Scavengers Box Set

by Sam J Fires

  We walk a while and then I’m forced to descend a flight of stairs. It feels as though I’m being led through a corridor of bodies. I can feel their heat, hear their breathing. At some point they begin to strike, spit and throw items at me which feels like rotten food. Then I’m made to halt by the hands holding me.

  The covering over my head is suddenly removed and my eyes take a moment or two to adjust. I look around at the audience sitting in high tiers around an arena where I now stand. An audience whose eyes are fixed on me. To my surprise, the bodies were not those of sharks nor were they assassins, but other children, other child prostitutes.

  They all begin to chant something I can’t make out and one steps forward from the mass and walks up to me. It’s a girl with long blonde dreadlocks. She looks to be around eleven or twelve, maybe younger but no older. She seems to be the leader. I open my mouth to speak but she slaps me hard across the face.

  The audience breaks into a cheer and then chants loudly again.

  The leader speaks with a surprisingly soft voice I have to strain myself to hear; “Do you know how we survive?”

  I consider answering but the blonde smacks me across the face, once more eliciting another cheer from the crowd, followed by rhythmic chanting.

  “We survive by living as one. We pay our tithe over to the Heap Lords and border city councilors. We strike at anyone who hurts us. We do what we must. We make our money.” And she raises her voice in a crescendo; “We survive!!!”

  The crowd breaks out into another cheer.

  “You! You little fool, have struck at us. You have taken food from our mouths. You have hurt our customers and exposed us to the danger of retaliation. Do you know what the Heap Lords will do to us if they don’t receive their fair share? Do you know the ecosystem you have nearly upset here?”

  I have never heard of any such a thing nor had the thought even crossed my mind.

  She continues. “Tonight will be the end of you. You will atone for your crimes.”

  The crowd now predictably cheers once more. I can’t help but laugh at the irony, one group of burnt children about to burn another.

  The blonde looks at me quizzically. Then anger clouds her face. “Do you think this is a fucking joke? What are you laughing?”

  I laugh even harder. The crowd murmurs and someone says, “Kill him, he’s crazy,” and another “He’s mad. Damaged beyond repair.”

  The blonde leader slaps me again so I headbutt her. She yelps as she drops to the ground, blood gushing from her nose. The crowd charges me, eager to tear me limb from limb when the blonde raises her hand to gesture for them to stop. She stands up and a second child brings her a cloth to tend to her nose.

  I look at her defiantly, she holds my gaze. I speak first.

  “That was for slapping me.”

  The blonde, taken aback, chuckles. “You’re brave, that’s for certain but there’s a thin line between bravery and stupidity.”

  “I’d rather be stupid than live like a coward.”

  The crowd begins to jeer but the blonde gestures for them to quiet.

  “What do you know about how we live?”

  “I know enough to know that you just accept this life.”

  She scoffs. “You act as though there is something better.”

  “There is. Things weren’t always this way. The world wasn’t always filled with sharks and Heap Lords.”

  “And who told you this? Your brother? The one locked up by the Heap Lord right now?”

  My heart sinks. They know who I am.

  But a small elation compensates for my identity being exposed. Olly is alive and they apparently know where he is.

  The blonde notices my surprise. “Yes, we know who you are. We know everything that happens in this city. We go places where nobody else can.”

  I meet her eyes.

  “Then I propose a trade that could benefit the both of us.”

  SHARKS’ FURY

  Book 3 of the Scavengers Series

  Chapter 1

  LITTLE BLOND BOMBSHELL

  F our heap sharks come stampeding toward us in the dimly lit and rank smelling corridor. My first instinct is to run. That’s how I’ve always dealt with sharks. But this time, we can’t run, we’re here to find Olly, not just some pieces of scrap.

  There is only one way forward and that’s toward the sharks. I look at the imposing, menacing quartet of heap sharks charging at us and breathe in shakily. I’m about to step forward to face them when the blonde leader of the children of the border city stretches out her arm to stop me.

  Before I can process what’s happening, she starts to charge at the advancing heap sharks. She picks up pace with every step and breaks into a tight sprint. Her tiny blonde head of dreadlocks bobs up and down wildly with every step until she’s almost right up on the sharks.

  This girl has some guts! She’s moving at top speed, and I’m gobsmacked at seeing someone rushing to attack the sharks with such ferocity, let alone someone so slight. I watch her accelerate, gathering a great deal of momentum. With every step she takes my heart picks up pace too. What she lacks in mass she obviously makes up for in speed.

  She reaches the closest shark of the quartet, and with one quick motion she fires herself into the air with her right knee bent. The petite blonde’s flying right knee slams into the solar plexus of the bulky shark like a battering ram.

  All the power generated by her sprint and leap is concentrated in that knee as it connects to the point just below his chest, and the imposing shark creaks like an old wooden door from the impact.

  While still in the air, her knee implants into his midriff and he buckles forward. She grabs his left shoulder with her left hand and at the same time brings her elbow down onto his crown. Her own force on the shark’s head, combined with the gravity of her falling body, amplifies the devastation wrought upon the shark.

  It all happens swiftly in one fluid motion and when it’s done, the girl lands on her feet while the grown man is on the ground, defeated by physics.

  I blink hard in disbelief. She is a tiny blonde force of nature. The next nearest shark lunges at her, trying to grab hold of her with his left hand. But she’s nimble and simply dances to the right, completing a half a pirouette on the balls of her feet.

  While completing this deft turn, she simultaneously deflects his outstretched hand with her left hand, catching hold of his wrist briefly. Grabbing it for that instant allows her to direct him into the wall, propelled by his own momentum.

  That short instant has also allowed her to tug him forward, ensuring he remains off balance as he clatters headfirst into the wall. An audible cracking sound echoes along the narrow passageway. Two sharks have been dispatched in quick succession, but she isn’t yet done.

  The sharks have been taken completely by surprise and before they’re able to get their bearings, she takes a step towards one and fires her right leg toward his abdomen, her shin striking his body neatly on the left-hand side of his ribcage. The kick does the trick and the shark drops immediately like a beached whale. Her speed and accuracy are unlike anything I, or the sharks, have ever seen before.

  The final shark is the biggest, but he is visibly shaken. Fear is unmistakably impressed upon his usually morose face. I know that despite his fear, the shark will not flee. It’s not their way. As youths they are trained to attack anything that violates the sanctum of the heap. Attack, attack, and show no mercy is the sharks’ way.

  The shark comes running at the blonde girl. I expect her to simply dance out of his way, but she adopts a more direct approach and locks her legs firmly in a confrontational stance. The fear evaporates from the shark’s face as he looks at her posture and chuckles with amusement.

  He moves quickly towards her and fires a powerful left hook at her head. For her part, she simply steps closer to the shark so that his hook misses and passes behind her head. Not only did he miss, but his belly is left completely exposed to her. She draws a rusty nail from her
pocket and jabs it up into his neck. The shark doesn’t seem to notice, and she then chain punches up and down the centre of his abdomen.

  The shark steps back with each punch until he loses his footing completely and drops onto his backside. I expect her to continue pounding the shark as he’s prostrate on the ground, but she merely strolls past him. By now the shark has felt the rusty nail in his neck and without thought, yanks it out. Blood spurts like a fountain, and the shark looks at the fluid gushing onto his hands and clothing and lets out a furious scream.

  He struggles to his feet and begins running at me. I start to back pedal, but the shark is faster and almost upon me. I wrap my hands tightly around the makeshift torch I’ve been carrying. The torch is made of a steel rod with cloths drenched in paraffin wrapped at its top. I’m just waiting for the shark to lunge and crush the life out of me, but instead he runs past me, screaming frantically as his blood drips to the floor with every step.

  As if nothing has happened, the blonde is continuing to walk, almost nonchalantly. I run to catch up with her and just as I arrive at her side, a loud bang shakes everything around us, it feels as if it could well have shaken the entire heap.

  “That’s the bomb” she says calmly. “We need to be quick.”

  Chapter 2

  MOSH’S STORY

  T he boy who had been impersonating prostitutes was causing a lot of trouble for them. Punters had been avoiding the children for fear of attack, and the Heap Lords were demanding their protection money all the same.

  Mosh had resolved to apprehend him and have him executed. She knew exactly who the boy was and how to find him. What’s more, on her last visit to the heap, she had seen the boy’s older brother and knew that the Heap Lord had put a significant bounty out on his head.

  But Mosh would never surrender the boy to the Heap Lord. She never surrendered children to adults, no matter what they’d done. She had her own method of ‘justice’.

  They existed to protect the children of the border town from the cruelty of the adults. Long ago, before Mosh formed the guild, the children of the city were used for whatever depravity whoever owned them saw fit.

  Mosh herself had never actually been a street prostitute, although she was no stranger to depravity. Her father had sold her to an old decrepit man who smelled of boiled rags and rotten tomatoes. She had been no older than three, and his smell never left her nostrils. She was used for a little more than a year until the degenerate pervert who had bought her, acquired a new child for his gratification. He discarded her by selling her to a bookmaker who owned a fighting pit.

  The fighting pits were exactly that. Every vice was on offer in a border town after all. The bookmaker himself had no direct interest in her but used her as one of his many laborers by day and by night for the gratification of his big betting customers.

  She was a deeply wounded little animal who hardly spoke and always jumped in terror at the slightest touch, even from one of the other children. But every night she was at the pits either with a punter or with the bookmaker, watching as men and women pummelled each other to death for a living.

  Though still timid, jumpy and broken, by eight years old she had developed an eye for determining which fighter would win a fight and had taken to secretly practising what she saw in the pits. She spent hours honing her skills but was a quick learner and she had the co-ordination and strength to become a good fighter.

  Rose arrived when Mosh was nine years old. She was about nineteen years old, if not older, and was a beauty of note. The bookmaker for sure had an interest in her. Rose was different to any prostitute or slave Mosh had met before. She was warm and loving and treated all the children kindly. She became a mother figure to all of them and developed a particularly strong bond with Mosh. She taught Mosh how to read and write and told Mosh stories of her own childhood. Rose grew up in what she said was an FF commune where she had learnt many skills in addition to reading and writing.

  The commune had been overrun by Z strain zombies and Rose, who at the time was barely thirteen, was forced to flee with a baby boy named Israel, his older brother Olly, another little boy who didn’t last very long and an older man. Rose lived with them for a few years but one day, while Olly was on a raid, the older man sold her to a band of fighters who were making their way from border town to border town, fighting in pit after pit.

  The fighters used her for their gratification, and as a servant, but were hardly ever rough with her. They saved their violence for when it profited them. She had learnt from a woman named Ally how to tend to wounds, and the fighters found this talent almost invaluable, but everything and everyone had their price in their world, and the bookmaker was able to buy her from the fighters.

  The bookmaker was smitten and mostly left her to her own devices. Rose, for her part, had concocted a plan to free herself and the children from the bookmaker using information she had accidentally discovered from Mosh.

  One day, while Rose was teaching Mosh how to read, Mosh inadvertently let slip that some of the fighters threw fights at the bookmaker’s request. Armed with this knowledge, Rose set out about a plan. She watched the bookmaker closely and discovered that he kept a record of all his more devious activities in a special book. She waited for her moment and then snatched the book. Her intention was to blackmail the bookmaker into freeing her and the kids. Once they were free of bondage, they would make their way back to where Rose had come from and create a new life at the FF commune.

  Rose had told the children all about the FF commune and how, with enough hands, the commune could again be sustained. She got her hands on the bookmaker’s special book and gave it to Mosh to hide.

  Rose took a risk, and she was never seen again.

  The bookmaker put out a reward for whoever could return the book to him. Knowing how close Rose and Mosh had been, he tried to extract the whereabouts of the book from Mosh by torture but Mosh had given the book to a fellow slave girl named Macey. When torture didn’t break her, the bookmaker threw her to the fighting pits, thinking that the child would die.

  She didn’t.

  The little child proved a fighting savant, having been raised and desensitized by the pits. She fought for a year and became a major drawcard, having not lost a single fight even against the most seasoned of foes.

  On the biggest fight night of the year, with all the notable characters of the border town in attendance, she took a dive. The crowd jeered and booed her, and then as quickly as she had fallen, she stood up and pointed at the bookmaker. The entire pit fell silent as she spoke.

  “I lost tonight because he told me too. He has been controlling the fights for years. He has been stealing your money.”

  She stepped up in front of bookmaker, flourished the book which she’d secreted in her clothes and handed it to the Heap Lord. The Heap Lord, who probably suspected the bookmaker had been deceiving him, stood up angrily and announced that the bookmaker too would have to disappear.

  The bookmaker stood up nervously but was pushed by the other notables into the pit. He begged Mosh for mercy.

  “This is mercy,” she whispered, before unsheathing a long, sharp knife and taking the bookmaker’s head off.

  Thereafter Mosh struck up a deal with the Heap Lord for all the child prostitutes of the city to come under her protection. The Heap Lord agreed, in return for a piece of the profits.

  Mosh’s first call for action was that all children under nine years old be surrendered to the guild and removed from the streets. Ideally, she would have removed all children from walking the streets but as long as they were in the border city, protecting the children meant honouring the agreement with the heap lord.

  This agreement was only supposed to buy them time until they could find their way to the FF commune, but almost two years on she had nearly given up on the idea completely. She had begun to think the FF commune was but a fantasy of Rose’s. For all she knew, Rose had bartered with the bookmaker for her own freedom and had abandoned them.


  Fleeing to the FF commune had become only a distant dream…... until the imposter who called himself Israel was brought before her and uttered the words; “I propose a trade that could benefit the both of us...”

  Chapter 3

  ISRAEL’S REPRIEVE

  I was surprised at how readily the blonde had agreed to my proposal. Olly had always spoken about returning to the FF commune and re-activating the compound, until that dark incident with the nuclear family.

  Societies are built upon a degree of trust. The Z strain infection that flooded the compound would long since have died and the compound would have remained under lock down. The only problem was that it would take more than the two of us to get the commune up and running again.

  It had been Olly and Rose’s dream to head back to the commune one day, but then Rose went missing, we met that family, and the dream of returning was lost.

  I had been living in the city for months and realized that the children of the city would make perfect recruits for returning to the commune but I hadn’t found a way to gather and influence all of them, especially not while hiding out.

  But fate dropped a big favor onto my lap. The children were already united and had a leader who could influence them - the blonde.

  When I’d said that I proposed a trade that could benefit the both of us, she had been understandably sceptical and asked what I could possibly have that she’d want.

  I’d looked her square in the eye and said, “a home”.

  She’d laughed loudly and the crowd had jeered. “We already have a home and you have been caught trespassing.”

  I hadn’t expected her to understand. “No, not this nightmare. An actual home. If you help me get my brother, there’s a place we can go to. He knows where it is.”

  All the aggression had faded from her face. ‘That’s what Rose used to talk about,’ she whispered.