Garbage Man (23 page)

‘Jenny, please listen. I've spent every day since then pretending it didn't happen, that it wasn't real, that somehow you just had an accident or that something bit you. Just like we told them in the hospital. But I never believed that.'

‘Ray, please -'

‘You have to listen to me. Just for a few more seconds and then I promise I'll never call you again. That thing was alive. I haven't been able to face it until today but it was. I think we killed it but there's more of them out there. Worse things.
Bigger
things.'

He could hear Jenny crying now. He didn't want her upset, he wanted her to listen. She needed to concentrate.

‘You never took any notice of me, never heard me. If you only ever do it once, it has to be now, Jenny. I think your life depends on it.'

‘How can you do this to me, Ray? It's so sick. You were always weak but I never thought you'd stoop to this.'

‘Thirty seconds more, Jenny, that's all. I was out at the reservoir this afternoon, not so far from where we stopped that day. I saw something rise up. I've never seen anything else like it except on that day with you. And then it made more of them - too many to count. I swear, Jenny, I swear to you now I saw it. Saw
them
. I had to call you. I had to let you know. So you could be ready. So you could . . . leave. . . if you wanted to.'

At the other end of the connection. Jenny seemed to have sniffed her way back to some kind of composure.

‘You can't have me back, Ray. No amount of bullshit or scare tactics is going to make me want a weak man like you ever again. You're scum, Ray Wade. You're garbage.'

The line closed.

‘Jenny. Jenny? Be there. For God's sake, still be there.'

He dialled the number and it cut straight to voice mail. He waited for the prompt to leave a message, then changed his mind and hung up. What more could he say to her? How could he even be certain she would listen to his message? He dropped the handset back on its base station and collapsed onto his sofa. He'd had his chance. He'd done his best to warn her.

Now he had to think about himself.

***

Mason Brand began to decay along with his post-harvest crops.

Though he'd always had a beard, he'd always kept it trimmed. Now he never touched it. It obscured him, hid his face the way ivy hides old ruins. He preferred it. He stopped cleaning his teeth and bathed even less than he had before. He knew he smelled bad but it didn't concern him. The cornucopia of fruit and vegetables the garden had yielded rotted, much of it unpicked. He ate rarely and made no effort to pickle or preserve any produce.

He no longer understood the nature of things. He would allow himself to die like a spent vine.

Except that he knew it wasn't time yet. He was waiting for something. Something would happen. He knew that much. It
had
to happen sooner or later. When he'd seen this thing, this
happening
, then he would stop living. It was proper that he, Mason Brand, be allowed to end and to rot. He no longer deserved a place in the world.

Autumn arrived less eagerly than the spring had come. The stifling, long days hung on an and on. Everyone else saw it as the most marvellous summer of heat hazes and broad, crimson-orange sunsets that graced each evening's horizon. People lay on the grass in parks and kissed languidly. Parents took their kids on picnics and bike rides. Students, emboldened by beer and cider, leapt into the canals and rivers of every college town.

No one believed the summer would go on forever, not truly, but no one wanted it to end. On the warm nights, muggy with moisture and the promise of rain that never seemed to come, the world, and Shreve in particular, was lulled by a sense of eternal youth.

When the first leaves turned and dropped in drowsy breezes, Mason Brand was the only one smiling. But it was a chill-bitten smile, a smile ahead of its season.

The very meat of him longed for the pressing of the earth all around him, its weight pushing down from above, its healing power drawing down the poison from his bones and transmuting his evil.

***

Ray waited two days for something to happen.

In that time he stayed at home. He ate baked beans and tins of soup instead of walking to the take-away or calling for a delivery. He didn't want to see or talk to anyone. Instead of hiring DVDs, he watched TV. He replayed Revenant Apocalypse instead of buying new games. At dusk and dawn he peeped through his curtains expecting the giant to thunder down his street and smash through the wall. He watched people put out their rubbish and waited for it to come to life and ooze out of their black wheelie bins.

He smoked as much dope as possible, achieving a permanent, medicinal high.

Nothing happened.

He watched the news. There were no reports of undead rubbish or towering landfill zombies. The world continued to devour itself in war; people still murdered their lovers and children; plane, rail and road accidents claimed their usual quota of victims; the prime minister still lied through his smiling teeth while he raped the nation.

Nothing had changed.

Finally he picked up the phone and dialled the number he should have called the night he ran back from the woods. She answered after one ring. His stomach lurched with unexpected joy at the sound of her voice.

‘Hi,' he said. ‘It's Ray.' There was a silence.

‘I didn't think you were going to call.'

‘Sorry. I've been . . . studying. Fancy a pint?'

16

Mason Brand couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. He didn't care. There was no hunger anyway, no desire other than for the blackness to hurry up and take him.

His skin was petal pale. Even his day-burnt face and forearms had faded. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been outside. He didn't know what day it was nor the time. He had no television, no radio, no computer.

Life had become a condition of two states: light and dark.

In the light he tried to sleep to pass the hours. It had worked for the first few days but then his body no longer required further rest. Instead of sleeping, he hid in the twisted sheets and blankets on his bed.

Then the darkness came, like a kidnapper slipping a black hood over the day's head and pulling a cord tight around its neck. He would sleep then because of his body's clock, its understanding of what the night was for. But then his body woke, no more than an hour or two after the light had gone and then Mason was awake in the most awful way.

Something about the workings of his mind was different at night. Some aspect of him was more alert than it was during the day. His veins itched with it. His mind's eyelid was peeled by it, left raw and staring. And with that eye he viewed his waking dreams of guilt and saw visions of the destruction of the world. Destruction that he was responsible for.

Under dark crimson skies, heavy with suffocating cloud, the Earth was changing. Upon its skin had grown many organisms in its long history. They had tunnelled and burrowed and lived and died without troubling it. In its waters they had swum for incalculable generations, keeping harmony all the while with the world and its rhythms. Then had come a new creature, similar at first to many of the others. The creature was wily and smart, outwitting its predators despite its physical weakness. The creature spread rapidly and successfully to all parts of the world's vast body. It became a parasite, feeding from the world, sucking on it, mining it, scorching it, flaying it alive.

What choice was left to the world but to respond? She was slow at first, merely showing the signs of her anger and disgust. She spun a little wide from her axis, shed her protective layers, became lean. The mountains ground against each other like determined teeth. The winds shrieked and whirled, throwing the parasite's dwellings to dust. The waters rose up and drowned the parasites, washed away their homes. Fires swept the dry climates.

But the parasite survived it all. The world's mere anger was not enough.

So she shifted her shape.

And this was what Mason saw in his dreams.

Where the land had been flat, blades of rock thrust up. Where the land had been solid, rifts tore open. The winds of the world joined forces and swept her in unison, one mighty gale that blew from West to East forever. The fresh waters of the world became poison. The sea waters grew into impassable towers. Everywhere the world grew eyes to watch the parasites die, grew mouths to eat them, ears to hear their screams and then their silence. The world consumed her parasites because it was the only way she knew to survive them.

Each night, awake or sleeping - he could not always tell - he watched the world eating humanity as she tried to save herself.

Why had it come to this? Was it really his fault?

He knew, of course, that much of the evil of men was nothing to do with him. He had lived in harmony with the Earth and her cycles and seasons. He had loved her the way only a farmer can love the world. He had tended her, respected her, exchanged with her.

Now this.

Perhaps that was why she had chosen him.

Eyes shut or open, Mason saw what he believed was the future or a representation of it. The world was not ending but humanity was. He had not been the nursemaid to a new way of life, he had been the trafficker who gave the assassin free passage. He had aided the executioner of all mankind.

He had not seen the fecalith for many days. Weeks, perhaps - he wasn't sure. What would it be like now? How much would it have grown? What and who would it have devoured and added to itself?

Would it still recognise him and if it did, would it even matter?

He'd led that poor boy to the most horrible end. The first human death in this new and dangerous world. His own end could not come soon enough.

It was in the middle of the night when he realised that waiting for the end was pathetic and cowardly. He should kill himself swiftly, mete out the justice due to him and have done with it.

He slipped from the filthy second skin his sheets had become and stood naked in front of the full length mirror in his bedroom. Moonlight filled the room with luminous silver light.

He was thin now. His ribs showed - he could count them all. What little fat he'd carried had gone from around his waist. His abdominal muscles were a ridge along the centre of his stomach. Inside, all his organs would have shrunk to fit this smaller cavity. His pelvis protruded like a small shelf. Everywhere the guy-wires of his body, the sinews, showed tight and proud beneath his thinning skin.

A razor would do it.

A blade across his skinny neck and his blood would pool blackly in that silver light.

There was no razor in the house.

He went to the kitchen. There he took out a tiny paring knife and his whetstone. The sound of grinding, slippery steel was loud in all that quiet. For five minutes he stood, his right hand sliding up and down, up and down; a sandy, gritty movement vibrating in his bones, raising the hair on his forearms and neck.

He tested the blade against his thumb. Sharp as a razor. Sturdier. Surer.

He moved in the direction of the stairs but sensed something outside the back door. He stopped and turned. Was there movement out there among the quicksilver shadows? He stood for a long time, watching. Stood until his vision greyed out and he had to blink it clear. It was so long since he'd looked outside that the shapes out there, the rotted-down stalks and stems and vines, made no sense to him. He recognised none of it in the insufficient moonlight.

The knife became a weapon of self-defence and he clutched it, blade upward, in his weak fist. The sense of a presence outside the back door grew and spread. A dark tide had flowed all the way to his back step, covering everything, a living black ocean.

But that could not be.

He stepped closer to the glass in the back door until he could see his own breath on it. The ground seemed to be rippling in the moonlight as though his whole house were at sea. His grip on the knife loosened because his palms were sweating.

He listened, turned an ear towards the glass.

Whispers across the lake of his garden in a language he did not understand.

He told himself he did not understand it but in truth he knew every word. The calling had returned.

Something scraped against the bottom of the door and he stood back.

The waves in the garden were rising, a squall getting up out there. Crests began to obscure the only shape he did recognise - his shed. The level outside was rising.

He backed away still further.

What could his knife do against all this?

And could he really kill himself now when tomorrow would no doubt bring the strangest dawn the Earth had ever seen?

He waited there for a long time, trying to discern some shape, anything recognisable in the flood of movement beyond the glass. He could not.

He waited for it - for them - to come and take him as he so deserved to be taken. He waited for them to separate him into vein, muscle and bone, lymph and blood, to dissociate his various organs and reuse them in accordance with their new way. They came no further than the threshold.

An hour must have passed wherein he entered some staring trance, as though contemplating a mandala. Then, finally, he was tired. Tired enough to sleep. He turned from the black ocean in his garden, disconnected and trudged upstairs to his bed. He placed the knife in the drawer of his bedside table next to his grandmother's Bible, a book he never read.

Before he died there was something he needed to do.

***

Aggie stood naked in the tiny bedroom of her shared flat in Wandsworth.

The landlord had made a poor job of turning two bedrooms into four - there was barely enough space for her to walk around her bed and the walls were like cardboard. Somewhere in the house there was damp rot and every room smelled of mould and sweaty decay. She hated it and barely spoke to her flatmates. Maybe it was because she believed she was worth so much more than the existence she'd found. Maybe it was because she was becoming exactly the person she swore she'd never be.