L.
Buck was lugging the black plastic sacks to the bins just by his doorstep, those green metal coffins squatting there like obedient beasts. The stench hit him proper unbelievably vile, a filthy cocktail of ancient boots, cunty rot, and cabbages gone to black slime in some forgotten corner of the earth. He slung the bags in with a wet slap against the grime-smeared walls, then clapped the lid down hard, as if to seal the whole reeking world away.
"How long," he thought, the notion solid as a brick in his skull, "till this whole spinning ball called Earth ends up the same stinking, festering, done?" It was no airy fancy; the thought had weight, a real chance, a percentage of pure opportunistic parasitism ready to explode in his face like a home-made nail-bomb wrapped in newsprint.
He glanced round. The sky was a touch less filthy than yesterday, a pale smear pretending at improvement, but the pollution hung thick, a choking yellow broth. Cars snarled past, driven by frantic wage-slaves racing to their desks, engines belching their daily poison.
Instinctively his hand dipped into the jeans pocket, hunting the familiar flat packet of Marlboros. Fool. He'd only just sworn off the fags not for some high-minded health crusade, nor out of pious dread of the reaper, but for the plain, brutal reason that he no longer wished to reek like a public ashtray left out in the rain.
“No, bollocks," he muttered. "No more ciggies for poor old Ziggie.”
He turned his back on the bins and the roaring road. Before tackling the flight of stairs up to the main door of the block, another thought struck him, sharp and clear: I'm a right naive sod, but if the end ever does come if this whole show collapses into one great midden I don't want to go out smelling like shit myself. That would be too disgusting, even for the last act.
