Not Your Usual Scary Stories

Filth - Part 1

That's how we lost Brendan. The last I saw him, he was trying to climb up a hill that looked particularly stable. Next thing I knew, kitchen appliances were rolling down the hill and raining from the sky. We found what was left of him under an old refrigerator. Enough to identify, but not enough to take home.

By the second day there was already talk of turning back, but I couldn't allow it. This mission was too important. Too important for both humanity and my career. Besides, we all knew what we had signed up for. Dangerous for sure, but imagine the stories we would return with, the photographs, the impact on the world. This trip could change everything, but only if we make it to the other side.

We pressed onwards, ignoring the grumbles of discontent. The way was slow, very slow, but we did cover ground. The second day was mostly about learning how to traverse the terrain safely. It wasn't until the third day that we really began to trek.

Thankfully, the path became safer the further we went. The center of the island is the oldest part. The mountains of trash have been slowly leveled by the elements over the years, and the force of new garbage pushing in has packed the ground ever more tightly. Still, it took nearly the entire day to make it to somewhat steady ground. We were all completely exhausted by the time we set up camp.

On that third night, something miraculous happened.

I got used to the smell.

Or maybe I should say, my body could no longer handle the smell and blocked it from my mind. It was still there, ever present, ever invasive, but I learned to only notice it in the taste of food or water. My nose had seemingly closed itself off, rather than continue this torture. It was the greatest relief I could have imagined, outside of leaving this place forever. And I wasn't the only one. The others seemed to have passed the worst of it as well. A spark of the joyful adventurers I had gathered on the mainland returned to their sullen faces. We shared breakfast with a muted enthusiasm before setting off once more.

Without that ever present scent plaguing my every thought, the fourth day was easier. I spent more time focusing on my surroundings. It felt like waking up from a dream. Suddenly the world around me was more than a reminder of my torture. I began to notice all sorts of things I had missed.

The landscape varied as we traveled depending on what trash it was composed of. Areas of biological matter had condensed into mushy swamps that spotted the land. Fungal tendrils snaked out of these festering pits and strangled anything in reach. They offered the illusion of firm ground but never held up to human weight. We avoided these as best we could.

We attempted to travel along the bank of one of the sludge rivers, but this quickly became unnerving. The path seemed safe at first glance, if one managed to ignore the looming towers of garbage stacked fifteen feet high on either side of the river. The walls towered over us as tiptoed along the squishy bank. It was far worse than I had imagined. We sank up to our ankles in the soft mush, and any wrong step would immediately result in an avalanche above or falling into the river below. We took these paths carefully when absolutely necessary, but avoided them as much as possible.

We traveled more often through the fields of mangled scrap metal. The ground was better here, made up of bits of plastic and destroyed paper layered on top of each other and packed down by years of steady toxic rainfall. It was almost like a forest floor, layers of pine needles and leaves creating a soft cushion to stand upon. If I tried hard, I could almost imagine the twisted car frames and scrapped pieces of industrial machinery as a type of foliage of their own.

That wasn't all I noticed though. The further we went, the more I began to see signs of life. There were plenty of cockroaches from the first moment. Millions of them scurried this way and that, most not bigger than a fingernail but a few bigger than my hand.