Free What Lies Below by Glynn James

Trapped
    Jack sat, staring at the ground inside the cage, not paying
much attention to any of the movement around him. People of the Junktown came
and went throughout the day, and the cage that he now called home was sitting
smack in the middle one of the larger, more open courtyards in the warren city that
was hidden in the junk. Jack had seen a lot of that city on his way in, though
he had been bound and gagged the whole time.
    Endless covered paths wound through the mountains of junk, and
along each of the many paths, there were doors attached to the walls. From the
outside, the streets and alleyways looked like walls of junk until you saw a
home or shop hidden behind it through an open door. The Junkers had made their
homes not only amongst the trash, but out of the trash, carving deep holes into
the very junk mountains above and the depths below. And there were far more
people than Jack could have imagined. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them.
    He was taken along many of these alleyways as his captors
guided him to where he would be held, and saw not only houses, but shops and
large open places where resources were kept. At one point they passed what
appeared to be the side of a massive old stone building, jutting out of the
trash, and it reminded him of the Grand Theatre back in the Outer Zone, except
this was used as a marketplace. There was an area where dozens of large metal
containers had been stacked on top of each other, and Jack could see makeshift
stairs and platforms built to reach the topmost containers. People were living
inside them.
    The cage that was to be his home, it would seem, was sheltered
from the rain but not nearly as hidden from the elements as many of the Junker
dwellings. There was only a rough mattress to sleep on and small boxed in hole
in the ground to relieve himself in. At least the cage was dry. There was that.
The cage was maybe twenty feet across both ways and tall enough to stand up in,
and Jack had spent a lot of time pacing around the perimeter with only his
thoughts to entertain himself.
    They fed him, if you could call the grey slop, which was
passed to him in a dented metal bowl three times a day, food, but he wasn’t
going to complain. Jack had the impression that most of the inhabitants of the
Junktown ate the grey slop. They had little choice, he thought. And honestly, it
actually tasted good if you ignored the lumps. Where they mushrooms or some
kind of animal? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t really want to know.
    He had visitors, though, and those visitors took away the
monotony of his incarceration. And anyway, he’d been there before, hadn’t he?
Well, maybe not exactly there, but he had been in a cage similar to the one he
now called home, and that had been somewhat smaller. But that was many years
ago.
    One good thing, though – he wasn’t expected to fight every other
day, and there were no jeering crowds. No blood soaked floor.
    Just the solitude of the cage and the quiet of his own
thoughts.
    He wasn’t expecting to be let at out all.
    The cage had held a lot of slaves a year before, Old Haggerty
had told him. Until FirstMan had arrived, with his troopers, and set them all
free, killing the mob of slavers that had held the Junktown in thrall for years.
But there were no others now. The cage was reserved for criminals to stay in while
their fate was decided. Jack had been the only one in the cage during his stay.
    He had three regular visitors. The one they called FirstMan, the
leader of the Junkers, came at least once a day and questioned him endlessly
about his past and his reason for being out in the Junklands. The man didn’t
seem to believe him at first but gradually became less hostile and more
curious. Jack thought he may even like the man, under different circumstances.
    “I’ll probably let you out tomorrow,” FirstMan said before
leaving each day, and Jack wondered after the third day if this was something
that would ever happen. He suspected that