Garbage Man

by Joseph D'lacey

  And that was where the game ended. It was enough for him to know he was able to find prospects out there. He could not allow such investigations to become actions. Even though he thought about it every single day of his life. He loved his family too much. If he hadn’t met Pam and had the kids, he supposed he might be locked up by now. Making a family hadn’t come naturally to him. He’d had to imagine other things in order to succeed with Pam. But he had them now and he cared very deeply for them.

  He imagined a time of freedom when he was older, somehow believing there would be less at stake when the kids had grown up and moved away. Such a time would probably never come. For now, and forever probably, pornography would have to suffice. It was dangerous enough like this. Stories about rings being smashed by the police and men like him being dragged into court were in the news all the time. He knew because he watched for those stories more than any other. He hadn’t allied himself with other people, though, and he hoped that would be enough to keep him safe.

  As soon as he’d ejaculated, guilt flooded every cell of his body. He sweated it, smelled it on himself. It was always the same. He cleaned up carefully, even down to picking up moulted pubic hairs from the carpet. Everything would be flushed away down the toilet. He checked his file system and saw how much footage and images he’d accumulated. It made him nauseous to think of what might happen if his computer was seized.

  Suddenly he was finding it a struggle to breathe. His heart was labouring but this time in a different way. It was beating like a baby bird’s heart but it didn’t feel like it was pumping enough blood. The rushing sound came back to his ears and rose in volume. The study seemed to go grey and all he could see was what was right in front of him. The computer. The files full of digitally-recorded exploitation.

  It had to go. All of it.

  This was the last one. He’d promised himself and he was going to make good on that promise this time. There was no untraceable way to erase files from a computer. He knew that. There were programs that would write over the disks hundreds of times but traces could be found no matter how many times the data was erased and overwritten. And the obvious question to be asked by the authorities in such a case would be: what on earth was so private it had to be concealed with such obsession?

  Tomorrow he would see to the problem and make his home and his family safe. Then it would be time to buy himself a brand new, totally ‘clean’ computer. A computer he would not befoul with his fixation.

  ***

  My name is Ray Wade. My username is The Survivor. It is a world of nightmares now, worse than anything I could have imagined.

  I spend the day collecting useful items and clearing out houses one at a time, one street at a time throughout the city. Houses are easy; they yield bounties for a minimum of effort at minimal risk.

  I’ve been scratched a few times but bitten only once. Not the sort of damage I need to worry about. However, while I’ve managed to collect ammunition of many kinds and plenty of medical items in various packs, the entire day has been fruitless because I have discovered no firearms. No rifle. No shotgun. Not even a pistol.

  Daytime is never too bad, never too dangerous. It’s my chance to recuperate and stock up on necessities. Take rest, drink a supplement, raid the silent town for anything that might be useful. Minor scuffles are usually the worst I encounter while the sun is up. At first I only had a flick knife - for use at very close quarters. It’s all about technique; dodging bites and grabs and lunges, darting in between these, scoring a single wound and getting back out of reach again. With patience, striking with precision, this is the way to overcome them.

  Dozens of them lie motionless around the town in my wake. Dead again. Dead for good and ever.

  That first day, with nothing but my flick knife, had been difficult. The first night which followed it was worse. Many was the time I began to believe I wouldn’t make it, that I’d lost too much blood or carried too much infection in my system. Somehow, eking out my meagre packful of possessions, I stayed alive. Every new house I came to, every storeroom I found, was a bonus. I lived from one moment to the next, thinking only of what I could salvage and how best to destroy those who assailed me.

  This night, though, I know in my heart it will be worse. Somehow, the sunsets hold a clue to how the night will be and here I am, not ready. Not ready by a long chalk, with the sun slipping behind gangrenous clouds, casting ochre and meat-toned shadows everywhere. The clouds lump up into intestinal creases, promising rain and possibly lightning.

  And what do I have to get me through a night I know will be the leanest yet for bounties, the roughest yet for attacks and ambushes? My pack contains two bottles of protein supplement shakes - one strawberry, the other pineapple, for what little that’s worth. For the dark I’ve been lucky enough to discover a miner’s headlamp and spare batteries. I have syringes, antibiotics, needle, thread, bandage and scissors and one large bottle of topical disinfectant. In case of a real emergency, I have a single shot of adrenaline that might buy me enough time to find a hiding place where I can rest up for a while.

  Problem is, while I am the hunter in the daytime, at night they come looking for me. Finding somewhere with a strong enough door to keep them out, even a lone determined one, will require a major stroke of good fortune. I don’t hold out much hope. One wound tonight, one serious bite or cut, and I will be sharing the dirt with the rest of them.

  I have one thing going for me.

  In the three days I’ve been here, I’ve found good handheld weapons. After using the flick knife I arrived with, I discovered a length of hefty pipe. A couple of well-aimed blows to the head with that was enough to take any of them down. At least so far. Then in a really tight spot, badly wounded and needing to tend to myself, I found a fire axe - lightweight haft and sharp as the day it was made. Get the swing right and it removed heads in a single swipe. Using it had almost been a pleasure after that.

  Accordingly, my hand-to-hand skill increased. In one house I bested an unusually fast and deft assailant. Killing it had been a major undertaking until I found its weak spot. When I subsequently searched the house, I found manuals on martial techniques and then, completely by accident, I discovered a false section in the bedroom wall. Behind it had been built a small alcove and altar. On this altar, next to the statue of some eastern deity I didn’t recognise, was a sheathed katana. I wasted no time strapping it to myself and making a few test strokes in the air of the bedroom. As if I’d been born to hold that very weapon, the strokes from the manuals came to me like inspiration.

  It was the confidence that weapon and those skills gave me that made me so careless of the time. Feeling unassailable and swaggering into every house on every street in search of booty, I’ve passed a whole day without making any real progress.

  And now the darkness is coming; bruised, aching nightfall over a dead town full of sickness. I have my pack, lightly stocked by any standards, and I have my head-lamp, which I now put on. And I have my katana; the one thing that might surely cut through this night and lead the way to morning.

  ***

  The RefuSec Waste Management truck pulled up to the gates of Shreve District Council landfill at 6.05 mother gates were locked and the staff car park was empty save for a dust covered and dented Ford Mondeo. It was dark and an uneasy breeze agitated the gates causing them to clang softly on their hinges.

  On the other side of the entrance, a light was on in one of the prefab buildings. Another, taller block of light appeared as the door of the building opened. Briefly it was filled by the silhouette of a man pulling on a coat. The door shut behind him. As he approached the gates, the truck’s headlights picked out the day-glo stripes on his workwear.

  A light mounted on top of the fence began to pulse orange and the gates slid open with a minimum of noise from their well-maintained runners and bearings. The man in the coat waved the truck in.
There was a hiss of brakes being released and a cough of diesel. The truck pulled inside the perimeter and stopped again. Behind it, the gates were already closing.

  The figure from the building approached the cab. The window was open. A tattooed face looked out, grinning and chewing.

  ‘Alright, Stig.’ said the driver through crackles of gum.

  The gate-man nodded, not missing the open-mouthed smacking.

  ‘Still trying to pack in the cigarettes?’

  ‘Nah. Given up giving up, mate. Addicted to the bloody gum as well now. Fackyin’ . . . look at this.’ Chewing all the while the driver with a bad painting for a face rolled up his sleeve. His eyes were open very wide. ‘Nicotine patch, that is,’ he said pointing as though the gate-man might miss it. ‘A fag’s just not the full bifter without the patch and the gum. I have to take a couple of beta-blockers with a few swigs of scotch before I can think about gettin’ any kip at night.’ The driver stared out into the night. ‘Fackyin’ . . .’

  The gate-man considered a light-hearted jibe about rehab and let it pass. The driver was lean and had a reputation for getting out of his cab to settle slights. Instead the gate-man said:

  ‘Know where you’re going?’

  The driver nodded. Too fast. Too many times. Like a viper-strike his hand came out of the cab window. The gate-man flinched but he needn’t have. The hand was thin and grimy, fading turquoise webs and dots extending down from the wrist, a swallow near the thumb. Between the long fingers a wad of dirty twenties. The gate-man smiled and took them, flicked through, and pocketed the lot.

  ‘Who’s overrun their quota this time?’ he asked as the hand withdrew upwards.

  ‘It’s not that,’ said the driver. ‘The incinerator at the hospital’s bust, innit. Fackyin’ . . . can’t burn up the cut off arms and legs and lumps of cancer an’ that. Amazing how much “waste” they create. I ain’t going in a hospital, Stig. Not ever. I’d come out half the man I am now.’ The driver looked down and grinned, eyes chalky, already thinking about something else. Briefly, he came back to the moment. ‘Tell you what else, Stig. It stinks. The worst stink of anything I’ve ever had to shift. Shit and disease and rotting meat, all from people like you and me. Went into hospital in one piece, left with bits missing and a super-bug. Never going in there, mate. Fackyin’ . . . never.’

  The gate-man nodded and stepped back.

  The driver slammed the truck into gear and ground away along the temporary road leading to the landfill cells. Very soon, when the canyons of trash were all filled, the whole landfill would be sealed and covered with soil. They’d turn it onto a public park or sports centre or playing field and, in time, no one would remember the network of feeder roads that led the trucks to the huge mouths in the earth that swallowed the town’s muck silently and willingly. All this would be gone but the gate-man would be doing something similar somewhere else - at least for a while. There would always be waste and there would always be a need for waste managers and refuse engineers. He smiled because he knew he’d never be out of work.

  Until he wanted to be.

  The sound of the truck’s engine receded into the darkness along with the glare from its headlights. The gate-man half wished the driver would make an over-stimulated miscalculation and bury himself and his truck as well.

  Fackyin’ . . . forever.

  But where was the charity in that kind of thinking? Besides, without the hyperactive driver, whose name he still didn’t know after years of after-hours interactions like this one, there would be no backhanders for burying the town’s unauthorised waste. Not to mention the loads brought in by other drivers from other towns in other counties all around the country. Landfill space was running out fast. At two-hundred quid per unauthorised load - and there were several of those every week - the gateman was amassing a serious retirement fund. He looked through the chain link fence at his battered car and smiled. No one would ever guess he was a wealthy man. Only when this job was long behind him and he was living in a country where the weather and the people didn’t bring you down every single day, only then would he allow himself to live the way he wanted to.

  It was going to be a lot of fun.

  2

  To anyone else it would have been the filthiest place on Earth. To Mason Brand it was a place of power, even more sacred and essential than his precious vegetable garden. He broke in there most nights to make contact with the land.

  He stood barefoot on a layer of freshly-dumped soil. It was about a foot thick, just enough to keep the smell down and the animals from digging through overnight. Below the thin, yielding earth millions of tons of compacted waste rotted. Through his soles he could feel the warmth of it rising up like living radiation. The warmth came in the form of gas - noxiously sweet-smelling methane mostly - and in a simple emanation of heat; a subterranean fever.

  The expanse below, filled with every kind of rubbish so compressed it was solid enough to build upon, was alive with decomposition. Tiny bugs were multiplying and eating the waste, breaking it down a particle at a time. Even the metals were being oxidised and consumed. All manner of human leavings and discarded materials were locked below him in cells the size of canyons excavated deep into the earth. Tramped down, by huge machines with toothed wheels, covered with soil to be forgotten and ignored. An entire county’s dumping ground. A place no one ever thought about unless the wind was blowing the wrong way.

  But Mason Brand thought about it a lot.

  There was something very dangerous about Shreve’s landfill. Here, after all, was the most poisonous site in the Midlands - in the country perhaps. More polluted than the run-off from any of Shreve’s factories. More pregnant with disease than the sewers. Cut yourself on a piece of rusted metal here and the wound would corrupt your entire body with sickness, end your life in a few days. These were the things the people of Shreve might have thought about the landfill, if they’d had a spare moment. And, of course, if they thought about it a little more carefully, they might have realised they were incredibly fortunate such a place existed; a place of severance and forgetting, a place of great convenience where all their waste could be covered over and ignored.

  Mason would have been the most optimistic of all of them. For him there was something very beneficial about this place of gathered mess and heaped destruction and filth. Something almost holy. He had a gut feeling about the land and about its influence. This instinct was something which came from generations who’d existed long before him, woodsmen and wanderers, the generations who’d lived close to the land. Mason had lived exactly like them for a time, like a neolith. It was a part of his past he tried hard not to think about.

  He had a sense of the Earth’s ability to heal and transform. This power came in the form of a pull or draw - not gravity exactly but a force of similar quality. The body of the planet, its soil and dust, was something like a living poultice. He had used this quality to cure himself of various ills over the years. A pack of wet soil wrapped in muslin and applied directly to his skin had cleared him of an attack of boils five years previously. Two years later, the same treatment, combined with crushed herbs from his garden, had relieved him of scabies.

  For deeper maladies, wounds to the soul, Mason Brand was in the habit of digging a shallow trench, lying down naked so his skin would touch the loam and covering himself with earth up to his chin. There in his own back garden, hidden among his fruits and vegetables, he would lie awake all night with the worms and the slugs progressing around him. The Earth would draw the spiritual sickness from him and by the dawning he would be clean. Clean as the day his mother had expelled him, innocent and unprotected, into the filthy world of men.

  It wasn’t something he talked about with his neighbours. Mason Brand rarely talked to anyone if he could avoid it. The landfill was a place where, by necessity, the Earth’s drawing was very strong indeed. And that was why, at night
, when the compactors stood still as drugged giants and the rest of Shreve slumbered within their clean brick walls, Mason would climb through the hole he’d made in the perimeter fence and stand barefoot in this place of entropy and rot.

  A quarter of a mile away, near the workers’ huts and the contractor’s offices, a small tower stood like a black candle against the light-polluted sky and at the top of this candle a flame, only visible at night, burned soft blue: the ignited exhalations of the earth, the collected methane being burned to save the atmosphere from its deleterious effects. But it wasn’t possible to collect all the gas and sometimes Mason would see violet will-o-the-wisps flash and shimmer and disappear as a small pocket of vapour ignited spontaneously. He saw these flashes as signs of the Earth’s life, blips on a monitor, pulses and heartbeats, messages of goodwill rising from deep within the body of the world. And from these portents he took faith in the way of things and experienced a simple gladness about the rightfulness and righteousness of decay.

  He curled his toes into the soil, gripped the Earth, held on to her. She took away his leavings too; bad energies, bad thoughts, sickness before it had the chance to take root in him. Wrongfulness was pulled down through him, leaving him pure.

  A sickle of moon rose up from the opposite horizon, as if to balance the disappearance of the sun. It was nothing but a cool glow at first, indistinct and pale behind the low, filthy clouds. As it rose it shrank and its edges became honed until it slit the fleshy vapours near the ground and floated free. A crooked smile, a slash in the night sky where the light from a pure universe seeped through.

  Mason was hypnotised. He had no way to measure the slippage of overlapping moments. He might have been doing no more than focussing on an object through a lens or he might have been standing there a whole season, growing roots through the veneer of loose soil and deep into the landfill. Finally, he blinked and looked around him, feeling it was time to go home. He needed to rest. Even the Earth slept, half of it slumbering through darkness as it rotated its spherical face to the blessing of the sun.