by DM Sinclair
He was fairly certain somebody had attacked him. With the same box Roger had used to extract him from his body. He remembered the pull of it, the seizing, the static charge, exactly like when he had first been extracted. Somebody must have used the box to grab hold of him, and then they had somehow brought him here and left him. But who? Roger? Why would Roger do that?
The bulldozer was coming back towards him so he decided it was time to move. And to find a way out of this place.
He moved across the trash-strewn field away from the mountainous heap of garbage and towards the sound of traffic he could faintly hear in the distance. If there was a road that way, he hoped he might recognize it and be able to figure out where he was.
He passed other ghosts on the way. A whole family of what he took to be 17th century settlers huddled near a pile of wet, flattened cardboard boxes. They ignored him as he hurried past. Further along he passed a couple lying together on a half-burnt mattress propped against the side of a trash mound. He guessed that they had burned to death in their bed because both of them were little more than horrific clumps of ash in roughly human form. They watched him as he drifted past, and he waved politely, trying not to stare.
As he trudged through the insistent rain, he thought about Roger. In particular, he recalled the expression of surprise on Roger’s face when Ryan had shown up at the Clinic to ask for his body back. What was that look about? And why was his body not where it should be?
He halted at that thought, his feet embedded in the mud up to his calves. His body was gone. He had a total of ten days to get back into it and change his shirt, and he didn’t know where it was. Nor did he know how long he had been here in this landfill, or how many days it had been since he first left his body. Three days to Everest, three days back, and then whatever time had passed between there and here.
What if it’s too late?
The thought gripped him hard and squeezed.
He spotted a middle-aged ghost in a distressed business suit searching through trash nearby as though he had lost something in it. Ryan sprinted to him.
“Hey,” Ryan called to the ghost who was struggling over a refrigerator box, “do you know what the date is?”
If the man heard him, he showed no sign. He dove into the trash bags like a snorkeler diving off the side of a boat and disappeared beneath the surface of the garbage.
Ryan looked around wildly. The bulldozer swung into view, coming back from the mountain. Ryan ran towards it, waving his arms above his head. When he caught up, the driver didn’t stop. So Ryan jogged alongside, keeping pace with him.
“Hey, what’s the date?!” He yelled over the growl of the engine. “Do you know the date?!”
Ryan could tell that the driver saw him, but he likely got pestered by a hundred ghosts a day in this place, and he was well practiced at ignoring them. He pressed hard on the gas and the bulldozer pulled away.
Ryan yelled the best obscenity he could think of at the driver’s back. And he could tell the driver heard it, because he turned his head and threw Ryan a murderous glare. Ryan ducked behind a mound of compressed cardboard boxes and listened until the bulldozer had trundled a safe distance away from him.
Ryan stood, uselessly brushing himself off. He aimed himself at the traffic sound and strode off through the trash. He had no idea how long he had been here, and had no way to find out. He had to get out of here and back to the city.
If it was not already too late, it soon would be.
At a desperate pace he jogged across the debris-strewn plain, which might have been a quarter mile or more.
As he went on, a strange reluctance began to nag at him. Like he was a child leaving home for the first time. Twice he considered turning back, but didn’t.
He finally passed through a high temporary fence wallpapered with bits of loose trash held pressed against it by the wind and rain. Beyond it he caught sight of the entrance to the landfill. A mud road led out through a wide gate into rolling grassy hills, and a long line of garbage trucks idled at a weigh station outside the gate. Two more bulldozers criss-crossed the open area at the entrance, forcing stray trash into some kind of order.
He realized that the trucks arriving and departing must have been the traffic noise he heard. But still, this was the way out and it had to connect to a major road somewhere. So he walked alongside the dirt track, staying out of the way of the trucks. The drivers ignored him as he passed.
As he put distance between himself and the landfill, his anxiety intensified and started to slow him down. Since the procedure, walking had always felt like moving through fluid. But the fluid now seemed to be getting denser. He had no trouble moving his legs, yet he struggled to actually keep moving forwards.
He fought against it, forcing himself to go on, but the further he got, the stronger the pull became. He sensed bits of his energy tearing off of him, yanked backwards like someone was holding onto the back of his shirt and it was stretching out behind him with increasing tension. There was no sensation like what he remembered pain to be, but it was uncomfortable and after another twenty yards he couldn’t take it anymore. He gave in to the pull and, without him having to move at all, it yanked him backwards. A hundred yards flashed past instantaneously, effortlessly, like he was being snapped back on a bungee cord.
He was halfway back to the landfill before he could even stop to think this through. And even then he had to force himself to stop. The instinct to run back towards the trash heap was all-consuming. Is there something about this place that traps ghosts inside? Is it a ghost Alcatraz?
It hit him.
He was bound here. Like Sye to the chair. That had to be it.
But how? The Clinic could un-haunt an object, like releasing Sye from his chair, but could they create a haunting that wasn’t there before? And if so, how could they create a haunting when the equipment was all back at the Clinic? There was no way anybody dragged that box and its power supply out to this landfill.
So whatever he was attached to, it had to be a thing, not a place. They must have forced him to haunt an object, and then brought it here just as he had carried Sye’s chair into the Clinic. And they left it here so that he wouldn’t be able to leave.
Ever.
He passed the line of trucks and arrived again at the weigh station and the gate. The rain pelted through him as he stopped himself and stared at the landfill. There were acres of trash and junk and detritus, some in bags, some loose, tons of it heaped into the mountain he could still see in the distance with bulldozers swarming around it.
My God, he thought, the slow leak of dread intensifying into a fast, relentless gush. The object could be anything. Anywhere in this place. And he had heard that landfills were relentlessly efficient about compressing the trash and burying it. They had to be. Whatever was keeping him here, it would soon be buried forever. Whoever had put him here had planned the perfect way to trap him.
I am never leaving this place.
SEVENTEEN
About half an hour after he walked back into the landfill, Ryan had come up with something resembling a plan. It resembled a plan in the way that a heavy rock resembles a parachute: it gives you something to hold onto on the way to your doom, but it’s almost certainly not going to help.
The first part of his plan was to retrace his steps and find the spot where he had regained awareness. Perhaps that would give him some hint about where the mystery object was buried. It was at least a place to start looking.
The second part of his plan remained vague, in that there wasn’t yet a second part. Finding the object was nearly impossible. And even if he managed to find it, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It wasn’t like he could pick it up and carry it somewhere.
But for now he would try to find it. That was somewhere to start.
A new worry tugged at him. He had no idea where his body had gone or why. What if it was having unthinkable things done to it? Could it feel those things? Could he? He realized that, b
esides changing his shirt, he kind of wanted to make sure his body was okay and back in its comfortable drawer having tubes provide for its every need. He was surprised at the concern he felt for something he had so readily abandoned. And it confused him to think of it as though it were another person, and one that required his protection. It’s not a person, he had to keep telling himself. I’m the person it was. It’s nothing anymore. Whoever’s got it, for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter as long as I can get into it for an hour and change that shirt. Focus. Gotta find where I landed in this place.
The first problem was that he hadn’t paid attention to his surroundings on his way out, because he had not expected to come back in. He concentrated hard, trying to remember if he had passed any landmarks during his exit. There weren’t any trees or other features of the natural terrain. The only features he could hope to make use of would have to be part of the trash. And those features seemed to be in a constant state of flux. Even now he could see the bulldozer far across the field shoving a huge pile of debris into a new resting place. It seemed nothing here stayed where it was for long. At least until it was buried.
He suppressed all thoughts of the utter impossibility of what he was trying to do—and there were lots of those thoughts—and kept walking.
He arrived back at the main heap, which more bulldozers had begun to chip away at. In walking the entire length of the landfill he hadn’t seen a single familiar thing. Or rather, everything he had seen had looked familiar, but exactly as familiar as everything else.
He turned around and walked back towards the gate. The low-hanging clouds pressed closer to the ground and the rain got thicker, threatening to disintegrate him with machine gun droplets as he walked. He wondered if it was possible for a ghost to be ripped apart utterly by rain. It didn’t feel good. But he kept walking.
There had to be something he had seen, a unique trash object perhaps, or…
Not an object, he thought. Ghosts. He had seen ghosts. And no doubt they were haunting objects that couldn’t have moved far. They would be near where they had been when he passed them before.
He quickened his steps and paid closer attention to the ghosts he passed. There were dozens of them, and he had barely noticed any of them during his walk in the opposite direction. He was amazed how easily he had ignored them. He had thought, especially now that he was one of them, that he was more aware than that.
He clearly remembered the pioneer family, the couple on the mattress, the suit-wearing-trash-snorkeler. But he couldn’t see any of those. He passed four marching soldiers in Union uniforms, their bodies riddled with wounds and one missing a shoulder, no doubt from a cannonball in flight. He passed a relatively contemporary man in a bathrobe, pacing. He passed a jogger in a tracksuit running literally in place as though on a treadmill, though no such thing was beneath him. He passed half a dozen more at least, but nobody he recognized, and already he was getting close to the gate again.
He decided that he was too far to the left of the main heap, so he turned around, walked about a hundred yards to the right, and then started towards the mountain again.
A thick gloom had settled in, even thicker than the gloom that had preceded it, but it helped to make the ghosts stand out. He counted fifteen or more, glowing brilliantly like gas lanterns spread out along the whole length of the field. He hurried towards the closest ones, running as fast as he could remember ever being able to run.
He didn’t know the first few, but he quickened his step even more when he finally saw someone he recognized. The charcoal couple on the mattress, still lying propped up against a small mound.
They had the same offended expression on their ash faces as the last time he had seen them. Still, he was happy to see them and wanted to tell them so. “Am I glad to see you guys!”
“Get lost!” the male of the two barked at him.
“Sorry! I’m not weird or anything, I just…”
He was cut off by a blast of engine noise from an enormous vehicle thundering past him. It was like a bulldozer but three times as large, and in place of the usual tank tracks, it rolled on enormous steel wheels with thick, protruding spikes like rows of pyramids around their circumference. As the machine blasted on, the giant wheels crushed and compressed the trash beneath it. One wheel caught the bottom edge of the couple’s mattress, and Ryan had to reel in horror as the machine crushed the foot of the mattress into the trash and kicked the head vertical. The mattress flipped and folded in half beneath the weight of the behemoth. The couple remained glued to the surface of the mattress the whole time, showing no awareness of the horrific thing that was happening to them.
As their mattress mashed into the ground under the bulk of the compactor, Ryan’s instinct was to run up and help. But there was nothing he could do. and the couple seemed unperturbed, so he just stood and stared. In seconds, they disappeared completely, crushed beneath several feet of garbage.
The compactor backed away past Ryan and he threw a scowl at the driver. The driver gave no hint of having noticed Ryan, though, and a few seconds later he was rumbling away down the valley.
Ryan stayed at the spot for several minutes, wondering if the ghost couple might emerge. But there was no sign of them, and he couldn’t think of anything to do. He could only hope they were comfortable in there.
Whatever object Ryan was haunting, he worried it might already have been shoved down into the earth like the mattress. There might already be no way to reach it. In that case, living with the Float Beer shirt would be the least of his worries. No, not the least. It would be the second biggest of his worries. The biggest of his worries would be living in a landfill forever. Being old and stooped for eternity seemed like a cakewalk compared to spending all of infinite time wandering around a dump wearing a Float Beer T-shirt with holes in it. It wasn’t like he would just have to tolerate it for a while on his way to something better. No, this was forever. There was nothing at the other end of it, no better set of future circumstances he could look forward to. The thought was terrifying.
He stretched the frayed hem of the T-shirt down so it would cover his belt for at least a few minutes until it gradually shrunk back to belly-button height. And he hurried on, trying to outrun his despair.
He came upon the pioneer family next. Studying them more closely this time, he saw that they all had frost on their faces and clumps of snow and ice in their hair. There were icicles dangling from the tip of the father’s nose. It was easy to guess how they had all died here together, hundreds of years ago.
As he ran past them he knew he was getting close. He could sense he was close. The drag from his haunting was almost imperceptible here. He had almost forgotten about it as he approached, but now he was keenly aware of its absence. The farther away he was, the more it pulled. So here, where it was hardly pulling at all, he must be close.
He stopped and turned in a circle, scanning the ground. The scan felt futile, since he had no idea what he was looking for. He hoped he would know it when he saw it. But the gloom was so deep, and the rain was falling in such dense curtains, that it was difficult to discern anything at all in the field of trash. And for all he knew, the object wasn’t on the surface at all. It could be thirty feet deep already.
Despair nagged at him again. But he had a flash memory of the empty body drawer at the Clinic, those dangling tubes that were supposed to be jabbed into his body and keeping it alive. What was keeping it alive now?
He approached a nearby mound and scanned it up close. Some of the trash was bagged, some of it loose and sopping wet. If only he could dig through it. But the best he could do was meticulously inspect the outer surface and look for anything familiar.
For hours he searched like that, leaning in close to the trash mounds so the soft glow from his vaporous form illuminated them slightly. The rain stopped after an hour or two, and he was relieved for that at least. He felt like he could keep his structure together with less effort, and his glow was stronger when he wasn’t be
ing ripped apart by raindrops.
Once in a while a shimmering form would meander past, reflected in the dark wrinkles of countless garbage bags. And sometimes he’d hear distant conversations. But the other ghosts took little notice of him. He kept looking. There was nothing else he could do.
He was sure it was late in the day by the time he gave up. Frustration overcame him. He kicked at the nearest trash pile, and his foot passed through it with no resistance at all. That just made him angrier. So he punched at it and found that equally unsatisfying.
He lay down on his back in the muck and closed his eyes, not even caring that a bulldozer rolled right over and through him.
He lay there for a long time. It might have been an hour. It might have been a day. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He had an eternity to feel sorry for himself, so he might as well start now.
But he stopped doing that when he became aware that somebody was standing over him.
Ryan waited, annoyed, hoping that whoever stood over him would stop doing that. When they didn’t, he opened his eyes.
The Trash Diver. The middle-aged man in the dark suit whom Ryan had seen diving head-first into one of the trash piles. Ryan had never seen him up close. And now that he did, he didn’t gain any new information. The Trash Diver was a middle-aged ghost in a business suit. He had a hard-set expression of rage, and it annoyed Ryan that his gaze was affixed not on Ryan’s face, but several inches lower. On his shirt.
“I know,” Ryan groaned.
“Get out of here,” the Diver snarled.
Ryan was stunned at the vehemence of the man’s tone. What had he done to deserve this anger? Ryan studied his surroundings. Was this the man’s territory somehow?
The Diver advanced another step closer to him. There was a seething behind his eyes that Ryan had seen before. It was the same focused anger he had endured from Sye, every morning for years at breakfast. “I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “is this your…”