Garbage Man (35 page)

Even though Shreve was now regarded as a ‘plague' town, most of the survivors stayed, imbued with a sense of pride at their staunchness and finding ever more beauty and simple wonder in a town that had woken up from a nightmare. Their town. Shreve.

It was quiet in the streets. Many people had died. And it was quiet in the surrounding countryside where so much of the wildlife had been taken and ‘used'.

Ray and Delilah agreed they'd see Kevin and Jenny for drinks, maybe dinner, very soon. It seemed right, after all they'd been through, that they should remain friends. But the days after the fecalith was shot and burned gathered as quickly as autumn leaves and the four of them didn't make contact.

Ray was philosophical.

Perhaps we all need time to heal quietly. Perhaps we'll come out of ourselves when we feel brighter inside.

***

Aggie Smithfield woke up in warm, clean sheets in a hot room.

Tubes in each nostril blew a steady but fine stream of pure oxygen into her. Each time she breathed out, her nose hissed as two jets of air collided. In her left hand was a syringe driver that she could squeeze to alleviate the pain in her chest. In her right arm a saline drip kept her from dehydrating.

The nurses were kind to her, their faces full of concern. The doctor, a young, dark man with far too much beard, spoke to her softly. Inspired her to feel better with his intense, confident eyes.

She did not know what day it was.

She could remember running away from something but she didn't know what it was. The doctor told her she'd had a terrible shock and serious injury and that she wasn't ready to remember. One day, soon, when she was stronger, her mind would let her recall what had happened. In the meantime, he said, she was to lie still, relax and let him and his team take care of her.

The pain in her chest - due to her cracked sternum, broken ribs and punctured left lung - was very bad at times. She used her syringe driver a lot. Depended on it for sleep. But the morphine had its dangers; it was in her sleep that the monsters came. Nameless, shapeless things that dragged themselves along after her with endless determination.

Screaming hurt the most. She screamed often, always on waking.

***

After so long without contact, the text from Jenny came as a surprise.

Ray and Delilah were drinking in the pub but both of them felt off colour. The lethargy and heaviness of their limbs had come on overnight. They had stomach cramps and couldn't face food. Ray suspected the previous night's Chinese takeaway. He awaited the diarrhoea and vomiting without enthusiasm. As there was nothing better to do, alcohol had seemed the only solution. They were both drinking whisky with ginger wine to ease their stomachs when Ray's phone had bleeped.

‘Who's it from?' Asked Delilah.

‘Jenny. Asking us if we feel all right. She says they're both laid up. They must have ordered from the same place last night.'

‘Text her back. Ask her what the symptoms are.'

As Ray keyed his phone, Delilah looked around the pub. It was quiet. None of the people there looked particularly happy. In fact, several looked quite pale. Maybe it was the light. Doug, the landlord, always a cheerful sort in his laconic way, was sweating in the gleam of the bright bar lights. She was about to shout over to ask him what he'd been drinking the night before when he leaned down and vomited into the bottle trolley behind the counter.

‘Shit,' she whispered, and then: ‘Ray?' He looked up from his phone.

‘What?'

‘The landlord just chucked up. Look around. Everyone's ill.'

Ray stopped texting and glanced around.

‘Nah . . . they're probably just . . .'

‘Just what?'

He studied the other patrons more carefully.

‘Fuck,' said Ray. ‘This is not good. Drink up and let's take a look outside.'

Beyond the pub car park the streets were deserted. Ray shrugged. More to himself than her he said:

‘That doesn't prove anything. It's been like this for weeks.' He walked quickly towards the main road. Already he could see there was little or no traffic on it. Then they heard an ambulance siren. Then two.

‘Christ, D. What's happening?'

‘It's starting again.'

‘No. This is something different. It's -'

A gut spasm cut him short and, utterly unable to control himself, he vomited onto the pavement. The stream of puke was dark, almost black. The puddle it made was oily. Not a bean sprout or water chestnut to be seen. Not the ghost of a spring roll. He looked at it, trying hard not to think about what it might mean. His body was shaking.

‘I'm freezing, D. I need to get inside.'

Walking back to her bedsit, Delilah was sick too - so suddenly there was no way to prevent it. All she could do was turn her head away from the pavement and retch over a small brick wall into someone's front garden. Ray couldn't stop himself from checking out what she'd produced. It was the same stuff. He remembered the smell from somewhere but he said nothing.

‘Maybe there's an outbreak of stomach flu. E-coli or something.'

He didn't believe it, though, and he knew she wouldn't either. At her place they took turns in the shared bathroom. Then, as they weakened, they allowed themselves the use of bowls next to the bed. By the time the black puke overflowed, they were too frail to get up and empty their bowels. The vomit seeped into the carpet.

Ray watched it from the corner of his eye.

Each time he fell asleep and woke up again the puddle had changed. Grey threads appeared in it like rootlets or tendrils. They gripped the bowl and wormed into the threads of the dirty carpet. They spread like veins. Soon they pulsed and Ray felt the rhythm inside himself.

He turned to look at Delilah.

Her beautifully pale skin was turning black, the black of rubbish sacks. Her hair, silky as crow feathers, was whitening, the same colour as the vein-like threads expanding from his sick-bowl. To find happiness, to survive the landfill war and then to lose it all like this . . . He wasn't too sick to cry. The tears that seeped from his eyes were viscous, dripped too slowly too be natural. It only made him weep more. He didn't want to know what he was becoming, didn't even want to assess himself in the mirror. She was silent beside him. Very still. The effort of lifting his arm to reach out to her was great. Like he was wearing lead armour. His hand was coal black shot with grey, dendritic capillaries. What flowed inside those veins now? The chalky veins had grown from his fingertips, protruding like shoots. His hand was shaggy with hair-like extensions.

He rested this strange hand on her chest. He wanted her to know while he still meant it, while it was still him talking. Her chest rose and fell intermittently. Her heartbeat seemed distant through his fingertips.

‘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.