Episode 34, “Out with the Garbage”

 

[image error]His fingers dug into the pavement. His hands were cracked and bleeding. He could not feel them. His limbs were numb, his vision blurry. Blood leaked from a dozen half-clotted wounds across his torso. Even past the ringing in his ears, he could hear his own ribs grating together. His legs would not support him.

He had almost no memory of crawling away from the cul de sac. He had no idea how far he had come. His lungs burned with every breath. His skin felt like it was covered with stinging insects. No matter how much he blinked, no matter how he squinted, he could not bring his eyesight into focus.

He was dying.

The alleyway in which he crawled was piled high in fetid garbage. He wormed his way through the refuse, not feeling the multipedes that crawled on him and stung him, not caring when he pulled himself through broken glass or sharp fragments of plastic. He should have died at the factory. He had died at the factory. He had breathed too much poison, taken too much damage, for it to be otherwise.

He needed to get to Montauk’s flat. Annika would be there.  He only wanted to see her. If he could just see her one last time, tell her he loved her, then nothing else that happened would matter. He could die. He could finally rest.

Throw the arm. Dig in. Pull. Throw the arm. Dig in. Pull.  Peyton’s world was reduced to this. Each breath seared his lungs. Each meter he gained left a river of blood on the paving behind him.

Every twenty meters, by his count, he threw up blood.  The vomiting became a rib-cracking dry heave by the fifth or sixth time; he had lost track. Whether this was his body trying to cleanse the poison or evidence of the injuries that were killing him, he didn’t know.

Keep going, he told himself.  Keep going.

There were bullets inside him. Projectiles had lodged in his body. Some might be self-propelled; they might even now be drilling their way slowly to his organs. In so many ways, his time was limited.

He just had to last long enough to see Annika.

He heard it, then: a rumbling, low and subtle, beneath the ringing in his ears. Rolling over, enduring the agony that shot through him as he collided with the wall of the alley, he tried to push himself to a sitting position. It took him a few moments to manage the maneuver. By then, he could see the source of the noise.

There were three of them.  The big one was clearly the alpha. The other two were followers, scarred as the first one was, but hanging back as their leader sized up Peyton.

The feral dogs were mastiffs. Hongkongtown’s wild dog problem ebbed and flowed. Cycles in which the animals were hunted were typically followed by periods of pack expansion. Complacency would yield as the dogs became a threat, which prompted more public hunts.

The garbage. He should have avoided this alley. The dogs had probably claimed this place. They saw him as a threat, which meant they would–

The alpha leapt for his throat.

He could barely lift his arms.  The animal hit him in the chest, bouncing his head off the alley wall, clawing and snarling. Its jaws sought his neck, ready to bite deep.  Instead he shoved his fist down the animal’s throat.

His own blood welled. He was grateful for the numbness in his limbs.  He reached in as deeply as he could, and when his arm would not move farther, he willed his hand to open and close.  He grabbed. He pulled.

The noise the animal made caused the other two to freeze where they stood. Their hair stood up and they whined in confusion.  They had no frame of reference for Peyton; he was bigger than any human prey they had stalked, smelled like death, and was doing something to their leader that they could not fathom.

Peyton wrenched his arm free. The mastiff alpha shuddered, convulsed. Blood poured from its mouth.  Its eyes rolled back into its skull.

With the last of his strength, Peyton threw the dying dog. It took everything he possessed.  He collapsed against the wall of the alley, slumping again. The other two growled, dancing back and forth, unsure.  Their ears were pressed against their heads.

He wasn’t going to reach his daughter.  He was going to end here, killed by dogs.  He tried to lift his arms and could not. He tried to raise his head and failed.

The dogs reacted to something he could not perceive. They turned and ran. The ringing in Peyton’s ears had become a pulsing, skull-shattering tone. Was this what dying sounded like?

No. The noise was not in his head. The noise was coming from the blocky gray vehicle moving up the alley.  Its square face opened, revealing the clockwork chasm of a compactor.  The noise was a warning tone. The vehicle was churning up the debris in the alley, consuming it.

A sweeper.  He was going to be picked up by a trash sweeper. His body would be crushed and carried to a trash recycling facility. He did not have the air in his lungs to laugh.

Garbage, he thought. I go out with the garbage.

A pair of slim, humanoid robots detached themselves from the sides of the compactor.  The helper androids had hooks for arms; it was their job to police up small garbage that the compactor missed, delivering the straggling bits to the chugging machine.  The technology had not changed in decades. Garbage detail was neither complicated nor particularly demanding work; these androids had probably been sweeping the same grid of alleyways for thirty years. They looked old enough.

No one to hear my last words, he thought. No one except a robot that won’t know what they mean.

That was all right. He didn’t have anything to say.

He actually managed a laugh, that time.

One of the androids paused.  It turned to look in his direction. He wouldn’t have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it.  The robot actually cast a glance at its partner, which continued picking up garbage, before it hurried over to look at Peyton.

Peyton stared up at it. Its blank camera eyes were fogged with dust.  As he watched, the robot reached up and thumbed lines of grit out of its lenses.  It leaned in so close that Peyton could see his reflection in its cameras.

“Ian Peyton?” it asked.  “You don’t look well.”

“Mon… Montauk…” Peyton whispered.

The android turned again to its companion. The sound it made next was no language Peyton had ever heard. It was static mixed with tones and beeps.  The garbage robot responded by turning and walking over. It beeped obediently.

The two figures — one a robot, the other something else — reached down, took his arms, and began dragging him toward the Sweeper.  They carried him past the compactor toward the rear of the vehicle, where a large flatbed cargo area waited.

“What…” Peyton said.  “Why…”

“Any friend of Montauk’s,” said the Og disguised as a robot.