Heat Wave: Burlington

Chapter 2

Summers in Vermont were not supposed to be an agony of dripping sweat and oppressive heat. It was, Brandon reflected, often the only benefit to long winters when the sun went on strike and there was nothing but gray clouds and the agony of that first breath where the air splintered in your lungs; where your lips cracked and bled unless you went through a tube of Chapstick every day. So why, he sighed, blowing his sweat-sticky bangs off his forehead, was it so freaking hot? The news announced that temperatures for the week were going to break the 1911 records of 105 degrees by the end of the week. 105? That wasn’t a temperature, it was a bad bowling score score.

Five years of working at what had started as a “summer job” between college semesters had all the earmarks of turning into a depressing career. He checked his aunt’s calendar; two units were going up for auction tomorrow. Aunt Ginny was kind; she’d kept the units untouched for over six months after their owners had stopped paying the monthly service fees, had attempted to contact said owners multiple times to just come get their stuff, no hard feelings. But in the end, the units were full and the bills unpaid and kindness didn’t cover the groceries. She’d started the auctions a few years before after one of those stupid reality television garnered interest in bidding on one man’s trash, hoping to find a treasure.

It was Brandon’s job to get the lot ready for the sales: clean up, check the locks, make sure that the bolt-cutter was easily available, and put out the folding chairs. If he had time, he could fix the office door, which had a tendency to swell and not shut properly, especially in the summer. Tomorrow, there would be tourists and locals gathered around the red-painted garage-style storage units, bidding on the unseen contents. He gazed up at the sun, squinting against the too-blue glare of sky. Maybe he should think ahead and stock a few coolers with soda and ice. He could price them into a wad of extra cash, selling cold drinks for three dollars a bottle. He made a note on the pad near Aunt Ginny’s desk and then headed into the fenced-in lot to clean.

Brandon had just finished abusing the leaf-blower—he was using it to sweep the parking lot and the rows between the storage units—when he heard the accident. He glanced toward the gates; it wouldn’t have been the first time that someone had scraped off their sideview mirror on the entryway, but there was nothing there. No, not nothing. He squinted and caught the very edge of a van turning the corner, and a twisted hunk of metal laying in the road. Sunlight glinted off the shattered plastic of a set of wheel reflectors. The remains of a bike lay, knotted, on the lip of the drainage ditch.

“Christ,” Brandon muttered. He crept forward, slow, not really wanting to see. Despite all his denial at his sister’s teasing, Brandon had a weak stomach for blood and gore. He’d never been able to sit through one of those abysmal gore-porn movies that she liked to watch, and seeing a real person with real blood on them…suffice to say that Brandon’s stomach was already churning. “Hello?”

Someone from the ditch groaned.

“Double Christ,” Brandon said. He considered fleeing back to the office, calling 911, and—but no, if someone was in that ditch, someone needed help now. He inhaled and then skittered down the lip and into the drainage area. Given the heat and lack of rainfall, the ditch was still not as dry as might be pleasant. The boy who’d been on the bike was laying in the mud, face turned just enough to keep him from suffocating in the muck. “Hey? You okay?”

The boy shifted, giving Brandon a better look at his profile, more man than boy based on the two-day stubble that dotted his chin.

“Yeah. Dumb question, I know,” Brandon said. He scooted closer, wincing as his shoes filled with slimy, warm water. “Can you get up?”

The man moved his limbs around, slowly, cautiously. One arm, then a leg. “Ug. Rather wouldn’t, but…” He groaned, managed to lift himself up a bit from the muck, enough that Brandon could slide in and get an arm under him.

“If anything hurts too much, just scream,” Brandon said, “and I’ll put you back down.”

“Don’t worry,” the man said, gasping. “I don’t think I can scream.”

“Well, your sense of humor isn’t broken,” Brandon responded. He gave the guy a nervous grin and for the first time, really looked at the man. Filthy, with a cut dribbling blood down the side of his face, hair an absolute rat’s nest with twigs and dead leaves clinging to it, and despite all that, Brandon was pierced to the core by a pair of silver-blue eyes, cold and clear as moon reflections off the lake.

Brandon managed to limp the man several feet down the ditch toward a less-steep section of the bank.

“Think my ankle might be sprained,” the man said, half his weight dragging at Brandon’s side. He eyed the side of the ditch dubiously. “Don’t think I’m gonna be able to climb up that.”

“No, but it’s drier, here,” Brandon said. “Don’t want you to drown in old leaf-swamp. If you can sit here, I’ll go call an ambulance.”

The man chewed his lip instinctively, then grimaced, getting a mouthful of mulch by mistake. “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that bad and…honestly, I can’t afford it.”

“Dude, you just got hit by a car.”

The man shook his head, splattering muddy water from the ends of his hair. “No, I got bumped by a car and fell off my bike. I’ll be okay. I just need to sit for a bit. I can…” he reached around his back and patted at the empty space a bit. “Crap. My cell’s in my backpack. Don’t suppose you know where it ended up?”

Brandon shrugged, shifted the guy back up a little, and then helped him sit on the lip of the ditch. “Wasn’t looking. Stay here, man, I’ll be right back.”

Brandon scrambled out of the ditch and headed for the office at a trot. He grabbed a flashlight, a handful of cleaning rags, a bottle of water, and the first aid kit that OSHA regulations required his aunt’s company to have—as far as Brandon knew, they’d never actually used it—and headed back to the ditch.

“Here. You might clean your face off a bit. I’ll be back in a minute and wrap your ankle for you.”

Brandon dropped into the ditch at the original fall spot on his way back, looking for the man’s backpack.

“Of course,” he muttered, discovering that the back had slid down into the culvert and was currently at the wettest, muckiest spot. Which was in a three foot high cement pipe that ran under the road and would eventually steer the waste and spillover water into the lake. And he’d have to crawl into the pipe in order to reach it. “Ug. I’m a nice person. I’m a nice person. I am a nice person.” Brandon chanted to himself as he dropped to his hands and knees. Reaching in for the bag, shoulder against the concrete, was not going to work. He slid into the pipe on his belly, inwardly grimacing at the ease with which he managed that task; God only knew what he was crawling over. Managing to snag the pack from that angle was easy enough. Unfortunately, shimmying back out of the pipe was…not. By the time he emerged with the pack, Brandon was covered with filth and rotten leaves and slime and smelly goo of every sort available. “Yeah, that’s attractive.” He wiped a handful of muck off his shirt.

By the time he slogged back to the owner of the backpack, the man had washed his face and grinned up at Brandon with a wry expression that set Brandon’s heart racing and turned loose a whole batch of butterflies in his stomach.