Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Save Gas, Fart
in a Jar
.
‘So, this place, what we’re doing, it’s freakin’
dangerous, I don’t want to lie,’ Mikey Hillsam began. He
had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they
weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged.
Standing side by side, they were about five hundred
pounds of dude.
‘We came here once, me and Mikey, just for – I don’t
know, to see it, I guess, see what it had become, and we
almost got our asses handed to us,’ said Joe. ‘So tonight
we take no chances.’ He reached into the cab for a long
canvas bag and unzipped it to reveal half a dozen baseball

---

bats. He began handing them out solemnly. When he got to
Rand, he hesitated. ‘Uh, you want one?’
‘Hell yes, I do,’ Rand said, and they all nodded and
smiled approval, the energy in the circle a friendly
backslap, a 
good for you old man
.
‘Come on,’ Mike said, and led us along the exterior.
‘There’s a door with a lock smashed off down here near the
Spencer’s.’
Just then we passed the dark windows of Shoe-Be-
Doo-Be, where my mom had worked for more than half my
life. I still remember the thrill of her going to apply for a job
at that most wondrous of places – the mall! – leaving one
Saturday morning for the job fair in her bright peach
pantsuit, a forty-year-old woman looking for work for the first
time, and her coming home with a flushed grin: We couldn’t
imagine how busy the mall was, so many different kinds of
stores! And who knew which one she might work in? She
applied to nine! Clothing stores and stereo stores and even
a designer popcorn store. When she announced a week
later that she was officially a shoe saleslady, her kids were
underwhelmed.
‘You’ll have to touch all sorts of stinky feet,’ Go
complained.
‘I’ll get to meet all sorts of interesting people,’ our mom
corrected.
I peered into the gloomy window. The place was
entirely vacant except for a shoe sizer lined pointlessly
against the wall.
‘My mom used to work here,’ I told Rand, forcing him to
linger with me.
‘What kind of place was it?’

---

‘It was a nice place, they were good to her.’
‘I mean what did they do here?’
‘Oh, shoes. They did shoes.’
‘That’s right! Shoes. I like that. Something people
actually need. And at the end of the day, you know what
you’ve done: You’ve sold five people shoes. Not like
writing, huh?’
‘Dunne, come on!’ Stucks was leaning against the
open door ahead; the others had gone inside.
I’d expected the mall smell as we entered: that
temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old
grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it
had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost
fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant
camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It
was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A
set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the
white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry
to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.
The whole mall was quiet; Mikey’s voice echoed, our
footsteps echoed, Stucks’ drunken giggle echoed. We
would not be a surprise attack, if attack was what we had in
mind.
When we reached the central promenade of the mall,
the whole area ballooned: four stories high, escalators and
elevators crisscrossing in the black. We all gathered near a
dried-up fountain and waited for someone to take the lead.
‘So, guys,’ Rand said doubtfully, ‘what’s the plan here?
You all know this place, and I don’t. We need to figure out
how to systematically—’
We heard a loud metal rattle right behind us, a security

---

gate going up.
‘Hey, there’s one!’ Stucks yelled. He trained his
flashlight on a man in a billowing rain slicker, shooting out
from the entry of Claire’s, running full speed away from us.
‘Stop him!’ Joe yelled, and began running after him,
thick tennis shoes slapping against the ceramic tile floors,
Mikey right behind him, flashlight trained on the stranger,
the two brothers calling gruffly –