American Apocalypse Read Online Free

wheeze turns into a groan. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement: The boy pulls his pants back up. I put more muscle into shoving the trowel out of Fat Man’s back. Blood trickles, then pours out of his mouth.
    His eyes roll up . . . one chubby hand feebly paws at the trowel. I feel alive, so intense, like I’ve never felt anything before. The anger is gone now, replaced by a light. I feel whole in a way that getting high never could give me, watching his life fade away . . .
    Flash . . . He is down. The blood is black; it is everywhere, still warm and sticky on my hands. I look over at the kid: He is staring at the body. He looks up at me; I have no clue what he saw, but he kicks the Fat Man in the side of his head. Fat Man’s head goes side to side as if he is saying, “Oh, no.”
    For some reason this sets me off. I start laughing and can’t stop. The kid looks at me; he smiles and kicks Fat Man in the head again. We are both laughing. The kid kicks him over and over in the head, growling something under his breath. If he had been wearing anything other than cheap Chinese sneakers, the Fat Man’s head would be caved in by now.
    Strobe light.
    I am whispering to the kid, “Hey. Hey! Little man.”

    He stops kicking. No one is laughing. I have no idea how much time has gone by. I tell him, “It’s okay, stop.” I lean over and wipe what I can off on the fat man’s shorts; being such a fat ass means there’s plenty of cloth to work with. I roll him over to use the back of his shorts also.
    I have a lot of blood on my hands; I see the shape of a wallet and help myself to it. The kid is watching me. I tell him, “He was an asshole.” He replies quietly, “I know.”
    “You okay?” He nods his head gravely.
    Damn—I feel tired. The Transformer has fallen in the grass. “Optimus Prime?”
    He nods.
    “Cool. Can you find your way back?”
    “I don’t want to go back.”
    This throws me for a bit of a loop. What am I supposed do? It irritates me; I try to keep it out of my voice because I know what it’s like to be a kid the world is dumping on—just not like this.
    “Look, little man, I got to roll out of here.” I indicate Fat Man with my chin. “Somebody is going to come looking for him, and they aren’t going to be happy when they find him.” I look at him, “You know what I mean, right?”
    He nods his head solemnly, pauses, then says, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
    I look away and then look back at him. “I know and you know, but will they?”
    He ponders this, running who knows what through his head. He nods, and then startles me by throwing his skinny little arms around me and giving me a hug. He backs away, adjusts Optimus Prime in his arm, turns, and begins walking back to the car lot. He walks about ten
feet and begins to run. I figure I have less than five minutes to be gone.
    Actually, it turned out that I could have gone back to bed. The kid went back to his mom, and she wasted no time in getting the hell out of there—no surprise there. The money Fat Man had paid her was probably burning a hole in her pocket; plus, even a stone junkie could figure out that the questioning that would arise from this might not be to her advantage.
    I went back to where my sleeping bag was and bundled up everything as fast as I could. I strapped my stuff to the bike and started riding hard in the opposite direction of where the Car People were parked. I came out on the other side of the office building that the parking lot had been built for and really started putting my legs into it. Only one problem: I had no idea where to go. Also, it was not the brightest idea to be out there on the road zipping along like a man possessed in the dark—not with a fair amount of blood still on me. I cut off on to a jogger path and slowed down. I needed to find a stream to wash off and a place secure enough to think.
    I headed for the big drainage pipes. They went under the road near a half-completed office