching them. Thirty yards away, the dozen or so guards were either shouting at each other, or pointlessly trying to move some of the coal, even though Jack knew - everybody knew - that the man underneath was dead. Very dead. He'd seen the mess left behind when someone had been crushed.
Among the yard workers was a one-eyed girl that everyone called Squint, though not to her face. She was older than most by maybe two or three years, and had a temper that would spark and explode at the slightest thing. Jack had seen a fair few younger kids hit the ground after a swift slap from Squint, and often for something trivial. You didn't mess with her, you didn't cross her, and if she told you to do something then you sure as hell did it.
On that day, Squint yelled just one word at the top of her shrill voice.
"RUN!"
And then she took off in the direction of the fence, a second or so before every other kid. Even before Jack started to run, she was going full tilt, sprinting as fast as she could, and when Jack got to the bottom of the fence and started climbing, she was already over the top and running for the ruins.
The memory of what happened after that day was fuzzy, a blur of starved, feverish moments and nightmares, but Jack clearly remembered the last time he saw Squint alive. She turned back, just before running into an alleyway, grinned at him, and shouted. "Good luck, kiddo!"
Kiddo. She'd called everyone kiddo.
Jack still wondered what had happened to Squint, wondered if she was still alive somewhere in the outer zone.
Talented
Three years before...
As the distant memory of his escape faded, Jack glanced over to the boy once more, and wondered if the child had also escaped the workhouses. There had once been a few of them dotted around the landscape not too far from the barrier, but they were all gone now, so if the boy was from a workhouse it had to be somewhere else. Jack had been back to the workhouse that he'd escaped from, many years later, only to find it deserted, though the open ground at the back of the compound was still, after years, covered in a thick black stain from the coal.
He'd often wondered why the workhouses disappeared, and thought that maybe someone had decided to move them after the mass escape that he had been involved in happened.
The boy could still have been from a workhouse, though, maybe one much further away, Jack thought, and he almost asked the child if he was an escapee, but figured that the kid would probably rather not talk about it.
The boy was called Ryan, Jack discovered that first night, as they sat opposite e
ach other, huddled around a small campfire built from the broken remains of a door that had fallen from its hinges and lay in the middle of the floor, not far from the entrance of their new, and possibly temporary, camp. They'd moved on a dozen blocks away from Jack's old camp, as he had insisted. He liked to move regularly, but the building they found wasn't ideal, with at least three entrances open to the wind. Thankfully, the room at the back still had a door that could be shut, which allowed him to light a fire without the light being visible out on the street.
Jack had no idea where they would find new footwear for the boy, and he had nothing of a value even close to the cost of shoes to trade, but he did have some old sack cloth, which he cut and wrapped around the boy's feet. They both slept after a meagre meal of salted rat meat which Jack had traded back at The Crossing, but it took a while for Jack to drift off.
Instead he lay there, watching his new companion, listening to the boy snoring, and wondered what the hell he was going to do with the child. This was the first time in his entire life that Jack had the responsibility of another person on his shoulders, and if he was honest with himself, he didn't have the slightest idea how to behave. Was he supposed to teach the kid? Help him learn how to survive out here, like the old man had done for him? Obviously the boy hadn't done so well by himself, but then, when Jack thought back to his own childhood living rough, he hadn't always been lucky himself. Sometimes he had barely scratched his way through, nearly dying at least a dozen times that he could recollect. Probably more, if he actually tried to remember them all.
Maybe he should take the kid back to The Crossing? Maybe he should try to find someone there to take him in… no, that was utterly pointless. There wasn't a single soul in that place that wouldn't use the boy for some low purpose. Sure, there were folks there that were less terrible than most - some even showed concern for other people occasionally - but Jack could count on one hand the number of people he thought may actually try to help the kid, and not even one of those was a guarantee. The boy was his to watch over, whether he liked it or not. He could always tell Ryan to scram, to leave, but he knew that wouldn't happen, either. He'd already made the mistake of starting to warm to the boy.
It was with these troubling thoughts that sleep finally took him, drifting in on the howling wind and muffling the worry of what to do next.
In the end it turned out that he wasn't going to need to do anything. Only a few days in the boy's company and Jack had already gotten used to him being around. Before Jack had even realised, an entire month had passed as they moved from place to place, each time finding a good camp spot that was well hidden and then scavenging among the ruins nearby.
The boy turned out to be one of the keenest scavengers Jack had ever met, even if his first impressions of the boy's abilities were all disappointments. The kid was clumsy to begin with, not really knowing how or where to start looking, how to search a place and spot the signs of possible buried treasure. He constantly walked straight past obvious places to check, and was always surprised when Jack pointed them out. But that soon passed, and after the fourth day, while staying overnight in one of Jack's regular hideouts on the way to The Crossing to find a trader for a rubber tyre that Jack had hauled out from under a pile of collapsed masonry, Ryan crawled out from a hole underneath a smashed up kitchen unit, with a can opener in his hand.
A real, working, not even slightly rusty, can opener. The damn thing was a rare treasure, and Jack stood there for a full five minutes, turning it in his hands, inspecting the clasp joint and the circular blade. It was in perfect working condition.
"You found this… down there?" he asked, with an incredulous expression.
"Yes. Just down there," said Ryan, pointing at the hole in the floorboards that Jack wouldn't have even considered trying to squeeze into - hadn't considered investigating the few dozen times he had holed up in the very same room.
They were on the third floor of a derelict apartment building not too far from where Jack had seen the Hunters for the first time, an area that had been picked clean over centuries. Most days it was impossible enough to find decent salvage of any kind so close to The Crossing, and this place was less than two miles away. Collecting enough wood for a fire was a hopeless task in such a populated and over-picked area, and finding stuff like this just didn't happen.
And yet here he was, holding something that was impossible to find anymore, ever. A relic from an era that was three centuries dead.
And that wasn't the end of it.
Jack looked at the can opener, turning it over in his hands, checking for rust spots. There weren't any.
"This should be rusty," he said, frowning, and then glancing at the boy. "Just lying around in a dark, probably wet place, all this time. I mean years and years. It should be rusty."
"It was in this bag," said Ryan, reaching for a clear, plastic bag lying on the floor. The bag had been ripped open, and a guilty expression crossed the boy's face. "It was in this bag, but I opened it. Sorry. I found it in the box in the wall."
Jack's eyes widened.
"What box?"
"Well. Not a box," Ryan backtracked, looking a little flustered or even embarrassed.
The boy thinks he's done wrong, Jack thought, frowning, but he let the boy continue.
"It's like a big square hole in the wall. You can't see it from the floor below. I looked. But under there," Ryan pointed at the hole in the boards, "you can crawl to the bit above the wall, and the top of the box is a bit open. The wall is cracked. I think there's more stuff in there but I can't reach any further in."
"What do you mean, there's nothing in the room where the box is?"
"I'll show you," said Ryan.
Jack followed the boy down the stairs, avoiding the piles of trash. Underneath the kitchen, on the floor below, was a large open room that Jack had walked through many times. There were two entrances, one to the stairs and the other to the front foyer of the building. But the walls were completely bare apart from occasional scraps of faded but colourful plaster.
Ryan stopped in the middle of the room and pointed at the north wall. "Right there," he said.
Jack walked over to the small hole that the boy was indicating, and peered up into the kitchen above. The same rotten and faded green cabinets could be seen through it.
"This hole wasn't here before," said Jack. "I would have seen it."
"Ah," said Ryan, looking sheepish."It kinda gave way when I first climbed inside". The child walked over to the wall below the hole, reached up, and tapped the plaster. "The box is right here, I think."
"It's hidden?" asked Jack.
"Yeah. You can check both sides. If you go under the stairs the wall is bare there as well. But the box is there. I felt it. The top had cracked open, I think, but only a little bit." The boy held up his hand, using two fingers to indicate a three inch gap. A gap just big enough for a child's hand to squeeze through. "I felt inside and it was all dry, but I couldn't pull any of the other stuff out."
Jack took out his machete and tapped the wall with the back of the blade. The sound was dull. He tapped the area a foot away, and the sound changed.
It was hollow.
"My god. There must be a safe hidden in there."
And there was. After five minutes of hacking at the aged and softened plaster, which crumbled and fell away in large chunks, Jack took a step back and stared at the secure door of a metal safe, his mouth open. He didn't know what to say, and was utterly dumbfounded. No one found stuff like this anymore.
Ten minutes later and they had used Jack's wrench to pull the kitchen cabinets from the wall on the floor above, and pull up the floorboards, then prised open the top of the safe. The metal was a colour that Jack had rarely seen before. New metal. And worth a lot to trade for. It might take a while for him to pull the damn thing out of the wall and break it up, but metal that wasn't rusty was valuable.
The safe turned out to be mostly full of paper. Currency from centuries ago that was abs
olutely worthless now, except for the material it was made of. But inside they also found boxes of marker pens that still worked, a bunch of wax crayons, and some faded photographs. But on top of the pile of paper, pinning everything down, was a box of tools. Screwdrivers, cutting knives, a hammer, a chisel set, and more - all of them in immaculate condition. Jack sat in the middle of the room, the tools in his hands, speechless once more. This hoard of treasure was the most valuable he had ever found.
That night they moved camps again, away from the place that they had made so much noise when Jack first hauled the safe out of the wall and then broke it apart. They hid in the cellar storeroom of a collapsed shop two blocks up, hoping that it was far enough away that if someone went looking and even found the recent disturbance, they wouldn't be able to track who had made it.
When Jack awoke the next morning, there were scrawled crayon pictures across the back wall of the cellar, near where Ryan was sleeping - stick men of various colours, and there in the middle was one tall figure and a smaller figure, holding hands.
Hunted
The thought of those pictures stirred something, a hurt that hadn't gone away even after nearly two years. He couldn't wait any longer, and quickly struggled out of the pile of rags, pushed aside the wardrobe doors and fell out onto the floor. He smashed his shoulder on the ground and winced with pain, but then ignored it as he lay there, staring across the room at the corner where the magazines should be, at the spot that was now empty. He stumbled forward, scrambling in the darkness, hunting for anything that may have been left behind, but the corner was empty, the magazines gone - including the one that Ryan had drawn his stick men in the day that they had taken him.
Jack had always worried - back then, when he had been travelling with the boy - that one day they would be caught in a raid. He'd worried about how the boy would react, if he would cry out in fear and give them both away.
And he'd tried to explain to the boy.
If they come
Two years before...