Page 126 of The Lost Zone
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m going after him. Mahmoud says he works for a drug cartel in the Canary Quarter. That’s as good a place as any to start.”
“Agreed, but if you’re going into the Quarterlands, take backup and be careful.”
Josiah paced around downstairs, looking for clues as to where Neil might have taken Alex. There was blood on the kitchen table – not much, but it couldn’t belong to Sem as he’d been upstairs the entire time. Something gleaming caught his eye, and he crouched down on the floor beside the kitchen door and retrieved it. He squinted at the little electronic button for a few seconds, rolling it over in his fingers, trying to work out what it was. It left a red smudge on his hands – blood. It was a microchip. That explained the blood on the door frame, too. Neilhad cut out Alex’s chip and thrown it on the floor. No doubt Tyler had been informed within a minute of it happening, but it obviously wasn’t information he’d have shared with Josiah. He knew he couldn’t waste any more time. Stuffing the bloodied chip into his pocket, he set off.
He put in a call to Reed while he drove, filling him in.
“You need backup. You can’t go into the Canary Quarter alone,” Reed remonstrated. “It’s like a war zone in there.”
“He’s had Alex for hours,” Josiah replied, driving into a lost zone at breakneck speed and feeling the satisfying crash of the vehicle hitting the water. “I’m not waiting for backup.”
“You should have taken the men at your house.”
“They were useless. I sent them back to Inquisitus.”
“Well, that was stupid. Nobody bloody well goes into the Canary Quarter by themselves. I’m on my way – with backup.”
The Canary Quarter was close to the centre of Old London. Once a huge shopping centre and office complex, it had become one of the biggest shanty towns in the country after the Rising, attracting refugees from miles around. Some of their descendants still lived there, along with the new refugees arriving all the time – indies on the run, escapees from the government work camps, illegal immigrants, and those who were simply down on their luck. It was a good place to disappear.
He could smell the place before he even drew close – the familiar stench of the Quarterlands was etched into his brain – and he steeled himself. He’d been to various Quarters since leaving the little slice of hell where he’d been born, but this one was on a different scale. Canary was the name given to the entire cluster of many different buildings here, but each one would be a separate Quarter with its own name, run by its own gang, making it complex to navigate.
The water around the high-rise Canary complex was full of dinghies, inflatables, rowing boats, and jerry-rigged rafts made of old tyres roped together. There was an endless stream of traffic coming and going for miles around, including a fair number of ducks in various degrees of decrepitude.
The stink coming off the place was almost enough to make him throw up. The water around it was sludge brown, full of raw sewage. Those fortunate enough not to live in the Quarterlands often found it strange that so few Quarter kids knew how to swim, but this was the reason. Nobody wanted their children ingesting that stuff.
Like LKG, the Canary Quarter was a thriving, watery metropolis, with a multitude of people coming and going at all hours of the day and night. It was also a city in its own right, as so many large areas of the Quarterlands were, with its own rules, trade, currency, and eco-systems. The particular rules and rhythms of the Quarterlands were impenetrable to those who’d spent no time in them. It was like visiting a foreign land where you didn’t speak the language. But Josiah did.
The walls of the buildings were covered in ropes and rickety handmade wooden ladders that spidered over every square inch of the surface. These were the only ways into and out of the buildings. There were some fairly large landing points dotted around the complex, easily identifiable by the amount of traffic around them and the gaping maw of their openings. Many of these entrances had once been huge windows, long since smashed in to create easy access points.
Josiah directed his duck towards one of the less busy entrances. He didn’t have time to deal with the jostling around one of the larger entry points; he’d take his chances inside.
The weather was still appalling, with Storm Jasper screaming all around. The water was choppy, and it took a few attempts before he could line up his duck against the side of thebuilding. Despite the weather and the lateness of the hour, there were dozens of feral kids hanging from the sides of the buildings, easily hurling themselves up and down the rope exteriors like little monkeys. He’d been one of them once. He parked next to a port, opened the top of the duck, and glanced up. Immediately above him, several curious faces gazed down. Kids hung off ropes and from ladders, staring with hostile intent at his shiny Inquisitus duck.
He whistled, and the children moved forward in a wave, so eager he could sense their hunger. They all wanted a piece of his suit, his duck, and his clean, shiny life.
“I have cash cards.” He held them up. “And a weapon.” He held up his revolver. He didn’t usually carry a gun, but he knew a stun gun would be little deterrent in the Quarterlands. “You can have half the cash cards now and the rest when I return –ifmy duck is exactly as I left it.”
He was suddenly surrounded by dozens of interested kids of various ages, all dour and sharp-eyed.
“If it isn’t, no more cash, and I’ll call the Thorities to clear out this entire building.” He waved his Inquisitus ID around so they could all see it. They gazed at him sullenly, unimpressed but wary. These weren’t cheeky kids with hearts of gold. They were hard-nosed Quarterlands kids – they’d as soon knife him in the heart as guard his duck, but theywerescared of Inquisitus, and with good reason. He had the power to make their lives very difficult indeed, and they knew it.
Josiah threw the cash cards at the kids, and they erupted, screaming, each of them desperate to capture one. In the ensuing chaos, he climbed out of the duck through the roof and straight into the dark, dank remains of what might once have been an office block. It was highly unlikely that his duck would be there on his return, but Reed was on his way, so there was a route out of Canary Quarter should he need it later.
Keeping his gun drawn, he strode into the depths of the building, glad to be out of the driving rain. The smell was overwhelming – the combination of damp and sewage made him retch, but he’d grown up with it, and the feeling of nausea soon passed.
The building was crammed full of people, some sitting on the floor, so off their heads on croc that they just rocked back and forth, sobbing. Others were on more serious drugs, and, among the many bodies littering the place, Josiah spotted at least half a dozen that were no longer alive. This was common in the Quarterlands. Every morning the gangs who ran this Quarter would do a sweep and throw the dead bodies into the water.
He waved pictures of both Neil and Alex around but barely received a flicker of response. These people were too far gone to even think of robbing him – and no doubt his gun and powerful build were also deterrents.
He ran down a hallway filled with people – some of them had torches, but it was otherwise pitch black. The extremities of any Quarter were always filled with the biggest no-hopers: newcomers, drug addicts, and the sick and dying. Further in, he knew he’d find more order and structure. First, he had to traverse endless hallways and rooms full of the hopeless and dispossessed. People crying, whether from croc or not, others too far gone to even argue over food and resources. There was little point anyway. The Quarterlands were run by various big gangs, many of them in a state of constant warfare with each other. Rebellion was put down ruthlessly and immediately, no questions asked. Everyone knew that. Nobody wanted to draw attention to themselves.
There was obviously a generator somewhere in the building, because a string of rickety lights had been hung along one section of the hallway, leading him to believe he was going in the right direction. Nobody lit up a section of the Quarterlandsunless they had resources, so he was clearly reaching gang territory. His father had been a gang member, but that had been in a very different kind of Quarter, where a group of more or less decent people had gathered together to create some kind of order for themselves and their children. These little pockets of almost civilisation could be found in most areas of the Quarterlands, amid the squalor, and he was clearly reaching that area in this one.
Not all Quarterlanders were involved in crime; some worked jobs on land, among the dry folk, but couldn’t afford to live there. Those people were more inclined to want order and a well-run facility. Still, even the people that presided over those areas were tough. Nobody had ever messed with his father. Like him, his father had been a big man, and not one who said much, although when hedidspeak, everyone listened. He hadn’t been a crook, either. He did the very valuable job nobody wanted but everyone needed of emptying the sewage. There were no toilets in the Quarterlands, but there were plenty of buckets, and Matt Raine had spent his days emptying them. This brought him into contact with every single occupant of their Quarter. It didn’t pay much, but if you didn’t live near a window, most were prepared to toss him something to take care of it. That something might be money but was equally likely to be a scrap of food, or some shiny object he could sell on. It had been a hand-to-mouth existence, but he’d been well respected.
There were always people like Matt Raine in the Quarterlands, committed to making their lot as decent as they could manage, and keeping their Quarter as clean and well maintained as possible. These were the people who kept the lights on, mended parts of the building that were becoming dangerous, organised schooling for the kids, and chased away the worst of the criminal gangs that were encroaching on their territory.
