Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Behind the Wardrobe

The bell over the door rang, and the man with the broom woke up.

He didn't jump.

He opened his eyes slowly, found me, and said, "We're closing."

"I read the sign."

"Then you know everything is half off, except the things that are broken, which are full price."

He yawned in the middle of the sentence and didn't cover it.

He was thirty or so, tall and thin, in a gray cardigan with a hole in one elbow.

His eyes had dark rings under them, and his hair had been slept on.

I knew his face, and that was the problem.

I had last seen it ninety days into the Red, in the sub-basement of the Terminal.

He had been on the other side of a row of steel bars.

I had carried him soup there, three nights a week, when nobody was looking.

Nobody ever told me his name.

Now he was standing in a dusty shop on Lorain Avenue with a broom, and he had no idea who I was.

"I'm Gillian," I said. "I'd like to buy your building."

"It isn't mine. It's my grandmother's."

He leaned the broom on a rolltop desk.

"And the bank is taking it in ten days, so you'd be buying a lawsuit."

"How much does the bank want?"

"A hundred sixty-eight thousand." He yawned again. "And no, I don't have it. I keep checking my pockets."

"I'll pay it. All of it."

He looked at me for the first time without a joke.

"Why?"

"Because I want the cellar."

"There's no cellar. There's a coal cellar. It floods."

"It doesn't flood," I said. "It's a cistern. It's brick, it holds about six thousand gallons, and it's been dry-sided since the eighteen-nineties."

"I've lived above this shop my whole life, and I have never known that."

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