Garbage Man Read Online Free PDF

his glasses, a toad of a man - not sweaty; oily.
    â€˜Finally, the queen arrives.’
    She sat down at the table. Donald looked at her out of the corner of his eye and put his fork down but he was already chewing something. Her mother, Pamela Smithfield, smiled but it looked like a wince.
    â€˜For what we are about to receive,’ she said ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’
    They muttered Amen.
    Donald resumed eating, everyone else began.
    Aggie put lumpy mashed potato and dried out chicken in her mouth. The gravy was brown but had no flavour. It didn’t even smell of anything. The only smell seemed to be wafting in from the waste disposal unit in the kitchen sink. It was always getting blocked. Either that or the wind was blowing the wrong way from the landfill again. She ignored it and chewed. Under the table, Sasquatch the golden retriever waited beside Aggie for his share of the meal - most of which would arrive from her surreptitious fingers long before it could be considered leftovers.
    â€˜Gosh, mother, this is lovely,’ she said.
    Pamela Smithfield’s smile returned, uncertain, faltering. She said nothing.
    Nor did anyone else.
    ***
    Not only did it smell like rust, it looked like rust. He picked off a dried flake of it. It came away reluctantly like a new scab. Crumbling this between his fingers, it even felt like rust as it disintegrated.
    Suddenly, more than anything in the world, he wanted it to be rust.
    But it wasn’t.
    He left the shed, locked it, let himself into the silent house through the back door and went upstairs to scrub his feet in the bath. Only when they were scoured red and no trace remained, only when he’d washed the tub out thoroughly three times, only then did he allow himself to run a proper bath.
    He lay there, knees poking up like strange tall islands, their dark hair matted flat to his white skin. Steam rose; the mist surrounding his anatomical seascape. He tried not to think about what had happened. All the evidence was gone now. It would be easy enough to let time pass and convince himself he’d made a mistake or that he’d stared at the moon for so long he’d hallucinated the rest of it. He became uncertain of his own judgement and was immediately glad for his fallibility, his untrustworthy perceptions.
    There was comfort then and his eyes closed against the knee-atolls and the glare of the bathroom bulb. It lasted only moments. His eyes snapped open. This matter would not lie. He could not ignore it.
    Mother Earth was bleeding.
    ***
    I consider my options.
    I can stay holed up in a room all night, recuperating and staying safe but I am wasting precious time by doing so - outside the situation worsens. I also run the risk of my scent being picked up by hungry assailants out on the hunt. One or two I can manage and, if the door is strong enough, I might keep them out until morning. But if one or two become three or four, there won’t be any door strong enough to keep them at bay.
    I can continue raiding houses but the strength and agility of the assailants is far greater once the sun is down. I risk losing more than I might gain from the plundering.
    The only real option is the bold approach: to take my katana onto the streets and hope I make it out of suburbia and up to the facility. There are routes, I know there are. Some of them will be almost uninhabited, even by assailants. But knowing which route to take is mostly luck. Stumble down the wrong alley or break through a fence in the wrong back garden and I’m likely to encounter odds I can’t match - not even with the weaponry of the Japanese warrior class. Not even with the skills I’ve developed, so hard-won over the last three days. The assailants have ways of moving, habits of attack and I’ve studied them well. Against one or even two at a time it gives me a big advantage. But against greater numbers I don’t think I’ll survive for long.
    This