Oblivion - A collection of short stories

The Wasteland

It was late at night, and very few lights illuminate the far away street. On the side of the road a little fox was rummaging through the leftovers of a meal someone had carelessly thrown out of a car window earlier that day. Suddenly, its ears twitched, and it turned all its attention away from the food and towards some low distant noise that unperceivable by the human ear. The fox listened for a few seconds before taking off in the direction the sound had come from. It ran along the side of the road, then straight into a patch of trees, crossed a small river and then slipped under the metal fence of the vast city dump. There it halted and listened cautiously. Seemingly content with what it had – or had not – heard, the small canine sniffed the air twice and then moved towards what looked like old rotting meat. The little animal was nagging on its newfound treat when suddenly something put it on high alert again. It quickly turned around and assumed a fighting stance, growling in the direction of the sky-high piles of trash. A quick loud swooshing sound followed; a noise similar to that a small but deadly avalanche could produce; and then there was silence again. The fox was nowhere to be seen.

It had been an eventful couple of weeks in Pineda, a small sleepy town on the outer edge of one of the biggest trash dumps of the country. Nothing quite like this had ever happened around those parts. It had all started with the nauseating smells that usually emanated from the trash mountains getting stronger and more suffocating. The townspeople hadn't thought much about it, having lived surrounded by trash for so long had made their noses become insensible to strong smells, and even the finer noses in their midst got used to it quickly. From one day to the next the towns few stray cats started disappearing, which most folks were quite content with since they had always found them to be a nuisance, but then the first people started disappearing. The first to go was the town's drunkard. One day he was still sitting at the pub downing his alcohol, and the next day he simply was not there anymore. The townspeople assumed he must just have fainted somewhere after having drunk too much, since it had already happened and every time he came back when he sobered up a little just to start drinking all over again. But not too long after that an old man who lived on the edge of the landfill disappeared. He had always been a loner, so the townspeople didn't immediately exclude the idea that he might just have gone to meet some family member no one knew about. Nevertheless, a sense of unease started spreading throughout the city. Then a group of kids who had been playing on the edge of the city dump never made it back home for souper. The next ones to go missing were a few landfill workers who had gone out to check on a particularly precarious trash mountain. The now scarred people started to talk, rumors started spreading, and amidst the chaos someone remembered having seen the drunkard walking towards the trash dump on that fateful night of his disappearance, which now allowed to draw back all missing cases to the big stinking heaps of trash laying on the outer edge of the city. No one wanted to go near it anymore, the garbage men started a strike, fingers were pointed and the whole town went down in chaos. In the meantime trash started littering the street, there always seemed to be more than what the townsfolks could possibly produce, and the foul smell became insufferable.

This is the state in which Melissa, the old man's niece, found the town when she arrived. She had come after not having heard from her dear grumpy grandpa in a while and found out he had gone missing. Her arrival finally gave the town something new to talk about, especially since it had been a few days since someone had last gone missing; and when she proposed to launch a big search party those people who decided to join did it mostly out of curiosity for the novelty this strange purple-haired city girl represented than in hopes of really finding someone again. The small group consisted of a lanky teenager whose face had yet still to recover from his latest acne outburst, two garbage men who had offered their expertise in navigating the trash-ridden landscape, an old grandpa which manner of speech consisted mostly of swear words, and a little excited girl whose exhausted parent had seemed quite ecstatic to be freed of for a day. They went out into the city dump early in the morning of that gray day, crammed in the small passenger compartment of two excavators, the homely teenager having managed to get himself in the same excavator as the young woman in her mid-twenties, leaving the old man to follow the chatty girls and the second garbage man into the other vehicle. The first hour of the ride was uneventful, with the small girl's rambling interpointed by the old man's rude exclamations, and the awkward teen had somehow found it in him to participate in the conversation between Melissa and their conductor. However, as they kept advancing further in the vast trash desert the atmosphere started to become tenser and the conversation slowly died down. Even the little girl eventually stopped talking and only fidgeted around with the teddy she had brought along for the ride. They had been exploring the wasteland for quite a few hours now, and still hadn't found nothing. Although what was most curios was that they had not only been unable to locate the missing, but that they hadn't encountered a single life form during their whole travel. The garbage men remarked that by then they should have seen at least a few rats scurrying around, birds taking flight from where they had been looking for scraps, maybe even a few bigger animals such as foxes, who sometimes ventured deeper in the city dump in hopes of catching one of said rats or birds. Instead, everything had been quite and unmoving.

Around lunch time they decided to stop for a while with their search and eat. They had just gotten out of the excavators when the heard it for the first time, a low rumbling sound, the kind of noise something big that moves quickly would make. It had probably just been a trash avalanche, it sometimes happened in the older parts of the trash dumps since the decomposing process made some piles become precarious, one of the garbage men asserted. They decided to eat inside the passenger compartments instead, and once they were done they started moving again, deeper and deeper in between the canyons of trash. They heard the noise again not long after, and then a couple more times. It seemed that each time the noise was produced the source of it had inched closer to them. After another hour they had to stop again, the little girl had screamed that she needed a potty break and most of the men admitted they could use a stop too. Melissa was helping the little girl pull her pants up again when she heard the scream. She promptly rushed out from behind the vehicle with the little girl on her heels and towards were she assumed the screaming teenage boy must be, and found the others already waiting there for her. In front of them was the top of an excavator, the lower part buried in trash, and protruding from the barely seeable cockpit was a hand. The young girl was made to turn around to prevent her from seeing the rotting appendix driveled by sharp pieces of waste that once belonged to one of the missing garbage collectors. The small group starred in terrified and disgusted shock, the sound of gagging coming from he who had made the discovery permeating the air. Then the haunting rolling sound was heard again, so much closer than ever before. It couldn't be pinpointed to one location, it seemed to come from all around them. The girl, still turned around, clenched her teddy closer in one hand. She started whimpering. With her free hand she tugged on Melissa's sleeve. Once, twice, getting more fanatical each time. The woman tried freeing herself from the iron grip, still too shocked by the discovery in front of her to pay attention to her surroundings. The little girl persisted, becoming louder and more panicked. By then they had attracted the attention of the rest of the group, and when Melissa looked at them for help, she was met by four pairs of glazed and terrorized eyes. They weren't looking at her. They were looking behind her. The hair on her back rose, she turned slowly. Then she saw it. A gigantic putrid creature made out of trash was moving towards them, like a fast-approaching wave. Its form was everchanging, it seemed to be crawling with millions of maggots and vermin keeping the hundreds of different rancid components together. Chunks of it kept disintegrating and falling off, nevertheless it appeared to become bigger and gain momentum during its unstoppable advance. On top of it, like on a macabre display of some sort, the carcasses of various animals and the distorted putrefied bodies of those who had gone missing created what resembled to be a crown.

They tried running, but it was useless. The last thing to be heard before they were hit by the tremendous force that – thing – possessed, before they were drowned in thrash and their skin was cut up by sharp debris, before they felt the little parasites entering their every pore and eating away at them, was the shrill desperate cry of the little girl resonating in the dull afternoon air.

The group never returned, so the townsfolk just assumed they had ended like all the other missing people, whatever their fate might have been. No one offered to go looking, no one was foolish enough to do it. They didn't need to. That night, the cold light of the full moon was hidden for a few minutes, before illuminating the new landscape. There had been a loud swooshing sound, and then the sweetly smell of decay had impregnated the air. A teddy bear rolled of the side of one of the garbage piles at the new edge of the trash dump.

In a city not too far away, a small boy woke up in his bed, terrorized by his nightmare, nose filled by a fetid smell that had yet to become familiar to him, unknowing of what had just happened. Unknowing of the menace slowly creeping closer.

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Hope you enjoyed this first short story! The next ones shouldn't be so creepy, but who knows...
Anyways, if you liked it and want to read more short stories similar to this one, don't forget to leave a like! And if you happen to have a cool prompt you would like me to write about, feel free to leave it in the comments.