The Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse (Kelly Driscoll Book 1)

by Nina Post

  She pinned Roger back with an intense, unwavering stare.

  “I’m putting you on the spot,” Roger said, backing off with palms held out. “Let’s table that. Tell me, how do you go about catching a fugitive?”

  Whatever Roger’s game was, she could play it.

  “Good, old-fashioned leg work, Roger.” She leaned forward and put her hands together. “We use the information we collect from surveillance and intelligence gathering to pinpoint a fugitive’s location.”

  “And what happens then?” Roger asked.

  “We turn the fugitive over to the appropriate agency,” she said. In a transparent vial, like they’re a urine sample at a doctor’s office, she thought.

  “The appropriate agency,” he repeated.

  “That’s right.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs.

  “What does this agency―whichever agency it may be―do with the fugitive?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” But considering the supernatural beings were converted to a gaseous substance in a vial, maybe they were used as a new kind of fuel.

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s beyond my purview.” That’s what Af had said to her.

  “You’re not interested in what happens to them?” Roger asked. She wanted to punch him in the face.

  “That’s beside the point,” she said, in a warning tone.

  He glanced at the camera again. “Don’t you have any concern for what it’s like for the fugitive after that point?”

  She dropped the glibness and pictured Tubiel. And Af. “Yes.”

  “Maybe they’re a fugitive for a good reason,” Roger said. “If they’re returned to wherever they come from, and don’t receive the support they need, maybe they’ll leave again, and by the time they show up in your radar, they’re damaged.” He looked at her with a squint, like he was trying to determine if she understood him.

  “Damaged.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe they’re damaged in the first place,” she said.

  Af rewound the building manager’s show on his DVR. He missed the first ten minutes owing to the excitement of unboxing his new professional-grade soft-serve machine, which he bought to replace the puny consumer model that leaked all the time.

  Taking to the sofa with his peanut butter ice cream, he almost did a spit-take when he saw that Roger was interviewing Kelly. And why was Roger glancing so surreptitiously at the camera?

  Af abandoned his food on the tray table and ran out the door.

  “So perhaps, officer Mongol, you are all too willing to compromise what scraps of ethics you have left in order to achieve your goals,” Roger said.

  Kelly saw something in her peripheral vision and looked out the studio window. Af gestured frantically at her to leave. She gave the smallest of shrugs. He rolled his eyes and paced the reception area, hands on his head. Finally, he just opened the door to the studio.

  Roger pointed to the Filming sign on the other side of the door then flicked his hand at Af, mouthing, “Go away.”

  “Please forgive the intrusion,” Af said. “But I think there’s a fugitive in my kitchen making soft-serve ice cream.”

  She sprang out of the chair. “My fugitive loves soft-serve.”

  “Yes, he’s really making himself at home in there. So if you would come with me, I would be most grateful.”

  With a curt nod to Roger, she left the studio with Af, who, when they reached the safety of the elevator, exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for minutes.

  “That was close. I might’ve had to sing ‘Let’s Be Neighborly.’”

  elly climbed in through the fire escape window at the back of her building, and dropped her bag on the floor. “Hello?”

  She walked toward the conference room on the south end, looking into offices on the side. None of the SPs were there.

  “Murray? Tube?”

  She stopped at the window in the conference room and looked down at the street, noticing the bright soda fountain sign and a Cluck Snack mobile food truck on the street.

  She called Murray, but it went to voice mail.

  “This is Murray. If you’re a warrior of the trader pits and need help or protection, please leave your name and address and a brief description of your problem. If this is an operative, I cannot immediately requisition whatever piece of equipment you are invariably demanding to have right this minute, so just tell me what it is and I’ll get back to you.”

  Beep.

  “It’s Kelly. The SPs aren’t here. Call me.”

  She snapped the phone shut and looked down the main hall through the door. She considered the possibilities. (a), Murray didn’t want to leave them here alone so he took them on one of his jobs. (b), Every SP was out on their own job. (c), They got bored and left en masse to get food or wander the streets. (d), They were in the proverbial ditch. (e), They had the power of invisibility.

  She settled on the option that Murray didn’t think the SPs were safe in the apartment, scribbled a note and left it on her bedroom door, then wrote the same note and sent it through the pneumatic tube.

  That done, she slung her bag over her shoulder cross-wise and put together a large bowl of cereal, using an old shaving mug and her titanium spork. Holding the mug, she went down the fire escape and grabbed her bike.

  Tailed by taxicabs, cars, and buses, she kept up her speed as she rode hands-free down the busiest street in Pothole City, eating cereal from her mug using the spork. She drank the sweetened milk at the bottom after she sped through the yellow light adjacent to a Cluck Snack delivery truck.

  After turning left, she headed south a few blocks and came to a halt in front of Murray’s apartment―a former toy company building, judging by the faded stenciling. Wood slats covered the door and first-floor windows. Weeds stuck out of the cement around the front entrance in their intent to claim the entire structure.

  She knocked hard three times, waited, then three more times, and called him again. “Murray, get your hedge-fund trader-protecting ass over to your phone now and tell me where my damn SPs are, because I rode my bike all the way to your place.”

  It took several minutes to jimmy the door, but she got through. Though the off-putting exterior promised only the rejected flotsam of a long-departed toy business, the interior was a loft with red brick walls, concrete floors, and a modern kitchen.

  “Nice.” She turned in a circle. Kitchen on her right and TV area on her left, with flat-screen display, a worn sofa the color of an old man’s hat, and cabinets full of record albums.

  Something rubbed against her ankle. A long-haired black and white cat sinuously threaded itself through her legs.

  “Where’s your food, Yvonne?” Kelly asked, naming the cat after Yvonne De Carlo. She went back to the kitchen and opened cupboards until she found some cat food. She peeled back the lid on the can and emptied it into one of the cat’s bowls. The other bowl she filled with fresh water.

  She opened the freezer door and took the lid off a pint of lemon sorbet. Murray had carved the top of the sorbet so flat it looked like a tiny Zamboni had gone over it. When she put it back, she noticed an opaque plastic container with a label on the front.

  “‘Prairie Dog Heads.’ Gross.”

  The refrigerator’s double doors opened out like the suicide doors on an old car. Inside were towers of plastic containers with leftovers and two-pound plastic tubs of Cluck Snack P’nut Butt’r Chunks (“For Ferrets, Not Dogs”).

  “I thought he was kidding about the ferret.” She took the P’nut Butt’r Chunks and switched their location with the similarly-packaged yogurt.

  In the cupboard, she found dry milk, olive oil, sardines, and stacks of canned beans and boxed grains, all neatly lined and stacked. She took out two boxes of hot cereal and held one in each hand. “Bear Mush. Germade. Huh.”

  On the middle shelf, she found a row of Cluck Snack brand vitamin supplements, and selected a bottle from the middle. “Contains t
hirty billion active bacteria.”

  Kelly headed to the opposite side of the loft and picked up two books from the coffee table: Managing the Strong-Willed Operative and The Stick or the Carrot: 115 Strategies for Motivating the Stuck Operative. She put the books down in the most messy arrangement possible, turned her attention to the record albums at one end of the storage unit, and perused the selection.

  Shaking her head, she moved to the next cabinet and looked through the albums there. In stunned disbelief, she rapidly flicked through the albums in the remaining three cabinets. There were hundreds of copies of the same album.

  “Grace Zabriskie Sings the Ferret Hits.” On the cover was a sly, impish Grace Zabriskie, accompanied by three ferret friends. She opened the hinged top of the record player, slipped the record over the silver knob, and positioned the needle.

  The moment the sound came out of the speakers, a white ferret scrambled out from under the sofa and faced Kelly. The ferret, outfitted in a purple walking vest, hopped from side to side, back arched, tiny jaws wide open.

  It turned its head and varied its movement with short backwards hops as it made a hissing sound. When the song ended, the ferret pounced on her shoe.

  “Hey!” She shook it off. The ferret ran into a far corner of the room and burrowed into a tiny tent, and then rolled something back to her that looked like the droppings of a small woodland creature.

  “No thanks,” she said, but the ferret was insistent, pushing whatever it had up against her shoe over and over. It finally resorted to holding the object in its mouth and digging into her jeans with its claws.

  “All right, keep your vest on.” She reached down and put out her hand. The ferret placed a hard, engraved pellet the size of a large marble on her palm. She held the pellet under a lamp so she could make out the lettering. “Custom Ferret Food,” she read, rolling the pellet around in her palm.

  The ferret made a strange sound, probably in impatience, but he could wait. She chewed on her lip. After a moment, she reached into an inside jacket pocket and took out another pellet identical to the one the ferret had just given her.

  “What do you know.” She rolled a pellet in each palm. “Wait, didn’t I see a container of this stuff?” In the kitchen, she opened a cabinet and took out a metal canister. Something rattled inside. She held it over her hand and let another pellet fall into her palm, then read the front and back of the canister.

  “This Ferret Food is prepared especially for Murray by The Ferret Purveyors, and is known as Whole Small Prey Multigrain Blend. 1984. Ingredients include fresh meat protein, organs, bones, skin, feathers, fur, dried porcine blood meal, barley, oats, papaya, spices.”

  She held a pellet in each hand. In her right, the pellet she had carried for years, a hard, round ball the color of liver left behind by whoever sent her mother, five others, and their cabin up in a tower of fire.

  Hearing a sound at the front door, she stood and shoved the food pellets in her pocket. With careful steps, she crept to the door and put her nose up to the doorjamb. She remembered the scent: cedar and furfural. The person on the other side of the door was the man she had been following ever since the day she found the pellet.

  One solid knock. “Murray!” A man’s voice, clipped and irritated. “Murray, open up.” He started to pick the locks.

  She pulled her larger knife out of its sheath and held it with a loose grip. She backed away out of sight but kept him in sight.

  A few minutes later, the man jimmied open the locks, swaggered into the apartment and went right for the kitchen, searching through cabinets and the fridge, inadvertently mirroring her movements. With a frustrated sigh, he ran a hand over his bald head and then wandered over to the sofa.

  Moving closer, she watched him pick up a copy of Modern Handler Magazine, flipping through the pages until he tossed it back on the table.

  With a yawn, he leaned back, switched on the TV, and watched a few minutes of a recorded episode of What’s On Your Mind, with Roger Balbi―then deleted everything Murray had stored on his DVR.

  Cold, but something a friend would do, too. What if they were friends, he and Murray? Maybe Murray recruited her on the bald man’s orders and she had been working under the bald man’s control this whole time?

  Having wreaked havoc on the DVR, the bald man wandered over to Murray’s clothes rack and messed up the precisely-spaced hangers, spacing some far apart and some too close together. She poised to strike, but the bald man rushed out the door, pulling it shut behind him.

  She took the new pellet and rolled it between her fingertips.

  found a loophole.”

  Raum burst into the conference room, where the five bound angels on the End of Days Sub-Committee were eating food from the automat. They stopped mid-chew.

  “A loophole for what?” Crocell asked, a noodle sticking out of his mouth. “Also, you’re twelve minutes late.”

  “A loophole for what?” Raum bellowed, incredulous. “Only the most important thing to all of us.” He touched two fingers to his chin and looked up. “Gosh, what could it be possibly be?”

  “Oh, you found a loophole for that short-term occupancy thing?” Gaap asked, his bat wings folded around him like a shawl sweater. “It’s about time. There have been no fewer than four short-term monster occupants in the unit next door during the past month, including a Gorgon, can you believe it? I can’t keep living like this. And why is it so cold in here?”

  “I’m not talking about short-term guests,” Raum said. “I’m talking about the loophole I found for escaping this prison.”

  Gaap put his palms up and reared his head back. “Whoa there, Raum. Slow down.”

  Raum sat on the edge of the table and took a carton and a pair of chopsticks. “Did I short out your single synapse path, Gaap?”

  “Where did you find this loophole?” Crocell asked.

  Raum rolled his eyes. “The Journal of the Contemporary Bound Angel, Western Canada Edition.”

  “Wait, you’re talking about getting out of this building?” Forcas said.

  “Yes,” Raum said. “Is there a gas leak in here? Why are you all so obtuse tonight? Maybe I should draw you a picture?” He lunged over to the whiteboard and grabbed the black marker. The marker squeaking, he sketched a building with windows, then an arrow and the words ‘Amenity Tower Prison.’

  He swept a pointed look across the room to make sure everyone was paying attention before sketching stick figures with wings outside of the building.

  There was no reaction.

  Raum tossed the marker on the conference table. “The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead. I want you all to listen to me very closely. We no longer have to be bound to Amenity Tower.” He clearly enunciated each word.

  “Where would we go?” Gaap asked.

  “Yeah, is this a timeshare type deal?” Forcas asked.

  “Are we going to a different building?” Crocell asked. “I’d like one where the fitness center is higher up, like in the middle or even the top of the building. And I’d like more amenities. Maybe a death worm run and a fire pit? I’m thinking of getting a death worm.”

  “Ooh, I want a climbing wall!” Gaap said.

  Raum paced on the far side of the room, hands on his head. “More amenities. Unbelievable,” he muttered. He turned back to the group, voice firm. “We are going to our freedom, you dunces. There’s no pool. There’s no fitness center. There are no meetings. You can, however, utterly destroy all these things and more, with fire or plague or sword or wrath. You can do whatever you want. Bring about the end of days.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be―” He pressed his hands together in a steeple and put them up to his lips. “Deeply satisfying?”

  The residents murmured, then a lull of silence.

  Crocell raised his hand. “Will there be a shuttle bus?”

  “There is no shuttle bus.” Raum picked up the marker and stabbed the table with it. “Don’t you understand that you would be free? Isn’t that what
we all want? We just formed this sub-committee a few weeks ago. I was sure we were all on the same page.”

  After a moment, Forcas raised a finger. “Raum, I’m still not sure where we would be going, or when we’d be back. I can’t just up and leave without notice. I’ve got bills to pay, a backlog of shows to watch, plants that need watering―”

  Raum slapped his palm onto the table and everyone jumped. “Do you want to stay here for the next thousand years, until ‘they’ allow you back?”

  Shrugs. Glances. Eating.

  “And if they deem you worthy,” Raum said, “then you’re just thrown back in without any support: no mentor program, no communication, no process. The last time I was sent back, I was exhausted, I was depressed. I was angry―”

  And sad. Raum knew he would never be accepted again, not really. He was done with going back. It was too hard. “I’m sure at least some of you felt the same.”

  Forcas sighed. “Tell us about this loophole.”

  “The loophole is that we can leave the building passively, in some kind of container. We cannot actively leave the prison of our volition but―but―we can leave in a container that is brought out of the building by a third party.”

  “Like a giant bus?” Crocell said.

  “Or a double-decker trolley?” Forcas said.

  “No.” Raum rubbed his eyes. He was mentally exhausted, and felt his loss all over again. He wanted to give up, just go back to his apartment and try again the next day―or leave them behind. “A thousand times no.” His voice was a tired, beaten down imitation of what it was earlier. “We leave in a dumpster.”

  “No way,” Gaap said. “Adenovirus from bats!”

  Forcas barked a laugh. “You should talk. And there aren’t any bats in the dumpster.”

  Gaap rolled his eyes and continued, ticking off each item on his fingers. “Bartonella rochalimae in raccoons. General grossness.” He held up three fingers. “And I’m sure I could think of more reasons not to use a dumpster. Why can’t we use a car?”