Garbage Man (33 page)

Mason scanned the surface of the rubbish in every direction. Standing this close to it in full daylight, it was hard to imagine where so much waste came from. How much was brought here each day, he didn't know. How many sites there were like this around the country, he didn't know. How long it would take for the rubbish to degrade and disintegrate, he didn't know. Nor did he know what kind of damage the decomposition would do to the land and life around the site. He'd spent years wondering about it and now, here he was, standing at the mouth of the place and still without answers. What he did know, what he still believed, was that the Earth was still transforming all the garbage as best it could and that here was one of the places where that transformative power was strongest.

Below him the surface of the rubbish billowed and swelled; the waves on an ocean of decomposing filth. Something broke through.

Rising up from the sea of detritus, rising as though levitated, came the fecalith, the thing that had begun its life on the night of the storm, the thing that had survived because Mason Brand had taken it in and nurtured it. It was huge now. It stood at least four storeys high, its giant feet floating on the trash beneath it. Mason remembered the pathetic, mewling embryo he'd found in his garden and wondered what had drawn it there. Was it merely coincidence that it had found in Mason the only possible way to grow safely? He would have liked to believe that - if it was true he could still turn his back on all this, take no responsibility for it - but he knew it wasn't true. This was some kind of natural pre-destiny that could never have been avoided. The farmer had seen all of this, Mason was sure about that. That was why he'd forced an education in the ways of nature upon him. And on every page of the A4 pads Mason had filled to clear his head of the calling, was the intelligence behind the creation of the fecalith and its legions of living garbage. There was no point in trying to deny it now; if he was honest with himself, it was the foretelling of these very events that he had been trying to ignore ever since the calling among those Welsh oaks first began.

The fecalith was a monstrous humanoid tower. It was fashioned of steel and timber and plastic and glass and circuitry and was welded together with the flesh of a thousand living creatures. It had begun life as a human foetus, removed from its mother's body and discarded here in a new and acidic amniotic fluid. Since leaving Mason's shed, it had hidden here in the landfill, growing, thinking and plotting. Staying safe until the correct moment arrived. Now, Mason was certain, the fecalith would make its presence known to all.

A hand reached down to him, a giant hand of vile reclaimed machinery and gore. It closed around Mason's chest and lifted him away from the ground until he was staring into one of its eyes. The eye was an old television screen. It studied him, turning him this way and that like a toy. Still, Mason was not frightened. He and the fecalith shared the same blood.

Its inspection complete, the hand dropped to the fecalith's chest and there a rusted panel the size of a door slid open. The smell from inside was so rotten, Mason choked. The hand pressed him into darkness and there, inside the fecalith's torso, he heard the beating of its giant, borrowed heart. The door slid closed behind him. Wires and tubes reached out towards Mason in the resounding blackness. Copper and rubber arteries pierced his head and neck. Animal veins and capillaries melted through his skin and attached themselves to his own. The plasma of poisonous excrement and homogenised bloods which flowed through the fecalith's vessels began to flow in his. And now, finally, Mason hoped and believed he would die.

Instead, the fecalith showed him something.

And Mason perceived it with every part of himself.

23

Shreve Tertiary College was one of the few places to escape the kind of destruction wreaked upon the rest of town by the fecalith's legions and the troops called in to quell them. The two campus maintenance men, trapped there on the first day of the attacks, re-wired the canteen television to run off a car battery. The teachers, students and other residents who had taken refuge on the campus therefore had two versions of what had happened to their town.

On the one hand, the trapped survivors had their own personal experiences and the things they could still see from the windows of the main building's upper floors.

On the other, was the fiction broadcast by the news teams of every terrestrial and satellite channel. The lies were so unanimously broadcast, it was almost possible to believe them, even for the people who'd experienced otherwise - the news stories were far more feasible than the truth, after all.

What would have caused awkwardness in any other situation brought Kevin, Jenny, Ray and Delilah together as allies, at least to a degree. They respected each other for making it this far alive. And they were incensed by the fabrications on the news.

‘Look at this bullshit,' said Ray as the four of them sat together in the front row of plastic chairs.

In the television version of reality, the ‘incident' was pitched as a disease outbreak with massive loss of human life. There was no mention of the monsters that roamed the streets. The only footage, repeated again and again, was of people running, people trying to hide. Editing made some groups of frantic survivors look like they were chasing the others: the diseased attacking the uninfected. Quarantine was the ideal solution. It was demanded by surrounding councils, terrified the outbreak would destroy their communities next, and the government was only too happy to comply.

Kevin sat there shaking his head.

‘Can they really get away with this?' he asked.

‘You can tell the newsreaders believe it,' said Ray. ‘Why shouldn't everyone else? There's no one out there to tell them any different. No one that's seen what we've seen.'

Jenny was crying, hot angry tears.

‘No one would listen even if there was.'

Ray knew why she was so upset. They'd had to lie about her toe because no one would ever have believed the truth - and now the same thing was happening on a national scale. Kev put his arm around Jenny to comfort her and Ray, for the first time since they'd broken up, didn't care. He was happy for Jenny and he was happy for himself. They were all still alive; that was what counted.

‘We'll always know what happened here,' said Delilah. ‘We should promise each other right now that we'll keep the truth alive. Government cover-ups have a habit of resurfacing. One day we might get a chance to share this.'

‘I'm in,' said Ray.

‘Me too,' said Kevin.

Jenny wiped the tears away from her cheeks and the corners of her eyes and nodded eagerly.

‘Absolutely. I promise.'

The helicopter gunships were successful in their way; every landfill creature they fired at was immediately neutralised, becoming inanimate trash once more. Paper and plastic and all manner of rotting animal tissue littered the streets. The gunships left the suburbs worm-eaten with chain-gunfire, houses half torn down by missile strikes. They killed the landfill creatures and they killed the people hiding from them.

They could not, however, find and destroy all of the fecalith's forces. And, no matter how many they gunned down, more of them returned to take their place. As soon as it was clear that this kind of tactic wasn't going to settle the issue, the army arrived on the ground in force. They gathered what intelligence they could.

It soon became obvious that the problem began and ended with the town's waste disposal area. The quarantining of the county made it easy for the army to set up a fully functioning mobile headquarters not far from the centre of the incident, The Shreve Landfill. Not fully understanding what was causing the creatures to spawn wasn't seen as a problem by the top brass.

And all the while, military intelligence, backed up by dozens of its own scientists, epidemiologists and game theorists, came up with their own carefully planned solution.

***

Olive drab tankers arrived in convoy at the landfill and emptied their liquid loads into the pits of rubbish. Infantrymen in breathing apparatus lined the edges of the quarry. Live ammunition was not issued. Anything rising out of the pits was slashed open with bayonets and pushed back into the landfill. For days the trucks came until the haze of petrol vapour shimmered over the expanse of the vast rubbish pit like a mirage.

All army personnel on the ground then retreated to a safe distance. A lone gunship rose into the sky from a mile away and fired a single missile into the centre of the trash. In a searing, gargantuan hiss, air was sucked towards the ensuing fireball as flames boiled upwards three hundred metres high. The burning fuel and waste vomited pure blackness even higher on the still, cold air. The smoke mushroomed upwards, leaning westward when it hit the air currents higher up. From a hundred miles away, people saw Shreve erect its own leaning tombstone against a chilled sky.

In the town, creatures and people alike watched the flames consume the trash that had been dumped in their landfill. Twenty years of the filthiest, least degradable rubbish from all over the country burned. The fields and hedges and trees around the landfill were scorched by the heat. For three days the site was unapproachable by any living thing.

Meanwhile, armoured units supported by ground troops mopped up the remaining landfill creatures street by street and house by house. Much of Shreve also burned at their will. The troops were efficient and indiscriminate. Human bodies lay alongside the bodies of the landfill creatures in every street. Only the larger concentrations of survivors were safe from stray bullets and twitchy trigger fingers.

On the third day, the streets, now silent and safe, the fire dwindling to a glow from below the edges of the landfill canyon, the army advanced to assess the outcome of their action.

***

Ray was drawn to the landfill. He persuaded the others to go with him.

Sneaking out of the college and away from the skeleton crew of troops ‘protecting' them wasn't difficult at all. The four of them slipped out via the covered glass corridor to the science block and from there it was yards to the perimeter hedge. Keeping low, they stayed in cover out to the woods, past the secret place that Delilah had shown him and onward to the edge of the tree line.

From their vantage point they looked down over the smouldering landfill.

No longer was it mounded with trash and well-packed soil. Now there was nothing but blackened gouges in the earth where the trash had been incinerated in white heat. The trenches and pits were almost as deep as the mine had been when it was abandoned. The surrounding land looked scarred and wasted, as though nothing would ever grow there again. It was the charred stump of an amputated limb, the socket of a burnt out eye. Overhead, the smoke column still rose up but it was a ghost now, riddled and twisted by the slightest breeze. The smell of blackening was still in the air, the very soil itself smelled scorched. Everything was silent but for the diesel engines of the tanks and trucks and the shouts of soldiers watching each others' backs.

‘Fuck,' said Ray. ‘It's just . . . gone.'

‘Too right,' said Kevin. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.' They all ignored him.

Delilah looked pale, sick.

‘It's not right,' she said. ‘What they've done. It can't be the answer. Just burn everything? Children would do that. Stupid little boys.'

‘Come on, Delilah,' said Jenny. ‘The whole landfill's been obliterated. They did the right thing. What other solution could there be? Those things were . . . feral. They'd have hunted us all down in the end.'

‘What makes you think a big bonfire is the end to this?' asked Delilah. ‘Do you think they'll never come back now? Maybe there are seeds of them scattered in the bottom of every one of those pits just waiting for something to set them growing again. Maybe they'll be stronger next time. Smarter.'

‘They weren't smart,' said Kevin. ‘They were hungry. It's different.'

‘They were smart enough to set up road blocks,' said Ray.

Kevin wouldn't be persuaded.

‘Every carnivorous animal can hunt. It doesn't make them intelligent.'

‘Intelligent enough to hunt is way too intelligent for trash, as far as I'm concerned.'

Kevin shrugged.

‘Let's not argue about it, Ray. It's over now. What does it matter?'

‘It matters,' said Delilah, ‘because there's some meaning behind all this, some reason for it.'

‘No,' said Kevin. ‘No way. Look who's cleared the mess up. I reckon the army are responsible for all of this. Some military experiment, some war machine that got out of control. Maybe it wasn't out of control at all. Maybe they meant for this to happen as a kind of live test.'

Delilah looked disgusted.

‘That's the most cynical suggestion of all.'

‘It's sick,' said Jenny. ‘But it's certainly possible. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. No one's going to believe what happened here even if someone starts telling the truth. The government and military will spin it as some kind of mini plague that they've had great success in containing. They'll look like saviours and anyone speaking out against them will look like fools.'

Ray pointed down into the centre of the largest pit.

‘We are fools. All of us.'

Something was moving in the blackened depths. Tanks and men were backing away from the edge of the fire crater.

An incinerated colossus rose from the ash. Ray, the only one of them to have seen the fecalith before, recognised it in spite of the conflagration it had survived. It was larger than he remembered, though damaged and fused in a way that made it look more human. All its constituent parts had run together making its blackened form elongated and sinuous. Glass and plastic, steel and rubber, concrete and wood, organs and skin. Cauterised more closely than ever by fire. It did not appear wounded. The fecalith looked strong.