Blighted Land: Book two of the Northumbrian Western Series (Northumbrian Westerns 2) by Ian Chapman
Authors: Ian Chapman
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about betting and women. Who they’d rounded up recently.
We went to Round Up Central, the old multi-storey car park on the South Side of town. The fella guarding the entrance waved to Nico and pulled open the heavy gate. Long before I’d arrived in Faeston Nico and the rest of them had gone to a lot of effort salvaging stuff from an abandoned prison across the border. They’d hauled doors and gates all the way here and had a gang spend weeks adapting the car park. Turning it into the town’s prison.
We bounced up the potholed ramp and parked on level one, where all Nico’s other vehicles were: the Jaguar and Range Rover. Spoils from his confiscations.
‘ Follow me, ’ he said. Gregg and Will wandered off upstairs, to the main offices but Nico led me downstairs, to the section I’d thought unused. We went through a dim passageway, lit by bulkhead lights, the air cold, dry. There was a heavy door at the end. He had to flick through his bunch of keys before he rattled the lock open. Partway along the passage there was another door in the wall. ‘Not many people allowed through here, Trent.’
‘Yeah?’
He slid his dark glasses up, fumbled with the keys to unlock the door. ‘This is just for the initiated. The cognoscenti, you know? Get what I’m saying. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Real lucky.’ I followed him as the door swung open. I didn’t feel very lucky.
Nico grinned. ‘Here we go.’
It was a large space, high-ceilinged, covering much of the ground floor. It was all concrete like the rest of the building, but made more stark with the spotlights set up along the sides. It was plain apart from the door we’d come through and a heavy steel shutter at the far end. Several men stood around writing on pads whilst another drew on a large sheet of paper. In the middle was the tank parked an angle on one of the town's low loaders.
Close up the vehicle was massive, a dark lump that gave off heat even though we were underground, making some low sound, not like an engine more something flowing, water under a stone bridge. It was painted a dull green marked with scorch marks. There were no wheels just two sets of caterpillar tracks. On the top of it there was a squat turret supporting a gun barrel of a calibre you could fit a small child in.
Nico walked around it and I followed. ‘It’s something else, eh?’
‘I saw it the other night.’
‘But close up, close up it’s really something!’
‘I suppose.’ Nico kicked the low loader. ‘Nearly bust this. Some weight. And the cranes struggled.’
‘Yeah?’ There were markings on the vehicle, letters and numbers. And symbols I’d not seen before, or not since before The Collapse, yellow squares with shapes in them.
‘Thing is, we can’t get into it. There’s no key. No lock that we can see but we can’t open the hatch’ He turned to me. ‘Imagine if we had one of these, if we could work out how to make others.’ He grinned. ‘We’d be unstoppable.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, tapping the thick steel. ‘Unstoppable.’
‘Problem is, we can’t make one, no one can now. Someone else made this, sometime else.’ He pointed at the walls and ceiling. ‘But there could be hundreds of them out there, thousands, left over.’
‘There are loads of them up at Otterburn.’ All the border couriers knew of wrecks abandoned in the old military base.
‘Not that junk. Working stuff. Like this…’
‘So why am I here?’
‘Because you’re one of us, Trent! A trusted member of the gang, a reliable foot soldier and good team player. You belong and you’re going to help us out.’ We carried on walking around, circling the great dark shape. At the back of the vehicle he grabbed my sleeve. ‘He’s the only one who knows about it, how to get in and work it. Where it came from and whether there are more. He knows all about it. We need to know.’
‘He?’
‘The driver, the guy who came out of it.’
I put my hand on the steel
We went to Round Up Central, the old multi-storey car park on the South Side of town. The fella guarding the entrance waved to Nico and pulled open the heavy gate. Long before I’d arrived in Faeston Nico and the rest of them had gone to a lot of effort salvaging stuff from an abandoned prison across the border. They’d hauled doors and gates all the way here and had a gang spend weeks adapting the car park. Turning it into the town’s prison.
We bounced up the potholed ramp and parked on level one, where all Nico’s other vehicles were: the Jaguar and Range Rover. Spoils from his confiscations.
‘ Follow me, ’ he said. Gregg and Will wandered off upstairs, to the main offices but Nico led me downstairs, to the section I’d thought unused. We went through a dim passageway, lit by bulkhead lights, the air cold, dry. There was a heavy door at the end. He had to flick through his bunch of keys before he rattled the lock open. Partway along the passage there was another door in the wall. ‘Not many people allowed through here, Trent.’
‘Yeah?’
He slid his dark glasses up, fumbled with the keys to unlock the door. ‘This is just for the initiated. The cognoscenti, you know? Get what I’m saying. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Real lucky.’ I followed him as the door swung open. I didn’t feel very lucky.
Nico grinned. ‘Here we go.’
It was a large space, high-ceilinged, covering much of the ground floor. It was all concrete like the rest of the building, but made more stark with the spotlights set up along the sides. It was plain apart from the door we’d come through and a heavy steel shutter at the far end. Several men stood around writing on pads whilst another drew on a large sheet of paper. In the middle was the tank parked an angle on one of the town's low loaders.
Close up the vehicle was massive, a dark lump that gave off heat even though we were underground, making some low sound, not like an engine more something flowing, water under a stone bridge. It was painted a dull green marked with scorch marks. There were no wheels just two sets of caterpillar tracks. On the top of it there was a squat turret supporting a gun barrel of a calibre you could fit a small child in.
Nico walked around it and I followed. ‘It’s something else, eh?’
‘I saw it the other night.’
‘But close up, close up it’s really something!’
‘I suppose.’ Nico kicked the low loader. ‘Nearly bust this. Some weight. And the cranes struggled.’
‘Yeah?’ There were markings on the vehicle, letters and numbers. And symbols I’d not seen before, or not since before The Collapse, yellow squares with shapes in them.
‘Thing is, we can’t get into it. There’s no key. No lock that we can see but we can’t open the hatch’ He turned to me. ‘Imagine if we had one of these, if we could work out how to make others.’ He grinned. ‘We’d be unstoppable.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, tapping the thick steel. ‘Unstoppable.’
‘Problem is, we can’t make one, no one can now. Someone else made this, sometime else.’ He pointed at the walls and ceiling. ‘But there could be hundreds of them out there, thousands, left over.’
‘There are loads of them up at Otterburn.’ All the border couriers knew of wrecks abandoned in the old military base.
‘Not that junk. Working stuff. Like this…’
‘So why am I here?’
‘Because you’re one of us, Trent! A trusted member of the gang, a reliable foot soldier and good team player. You belong and you’re going to help us out.’ We carried on walking around, circling the great dark shape. At the back of the vehicle he grabbed my sleeve. ‘He’s the only one who knows about it, how to get in and work it. Where it came from and whether there are more. He knows all about it. We need to know.’
‘He?’
‘The driver, the guy who came out of it.’
I put my hand on the steel
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