"Consider this your new job and me, your employer."
Isaac Rhoades is used to a life alone. There aren't many other options for his line of work, something that he used to believe had thoroughly hardened him. But when a routine trip to the city leads...
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If you'd asked Kaelyn Mauldin five years ago where she saw herself, dumpster-diving behind a supermarket at midnight would never have even crossed her mind.
No, no, Kaelyn reminded herself. You're not "dumpster-diving." You're living the Freegan Lifestyle. Better to pretend that the reason she was standing knee-deep in discarded tuna sandwiches and God knew what else was for her newfound method of saving money and sticking it to capitalism and not because, well, she didn't have any other choice.
The smell was what got to her first—she'd always been quite squeamish as a child. Even if the food had only been tossed half an hour ago at closing, the stench of the dumpster itself made it easy to believe that it'd always been here. At some point, the smell became so much that she couldn't even trust a sniff test to tell her how long it'd actually been there.
This was where a flashlight usually came in handy to help her make a visual distinction, but her phone had died hours ago. She'd realised too late that she'd left her charger at her apartment—if you could even call it that—and she had a new policy about not being back there during the day. Not unless she wanted to face running into Marvin.
She was convinced that he camped outside his peephole waiting for her to return. She didn't fully blame him, of course. She was very far behind on her rent. Hence, the dumpster-diving.
To be fair, it was better than last month, when she'd tried to convince herself that she was actually surviving on what she called the "Five Off, Two On" fast. But regardless of how scarily creative she'd been at finding ways to make a ramen packet last at least 24 hours, her body couldn't be tricked into thinking it was enough. Three trips to the hospital and an exuberant bill—another thing she had no hope of paying off anytime soon—as a follow-up had luckily been enough to convince her to switch tactics.
Even still, she was having trouble adjusting to her new "lifestyle." She'd never realised how many companies locked their dumpsters before trying this. Finding a few extra meals in the dumpsters these past few days had been helpful, but it would take a while to offset the damage she'd already caused in the weeks prior.
Her hands closed over a bag of chips, and Kaelyn squinted at it in the darkness to inspect it. It wasn't barbecue—she was not lucky enough for that—but the bag was undamaged, which was more than good enough for her. She shoved it into her backpack and leaned against the side of the dumpster. Trying to do this without adequate lighting was almost impossible. At the very least, it would certainly take forever. And in this chilly weather, she couldn't afford that.
Still, she didn't have much of a choice. A bag of sea salt chips and a dented box of crackers she'd found earlier for dinner weren't much better than stretching out a ramen packet. Sighing, Kaelyn turned back to the darkness of the dumpster and began her search again.
Almost immediately, she drew her hand back after the thing she'd thought was a packaged pastry squeaked at her.
She let out a shrill shriek and, not seeming to be able to get out of the dumpster fast enough, almost tripped as she swung her legs over the top. She landed ungracefully on her feet, but was quick to recover and create some distance.
