Garbage Man

by Joseph D'lacey

  ‘Christ,’ said Ray.

  ‘We said we’d leave him.’

  ‘I know what we said but look at him. He’s fucked. What if it was you down there, D? Or me?’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘How can you be so cold?’ She took hold of his hands.

  ‘What about us, Ray? What if, because of the kid, you and I don’t make it? Or only one of us makes it? I want a life, Ray, a future with you in it. I don’t want to survive all this for nothing.’

  ‘I want the same thing, D. Believe me. But if we can’t take care of people like him, we don’t deserve a future. Anyway, think of the guilt you’ll feel knowing you could have helped but didn’t.’ Ray pushed past her. ‘He’s coming with us.’

  She watched him balance his way back to the first roof they’d climbed. Jimmy was still trying to climb onto the guttering. The way he was doing it would surely bring the whole structure down. Instead of using it to assist a jump, he was letting it support his whole body weight while he tried to get one leg up. It wasn’t working. The landfill creatures had reached the first of the steps in the wall. Ray was descending the roof towards Jimmy.

  Delilah watched, refusing to move.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  And then she was hurrying back to them.

  ***

  Mason watched the family come out of the back door like animals testing the air of a new dawn. Mr. Smithfield led the way followed by his wife and then Aggie. This was no longer the world they recognised, certainly not the world they wanted it to be.

  From every dwelling in the Meadowlands estate came the screams of people fighting off an army of nightmares. More helicopters circled in the sky, still uncoordinated. Mason saw an air ambulance hesitating to land, a couple of circling TV choppers, a police surveillance helicopter and the arrival of something that looked more military - something big enough to contain troops perhaps. He didn’t believe any of the aircraft or their crews could do much good. He doubted anyone really understood what they were faced with.

  He’d instructed Mr. Smithfield to bring his car keys. All they had to do was get inside the Volvo and they’d be safe. For a while.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said to the Smithfields, ‘And stay as close as you can. We’ll have to move quickly so don’t get separated.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Mr. Smithfield.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Do you have much fuel?’

  ‘I filled it up yesterday.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mason walked to the gate and opened it. The others hesitated.

  ‘Please, you have to stay right with me. Close enough to touch me or you won’t be safe.’

  Richard and Pamela Smithfield exchanged glances then, wondering at the idea of touching this man. Was he some kind of deviant here to kidnap them? Mason saw the look but he didn’t let it bother him. Nor did he wait. He opened the gate and walked quickly towards the car. Immediately the Smithfields appeared at the front of the house, all the living garbage on their front lawn and on the two neighbouring properties swarmed towards them.

  Mr. Smithfield looked around in incomprehension.

  ‘Please hurry,’ said Mason.

  Mr. Smithfield pressed the key fob and the doors unlocked. Aggie and his wife jumped in and closed their doors but he stood a moment longer watching the creatures approach with a look of horrified curiosity. Mason opened the passenger door and got in. Creatures converged on the car from all sides.

  ‘Mr. Smithfield, get in the car. NOW.’

  Richard’s reverie broke and he walked around to the driver’s side. In front of the door was a creature with six desk-lamp legs and the teeth of a dog in its hinged head. It snapped at his leg and he jerked away as if realising for the time that he was in danger. Animated refuse approached from every direction. The dog-thing was not put off and it advanced, causing Mr, Smithfield to retreat towards the front of the car. Looking behind him, he realised just how many creatures were now coming his way.

  In the car Aggie screamed,

  ‘Dad! Hurry up!’

  His wife’s hand went to the door handle but Mason spun in his seat and pulled her away.

  ‘You help him, then,’ Pamela yelled. ‘For God’s sake, do something.’

  Not knowing what exactly he would do if one of the creatures got hold of Mr. Smithfield, Mason stepped out of the car again, careful to shut the door behind him immediately. The creatures nearest to him hesitated. He put himself between Mr. Smithfield and the ones approaching from the front of the house. They stopped moving.

  In front of Mr. Smithfield, the six legged thing was advancing fast. Mason touched his arm.

  ‘Let me get in front of you. I’ll block it.’

  The creature didn’t wait for that. It lunged, snapping its canine jaws. Mr. Smithfield jerked his leg out of the way reflexively, stumbling back into Mason. A strange laugh, like a popping bubble escaped his mouth.

  ‘Bloody thing tried to bite me.’

  With the laugh came realisation. Mason saw a new tension tighten Mr. Smithfield’s frame. The next thing he saw was

  Mr. Smithfield’s right foot arcing up under the dog-headed creature’s front section. It broke open on impact and the thing flew back to land among the dozens more behind it. Mr. Smithfield launched himself around the front of the Volvo and snatched the door open, turning the engine over before Mason was properly back in his seat.

  ‘We have to go away,’ said Richard Smithfield, more to his steering wheel than to his family. ‘Far, far away from here.’

  Mason looked at him and then at his wife and daughter. They were not special. They were just people. Living things from the old world succumbing to the dead things of the new. He wondered why he’d bothered to come back for them when they couldn’t think properly, couldn’t see what was really going on here. Didn’t they even begin to understand what all this meant? What it was leading to? Aggie, at least, should have known better but she didn’t care any more than her family. All she’d done was sever contact with him.

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to work, Mr. Smithfield. What we really need to do is find somewhere nearby where we can be safe for a while. A place where we can wait.’

  ‘Wait? What the hell are you talking about, “wait”? Wait for what?’

  ‘To be certain about their motives. To see if we can . . . communicate, construct . . . relationships with them.’

  ‘We don’t talk to shit - whether it walks or crawls. Someone should be down here blowing these freaks into fart-clouds.’ As though he’d summoned his own angels into view, two hovering blots appeared over the houses of another street on the estate. ‘See those? They’re helicopter gunships. That’s what’s going to save us. That’s what’s going to turn this around.’

  Aggie giggled at her father’s language and then shut up when she saw he wasn’t being funny. Something crawled up onto the bonnet of the car and both she and her mother screamed. Mr. Smithfield slipped the Volvo into reverse and pounded the accelerator. Everyone’s heads snapped forwards as the car leapt back. The smell of rot and excrement was heavy in the small space - it came from Mr. Smithfield’s fouled right shoe. No one was prepared to roll down the window to let the smell out, however. The thing on the bonnet, something black with light bulb eyes, slid back onto the driveway where its eyes shattered. Mason heard it scream but he didn’t think anyone else did. Perhaps he’d only felt it. Perhaps he’d only imagined it.

  ‘You know, Mr. Smithfield,’ he said as the head of the family reversed the car around in a tight curve and thrust the gear lever into drive, ‘That’s the kind of attitude we really need to dispense with if any of us are going to survive this.’

  The car screamed out of Bluebell Way, dodging obstacles all the way. Behind them came the whine of high-speed chain-gunfire and the wh
ump of a gas tank exploding. Mason strained around in his seat in time to see a black smoke cloud, with fire bursting inside it, roil skyward. He’d been a fool to come here, he realised. What was he doing delaying his final moment this way? And for these people who thought - or failed to think - in just the same way everyone else did? There was no point to it.

  Mr. Smithfield had turned his car onto the main road into Shreve, but he was driving away from town. Mason turned to him.

  ‘Stop the car.’

  ‘What? No. No way.’

  ‘Stop and let me out. Then you can continue with your family wherever you want to go.’

  ‘You said you were here to help us. You’re not going anywhere until you get us to safety.’

  Mason took a deep breath, pushed his lips out as if deciding something.

  ‘How do you know you’re safe with me?’

  He felt the atmosphere in the car shift and swell.

  ‘How do you know you can trust me? Aren’t you curious why those things out there never came near me? Don’t you think it’s strange?’

  Mason looked into the back of the car and his eyes met Aggie’s for a few brief moments. He knew she didn’t intend to keep her promise. Her mother must have seen the look passing between them but, for the moment, she ignored it. Perhaps later she’d question her daughter about it. Discover that this was not the first time they’d ever met.

  Already the car had slowed to below the speed limit. Richard

  Smithfield looked at his gaunt passenger.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t think you really want me in your car, Mr. Smithfield. Not with your family.’

  The car slammed to a halt.

  ‘You’d better explain.’

  ‘I know where your son is.’

  Mrs. Smithfield stifled a strange whimper in the back of the car. In it, Mason heard the twined hope and despair of a mother wishing her child safe, of a mother not knowing.

  ‘Donald’s . . . alive?’

  ‘That’s very difficult to say, Mrs. Smithfield.’

  Mr. Smithfield’s voice was flat and direct, barely contained.

  ‘Well, you’d better find a way of saying it, or it’s going to be very difficult to say whether you’re alive or not.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him but I might as well have,’ said Mason, more to himself than to the boy’s family. ‘It’s my fault he’s where he is now.’

  Up ahead, swarming over the hedges were more landfill creatures, larger ones that had been feeding longer and on more varied prey. They moved in jerks and stumbles or humped along like sea animals trapped on land. But they were faster, stronger than the others. They moved with more certainty. There were enough to block the road. Mason glanced behind. More were waiting in the direction they’d come from. Mr. Smithfield followed Mason’s eyes.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Let me out, Mr. Smithfield. I’ve got you and your family this far. Let me out and I promise I’ll tell you where Donald is.’

  ‘Richard, let him out, for heaven’s sake. Those things are everywhere. They’re coming!’

  ‘Christ.’

  The locks flipped open and Mason jumped out before the man changed his mind. He slammed the door and the window slid down. Creatures converged on the car in front and behind. The road was half clogged by them already.

  ‘Where’s our son, you maniac?’

  Mason leaned down, caught each of their gazes for a moment.

  ‘I gave him to the fecalith so that all this could begin. I gave him for the new world, for this world to have a chance.’

  Mrs. Smithfield’s hands were over her mouth. Aggie’s mouth was a black hole of shock. Mr. Smithfield, Mason could tell, was weighing up whether there was time to leap out of the car and beat him to death before the landfill army blocked the Volvo’s escape route. There wasn’t.

  ‘We’re going to get through this and when we do, I’ll be coming back for you, Mason Brand. Remember that.’

  The window slipped shut as the car sped away. The space in the road was closing fast. Mr. Smithfield drove into the oncoming traffic lane to get past the creatures, running over limbs and pseudopodia and tearing open fragile bodies as he went. But the car made it through and Mason listened to its engine fading up the road for a long time.

  Long enough that when he returned from the reverie to the moment, he found himself surrounded by the life forms born of the landfill.

  21

  The car was drivable but directing it demanded full concentration. One lapse and the BMW’s responsive steering would swing the car off course. The tyre flapped around and occasional sparks came from the steel rim. Kevin knew the wheel would be heating up with the friction and pretty soon the sparks would be flying as though from an angle grinder. Then they were at risk of catching fire, of exploding.

  ‘Come on, just a little farther.’

  He dropped his window and leaned out to see the damage. The car swiped around and he brought it back on track. They were down to fifteen miles an hour. The tyre came off altogether and was left behind in the road. A stray spark caught his cheek and stuck there, burning.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He brushed it off. The car wobbled badly in response.

  ‘Okay, okay. Concentrate.’

  Down to ten miles and hour. In his rear-view mirror he caught sight of something coming down the road behind them. He couldn’t make it out clearly because the mirror was vibrating too hard.

  ‘Hold the mirror steady.’ She didn’t respond.

  ‘Tammy!’

  She put a hand to the mirror and the image in it settled down. He wished he hadn’t seen it.

  Behind them taking up the whole road was a flood of landfill creatures, mostly in shiny black bin liner skins. It looked like some kind of mutant army hunting them down. The noise from the damaged wheel worsened, got louder.

  Eight miles an hour. He stopped the car.

  ‘Get out.’

  She didn’t move.

  He jumped out of the driver’s side, crossed to hers and ripped the door open.

  ‘They’re coming. Hundreds of them. If you don’t get out and run, they’ll have you.’

  Still she rocked, not wanting to hear, not wanting to accept any of it.

  ‘Tammy, for fuck’s sake, I’m going to leave you here if you don’t get out of the car right now and come with me.’

  When she didn’t move he took hold of her hair and dragged her from the seat. He pointed her in the direction they’d come from.

  ‘See that? Quick, aren’t they? You want to stay here, fine. I’m leaving.’

  He turned and ran toward the college main gate. When he turned back she still hadn’t moved. He ran back to her and took her hand.

  ‘Tamsin, I know it’s over with us but we’re still married. I don’t want to see you die out here. They will kill you, you know. And they’ll eat you. And then you’ll be one of them. Is that what you want? Are you committing suicide?’

  She looked into his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kevin. I’ve screwed everything up. Nothing ever made me happy, not even you.’

  ‘Make it up to me. Run with me. Will you do that?’

  He pulled her and she came a few steps.

  ‘I can’t. I killed our baby.’

  The words didn’t fit the situation. He didn’t understand.

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I was pregnant. It was our baby, Kevin. I killed it. I went to the hospital and they cut it out of me like it was cancer. I could never be a mother. The only thing I ever cared about was myself.’

  The strength went out of Kevin as he understood what she was telling him and realised it was true. He remembered now all the nights she’d woken up sweating
with a scream forming in her throat, how she’d cut the scream short as she reached consciousness. It had been so deep in the night he’d never really remembered it too clearly in the mornings but now he recalled, now that it mattered. Sometimes Tammy had mumbled through her nightmares. Poor little baby, she’d said that many times, hadn’t she? And once: why can’t you just let it die?

  Oh, Christ, not this. Not now.

  This was not the time to be sorting out the past. If they didn’t shift, there wouldn’t be a future. All this - was it more of her lies? there was no way to tell - it had to wait until they were both safe. He had to make her move.

  ‘Tamsin, listen to me. Whatever happened, we can talk about it later. Right now we have to run.’

  Still she stood there like a drugged lunatic.

  ‘Tammy, please. Come on, you’re a competitive girl. Fight one more battle for supremacy with me. Race me to the front of the college. Think of the satisfaction you’ll feel if you win. Then we can talk.’

  She smiled through messed-up mascara and shrugged like it was a bet for a pound. Behind her the army of landfill creatures were coming up fast, some of them could run now, not well but well enough to cover ground efficiently.

  Suddenly regaining herself, she broke first, tearing away like the cheat she always was. He didn’t hesitate. Soon he was beside her, about to pass.

  Unable to bear the idea that she might lose, she made it a sprint.

  He rose to the challenge.

  Some of the things behind them broke rank, running faster than the rest. Kevin, looking over his shoulder, saw them, humanoid cripples they were, but somehow powered by hunger and determination and ignorance of pain. They lumbered on their makeshift, cobbled-together legs.

  And they gained ground.

  Kevin could hear every kind of sound when their limbs impacted the pavement - cracks, slaps, knocks, judders, thumps. The fastest ones were only twenty yards behind them now. He gave it everything and powered past her knowing she’d have no choice but to give everything she had to the chase. He looked back again. She was only five paces behind him. It was a good two-hundred metres to the first of the front steps of the College. Another twenty bounds from there to reach the safety of the doors at the top of them.