City of Night

Chapter 16

Glorious, the stink: pungent, pervasive, penetrating.

Nick Frigg imagined that the smell of the pits had saturated his flesh, his blood, his bones, in the same way that the scent of smoldering hickory permeated even the thickest cuts of meat in a smokehouse.

He relished the thought that to the core he smelled like all varieties of decomposition, like the death that he longed for and that he could not have.

In his thigh-high rubber boots, Nick strode across the west pit, empty cans of everything rattling in his wake, empty egg cartons and cracker boxes crunching-crackling underfoot, toward the spot where the surface of the trash had swelled and rolled and settled. That peculiar activity appeared to have ceased.

Although compacted by the wide-tracked garbage galleons that crawled these desolate realms, the trash field — between sixty and seventy feet deep in this pit — occasionally shifted under Nick, for by its nature it was riddled with small voids. Agile, with lightning reflexes, he rarely lost his footing.

When he arrived at the site of the movement that he had seen from the elevated rampart, the surface did not look significantly different from the hundred fifty feet of refuse across which he had just traveled. Squashed cans, broken glass, uncountable plastic items from bleach bottles to broken toys, drifts of moldering landscape trimmings — palm fronds, free limbs, grass — full trash bags knotted at their necks…

He saw a doll with tangled legs and a cracked brow. Pretending that beneath his foot lay a real child of the Old Race, Nick stomped until he shattered the smiling face.

Turning slowly 360 degrees, he studied the debris more closely.

He sniffed, sniffed, using his genetically enhanced sense of smell to seek a clue as to what might have caused the unusual rolling movement in this sea of trash. Methane escaped the depths of the pit, but that scent seemed no more intense than usual.

Rats. He smelled rats nearby. In a dump, this was no more surprising than catching a whiff of garbage. The musky scent of rodents pervaded the entire fenced grounds of Crosswoods Waste Management.

He detected clusters of those whiskered individuals all around him, but he could not smell a pack so large that, swarming through a burrow, it would be capable of destabilizing the surface of the trash field.

Nick roamed the immediate area, looking, sniffing, and then squatted — rubber boots squeaking — and waited. Motionless. Listening. Breathing quietly but deeply.

The sounds of the unloading semis at the east pit gradually receded, as did the distant growl of the garbage galleons.

As if to assist him, the air hung heavy and still. There was no breeze to whisper distractingly in his ears. The brutal sun seared silence into the day.

At times like this, the sweet reek of the pit could convey him into something like a Zen state of relaxed yet intense observation.

He lost track of time, became so blissed-out that he didn’t know how many minutes passed until he heard the voice, and he could not be certain that it hadn’t spoken several times before he registered it.

“Father?”

Soft, tremulous, in an indefinite timbre, the one word question could have been posed by either a male or a female.

Dog-nose Nick waited, sniffed.

“Father, Father, Father…?”

This time the question seemed to come simultaneously from four or five individuals, male and female.

When he surveyed the trash field, Nick found that he remained alone. How such a thing could be possible, he did not know, but the voices must have spoken out of the compacted refuse beneath him, rising through crevices from… From where?

“Why, Father, why, why, why…?”

The lost and beseeching tone suggested intractable misery, and resonated with Nick’s own repressed despair.

“Who are you?” he asked.

He received no reply.

“What are you?”

A tremor passed through the trash field. Brief. Subtle. The surface did not swell and roll as before.

Nick sensed the mysterious presence withdrawing.

Rising to his feet, he said, “What do you want?”

The searing sun. The still air. The stink.

Nick Frigg stood alone, the slough of trash once more firm beneath his feet.