Unclean

Unclean

1992. Thursday morning. On that cold, foggy morning of nearly 05:00 am, we had to fight against something. Something so hideous it still haunts me to this day, even just trying to remember it causes me to cringe on my park bench I call a home...

On that day, we saw - the garbage truck. *shudders*
We had dragged ourselves out of bed at 04:45. We were supposed to get up at 03:00 hours, but private bartender hit the damn snooze alarm and slept on it. We paid a heavy price that day for just that one mistake. We were doomed to fail from the very beginning, if only we could have known the full impact of what was coming. I could have saved my men and our tastebuds.
My men and I were cornered in the backyard of our house, using the dog kennel for a makeshift wheelbarrow, living in a shallow 20cm trench. I don’t know why we bothered with the trench, or the wheelbarrow for that matter. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t know why we bothered with any of that stuff, or even how we kept our alarm clock powered... Anyway the point was, for whatever strange reason, we keep our large supply of seven wheelie-bins in the back yard. Luckily for us, there are 15 of us on the front lines, so I chose the fittest seven to push the wheelie-bins. Two kept guard, the rest were either medical support or suppressive fire, though lieutenant Johnson decided to do both, for reasons unknown to me. We lost a load of bandages that day. Damn man kept lighting them on fire and throwing them.
We ran onto the road, myself at the back, watching with my rifle raised and ready for any sign of resistance. Charging ahead, medics and gunners in the half-filled bins, beating our hands against our bins and bellowing in the most manly way possible (when you’re riding in a wheelie-bin anyway), we broke out into the fog. Visibility was limited, we could see no further than 10 metres ahead of us at any given time. I moved forward to take the lead. That was when the first vegetable hit the road. It was an old capsicum. Blast! They have capsicums! Sabotage! We ran faster, trying to escape the barrages of food stuffs and objects that were now raining down on us. People kept throwing things, why that is, we didn’t know. It was five in the morning, these people shouldn’t be out of bed yet, let alone in riot suits throwing household items!
Then, out of the fog ahead we heard a mighty roar. The ground shook, the falling hell ceased and all was still and quiet. It was like the calm before a storm. It was...The garbage truck. As the beast trundled itself into our view, it burst from the fog like hell itself, screaming as it’s brakes did nothing at all (so why are they screaming). The truck plummeted towards us at it’s allotted speed of 10-20kms an hour (in an urban residential area). We had no choice. Leading a charge with a battle-cry of “We want our money back!?” , we checked the men in the bins were wearing their flame-proof suits and lit the bins on fire. It was then that I noticed- the truck was a twin-driver vehicle. There was an option to drive it on the left or right side. There could be two drivers for all we knew and the fog was too thick to see clearly. The only choice we had at that point was to split our forces and attack from the sides. Three of us split onto the left side of the truck, three on the right. Myself and sergeant clay stayed in the middle, hurling objects from the bin Clay had command over, igniting old biscuits and mould-riddled lemons alike and hurling them at the windscreen of the truck. It stopped in the middle of the road. We had slowed it down enough, now was our chance! The men on the sides started ramming their bins viciously into the side of the truck, whilst the men occupying the bins scratched at the paint with rusty nails on each ram. Clay ran his bin into the front bull-bar and clambered onto it, wiping the windscreen with a sloppy banana.
Just as we though victory was ours, the garbage truck extended it’s grotesque arm and wrenched a bin from the grasp of one of the soldiers, hurling it into the back of the truck, bringing the man who was in the bin, private Johnny Hooper, in with it. It ate him whole, showing absolutely no remorse or consideration for personal hygiene into account.
With a yell, he was lost from sight. Little Johnny was never the same after that. But then again, we weren’t either. As soon as the truck started to retaliate, we made evasive manoeuvres and called off the attack. As a last reckless move, Clay jumped onto the top of the truck’s cab, reached down into the back for something and returned with J. Hopper, unharmed, but not unchanged. We made it back to the recon point, having failed our mission. At that point we had no idea that Johnny was infected and had become impure, forever doomed to be one of the unclean ones. His uncleanliness spread to us, infecting us with eternal stench. Our commanding officer dismissed us all from the battlefield. Back home, we were shunned and abhorred by all we came into line of sight with. Forever damned, we are forced to live of what we can, homeless and always hungry. We are often forced to split up to avoid attracting attention, but we make sure to meet up again at the homeless conference that happens every five years. Some of us find it hard to attend, as we can hardly hitchhike and the only advantage to going is sharing a can of beans. But, I must tell you I can hardly argue with good old beans. A damn sight better than these soggy pickles I’ve been eating, *shudder* I tell you now, pickles are cucumbers, soaked in pure evil and left overnight on a pair of old socks in the open air, left to go soggy in that same fog that condemned us to this fate. This is our curse.

We are the impure. The unclean ones. The eternal.
This is our story

END