“I wish you’d stop using that metaphor,” Alan said. “Ick.”
But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan’s door.
“That dumpster is full of cardboard,” he said, gesturing. “It’s recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one,” he said, oofing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he’d clenched between his teeth, “is where they put the good stuff. Looky here.”
Alan tried to climb the dumpster’s sticky walls, but couldn’t get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster’s transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the rattle. “This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot of defective product, since it’s cheaper than shipping it all back to Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,” he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He passed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on the handle.
It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk of metal growing out of its ass.
“More of these, huh?” Kurt said. “I found about a thousand of these last month. They’re USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they’ve all got a manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color—whatever shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.
“I’ve got a couple thousand of these back home, but they’re selling briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and we’ll snag a couple hundred more.”
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he was grinding underfoot.