Garbage Man by Joseph D'Lacey

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