I was not worried for Sarah. She had told me herself that she could handle whatever situation she found herself in on her own, and this robably one of the easiest things to take care of. Just keep walking and don’t fall on your face, that was the way to do it. In trast, what I was tasked with doing seemed nearly insurmountable. Walk into a city full of trash areme amounts of noise and find two people who could have left the city or entered a private building long ago. As I stepped past the first building that could have been said to be part of the city, I immediately saw an unbelievable amount of trash taking up most of the city. Even iy that I had just e from, there was not this much trash. It went up to my ankles in spots and I had to hold my breath at certain points in order to not vomit. There u smell of garbage juice, the anonymous liquid that was created during any buildup of garbage. This filthy city had a yer of that liquid c the ground, and wherever aepped, they caused a spsh that stirred up the smell even more. Most people were not wearing masks, and they seemed to be entirely indifferent to what was going on around them, aside from ohing. The homeless popution in this new city erhaps rger than the amount of people who actually had homes, and they all seemed to be in various states of distress. Some were in a state of psychosis, talking to themselves and themselves only. They shouted aloud, calling those people who would torment them so much bastards and fools, and that they would surely beat them the ime around. One of the roups was the people who were hungry. I had been hungry before, I had evearving, but not like this. The hungry people were desperate, desperate enough to drink the garbage juid eat the rotten scraps that they had found lying iween cardboard and strange melted pstics. There was a dying problem in this city. People died at basically every sed, but not from violence. I saw people keel over and die just because their body couldn’t take anymore of the torture that had been attached to them for their whole lives. I thought back to the ragged city and the car crashes. The people who had died had mostly do of their own volition, gotten into a fight and died because of some stupid thing or ahese people hadn’t even gotten the ce to save themselves, and even though there were tless piles of trash in the ragged city, someone was always at least trying to it up. Here, there was nothing.
The dead people had died in a few unique ways. The most on were dehydration and starvation, which you could see by the shriveled and maomachs or the cracked and dry lips of the bodies which y there on the ground. Some of them, horribly enough, had died from refeeding syndrome, which caused their bodies to bloat and them to die because they had actually eaten too much. I tried to imagine a worse fate than dying because you ate too much garbage, and failed to think of ohe st on category were the people who had died by suicide, usually from tying a pstic bag around their head. And all around us, men in suits with briefcases were walking over the bodies, calling people on the phone and screaming at them, usually about the t that the person oher end had dropped, saying that this stituted thievery of the highest order and the people would no longer make enough money, disappointing their shareholders a thousand times over.
I saw something quite peculiar as I was walking further into the city. I saw a man, just like any other wealthy man who happeo be walking by, trip over a dead body and fall into the garbage. He immediately tied a garbage bag around his head and stuck his telephoo the air, seemingly as an invitation. I walked over, passing by many homeless people who did not even move a millimeter towards the man and his phone, picked the phone up, and pressed it to my ear. The voice at the other end spoke first.
“Hello? Are you someone who has just picked this pho of a dead man’s hand?”
“...Yes. Why?” “You get to take this man’s spot now, no matter where you stand in our society.”
“...Okay.”
“Walk into the building marked 11219, e, and there will be a person who will run up to you and show you where you o go. Good luck.”
The man at the other end hung up, and I looked around for 11219. I saw it across the street, and it was actually only about 35 feet away from where I stood. I walked over, pushed the doors open, aered the marble and quartz building.
