‘Love. You. D.’
***
Kevin and Jenny sat in her tiny white Mini with a length of green garden hose drooping in through the window. All the other windows were tightly rolled up. Kevin had used half a roll of duct tape to seal the hose inside the exhaust pipe. He didn’t want there to be any mistakes. No brain-damaged comebacks.
They reclined the seats and held hands but there was nothing comfortable about breathing engine smoke. They lay there coughing and crying. Kevin was dizzy and nauseous but he didn’t know if that was the fumes or the disease. They’d had so much to look forward to, had already put so many bad things behind them.
When the sickness had first hit them, Jenny was iron-hearted in a way he’d never anticipated.
‘Whatever made those things rise up, it’s in us now. I’m not having it. I’ve survived once and there’s no way I’m going to give in to them now. We have to kill ourselves before whatever’s inside us takes over.’
He’d argued with her for the whole day and all the while they both got sicker. He couldn’t believe they’d bickered away their final hours together. Nothing beautiful there to remember. No, for good memories he had to go back further. Back to when being with Jenny was adultery. For some reason, that was when he’d been happiest. Not knowing her, only knowing something was developing between them. Something stronger than he could deny. Something bigger than both of them. Too suddenly, too quickly, their happiness was ending.
‘How do you know?’ he’d asked her. ‘How can you be certain this is anything to do with what happened.’
‘Oh, come on, Kev. Don’t be so fucking ignorant. How many diseases have you heard of that turn your skin and vomit black? That turns your veins grey? That continues to live even when it’s outside your body? This is all connected.’
‘But how in God’s name did it happen?’
‘Delilah was right. She’s not just some stupid Goth chick. She was tuned in. Burning the landfill and the fecalith was the wrong thing to do. What if all it did was release what was inside those things into the atmosphere? What if it turned the smoke into a cloud of germs or spores? We’re turning into human trash, Kev. Can’t you smell it?’
He could. They’d both begun to reek of shit and decomposition the moment they’d begun to feel queasy. They’d made it to the toilet to be sick but soon the toilet was overgrowing its bowl with heaps of grey threads that strained outwards across the whole bathroom, crept under the door.
It was only when Jenny’s now grey hair began to move by itself and her screamed pleas became those of the insane that he did what she asked. He’d rather they fell asleep together in the car than watch her slit her throat with a carving knife as she’d threatened to do. That would leave him there to die alone, too frightened to finish himself off.
So now they held hands. And the car filled with smoke. Kevin was afraid to die and he hung on. More than once he lost consciousness and came back with a start, the interior of the Mini whirling around him. He tried to take his hand away from Jenny’s to steady himself but they had grown into each other somehow, the veins twining them, plaiting their arms together.
He’d stopped coughing by then. The inside of the Mini was like the inside of a cloud. Not so frightening as it had been at the start. He allowed his eyes to close.
25
The gaps between visits from the nurses became longer. Their faces when they did come no longer had the look of compassion and empathy they’d had before. The nurses looked preoccupied. They were thinking about something else.
One day the doctor didn’t come. The doctor with his sparkling eyes, his face a mystery behind his beard. Aggie thought she was falling in love with him but didn’t know how to tell. When he didn’t come she panicked a little. The pain in her chest had receded but she still pressed on her driver for hits of morphine, more out of habit than of necessity. When the doctor didn’t come, she put herself to sleep. Later that day, when the nurses didn’t come, she knocked herself out again. Her dreams were of vivid, patterned silence as vast as space, terrifyingly quiet, terrifyingly huge. She awoke sweating and needing to pee.
It was night. The hospital was noiseless but for the hiss of her breathing against the oxygen flow. She was wide eyed, more awake than she’d been since she’d found herself in the hospital. Certain things were very clear in her mind. Her mother and father were dead. That was why they hadn’t visited her. There was something wrong in the hospital, otherwise there would have been nurses to pass her a bedpan.
Tomorrow, she would have to get up and she was fairly certain she’d be doing it by herself. She listened to the hush of the hospital and clung to it. Somehow, silence was safe. The urge to urinate came and went in waves. She decided she could probably hold it until morning - another incentive for her to get up when it was light. She pressed the syringe driver control to help her sleep but nothing happened. Carefully, she reached a hand to the side of the bed where the cylinder containing the morphine lay. She picked it up and inspected it in the dim glow from her nightlight.
The morphine was all gone.
***
The urge to pee had become part of her pain at some point in the night.
Now, as the light rose across the high dependency unit, she could no longer ignore it. She looked up behind her head to the stand from which the saline hung. The clear bag which had held it was also empty. She peeled the micropore dressing from the back of her right hand and removed the needle that had supplied her with the fluid. She did the same on her left hand, slipping out the morphine needle. The hissing in her nose had ceased; even the oxygen had run out.
The back of her bed was already partially raised. Instead of trying to push herself upright, she used the electronic controller to raise the back of the bed and bring her into a sitting position. It hurt but not as much as she had expected. Once sitting, she dropped the safety bar away from the bedside, braced her hands under herself and swung her legs to the edge.
A bolt of pain tore through her chest and she almost pissed herself right there on the sheets. She waited, surprised how quickly the pain receded. She pushed her legs over the side and waited to recover from the next onslaught of chest pain. Finally she edged her feet to the floor and stood up. Her legs were very shaky. She wasn’t sure she would be able to stand unaided. As her bare soles touched the cold flooring, a huge draining sensation sank through her body. The room faded to white and receded, her ears whined. She collapsed.
***
Pain brought her around and she had the impression that it could only have been a few seconds of blackout she’d suffered. Her chest, having been something approaching comfortable for many days as she lay in bed, now raked her with hot claws. As bad as it was, she knew it wouldn’t stop her from getting up.
Using the plastic chair by her bed, she hauled herself upright again. Again the room spun but this time she held it together until the spell passed. She looked around for something to help her walk. Not far away there was a Zimmer frame. For the moment she didn’t care how that would look to anyone coming in. She had to find out what was going on. Sliding along the wall she reached the walking frame and from there she crossed, a shuffle at a time, to the window.
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 sha
ggy 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
Also Available
Garbage Man Page 30