by Shawn Keys
Cara’s imagination ran away with her. They all knew these places were fire hazards. Karin had said she had seen reports Patrick and his team had drafted about them. They had shown those reports to the company that provided the Santa’s village decorations each year and demanded higher quality products. The ‘Santa’s Shack’ company had written back that if malls paid them better, they could buy better stuff. The war of words went predictably enough, with neither side backing down.
Now, Patrick had his perfect excuse. Oh, he might get in trouble for not paying out, but he could moan and drip about how the company would have pocketed the money without actually improving any quality. Or point at his profit margins and show how close to the line he was walking to closing the mall forever. That would hurt the city.
All of that reflected in his eyes, semi-mad with the plot. Not seeing all the holes in the plan. Not seeing all the ways it could end in disaster, and result in him getting nothing.
Cara stamped her bound feet in frustration. And that didn’t change the fact that whether he got his money or not, we’re going to be dead!
Patrick admired what he had done. “That’ll do.” He shook his head at them. “I’m sorry, girls. I really am. I wish you had just gone home. But this whole building is going down. And I can’t have anyone as a witness.” He pulled out a box of some unknown chemical. It was in a baking soda box, but Cara didn’t think that was the only thing in there. He settled it on top of a different pile of powdered chemical he had poured out on a table near the Christmas tree. It was right above the electrical socket. He explained, “When this acid eats through the cardboard, the whole thing will catch fire. Eventually, it will get to the socket, and… well, things will spiral from there. This will all burn away, and it will look like a short circuit caused the whole thing. Bad wiring. Stacking too many cables together. Tale as old as time, as they say.”
He frowned one last time. “I really am sorry.” Then, shaking his head, he fled before he could change his mind.
A wisp of smoke curled off the cardboard box.
Cara whimpered. He hadn’t even told them how long they had! That amateur probably doesn’t even know!
The three girls traded wide-eyed looks, then glared at the crude timer Patrick had left behind.
Another wisp of smoke wafted upward.
Cara sobbed, unable to believe this was how it was going to end!
Chapter 3:
Pulled from the Fire
Drake huddled against the outside, brick wall to whatever shop was on the other side. It didn’t matter what it was. The shop-owners would never know he was using it. Especially not tonight. If Drake checked, he would probably find the store had already closed for Christmas Eve.
He didn’t care. His focus was totally on the Blue Marlin mall across the street. He was standing on the far side of the road, across a parking lot, and half-hidden behind a stack of wooden pallets. No-one was going to see him watching from this far off.
The last truck for the day was off-loading its payload. Everyone on the crew was irritable at still being there. They were in a hurry. They were stacking the packages fast, haphazardly, knowing it was going to cost them time after Christmas. But that was alright by them. Minutes now was worth the hours later.
Drake stamped his feet harder. He hated waiting. He held his hands over a sewer vent that was spewing fetid air. It stank, but it was warm. Come on, guys. Finish up!
They did. The truck driver and his partner waved, then pulled away from the loading bay. They drove up the ramp from the basement level storage facility, then drove away, no doubt heading home.
The men in the loading bay pulled shut the garage door, then began to scatter as well.
Drake held his breath. This was the pivotal moment.
What’s it going to be, guys? Lazy or not lazy today?
They shook hands. They joked around with each other. Then, the off-loading crew walked away to their cars or deeper into the mall to get changed. One of them pulled the side-door shut. Drake knew by experience that the side-door auto-locked once it slammed closed.
None of them stopped to lock the padlock on the loading bay itself.
Drake nearly laughed in relief. The loading crew averaged about 50% when it came to locking the thing after hours. The roving security guard always caught it when he did his rounds from the guard shack positioned on the far side of the mall parking area. But when the workers left it open, there was an hour wide window of time. A path into the heat and luxury of the mall’s underbelly.
Well, relative luxury. Corridors lined with steam pipes and grungy floors might not sound like much to most people, but for him? It was fricking Shangri-La.
He waited as long as he could. Which was stupid. He should wait a lot longer. He lived outside. He could wait hours if he wasn’t being impatient. But he was. Last night, falling asleep had been hard. He had drifted in and out of a light sleep. Fatigue clung to him, and he felt dirty. He always was dirty, but he really felt it today. He had shied away from people, feeling their every stare on him. Their judgement had cut deeper. His armor had been peeled back a little.
He could have considered going to the local shelter, but… no. He couldn’t. He had a hundred excuses why. The water wasn’t all that hot. The privacy wasn’t perfect and there were always people watching. Worse, the supervisor of the shelter would be damned cheerful and helpful and… well, none of the things he wanted to deal with tonight.
Unable to take it any longer, he hustled across the street, dodged a couple cars, then ventured across the empty parking area. He checked everywhere, not wanting the security guards to see him going. He had no idea where the cameras were, if any existed. But he had done this a few times now, and no-one ever showed up to chase him away.
He got to the loading bay and pushed open the large gate just a couple feet. Rolling underneath it, he pushed it shut. Taking an extra precaution, he opened the auto-locking side-door, wedged it open, then darted over to close the padlock. This way, the security guard on his rounds wouldn’t get it into his mind to be oddly efficient and check the interior.
Letting the security door close, he made his way deeper into the labyrinth under the mall. It had taken some getting used to, but he had figured it out.
The first thing he did was get lost for another couple minutes. He had taken a chance to get inside, but now that he was warm, no sense being stupid. He heard a few people moving around. He stowed himself in a quiet corner and listened to the random noises of people finishing their shifts. A couple lingering guys from the loading crew finally ended their chat and took off for home. A listless janitor without a life took his sweet time, but eventually he locked up his cleaning supplies and went home, too.
To be safe, he waited another 15 minutes after the last time he heard anyone.
He sighed. Sweet, sweet freedom.
He beelined right for the true, wonderful, beating heart of this place.
The laundry.
Inside, there were machines for actually doing laundry, but there was also a shower, for anyone who got filthy somehow while doing work. Drake stripped down to his birthday suit with all the haste taught to him by his drill sergeants, basking in the ambient heat of the laundry room which was a full four degrees warmer than the basement corridors.
He checked the machines, picking one that wasn’t in use. Every change he made was another chance people would figure out someone was in here overnight. That was the long-term danger: that this refuge would vanish. He only used this place on the nights when he was truly desperate. He hadn’t told anyone else his patterns for getting inside. He didn’t trust anyone else to be as careful as he was.
Once he had the machine churning away on his clothes, Drake stepped into the shower and turned it on full-blast. It was almost scalding hot and with enough power to strip paint off a house. It was glorious. He felt weeks of caked-on dirt stripping away. Holding his limbs this way and that, he let the spray crack open pores that hadn’t breath
ed in ohhh so long.
Then he added soap. He would have been happy enough with the water scrub, but tonight… he wanted to feel old school clean. Like, really clean. So, he took the risk and poured out some of the ready-use soap from the dispenser. He lathered down his whole body.
Then… the coup de grace. He had been in here often enough to know where everything was. Most items, he dared not touch. This time, he stole one thing… just one thing off a shelf. If they noticed this gone, well, it would be worth it.
He grabbed the straight razor off the shower shelf and began to scrape his skin clean. Oh, he might regret that later, since a little bit of ‘fur’ could help with the cold. But he scraped away all the pests, trapped dirt and caked on sweat. It felt like he was stripping away a year of tears and pain. It was rejuvenating. It didn’t just lighten his body. It lightened his soul. He carved away every bit of hair he could, watching it wash down the drain in a cathartic process that approached spiritual proportions.
He stepped out of the shower, leaving it running so the steam lingered. He wiped away the mirror and cleaned off his rugged, half-formed beard. Little by little, he saw the man he was emerge as he unveiled the jawline and bold features of his face. This was the man who had churned through USMC basic training like a demon with something to prove. This was the guy who had served a tour in Iraq and then volunteered to go back. This was the guy who had been encouraged to take his ASVAB and then kicked the test’s ass. Who had qualified as a Force Recon skirmisher and scout. Who had personally pulled dozens of civilians across the Ukrainian border and helped hold that country together with bailing wire and duct tape.
This was the guy who had once thought he had something to prove in the world.
His hands planted on the counter. As soon as the positive sensation of confidence and pride swelled, it started to waver and fail.
This was the guy who lost everything when Grace and Beth had been crushed to death by a drunk driver.
This was the guy who had been medically discharged for catching a hip shot that took away half his movement in his right hip joint.
This was the guy who had come home to find hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills his parents had hid from him, ‘not wanting to bother him’, as his father died slowly of cancer.
This was the guy who had buried his mother less than a year after, the stress and hardship having worn her down to nothing until a random bout of pneumonia claimed her.
Their house had been sold. Everything he owned was gone. The last dribble of cash he had was the medical payout the USMC had given him. He remembered with a dark laugh seeing the account balance afterward: $872 in the bank. He was in the black. He owned nothing else. Homeless. With $872 for the rest of his life.
That wasn’t even enough for first & last month’s rent anywhere. It had bought him a bus ticket to a warmish city on the East coast and a few other things. He still had a little under $500 in that account. It was his ‘rainy day’ fund. His ‘save my life’ fund. It was all he owned in the world.
He remembered seeing stories of veterans on the streets. He always wondered how that happened. It wasn’t just a vague sense of patriotism; he was angry about it, but he honestly didn’t know how it was possible.
But now he was living it. He hadn’t been in the service long enough to qualify for a pension. What do you do when everything you have suddenly evaporates in front of your eyes?
But that served him right. He couldn’t save Grace. Couldn’t save Beth. Nothing he had done overseas mattered all that much, and then he’d come home to prove just as worthless at saving his parents.
A way out? He didn’t deserve one. Why bother looking?
He punched the counter. Hard enough to shake it. Stop! Alright? Just… stop. Feel free to cry yourself to sleep tomorrow night. But not right now. Tonight is a good night, hear me? He barked at himself, chasing himself back toward good humor. He could wallow in self-pity tomorrow, once he was back in his little grotto in the burned-out apartment. Tonight, he was in heaven.
So, he would enjoy it. Merry fucking Christmas to me.
He walked back out into the center of the room, extending his arms and rolling his neck to get rid of the cricks. It felt amazing to just walk around naked! Warm air blew on him everywhere. He was so warm that he didn’t even want to be wearing clothes!
Of course, because that is the way the world works, it was at that moment the dryer binged, singling the end of the cycle. It sounded like a demand to stop being such a miscreant exhibitionist and to get his damned clothes back on. He smirked at himself for going a little crazy.
He strolled over lazily, not in any rush. Then, he got concerned. He caught a whiff of smoke on the air. Had he burned his clothes?
Shit! That could be a real problem! If they were ruined, stealing a few replacements would be necessary. He hated stealing unless he had to. Worse, it would be one more sign he was there.
He dove at the dryer, ripping it open, then breathed a sigh of relief. There was no indication of a dryer fire. His clothes, as beaten up and in as poor a condition as they were, were still whole and ready to be worn again.
The scent of their fresh clean filled his nose. He pulled them out, laying them on the nearby counter. He sighed at the sight of them; they were clean, but still utterly disreputable. For a starter, the T-shirt that lay up against his skin was still stained; it would never be fully clean again. He’d have to look for a replacement as soon as he could. The underwear was once black, but were now a soot-grey and ripped in dozens of places. They would fail utterly soon enough. His socks… well, less said about them, the better.
But they were his.
Slowly, he pulled them on…
His nose was no longer buried in the fresh laundry. The smoke returned. Not pleasant smoke, like from a campfire. Not even pungent smoke, like when he burned paper and other things in his hideaway fires. No, this was acrid smoke. Electrical. Plastic. Maybe worse.
What the hell is going on?
He tugged on his layers of clothing, one after the other. A nearly forgotten part of himself was revived at the smell of the fire. Part of any marine’s training was how to fight fires on the ships that carried them. Smelling smoke was the first stage, and it immediately meant fun was over. When your home was burning down around your ears, things got serious fast.
He pulled on all the layers, even if it was way too warm in the mall for them. Layers in a fire would help. He stuck his head out the door of the laundry. Yeah, that’s definitely fire. He sampled the air, and decided it was thicker to the right. Which meant it would be safer to go left. But he needed to see it. If it was some garbage can fire, maybe he could save the mall staff a world of pain and put it out. He owed them that much for their (perhaps unknowing) help they gave him.
Jogging down the hall, he came to a crossroads. The smoke was thick here, and he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Getting a little worried, he was about to bolt and leave the scene before the fire engines showed up. By chance, he glanced upward. There was a service grate in the ceiling. Through it, puffs of smoke were billowing through.
Crap, it’s right above me! He seized hold of a large dirty rag container and tipped it over into the middle of the corridor. He reached up and tapped the grate. It was warm, but not ready to burn him. That meant the fire wasn’t everywhere in the room yet.
Better safe than sorry, he grabbed a couple of the dirty rags and planted them against the metal grate. He heaved upward, but was stopped. Banging harder, he realized the grate was screwed in place. Gritting his teeth, he braced himself and really leaned into the effort. He felt the tiny metal screws groan, then creak, and finally give way under the pressure of his assault. The grate popped off in a sudden rush, sailing a good few feet as the strain was released.
A wave of additional heat roiled down over him, no longer blocked at all. Drake peered into the space. The overhead lights were burnt out, but the fire was burning strongly enough to provide re
sidual light to see. There was also a strange, multi-colored glow to one side. If it was any other time of the year, he would have been confused. In December? It had to be Christmas lights that hadn’t yet failed.
He gripped hold of the edge of the hole, then flexed muscles that he hadn’t worked out officially in far too long. Fortunately, he still had enough core-strength from his days in the service. Better than that, he had the technique to do a muscle-up, pushing himself past the rim and reversing his grip at just the right moment. Working out, like so many other things, was as much about technique as the raw strength.
He propped himself up, and gazed up into the roaring fire.
The huge, central Christmas tree was engulfed in flames. It must have ignited fairly recently, because it still had most of its shape. It would take a while longer before it burned into a twisted cinder. The ‘Santa Shack’ was a temporary construction made of pure wood, and that was also cooking under intense heat. Fortunately, there was no real ‘roof’ to the shack. It was open to the mall above. Smoke was escaping, and the fire wasn’t able to climb right across a ceiling which would have let it engulf the Shack far faster. It also meant the heat wasn’t contained so badly.
That didn’t mean he could survive in that space for too long. It was sweltering hot, and the fire was indeed spreading toward the other walls and creeping along the false wood floor into which many of the ‘Santa Shacks’ were bolted. The grate he had crawled through was positioned over a pre-cut hole as drainage and for cable access.
He was no fireman, and certainly no fire inspector. But as he watched, the fire ate across the ground and spread with a menace. Far faster than a typical flame would, in his opinion. He was about to abandon the whole place as lost, drop out of sight, and go find a fire alarm box to pull.