Authors: Glynn James
Almost Right
Old Tech
“You were almost right,” said Jack. “It’s not here.”
They stood side by side in the large clearing that FirstMan
had brought them to, the boy still much shorter than Jack, even though he had
grown quickly in the two years that had passed. Jack placed his hand on Ryan’s
shoulder and nodded. “You already knew that when we were on our way back here,
though, didn’t you?”
“Almost?” asked Ryan with a sheepish grin. “I wanted to find
it for them, but it didn’t matter how hard I concentrated, nothing came. I
can’t do what you do. Not always. It just doesn’t come every time, like with
you. I just kept getting an urge to search further out.”
Jack nodded, though he wasn’t surprised in the least that the
kid had picked up some of his talent during the time they had spent travelling
together. He thought that something like that must rub off on those around you.
It certainly had on Drogan, though his old – now departed – friend had been
more unpredictable with his results. And when he thought back, hadn’t he
himself gained the ability from travelling with that old man, when he had been
very young? It wasn’t a natural ability. That much was for sure.
“Sure you can, if you try,” Jack said. “And maybe further out
is precisely where you should be looking? Maybe you were right but didn’t
follow your guts?”
The boy frowned up at him, and Jack let go of his shoulder and
turned to scan the horizon, ignoring the crumbling buildings nearby. They were
wrong about those. The whole complex had been used for manufacturing
electronics at some point in the past. A very long time ago, Jack thought. But
most of what had been there had been taken, or moved to somewhere else. Not all
of it had travelled far.
He squinted in the bright sun and tried to ignore the figures
standing a hundred yards away, watching them. FirstMan and his troops. He
wasn’t yet sure about them, especially one now called RightHand, but Ryan
seemed to think they were okay, seemed at ease around them. But they weren’t
Junkers, Jack knew, or they hadn’t always been. He didn’t trust their past,
whatever that may be. He also found it distracting having them standing there,
watching hopefully. This thing they were here to find was important to them.
His gaze wandered over the horizon, passing skeletal
structures that had once been a city. Many other buildings would have stood
between each of the towering ruins but had long since crumbled and collapsed, leaving
these odd, vast towers, tottering on the edge of extinction themselves, dotted
around the landscape like lonely teeth in a rotten maw.
Two of them caught his attention and drew him towards them,
and he knew that one of them held the thing they were there to find, but he
couldn’t decide which it was or what was unusual about the other. Two ruined
buildings, and one that he needed to search, but both had something to hide.
They both looked guilty, he thought.
“So do you think it’s here, then?” asked Ryan. Jack turned
back to look at the boy, noting with a little amusement how his hair had been
left to grow long and how it now curled up near his shoulders. Needs cutting,
he thought. Was that a slight hint of impatience he saw in the boy’s
expression? Maybe.
“Yes,” Jack replied. “I think it’s here, but we’re looking in
the wrong place. It was moved at some point, a long time ago, but not far. It’s
further out, though, in one of the distant buildings.”
Ryan looked hopeful at this. “But, where?” he asked, looking
out at the far buildings.
Jack pointed at the first, a tall building, half collapsed but
still rising maybe half a dozen floors from the ground, and then at the second,
much more squat in comparison. Both were at least a mile from where they stood.
“See the tall spire,” he said, “and see that one that’s already collapsed in?”
Ryan nodded.
“It’s one of those two,” Jack said. “I’m sure of it.”
“But which?” Ryan asked.
“That’s what I want you to tell me,” said Jack. “Look at them.
See if you can spot what I can’t.”
Ryan did as he was told, staring off into the distance, first
at the shorter building and then at the collapsed one. He frowned. It was
there, that gut feeling, just as Jack had always said it would be, but both
buildings called to him. It was a strange feeling to have, and Ryan had never
felt it as Jack described it while he had been with him. It wasn’t until he had
been living with the Junkers for a few months that he started to really
understand how things called to him. He only had to learn to listen to his
instincts and spot the signs that were right in front of him.
He stared hard at the taller building, sensing something
hidden there that had been long forgotten, and feeling that people had recently
been there but not discovered the secret that was hidden within. Had they been
there looking for it? He couldn’t tell, but he knew they had been disappointed
when they left.
The second building – the much smaller ruin – felt entirely
different, though. It had been a very long time since anyone had ventured there,
so long that he felt it could maybe be decades or centuries. “I don’t know
which it is,” he said.
“Hmm,” mumbled Jack. “Me neither. But you get something from
both?”
“Yes,” said Ryan.
“Want to make guess at it?”
Ryan shook his head.
Jack turned back to stare at the tall building.
Recently searched, he thought. Not recent as in months, but
maybe a year. A group stayed there. The other building. Not searched since the
days of the old world. Untouched. Something is hidden there, though, and he
knew that would bug him. The taller building was what his gut now said.
“It’s the tall one,” he said, turning back to Ryan.
“You think?” asked the boy, and for one moment Jack questioned
his instinct. “I thought that too!”
“You know, we don’t have to stay,” Jack said, his voice low.
Ryan looked up at him, frowning.
“We don’t have to stay with these people. We’d be fine on our
own again, just like we used to be. We could just strike out, there.” Jack
nodded towards the buildings in the distance.
“I don’t want to leave,” said Ryan. “And you won’t, if you
stay.”
Jack smiled. “If I stay?”
“If you don’t head off out there alone,” said Ryan.
“Boy, I lost you for over two years... nearly three,” said
Jack. “Nearly never found you. I won’t let that happen again. If it means
getting used to these…” he waved his hand at the group gathered fifty yards
away, “junk people, then that’s what it means.”
Ryan grinned. “They’re called Junkers,” he said.
“Junkers, yes. I’m sure I’ll get used to them.”
They stood silent for a minute, the time passing slowly as
they both struggled to find the right thing to say. Finally Ryan spoke. “So,
the tall building,” he said. “That’s where we need to look?”
Jack nodded. “That’s where your FirstMan’s gadget is,” he
said.
All Out of Cache
A year before
They couldn’t find the equipment cache. Ranold had the
entire troop out for two days, searching the area and questioning the captured
Junkers, but no one knew where it was. It was hidden, and only Jagan had known
where he kept his stash.
He stood in what the Junkers called The Throne Room, staring
around at the mess. The place that Jagan had called home was trashed, turned
over and over by his troops, the floors pulled up, the tunnel that led out the
back exposed, but they found nothing. Wherever Jagan had kept his stash of goods
it was well hidden. The Junkers couldn’t even tell him where Jagan went, most
of the time.
That was something that niggled at the back of his mind. He
had always been given the impression that the Junkers, the savages that lived
out in the junk and wastelands were precisely that – savages – but they were
polite, they built homes hidden in the junk, and they taught their children to
read and they had laws. It was tribal, sure, but this was no savage society.
And he had orders to kill them all.
He’d seen the expressions on the faces of his troops when he
informed them of the Governor’s command. Not a single man or woman wanted to
obey. Not one. He wondered, thinking about how they had reacted, if any of them
would even follow the orders. He imagined the situation escalating into
something messy, a fight between the squads, those that would carry out their
orders and those who refused to murder innocent civilians.
Because they all saw that these people weren’t monsters, and
they’d all seen the school of a hundred or more children, sitting in a large circle
inside the hollowed out hull of an abandoned sailing ship, their grubby, dirty
faces, fearful of the troopers but bright eyed and keen to learn the magic of reading
and joy of singing songs.
And they’d all known that those frightened faces thought the
troopers were the bad guys. And he supposed they were, or could be. But more
importantly they could
not
be, as well.
No. He thought. There would be no fight. Not one of his troops
would obey that order. They had all spent time capturing vagrants in the Outer
Zone, but their orders were to capture alive, not kill. This was an entirely
different thing.
And there was this problem of the equipment cache. Whatever
Jagan had been keeping here was important to Governor Jackson, and that man
wanted it, but they couldn’t find it.
And that conversation hadn’t gone well.
“Sir, reporting that after forty-eight hours we are unable to
locate the cache,” he’d said.
Silence on the other end of the radio. But then Jackson
finally spoke.
“Keep looking,” he said.
“Yes, sir. We have supplies for maybe two more days before we
have to head back.”
“No, corporal. You can take supplies from that Junker scum.
You will erase them anyway, once you are done. The only reason I allow you to
let them live, for now, is because you insist you need to question them. But
that isn’t working, is it? Find the cache and bring it back. You are not to
return until you locate it.”
“Yes, sir, but what if we don’t find it?”
“Then you keep searching until you do.”
Keep searching until you do find it.
Ranold looked at the massive bed that sprawled over a large
area in the corner of Jagan’s throne room, the pillow, rugs and fur turned
over. If they’d captured him instead of killing him, as ordered, then maybe
they’d have found it by now, but that was another thing Jackson had demanded
without argument.
The man simply had no grasp of operations or how to achieve a
goal. Well, Ranold thought, maybe he did, but his methods were ridiculous and
self-defeating.
Waylan entered the throne room from the outside and Ranold
turned to him. He noticed that the weather had changed, and the sun was shining
down on the huge open ground outside Jagan’s abode.
“Hey,” said Waylan, a keen expression on his face. “You know,
they have an underground mushroom farm here.”
Ranold frowned. “A what?”
“Seriously,” said Waylan. “It’s massive. Must be an old
warehouse, covered by the junk ages ago. It’s huge inside and dark. Just a bit
of light shining through some gaps. It’s bigger than that reclaiming building
back at the facility.”
Ranold shook his head. “So much for savages,” he said.
Waylan’s expression turned serious. “We can’t kill these
people,” he said. And there it was, the first spoken acknowledgement of what
they all knew.
“I know,” said Ranold. “But if we don’t, and we don’t find
that cache, then we can’t go back. Jackson was quite clear.”
“What’s he gonna do?” asked Waylan. “Demote us all?”
“He’ll court martial us if we go back having disobeyed orders,”
said Ranold. “He was quite clear about that.”
“Then I won’t go back,” Waylan said nervously.
Ranold frowned. “What?”
“I won’t go back,” repeated Waylan.
“What do you mean?” asked Ranold. “What will you do?”
“I’ll stay here,” said Waylan.
Ranold was surprised by this and stood silently for moment.
Waylan seemed to take this as an indication to go on.
“Look,” he said. “These people need help. They’ve spent the
last few years under the grip of that idiot, Jagan. He killed them if they
disobeyed, and you don’t even want to hear the other things he did.”
“I know what he was like,” said Ranold. “You remember I was a
grunt when we took down his pit fighting operation in the Outer Zone?”
“Yeah,” Waylan said. “Of course. I forgot. But anyway, these
people need someone to take charge and rebuild, man. Come on. Wasn’t that our
dream anyway? Sure, we wanted to do it out in the new world, but we’ve found it
right here. And, oh boy, you wanna see the good stuff that’s just gathering
dirt around here. I mean old tech, generators, appliances, all sorts of gear.
We could have power up and running in a matter of days.”
“Junk is not a good reason to stay out here,” said Ranold.
“Yes, I know,” said Waylan. “But did you know there are over a
thousand Junkers here and in the surrounding area?
“What?” said Ranold. “That many? A few hundred, I thought.”
“I spoke to some of the elders. Now they’re starting to think
we won’t kill them all, they’re talking, and they told me over a thousand.
There’s about twenty hidden settlements. C’mon, man. You wanted to start anew,
to build something meaningful and not have to follow orders. We don’t have to
go to the new world to do that. We found it right here. This is what you said
your dad wanted. What you wanted.”
“What of the others?” asked Ranold. “Not everyone is going to
want to stay.”
“I think most, if not all, will. But we’ll deal with it,” said
Waylan. “Right here. This is important.”
Right here, thought Ranold. And I like mushrooms.
Hidden treasures
Now
“How does it work?” asked FirstMan as he walked beside Jack.
They hadn’t taken Jack’s words on faith, and he thought that FirstMan believed him
only because Ryan believed, and he made a note to ask how the boy had gained
such trust among these men.
“What?” asked Jack.
“The way you and Ryan find things,” said FirstMan. The man was
older than Jack had expected, probably older than Jack by a decade, and he bore
the scars of combat to show for it. Deep lines etched one side of his face,
which Jack suspected may be shrapnel wound scars, and there was mark on his
chin that looked like it had been very deep. “You just stand there and then you
know where stuff is,” said FirstMan. “It’s quite unnerving.”
“It’s not really just standing there,” said Jack, finding it
awkward to explain. “I can somehow read my surroundings and…sense? I think
that’s the best word, sense, what happened before, just by the signs left
behind. You ever hear of something called dowsing?”
FirstMan nodded.
“Well,” continued Jack. “It’s sort of like that but looking
for more than just water.”
FirstMan was silent for a moment. “You can find clean water?”
he asked, now even more keen for answers.
“It’s all around us,” said Jack. “And that cage you kept me
in?”
FirstMan frowned.
“Well, that hole to take a dump in probably drops straight
down into an underground river,” he said. “But yes, it’s sort of like dowsing,
for something other than water, and without the stick.”
“But you can sense it all the way over there?” quizzed
FirstMan, indicating the tall ruin that loomed over the flattened landscape
just a quarter of a mile away. The mountains of trash weren’t present in this
area of the Junklands, but there was still plenty of junk strewn about, just
not mountainous amounts of it.
“It’s something I picked up from an old man, back when I was a
kid, just by watching him work,” Jack continued. “You think it’s odd, what I
can do? You want to see a crooked old man smelling the air and then finding an
old stash of tools three floors down in a cellar five miles away.”
FirstMan stopped walking and looked at Jack with an incredulous
expression. “You’re serious?”
Jack laughed. “Very,” he said. “I was maybe eight years old,
about Ryan’s age, really, and we were out in the middle of nowhere, not far
from the Ashlands, and places where people don’t go and shouldn’t go, and he
stood for half an hour, smelling the air. All I could smell was that ash smell.
You ever been out there?”
“To the blighted lands?” asked FirstMan. “Yes, a few times,
but we were always geared up. You can’t smell anything in full suits of combat
carapace. Dismal place, though. Full of things that should be dead.”
Jack nodded. “That’s the place,” he said. “Well, the old man
stood there for ages and then just started walking. Didn’t speak a word. We
went for half a mile, him stopping every few minutes to sniff, then another
half mile, and so on and on for about five miles. Eventually we stopped at a
ruined building, just like all the other thousands of ruins out there. Nothing
to distinguish it from any other. Then he sniffed again, nodded, pointed at the
ground and told me to dig. Plopped himself down on the floor a few feet away to
roll a smoke and watch me.”
“And you found tools?” asked FirstMan.
“Pristine tools,” said Jack. “Boxes and boxes of the damn
things. I dug where he pointed and opened up a stairwell that nearly collapsed
under me. Three cellars deep the place was, and full of cobwebs and spiders and
all kinds of nasty stuff. He made me build a wheel cart from scratch just to
haul the stuff back to The Crossing. Never lifted a hand to help with any of it,
either.”
“Harsh,” said FirstMan.
“Yeah, but I learned a lot,” said Jack. “I learned a lot and I
learned it fast. I was his slave, and I got paid with food and little else, but
the talent I learned from him was worth that price. You know, he could stand
still in a room while talking to you and just vanish. Still talking, just
somehow not visible, and yet not leave the room. It took me a long time to
realise that most of it was about what was in your own mind. He had this theory
that he went on about a lot. He thought that people used to be able to do many
more things that were forgotten and that you just had to remember how to do it.”
“Sounds strange, but amazing still,” said FirstMan.
Jack laughed. “Yeah, it does. He said his ability to vanish
was just a matter of making someone else forget he was there. The old guy was
pretty screwed up.”
They arrived at a wide, open ground across from the target building.
The huge space appeared to have been some sort of plaza. The ground was covered
in broken slabs that still bore faded colours and patterns that Jack couldn’t
make out clearly. Across the other side of the plaza was the rusted carcass of
a tank, with its gun long collapsed to the ground.
The group of armoured troops that FirstMan had brought with
them, all geared out in Hunter combat armour, the origin of which was still a
puzzle to Jack and a question he was itching to ask, started forward, heading
towards the tall building. But Jack felt something uneasy in his stomach, something
urgent, and it wasn’t the need to relieve himself.
Something was not right here, but he couldn’t place what it
was.
“Wait,” he said, lifting his hand and signalling the men back.
A few stared at him questioningly, and then looked to FirstMan for orders. But
FirstMan waved them back.
“Problem?” asked FirstMan.
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Something odd. Something makes me
nervous.”
Jack turned to Ryan. “Buddy, get back over there near the
building and keep out of the way.” Then he turned back to FirstMan. “Just in
case.”
Ryan didn’t wait to question, and jogged back to the building
opposite the taller spire, and stood peering around the edge of a crumbling
wall, the curiosity too much to just hunker down and hide.
Jack stared at the front of the building, and at the junk
strewn around it. There was a very definite area, maybe fifty feet wide, in
front of the building that was completely clear of junk. The ground was still
dusty, and dirty, but there was a section up on the dais in front of the
building that was…
That was it. That was what was wrong.
“Everybody get back under cover,” Jack said as he peered at
the patch of ground and stooped to pick up a stone. He waited until they were
all behind cover, took a dozen steps forward, and threw the rock. He waited two
seconds to confirm that the stone had fallen inside the open space, and stepped
to the side, putting the ruined tank in between him and the clear spot.
There was a click, a series of beeping sounds echoing across
the plaza, then a grating sound, followed by a continuous tick, tick, tick that
didn’t seem to stop. Eventually he edged forward and peered around the edge of
the tank. In the middle of the dais, where the clear spot had been, was a gun
turret sticking up from the ground. It was pointing directly at where the stone
had landed and was furiously attempting to shoot it.
But it was out of ammunition.
FirstMan arrived next to him, the other troopers following.
The leader peered at the angry gun as it shifted and tried to track anything
else in the locality, again repeatedly firing nothing at whatever it had
decided was a target.
“Well, that could have been messy,” said FirstMan, turning to
Jack. “I think maybe I’ll just trust whatever strange talent you have from now
on,” he said.
Jack peered at the man who led the Junkers. There was
something unusual about him. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked.
FirstMan frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not like the rest of the people out here,” said Jack.
“You and your men.”
FirstMan smiled. “So not just good at finding things, then,”
he said. “You spot far more than I’m comfortable with, Jack.”
Jack shook his head and smiled back. “I’m no threat, you know
that,” he said. “But you didn’t take that armour from dead Inner Zone troopers,
did you?”
FirstMan grinned back. “No, it was issued to me,” he said,
deciding that he liked this man, Jack, and considering that the man would have
just saved their lives if the defence gun had been packing ammunition, he
thought he could trust him. “I’m Ranold. Previously Corporal Ranold, of the
Inner Zone RAD. Though I prefer the Junker term FirstMan, if you wouldn’t mind
sticking to that in front of other Junkers. All of my men are ex-RAD as well.
But we’re all Junkers now, and we’ve worked hard to unite the tribes into one.”
Jack looked puzzled. “Then why are you out here?”
“It’s a very long story,” said FirstMan. “And one that we
should tell another time. When we have what we came for.”
“It will be below ground level,” said Jack, indicating the
building with a nod. “Probably in some kind of storage. I think there was a
battle in this area, a long time ago, and the tech was moved and secured.” He
turned and started towards the front of the building.
“So a bunker, you think?” replied FirstMan, following him.
“A bunker,” replied Jack. “Though I doubt it’s locked. Just
well hidden.”
“Then let’s go find it, shall we?” said FirstMan.