45) Won’t you be my neighbor

Tom turned out to be a younger looking guy, kind of skinny with dark coloring, and his car was way too nice for this neighborhood.

He was also the first person to see the Heap, and his reaction was everything I had ever hoped for.

“Jesus Christ!”

I nodded as I walked toward him, raising my hand. “Nope. Harold Bright. We spoke on the phone?”

He turned his wide eyes from the mass of walking sticking that had paused in place after lurching around the house in its tireless efforts to hold back the hordes of ravenous rodents that undoubtedly were patiently waiting for the chance to ravage my landscape.

I gave him a moment to fumble with his heavily laden clipboard thing. Something like a clipboard lid mounted on top of a plastic case. “I’d invite you inside, but I got more critters in there. A pack of feral coyotes and a tween anthropomorphic tree spirit. They don’t bite but they they do shed.”

He looked a little overwhelmed, so I clarified. “The coyotes, not the tree spirit. At least not until fall.”

We ended up doing our business on top of the hood of Tom’s town car. He didn’t seem to mind so neither did I. He showed me a printout of the plots of land I was buying, which consisted of the burned down wreak next door, the old store on the other side, and two houses connected to my land by way of the alley behind my house.

Those, along with most of the alleyway itself. It looked like only two people had bought their halfs of the alley behind their houses after the city offered them up for sale. The people in charge had finally figured out that they didn’t need alleyways anymore after only thirty years of switching to picking up trash from the front curb instead of putting your cans in the back.

“So there are five other houses on the street, all of which would be connected to yours by the alleyway, that are for sale by their owners. All of them, in my opinion, are asking for way too much money for this area. But if you want me to make a low offer, I doubt any of them are in communication with each other that they would find out someone is buying up the street.”

I nodded at Tom. While I had a good chunk of money now, for me, real estate costs real money. “Lowball them. I’m either going to have more money to work with later on, or things are going to get so bad… Well, who owns the land on paper isn’t going to matter all that much.”

Tom gave me a wide eyed look, “Is… it going to get that bad?”

I winced. “I was letting my mouth get ahead of my brain there Tom. The only way it’s going to get really bad is if people start playing games. Trying to turn this situation into something they can get rich on. Which is exactly what the people with the money and the power would do, but…”

Looking over at the Heap, I shrugged. “A lot of us are getting real power now. Us being the sort of people who never played those types of games and are more concerned with what kind of world we’re leaving to our kids, and their kids.”

Sighing I looked at the two houses I had just bought. “Things are going to get worse before they get better, but if bad times are coming at us, something can see it coming…” I pointed over at the two houses. “I’m going to have room now to shelter a few people, and the power to protect those on my land.”

Heap waved at him, I figured because that would be something I would want it to do.

Turning to look at Tom, I gave him a no. “You’ve gone above and beyond for me. As far as I’m concerned you can be one of those people, and whoever you consider important enough to go get and bring with you if that time comes.”

I signed some papers for him to take and got some papers for me to keep, as well as some keys. Then I tried to pay my Realtor in cash, but it turned out that paying him by check gave me a better paper trail.

Waving at Tom as he drove off, I grinned to myself. “Take it down.”

Heap went to work. Tearing down the burned wooden walls of my new wreck of a house with a crash of falling siding. Yanking out metal pipes and wiring. Sending the half crumbled remains of the brick fireplace down in a cloud of shattering masonry and dust.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It took a shockingly small amount of time to bring the remains of the house down, but it left me with enough time to open up the old store to hold the wreckage, and to let out some barking coyotes who wanted to see what all the noise was about.

“Guess schools out.”

The old store had some old coolers left behind in it, which I was sure had to break, as well as a bunch of dented rusting shelving units. “Looks like the roof leaked.”

None of that matters, I just needed it for storage.

Heap got everything shoved and stacked off to the side, and then began carrying over a bit of wreaked house in clusters of assembled arms made up of sticks, with the larger bits held steady on top of it until it could be stacked and piled up in the old store.

“I guess I could use this later as some sort of magic plant farmer’s market, but right now I just need a place to stash the trash to show that the land is cleared.”

Afterwards it was still early enough in the year to get some more plants in the ground once the land was cleared.

Leaving Heap to his work, and a now less little but still green girl watching it in sheer fascination, I headed off with a pocket full of keys to check out my new properties.

Which were run down, and either had to be torn down, or fixed up enough to bring them up to code.

Tearing them down I could do on my own, but first I had to deal with the cops again.

One of the houses had a squatter.

Had.

The coyotes let me know something was wrong before I even went in the house, but they didn’t seem worried like I was in danger, just antsy.

I looked at Wylina as Blue tugged at the hem of my pants with her teeth. “What?”

Shrugging, I decided to take a walk around the outside of the house before going in. That’s when I found the broken window. It has been smashed in and even a good fifteen feet away from the house, I could smell something rotting.

“...damn.”

From what I could tell, a Lasher had gotten to the guy while he was sleeping on an old couch. It had torn out his throat first, which I was guessing was why no one had heard the guy dying.

The coyotes sniffed at the dead guy once we went inside, and then the rest of the house, but they didn’t seem worried like a Lasher was still in here with me.

I slapped my hand on my thigh as I headed out the door to call them over to me. “Alright, I got to call in the cops, and it’s best to anticipate abrupt violence without cause or reason when dealing with them. So you three are going to need to stay in hiding while they’re here.”

Really, I would rather lock them up in my house, but I had always tried to avoid doing that when I wasn’t in there with them. If I died… who knows what could happen to them?

Or you know, now I could do that since I had someone else to deal with that. “Acey, if Wylina is howling from inside the house, I’m going to give you a key to let her and the pups out.”

She gave me a blank smile, agreeable but having no clue what I was talking about.

Since the dead guy wasn’t going to get any worse, I took the time to show the girl how to unlock a door, and where I was hiding the key inside a fake rock next to the back porch.

Then I called the cops in, stopping halfway through the conversation with them on the phone to yell “Heap! Go to ground until we’re done with the cops.”

The two cops who showed up seemed more exhausted than suspicious of me as they checked on the body. They did a quick search of the house with their guns out, then questioned me and wrote down a report.

Then they just left, with the body of one Barry Bash, they had found his wallet, left there right where he had died.

I put Heap back to work, let the coyotes know they could move about freely, and had time to check out the other house before a truck from the coroner’s office showed up for Barry.

I made sure they had my contact information. I had been the one to find him after no one had come looking for him. The least I could do for him was to be sure at least one other person was at his funeral besides a priest and a gravedigger.

There would probably be three coyotes there as well, but I had no idea how he might have felt about that.