Chapter 2

Cavern City, as its name suggested, was in a cavern. The entrance loomed out of an outcrop of rock, marked and rutted with the passage of many vehicles. Once, the cavern had provided protection from malicious dumper pilots who had succeeded in destroying any settlements on the surface.

This no longer mattered so much as Cavern City and the air around it was now marked on all navigation charts with big red crosses and the words “don’t fly anywhere near”, owing to the hail of gunfire, rockets and anything else that could be launched at low-flying spacecraft. One particularly angry individual had built a trebuchet capable of launching cars and had two kills to his name. The weapon had been left as a monument to his success on the ridge of bare rock that loomed above the town.

The entranceway was guarded by several armed men who were spread out across its gaping maw. Traci was almost disappointed not to see cages holding skeletons and torture victims. Instead, a slow moving queue of traffic inched its way into the gloom. It was all distinctly pedestrian.

They joined the queue and the quad bike edged forwards. Every time Kellin twisted the throttle the engine barked in fury and Traci’s head was thrown back. They hurtled forwards a few feet before coming to an equally violent stop. Fumes gushed from the exhaust and the wheels tore through the earth.

Traci climbed off. She was supposed to shoot him now and disappear into the throng, but she suspected gunning him down would probably attract more attention than it would avoid.

And he had kept his word. He might even prove useful in the future.

“Your payment,” she shouted over the noise from the exhaust.

“We’re not inside yet, plus you still have to pay taxes.”

“Taxes?”

“Yes, to the King. People are only allowed in if they’ve paid. The only thing you have to pay with is that weapon, and once you’ve lost that things will go badly for you.”

“Ah. You’ll pay my taxes?”

“Yes, the pistol and the ammo are worth way more than what I’ll lose. And that was the deal.”

She sighed, climbed back onto the quad and held on as it barrelled forward again. True to his word he had navigated them through a maze of scrap, canyons of sharpened steel and out at last onto a dry plain that rose up to the rocky outcrops on the ridge. There’d even been a farm growing malnourished corn.

Now they were here and he was going to pay her taxes.

“Permit!” the guard stomped over. He wore several layers of tyres sewn together into a crude form of armour. An effective looking assault rifle hung from his back, but to Traci’s eye his demeanour suggested that he did not expect trouble.

Kellin produced a slip of dirty paper and the guard squinted at it. He shifted his helmet, a battered old military issue that might once have been grey but was now camouflaged with several shades of brown, and grunted his satisfaction. There was a crown motif stamped on the helmet.

“Taxes!”

Kellin waved his hand at the trailer. The guard picked over it for a few moments and came away with the first aid kit and the goggles.

“Not a very good trip, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing in those pockets?”

Kellin proudly removed the glasses from his pocket and handed them over. The guard looked at them with astonishment before handing them back.

“And the girl?”

“She was in a bag.”

The guard turned to Traci, ignoring Kellin’s reply.

“Shame about all the blood on the dress. Might have been worth something to the King. Still, pretty face, shouldn’t have too much trouble finding work in town. Try one of the cocktail bars. Very posh places, I think you’ll fit right in. And dump this loser. He ain’t going anywhere.”

Kellin smiled at the words, though Traci noticed his hand gripping something in one of his pockets. He waited till they’d entered the tunnel before venting his feelings.

“Bastards. Almost as bad as the Government.” Kellin hawked and spat. “They’re getting worse, you know. Taxes, laws, committees! The different gangs used to keep them in check, but they’re getting too big for their boots. Boots that probably fit, too. Bastards.”

“At least you’ve got the permit,” Traci pointed out.

“No, I don’t. It’s been out of date for ages now. Just the guards can’t read and I never bring home anything worth taking.”

“Well you have today.”

They passed into the tunnel. She was surprised at the lights. Strings of them hung from the ceilings and walls. Some were actual light bulbs, others jars and bottles with copper wires threaded through them. Every so often they passed under a green light made from an old beer bottle. There were no red lights, and traffic flowed in two lanes up and down the tunnel, bumping into one another and exchanging cheerful, expletive-filled chatter.

The tunnel opened into a vast grotto. A city of shacks and storage containers climbed the walls. Buildings leaned upon one another like drunken men, threatening to fall upon the alleyways and streets that threaded between them like a well-designed maze.

Traders and hawkers manned their stalls and bellowed their wares above the general babble. Several bars lurked just beneath the eaves of the largest buildings, their speakers blaring out a mixture of noise and music. One man sat cross-legged on the floor and beat a drum in an undying rhythm with his bare hands, shaking his dreadlocks from side to side and grinning wildly at anyone who passed.

All the noise echoed off the caverns’ blackened walls and reverberated back.

The smog of mingled exhaust fumes and semi-cooked food struck them. Several vendors wafted questionable sticks of barbecued meat and fended off potential thieves with hefty-looking sticks. There were several signs advertising clean and unclean water; another promised fresh rat and dog, though one was simply titled “meat”.

A large slab of corrugated iron had been turned into a huge billboard. The crown emblem was emblazoned upon it in yellow spray paint, along with the words “Robo fite! To nite! The Area!!!!”

Someone had scored that writing out and replaced it with: “Robot fight, tonight and every night, in the arena!” This was followed by several comments about the use of exclamation marks.

Kellin plunged into the crowd, the quad bike howling at anyone foolish enough to stay in the way. They jolted down another street and then swung into a smaller grotto. The buildings crowded in as the ceiling stooped down on them like a closing mouth. Each fang of rock dripped water down onto the tin roofs in a steady tick.

“There’s never been a cave in, has there?” Traci asked nervously.

“We get one every few years.”

At last they pulled up in front of a stooping building held together by scaffolding and several blue shipping containers. Kellin opened a small garage door and, in a swift, well-practised manoeuvre, he reversed the trailer and quad in before striding out and pulling the garage closed.

“I guess this is where I say goodbye.” Traci turned to make her get away.

“Um, payment?”

“Oh, of course.”

“And you can stay here. Probably safer than trying to find somewhere else now.”

“Oh, really? Sorry, did I mention my boyfriend was a fireman — I mean, a soldier?”

Damn head wounds, Traci thought.

“True, but I wasn’t born in Cavern City. Someone was kind enough to put me up on my first night. All he asked in return was that I return the same favour whenever I could. It’s how people survive around here.”

“No funny business?” She snapped, handing him the ammo clip.

Kellin looked down at his dusty clothes and grime-stained boots.

“No funny business.”

Kellin’s home smelled of a mixture of engine oil, damp and cat. Indeed, the deep, dangerous and unsettling yowl suggested to Traci that she was by no means the only predator present. Strange mechanical monsters loomed out of the dark, frozen between workbenches littered with severed engines.

Taking a step forwards, Traci felt a shooting pain in her shin. There was an almighty crash as something fell off the table she’d just bumped into. The cat yowled back at the challenge from somewhere in its kingdom of darkness.

“I’ll turn a light on.”

Kellin, who navigated his home in the dark without incident, produced a box of matches, a pair of scissors and two bottles, one of which was clearly bleach. With two swift cuts he beheaded around twenty matches and dropped them into a jam jar. Three capfuls of mystery chemical followed them in, and then a liberal dose of bleach. A chemical smell filled the room, along with a dull hissing.

Kellin ignored both. He slapped the lid of the jar back on and shook vigorously. The jar lit the room with an eerie green glow. He repeated the procedure for two other jars, and now the monsters lurked in a lurid aqua light show.

“Cute,” Traci scoffed. “Though you could just have lit a fire.”

“A fire! Underground!”

Traci’s “morning” began with several hard facts about life on Dump.

There was no morning, night or day at all. Being underground, people had set their own rhythm that did not make sense to her. She awoke, still wrapped in the tattered brown blanket that smelled strongly of cat piss, when the upstairs neighbour began smashing glass bottles.

“What the hell are they doing?” she hissed.

“Glass,” Kellin’s disembodied voice came through the dark, “she collects glass, they melt it down and make new things out of it. Go back to sleep.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t. Instead, she sat up and turned on a small light that she kept hidden in her purse. Nope, I’m still here.

She lay on a stained, grey mattress that Kellin had borrowed from one of his neighbours, wrapped in what she feared was the cat’s blanket. Half-finished projects slumbered in the workshop around her. The carcass of a quad lay in one corner. In death, its parts were being donated to Kellin’s current vehicle.

The man himself slept in a hammock strung up in a corner. A ball of fur lay on his chest. Its amber eyes were locked on Traci, as they had been all night. A single toy rocket hung from the ceiling above Kellin, and the shelf behind him was jammed with books.

“What time do people get up around here?”

“Later.”

“I need a shower. Does this” — she bit back the word she wanted to use — “place of yours have one?”

“No, but there’s a basin through back. Won’t be enough hot water for a bath today. Tomorrow though.”

“Right. Shame I won’t be here to take advantage.”

“You’ll be here,” Kellin sighed, shifting in his hammock, “nobody ever escapes Dump.”

The cat on his chest didn’t budge an inch.

“Like hell I will,” Traci got up and banged her head on the ceiling.

Her bout of swearing roused the cat, if not the man.

Kellin awoke hours later and pottered about his home. Traci had left and he enjoyed the solitude. Smudge lounged on his reclaimed blanket and Kellin poured himself a mug of coffee. It was one of the few luxuries he afforded himself.

“Who were you?” he muttered to himself. “And how did you end up in a bag? And why did you have two military issue guns on you?”

He lay back down on his hammock, which was strung between two bent bits of scaffolding that may or may not have been weight-bearing for the building above. The small alcove in which he slept was the only place he had bothered to decorate, and as such it was curtained off.

This was his and his alone.

He’d papered it with pictures of star maps. He had cut them out of a book he scavenged, and now they formed a black spacescape. A rocket made out of dangerously sharp tin hung from a string. It had been a favourite toy, once all the poisonous paint had been scraped off.

Sighing, he hauled himself out of bed, dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and tried to leave his home. The front door came away in his hands and it took a few moments to rehang and lock it.

Town was quiet. Everyone was either drunk or hungover. Kellin knew that despite living underground, people still had very strong opinions about what time it was – regardless of whether that time matched what the sun was doing outside They still wished each other a good morning before going on a night out. It was the sort of chaos Dump thrived on.

He trudged past a group of homeless men lying slumped against each other.

“Mornin’ Kellin.”

“Morning Suwee.”

“You lost that fine young woman you found?”

“I think she lost me.”

“Ah well. Plenty more fish in this oily puddle.”

“True.”

Trig’s premises — Kellin had never decided whether it was truly a shop or a workshop — was as quiet as town. Racks of guns marched up to a counter surrounded by cargo netting with steel plates lashed to it. The wooden counter was solid (Kellin had helped move it) and could withstand most calibres of weapon from up to five feet (Kellin had helped test it).

Trig had been robbed, once. Kellin knew it was not an experience his friend wanted to repeat.

The shop owner himself was through the back, an oily rag in one hand and a screwdriver bit between his teeth. His other hand was uncoiling the belt from an impressive-looking machine. Framed in the doorway, Trig looked painfully thin without the leather jacket on, and his black hair was tied back as ever. His bare arms were smeared in oil and the tattoo of a dragon coiled up one of them, disappearing into a bony shoulder.

The door slammed, but Trig didn’t stir at the noise. Kellin tried the bell, made out of two spent shell casings hung next to the counter. Still no response.

“TRIG! ARE YOU THERE!” Kellin roared at the top of his lungs.

Trig leapt about three foot into the air. Since he was well over six foot tall, this would have put his head roughly a foot above the height of the ceiling were it not there. Bellowing in pain, he groped around looking for a solution to his problem. The sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun was the first thing he found.

“Who is it!” he roared before pulling the trigger.

Kellin ducked behind the counter (which, when they’d tested it a year ago, could withstand a normal shotgun blast), and gritted his teeth. A neat hole erupted from the wood next to his head. He felt the shotgun pellets and a shower of razor-sharp wooden splinters burst past him.

“IT’S KELLIN, STOP SHOOTING YOU IDIOT!”

Sticking his head over the counter, which was brave because Trig had another barrel’s worth of solution to unleash, Kellin waved.

“Oh.” Trig let the shotgun fall loose. “I thought you were some more robbers. I told you to ring the bell.”

“I did ring the bell! I even told you I was coming!”

It was Kellin’s turn to shout.

“I didn’t hear…” Trig stuck an oily finger in his left ear and began working it back and forth.

“No wonder business is bad! Do you shoot at all your customers?”

“Only the ones I know.” Trig put the shotgun down and shot it a dirty look, as though it had betrayed him. “What were you wanting, anyway?”

“I showed you yesterday.”

“Was that the day you had the woman with you? You got some!” Trig rushed round the counter and lifted Kellin from his feet. The embrace knocked all the wind from the recipient. “You finally got some. I told you you’d manage it one day.”

“Managed… it… a… long… time… ago…” Kellin managed to gasp.

The bear hug was relinquished and after a few friendly slaps to the face Trig led him into the workshop area.

“Been a busy night. Stripped down Bertha and Sarah, gave them both a good oiling. Betty’s next.”

“Which one is Betty?” Kellin grunted.

“The power hammer. She can hit a piece of metal ten times harder than I can. And she never gets tired…”

“Trig.” Kellin cut in. “When was the last time you slept?”

“I slept lots!” he glanced down at the floor. “A few days ago.”

“And when was the last time you ate?”

“Ah… well.”

“We deal, then we go get you something to eat.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“Tough.”

“Aw hell. Fine. I’ll eat. But I ain’t sleeping till I feel tired.”

“Well, try to sleep before you shoot at anyone else, all right? It’s bad for business if the gunshop owner starts shooting his clientele.”

“So what you got?”

“This laser thing. Plus maybe twenty rounds of ammo for it. Nice toy, but not really what I’m looking for.” Kellin handed the pistol over. “Need a new rifle, one with a scope, nothing too fancy. I like things that work over those that look good.”

“Got a couple of things you might like. I’ll throw in a side arm to. Can’t have you strolling around without some form of protection.”

“Hey,” Kellin said, taken aback, “I’m not in the gang anymore. You can’t just go handing stuff out to me. What would Short Stuff say if he found out?”

“Short Stuff says a lot of things,” Trig muttered, leading them out onto a small firing range behind his shop. Four manikins with targets painted on them sat at the end of it. “And you’re getting a fair price for this.”

The laser made a suitably futuristic noise when they loaded it. Trig raised it with relish and took aim. Kellin put his fingers in his ears.

“This should be interesting.”

The noise seemed to break the air. It rebounded back off the cavern walls high above them, and people paused in what they were doing to look up in confusion. Meals burned, children were left unsupervised in bathtubs and at least one car crashed.

An almighty explosion rocked the cavern.

Kellin and Trig were blasted off their feet. A gale of dust and debris blew over them as they lay for a few moments, stunned. A rare silence descended on Cavern City.

Then Kellin sat up.

“I think that was meant to kill me,” he mumbled.

Trig sat up.

“Lucky I wore gloves,” he looked down the range at his target. “John’s had it.”

“He has,” Kellin said looking at the space where the sandbag manikin, which had survived repeated and concentrated gunfire for several years, had stood. “Sam and Bob have had it as well.”

“Luke seems to be sort of intact.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” Trig shook his head, “can I fire another one?”