Garbage Man (36 page)

She stood there a long time trying to understand what she saw.

The dreams she'd suffered under the influence of the morphine were not just nightmares from her imagination. What she saw outside reminded her of the things she'd tried not to remember through all the time she'd been stuck in the hospital.

Down in the hospital car park and in the streets and parks beyond, nameless things shambled once more. Only this time she could recognise what the things had been. Each of them looked like black scarecrows. Their heads sprouted white roots instead of hair and these roots hung down like the tresses of a witch, tangled and matted. The hands and feet were the same but smaller, nothing more than shaggy outgrowths of grey and white stalks that might once have been veins. It was obvious that the things had once been people. Their shiny, black bodies thronged the streets like crowds of partygoers all wearing the same costume.

But their movements weren't random or confused. They seemed to be searching for something. They looked lost and forlorn.

Aggie was afraid, remembering what the other creatures had done, what
they'd
been searching for. As she watched, it became clear she probably need not be afraid of these new creatures. They were foraging for leavings. And they were hungry.

Very, very hungry.

A group of six or seven had found the large dumpsters at the back of the hospital. All of these waste containers were now overturned. The scarecrow witches lay among the mess holding refuse sacks to their black faces and tearing large bites out of them. They chewed down everything: glass jars and tin cans. Paper towels, tissues and food wrappings. They ate leftovers from the kitchens. Nothing was passed over, not even the plastic bags.

One of them had discovered the medical waste dumpster. It was eating a gangrenous lower leg, having no difficulty biting clean through the bones. As Aggie watched, it opened its mouth unnaturally wide and chomped off all the toes and half of the foot. Others soon arrived. They tucked into the bags as though they were giant haggises. Crunched through boxes of disposable scalpel blades and used hypodermics. Their faces, a tangle of white veins over unctuous black skin, bore one simple expression: voraciousness.

On the pavement on the opposite side of the car park, one of the scarecrow witches stopped and looked down at the concrete it was walking on. A dog had fouled the pavement, leaving a crusted-over pile of sausage-like excreta. The creature dropped on to all fours, dipped its shaggy grey head down and sucked up the turd in one enthusiastic bite. Having found something so good on the floor, the thing crawled away into the shrubbery to see what else it could find at ground level.

Aggie remembered she had to pee then.

She struggled across the chilly linoleum to a unisex toilet. Inside she used the frame to help her sit down. She peed for a long time but the relief she felt was overshadowed by what she'd seen of the world outside. She stood, more easily this time, turned and flushed away her waste. Where would it end up? she wondered. In the belly of one of those things down there? Things that had once been people?

She began to think very hard about how to keep everything clean around her. She was fairly sure the creatures weren't interested in what was living - that much she'd worked out from watching them. All she knew was they were ravenous. With no one left to stop them, they'd eat every last scrap of garbage in the world.

***

She stayed in the high dependency unit for a few more days eating the food left in the nurses' station and then, on the ground floor, she found the staff canteen and devoured what was still edible from the refrigerators. The electricity was off. She'd always been too warm in the hospital but now the cold was penetrating every room.

The hospital was deserted. As her strength returned she searched every room from roof to basement. No one was left. When she was well enough, she risked crossing from her unit to another building. The scarecrow witches still roamed the grounds, some on their hands and knees, others sniffing the air as they searched for refuse. They ignored her as she passed.

Every building in the hospital was empty.

As soon as she was able to walk without feeling faint she stole some clothes from a locker in a staff changing room. They were men's clothes - jeans, tee-shirt, jumper and jacket, all too large - but she didn't care. She needed to be war m. The shoes were never going to fit and she ended up having to use a pair of slippers from one of the wards. The slippers were pink and fluffy. She wept when she thought of her mother and the agony in her chest returned twofold. There were painkillers in the nurses' trolley and she took a bottle of Cocodamol with her to help with the pain. It was when she was still that the ache in her broken chest was at its worst. Once she was on the streets and walking, it eased.

She wasn't as strong as she'd thought. It took her two days to walk to the Meadowlands estate. She had to spend the night in an abandoned house. Even though the scarecrow witches didn't even seem to see her, she still locked all the doors. The following evening she arrived at her own house, deserted now and the back door still wide open. She found the key she was looking for in a box under her bed, changed into some of her own clothes and walked to Mason Brand's house.

The garden had gone to seed, the overgrowth beginning to die back now the cold weather had come. In the bottom corner of the garden where they'd knelt together in the moonlight there was still a patch of bare earth. At the centre of it grew a plant, some kind of weed she didn't recognise. It had flowered and where the flowers had been were small knobbly pods. The pods had split and their seeds lay on the ground. She picked a pod and shook the dry seeds into her pocket before heading up the garden to Mason's back door and unlocking it with his key. In the cupboard of an upstairs bedroom, she found a small pine chest.

It was time to take responsibility, to grow up and keep the promise she'd made him. She would learn the Earth's ways. She would pass them on.

***

Day by day, winter put the world to sleep.

It chilled the sap of the trees, chasing it deep into their hearts. It sent the animals to their burrows to wait for warmer days. It forced the human survivors to go to ground in their own way; finding safe places, places to be warm and quiet. Places where they could think about survival and the future, if there was to be one. Places to remember all they'd possessed - and all they'd lost because of it.

They hid from the new breed of creatures, born of the fecalith's spirit and of the ashes of its children. They hid from the winter's long season and they hid from the Earth as she cleansed herself.

They hid and they waited.

Spawning the Fecalith

Take an enormous dump somewhere in the Midlands...

Hold on. That just sounds wrong, doesn't it?

I'll start again.

Imagine a huge landfill site somewhere in the Midlands, where almost every kind of garbage is buried underground - some legally, some not. What have we put down there? And what if the combination of chemical and biological waste is similar to the primordial sludge from which life first crawled hundreds of millions of years ago?

The reality is, we're running out of places to hide our trash, so who knows what really ends up right under our feet? What would happen if the Earth evolved a new way to deal with all our pollution - some kind of new, garbage-eating species perhaps? These were kinds of questions that prompted me to start Garbage Man. The book began life as a short story. I had no idea of the ending or what direction the tale might take along the way. As is often the way, I simply set off to see where I'd end up.

The original opening scene was the one in which Mason prepares his garden for planting as a huge storm approaches. In between other projects, I returned to the idea and fleshed it out, gradually discovering where the tale wanted to go. The short story became a novella and the novella a short novel. It grew, piece by piece, much like the mewling, embryonic fecalith that Mason nurtures from newborn to adulthood.

When I showed the manuscript to Beautiful Books, it was a very slim volume at 55,000 words - about the same length as The Rats by James Herbert. Naively, I assumed that would be the job done.

Some weeks later, however, Beautiful Books came back to me with a few comments:

“The characters are indistinguishable. Make them all different,” they said. “The protagonist's motivations are unclear. His reasons for behaving the way he does need to be easier to understand. And that sex scene is in the woods is dreadful. Get rid of it. By the way, you need to write another forty thousand words.”

‘By the way' indeed.

The deal was simple: if I could make the changes, they'd publish it.

Hah!
I thought. What you don't understand, Mr. Beautiful Books, is that I am an
artist
and that I have standards. Writing is my craft. My life. I'm not changing all this content just because
you think I should
. It's not my fault you can't understand literature!

Of course, I uttered none of these thoughts out loud. I made the required changes and wrote the extra material as quickly as I could. It was that or no publication.

Some of the new scenes involved Tamsin Doherty's aborted foetus and the life it took on in her nightmares. Quite apart from the deadline Beautiful Books had given me, we were expecting a child and I wanted those scenes finished before it came along. I didn't want to be thinking about mutilated babies crawling blindly along endless concrete corridors when I became a father for the first time. Much more fun were Ray Wade's video gaming triumphs and what befell the inhabitants of Shreve in the final scenes.

I've made a lot of compromises in manuscripts over the last few years and almost all of them have resulted in better books. However, I still can't decide whether the magnitude of edit on Garbage Man was a good thing or not. Most of the extra material requested had to form the early part of the story and, in my opinion, that slowed the tale down. At the same time, it made what had been a straight-up horror romp a much more considered tale, in which themes like the burial of personal secrets could be explored. I suppose it's for you, dear reader, rather than me to make the final judgement call.

Whatever your conclusion, don't forget the most important thing:

Recycle!

Joseph D'Lacey

October, 2013

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