What Lies Below Read online

  “Sir, can you repeat? Over,” he said.

  “I said proceed to remove the rest of the population there, corporal,” said Jackson, “I don’t want the problem returning in a few years, so they all have to go.”

  Corporal Ranold paused for a moment. No. He had heard correctly. The Governor had ordered that he and his men slaughter the settlement.

  “Sir, wouldn’t it be better to order a roundup and bring them in? Over,” he asked, but he already knew the answer.

  “What was that?” asked Jackson. “You’re questioning my decision? Don’t be silly. Have you any idea of the cost of such an operation? Better they are put down now, corporal. Follow your orders and then find that cache of tech. That is all you are to bring back. And don’t bother to come back if you don’t find it.”

  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?”
<
br />   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.”