No Small Bills Read online

  “Yeah yeah, I get it,” I grumbled. Still, I couldn’t get too angry at her. She had gotten us a ride. And we had stuck her to find that ride while we were indoors, all nice and cozy, and eating enough food to choke a fleet of horses. Fair was fair.

  Besides, I had to admit I was curious. Garbage men had always held a fascination for me—as a kid I remembered staring out the window in the morning as they rumbled down the block, riding along the back of the truck like it was nothing, hopping off to lift enormous bags and boxes and bales and toss them effortlessly into the truck’s open maw. They’d always seemed unfazed by everything: the weather, the weight, the neighbor’s prize pit bulls. I’d thought it’d be cool to be a garbage man. And think of all the stuff you could find! Somebody was tossing it, so clearly anything you found was yours to keep if you wanted it—I’d imagined furnishing whole houses that way. Hell, we’d done our frat house back in school by trolling the dumpsters of the other frats—it was ridiculous what the richer kids threw away just because it wasn’t in style anymore or wasn’t the latest model.

  And here I was, about to be at least a temporary garbage man! And a space garbage man at that! What kind of cool crap did aliens throw away? And how much of it could I bring with me?

  “Get ready,” Benny shouted a few seconds later, interrupting my musings. “We’re back on my route, and the first stop’s comin’ up!”

  I glanced over at Ned and Tall. “Time to work off those breakfasts, huh?”

  Both of them nodded. Ned seemed resigned to helping, but Tall looked as interested as I was. I wondered if he’d dreamed about being a garbage man too, before the Feds had snatched him up and made him one of their own. Or was he just excited about the prospect of finding and confiscating a bunch of broken old alien tech? Maybe both.

  “Here we are,” Benny announced, slamming on the brakes. The truck slid and swerved and rolled to a jarring stop. “Let’s go!”

  He wrenched open his door, levered himself out of his seat, and threw himself down out of the cab. I twisted and kicked my own door open and hopped out as well, hopefully a little more gracefully than he had, and then helped Mary out so Ned and Tall could squeeze past her.

  “I’ll just wait in the cab,” she told us with the tiniest little smirk once we were all out. Then she climbed back in, pulled the door shut, and waved at us. Gee, thanks.

  But there wasn’t anything for it but to shiver a bit, turn up my collar, and trudge toward the back of the truck, where Benny was waiting. At least Tall had a suit jacket! I was in shirt sleeves!

  “Right, how’s this work?” I asked Benny as we stomped up to him.

  “Real easy,” he replied, spitting tobacco juice off to the side somewhere. “You lift this lever here,” he shoved up a huge lever mounted along the side of the truck’s rear end, looking a lot like one of those one-armed bandit machines you see in Vegas, “and that opens the back.” Sure enough, the rear split wide, gaping open like a hungry man preparing himself for a huge bite of something tasty. The fact that the two halves had interlocking sections so it looked like big flat teeth didn’t do anything to lessen that image. “You toss all the trash in here, then tug the lever back down. The truck does the rest.” He indicated the two handlebars mounted on either side of the rear. “Might be easiest and quickest if two of y’all rode back here ‘stead of in the cab—that way you can just swing down and toss in the trash each time we stop. I can come back out whenever you need a hand with the really heavy stuff.” And with that he turned and waddled back toward the front, spitting more juice as he went.

  “Great,” I grumbled. “The hillbilly alien gets to sit in the cab with Mary while the three of us handle garbage.” But part of me loved the idea of riding the truck like a real garbage man.

  “I don’t mind,” Tall admitted, shrugging. “The sooner we help him the sooner we get to the matrix. Besides,” he grinned at me. Actually grinned! “Didn’t you ever want to be a garbage man?”

  I couldn’t help grinning back, at least the best I could with my bill. “Yeah, I did.”

  Ned shook his head. “Well, since this is both of your dream come true, why don’t I leave you to it?” He laughed and walked back around to the front.

  Tall and I looked at each other, then laughed. Yeah, sure, why not? Then we turned to the garbage.

  It must have been the same numbing effect my brain was doing on the particles and the truck and everything else, because what I saw were three large trash cans, filled to the brim with plastic bags of trash. They looked completely ordinary, just like the trash I’d see back home. I admit, I was a little disappointed. I’d been hoping for something more, well, alien.

  I could tell from the look on his face that Tall felt the same way. “Hey, maybe as we get more used to it our minds’ll relax this illusion a bit and let us see what’s really here,” I suggested.

  “Could be,” he agreed, and seemed to brighten a little. “Well, might as well get to it.” He grabbed a trashcan, hoisted it up onto the bottom edge of the truck’s rear, and tilted it up so the contents all fell into the waiting trash compartment.

  “Right.” I grabbed a can myself and wrestled it over there, trying to do it as smoothly as he had, but Tall had a good five or six inches on me in height. And he probably weighed about what I did but on him it was all muscle. On me it was fat. And bill—don’t forget the bill. I finally managed to get it up and in, only spilling a bag or two in the process, but by that point Tall had already finished the third can.

  “Ready?” he asked when I set the empty can back down and grabbed the one fallen trash bag. I nodded, too out of breath to say anything. He did have a smirk but on his face but it didn’t seem as nasty as the ones I’d seen earlier, back on the train.

  Tall yanked on the lever, slamming the two halves back together. We heard a loud grinding sound as the mechanisms inside crunched up the trash, then a clank as a panel opened somewhere inside and slid all that trash into the truck’s main compartment. Tall grabbed the handle on that side and swung himself up onto the wide rear bumper, and I did the same on my side, though not as smoothly. Then he banged on the side of the truck with his fist. Benny was obviously used to that signal, and a second later the truck roared to life and took off down the street again.

  And so it went for a bit. It was cold out but not freezing, and the exertion soon warmed me up so the cold actually became refreshing. I got smoother at hopping down, hauling cans, emptying them, and swinging back up. Tall and I started working together better, too, alternating so we weren’t in each other’s way, grabbing opposite sides of really big cans or massive bags and carrying them over and in together. It was fun. I was starting to wish I’d become a garbage man, after all. Hell, maybe when this was all over I still could. I wondered what their veterinary insurance was like? I’d found it easier to go to vets than to regular doctors—they seemed less freaked out by me, were nicer, had better hours, used smaller needles, and usually had tastier treats. And cooler stickers.

  Then things started to get weird.

  “What d’ya think that is?” I asked, gesturing toward something sticking out of one of the cans we were approaching.

  “No idea,” Tall admitted. “Probably best not to ask.” He hadn’t shown much interest in the garbage we’d tossed so far, though that wasn’t too surprising considering it had all looked completely Earth-normal, down to spilled contents exactly matching what you might see on any New York street on garbage day—who knew moldy potato salad and rotten tomatoes looked the same throughout the universe? But this one was different. It was tall and cylindrical and iridescent even with the overcast and the snow, and it had sections that gave off a faint glow of their own. And it hummed. At first I thought it was Tall, or maybe me, or the truck, but the closer we got the more obvious it was that the sound was coming from the thing itself. Was it an outer space broomstick? A galactic vacuum cleaner? A death-ray bazooka? A cheap telescope? A wireless TV antenna? I had no idea, but for some reason hand
ling it made me nervous, maybe because it was the first trash we’d seen that definitely hadn’t come from our world.

  The truck ate it just fine, of course. I’m convinced you could shove a black hole or an exploding sun into the back of a garbage truck and its grinders would make short work of the astronomical wonder. It might even work better afterward, like greasing the gears.

  When we went to climb back onto the truck afterward, though, I noticed something else. The handles were different. They were flaring out more, curving more—they had been standard towel-rack-style handles before, plain and simple and squared, but now they were more delicate and more artsy. And the rear bumper was wider but thinner and swept out more at the corners, so it was like we were standing on little mini-platforms instead of just part of the bumper.

  “Did you—?” I started to ask Tall, gesturing at our feet and our hands as Benny revved the truck and took off for the next stop.

  “Yeah,” Tall cut me off. He shrugged. “Like you said before, must be our minds adapting to all this weirdness, letting a little of it start seeping through.”

  I’d said that? Really? It sounded almost like it made sense. But yeah, I guess I had. Wild.

  After that we started noticing other little changes. More and more of the garbage had odd shapes or textures or smells or sounds—or all of the above. The bags became silvery mesh things, or shimmering energy webs, or plated metal sacks. I emptied one of the energy webs out and kept the thing itself, which squashed down into a ball the size of my cell phone and fit neatly in my pocket. Hey, you never know when you might need an extra garbage bag, and I had a feeling this one wouldn’t leak no matter what you put in it. I’m pretty sure I saw Tall pocket one of the mesh ones, too. And a few of the smaller metallic items we ran across, probably to investigate later and possibly add to his Boy Scout Wardrobe stash.

  The truck’s outline was shifting a bit as well, becoming less blocky and more streamlined, though its surface was still gray and pockmarked with dings and scrapes and dents. It was bigger, too—a lot bigger, or at least a lot wider, and seemed to spread out and then angle back in sharply in front, like a spearhead or an arrow. The compactor in back curved in on itself, as if the mouth were opening in surprise, until it became a circular hole that irised open and had some kind of crackling blue energy within it. The big lever shifted into the truck, recessing into its side, and became a sleek silvery handle that you reached in, tugged out, and twisted to the side—to reset it you reversed the process.

  Then, at one stop where what looked like a fuzzy green rug overflowed a row of five trashcans and spilled out onto the street, I got the biggest shock yet.

  “Here, I’ll give ya a hand with this one.”

  “Aaahhhh!” I nearly jumped out of my skin—which would have been mighty embarrassing, not to mention cold—when the thing shambled around the corner of the truck. It was . . . it was . . . well, you know Jell-O? The red kind? With the fruit in it? This looked like that—if that was a crude artist’s rendering of somebody’s nightmare. It was reddish-brown and jiggly and you could sort of see through it, enough to make out the organs and spine and other stuff floating within. It had little shiny eyes on long stalks, and a bunch of thin tendrils like noodles hanging from its face where its mouth should be, and a glowing red ember right in the middle.

  The Minnesota Twins cap, though, hadn’t changed a bit.

  “B-Benny?” I asked.

  “Yeah?” It had gotten past us, and now its eyes swiveled back. “You comin’ or what? We don’t got all day—I’m already behind schedule!”

  I looked at Tall, who was pale but looked back at me and shrugged. So we joined Benny and together we heaved the thing around—his arms were more like tapioca than Jell-O-O but they were strong and apparently he could stretch them way out when he wanted—and managed to feed its front end into the trash compactor. Then some kind of suction took over because the truck literally sucked the thing in, chewed it up, and that was that. Benny oozed back to the cab and Tall and I hopped back up on the platforms. They were actually little discs of their own now, and completely separate from the rest of the truck, hovering along behind it and staying exactly the same distance away like they were connected with invisible chains.

  “That was—” I started as the truck jolted into motion again.

  “Yeah,” Tall agreed.

  “So that’s how he really—”

  “Must be.”

  “Whoa.” I thought about that, trying to mentally overlay the two images of Benny, the before and the after. It kinda fit, actually—I could see where the beard had come from, and the beady eyes, and the red nose.

  “What about the tobacco?” I wondered aloud after a minute.

  “What?”

  “The tobacco. Benny’s tobacco. If it’s not really tobacco, what is it he keeps sucking and chewing and spitting?”

  Tall and I exchanged a glance and shuddered at the exact same time.

  “Right. Never mind.” I looked around, desperate for any other thought or image, anything at all. Illusory or not, I didn’t want to lose my breakfast. “Hey, the snow’s letting up.”

  We both stared out at the world around us. Only it wasn’t a world anymore. The suggestions of streets and houses and trees were completely gone along with the snow. Instead we were looking at streams of tiny golden particles, whizzing by in all directions and at all angles, like we were caught in the world’s biggest confetti storm. It was amazing. And through the particles I could make out the stars—so many stars! It was like the ones we saw at night were only the brightest ones and now we could see all of them, so many they looked like a solid glowing mass in places. It was amazing. And beautiful. And kind of terrifying.

  I missed North Dakota. At least that I could understand.

  But at least I didn’t feel cold anymore.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Can I take your order?

  “We gotta pull in soon!” Benny shouted out his window as Tall and I walked back from the most recent stop, a floating space station shaped like a glittering star pendant. “Gotta weigh in!”

  “Weigh in? What, you mean a weigh station?” Tall asked. “Figures,” he muttered when Benny nodded. “Rules and regs no matter where you go.”

  “What’s a weigh station?” I asked as we hopped on our platforms, grabbed hold, and the ship—I couldn’t really call it a truck anymore, not since the wheels had disappeared and what looked like giant neon tubes appeared below the sides and apparently supported the ship’s bulk—took off.

  “Back home, trucks have to pull into weigh stations at regular intervals,” Tall explained over the ship’s noise. “Every type of truck has a maximum weight allowance, and you can’t drive on the highway if you’re over that limit—too much risk of overturning, blowing out a tire, and other problems. So you pull in, your truck gets weighed, you get it cleared for its current cargo load, and you move on.”

  “Oh.” I’d passed those signs for Weigh Stations a hundred times along the highway and never really known what they were about—I’d sometimes wondered if it was a free service for people on vacation, so they could weigh themselves and see whether they needed to stop sampling quite so much of the local cuisine. I guess this made more sense, but I still liked the image of overweight tourists standing in long lines and calling out to each other, “Hey, Marge! Twenty pounds over! Guess I’d better lay off the meatloaf, huh?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it’ll take too long,” I said after a minute. “I mean, they can probably just scan this thing from a distance and know everything about its contents, right?”

  “Maybe.” Tall didn’t sound convinced. “But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that no matter how easy it might be to do something, if it involves a bureaucracy they’ll find a way to make it take forever.”

  We zipped along in silence for a while, and then Benny pulled off to one side—not that there were lanes here, and we saw very little other traffic, but the colors around us
were a consistent shade of golden-green-brown, and on either side they were redder and more blue, which made me think we were in the equivalent of a space lane. Now we were on the “curb,” and Benny hopped out. Ned and Mary piled out after him—I’m guessing he told them to—and all three of them converged on Tall and I.

  “Weigh station’s just up ahead,” Benny told us once we were all gathered. “Shouldn’t take too long, but best if y’all wait just the other side of it.”

  “Why, afraid we’ll throw off the weight?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how that could work—even in his real, Jell-O body form, I suspected Benny weighed more than the rest of us put together. Even counting Ned. And Tall. And the crap in his pockets.

  “It’s not just weight they check,” Benny answered, shaking his head, which caused it to jiggle alarmingly. “They check everything about your ship, your licenses, your clearances, your route and destination.”

  “So what does that have to do with us?” I scratched at my bill. “You said we were on your route!”

  “Y’all are,” Benny agreed. “But my cab’s only rated for two occupants total, including me. And the whole rig’s got a maximum of three allowed. Most a’ the time I’m the only one inside and TBA’s on the back. For big jobs we might grab an extra pair of hands. But there’re four a’ y’all, and there’s no way I’m cleared for that.” He shuffled his “feet,” leaving little gelatinous trails. “Sorry. But like I said, it shouldn’t take long. Y’all just mosey on past the weigh station and wait for me there—soon’s I’m cleared I’ll drive out and pull off and y’all can hop back in and climb back on, then away we go again.”

  I wasn’t too happy about it, and it didn’t look like Tall was either, but Mary nodded. “Of course,” she told Benny. “We appreciate your providing us with transport, and we have no desire to jeopardize your occupation. We will meet you past the station, as you suggest.”