Scavengers Box Set

by Sam J Fires

  SCAVENGERS

  THE COMPLETE TRILOGY BOXSET

  A Dystopian Society in a Post-Apocalyptic World

  BOOK 1 DOG MEAT

  BOOK 2 SHARK TACTICS

  BOOK 3 SHARKS’ FURY

  By

  Sam J Fires

  https://www.facebook.com/samjfires/

  Copyright 2020 by Samuel Fires Publications. All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or person, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental. License Notes This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment

  Table of Contents

  Dog Meat

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Dog Meat

  Chapter 2: Friends Of Freedom

  Chapter 3: Olly And His Little Brother

  Chapter 4: Ally’s Dilemma

  Chapter 5: Ally Finds Her Purpose

  Chapter 6: A Close Shave

  Chapter 7: The Coming Of The Second Son

  Chapter 8: Finale

  Shark Tactics

  Chapter 1: A Leap Of Faith

  Chapter 2: Well Of Despair

  Chapter 3: The Big Reveal

  Chapter 4: Keep Your Wits About You

  Chapter 5: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality

  Chapter 6: Life Is Cheap

  Chapter 7: Suffer The Little Children

  Sharks’ Fury

  Chapter 1: Little Blond Bombshell

  Chapter 2: Mosh’s Story

  Chapter 3: Israel’s Reprieve

  Chapter 4: The Power Of ‘Etch A Sketch’

  Chapter 5: Olly’s Nightmare

  Chapter 6: Shark’s Revenge

  Chapter 7: Only The Brave Die Young

  Chapter 8: Have Mercy

  Chapter 9: The Nuclear Family

  Chapter 10: Last Remains

  Other Books By Sam Fires

  About Samuel Fires

  DOG MEAT

  Book 1 of the Scavengers Series

  PROLOGUE

  W e’re led to believe that an apocalypse will happen all at once. Cinema, graphic novels, even the Bible presents us with the “rapture” narrative whereby suddenly, wave after wave of evil and decay will instantly wash over civilization until civilization itself is washed away into the sea, as though it was nothing but sandcastles built by children.

  At least in the Biblical version, the good people are snatched up by God and taken somewhere better while all the evil people are left to duke it out on good old earth. In our version, the good people are all gone too, but not to a better place. All the kind, helpful, benevolent souls were either enslaved or decapitated by those with a more practical disposition.

  But here we are, with a family who have managed to secure their most valued possessions; some food, water, weapons, a car and other previously common items that had since become commodities in their world. What is most surprising about this bunch, however, is just how trusting they are and not just of my brother and me. To be sure, people still travel in groups of course, it is still safer, but these groups are made of people that were interchangeable. People who were regularly deserted and betrayed as the need arose.

  In contrast to the prevailing norm, these benevolent fools are actually a legitimate family. There is a mother who is kind, wholesome and charitable, a father who is stern and loving, a pair of girls no older than fifteen but no younger than eleven with names which I don’t care to remember, and a dog.

  A nuclear family is a rare find these days. Mothers often abandon their children to forge unions with powerful leaders not interested in taking on liabilities like children. Fathers trade daughters for supplies, that is, if they don’t make use of girls themselves. Brothers and sisters betray and even murder one another for morsels of food or some other scraps. No, the family unit is a relic of a time long since passed.

  CHAPTER 1

  DOG MEAT

  T he ‘heaps’ were what were previously known as junk or scrapyards which had come to grow so large that one could get lost and never be seen again. Navigating a heap was impossible without the aid of a Heap Shark or talented poachers, like me and my brother.

  The Heap Sharks were eunuchs who were raised in the scrapyards by previous generations of Heap Sharks with the sole purpose of serving the Heap Lords. In their world, heaps contained all sorts of valuable goods which people traded in order to survive and the Heap Lords were the ones who owned these gold mines of commodities.

  People traded with Heap Lords in order to get their hands on these commodities. Sometimes they traded the things most dear to them and on many an occasion they even traded the people most dear to them. Children and women were taken into the harems of Heap Lords to live out their days as sex slaves and birth children, all while under the watch of senior Heap Sharks.

  Boys and ‘undesirable’ girls were taken deep into the heaps and transformed into Heap Sharks. For both boys and girls, the transformation normally entailed some degree of genital mutilation with boys being castrated completely and girls undergoing a crude form of clitorectomy. Heap Sharks were not meant to be seen as human. They were not meant to love or procreate. They lived only to serve, and each generation mindlessly perpetuated the bondage onto the next.

  Some heaps had only one Heap Lord whereas others had several, ranging anywhere from two to entire families. Whereas families were rare everywhere else, Heap Lords had enough resources and the security to cultivate and rear large families, able to sustain peaceful and even decadent living far removed from the violence of the real world.

  The heaps were often split into sections with a senior Heap Shark responsible for each section and the troops of Heap Sharks operating within it. The Heap Sharks’ purpose was dual. They guarded their section of the heap to the death, and where required acted as guides to those wanting to obtain some commodity from the heap.

  My younger brother, Israel, and I were poachers, and we dared to break into the heap mines and steal commodities to trade independently of the Heap Lords’ monopoly. It was dangerous work, but we were good at it. We knew how to get into the heaps undetected, find what we wanted and get out without anybody ever knowing that we had ever been there.

  We discovered quite early on that poaching was ultimately all about caution, timing, precision, stealth, speed, patience and above all else discipline. We had raided this heap mine several times in the past and as such hadn’t needed to linger within the border city for too long.

  We had spent that day gathering intel for the evening ahead. The evening was not particularly windy but windy enough for a quick, light raid. We waited for a little past midnight and then made our way to the boundary.

  In our world where civilization had long since washed away, one made do with what one could. We covered our faces with whatever material we had been able to find. Israel’s mask was a dark cloth he wrapped around his entire head except for his eyes and mine was a dark bandana, tied like a surgical mask over my mouth and nose. A ninja and a cowboy. We had only one rope between us.

  We waited. A strong gust of wind howled over the horizon and with that I swung the rope into the air with one swift movement of my arm so the makeshift grapple at its top end could hook onto the wall. As I launched the rope into the air, my brother slowly stepped back a couple of yards in order to give me a bit of a run-up.

  What followed was perfectly timed as a result of years of practice. Just as the grapple at the end of the rope was about to make contact with the wall, Israel began to run toward the wall and at the very second that the hook fixed its teeth onto the top of the menacing wall, my small but agile little brother leapt up against it, g
rabbing onto the rope and began to climb.

  He moved quickly and quietly to the top of the wall like a ninja, with me climbing right behind him. It took less than thirty seconds for us to reach the top of the tall, imposing wall. On reaching the top, the wind was no longer howling, and the night had again fallen into a deep, deadly silence save for the slight racket emanating from one of the taverns in the border town.

  Israel kicked the hook off the wall and lay quietly on the wall to minimize the likelihood of being spotted. Having done this hundreds of times before he knew that I too would pull the rest of the rope up while also making myself inconspicuous until the moment was right again. I repositioned the hook on the wall so that the rope could be thrown down on the inside of the wall. After successfully attaching the hook onto the inner rim of the wall, I lay still just as my little brother had been doing.

  Timing. We lay atop the narrow boundary wall breathing slowly, counting the moments. Waiting. Still. Patient.

  Another bitter gust of wind whistled across the horizon and I dropped the rope so that it hung on the inside of the barrier wall. I was better at both launching and setting the rope than Israel and there was no room for error, for missing, for the hook banging against the wall and making too much noise or falling over and hitting the ground. It all had to be perfect.

  My brother was faster both in climbing up and abseiling down a wall. Before we could even think about descending, I checked that he had fastened a black satchel along the top rim of the wall. The satchel was crucial. If anything went wrong, it was our “plan B”. Nothing had ever gone wrong previously, and we hoped that nothing would go wrong now. We lay, silently observing the routine of the Sharks.

  Nothing had changed. The section we were breaking into was one of the smaller sections and was overseen by only one senior Shark who was nowhere to be seen. The area, however, was patrolled by six Heap Sharks, all walking the exact same sequence over and over.

  We waited four minutes and had seen only two Heap Sharks march by below. We had only two minutes to drop down before the next one would pass by. Another haunting blast of wind howled along the horizon. This was our cue.

  I dropped the rope and was down in ten seconds, my younger brother following had his feet on the ground even quicker. On reaching the ground, I whipped the rope hard so that its teeth could lift from the wall and drop with the rest of the rope which Israel caught and rolled up.

  We retreated into the shadows even though the next Heap Shark was only due to pass by in a minute or so. The wind had died down again, and one never could be too careful. We had a motto, ‘get in quick, retrieve with speed, leave – pay heed!’.

  A few days prior we had come across a man at an outpost in a very dangerous and isolated part of the land. The man was looking for a sheet of corrugated iron to finish building a coop for chickens. He was planning to breed and sell chickens. Where he would get chickens was anybody’s guess as most fowls and chickens had been wiped out a long time ago during the bird plague and those which had survived had for the most part become toxic to humans. In fact, bird blood had become a much sought-after poison by assassins.

  But we didn’t really care what the old man wanted the corrugated iron for, so long as he traded something valuable, that would be fine. I was convinced that the corrugated iron was right where we had entered. Our reconnaissance led me to this conclusion, but Israel wasn’t as convinced. But I was persistent, and that persistence eventually paid off. Wedged in between a tall stack of pieces of industrial sheets of metal and building rubble was a flat fold of corrugated iron.

  It was perfect. It was a bit rusty but would still fetch a good trade from the man at the outpost. We slowly began to try and free it from where it had been wedged. This proved to be an intricate dance of stopping when there was too little cover or when Heap Sharks were approaching and pulling and maneuvering the sheet gently enough not to disturb the entire heap but with enough force to unhinge it whenever we could.

  We were experts at this dance. We’d done it hundreds of times before. Slowly we worked the sheet free and were a pull away from freeing it when we heard a loud bang outside the wall. The sound was no ordinary clamor and was loud enough to startle us.

  I pulled at the sheet of metal too hard and my hand slipped along its jagged surface, slicing it open in one movement. I squealed as tears filled my eyes.

  My whimper was not too dissimilar to the sound dogs made as they were being slaughtered by Heap Sharks for meat. The minute I yelped, my brother and I knew we were in grave danger.

  Israel tore a piece of his shirt to fashion a makeshift dressing for the wound. The shirt was dirty and not ideal for dressing a wound, but something had to be wrapped around my hand to stop the flow of my blood, for blood meant a trail. Blood meant a scent and a scent meant Heap Sharks.

  That day our luck ran out as my dog-like yelp echoed across the silent night, inevitably getting the attention of Heap Sharks, and everyone knew that a Heap Shark’s favorite food was dog meat.

  Our survival now depended on getting out of the heap, quickly, quietly and without a trace. Facing a Heap Shark meant death…always.

  CHAPTER 2

  FRIENDS OF FREEDOM

  H e had never seen himself as a family man. In the old-world, Jacob was a computer programmer, back when computers were machines which executed instructions. Jacob’s career in computers hadn’t been particularly brilliant though. He’d been involved in artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet and all things cutting edge. But as with any other person born in the nineties, he could only gawk and giddily guffaw at the possibilities and convenience of it all.

  When Google announced that it had achieved “quantum supremacy” in October 2019 with a 54-qubit processor able to perform calculations in 200 seconds that would previously have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years, he felt as though he were witnessing Apollo 11 landing on the moon. However, what Jacob failed to realize was that just as the race to space that had taken place during the Cold War had had profound consequences on the trajectory of history, the race for quantum supremacy would exert an even more profound bearing on the future of humankind.

  It wasn’t too long after Google’s breakthrough in quantum supremacy that anxiety set in within cybersecurity circles. Some said that with quantum computing “no code would remain unbreakable”. They said that “the abilities of quantum computing would ultimately nullify all internet encryption systems”. This created an entirely new sub-field in which some security specialists tried to pre-empt this consequence of the quantum revolution by creating “quantum-resistant algorithms”. Others were more balanced in their attitude about the impact of quantum computers on cybersecurity, forecasting that “it would take decades for quantum computers to pose a significant threat in this regard…” Jacob found himself in agreement with the latter group but within society a strange group emerged out of a sub-culture of paranoia. This group referred to themselves as the “Friends of Freedom”, FF for short, and were one of the main drivers in creating paranoia around quantum computing and personal privacy.

  In the beginning they could be seen outside of malls and cafes harmlessly handing out pamphlets about the “dangers of quantum computers”, “breaking 2048-bit RSA encryptions within eight hours or less”, “Big Brother watching”, “1984 by George Orwell” and other such “incendiary” rhetoric. Though the movement was believed to have begun in the US, its true origins were uncertain.

  Despite the movement’s bastard origins, it managed to assume some power and its influence soon stretched far and wide. Something about the winds of the global nature of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” blew the FF’s influence to all four corners of the earth and soon there were paranoid people across the globe, all promulgating FF literature wherever they could. Some even became aggressive when the general public refused to join in with their hysteria. There were members of the FF- extremists - who began to engage in retrogressive behavior
, forming little communes where they refused to make use of computers of any sort. Not even mobile phones were allowed on their premises.

  For a long time, these communes were largely left to themselves on the fringes of their respective societies. This peace, however, was soon broken by the notorious “Miller Incident”.

  A social media starlet and blogger, hungry for more fame and fortune, decided to go where nobody had gone before. The social influencer described, step by step, her intentions and plans by way of various social platforms. She penetrated FF circles. She attended their meetings, befriended them, handed out pamphlets alongside them and was ultimately invited to visit a commune with them. She accepted the invitation under the guise of desiring to join.

  Naturally she had no intention of joining. She preferred her power in the palm of her hand, not on the back of some ideology.

  When she reached the commune she managed to secretly photograph and record much of the happenings on the premises; their military-like training, their food supplies, their stockpiling of all sorts of common items including books, the activities their children engaged in and so forth. It never occurred to her what would’ve happened if she were caught. In her posts, it almost appeared she saw being caught to be an impossibility. But caught she was and what happened next was not completely clear, but it appears that they took her to be a spy after finding her secretly filming with her mobile phone and she was executed on the spot.

  Later, the claims by the commune leaders were that she was meant to have been escorted off the premises without being harmed and that the execution was perpetrated by overzealous newcomers who took matters into their own hands.

  Almost immediately after she had stopped broadcasting, her fans had contacted the authorities and informed them accordingly. The authorities made their way to the commune and were largely met with hostility. A search order was obtained and later a warrant for the arrest and detention of the parties involved in the murder as well as the senior members of the commune. Overnight the recently deceased starlet became a media darling, a martyr and a champion of free speech.