Watchers

Chapter 9: Hot Garbage

Sasha follows the nun back inside the building and they go farther down the hall away from the great room. They pass large oak doors that open onto a small chapel lined with pews.

The nun asks as they walk, "How are you liking it here, my dear?"

"It beats freezing my ass off," Sasha says, then immediately bites her tongue. She hasn't had to watch her words in a long time and she's out of practice - she wonders how bad it is to swear at a nun, then mumbles a quick apology and adds, "It's nice to have a hot meal and a sense of purpose."

"We do our best to help," the nun says.

They walk past another set of open doors, where Sasha hears pans rattling and smells something savory like beef stew. It's the kitchen, and she sees Jane there along with a half-dozen other people. Sasha gives her a quick wave, and then continues down the hall with the nun.

She asks, "Is Daniel getting a work assignment today, too?"

"We're giving him ample opportunity to recover," the nun says with a confiding smile, "before we put him to work."

She opens a door at the end of the hall which leads to a set of stairs and a faint, unpleasant odor not unlike what she smelled outside. It's dank and sour, and Sasha doesn't want to go into the basement of the shelter, but she follows as the nun descends the steps ahead of her. Sasha had assumed the stench was the decaying smell of the city itself, or of pollution coming from the nearby factories. The farther she goes down the stairs, though, the more obvious it becomes that the smell is coming from the Haven itself.

It becomes stronger as they walk along a hallway with glazed cinder block walls that again brings Sasha's middle school to mind. She hopes that the job awaiting her has nothing to do with that smell, but she already knows that it will.

At the end of the hall, there are two large, steel doors - one on the right and one on the left. The nun hands Sasha a mask to filter out the smell, then pulls one on over her habit. She opens the door on the left and Sasha sees exactly what she'd been expecting - a room full of garbage.

There are about two dozen shelter residents standing at various points on a long conveyor belt which feeds heaps of garbage from one end of the room to the other. There are bins beside each person, which they sort plastic, paper, and aluminum trash into, and the far end of the conveyor belt leads outside the building, where a cold draft continually circulates into the room. She should be grateful for the draft, because in the summer, the smell would be ten times worse.

The nun leads Sasha into the room, saying, "Welcome to the recycling center. This room is the Haven's primary source of income - we take garbage from businesses all across the city and sort it for recycling, and the profits go toward clothing, utilities, and any food we cannot grow in the garden."

Sasha nods along and tries not to show her disgust. She accepts a pair of thick rubber gloves from the nun and listens as she gives her instructions on what to sort out from the heap on the conveyor belt. Then the nun points her to an open spot and leaves Sasha to it, trying not to be so obvious about the speed at which she leaves the room.

Sasha looks at the garbage continually moving in front of her, and at her new coworkers. The mask and the noise from the belt make talk almost impossible, and they all look resigned anyway, like they're trudging their way through the task the best they can.

Sasha tries to do the same, likening this to the warehouse she used to work at. Back then she'd been packaging things for shipment, and she tries to imagine the plastic bags and aluminum cans she plucks out of the rotting garbage as nothing more than products in a warehouse. She has to numb herself to the task because the mask doesn't do a whole lot to conceal the smell and if she thinks about it, she might gag.

She decides that she will do this job today because she's indebted to the Haven, which has fed, clothed and sheltered her, but she won't stick around for another day of this.