Knacker the Trader

Breaker. Trader. Nothing is scrap until he says so.

Recorded history

No one remembers when Knacker first appeared on the trade roads.

Some swear he crawled out of the wreckage of an old motorway pile-up. Others insist he walked in from the ash flats carrying nothing but a door strapped to his back. He has never contradicted either account, which the archive suspects is a commercial decision rather than an oversight.

The name started as an insult. Before the Collapse he worked as a breaker, the sort of man who dismantled dead vehicles and sold them in pieces. After the world ended he simply scaled up. Tanks, drones, generators, prosthetics, wind turbines, pre-war vending machines: if it was broken, he could strip it, fix it, or sell it in parts. People spat here comes the knacker when he turned up to pick over a settlement that had just fallen.

He kept the name. It is now the one you use when you want something specific and are prepared to pay for it.

Trade

Knacker held the Dust Market's standing rates, and for as long as the market ran they were the closest thing the region had to a published price list.

Scrap buys ammunition, intelligence, field medicine and, at the top of the board, the services of someone willing to carry a rifle on your behalf. He does not extend credit; that is the Banker's business and the two of them have an understanding about it that neither has ever explained.

What he does do is find things. A trader who deals only in what is on the table is a stall. Knacker deals in what could be on the table next week if someone were willing to go and get it, and a substantial amount of the Wasteland's salvage work exists because he mentioned an interest.

That habit is the reason he is still working. When the Dust Market emptied out, the traders who were a location went with it. Knacker was never a location. He was a man who knew where things were, and that inventory did not need a stall to sit in.

The Hound

The archive holds one association for Knacker, and it is not a trading one.

He keeps company with the Cŵn, and is at the tower when the bodies of those who approached it are burned. The two of them do that together. No payment has ever been recorded passing in either direction, which in Knacker's case is close to conclusive: everything else he does is priced.

The archive had assessed him for some time as a man with no allegiances, and that assessment rested on the absence of any. It now holds one, and cannot price it either.

Assessment

The archive files him as a trader rather than a Scavenger, and the distinction matters. The Scavengers were a faction and are a closed record. Knacker was never a member of anything, which is precisely why he is still trading.

He is not sentimental about objects and is famously unsentimental about their previous owners. The archive wrote that line before it knew where he spends some of his evenings, and has not revised it. He is, however, straight about condition: a part sold as working works, and a part sold as scrap is honestly scrap. In a region where that is unusual, it is most of the reason he is still in business.

Archive notes

• Real name unrecorded and probably unrecoverable.
• Set the Dust Market's standing trade rates. No longer based there; the market is abandoned.
• Deals in salvage, parts and mechanical repair; does not extend credit.
• Accurate about the condition of goods sold, reliably and by policy.
• Associated with the Cŵn, and present at the tower fires. No payment recorded in either direction, and the association is not explained.