Garbage Man (5 page)

Then, and only then, he'd be able to breathe again.

***

The sensation of floating is wonderful at first. She feels giddy, light in her core.

Then she sees the building, far in the distance, piercing the sky to some degree but failing to attain heaven. She begins to fly towards it, not wanting to. She has no control. She is not flying, she is being carried, forced to fly. Perhaps then, she could also be made to fall. The earth is very far below, she would fall for a long time. She has a sense of being on a precipice, held there by something untrustworthy. A clip which might be faulty. A belt which might be old and frayed. Or perhaps something worse, the whim of a tormentor. Some entity she must trust to hold her even though it has the power to destroy her.

Like this, always on the verge of losing her balance or being pushed, she is propelled towards the building.

Reaching it and seeing how it thins to a thread as it extends downwards, she realises how tall it is. Miles, perhaps ten miles, from roof to foundation. Steel and glass and concrete. The entity holding her drops her and she begins to understand the true nature of falling. Wind pushing up at her but not enough to slow her down. The feeling that she's left part of her insides behind. No net, no parachute, no safety line, no jutting branch or handhold.

The entity is not ready to let her die yet. It wants her to see something. She stops falling. No deceleration, nothing below to catch her, she just stops. It hurts at such velocity. And now she is hauled high again, flying against her will, back up towards the roof of the building.

She sees the baby and feels as though she must have seen it a thousand times; the crawl-leather on its hands and knees and feet, the bruises on its head. The entity has brought her here because no matter how many centuries it has been searching this roof, the baby's journey is only just beginning.

Something new now. It looks so familiar but she can't remember if it was there before or not. Now that she sees it, she supposes it's always been there. The baby has found a sky light. It is made of angled panels of glass which meet in a shallow apex. The baby does not know what a sky light is. The baby knows nothing but the will to crawl and search.

It thump-thumps up onto a glass panel, eager now that it has discovered something new. Its hands and knees slap against the glass as it climbs the gentle gradient of a sheet of glass many times its size. This is a new feeling beneath its fingers. Cold, yes, but smooth and comfortable.

A crack appears. It makes a scratching, creaking noise and the baby stops crawling for a moment. Sound. A sound other than the slip and slap of it patting its leathery limbs on concrete day after day, year after year. She can see the crack is right under the baby. If it keeps crawling, it might leave the crack behind, make it to the safety of the apex or even that of a stronger sheet of glass.

The baby laughs, just once, a sort of gurgled ‘Ha!' of triumph. It knows it has definitely discovered something new.

The glass breaks.

She flies through it with the baby. Follows it down.

4

There was a photo of the farmer's wife too, also alone, and taken on another day.

Somehow the opportunity to photograph her and her husband together never came up. This time he was using black and white again. He'd found her in the kitchen peeling potatoes at the table. He had his camera with him but not because he'd planned to take her picture. He stood in the doorless entry to the kitchen seeing that everything about the scene was right and his hands went automatically to the camera slung around his neck. Only when he had his hands on it did she look up at him.

He'd asked her husband's permission to take his photograph in his armchair by the window. This was something different, an opportunistic moment. He was about to ask her if it was all right when she looked back down at what she was doing as though he wasn't there. He'd been around the pair of them long enough to understand how much they spoke without using their mouths. He relaxed a little, checked the light reading and brought the camera's eye to his eye and when they were both seeing the same thing in the same way, he took the shot. But in the moment he'd found his composition, in the moment he'd committed himself to the shot, she looked up at him and her face opened.

Here, take it all,
she seemed to be saying, like a rape victim going limp with compliance, that passivity taking all the power from the rapist. This wasn't a rape, of course, not in any sense. She wanted him to see what was in her face and she opened it for him. Just then and never again.

Mason looked at that photo now. There was nothing in it to give it a date in recognisable time, except perhaps the quality of the picture itself. It could have been a hundred and fifty years old. There she sat at her table, a half peeled potato in one hand, a short knife, half worn away with sharpening in the other. Her fingers were crooked and had painful-looking arthritic nodules on them. The joints were swollen but still bony. A pile of peelings lay to one side. In an aluminium pan of cold water with a loose handle lay the clean, skinless potatoes. She looked up from her work and in her eyes there was history: the transition from carefree girl to practical farmer's wife to widow-expectant in a single glance.

Every time he looked at the photo, Mason thought he could see bitterness but there was no bitterness there. Only experience and tolerance; not resentment but forbearance. There was a solitude there too, the seed of which must have been growing for a long time. She did not have her husband's sight and so could not share his view of the world. Not even his view from the window where he sat. Being with him, loving him so quietly as she did, had made her a lonely soul living firmly in this world while her husband looked into the next.

Oh God.

There was no help in staring at these fragments from the past - good work though they may have been. He wasn't looking at the photos to remember who he was or feel better about the past. He was looking for guidance, for answers.

The farmer would have known something about the bleeding Earth but he had long since followed where only his gaze had penetrated before.

Mason severed the connection with the photos, disorientated by the clarity of the memories that accompanied his staring. Such was the power of photography.

Little use it was to him now.

The farmer and his wife had helped him back then. He would have said they'd helped him to regain a missing part of himself but the truth was, the missing part was one he'd never been connected to until he arrived in on their land. He had to lose the rest of himself on that stretch of ancient hillside before he discovered the part that had always been missing.

***

I make it to the gates of the facility but it's been slow going. Assailants stand everywhere in twos and threes. Watchful, sensing the air at all times, the merest whisper of my passing makes them turn their heads my way. I want to leap up and draw my sword, at least take out one or two groups, but I know the noise will attract more and still more of them until I am swiftly overcome. Again and again I've had to lie perfectly still and pray I haven't roused them enough to come and investigate. I've pushed it, pushed it because my advancement has been so slow, but I've made it all the way to the facility car park without a single encounter. I am healthy
. I am strong. I have weapons and skill. Dawn is only an hour or two away. All I have to do now is find a way inside the facility.

It's the perfect moment. Better than I could have hoped for.

Ray Wade saved the game to his memory card and looked at his watch.

Christ.

4.45 am.

There was a rotten smell in the house that the dope smoke barely disguised and his eyes were red and sore. As usual, the bin needed emptying and the late night screen-watching was burning his eyes. Or it could have been the worsening stench from the landfill - a toxic gas, so the papers said.

Tomorrow - well, later today - was another day of lectures and classes. If he was lucky he'd get three hours of sleep. Jenny had been in bed for a couple of hours already - bored by his lack of attention. Either that or too stoned to stay awake any longer. Ray rubbed his face, dropped the controller and switched off the console and TV.

His skin was still puckered with goose flesh. The zombies in Revenant Apocalypse gave him the
serious
creeps. Perhaps because of this, and the tension the game created, he was completely hooked on it. They were so . . . watchful. So awake. Sniffing the air like dogs, vigilant eyes backlit by disease. And the way they attacked was merciless. Shit, it was fast too. You couldn't turn your back and stroll away. If you engaged them, you had to put them down. God, he'd wanted so badly to use that katana on the fuckers.

That would be a treat for the following night.

Well, really it was this night, wasn't it? He smiled in the skunk-spicy darkness of his tiny living room. Not too many hours to go until he let slip the samurai blade.

***

The baby chuckles, the first emotion it has ever shown other than determination - if that could ever count as an emotion. It has found its little hill of glass and scales it with confidence, with more strength than an infant ought to possess. She hovers above it unable to scream a warning even though she tries. The entity won't allow her to interfere, only to observe. No, that's not true; the entity allows her to feel everything, to empathise utterly with the chubby bundle, so hardened and bull-headed in its quest. She already knows something of the pain that is to come.

But only something.

There is no time here, she has decided. When she is here she recognises everything. When she wakes, all she knows is that she has dreamed this before. How many times, she has no idea. But when she is here, with the building, with the baby, she knows she has visited a thousand times. A hundred thousand. Revealing and discovering each part of the nightmare incrementally.

It will never be over.

There's a squeaky cracking sound as the fracture creeps across the pane of glass. The glass gives way to the baby's weight and it falls through. She's right behind it in slow motion. So she sees how easily the edges that touch the baby open its unprotected flanks. The cuts are slow to respond, perhaps because they are the first wounds the baby has ever known. Or perhaps it's simply because the entity wants her to see the details. Edges a mere molecule thick stroking innocent, flawless skin and revealing the flesh below. Then, finally, the wounds are obscured by a welling up of the baby's life fluid.

It falls in silence. So sharp are the blades which have cut it that it doesn't even know it has been opened up. It is also still a relative stranger to pain. She knows this state cannot last. She knows worse, much worse, is to befall the innocent.

Silence.

They fall together in silence. The baby first, she following closely.

Concrete welcomes them with cold inevitability and unyielding hardness.

The baby hits the floor in a rain of transparent razors. She does not. She is the witness.

The baby is not dead. But it should be. It is still but for its breathing.

Its left arm is broken. Not a simple greenstick fracture but a break. Radius and ulna snapped like tiny sticks of rock. Despite the hard pads on its hands and knees, glass shards have penetrated every part of the baby's body which have made contact with the floor. Its mouth is a wet, red mess. If it had any teeth they would be gone. Instead the mandible is cracked and flattened. The upper palate is crushed somewhat, making the baby's bloody face flatter, wider. It bounced when it hit, from its face onto its side and she can see the many places where the glass has pierced it ventrally and exited dorsally. It has developed ‘spines' of glass.

They have landed - no, the baby has landed - in some sort of corridor or hallway with many doors leading off to either side. She is dismayed in a way that she is not able to express. She is not allowed to express it. The entity makes her hold her feelings in.

The baby opens its eyes. It is looking up. For a moment she thinks it sees her and her guilt deepens, colouring her very soul a warm red. But the baby does not see her. It looks through, beyond. And besides, she sees now that the baby only has one eye that still functions. From the other, the broad end of a glass lancet protrudes. This does not prevent the baby from trying to blink. One blink works, the other meets resistance.

And now, finally, the baby is waking up to pain for the first time. It feels its wounds; all of them, and its solitude and it howls for all of this. She would love to be allowed to hear its scream; she deserves to, she believes. But the entity permits her only to imagine what this scream must sound like. The baby howls and weeps, the hot sting of its tears no sensation at all beside its abandonment and wounding. It cries like this for a very long time and she is not allowed to give the baby comfort. Cannot approach to lay a mothering hand upon its torn, dying body.

But the baby is not dying.

When it realises this, when pain and crying are unanswered, it stops its grizzling. The broken baby turns from its side onto its hands and knees again. Leaving etches of blood in grooves made by the glass that is now part of it, it crawls along the corridor. At each door it discovers, it raises its broken arm and flails for entry. For response. When there is nothing, it crawls on, scratching along the concrete in cherubic agony, in saintly silence, still searching.

***

The photos were always evocative.

Mason remembered how he'd driven his camper down a rocky track toward the trees. It was steep enough to make him wonder if the camper would ever get back up. His very next thought was:

Who the fuck cares?

The ancient track stopped being rock and became rutted dirt and shale nearer the trees. But the way was still clear and the gradient had eased. He supposed the farmer must have kept the track open with a tractor or quad bike - if not the farmer, then someone he hired to help. Under the trees it was darker, the unending grey of the Welsh sky not making much impression beneath the low leaf canopy. The track ended at a gulley where no vehicle could go any further.