The Garbage Belt

By Kari Kilgore

Looking for humans? Just look for the garbage.

From bones to plastic to dead electronics, people rarely manage to clean up after themselves. 

Humanity takes a long time to learn how to manage limited resources, too. The rare and precious get lost with the useless and plentiful.

Meet Gayle Simmons, pilot of the Treasure Hunt. 

Rare and precious, in her sights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Jun 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386295242

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

The Garbage Belt

For my Papaw, Arthur Kilgore

---

Who would decide a thing needed doing,

then work out his own unique and often

puzzling way to get it done.

---

And somehow, it worked.

Every single time.

The Garbage Belt

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Chapter 1

There had been a time when Gayle Simmons would have been thrilled to pilot a brand new, state-of-the-art scouter shuttle.

Every millimeter of the compact ship gleamed. The holographic instrument display floating under her fingertips, responsive enough to know what control cluster she needed before she did. The broad expanse of the forward viewport, so transparent and flawless she would have sworn she could reach right through it. The plush command chair that cradled her whole body, adjusting to her as she moved, far more comfortable than any piece of furniture she’d ever owned.

No detail had been overlooked, no expense spared in the design of The Treasure Hunt. Instead of typical steel floors, walls, and ceilings, every surface of the scouter was lined with heavy charcoal grey fabric.

It had taken Simmons a few days to get used to eerie silence rather than echoing footsteps as she moved through the ship. The lining damped every single sound she, her longtime crew member Rog, or the vessel itself made.

The stuff even repelled stains somehow. Or maybe it absorbed them and turned them into money.

These days the biggest thrill Simmons got from the Treasure was the greatly improved odds of bringing in treasure of her own.

Only a person with more money than sense would have designed a scouter more luxurious than the finest hotel on Earth, then hired a flinty space rat like Simmons to pilot it.

She took a long swallow of nutri-stim,