world. Slime was running down our hair and pooling in our ears. The yellow flashing light in the street cast twisted shadows all around.
“Geesink Norba,” I whispered. “Geesink Norba, Geesink Norba, by the terms and conditions of contract to remove all commercial and household waste within the borough, Geesink . . .”
The roar became a rattling battle cry; with it, there came another sound. It said:
“Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing. Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing.”
I reached the grass, rolled onto my back, looked down the street I’d crawled from and saw the saturate start to turn, infinitely slow, currents and counter-currents spinning within its great belly as it began to think about the thing that was behind it. The woman was fallen a few feet from me. I turned to her and hissed, “Cover your head.”
She obeyed, and I curled up as tight as I could, arms over my skull.
I saw the saturate contort and twist as the flashing yellow light and mechanised voice came closer. I saw it seem to contract downwards and expand outwards, as if it was somehow going to leap. I heard, “Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing,” saw flashing yellow madness, heard wheels sloshing through oil, engine thundering, heard a sucking sound like the whole ocean being pulled down a very small plughole, heard a great grinding as of metal jaws, and whispered, “Veolia, Accord, Geesink Norba, Onyx, rubbish collected on your scheduled day . . .”
And something hit the saturate. It hit it smack in the middle, punched a hole straight through its belly and out the other side, a great darkness that seemed to suck everything in, and the darkness had teeth, heaven help the ignorant, the darkness had teeth made of aluminium and steel, silver flashing teeth that crunched down on all that fat and swallowed it whole into some forsaken black gullet, sucked it all in with a roar of diesel and pumped out black smoke in its place, until the saturate was half its size, a quarter, just rivers of white fat pouring into that darkness, sinking deeper and deeper until with a final splatter . . .
There was just oil and grease spilling across the road. Inanimate liquid, dribbling from the jaws of the beast that had sucked the life from it. Little blobs dripped from the branches of the trees like smelly snow. I got to my feet and looked at the thing that had killed the saturate.
It was a dustbin truck. Its sides were black, not through paint, but time and use. Burnt-black, charred-black, dirt-black, coal-black, every kind of black there could be, all spattered and scratched and scorched onto its flesh. The welding that held it together was brown chipped rust that shed breadcrumbs of reddish copper onto the ground as it drove; its wheels were the height of a large child; its light, spinning on a roof of twisted, crooked metal, was yellow, too bright and too fast to look at. I shielded my eyes, and saw in the dull remnant of my vision a man get out of the driver’s cabin, a whole man’s height above the pavement, and walk carefully round to the back of the truck. He knelt down beside it, reached under the back wheel, and twisted something. A great gout of black smoke burst from a pipe in the top of the truck’s roof, and slowly, two metal vault doors began to ease shut over the open back of the truck, sliding down over silver teeth gleaming in the reflected light and dripping white fat. They came together with the clang of the doors of Fort Knox. The dustbin man looked up.
His eyes were two blown light bulbs, the little twisted wires gleaming in their sockets. His skin was the same charred blackness as his truck; his hair, which had one time been dreadlocks, was now just living blacknesses, writhing and twisting around his face with the mess of insect life and vermin that crawled from it. When he exhaled, the same black smoke of his vehicle rolled across his silverish lips, and as he walked, his green-yellow neon jacket shimmered and flashed, almost drowning out all other perception. I flinched back from the brightness of it as he approached, three-inch boot heels clanging on the ground, tangled old string tying together their ruptured leather and soles of melted rubber. He was coming straight towards me, impassive, face drained of all feeling. I turned to the woman and hissed, “Do you