Subcommandante Mumbles v. The Dinosaur Nazis, Episode 2 (Part 1)

by veilwar

I lifted up the lid of my box. The Martin Luther King, Jr. East Busway overpass blocked most of the sun and my hangover thanked the bridge for its kindness. My hangover was less pleased with the un-muffled choppers roaring past on N Dallas Ave.

I had a nice box, originally home for a Frigidaire Model DGUS2645LF Stainless Side-by-Side Refrigerator. A nice fridge by all accounts, and the equivalent of double-wide luxury housing in these parts. Thick cardboard, structurally sound, room to stretch out in. Through the thin gap that formed as I pushed up on the lid, I watched the windows of the building across the empty and trash-ridden area under the bridge. Puffs of breeze stirred the detritus into listless, half-hearted life only to abandon them a few inches away.

The brick building was run-down, like all the buildings for miles around. The windows were hazed with decades of grime, or boarded up with graying plywood. Behind one of those windows was a Gestapo agent. Here in the box with me was the smell of piss and vomit, with a subtle note of cheap tequila. I couldn’t figure which was more ridiculous; that I was hunting Nazi secret agents in Pittsburgh or that I’d spent the last week homeless under a bridge. Right now, I leaned toward homeless by a nose.

The back door of the rattletrap building was welded shut and blocked by a rusting green dumpster. The only functional door was on the lower right, facing me. The light in the room on the second floor came on and off at irregular intervals, but so far no one, Nazi or otherwise, had entered or left the building.

I winced as another phalanx of bikers goosed their throttles just as they passed. The loud, bubbling roar of unmuffled engines lanced pain through my frontal lobes. Fuckers are doing that on purpose, I know it.