Radio Hope (Toxic World Book 1) (8 page)

In front
of the crowd stood the man who had brought the radios. He scowled at the guards from behind the spider of his nose bandage. Next to him stood his daughter, still dressed as a boy. Marcus recognized several of the regulars who came to the harvest market every year. He also saw a lot of newcomers.

Newcomers were always trouble.
They didn’t understand how the deal worked and it took some time to get it through their uncivilized heads.

Marcus told Clyde to stay at the gate and went to meet them.

“Where’s The Doctor?” the man with the broken nose asked.

“I speak for The Doctor.”

“I’ve heard that said,” the man nodded.

“So what’s your
business?” Marcus asked.

The scavenger fixed him with a cold gaze.

“We want to move inside.”

CHAPTER NINE

Jackson was yawning when they arrived at his shed. He’d made an early run to the village to make sure they had enough water to last them a while, and left his cart with Olivia. It wasn’t so they could use it themselves—none of the villagers ever strayed north of the hills—but he wasn’t about to leave his cart sitting around in the Burbs where it could get stolen.

Annette came down the dirty lane
armed to the teeth. Next to her walked some big guy he didn’t know and a smaller guy he recognized as one of Abe’s technological flunkies who worked as a DJ at the radio station. Great, a mouthpiece of the system. What was he coming along for? They must be scavenging for some piece of technology.

All three carried identical army packs. The big guy had an AK-47, one of the later Chinese patterns, while the mouthpiece had an automatic pistol in a holster at his belt.
Annette had a revolver, plus a shotgun and a rifle case slung to her back.

“Well, at least they’re well prepared,” Jackson muttered.

Jackson wasn’t. Besides a tattered gray overcoat, its pockets stuffed with scraps of food, and a small canvas bag containing a canteen, his cleaver, and a blanket, he had nothing.

“Hey Jackson, this is Mitch Evans and Ha-Ram Lee,” Annette said as they stopped before him.

“You the guy with the map?” Mitch asked, not trying to hide the fact that he was staring at Jackson’s brand. Ha-Ram was staring too.

“Yeah, but don’t spread that around. Plenty of people in the Burbs who would slit my throat to get it.”

Mitch grinned and said in a mocking voice, “Who’s to say I wouldn’t?”

“Very impressive, tough guy, let’s go,” Jackson replied, turning his back on him.

“Where’s your pack?” Annette said as they headed south from the Burbs.

“I don’t have one.
Where’s my gun?”

“
He said no to that, and I barely got him to say yes to sponsoring your friend. I got your share of the food in my pack. How are you going to carry it?”

“I’m not, you are,” Jackson said.

He felt bad giving this woman attitude, since she was just an unwitting and probably unwilling lackey of the powers-that-be, but he had to establish dominance from the start. Mitch he couldn’t take, Annette he couldn’t outshoot (even if he had a gun), so he had to hold firm. He was the one with the topo, after all. Information was power. Abe knew that all too well with his radio station.

Once they were ou
t of sight of the last of the shacks, Jackson stopped and pulled out the map from where it was tucked under his shirt. Even though it was printed on government-issue durable cloth paper and well laminated, he handled it with care. He unfolded it and spread it on a flat rock, using small stones to keep the wind from catching the corners. Annette, Mitch, and Ha-Ram peered over his shoulder as he crouched over the map.

For a moment he looked at all the old place names, now wiped out by the greed and
shortsightedness of the ruling class. How many millions dead in this region alone? How many streams poisoned? How many forests burned? All to enrich the lucky few.

And now he was working for them. Fuck.

“Here’s New City Cove,” he said, pointing to a little arc next to a blue expanse on the map, “and here are the mountains running from north to south. There’s the North Pass and the South Pass. What Abe wants us to do is check out this other pass that most people in these parts don’t know about, which is all the way down here.”

His finger jabbed at a narrow defile in the complex contours of the topo. He
looked over his shoulder at his audience and saw only glazed eyes. Good. A topographic map was difficult to read if you’ve never seen one before, and were Annette and Mitch even literate?

Ha-Ram’s brow
furrowed in concentration. His eyes lit up as he noticed the key in the lower right hand corner. Jackson tensed. He’d have to watch that one.

“Anyway,” he continued,
hunching over the map again and just happening to block Ha-Ram’s view of the key, “As you can see it’s a long march southeast of Toxic Bay. I’ve arranged for a fisherman to take us across and—”

“Wait a minute,” Mitch interrupted him, “you want to cross the bay?”

Jackson looked at him. “The other option is to walk around it, which would take more than a day, and we’d be skirting the petrochemical works, the docks, the old industrial park, and the city. Oh, and since Abe had us start so late, we’d have to camp for the night somewhere close to the petrochemical works. You want to do that?”

Mitch jabbed a thumb in Annette’s direction. “She’s the reason we’re starting so late.”

Annette looked about to object, then she shut her mouth and shook her head.

Jackson folded
the map and tucked it back under his shirt. “Let’s go.”

They continued through the hills. As the stench from Toxic Bay began to assail their nostrils, each of them put some cloth around their nose and mouth.

“I can’t believe you actually spend time with these fisheaters,” Mitch grumbled.

“Plenty of people in the Burbs and the wildlands eat fish,” Jackson countered. “When the rich take all the best grazing lands for themselves and hoard all the meat animals what do you expect people to eat?”

Mitch snorted. “It’s their fault if they don’t know how to survive. I bet you never ate fish before you fucked your life up.”

Jackson bit his tongue. This idiot was so deep in the system he couldn’t see its injustices. Typical ruling class tactic—g
ive some scraps to a select few and they’ll defend the system until they die.

They passed out of the hills and the village
came into sight. Ha-Ram stopped in his tracks.

“Ugh! Look at this place,” he gasped.

A breeze wafted off the bay, stinging their eyes.

“You never seen the bay before?” Jackson asked him.

Ha-Ram shook his head slowly. “It’s worse than I heard.”

Jackson grunted and led them down to the settlement, where a group of villagers
stood waiting. They were all armed with spears and clubs. Oscar had a battered old shotgun. The children who usually greeted Jackson were nowhere to be seen. He was the only outsider who came here regularly. These people had moved here specifically to be away from outsiders. Outsiders meant trouble.

“Hey Jackson, boat’s ready,” Oscar told
him in a tone that indicated they should get on it right away.

“Hold on, I just need to tell
Olivia something.”

Oscar replied with an impatient sigh. Jackson turned to the others, who were looking about them uncertainly. Ha-Ram was coughing and pressing his handkerchie
f to his face. Annette was a bit green around the gills and had her hand on the butt of her revolver. Mitch looked like he was trying to hold his breath until they got out of there. He gripped his AK-47 and glared at the villagers.

Like how the other half live
?
Jackson thought.

“I’ll be back in one minute,” he told them.

“You better be,” Mitch said in a strangled voice.

Jackson went to
Olivia’s hut. She stood at the doorway waiting for him and pulled him inside.

“I got it!” Jackson said. “All you have to do is go to the gates and tell them Abraham Weissman sent you. He’s going to make you an associate.”

Olivia smiled sadly and put her hand on his cheek. “We already talked about this.”

“But—”

“This is my home, Jackson.”

“Your home may get overrun. I’ve heard people say that the Righteous Horde is slaughtering anyone who looks sick.”

“Rumors. Scavenger talk.”

Jackson took both her hands in his. “Please go. For me?”

Olivia looked down at the floor, then back at him. “If they come near I’ll go.”

“But it might be too late then!”

“Oscar is putting sentries out. And we can always get on the boats.”

“There aren’t enough boats. G
o to New City. I want to see you there when I get back. Come on, this is the only reason I agreed to go on this mission. I don’t even know what we’re really doing out there.”

Olivia
kissed him. “OK, I’ll go the moment I hear they’re coming. Take care of yourself and come back in one piece, all right?”

Jackson kissed her and smiled. “I will. I always do.”

He hurried out the door before she could say any more. He didn’t look back as he gathered the others and headed down to the shore.

A dugout made from a hollowed tree trunk
waited for them. Jackson figured the tree must have come from further down the shore. No trees had grown around this bay for decades. A pair of villagers holding paddles waited for them. One had a boil the size of an egg next to his eye. The other had a cancerous lump on his neck. Mitch muttered something under his breath that Jackson didn’t catch.

The stench was much worse
this close to the water, a sharp, acrid smell that assailed the nostrils and stung the eyes. The dugout lay half on shore and half in the sludgy water. A few sickly looking reeds were all that grew here. Ha-Ram gagged.

Jackson climbed aboard. The others gingerly followed. Mitch cursed
as he slipped and one boot plunged into the water. He pulled it out and an oily film slid off it.

Once they were all aboard
, the boatmen pushed off and they glided out into the bay.

The surface
was covered with a multicolored sheen. Dead fish bobbed here and there, rotting in the filth. It was strangely silent. No seagulls cried overhead. No insects cheeped from the swamp. No frogs or toads croaked their throaty songs. A viscous sludge on the water smoothed out the ripples their boat would have otherwise made.

The people, too, kept silent. Jackson felt unnerved. He had never ventured out into the bay before. He couldn’t imagine how the others
must feel. He turned and looked back at the ragged group of sickly people who had chosen to live here. They had gathered in a crowd by the shore. Olivia stood a little apart, unmoving. The children had reappeared too, including Bobby. The blind albino boy waved at them. Even though he knew Bobby couldn’t see, Jackson found himself waving back.

The dugout cut through the water
toward the center of the bay. Jackson looked around with the curiosity of one seeing a familiar place from a new perspective. Behind him the village dwindled into the distance. A cluster of ruins stood not far off where once stood a town in the Old Times. A ruined harbor lay in front of it. From there a bridge spanned the mouth of one of the rivers that fed this bay. The concrete had cracked and darkened with years of acid rain. The center of the bridge was gone, the jagged, blackened edges to either side speaking mutely of some long ago explosion. On the other side of the bridge crumbled another little town with another little harbor. He’d heard one of the villagers say these two places were once pleasure resorts for rich people who visited on their yachts and wanted to stay in a quiet little town instead of the city on the opposite shore.

Jackson snorted. If
that was the case it must have been some time ago, because just beyond the second town stood the petrochemical works. The rich wouldn’t have parked their yachts next to that! Apparently this bay had been like most places and suffered years of decline before the final fall. Father had told him terrible tales of once-beautiful forests and valleys ravaged by war and strip mining and the other horrors born of the greed and violence of the ruling class.

A gagging sound snapped him out of his reverie. Ha-Ram was puking over the edge of the boat.

They were almost dead center of the bay now and had entered that horrid lane of iridescent sludge that oozed from the petrochemical works. Father had told him that most rivers had been diverted for industrial use, and so after this place had been abandoned, the water running through it was in a perfect position to catch anything coming from its rusting pipes and containers. He wondered how long it had been leaking, and how much more poison lay in that great beast’s belly.

His eyes stung and he blinked acidic tears. Mitch was lucky enough to have brought some goggles so his eyes looked fine, but Ha-Ram’s and Annette’s were red and bleary.
He noticed that Annette kept one eye closed.

Her shooting eye
,
Jackson figured.

The boatmen seemed unaffected. They paddled o
n silently, having no interest in speaking with or comforting their passengers.

Neither did he.
They needed to see how the other half lived. Perhaps it would raise their class-consciousness. Breathing in a few toxins was no more than what they deserved.

But he wasn’t getting wha
t
h
e
deserved. He’d been a good fighter for the proletariat all his life, and for what? He lived in a shack, an outcast from his own city and forced to breath in toxins just to make enough trade to eat. And he hadn’t changed society one bit.