The Mariner

There used to be water, in the unending sea.

Not sludge. Not the slime of countless ages, buried too deep to evaporate and trickling ever downward through mile on mile of sunbleached, stinking detritus. Not meagre hydration that meant you had to dig and root and forage for the relief of a few drops of sour, salty, artificially sweet fluid on your tongue. Actual, genuine water, clean and clear and warm, stretching from horizon to horizon, glittering under the intact moon.

The Mariner could not imagine such a thing.

She knelt, half-buried, in bottles and bags and bits of clothing, hands scrabbling quick and frantic to sort through the filth and waste. Here – here was a colorful bottle, its label long since burned pale before the sun went cold, the residue of whatever contents had clustered around its nozzle decayed into fine powder millennia ago. But perhaps, if she was lucky, somewhere deep within –

She began tearing at it, a sharpened bit of metal and her crooked teeth gouging at a surface that discolored and crackled beneath them, the familiar sour taste of plastic coating her dry tongue. After a moment a crack opened like a pained mouth, and she scrabbled at it with long, broken fingernails, prizing it open, breaking it apart.

But whatever had been in that bottle once was gone now, and left nothing but hard eggshell plastic behind.

There was no energy to spare on lamenting. Already her hands were digging down, shoving aside bottles and bags and boxes and tires and scraps of old cloth. Already she was shoveling the husk-dry trash aside like sand, diving into it like water, seeking something else, anything else, that might have once been edible.

Her hands were thin and yellow and weathered, shaking things like scraps in the wind that pawed and dug and scoured almost of their own free will. Her breath was thin and shallow, a calculated rhythm that pulled what little oxygen there was out of the corrupted yellow air, the burning of her lungs a necessary pain that had long since faded out of her consciousness. The goggles that had clung to her eyes since birth had formed a tight trench in her skull, so deeply engrained that they felt like a part of her, an added organ that she couldn’t have removed even if she wanted to. One of the lenses had shattered long ago, and beneath it her eye had been reduced to nothing but a little blind scar, burned and withered and sealed shut by the acrid air.

Forward through the plastic she dug, the sticky cloth wrapped around her feet serving only partly to protect them. A cartoon smile beckoned from the filth, and she pounced on it hungrily, digging out a faded food wrapper, the eyes of whatever mascot it had once borne torn away and lost. Greedily, her tongue licked out, rasping against the pale underside of the thing, the thin-worn wax paper tearing at even that slight pressure. But the food it had once held was gone, eaten away by time long before her shriveled, rumbling stomach had even been conceived.

There was nothing here, the Mariner decided. Nothing that could be left for her.

Shuddering, she stood, the tremors that wracked her body worsening as she trusted her weight to bones instead of plastic. Her hands shook so bad that she could barely control them as she reached up behind her, untying the rough twine that wrapped around her body and taking down the long, decaying travelling-stilts that it had held in place, gently sliding one foot and then the other into the straps.

One had been made of an ancient metal signpost, perforated and lightweight, a kink in its length forcing her to hold her leg at an awkward angle as she used it. The other was formed of some kind of black plastic, a foot longer than its counterpart, the tiny colored lights along its length still blinking sometimes, sporadically, as though trying to cling to life. She carried one in each hand as well, one formed of a pair of golf clubs bound in wire, the other a delicate fiberglass thing that stung against her skin, so that when she finally hauled herself upright with pained, jolting shudders, she adopted a strange, quadrupedal form, tall and aloof from the plastic sea.

One long step, her bones aching and crying out in response. Another, the stilts crunching and grinding against the waste they landed on, and another and another, until at last she found the rhythm of it and settled into an awkward, pointed gait. It was hardly comfortable, but it was faster than crawling through the muck, and the cadence of it meant that it was easier to breathe. Sometimes, as she stumbled and picked her way across the expanse of grime, she wondered if this was how people had moved across the sea, in the faraway time when it had been water.

Sometimes, as she moved like this, she found bigger pieces of what had been left behind. A neon sign, perhaps, the colorful lights crawling around its exterior gone dark, a few illegible letters all that remained of the message it once bore. The hulk of a car, more rust than metal now, a single staring headlight shining its lonely beam out across the eternal hazy twilight. A mass of books, fused by time and acid rain into a single mass of pulp and paper, covers with pictures of landscapes or laughing children half-visible occasionally within the hardened ooze. A radio-tower on the distant horizon, old wires dangling like ivy, the beacon at its peak calling eternally to speakers that it would never find again.

She had even seen a ship, once, looming half-seen through the yellow-white mist. Its hull had towered like a shadowed continent up into the sky, its smokestacks great spires that broke up its silhouette like battlements. Its paint had been just barely visible from this distance, white and red and iron grey, no more than tiny variations like layers in rock, their scale the only thing that protected them from being worn away altogether. A part of her had wanted to go to it, to search this colossal, ancient thing, to dig its secrets out like the center of a fatberg and feed her mind upon them. But there would be no food, in that ancient wreck. Nothing at all, except echoing, hollow emptiness. And time not spent searching for food was always time wasted.

Quite suddenly, shattering her thoughts like an ancient jar, she felt a sizzling, burning pain on her exposed arm.

Almost before she knew what was happening, she had dropped to the ground, frantically pulling the stilts off her feet. Another pain, and another, as little hissing plops began to sound on the waves of trash around her. It was the thing she lived in fear of, the single most terrifying threat out here on the plastic waves.

Acid rain.

There was no time to bind the stilts back onto herself. The acid was already starting to eat through her tattered shawl, little burning droplets pattering against her flesh. She would have to find them again, after the rain, and hope that they were still usable when the storm ended.

Hastily, like a fleeing rat, she filled her lungs with sulfur air and burrowed down like a diver into the depths below her.

It was dark down there, beneath the surface, the only light faint and discolored as it filtered down through layer on layer of translucent plastic. The air was rank and foul, though different from the burning miasma up above – a wet stench of rot filtering up from the depths, of things contained too long without air or light. Down through those things she pushed, arms shoving them aside to give her room to crawl, until at last she lay buried entirely in an artificial tomb, and the hissing spatter of the rain echoed against the trash above her.

But she could not stay still for long. The shelter of the depths was callous and fickle, and soon enough the rain would join her down here, beginning its own endless, eternal descent through the decomposing sea. And so downwards she pushed she pushed, half-swimming through the mass of plastic rot and debris, hoping desperately that she could escape from that burning, yellow-white fluid that trickled down behind her.

She hated it down there, within the ocean itself, where the trash pressed close against her skin and the suffocating airlessness made her head swirl. The filth was wet and eternal, never enough food to eat or water to drink, only the temptation of them beckoning her ever downwards, ever deeper. Smaller things started to gather here, cigarette butts and Q-tips and plastic spoons and bottle caps, coins like tiny stones and the broken heads of dolls peering out like fish from among the garbage-bags, all of it filtering ever downwards towards whatever waited below.

With them came other things, little and sharp and rotting away. Shards of glass that pounced like dead insects, their razor heads burrowing into her skin and spilling far more blood than she could afford. Needles and razorblades that carried poison in their bites, rust and sickness that made her head swirl and her good eye cloud. Bright liquids that burned to the touch, that looked and smelled like water but lied, and made her spasm and vomit to drink them. The worst of it had filtered away from the surface, but down here they sank still, finding their eternal road through the cracks and gaps as the filth around them was compressed ever tighter by the unbearable weight from above.

But the dead, as cruel and sharp as they were, were not what she feared down here in the trash. For they were dead, and they understood it. They did not cling to life that fled their grip like grains of sand, or claw at anything that might be able to provide them one more fleeting moment.

There was a sound, from somewhere deep below.

It was a colossal sound, subtle and vast, like an earth tremor far away below. It was a sound of something moving, something so big and so hungry and so desperate that even the mere suggestion of it made her recoil and flinch against the layers of bottles that dug into her back. It was a sound of forgotten times, when movement meant life and hunger meant food, when existence could be sustained on more than fear and denial and hoarded memories.

She felt her empty stomach twist, as she held herself perfectly, utterly still.

Beneath her, she felt the water bottles and plastic bags push up into her gut, as whatever moved beneath her slid them up above itself in its wake.

A breath, tiny and shuddering, far from sufficient but all she dared. Another. A third.

Ever so gently, she felt something dry and papery brush her fingers, like a hand reaching out from the sea of refuse, a hand of another mariner like herself, desperate for help or asking to be followed, down below.

As delicately as she could, she pulled her fingers away.

She thought there was a sorrow in the sounds from beneath, as whatever moved down there carried itself away through the dead corpse-sea. But perhaps it was only her imagination, assigning thought to that which only survived because it dared not die.

Shuddering, the Mariner pushed herself upwards through the endless miles of plastic, dragging herself close enough to the surface to hear the pounding of the rain.