Creeptober Horror Spree: Volume One

Dumpster Diving

Logan had been back on his feet for years now, leaving homelessness behind him for good thanks to a mixture of good luck and ambition. Habits were not easy to break, though, mostly when they were second nature. For instance, Logan felt a constant aversion to spending large sums of money, even for a necessity. The habit that lent him the most secrecy, though, was dumpster diving. It carried a reasonable stigma, but it was a judgmental one. Dumpster diving was only disgusting if the dumpster was disgusting. And if the dumpster was nasty, nothing inside was safe to eat.

Supermarkets threw away perfectly good food, still sealed in packages daily. Logan rarely needed to grocery shop. When clothing stores failed to sell an out of date fashion, the offending articles wound up in cardboard boxes beside the dumpsters. Logan rarely had to pay for clothes. There were grosser things to do with your free time that were much less cost-effective. Logan wasn't ashamed of it, but he surely didn't confide in coworkers about it either. They wouldn't understand, and he didn't need them to. He had free clothing, food, and even furniture, and nobody was the wiser. It wasn't like he didn't own a washing machine.

Logan would often find treasures among the trash, and not just metaphorically. Rare machinery carelessly discarded by the ignorant, mechanical keyboards from the 80s; he even found a mint condition baseball card collection once. A local collector took it off his hands for a cool grand. Logan would often spend extra time combing through the refuse of affluent communities because it was insane what they were willing to throw away. Hanging over the edge of one such dumpster, Logan spied something shiny, resting between two bulging trash bags.

He leaned in a little closer, stretching out his hand. Contrary to assumptions, he didn't like getting inside dumpsters unless he had to. However, the object looked like jewelry, and if it wasn't fake, it could pawn for a reasonable amount. So Logan was growing more open to the idea of literally diving in, but finally, his hobo yoga paid off, and his hand clasped around the item. Then, Logan's vision flashed. Like someone had taken his picture too close. He let himself slide down out of the dumpster, feeling disoriented, only to find his hand empty. Confused, it took him a moment to register he was in a different part of the city.

"Tried to get the shiny thing, didn't ya?" A homeless guy slumped against the wall asked, laughter evolving into a cough.

"What-" Logan looked around. He had no words.

"I don't know either man," The homeless guy shrugged. "All I know is it appears in random places, but it always shits you out of this particular dumpster. You're lucky, though."

Logan gave him a quizzical look. "Why am I lucky?" he asked. Now he had to take a bus home.

"Well," The homeless guy sniffed. "Sometimes the dumpster just spews blood and chunks and whatnot. I don't know where you idiots go when you touch that thing, but sometimes it just blends you up."

Wet sloshing erupted from the dumpster as flecks of blood sprayed up the wall.

"Yeah, see? Just like that."