Junkyard Universe

The night Petrolteddy lost her family was the same night she forgot her true name.

After they were gone, she picked through the charred scrap heap of her home. She found paper with some words but they were scrambled by her overwhelmed brain, indecipherable symbols. She understood that the words meant something, and there used to be a word for her, but now it was missing from her mind.

So, she chose words she liked the sound of and renamed herself.

Petrol, for the stuff she collected; which she used to light things with, which powered her life, which saved her from marauders; and, teddy, for the only keepsake she saved after her family was taken away. Teddy was small and scorched and dirty, and wore a tiny tarnished gold plated heart locket around it's neck. The only precious thing she felt she had left.

She eventually taught herself to read.

It had been 10 years since she’d learned how to read a calendar she'd found, plastered to an abandoned office wall, with meetings scrawled across it about outcomes and resources. It was another 7 years before she discovered leap years on another calendar. She had to reassess her entire calendar and diaries. She lost 3 days and decided that it was a good thing. She didn't need days and months. She had the sun and the weather. She got rid of the old calander. All she really needed to do daily was scavenge, hide, eat, sleep and read.

Under a hot white sun, amid a pile of junk, Petrolteddy rummages through refuse.

Spotted throughout the junkyard are old posters, graffiti, and newspapers poking out of the mess and plastered on slabs of concrete. “MOSQUITO BORNE VIRUS KILLS”, “QUARANTINE NOT STOPPING KILLER VIRUS”, “NO CURE FOR NEW STRAIN", "GOVT TAKES DRAMATIC ACTION TO STOP SPREAD OF VIRUS WITH NUCLEAR FORCE”, and "PARLIAMENT DISBANDED DUE TO DEATHS BEFORE NUKE PLAN APPROVED."

Petrolteddy blends in with her surroundings, she wears grey. The dead city is grey.

Next to her sits a small backpack. She finds and places a metal plate in the pack. She stops. She see's something moving in her peripheral vision. A man wearing a wide brimmed hat forages on a mound. He is tall and thin and brown, he stands out in the greyness. He sees her and stops what he's doing as well. After a few moments stillness, the man nods his head at her. Petrolteddy grabs her bag and runs off.

In another section of the junkyard, Petrolteddy searches again.

She finds cans of food and batteries among the rubble. Behind her a blurry dark object floats on the horizon. It stops a short distance from where Petrolteddy is standing. Petrolteddy puts the batteries into her pocket and continues to check the quality of the cans. There are no labels on them. She shakes them and squeezes them like fruit.

The black device creeps towards her, softly humming.

Petrolteddy hears it and stops. The device clicks and whirrs. Her eyes widen. She is still. The device moves towards her with more determination.

"Shit."

She drops the can she was looking at and runs.

Petrolteddy skips and jumps and claws her way through the mess of refuse. Behind her the device is in full pursuit. It is a circular metallic disc painted black but peeling to reveal a metallic shell casing. It hovers in the air like a UFO. On the underside it reads “AUTOMATED PREY POSITIONING UNIT (APPU)" and "The Bastard Boys”. On its curved edge the words “dont tuch fukars - weel find u” are scrawled in rough red handwriting.

Petrolteddy launches herself through a pile of tires and rests behind a fallen wall for a few seconds before the APPU peers around the corner. She scrambles up again, darting in between some crumbling concrete pillars and sliding down a pile of rubble. She positions herself on top of an old washing machine and leaps over a deep pit. She hauls herself up a mound of trash using electrical wires that protrude from underneath the debris. She runs around a refrigerator laying against a mound.

The APPU circles the refrigerator and stops.

There is a large blue skip buried in a mound of broken concrete. The APPU slows down its pace. Searching. Searching. Searching. The lid of the blue skip is open. It is dark inside. The APPU goes in for a closer look.

BANG!

The heavy lid crashes shut, trapping the device inside. Petrolteddy drags the refrigerator over and props it against the lid. She leans against the refrigerator for a second's rest, and sees something interesting laying in the rubble a few feet away.

A finger is sticking out of the ground. She starts digging it out.

Behind her, the bin lid creaks and the refrigerator tumbles off the door. Petrolteddy narrows her eyes. The APPU bursts out of the bin and heads straight towards her. Too late to run she falls on her back, losing her bag. The APPU stops directly above her. She tries to crawl backward but the APPU pins one of her arms and legs to the ground with black spikes that emerge from the shell like pitchforks. A monitor on its underside flashes “SCANNING PREY... FEMALE... HUMAN... DETERMINING POSITION... ONE MOMENT...”. Elevator music plays from inside its shell.

With her free hand Petrolteddy punches her fist into the monitor repeatedly until it breaks and falls off. She pulls at the naked wires inside the machine and sparks and smoke appear. She reaches deeper inside the APPU and digs around for a few moments. She finds what she is looking for and yanks it out. The music drones to a halt. She holds in her hand a small black box with wires sticking out of it. There is a small flashing light on it. The APPU creaks and groans, then crashes to the ground. Petrolteddy slaps away the now limp spikes and rolls out of the way.

She searches in her top pocket and pulls out a small device that looks like a battery with a wire hanging off it. She uses something gummy, pulled from another pocket, to stick it to the black box. She pulls out a lighter and lights the wire. She runs to the edge of a large crevice in the junkyard and hurls the APPU’s black box with bomb attached into the mess. After a few seconds it explodes sending shattered pieces everywhere. She realises she doesn’t have her backpack and frantically looks around.

The man she saw earlier appears and holds the bag out to her.

"That was pretty cool... what you did… smashing it like that."

Petrolteddy plucks the object that looks like a finger from the ground; it is a mannequin’s hand. She glares at the man.

"I don’t need your help."

The man looks sheepish.

"Yeah. I know."

She swaggers over to the man and snatches the bag from him, pushing him to the ground as she runs away. The man watches her leave but doesn’t follow.

Underneath the junkyard, Petrolteddy has constructed a small cavern as a home.

It is dark in the cavern and the space seems to expand into the shadows. On some of the visible walls there are ladders and electrical goods tied together to hold everything in place. There is a rough bed with scraps of material and clothes sewn together for blankets. There are pieces of furniture constructed in the same manner with elements here and there of different types of furniture strung or nailed together: a couch, a coffee table, a dresser, a bath, a basin and a kitchen table with two chairs underneath it. There are piles of books lining the walls and covering most of the floor space.

Petrolteddy crawls into the cavern carefully, crouching.

She checks the air with her eyes and ears, body unflinching. Satisfied, she relaxes her posture. She puts her bag on the kitchen table and lights three candles. Taking a candle with her, she approaches a dark corner of the cavern. She puts the candle on a ledge and opens her bag. She starts arranging the things she found in the junkyard in front of her. The batteries, a few cans of food, a whisk, a couple of books, a metal plate, and the mannequin’s hand.

She holds onto the mannequin’s hand.

In a dark corner, she attaches the hand to an arm. Letting go of the hand she picks up the candle and its light shines on the entire piece. The hand is now attached to the sculpture of a woman. On one side of the woman are a couple of older children. On the other side of the woman is a small girl, holding teddy. They are posed in a comfortable familial setting. Petrolteddy crouches next to the girl and studies her face. She reaches over to teddy and rubs the locket on its neck.

Outside, the sky has turned dark.

The man who spoke to Petrolteddy sits on top of a mound of broken concrete. Embers glow in front of him and he snacks on the tail of an animal he's recently cooked. Petrolteddy approaches him from behind in the dark. She watches him for a while. He doesn't seem to notice her. She holds a large knife in one hand but, seeing him at ease, slips the knife back into a pocket on her pants.

She moves away.

Her junkyard is getting crowded.