Thrown Away (3 page)

Through the narrow slit that was his only view of the room, Jack saw the dark shape move,
slowly sweeping the area and peering through the two openings that led into the other two rooms in his small, rubbish-littered hideout.

He knew that these places had once been called apartments, and he guessed that centuries ago they would have been homes for people, couples, or even whole families. This much he had learnt from the remnants of magazines and books that could occasionally be found among the ruins and from the signs that he had seen on the stairwells of many of the old buildings. If you took the time to look around, evidence of the old days
- from before the world collapsed into the chaos that he'd seen for most his life - was everywhere. Tatty old posters, half worn away by the weather, still clung to the walls, depicting people in some of the strangest clothing he had ever seen - bright and sparkling costumes that surely couldn’t have been every-day wear.

Books lying in tattered heaps in the corners of old buildings were also a treasure of tales of the old world. Most of them had been burned for
fuel, but occasionally he would come across them, sometimes hidden away where someone hadn’t looked. And the magazines and old newspapers - he loved them the most - not only could he learn about things from the long gone, but there were pictures that showed him what things had looked like back then.

Once, in a run-down office building many miles across the city, out near the Ashlands, he had found an article about the very street that he was on. Some sort of
horrible act had been committed. A murder, he thought, but it wasn’t the scene of uniformed soldiers that had interested him. It had been the buildings in the background of the picture. He could clearly see the very building that he was in, and next to it the vast thing that had once been called The Grand Theatre. Jack didn’t know what one of those was, but by the size of the place, he thought it must have been something important.

Two huge towers rose on either side of the main entrance, and a massive board with bright white l
ettering stood as a bold centrepiece. There were hundreds of people queuing outside the entrance, just yards from a cordoned off area patrolled by men in uniforms. All of those people were waiting to be allowed admittance into the vast building that he knew was now, centuries later, just an empty shell.

Jack had been in there before
he discovered the offices nearby, and wondered in awe what the huge room, with the cracked and weathered carpets, was for. In the magazine there was a picture of the interior, with rows upon rows of seats, all filled with smiling people as they waited for whatever spectacle happened at The Grand Theatre. He had presumed that it was some kind of meeting place, and that the stage at one end of the room - now just a hollow hole in the ground with a twisted set of metal stairs leading up to nothing - was where someone important would stand.

So much was hidden away, waiting to be found by those
with an eye for searching. So much still left behind but unnoticed. A keen eye could spot the clues that many had missed, and Jack had collected a few almost intact magazines over the years - something considered valuable just for the paper. And as he sat in the wardrobe, watching the figure of the Hunter move through the room, his gaze stopped on the small pile of magazines across the room in the corner, where he had left them, and when one of the tracer lights passed over them, stopped and went back to settle on the top magazine, his heart started to thump harder.

Stupid
.

He had left them out in full view, an obvious sign of at least recent occupancy.

The dark shape of the Hunter moved across the room, rifle sweeping backwards and forwards, covering the door, the windows, and the dark recesses as the soldier approached the corner. The figure moved out of Jack's slice of vision, but he could hear the rustle of paper, pages being flicked through, being disturbed. And then the sound of the same boots again, thudding across the boards, the shadow moving swiftly out of the room and then heading away. They were leaving, treading heavily on creaking floorboards as they moved off down the corridor.

Jack breathed
again, still keeping as quiet as he could, but his lungs had been close to forcing the breath out of him, screaming to inhale more air, and it was a relief to exhale and fill them again. Stupid, he thought. Part way through the raid he had stopped regulating his breathing and held it. And he'd held it so long that it was too late to exhale without making a loud noise. If the soldiers had been there for a minute longer he wouldn’t have been able to keep his breath in, and right now he’d be in the back of their vehicle, on his way to wherever they went.

The urge to look out was almost overwhelming. He needed to see if they had taken his magazines. They were his most prized belon
gings, picked up here and there from various hidden treasure troves across the city - at least a dozen of them, including the one that the boy had left behind. The one the boy had drawn pictures in.

Now Jack felt the ache in his chest, a pain that he had tried to keep at bay for
two years, but sometimes it crept over him at the most unexpected moment. He couldn’t think of that right now, mustn't drift back into self-loathing and thoughts of the past that was lost.

He just stayed there, still, impatience burning in his guts, the urge to burst from his hiding place and scramble across the room almost unbearable, knowing that any noise could bring the soldiers back. He cursed his own foolishness. Why had he not just put them in his rucksack? That was where he normally kept them. He had taken them out to look at, and to add his newest finds to the leather sleeve that he kept them in to protect them from damage. Three new magazines to add, and yet he hadn’t put them away afterwards
. Instead he had drifted off to sleep, leaving them in a pile, and only waking at the tremendous noise of the approaching Dropship. In his panic to hide he had forgotten about the magazines and had just run for the wardrobe.

Now he couldn't see if they were still there
, and couldn't see if the Hunter had taken any of them. The paper was worth money to the right buyer, but not as much as their sentimental value to Jack, and nowhere near as much as that magazine with the boy's drawings.

There was no price on that one. Could never be.
He had scolded the boy, told him off for defacing what was precious to him, and yet, now, the one with the drawings in it was the most valuable thing to him.

The right choice

Three years before...

The boy had no shoes on the day Jack met him, and kept repeating that fact as Jack stood there, considering what to do next.

This isn't my problem, he thought. This is just stupid of me, staying here in full view for too long. I'm an open target. I need to move on.

But what about the chi
ld?

I could help him if I chose to, if I was willing to take the burden. Or maybe I could at least take him to The Crossing, and find someone who would want a boy to work for them.

There was no one who could be trusted. Jack sighed. Finally, he decided to just walk away. This was a problem that he didn’t need. But then a memory from his own childhood came to him, because Jack had lived on the inside of the barrier once, but that was so very long ago.

Only two tickets

Many years before...

Jack could only h
ave been six or seven years old - he couldn't recall exactly - and all of his memories of those days were remembered like a small child would remember them.

He was very young when he stopped living on the inside of the barrier and found himself walking in a line, following other children. He
wore no shoes and they were walking over the hard, gravelled ground, out of the security gates and into the crumbling ruins that was the
outside
.

The day before he had been at home, in the warmth, playing with his toys and reading his books
. His parents had been packing up everything in the house, or at least most of it. He had peered into his parent's bedroom and saw his mother putting things into a large plastic container that looked like an over-sized suitcase. It wasn’t one of their normal suitcases, the purple ones under their bed. This was different. His mother was putting things into it, and then taking them out, and he thought that she seemed to be choosing what to take with her.

They had gone on what his father called vacations, sometimes. It meant leaving, and it meant travelling on the sub-train for a long time, and then arriving at a place where there was sand and lots of water. They would stay there for a few days and then go home again. But this time had been different. All the furniture was covered with plastic sheeting, and the cupboards -
which were normally filled with food - were now empty.

He'd gone back to his toys, not paying attention, preferring to use his crayons to draw stick men with guns shooting monsters, or huge dinosaurs eating helpless victim
s. But then he heard raised voices from his parent's room. They were arguing, he'd thought. It wasn’t a frequent thing. His parents were both quiet people, prone to long periods of silence. He couldn't hear what the argument was about, but vividly recalled one phrase that his mother said.

"
But there are only two tickets."

Those
were the only words of the conversation that he'd caught, and it was the last thing he ever heard his mother say. A short while later he heard the front door open, and then shut, and then two men were in the room with him, ushering him out of the house.

Jack knew now that
his parents had made some kind of decision that day, all those years ago, and the choice meant that he would go somewhere else. He'd figured that much out for himself. There were only two tickets to whatever journey his parents had gone on, and therefore, he couldn't go with them. Forty years must have passed, and he still didn't know where they'd gone. He always thought that you came back from a vacation.

As he'd walked in line with the other children, fear building in his chest as he saw the massive walls that protected the inner city
- which had been his home for the entirety of his life - becoming more distant, further behind them with every step that they took out into the ruins. He remembered that his feet hurt on the gravel, and they bled, just like the feet of the boy as he sat at the side of the road that day.

A choice had been made a very long time ago that led to
Jack walking barefoot away from every comfort he'd ever known, into a life much more precarious, harsh, and dangerous.

Let's get moving

Two years before...

Why had he made a decision, right then, to not leave the boy without first offering to help? Had he seen
something of himself there, sitting on the side of the road? Had he seen that the boy was like him?

"Come on," Jack said, looking around, scoping the streets and the abandoned buildings for movement. If the boy had been bait, the attack would already have
been upon him.

But that didn’t mean they were safe.

Jack started to walk along the sidewalk, his machetes still drawn, eyes flickering over every possible hiding place. But when he stopped at the intersection and glanced back, the boy hadn't followed him. The child was standing, but not walking. He was just standing there, his tiny, round face screwed up with indecision.

The kid is terrified, he thought, and can't trust me. He couldn't blame the child for being cautious or afraid, but alive was always better than dead, and if the boy stayed where he was, he would be dead before morning. Maybe the kid didn't realise that?

He sighed, impatient but reluctant to leave the boy to his fate.

"I've got food," Jack shouted. "And…
we'll try to find something for your feet."

The boy's expression changed at that, a fl
icker of hope removing the wide-eyed fear from his eyes.

"New shoes?" the boy asked as he took
a single, tentative step forward.

"Yes!" Jack said, already beginning to regret what this offer would cost him. "But let's get moving."
He waved his arm, indicating the buildings around them. "You think losing your shoes is bad? There are worse things that folks will do to you if you stay here too long."

Jack headed off down the street, deciding if the boy followed him he would help him, at least for a while. But if he didn't follow, then it was his choice, his
life. Jack was already putting himself out, he thought. If the boy didn't come, then fate would decide what would happen to him.

But the boy did follow, and was soon jogging along beside him, not complaining even once. If his feet hurt him as they travelled away from The Crossing, the child didn't make it
apparent.

Jack's hideout at the time was a long walk away, at least four miles from The Crossing, and he didn't stop to rest. It would be dark in a few hours and he wanted to be barricaded in by then, hidden away from what prowled the streets at night.

As they walked, he glanced over at the boy, realising for the first time just how small the child was. He couldn't have been older than six years old, about the age that Jack had been when he had escaped from the workhouse.