Thrown Away Omnibus 1 (Parts 1-4)

by Glynn James

  “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.”

  Jack frowned. “We get to keep stuff? I mean, they let us keep things?”

  Higgins laughed, almost coughing with the effort. “No, of course they don’t let you keep stuff, not if it’s useful to them, anyway. But if we don’t put it in the back of the dumper, they don’t ever knows about it, get it?”

  Tyler picked up the rucksack and handed it to Jack.

  “What Higgins is saying, is what they don’t know about, they don’t want. And out here, it’s just us.”

  Jack looked at the digger, and then the carrier.

  “But the drivers of the vehicles, surely they see if you take stuff?”

  Tyler grinned. “What drivers?”

  Jack frowned again.

  “Ah,” said Tyler. “I get it. Come on,” he said. “Come look at this.”

  Tyler made his way around to the front of the carrier vehicle, and Jack, confused, hur
ried behind him, trying to fit his new rucksack over his shoulders.

  No wonder none of them wants this damn thing. The straps are both ripped.

  “There,” said Tyler, pointing at the cab of the carrier. “You see the door?”

  Jack looked at the side of the cab, and then tried to peer over the top.

  “No,” he said.

  “No, indeed,” said Tyler. “That’s because there isn’t one.”

  Jack walked around the front of the carrier, peering at the far side, but found it just the same. A sheer metal wall that ended at the front screen. The screen itself was opaque, but Jack had thought they were just designed that way to block visibility of the driver and the rest of the cab crew from the outside.

  “It’s automated,” said Tyler. “They all are.” He pointed at the dumper truck. “They can get at them from underneath, to maintain them, but there’s no person in there, or even room for one, from what I’ve heard. It also means no one can steal the damn thing, on account of there being no controls for a human to use.”

  “You mean that there are no facility staff with us?” asked Jack. “Just us? We’re the only ones out here?”

  Tyler nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “They remote pilot them, or pre-program them, or something. The carrier will remain right there for five days, and then it just goes back, on its own, after the alarm sounds. And it goes with or without us in it. And the dumper goes back every day and comes back before morning, empty.”

  “Not even guards?”

  “Yes, there are guards, but they stay at a central camp about half a mile away from here. That’s how they do it. They set up in an area, then they carve out a hole for each of the crews. Now, you see that beacon on top of the carrier? If that starts making one God-almighty noise, you run like hell and get in the back of the carrier, because it seals shut after a couple of minutes whether you’re in there or not.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means that something uninvited has moved into our sector.”

  “Like a creature?”

  “Like predators, sure, sometimes. Plenty of those out here, but the radar doesn’t look for them and they mostly leave us alone. See, the predators learn faster than people. Usually the siren means that Junkers just got picked up on the radar.”

  “I see,” said Jack. “So, what happens if someone wants to just run off?”

  Tyler smiled. “Yeah, sure. We’ve all thought about it, at one time or another, until we find what’s left of someone who did run off.”

  “Oh. People do, then?”

  “Sometimes,” said Tyler. “Even had a guy with us about five years ago, ran with us for six months. Before Rick joined us, this guy was part of my crew. Then he decided to make a run for it and took off into the trash. Didn’t even bother that we were all watching as he went. Course, he also didn’t try to take any gear with him, or we would have stopped him.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “We found him about three months later, when we cycled back round to the same spot, after Rick had taken his place. Higgins dug him up while we were salvaging. Found him trapped under a pile of crap with both his legs chewed off. He’d got about two hundred yards.”

  “Damn.”

  “Oh, yeah. Damn all right. That wasn’t the only thing eaten. He had no hands and no face. The only way we identified him was his tags. Thought it was a dead Junker until Rick spotted the chain still hanging from his neck. Well, what was left of his neck.”

  Jack shuddered, and involuntarily reached into his shirt to touch the dog tags that hung there.

  “You see, out here,” continued Tyler. “You either have the bugs, or you have the Junkers. Both of which will kill you. And no food. Nothing grows out here, it’s all lifeless and poisoned. We find bodies every now and then, among the junk. I’m guessing some of them are escapees, but who knows.”

  Jack nodded, his mind still stuck on an image of a body with no legs sticking out of the junk.

  Tyler shrugged. “What I’m saying is. You wanna run for it, no one is going to stop you, but don’t expect to take anything with you. We don’t waste good gear here.”

  “I wasn’t planning to run,” said Jack, but wondered if he really was considering it. Six months was a long time to find no trace of Ryan, and he’d looked everywhere he could at the Facility. Maybe out here, he could search, but where would he even begin?

  You have to start somewhere, though. Don’t you? But dead isn’t a start.

  “Anyways, as I was saying,” said Tyler. “If you hear the siren you run back to the carrier, and don’t stop for nothing.”

  “And then?” asked Jack.

  Tyler frowned “Hmm?”

  “Then what happens?” asked Jack.

  “Nothing. We just wait in the carrier until the drone or the troops arrive to remove the problem. Or until it just goes away.”

  “What if you’re not inside the carrier when they get here?”

  Tyler’s expression turned from amused to grim.

  “Then you become a vacancy.”

  You Again

  Expedition Control Centre

  Lisa Markell wiped the sweat from her face and stared up at the mass of twisted metal in front of her. The huge Drover vehicle had arrived just an hour before, trundling along slowly, as they always did after being left behind to catch up. By the time it had arrived, the salvage groups had already left for their individual areas and the camp had gone into overwatch.

  “Can it be repaired in the field?” she asked, looking at the aged mechanic standing just a few feet away, and then at the young trooper standing next to her. Hailey Simmons had been assigned to her expedition just a few weeks before, and Lisa hadn’t liked her at first but the young trooper’s can-do attitude soon stopped being irritating, and now Lisa kept her at her side constantly. The girl got things done, or brought things to Lisa’s attention much sooner than they otherwise would have been.

  Take this drover, Lisa thought. The driver would have dumped this in the parking ground and walked away, leaving it for what? A day? Two days? Probably three days from now, when I’d want the damn thing hauling along the old roadway and clearing it for us, and we would have been delayed for repairs. Now we get the problem sorted before it’s needed.

  “Ah, maybe. Yeah,” said the mechanic, rubbing his stubbled chin and looking at the debris jammed into the Drovers cutter. Drovers were originally designed for cutting tunnels in the earth, or even in rock, but they weren’t the most robust of contraptions, and when one became no longer of use to the mining sector, they were turned into road clearance trucks, and sent out to make long gouges in the hills and mountains of junk out in the Salvage Zone.

  “Maybe?” asked Lisa. “Really?”

  “No problem,” continued the mechanic, now looking flustered. “I can just cut that out and then we can get in to free the mechanism. Maybe a day?”

  Lisa smiled. “Good. Very good. See to it, then. I need this three days from now, to clear a road to an abandoned facility we need to access.”

  She turned and headed back to the main control centre, a large construction built from a dozen large trucks that could just park next to each other, lower their sides and become one enclosed building. She was relieved to step out of the blistering heat and back into air conditioned rooms. She headed for the control room, right at the heart of the building, and sat down at her desk.

  “Did we manage to re-fill all the group vacancies before we left?” she asked, not even looking round to see if Hailey was with her. Lisa knew she would be.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Hailey. “I saw to it myself, as you asked. I picked out some healthy candidates and wrote out the cards last week. It took them a while to process, but we got the replacements just as we were leaving for this trip.”

  Lisa looked out across the control room, which she always thought was surprisingly large considering it only took up the compartments in three of the trucks. A few yards away was a
bank of two dozen LCD monitors, watched by two troopers, all showing different views of the various areas currently being worked by the salvage crews in her expedition group.

  “Did you want to review the new replacements?” asked Hailey. “I have them right here.”

  Lisa was about to say no, but then chuckled quietly. The new recruit was certainly keen to please, she thought, and after how much of a relief she was proving to be, Lisa thought she should at least show interest in the girl’s work.

  “Sure,” she said. “Throw them over here.” Then she turned back to the screens again. The screen at the top right corner was flickering, and that would annoy her very quickly.

  Lisa took the thin pile of cards that Hailey handed her. There were a dozen. Had she really lost that many scabs in the last few months? It was hard to tell. There were more than enough accidents out there and, of course, the occasional escapee. It couldn’t be helped. But a dozen? That seemed a little high.

  She flicked through the cards, checking that the current health status of each individual was marked over ninety out of a possible hundred. Healthy ones, well done again, Hailey, she thought.

  It wasn’t until Lisa flicked to the second to last card that she stopped and actually paid some attention to the details. Something had triggered a thought, or a recognition, and it was something on the card before, just as she looked at the last one. Lisa flipped the last card back to the top of the pile and peered at it, curious. What was it about that card that brought back a memory? For a moment she sat there, brow furrowed, just staring at the card, trying to spot what it was about it, or about the individual whose tiny photo stared back at her, that reminded her of something.

  The name. Jack Avery. That wasn’t familiar, or was it? She’d heard it before. But why was it so important?

  Then she recognised the face. It looked cleaner, less pale, and was shaved, but there was the scar above the eyes, just as she remembered.

  Well, well. So that’s what happened to you, she thought.