Awake in a forest. Quicksilver mist and electrified dew crackle on wrought-iron leaves and barbed-wire lawns. She picks her way through tar pits of liquid shadow and slithering, singing blades, amazed that in the afterlife, she can still feel pain, oh, like never before.
She staggers out of the razorblade trees to find His mansion sprawling out over both horizons, and the moon has His face, and all their prayers are answered at last, night without end, Amen.
And all of them are there, waiting for her.
Like any spoiled birthday boy, He awoke and unwrapped and broke all his presents, and is already bored. He stands on a balcony, all black curling horns and exquisite tentacles caressing the flayed remains of His slaves, sculpting and fusing the choice bits into a new and tantalizing toy, a voluptuous mountain of turgid, squirting teats and pouting, slobbering cunts. At its apex, the gargantuan torso ends in a stump, the protruding vertebrae carved into an empty throne of tattooed flesh.
In this private heaven created by their blind, suicidal worship, He has become what they always wanted Him to be, and now He is remaking them into what He always needed.
He shows her the crown she will wear forever, and the hammer and nails to put it on, and when He pulls its strings, His leviathan bride bows low to accept her as its head.
The sea of discarded human scraps parts for Sloane as she wades through it to kneel before Him, and she has to hide her smile, because He thinks this is His dream, and the game they are about to play will have to last forever.
“There’s one more thing you got to know about the dump,” said Igor Blasco, “if you want to be a real garbage man.”
Rope Lipton looked over the rusty iron drums in the bed of the pickup truck as he and Igor covered them with a tarp. Shit had already eaten its way out of two of them, and where it dripped off the tailgate, the oily gravel sizzled and danced. He had been here a year, and in the last month, when he’d got off some sort of secret probation, he’d started to learn how the dump really worked. He’d learned so much, already, that he never wanted to know.
“Like what?” he asked, backing away from the truck as soon as the tarp was lashed down. His mask sucked up against his mouth when he tried to breathe, and the air sweated toxins that he could feel dissolving into his blinking, dripping eyes.
“Where we take the bad shit, sport, the shit nobody ever wants found.” Igor always called him tiger and sport, and worse whenever Rope’s back was turned, but he couldn’t find a better job after he got out of jail.
Rope should have known better, but he was intrigued. He’d caught bits of rumor about some sort of secret place in the dump, something only Igor knew about, and this morning, perhaps in reward for lying to the OSHA inspector yesterday, Rope was about to be let in on it.
Most likely, it was merely something highly illegal, dangerous and stupid, but the tones of those hushed, black-lunged whispers in the break room—the way Chuy, the old Mexican bulldozer operator, crossed himself and kissed the weird amulet under his flannel shirt when someone brought it up—hinted at much more than just a hole in the ground.
They climbed into the truck. Igor fired up the enormous engine, threw it into gear and set out of the compound, into the sulfur-green glow of a junkyard sunrise.
They were at Collection Center 3, the furthest outpost of civilization in the dump. Furious seagulls circled over the shifting tides of trash, battling for the freshest jetsam from the armada of trucks disgorging their bagged and loose garbage in discrete pyramids. The pickers sorted recyclables out of the mounds, and the bulldozers rearranged the landscape into stratified terraces. Rope knew that if he dug in the same spot long enough, he’d find his own fossilized diapers and petrified newspapers from the day he was born.
The dump was the last and largest within the city limits, servicing the daily waste disposal needs of about two million consumers. Though they had filled in the last of the box canyons and graded off the last knobby coastal hills, you couldn’t see the surrounding city from anywhere inside—kind of like at Disneyland, and not just because of the sickly miasma of methane and nitrogen bleeding out of the overripe ocean of waste.
They reached the back gate, and Igor gave Rope the keys to unlock it. Rope took a while to find the right key to the big rusty padlock, and it got harder to concentrate when he looked through the fence. This part of the dump was different, and what he’d seen so far made him unwilling to go again.
He got the lock off and held the gate open for Igor to drive through. When he climbed up on the stepladder to the cab, Igor punched it. Rope’s boots, slick with slime, spun out from under him. He hung onto the mirror and slithered in the open window. He didn’t want to be outside.
The trash was older here, and piled higher, in precarious rolling hills and frozen tidal waves that shifted with the slightest stirring of the sickly wind. Hazardous shit—industrial and military junk, misplaced medical waste, stagnant ponds of scummy not-water, all but glowing in the shadows, clotted with pickled rat carcasses.
Rope looked to Igor for reassurance as the road sank into the walls of waste to become a narrow, twisting canyon. The senior sanitation engineer took a toot of crystal meth out of his plastic bullet and cracked open a Mickey’s Bigmouth like it was just another morning.
The walls of trash threatened to close over them, almost touching to form a tunnel, but the road serpentined around a dormant diaper volcano and emerged onto a festering field broken only by the gray concrete blocks of the old Navy housing project.
The Navy spared every expense on the drab rows of apartment blocks, and grudgingly abandoned them when the residents began to complain of birth defects. “Flipper babies,” Igor called them, “real Navy seals.”
Soil and water tests were taken and swiftly buried, and the Navy surrendered the property to the dump, which simply knocked down the fences and spread into the Navy project until the ground floor windows only peeked above the tide.
Rope looked in the broken windows of the second floor, saw hanging pictures and empty flowerpots and broken furniture left behind. He thought he saw silhouettes of children watching him, swimming through shadows on vestigial paddle limbs.
“You feel it, don’t you?” Igor demanded.
“I don’t feel nothing. Maybe a beer—”
“No beer, tiger. Gotta stay sharp. Ah shit, have one.” He collected his thoughts for a moment, something that left Rope amazed, because Igor never thought about anything, and he never, ever, shared his beers. “Nobody likes a dump, except people who have to be there, because all this shit got thrown away, know what I mean?”
Rope didn’t, but he nodded while he slurped his beer.
“You don’t know shit. When you throw something away, whatever it is, you kind of curse it a little. Nobody wants to touch trash, it’s like shit or piss, it’s taboo, see? And when you get all that shit in one place, pile it high and pack it tight… Look down there.”
The truck topped another rise and idled on the edge of a pit so wide and deep, Rope expected to see Chinks crawling up out of it.
He couldn’t see the fence or the city or the congested traffic on Highway 52 on the other side, just more trash-tundra, up to and over the mustard-gas horizon.
The pit was gouged out of the fossilized strata of compressed trash, and the road wound down to the bottom, where a cinderblock bunker sat all by itself. The truck slipped and squealed on the slimy spiral slope as it descended into the hole, and Rope started to see the things that moved in it and grew out of it.
Trees stood up out of the trash, but not like the spindly eucalyptus groves in healthier parts of town. The bulging trunks and succulent, swaying branches looked like boiled, spoiled meat, and the way they twisted and swatted in the still air at the frenzied clouds of seagulls proved they were not trees at all. Squawking gulls stuck to the lazy, predatory branches like flies, and were swiftly dissolved in bursts of acidic foam.
Naked, hairless rat-jackals prowled barrow-mounds of bloated Glad ba
gs and loose, maggoty debris. They paced the truck knowingly, sat back on their leprous haunches and preened their delicate forepaws with long black razor tongues.
The truck stalled out in front of the bunker. Rope looked out at the rat-jackals and the meat-trees. “Did the—the stuff you dumped… do this?”
Igor polished off his beer and strapped on his gas mask, and Rope did the same. Through the chambered rubber filters, Igor sounded like Darth Vader. “Boy, when you get this much bad shit in one place, shit just happens, you know?”
He checked the action on his pistol, tossed the keys in Rope’s lap. “This is where we put the hazardous shit. We got a real deep hole, a special one.”
Only now did Rope look around at the trash at the bottom of the valley, and a low whistle escaped his lips. This was the strangest thing he’d seen yet, though there was nothing impossible or innately fucked up about it. The stuff on the ground all around the bunker was not trash.
Igor caught Rope’s jaw in his crusty glove, squeezed. “Don’t touch a fucking thing. You know those old shells?”
Rope tried to nod in the vise of Igor’s fist. The dump used to be part of an old Army proving ground before WW2, and the bulldozers sometimes unearthed live artillery shells. He thought they were just stories, until a bunch of them went off during a trash fire.
“This shit is a thousand times more dangerous.” Igor popped the door and slid his gigantic ass painfully off his inflatable hemorrhoid doughnut. “Get the shotgun and follow me. Keep your eyes peeled.”
Rope shrugged and unlocked the shotgun from the rack in the back window. “For what?”
The Loser rides the bus, in the sideways seat by the back door, under a big banner that says Winners Ride The Bus! Every other seat is crammed with morning express commuters, but even though he has his herd of bags close by his feet on the floor, no one sits next to him.
A golden ribbon of fluid trails out across the ripped seat cushion from under the fluttering wings of the Loser’s outermost raincoat. He notices it and feels bad. He dabs a finger in it and tastes it, remembers… something.
A faceless puppet in the next seat starts to scream, but its mother jerks its strings and hisses, “Don’t stare!” in a scalding whisper.
He hides his face behind his gloved hands, but this strikes him as silly and pathetic, because he has no idea what his face looks like. He checks the cracked plastic bottle of Golden Griddle maple syrup in his pocket. He picked it up on Adams in Kensington, where a woman with too many bags dropped it in a gutter coming out of a supermarket. But he doesn’t remember if it was today or yesterday, and the bottle has lost its glow.
Today, the Loser rides the 115 on a loop. He continuously rides and walks on his routes because he is the most functionally insane human being in the city, if not the world. If he ever had a past or a future, he lost and forgot them, but in return he gets to see what no one else can.
He cannot see any of the people on the bus as people, nor can he see the bus itself, or the drab procession of stores and apartment complexes outside. Not the way people do. He sees through them to the Platonic ideals of these things—what they mean, not what they appear to be—and all the webs, wires and nooses that bind them to each other, and to the world.
Some of the bus riders are expressed as complex mathematical formula, or floating words, or fuzzy, embryonic shapes, or bizarre jigsaws of animal and machine totems, or vague mists of noxious vapor. He can see right through most of them, and out through the ghostly outline of the bus, unfleshed but for a skeletal grid fused by the collective need and resentment of its patrons, and he looks deep and far and long in every direction, as the 115 grinds on down University Avenue, out of loud, lurid Hillcrest and into the muted neo-Victorian backwater of Banker’s Hill.
Through the drooping rows of palms and willows and between the dense picket lines of parked cars, he sees the beckoning glow only he has eyes for, and reaches up to pull the cord that rings the bell. His syrupy ass sticks to the seat when he lurches up to gather his bags.
A transparent rooster jumps up and kicks through the bags to get out the door before him, causing the Loser much distress. He gets the handles of the last bag over his wrist, and looks around, and sees something that was not there before.
A wallet under the glass rooster’s seat; cheap imitation eelskin, frayed at the single-stitched seams, stuffed with overextended credit and phone cards, three driver’s licenses, one hundred or so dollars in cash and a folded cocktail napkin with a phone number on it, outlined in stars. It is this napkin, oddly enough, that he sees most clearly, the number that makes this object glow so brightly.
Something very big might have happened to the owner, had he called. Something life-changing, forever lost. The Loser collects the wallet with a fluid dip that no one sees because he is as invisible to them as they are to him.
He drops the wallet in his bag and gets up. The bus driver floats up from his seat, a smoke-belching contraption accordioning out of the cockpit, grinding its gears up as frustration mangles its shoddy components. “You getting off today, sir?”
Words fail the Loser yet again, but he makes sorry noises and drops back into his syrup-puddled seat.
He has enough to go back to the dump, maybe enough that, at last, his offerings will be accepted. If he can get into the bunker, he can open the door and stand inside it and from there, he can see where the lost thing is, the one that he must find. He tries to think, for a moment, about what he is doing, and why, and who he is, and he thanks somebody that he cannot remember.
The rat-jackals slinked away when Igor shot the brains out of one, but Igor saw something else in the pea-green mist that made him rush unloading the truck. He threw down the lift-gate and shoved the dolly at Rope, who bobbled it and almost dropped the shotgun. He looked around, but he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, ha ha.
“Pay it no mind, tiger.”
“It ain’t real, right, boss?”
“Oh shit, boy, it’s all real.” Igor strolled over to the rusty meat locker door on the bunker and commenced keying the padlocks and deadbolts. Rope crouched and backed away from the door, skin prickling as if it knew something was going to spring out at him when it opened.
Finally, Igor threw it wide, looked back at Rope and cackled. A coughing fit doubled him over, but when he recovered, he said, “Come on.”
Rope followed him inside. The soupy sunlight stopped dead on the threshold. Inside, it was cold and dry as the Carlsbad Caverns, and nearly as dark. And filled with shit. But, like the stuff outside that covered the floor of the valley, it was not trash.
Toys, dolls and whole, wrapped gifts, accidentally thrown out with the Christmas wrap; boxes overflowing with fine and costume jewelry, glass eyes and prosthetic limbs; TV’s and lesser appliances, lost or dumped swag from botched robberies; crumbling ziggurats of books, pyramids of rolled rugs and tapestries, dismembered statuary, drained aquaria, Nazi and Commie flags and guns and swords and bongs and meth lab apparatus. And in the center, under a dome-shaped cage wrapped in layers of chicken wire, a big empty space that got no lighter when Igor hit a switch to ignite a row of yellow incandescent lamps.
It was to this caged empty space that Rope was drawn. It wasn’t darkness, but emptiness—so profoundly blank that it made the space around it seem like a picture, and the artist just hadn’t painted anything there. The longer he looked at it, the more it seemed to turn into a tunnel with pulsing lights streaming down into it, but he knew this was his mind playing tricks on him, because it had no clue what it was looking at.
“I started collecting lost-and-found shit almost from the first day,” Igor said. “Stop looking at me like that.”
Rope wasn’t looking at him at all, but staring into the empty space in the cage.
Igor crept up behind him and hung onto the cage with his fat fingers. He hawked a gob of snot into the hole, and a gust of chill wind stirred the lone lock of hair on his red, sweaty skull. The wind sucked int
o the hole, he noticed.
“When all you see is trash for a mile in every direction, you get an eye for stuff that don’t belong, when your bulldozer turns it up. I just wanted to fix up the shit and sell it at the swap meet, this was before all that Ebay bullshit, mind you… but I couldn’t part with it. I started to see something… a kind of light, like the rainbow shine on beef when it’s spoiled, but magical, you know? Like it was charged, because it was lost shit. Somebody missing it, gave it power…
“Anyway, I just collected the shit for eighteen years, and I couldn’t bring it home, so I put it all in here. But then he started coming around, and bringing his shit out here, and then it just opened up…”
“What is it?”
Igor grunted, but he didn’t answer for a while. “You know, when you lose your keys or your wallet, and you tear the house apart, but they’re nowhere? Not lost, not stolen, but just gone?”
Rope shook himself out of a trance and nodded.
“That’s where they go.”
Rope just nodded again. It made sense. “Who is the Loser, boss?”
Igor shoved him. “Go get the fucking barrels loaded, peckerwood.”
Rope gratefully turned away and went back outside. He stuck the shotgun outside first, then followed it out to the back of the truck. The barrels were on the lift gate, and he got one on the dolly and levered it back into the bunker without incident.
Igor held the cage door open, and pointed at the hole like a gracious host showing the way to the toilet. Rope edged the dolly up to the mouth of the cage, but balked. Igor tore the handles out of his weak grip and stood the dolly up with a jerk so the barrel tipped over and into the hole.
It never hit the floor, but beyond that, Rope could not say for certain where it went. It did not make a sound. It didn’t disintegrate or implode. It just dropped out of sight.
Rope leaned forward without meaning to, out over the edge of the hole before Igor hauled him back by the collar of his jumpsuit.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 17
