These kids lived in rows of dumpsters. It looked like a sad parody of the suburbs. Everyone had the same layout, just filled it with different crap. The kids who lived in these slums were tough. They had gangs, mob bosses and territories they fiercely defended and warred over.

For a time I was one of these kids. I lived in Blue #3 and had a few roommates. We were part of two gangs, a gang of boys and a gang of girls. At the time we were at war with another gang of kids that lived in the dumpsters on the opposite corner of ours. We shot at each other with modified bb guns taped up and covered in whatever trash we could find.

The other kids had built a gun that looked like a crossbow and fired bb’s really fast. Somehow in the fire fight, I’d run out of bb’s and was scrounging around finding the ones that they had shot into my dumpster. I was scooping them into my blue engineer’s hat and sloppily poured them into a pump-action gun I had found several weeks ago.

Things were going badly for our group of dumpsters. We were going to have to evacuate to the encroaching gang. But we weren’t really worried about the dumpsters as we were about the bathroom in the building that our dumpsters surrounded. In a bathroom deep in the dark basement of this abandoned factory building grew the Fungus.

The Fungus was like a drug, but really we didn’t know anything about it save that when we ate it we woke up in a totally different world. It grew sporadically throughout the dumpster-burbs and was a highly desirable commodity among us kids at the time. When you ate it you immediately fell asleep and woke up in a beautifully whole and complete world. Each kid woke up somewhere different.

I woke up in a room with spaceship wallpaper and a younger brother sleeping on the bed next to mine. I had two parents who loved me and took great care of me and went to school. But when I went back to sleep at night in the room with spaceship wall paper, I would wake up back in the basement bathroom of the warehouse surrounded by the dumpsters where I lived.

Our gang had found this growth of fungus months ago and set up to harvest it, distribute it and defend it. Rival gangs were all busy fighting for it, but no one could find their own growth of fungus. Eventually the other gangs in our neighborhood got together.

So here we were, out gunned and out manned running into the warehouse for a final stand to defend our stash of Fungus. Down in the basement the fungus was growing wildly. We didn’t need lights down there anymore because the Fungus gave of a light fluorescent glow. But instead of defending it we decided to eat it.