Brambleman (42 page)

* * *

The Dumpster saved Charlie’s life. He was
alone at the Store-All, holding the contract vat over his head,
pouring its odious contents into the green bin when a deafening
blast threw debris, shrapnel, and chunks of asphalt in all
directions. He was shielded from the explosion by the trash bin’s
considerable bulk. Metal screeched on asphalt as it shifted on the
parking lot pavement and crashed into him, sending him
sprawling.

The plastic tub landed upside down on his
head, dousing him with blood. It stayed there for a moment while he
flailed his arms wildly. Frightened out of his wits, he first
thought the blood had exploded to punish him for trying to get rid
of it. Still on his butt, Charlie flung the tub to the side. His
world was an inferno: heat and fire everywhere, dust and smoke in
his eyes and lungs. His ears were filled with intense ringing.

“What the fuck!” Charlie screamed, but he
could barely hear himself. Wide-eyed, he scrambled to his feet.
Chaos surrounded him. On the other side of the Dumpster, flames
shot twenty feet into the air, and a thick cloud of black smoke
roiled upward. Fires burned all over the lot. Store-All’s office
window was shattered and flames licked the inside walls. The top of
the Dumpster was burning, too. Smoke from burning plastic pierced
his nose and stabbed his lungs.

Dazed, with his heart racing, Charlie spit
out coppery, foul-tasting blood and took a few unsteady steps
around the Dumpster, crunching glass with every step. To his shock
and horror, his van was now a blackened, burning hulk. Make that
three
burning hulks, along with a hundred minor parts—the
pieces of his life—scattered all over. He looked up at the
mini-warehouse’s roof in disbelief. Was that the driver’s seat on
top of the building?

It was difficult to think with that thing up
there. He shook his head to clear it and realized that it wasn’t
the blood, but the van that had exploded. And it was no accident.
The engine was off, which meant that someone had tried to kill him
with a car bomb. “Holy shit!” he cried. “I’m in Iraq!”

His sticky-lidded eyes stung from smoke, ash,
and dust. He put his forearm over the bottom half of his face and
staggered around in a circle, dripping blood like Carrie at the
prom. He looked at the front gate on Wynburn Avenue. Traffic had
stopped. People stood beside their cars. Some moved toward him
slowly but couldn’t get through the security gate.
Stupid
zombies
.

Yelling and honking filled the air, cutting
through the ringing in his ears. “They’re trying to kill me!” he
shouted, then fell to his knees and wailed, “They destroyed
everything!”

But they hadn’t—not yet, anyway. He patted
the flash memory drive in his pocket. The final draft of
American Monster
was with him, and his Waterman pen was in
his pocket, so he was still in business as a writer. He patted
again and felt his wedding ring. Which was strange, because he
couldn’t remember putting it there—or even carrying it with him.
Had the explosion—
Nah
. Maybe he’d planned to hock it and
just couldn’t remember now that the blast filled his head.

In any case, everything else was in danger.
The door to his unit, which he’d left open, was hanging
precariously by its top hinge, and a fire burned inside. In a few
minutes, his possessions would be destroyed. He needed to save what
he could and get out before the zombies got to him.

In desperation, he sprinted across the lot,
leaping over wreckage, shielding his face from the flames consuming
the van. With a loud grunt, he yanked the broken door off his
storage unit. He blinked against the smoke, grabbed his mountain
bike, its chain lock draped around the handlebars, and wheeled it
out. He’d taken off his duster inside the unit earlier to wrestle
with the vat. He dove back inside and grabbed it along with an old
backpack. Choking on fumes, he dug into a garbage bag filled with
old clothes and pulled out an armful, then stumbled out the door
and stuffed them in the backpack.

The uninsured vehicle’s burning frame now
stood between him and the street. Fifty yards away, a half-dozen
people were at the front gate, shouting at him to open it. “Help is
on the way,” an older man yelled. But Charlie Sherman didn’t
operate under man’s laws and therefore expected to derive no
benefit from them.

“No cops,” he muttered, turning away from the
growing crowd. He saw the license plate on the ground. He crammed
it in his pack, too.
For me to know and you to find out
.
While he figured the police would eventually identify him, finding
him was another matter. He was safer as a moving target than a
sitting duck. He checked the bike’s tires. Soft, but rideable.

To escape through the back fence, he needed
his bolt cutters. Holding his breath, he stumbled back inside his
unit. The heat was nearly unbearable, and smoke burned his eyes. He
fumbled with the hasps on his big metal toolbox, then felt around
inside and grasped a rubber-gripped handle. He rushed outside with
the cutters, exhaled, inhaled, slipped on the duster and backpack,
then hopped on the bike. Holding the cutters across the handlebars,
he started to pedal, stopping when he saw what was left of his
computer on the pavement twenty yards away from the van—the bottom
half containing the hard drive. He ripped out the drive and jammed
it into his pack, then pumped the bike to the back of the lot. He
was now screened from Wynburn by several warehouse buildings. As he
neared the fence, he heard an emergency vehicle’s
whoop-whoop
.

He jumped off the bike and started snapping
through fence links. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. He stuffed the
cutters in his crowded pack. The wire scratched him as he rammed
the bike through the slit he’d made. A steep embankment covered
with thick tufts of brown grass led to some railroad tracks. He
half slid, half walked down, using the bike for support, then
pedaled away to a rising chorus of sirens. He bumped along on the
gravel beside the tracks. When he hit a hard, smooth patch of dirt,
he put the bike in high gear and pedaled fiercely, glancing over
his shoulder at the towering black cloud—his life up in smoke. He
wondered if this was Trouble’s work—a double-cross by the Party of
the First Part. If so, he was doomed and all he was doing was
stretching out the inevitable, ugly ending. Which would leave him
crushed like a bug, most likely.

Several minutes later, he stopped beneath an
overpass. A jumble of shopping carts lay at the foot of a concrete
embankment rising diagonally to the bottom of the bridge. Above the
two pillars that supported that side of the Arbor Drive bridge, a
cardboard hut was wedged between concrete and iron—a refrigerator
box some poor wretch called home. The flaps were open and it
appeared vacant, though its inside was lined with blankets and old
coats.

Charlie hollered out a greeting and got no
answer. He leaned the bike against a concrete pillar and scrambled
up the incline. As he drew near the shelter, an acrid stench
assailed his nostrils. He entered and held his breath as he
stripped off his bloody clothes. He flung his foul duds into the
brambles beside the bridge and put on clothes pulled from the
backpack. He had no pockets, so he put his phone, wallet, and keys
into his pack and pedaled off in paint-covered sweat pants and a
bulky sweater, the cold wind whipping his face.

First things first. He got off the railroad
right of way, took a side street, then zigged and zagged while
trying to think of somewhere he could stay, someplace warm and
safe.

Unfortunately, he could think of no such
place. On top of that, his credit card was nearly maxed out and
there was a price on his head, set by man or God—or maybe both. And
while they hadn’t killed him, he hadn’t survived yet, either.

His heart raced from exertion and fear. The
shock of the bombing and the winter bike ride sapped Charlie’s
strength and played tricks on his mind. He kept looking over his
shoulder, expecting to see motorcycle cops—or a black car—racing up
behind him. He felt like the world was made of quicksand, and if he
stopped he’d sink into it and disappear. Every so often, he laughed
at the ugly joke his life had become, with its mixed-up punch
lines. Once he cried because his daddy killed himself, and now—for
the hundredth time—he understood why.

Charlie was pretty sure that the varmints had
tried to kill him, since no one else cared whether he lived or
died. Then again, there was Trouble, but explosives weren’t his
style. Still, Charlie wasn’t letting him off the hook, not after
the old trickster had suckered him into this mess in the first
place.

After an hour of riding around, feeling like
a hunted animal, he needed shelter from the cold. He went to the
only place he felt he could reasonably claim a right of access.
Charlie locked the bike to the rack in front of the Decatur YMCA
and went inside. The people there were strangers to him. A black
staffer stood by the registration desk and held up a hand.
“Stop.”

“Stop?” Charlie said. “I need to—”

“You can’t come in here like that.”

Charlie held his membership card like a
badge. “But I got to. I got to.” He turned and looked over his
shoulder, half expecting to see cops rushing up on him from behind.
“I just need to clean up.” His hands trembled. His eyes filled with
tears. His voice cracked. “Please, sir. Please. I don’t have a
place to stay. I don’t have anything anymore. I just need to clean
up and go away. That’s all.”

The man folded his arms across his chest.
Charlie turned to another black staffer, the clerk sitting behind
the front desk. “I pay my dues. Every month. I got a right. You
can’t discriminate just because—”

The clerk grabbed the card and gave her
colleague a nasty look. “What part about the reason for the season
do you not understand?” Then to Charlie: “We close in fifteen
minutes, due to the holiday. You’d best hurry.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Charlie said. “I
won’t forget this. Ever.” He shuffled straight toward the locker
room, leaving the employees to argue about his worth. Fortunately
for him, the place was nearly deserted. Charlie threw away his
sweat pants and sweater, which were sticky with blood. He groaned
when he glanced in the mirror and saw that his bloodstained face
was covered with stuck-on ash and soot. After his shower, he put on
brown corduroy pants and a white shirt, then wiped off his
blood-crusted boots with a Y towel. When he looked in the mirror he
was amazed to see the only marks on him were a couple of scratches
where he’d pushed through Store-All’s fence.

On the way out, he rifled through the
lost-and-found bin, searching for a coat. He had to settle for a
red quilted vest. He put it on under the duster and slipped out. It
didn’t matter how ridiculous he looked; he felt worse.

Now what? Crash at a cheap motel and figure
out what to do next, that’s what. He pedaled into downtown Decatur
and stopped at Mailbox. Even though he’d locked his bike to a lamp
post, Charlie walked into the store backwards, ever watchful of his
most prized possession.

Taking time out from explaining to a customer
that he couldn’t give next-day delivery on a package shipped
Christmas Eve, the slacker clerk smirked at the writer’s new
outfit. Ignoring him, Charlie went to his postal box and struggled
to unlock it, then stopped to rub his hands together and blow on
them. After a minute’s work on his hands, he was dexterous enough
to turn the key. There was one piece of mail, a thin envelope from
Fortress. He pulled it out and tried to open it, but his raw, red
fingers were useless for such detail work. He saw a pen attached to
a beaded chain on the counter. He slipped it under the flap and
ripped the envelope open. Inside was a sheet of paper with numbers
on it—and a check for $10,000.

Charlie stood with his mouth open, blinking
and shuddering as a great, grumbling evil lifted off his back,
pinching a nerve just to be mean on its way out. He stared at the
check. He could feel himself getting taller. He cried out in joy,
“I made it! I made it! I made it!” and bounced out the door,
dashing back an instant later to retrieve his keys from the
mailbox.

“Happy Festivus!” the slacker yelled after
Charlie. “And to all a whatever!”

Soon afterward, Charlie sauntered into
Southern Trust Bank and proudly deposited $9,500 in his checking
account. He kept the rest in cold, glorious cash. He stepped out of
the bank a new man, bursting with joy at the realization he wasn’t
going to starve or freeze to death, at least not for a while. He
could start over: cheap car, cheap apartment, new shipping
department clothes, even a steak and baked potato, with sweet tea
to wash it all down.

As he unlocked his bike, the wind stiffened.
It would be a tougher ride now, and he had many miles to go. He
hopped on and pedaled along the sidewalk, then jumped the curb into
the street, his duster streaming behind him. A bus passed by. The
warmth of its diesel exhaust comforted him.

Weary and fatigued from his murderously busy
day, the raw-lunged, adrenaline-spent bombing victim pedaled into
the lot of his favorite Nights Inn just before dusk. He hid the
bike from view and registered, sneaking a peek at the license tag
in his pack, since he couldn’t remember its number. “Can I have a
room on the first floor?” he asked.

G. Patel shook her head. “You’re lucky we
have anything,” she said in a lilting accent. She took his credit
card and handed it back a moment later. “I’m sorry. It is not going
through.”

He’d hit his limit. His credit had crashed on
Christmas Eve.

“I can pay cash,” Charlie said with a catch
in his voice, almost sobbing when he realized how close he’d come
to sleeping on the street. She gave him a doubtful look. “You do
take cash, don’t you?” he asked. The look on her dark, pretty face
remained. “I’ll pay two nights in advance.”