Strategies Against Nature

by Cody Goodfellow

  Nobody looked at him. The softheaded kid had gotten loose and his family was chasing him around among the semi trucks. A green prison bus pulled up filled with chaingangs of hooting, toothless vagrants.

  After El Centro, the traffic was mostly trucks and buses. The shoulder was littered with derelict cars and trucks, and here and there a wild-eyed hitchhiker or a pedestrian who ran from the road at the sound of his engine.

  The road to Calexico filled him with the odd sensation of coming to a festival or a family reunion. Something was drawing hundreds here, while hundreds more were being shipped against their will, judging by the sour faces glaring out the windows of buses he passed.

  The dunes rolled by in an endless procession of recycled scenery that cried out for improvement. A thousand-mile eyesore, an empty barrier no living thing was meant to cross. But when he barreled over the last rise and dropped into the shallow basin where the border town sprawled in the yellow dust, he wondered who had made a bigger mistake—himself, in coming here, the maps, in lying about what lay out here, or the people who built it.

  Google Maps was full of shit. Calexico was a walled city, now.

  After hours of colorless desert, the palisades of trash were like a colossal, rambling circus pavilion or a mountain of melted stained glass, and even after the walls of waste swelled up to almost bury the two-lane road that turned off the interstate, he could not take his eyes off it. At freeway speed, the dazzling blur and glitter of plastic and paper was hypnotic, and he nearly crashed into the back of one of the dozens of massive trash-haulers clogging the road. Where the mounds broke up to reveal the reinvented desert beyond, he spied armies of people in castoff clothing and improvised gasmasks, working the garbage piles like campesinos on a corporate farm. Toiling in swirling clouds of dust and flies, the gleaners must number in the thousands. Stan briefly wondered why he hadn’t seen this on the news, but maybe he had. With the sound turned down, you would assume you were looking at some shithole in India.

  Some ways down the road, the trashscape retreated behind fences with green nylon screens, and he passed trailer parks, liquor stores and finally, proper cross-streets. A Target was boarded up, but a tent city filled its parking lot. Except for an ambulance in no hurry to deliver its cargo to a hospital, he saw no signs of life in the shantytown surrounding the abandoned mall. Everyone must be out working the fields.

  He cruised the main boulevard to its end a mile down the road without seeing anything like a city hall. Several fortress-like office buildings and truck depots held pride of place in the center of town, but except for the armed guards at the gates, he saw no authorities he could ask for help finding his wife and daughter. Cameras perched like crows on every stoplight, so someone must be watching.

  He slowed down to scope a minimall with a 7-11, staring into the tinted windows to see if there was anyone inside, when he heard the squawk of a siren behind him.

  Thank God, he thought, pulling over and closing his eyes against the wave of fine dust that flooded his car. The neighboring building was the tallest in Calexico. An old Bekin Private Storage, it stood five stories above the empty boulevard—windows bricked up, girded in rusty fire escapes and surrounded by broken-down motor homes like abandoned siege engines.

  “STEP OUT OF THE VEHICLE,” said the loudest voice he’d ever heard, “AND LAY ACROSS THE HOOD WITH YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD.”

  Stan turned in his seat, but suddenly, the back of his neck got very, very hot. Not like embarrassment or a sunburn, but like his neck was wrapped in hot metal. He ducked away from it as he opened the door. They were doing something to him, a heat ray or something. He climbed out of the car.

  “Hey,” he said, I’m trying to find my wife’s house.”

  A stocky guy in a uniform was already coming up on him with an angry, impatient stride. Stan had only a moment to glance at the car that pulled him over, and see that it was white with lights on the roof, but it said WWC SECURITY. These guys weren’t even cops—

  They sure acted like cops.

  He said, “I could sure use your help—”

  Before he could raise an arm, the rent-a-cop slid out his nightstick and drove the blunt end of it into Stan’s gut.

  Bending him over, he introduced his knee to Stan’s throat. His trachea closed up like a paper straw. Tumbling to the hot tarmac, he managed to make them even angrier. Both rent-a-cops came over and kicked him until he curled up into a ball, then hoisted him up by his armpits and dragged him to the open trunk of their cruiser.

  Gasping for air, he begged, “I didn’t do anything. Look at my ID—”

  “We know who you are.” They bent him over so his head was in the trunk, trapped between plastic lockers of first aid supplies. A plastic zip-tie slithered around his wrists and snugged them together behind his back. “Get his pants down, would you please?”

  “What the fuck are you doing this for? I didn’t do anything, I just came looking for my daughter—”

  “Subject refuses to cooperate, and remains hostile and verbally abusive.” The hitter spoke in a level monotone for the benefit of a little security camera mounted on his shoulder. His partner dutifully undid Stan’s pants and dragged them down, along with his boxers, to his ankles. “Responding officers used appropriate physical force to compel subject’s participation in the field test.”

  All the while, Stan screamed for help, but the rent-a-cop elbowed his head into the carpeted floor of the trunk while his partner tore open a plastic pouch with some kind of surgical kit in it.

  The hot, dusty desert breeze wafted up between his legs, tickling his exposed junk. Shame and terror fought like cats in a bag in his frenzied head. He tried to kick them, but his legs were shackled by his pants.

  “Get the fuck off me! You’re not even cops!”

  The security guard fumbled with the buttons on his camera, then leaned down close enough for Stan to smell what he had for lunch. “Listen, asshole. You are trespassing on private property, and if you’re not infested with pirated applied biological products that don’t belong to you, my partner and I will happily let you fuck our wives.” Stan blinked as the rent-a-cop’s sweat dripped in his eye. “You’d like Glen’s wife. She’s got no teeth, so she sucks dick like a baby on a bottle.”

  His partner cut in. “Your mom’s a good teacher. You should see Mitch’s wife, mister. Trust me, you’re better off with the worms.”

  They both laughed. “But seriously, buddy,” Mitch said, “we don’t enjoy this any better than you do. Nobody here works or eats without getting tested, first. So why don’t you just shut up and let us do our fucking jobs, hey?”

  Mitch restarted the recording. “Commencing field test.”

  Cold steel forced open the puckered door of Stan’s anus and slid in and in and in until he seemed to feel it tickle the back of his throat. Gagging at the unbearable violation, he squirmed, but both rent-a-cops sat on him. A cotton swab dabbed at his eyes and probed up his nose, then got dropped into a Zip-Loc bag. “Secondary tests look positive. . .”

  “For what? Positive for what?”

  “Subject has unidentified product ova in saliva and rectal discharge. Assisting officer has not yet completed the primary examination—”

  “Eat a dick, Mitch. This poor fucker’s got spaghetti up in here.”

  “Get a sample, then it’s enema time.”

  “I don’t need an enema.”

  “You got maybe three or four different species of product in your colon, bro. Trust me, you need this. Mitch, gimme another dish. These are all full.”

  Something hit the roof of the cruiser hard enough to bounce it on its shocks. Stan couldn’t see outside of the trunk, but he heard the splatter of fluid and the roar of fire, and the rent-a-cops dropped him in the street.

  “Motherfuckers! Call for backup!” Mitch ran up to the storage building with a riot gun and a shield like a trashcan lid to fend off the rocks and bottles.

  Hooting and catcalling in high falsett
o voices, rodeo clowns in rags scuttled down from the roof and fire escape ladders, quite unafraid of the Mitch’s rubber bullets.

  Glen kicked Stan in the ass and said, “Stay down,” then took out his radio. “We’re on Main and Fourth, and under attack.”

  Still cursing, Mitch leapt for the dangling fire escape ladder and caught it on the third try. Hauling his furiously kicking legs up to the bottom rung, he screamed at Glen to get the subject in the car, when the fire escape gave a wrenching shriek and came unbolted from the wall. Mitch held on as he fell to the ground, but four stories of ladders and balconies piled up on top of him.

  Glen drew his gun and ran over to Mitch, firing wildly at the upper floors of the building.

  Stan struggled to get to his feet. The sidewalk was suddenly alive with hooded, masked street people.

  Stan’s car revved up and took off. Glen turned and fired at it. Someone hit him in the head with a brick. Bleating, “We need backup,” he staggered to the cruiser and collapsed across the front seats.

  Someone grabbed Stan’s bound arms and lifted him off the hot tar. Someone else hoisted up and fastened his pants.

  A knife jabbed him in the back. He started to scream, but the blade cut the zip-tie. His hands ballooned with blood and screamed blue murder.

  “Run,” said a man in a purple ski mask, and shoved him. Stan stumbled and dithered until Glen fired the shotgun over their heads.

  Over a low chainlink fence and across a tumbleweed field and through a burned-out house and down a crooked, trash-strewn alley, just trying to keep up with the crazy-legged gang. Two of them wore uniforms from a grocery store, another wore a grubby white pharmacist’s smock, and two more were dressed as security guards.

  He followed them down the alley and across a deserted residential street, then into an open basement window under a derelict maquiladora.

  In a dank den packed with trash bags and castoff clothing, the gang collapsed in a giggling, gasping heap. The one in the purple mask tore off his coat and shirt, kicked off his unlaced combat boots. Stan realized that he wasn’t wearing a mask.

  His face, neck and most of his chest were covered in a mottled purple and maroon fur that looked, despite the color, like bread mold. A scalpel-sharp reek of mildew suddenly pervaded the room.

  He caught Stan staring at him, and kicked a trash bag at him. It was filled with dirty polyester uniforms emblazoned with a logo that said Drug Czar: Where The Drugs Are.

  “You better change. Those there are still good, if you wanna get into the mall.”

  “They already know my name. They have my car. . .”

  “Forget it. You gotta change, so they won’t sniff you out. Change your protein coat.”

  All of them dug out and donned baggy orange hooded jumpsuits. Stan tried not to stare at the man next to him as he peeled off his filthy rags. Patches of skin on his oddly bloated torso were almost transparent, like some sort of walking aquarium, with clusters of wriggling flatworms and swollen blue nuggets of muscular cysts just under every inch of exposed skin. He seemed at peace with his situation as he gingerly stepped into a crusty black pair of jeans, so as not to crush the clusters of mating worms in his joints. As he blankly turned to meet Stan’s staring gaze, a slender coil of worm swam across the lens of his left eye. “Tricky,” the man said, by way of introduction.

  Stan clutched his stomach and tried not to throw up. “I just want to find my daughter.”

  “If she’s here, you’ll find her,” a hairless, possibly female urchin assured him with a sad smile. Like all of them, she’d filed her teeth to fine points, and replaced the missing ones by somehow anchoring brass finishing screws into the gaps in her jaw. “Nobody’s going anywhere. What kind of worms you got?”

  “I don’t know.” Stan’s heart was still pounding. “I think they came from dog food.”

  “What brand?”

  Stan told them, briefly, about Morgan and the dog food.

  “Then you’re one of us, man. Fluke,” the moldy man introduced himself, offering a bag of commercial kitchen trash. Stan hesitated only a moment. His stomach churned like a deep fryer, acid welling up in his mouth.

  Gnawing on a polystyrene meat tray, licking rancid blood off his fingers and slurping the cellophane shrinkwrap, he got halfway through before he thought to feel weird about what he was doing. But no one looked at him. The gang busily gobbled its own trash with the single-minded gusto of pigs at a slaughterhouse trough. Someone’s stomach gurgled, someone else farted, and the gang laughed.

  “I don’t want. . . worms,” Stan said. “Isn’t there a cure?”

  This caused another fit of giggles. Fluke snarled, “What, the rent-a-cop cure? They shoot you full of the new hookworms, to eat up your symbiotes. The only thing that keeps ‘em under control is the shit they put in their food and drugs. Try to run, and they’ll eat their way out of you.”

  “What happened to this town? When did it change to. . . like this?”

  “I used to work for the company, back when there was a town. It went bankrupt, and the company bought it. The worms in you and me were a test they scrapped. Almost made mankind fit to survive in this shit we created, but they took it back in a hurry, because there was no profit in setting people free.”

  Stan wanted to argue with him, but he knew in his—ha!—gut, that it was true, because the men in charge of this town were surely insane and evil motherfuckers.

  “This is all on purpose? They’re doing this. . . why?”

  “Building the future, dude. It started out that way, sure, why not? Nothing changes, nobody gets rich, if there’s no market for what they have to sell. And they just figured out that parasite species outnumber the honest predators and prey four to one. They found a way to change the rules in this pie-eating contest, because if nobody eats the whole thing, the Rapture’ll never happen, or some dumb shit. Unintended consequences. . .” Fluke stroked the lurid fungal fur on his neck. “They’re not always bad.”

  Stan tried not to get desperate. Nobody seemed to want to hear him. “My ex-wife brought my daughter here. I just want to find her, and take her home.”

  “Then you better start picking up trash, buddy and look under it.”

  Stan went with the gang when they left. He didn’t know what else to do. He had nowhere else to go, no one who would listen to him. They would help him find Morgan. They had to. . .

  None of them knew Larry or Sharon, but names didn’t mean much, here. He tried to talk to Fluke, but his obsessive focus on their next mission—he kept calling it that—swept Stan up. These were the fucks who poisoned his daughter, came into his house and tortured him and stole away his family. It was not so hard to believe that they were responsible for all of it, for everything bad that had ever happened to him.

  They scuttled through a hole cut in the perimeter fence of the central collection yards. They ran among dunes of densely packed landfill, grand canyons plowed by bulldozers and coated in seething clouds of monstrous black flies. Rows of derricks sixty feet high roared and gushed green fire into the sky, burning off excess methane produced by the alchemy of decay.

  The strata of petrified waste set his stomach rumbling. An instant, infinite realm of plenty, a Candy Land of scavenged wealth and power, the compressed trash bore a message of mouth-watering arrogance to the future. Here was a people who made an enduring monument to every meal, a sarcophagus for every baby’s bowel movement.

  Herds of gleaners sorted the trash-mounds into huge wheeled carts. They wore gas masks and heavy rubber gloves. Fluke’s gang only had paper filter masks and cheap sunglasses, but nobody stopped them.

  Long after Stan had lost sight of the fence, they reached a huge hangar in the center of a railyard where all the carts ended up. An army of gleaners pushed the carts in and out of the hangar, and a fleet of tanker trucks was parked at the far end.

  It was some sort of recycling operation. Or a huge incinerator, but he saw no smokestacks, like at the other trash processing ce
nters dotting the horizon.

  With the faceless drones and the concentration of feverish activity, Stan was easily infected with Fluke’s silent urgency. He took the unlabeled plastic jug Fluke gave him and followed the others into the hangar.

  Stan braced Fluke and tried to whisper in his ear, but he had to shout over the noise. “Are they turning the trash into fuel?”

  Fluke laughed. “Not fuel, man. . . food. Not for us, though.” Tugging Stan’s baggy sleeve, he led them inside. “This is slave food. . .”

  The others deposited their bundles of garbage on the conveyor belts that carried the harvested trash behind corrugated rubber curtains. A man in a mask with a mosquito’s proboscis and a disturbingly clean white smock stopped Fluke, but their leader waved a bar code badge at the camera in the man’s hood and he stepped aside. Stan looked behind him and realized the others had broken off and vanished into the partitioned hive. He chased Fluke up a ladder and down a gallery overlooking the entire operation.

  It was like looking down at an enormous model of an infested digestive system. His system, for example. . .

  He saw what the conveyor belts and carts were feeding. The belts emptied into huge chutes that in turn filled vast tubs that lined the length of the hangar. A heaving soup of trash and liquefied waste slopped over the sides as the inhabitants of the tubs reared up to gorge themselves on fresh waves of garbage.

  Undulating sea serpent coils dozens of feet long corkscrewed through the trash-baths, coiling round each other and battling for the choicest bits. Their great gnashing jaws flared out to display rows of finely grinding teeth that flowed back down their bottomless throats.

  Fluke pointed down at the far end of the tubs, where the nether end of each worm was harnessed to something like an oversized milking machine. Snarls of ribbed hoses snaked out of the tub and into the sheet metal wall.