Garbage Man (34 page)

The four of them watched as it reached into a cavity in its own chest and drew something out, something pink and ragged that dripped dark fluid into the ash several metres below. The fecalith was holding out a kind of doll in front of it as though it were a talisman to ward off the military and their weapons of war. It proffered this charm to the retreating troops.

On the scorched air they heard a man's voice shouting out from the pit. The fecalith, speaking through its mannequin mouthpiece, his voice tiny and human, agonised and imploring.

‘What's it saying?' asked Kevin. Ray shook his head.

‘I can't quite hear it. Looks like it's reasoning with them, though.'

The pink doll was, in turn, holding out its hands to the soldiers in gestures of pleading and placation. He looked as though he was trying to explain something. He reminded Ray of speakers he'd seen on the news in places of deep human conflict. He was passionate, inspired, cautionary.

Suddenly the pink doll's body went limp. A second or two later, they heard the triple burst of machine gun fire. More followed from many men kneeling or lying on the ground. The doll's body jerked and reddened. Pieces dropped away from it into the pit. The fecalith drew the doll back, placed it once more inside its chest. The gunfire continued, intensified. The fecalith didn't seem to know what to do. It stepped back and away, its lower legs still obscured by the pit in which it stood. Like the mannequin, it held out its blackened hands to the soldiers to make them stop.

The tank's gun recoiled, rocking the whole vehicle and sending up a billow of dust from all around it. There was an explosive flash at the fecalith's shoulder, spinning the giant a quarter turn to its left and pushing him backwards. The sound of the blast reached the four onlookers, followed by a push in the air. Kevin lost his footing and sat on the ground.

‘Jesus Christ.'

Smoke erupted around the fecalith's head after the impact, obscuring it.

The gunfire ceased. The giant swayed.

‘No,' said Delilah. ‘No, no, no. This is all wrong, Ray. Can't they see that? They can't just blow him away like this.'

Kevin shook his head as if he'd heard her wrong.

‘Him?'

‘It's alive,' she said.

‘It's not a fucking person, Delilah. It's a freak of nature. And it's a killer too.'

Jenny felt the same way.

‘They have to destroy it. It's the only one left. It's probably the one that controlled all the others.'

‘We should definitely move into some cover,' said Ray. ‘If the army realises they're being observed I doubt they'd think twice about wasting us.'

Another flash burst on the fecalith's hip. The noise reached them as they watched it stagger away half bent over. The damage to its shoulder was obvious now that the smoke of the first impact had cleared; black splinters protruded from a rend beside its neck. Its left arm hung, apparently useless.

The four of them backed into the trees to watch from safety.

***

The fecalith shared everything with Mason, just as Mason had shared everything with it.

It was the basic needs that came through most obviously and most strongly. Things Mason could have imagined: the terrible hunger the fecalith felt, a drive too strong to resist. The pain of its existence and its inability to express that pain. Every time it grew or added to itself, its wounds were raw. Physical development was like a series of operations without anaesthesia. New limbs and organs were agony to install and the places where flesh and trash met never completely healed. The fecalith walked perpetually in a filthy grey cloud of agony. It had done so ever since it was conceived by the wrath of the storm. But pain and hunger were things Mason could understand easily. They were human characteristics, human sensations.

What was not human, or what seemed no longer to be, was the sense of wonder that made the fecalith's pain bearable. It was enchanted by its very existence, lived with a permanent sense of the miraculous, like some agonised saint witnessing the hand of God in everything. Each tiny moment of consciousness was a rapture and a joy at the living fact of itself.

If only people felt the same way, thought Mason, what a different world it would be.

In the chest of the fecalith, Mason changed. The filth that flowed in its veins now flowed in his through the many tubular and canular connections between them. The fecalith's chest had become a kind of womb in which Mason grew in knowledge. The fecalith fed him of its own strange plasma, nurtured him. Kept him alive. Every union with the fecalith was painful, each penetration of wire or silicone or steel or glass an abhorrence. Mason was deeply fulfilled, though, for he had become one with the new life, the new nature and that was more than he could ever have hoped for.

The consciousness of Donald Smithfield was gone, as were the consciousnesses of the dozens of animals he'd fed the fecalith in his shed. They were simply dead; everything physical that remained of them was in use by the fecalith. But their spirits - it had let those go. Donald Smithfield was dead but he was free. This and the knowledge the fecalith shared with him assuaged Mason's sense of guilt. The boy had died for something great.

The fecalith showed him what it was. It showed him the planet's history. Mason found himself unable to be sceptical about what he saw, it made such simple sense. The fecalith displayed for him the many ages in the world's growth, the coming and going of many species that had survived mere thousands or hundreds of millions of years. Many of the species had become too successful and the Earth, in its own time, had destroyed them to save itself. The Earth was a huge living organism, within and upon which many tinier organisms lived out their tiny lives. Like the cells of the skin or the bacteria in the gut, these tiny lives were meant to exist in harmony with the whole ‘body' of the Earth. When a group of cells became too successful or too prolific, disturbing the delicate balance of the whole organism, the organism cleansed itself. In this way, many creatures had come and gone since life on the planet began. Most amazing of all to Mason was the uncountable times that humans had existed, flourished, become destructive and been wiped almost totally away. Each time humanity had survived the Earth's self-cleansing process, it had changed, become better in some way, learned some lesson about harmonious survival.

The world was about to self-cleanse again, the fecalith showed him. Its birth in the depths of the landfill was only an early sign of the change. Mason had been right all along, the fecalith was a new order of life. It came from the dead things humans threw away. Human trash had accumulated to a globally toxic level. Now the Earth was working hard to get rid of the toxicity and its cause. She'd sent a new species to facilitate the operation. The new species could not be destroyed or stopped by humans but that didn't matter. There was new hope - as there always was and always had been - because the Earth would not destroy humankind totally. It would merely bring it to the edge of extinction where, as a species, humanity would learn a valuable new lesson and then rebuild itself better than before. The whole organism of the world would benefit from the cleansing. There was a bright future ahead.

Mason was happy in the darkness of the fecalith's heart, learning and grasping the secrets of new realities, seeing new hope for the world and being at the very centre of it.

Then the fire had come.

The fecalith knew it was coming when the tankers began to fill its ocean of rubbish with fuel. But he didn't pass this on to Mason - there would be no point in filling the man with fear. Mason, who had been like a father to him, was now like his child. When the flames came, it did everything it could to protect him.

Mason felt the physical shift all around him when the fire began with a huge explosion. But the noise was so muffled he didn't know what it was. Not until the temperature began to climb inside his cool heart-womb. Not until he began to cook. When the heat melted off Mason's hair and his screams were too much for the fecalith to bear, the fecalith extended fleshy tubing into Mason's mouth and nose and cut him off from the air. The fecalith oxygenated Mason in other ways, with fluids instead of air; it pumped the coolest of its liquids into Mason to keep him alive as best it could. Meanwhile, the fecalith could not help but be burned and therefore changed by the fire. It knew, though it could experience and endure endless pain, that it could not die. Not ever. And so it had faith in the world that made it. Faith that it would survive. Faith that the world would become a better place.

Mason's consciousness became an awareness of nothing but burning. Burning and not dying, though he begged and begged for its cool, black release. In that fire of three days they were both re-forged.

Facing the soldiers as the fecalith's mouthpiece, Mason had felt no fear. Instead an evangelical frenzy took him as he tried to convey to the men, the men who had not and could not live through fire, what the future held for them if only they would lay down their weapons and listen. If only they would take heed and change.

He didn't believe it when they opened fire. The bullets hurt as badly as the flames. He held out his hands to stop them but they took no notice. It was then, when so many machine gun volleys hit him that his very limbs began to drop away, that Mason began to die. It was both a terrible shock and a glad relief for his life to be over.

Withdrawn once more inside the fecalith's chest, he felt all the interfaces being withdrawn, the makeshift tubules and veins receding, his awareness ebbing.

‘You said we could not die.'

‘You are not we,' replied the fecalith.

An explosion sent Mason sliding around in his own blood inside the chamber of the fecalith's chest. He sensed the creature's terrible pain increasing. Suddenly it seemed that he might have been wrong about everything, that the fecalith was insane or, at worst, a liar.

‘They're killing you, aren't they?'

‘We cannot die.'

Mason grunted, a laugh of sorts.

‘You're delusional.'

‘No, Mason Brand. You can die. You
will
die. But we will live on. This fire is simply a beginning.'

Another shell, nearer to Mason this time. The black world shook and reeled. Light came in from somewhere. The fecalith's body was breached.

24

The four of them watched the army blow the fecalith to pieces. More tanks rolled to the edge of the landfill pit. They fired at will, sending shell after shell into the already charred hulk. It came apart. One side of its head disappeared in a single impact. Its right arm fell away at the elbow. No longer could it hold up its hands in supplication. It stood, resolute and fearless, one television-screen eye watching it all.

The soldiers on the ground fired until their muzzles were hot and their magazines empty. Then they reloaded and started again. They aimed at every part of it; limbs and thorax, head and neck, even its sexless groin. But it was the tanks that did the real damage, each shell breaking the fecalith open, tearing it down. Finally they broke one of its legs and the four onlookers watched it topple into the ash.

The tanks and troops retreated swiftly from the landfill, pulling back towards the main road. Seconds later, whining thunder swelled in the distance and three jets approached the site. Each loosed two missiles that left smoking trails as they hissed into the pit and ignited. White light burst upwards followed by a crackling roar. They felt the heat even in the trees. Whatever was in the missile burned with an almost purple whiteness, flashing and giving off a much lighter-coloured smoke.

They watched for most of the morning as the flames died down to nothing. When it was cool enough, convoys of huge trucks began to arrive, tipping and leaving mounds of earth and hardcore at the edge of the largest pit. Green bulldozers arrived to push the earth over the remains. Hour after hour the trucks brought in a mountain of soil for the earth movers to push into the smoking void. They didn't stop until that section of the pit was filled level. By then it was cold and dusk was approaching.

‘We'd better go,' said Ray.

He took them to his place because it was the closest. Around the streets of Shreve the army presence was far less obvious. Nevertheless, they checked around every corner and stuck to the quietest routes.

Inside his flat, away from the chaos of the streets, Ray handed everyone a can of cider. No one raised their drink for a toast. Ray watched Kevin sit with his arm around Jenny's shoulders, no longer even surprised by his lack of reaction. It didn't matter that she was sitting there with another man. Ray was glad to be a survivor. He was in love with Delilah. Now that they'd made it through the worst of this nightmare they could have a life together. They'd fought for it. They'd made it this far. They'd earned it.

‘Don't know about you lot,' he said, ‘but I'm walloped. I'm going to crash. You two alright with the sofa? There's plenty of extra cushions and stuff.'

Kevin nodded.

‘We'll be fine.'

In bed, Ray held Delilah tight. She'd been very quiet all day.

‘Are you okay, D?'

It was such a long time before she replied he thought she'd fallen asleep.

‘I'm afraid.'

‘Afraid?' he asked, half-asleep himself. ‘You haven't been afraid of any of this. What's changed?'

‘It's the way they dealt with it. Burning him. Burying him. Doesn't seem any different to what we would have done before. It doesn't seem any smarter.'

Ray was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

‘I'll have to talk to you about this in the morning. I'm too tired to make sense of any of it.'

She squeezed his hand.

‘You're right. Let's forget about it until tomorrow.'

***

The army left as quickly as it had come.

The clean up operation in Shreve was carried out by local services and thousands of volunteers. Truckloads of waste, now mingled with human and animal flesh, were ferried from the town to the landfill site where they too were burned in petrol and then buried. Thick black smoke rose and drifted wherever the wind took it. In the aftermath of such tragedy and destruction, complaints from neighbouring communities and villages about the stench and fumes were ignored.