The Scavenger's Way

After years of methodically combing the country, even the most distinct of landscapes had become interchangeable. Simon had stopped noticing variations, the ups and downs of the roads, changes to the horizon, to the shades of earth beneath his feet, grassy plain or rocky terrain. Everything was too similarly ravaged to be distinguishable, and so he kept his head down, only discerning changes around him when it was necessary to find his way. These trips were not a joyride or scenic tour anyway. It was strictly business. Not that he preferred to be anywhere else. He was ill-suited for any sort of city life, and stuck out like a sore thumb walking among the button-down, well-groomed urbanites. They would stare at him in his patchwork jumper, scoff at the frayed scraps of fabric that he’d used to repair it, and turn up their noses at the bits and pieces of wasteland artifacts tied to his belt. City folks, safe in their walled-off, temperature controlled, artificial habitats didn’t understand the need for functional clothing. They wouldn't appreciate the amount of design that went into the suit either, the amount of effort it took to find the right kind of zippers, and durable, waterproof materials that could be both breathable and warm.

With few markers left to distinguish between districts, figuring out where the borders lied, where one area ended and another began, was an expertise only possessed by a small number of scavengers. Most made their profits simply by hawking what they found in the city’s shops, but Simon was one of the few specialists who could hunt down specific objects for clients. His special navigation skills meant he was always in demand, but also made him the subject of much suspicion everywhere he went. He would always be asked, even by the most satisfied of clients, how he managed to find his way to such obscure, specific coordinates, and pull out whatever lost item had been hiding there. His answer was usually a shrug - he didn't know either - and then they would give him the look, a scrutinous gaze that would tighten on him, as though they were trying to leash a foreign and unnatural creature with their narrowed, judgemental eyes.

For his latest job, Simon had been sent to an area north of the fourteenth district, a large unnamed and uninhabitable territory that few bothered to explore anymore. It was mostly swampland, and if there was anything left to plunder, it was too deeply buried in the muck, or devoured by the rotted remains of the toppled boreal forest, to be retrieved. He knew the fourteenth district well, but was unfamiliar with the terrain beyond. Much of his work brought him to the same areas and he wondered if his skills were merely a matter of expert memorization and if he strayed from the patterns he knew, he’d be as lost as any of the other fragile and ordinary city folks. But he couldn’t resist a challenge, nor the large payment he would be receiving if he succeeded.

His three day jaunt to the border had been easy-going - no searing temperatures, violent wind storms, landslides or quakes. The topography remained flat, dry, and dusty. He skated along the cracked asphalts strips with his usual hurried and focused pace, his gaze continuously turned down, watching for sudden fissures, or rivulets of leaking, potentially poisonous waste. Maybe this would be easier than he thought. Maybe there was no true variation left in the world. Maybe it had all been burned, bombed and brutalized out of existence.

After a few more miles, the road started to become less discernible, and what crumbled chunks remained split under his feet, and sunk into the increasingly soft and shifting mud with even the most gentle of steps. Then the road just disappeared altogether, leaving only an endless, dark swirling bog, and no clear path forward. He finally looked up. He couldn’t see the sky anymore. When he’d heard that the forest was toppled, he assumed they meant it had been leveled, and that whatever remained of the trees would be easily passable. It was true that the great boreal rim no longer stood proud and erect, but what remained of it, a twisted and barbed conglomeration of branches and roots, was just as fierce and dense as the original.

Simon huffed loudly as he reached around and unzipped the pocket on his flank. He fished around inside and pulled out a transparent vacuum sealed bag. Inside was a piece of mulberry paper that looked like a single graze of a fingertip would disintegrate it. He knew that the paper alone was valuable, of a craft long extinct, pulled from a tree that probably didn’t exist anymore. It carried with it the burden of the city, an uncomfortable proximity to it’s humming power grid, the endless stream of unnatural light and the garish fear of darkness. Simon laid the bag flat against his gloved palm so he could see the lines etched on the paper’s surface more clearly. It was, as he understood it, a map of sorts, but there was very little guidance to be gained from the faint, rough sketch. He flipped the paper over. The sketch on the other side was made with a darker thicker instrument and not nearly as pale. It showed a roughly cut heart shaped object, sitting in an intricate cage of bristles -something like a nest - with a chain running from the tip of it. Frederick, his retainer, had referred to it as a locket, though to Simon’s eyes it didn’t look like something you’d wear. The way the chain was angled in the sketch made it look like a kind of tether holding the heart in place.

“Call it whatever you want,” Frederick had said. He was one of Simon’s regular clients, but only acted as an intermediate, procuring various relics and oddities for elite collectors. “I’m not paying you to figure out what it is. Just find it, and find it fast.” There was a tension in his voice that Simon had not heard before, as though his throat was slowly being sealed with concrete.

“Will there be others after it?” Simon asked.

“Of course.” Frederick was pacing along the sliding glass window of his 56th floor apartment. The neon glare of the city below was reaching up through the night sky, scarring the darkness with blinding and sickly off-white streaks. Frederick was caught in its cast and it made him appear translucent, like his skin was disintegrating.

“What do I do if someone else gets there first?”

Frederick turned away from the window. His face was ashen, and carved into harsh angles by the glare. “Well that’s for you to figure out isn’t it.”

“I’m not an assassin.”

Frederick pushed the long tail of his indigo satin robe behind him and sauntered up to Simon. He looked him up and down. “No you’re certainly not. But you are a survivor. I don’t know who else will be coming for it, but whoever they are, they won’t hesitate to take you out if you get in their way. You understand, yes?”

Simon nodded.

“That’s a good boy. Now go fetch.”

Frederick escorted him to the apartment entrance, pushed open the heavy iron security doors and gestured for him to leave.

“One more question,” Simon asked as he stepped out into the hallway. “Is it a weapon?”

“Would it bother you if it was?”

Simon shrugged. He was not as naive as to think that some of the objects he’d retrieved hadn’t been used create weapons.

“Just curious. It may help me find it.”

“Why would anyone want another weapon? There’s enough firepower in any given city to wipe us all out several times over. But do remember - curiosity can be deadly. I think this bears repeating. You are under no circumstances to open the locket.” And with that Frederick closed the door in Simon’s face.

Simon had not seen any sign that anyone else was in pursuit, and it didn’t look like the bog ahead had been disturbed in a very long time. He hoped that was the case. As it was, pushing through the boreal cemetery, and hunting for the locket amidst the deep, endless muck and smoky darkness would test the limits of his navigation skills and require every ounce of focus and strength he could muster.

He tucked the sketch back into his pocket, and unclipped a thin, collapsible set of earphones from his belt. The cobbled together wire ran into his jacket, down across his torso and along his leg to where he had strapped his most prized possession. There were a few strategies he found effective in helping him prepare for challenges such as this, but nothing got him revved up and ready like putting on his earphones and turning on his Discman full blast. This, of all the various artifacts he’d collected was the item he was most proud of. He knew for certain that nobody had a Discman, and by the off-chance somebody did, they’d wouldn’t have been able to get it working like he had. Simon had heard rumours that at one time Discmans were commonplace and that the music inside could be changed by swapping out the discs. There also apparently used to be many millions of disks spread throughout the world, but they were rare fragile relics, and melted too easily. Simon had only been able to find the one.

He laid the earphones over his ears, pressed a switch that he’d soldered into the cable, closed his eyes and waited for the music to start. The sound of static came first, an anticipatory white noise that he felt deep in his body’s chemistry, in the veins, synapses, the muscles, and then it started - the thrumming of an extinct craft, the hymn of an ancient civilization. He saw faint white lines emerging in the dark space behind his eyelids that pulsed in harmony with the music. They grew brighter, and took on the earthy hues of his surroundings as shapes started to form.

The chorus hit and Simon stepped off the edge of the road. His boots sunk deep into the mud. He caught the scent of a sulphurous pheromone wafting up from deep below the bog - like something foul being disturbed by his stride. He pushed onward. The orchestra rose to a crescendo, and the shapes in his eyes became a trail, leading him through the thick tangled mess of dead spruce, and into the pitch black heart of the forest. The smell worsened, and he picked up his pace. During a rousing piano interlude, he thought heard a rumbling bellow. Somebody was calling out from the darkness. Somebody was calling his name. He stopped. No one called him by his name. No one even knew what it was. Then he heard it again, loudly and more clearly. It was coming from beneath him.

He kneeled and tested his hand against the surface of the mud. The spot was especially fluid and his fingers slipped through with relative ease, so it plunged his hand further down, straight into the earth, until he felt something hard and round. When he retracted his hand, there it was, sitting in his palm, caked in dirt. The locket was smaller than he thought it would be, seemingly innocuous and ordinary - just a run-of-the-mill piece of jewelry - but it buzzed and vibrated with a strange energy. Simon held it up close to his ear. The voice was still there, sealed inside, humming his name over and over again in a bassy and familiar tone. He removed his glove, and let his calloused and scarred fingers linger and caress the small latch that kept it shut.