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

by Nina Post

  “How could they possibly do that?” Don sipped his drink, eyes wide and blinking in a show of innocence.

  The bald man took a book from the desk, opened it to the middle, and set his wet drink on the paper. Don watched in dismay as the ring spread and soaked through.

  “Those angels are supposed to be bound for a thousand years or more.” The bald man wiped his hands on his pants and sat. “And you were in charge of processing that paperwork. I wouldn’t even have to make an anonymous tip. Anyone in charge could easily trace the mess back to you.”

  Don’s expression indicated that he knew better. “What is it to you if they run roughshod over the planet?”

  “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I have certain interests here.”

  Don leaned back. So did the bald man. Don shifted uncomfortably.

  “I got blamed for your first colossal mistake,” the bald man said. “I took the fall for your incompetent minion, but I will not be collateral damage for another screw-up. Leave her alone, and stop trying to compete with him. He’s not competing with you.”

  Don shot forward. “Did he say something? What was his exact tone? Defeated, dejected, bitter? All three?”

  The bald man rolled his eyes. “You’re a middle manager. You’re not in the field anymore, and you’ve caused enough trouble. Just let it go.”

  After the bald man left, Don picked up his red phone.

  “Get in here now.”

  He practiced his chip swing by the east window until the door opened.

  “At your service, boss.”

  Don chuckled, ignoring his visitor’s subtle sarcasm. “That’s why you’re the star in my pocket that I save for a rainy day. For example, a day in the forest.”

  “The forest job again? Why do you have to bring that up every single time?” The visitor shuffled papers on the employer’s desk.

  “Because your mistake affects me.”

  The visitor straightened. “Is that how you see it? You tell me where to go, what to do, and when to do it. If things aren’t exactly how you like it when I get there―”

  “Exactly how I like it?” Don thumped a hand on his desk. “You mean, if I want two people dead, and only one of them happens to be in the house, and you don’t check to make sure all of your targets are there, then I’m the unreasonable one for blaming you?”

  “They were both supposed to be in the house.” The visitor flicked his gaze up to the ceiling.

  “And I don’t allow you the latitude to compensate for extenuating circumstances? For contingencies?” Don waited.

  The visitor stood and paced, stopping briefly by the south window to fix a crooked framed certificate.

  “Look, you tell me that you want something done, and by a certain time.” The visitor dusted the bottom of the frame. “You tell me they’re both going to be in the house in the window of time you gave me. It’s your responsibility to get the situation right so I can do my job. My directive was to torch the place at sunrise, not verify the number of occupants.”

  A moment passed before Don asked, “Have you ever tried taking initiative?”

  The visitor glared at him. “I took initiative once, at the Chamber of Peacekeeping and Water Sports General Session. I didn’t hear the end of it for months. Eighty-seven voice mails the first week ripping me a new one for going off course. For taking initiative. So no, I wasn’t motivated to do it again.”

  Don laced his fingers and pressed his thumbs to his mouth. “Perhaps I’ve been inconsistent. You’re an enterprising employee. Finish the job I gave you by the end of the week, and you will be… rewarded.”

  “There are complications,” the visitor said, reluctantly.

  Don pulled his chair closer to his desk. “She’s the last of the Driscolls, and I want her gone, one way or the other. With her out of the way―”

  “What about―”

  “Oh, my intelligence sources tell me he’s out of commission for good. And with her out of the way, I’ll finally be able to shut down production of the Cluck Snack products, so those creepy silent angel-things will stop getting in my way. No offense. And I need to be sure that Af is in Amenity Tower. I want that building destroyed, preferably with both of them in it.”

  elly noticed that a few of the SPs had quietly returned to her building without any explanation of where they disappeared to earlier―or where the rest of the SPs might be found.

  Standing at Mr. Black’s desk, she spread out the train map she nicked from Murray’s bag, placed an orienteering competition paperweight on the top left corner, and the pen base at another. The filaments of tracks were dense and complex. Maybe too complex to navigate.

  “Kermit!”

  In a few seconds, Kermit jogged into the office wearing his usual oversize high-tops and faded Iron Maiden shirt.

  “Take a look at this. Does it make any sense to you?” Kelly stepped back a foot so Kermit could stand behind the desk. He tilted his head one way, then another.

  She handed him a magnifying glass. Kermit held the glass up to the paper, looked closely, and stood straight.

  “This diagram reminds me of a fungal structure with fruiting bodies in a fairly mature stage,” she said.

  Kermit blinked.

  “I used to see them on logs in the forest.”

  She took a step closer to the desk and Kermit did a little skip to get out of her way. “I think it’s an elevated train map.” She tapped the paper with a finger. “This hyphal net, the mycelium, appears to be the route map. And the train itself could be the sporiferous hyphal tubes. The cytoplasm flows toward the tips of the hyphae, so maybe that provides the motion. Oh hell, I’m not a mycologist.” She straightened and sighed. “It could be something entirely different.”

  Kermit bent over again with the glass, from the side of the desk.

  She placed a fingertip on the end of one of the veins and traced it back to a large shape. “These blobs”―she moved her finger over the paper indicating blobs of different sizes and colors―“are probably the fruiting bodies of the mycelium.”

  Kermit nodded, his feathered hair bouncing.

  She leaned in a little farther over the map, tracing a line on the map to one of the blobs. “And I think… perhaps… the fruiting bodies are the train stations. You can see that the sporophores―the stations―vary in size. Why, I have no idea. If the trains only go to hell lodges, then maybe the size of each station on the map indicates the importance of the corresponding lodge.” She looked up at Kermit, who gave her a goofy smile.

  “I need to find the station by Don’s office. Murray took me there before, but I need to get there without him. If I can see the train, and get on the correct one, I can disembark at the right station, find Don’s office, then search it for the evidence I know he has.”

  She tapped a knuckle on the table to each of the last four words. “And then, I hope, get back here.”

  Kermit gave her a dubious look.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get stuck.”

  He took his sketch pad from his jeans, and sketched something for her.

  “You’re going to get a Cluck Snack Steamie Pocket,” she guessed from the drawing. “Go for it.”

  Kermit loped out of Mr. Black’s office.

  She rubbed her forehead in hard circles then went back to the mesh network on the map. Some of the threads on the map were thicker than others, and the paths weren’t named or marked. “Those lines must be used more frequently,” she said to herself. “It’s bananas, but think I can find it.”

  Kermit came back with a Steamie Pocket and another SP.

  She checked his ID bracelet. “Firiel. In charge of the protection of fungi. Favorite food: Cluck Snack Salsa.”

  “Needless to say, Firiel, you’re coming with me.” She folded the map. “If we get stuck forever in a hell lodge, then at least we’ll be together.”

  Firiel drew on his sketch pad and held up the page so she could see a frowny face with one tear.
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br />   Kelly looked at Kermit. “I don’t know if he’s referring to the ‘stuck forever in a hell lodge’ part or the ‘living with just me’ part. Either way, that’s fair.”

  Firiel clutched the canisters of old-fashioned oats he took from the pantry while peering down the tracks at the station. Kelly’s pea coat flapped against her thigh.

  Snot dripped from Firiel’s nose down to his mouth. She plucked a tissue from her pocket and swiped it against his upper lip. “What’s with the oats?”

  Firiel sniffled and blinked his tearing eyes. She dabbed his eyes with the tissue, since he had a death grip on the oat canisters.

  “When is this thing going to show up?”

  Firiel shrugged, then a glistening tube shot down the tracks toward them, the tip morphing into a train shape. It halted with a toy-like squeak, not the grinding metal screech of the regular train. A fissure opened in the side and turned into a double-door. They stepped on and the opening closed behind them. Fluid flowed through pipes attached to the ceiling.

  A taciturn server in black pants and short jacket appeared beside their table.

  “Two milks,” she said. The server nodded and glided away.

  Kelly took off her coat and folded it up on her lap. The server returned with their milks and seemed to expect something. She shrugged and reached in her front pocket for some cash, but Firiel handed the valet the canisters of oats.

  “Thank you, sir. It’s much appreciated.” The server bowed, and left again.

  “What does he do with the oats?”

  Firiel sipped his milk through a bendy straw and drew something on his sketch pad. She considered the sketch: a network of fuzzy blobs, a cord that led to a flat-screen display, and then a stick figure.

  “I think I get it. He’s another persona of the fungus.”

  Firiel smiled and drew on the sketch pad again. One of the fuzzy blobs devoured a canister of oats.

  “And he eats oats.”

  Firiel gave her a smile. He took the sketch pad and added some dots. She held it and didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Spore ejections?”

  He waved his arms around, flicking out his fingers from his thumb repeatedly. He drew more dots and lines.

  “Lots of ejections,” she said.

  He turned his hand palm up and moved it up. More.

  “Hundreds―no, thousands of ejections,” she said. “Creating an air jet.”

  Firiel grinned.

  “So that’s how the train moves.”

  He hugged his sketch pad and shrugged.

  Half an hour later, the tube made an opening and Firiel stepped out first. They walked through a tangled mesh of filaments to another door that led to a station.

  When she saw the chicken egg fortune machine, she recognized the same stop as before, but a new machine flanked the egg fortune dispenser: a softly glowing Buddha encased in glass. The slot was marked ‘10 Baht.’ She pulled a quarter from her pocket and held it next to the slot to see if it would at least fit, but the shape and color had changed into a ten Baht coin.

  “I’ve got a magical pocket.” She placed the coin in the slot and smiled when the Buddha’s eyes flashed and cycled through colors. The automata made a cacophony of kitchen-appliance sounds, then ejected a fortune. In Thai.

  She tried the chicken automata. A golden egg dropped and she reached past the tiny hinged flap to get the egg. Inside was a tiny plastic monkey.

  “As useful as my high school guidance counselor. Maybe I can get Don to replace these with drink machines.”

  Firiel raised an eyebrow.

  “Cluck Snack drinks, of course.”

  elly and Firiel walked on silver sand to the lodge she remembered. Lizards skittered underfoot. A pot of red geraniums hung from the porch roof over two Adirondack chairs.

  She held Firiel back with her arm. “I have to make sure he’s not in there. One of your colleagues told me he was at his downtown office tonight.”

  She ran in a crouch to the side of the lodge, stopped under a window, and peeked over the sill. After a moment, she walked around back in a crouch, came around the other side of the lodge, and hurried up the porch. She waved at Firiel to come over.

  “Wait here, out of sight. If anyone shows up, hide. Okay?” He ran across the porch and knelt behind a post.

  The lodge served as Don’s main office, she suspected. She didn’t know where he lived, but it wasn’t in this lodge, unless he slept at his desk, and Don didn’t strike her as a workaholic.

  From the outside, the lodge looked like a hunting cabin or a ramshackle summer house. Inside, it was one long room. A massive desk, weighed down with precariously-placed stacks of paper and files, dominated the left side.

  To one end of the desk was Don’s end of the pneumatic tube, positioned where he could reach it from the chair. “That’s where the magic happens,” she muttered.

  Bookshelves stuffed with black binders lined the wall behind the desk. Aside from the binders, the shelves were a haphazard mess.

  She started her search with the papers on the desk. When she finished with one stack, she checked on Firiel, who huddled in the corner of the porch, watching through the slats. A blackbird hopped up and down on his left palm.

  As she rifled through the next stack, she got the impression that Don did careless work, made frequent mistakes, and spent most of his time getting other people to cover up those mistakes.

  Moving on to the shelves, she bent to the side to read the labels on the binders. They were arranged by year and went back decades, centuries. She pulled out the binder from 1985 and flipped through the papers, seeing nothing of interest until reaching a document from September of that year.

  By the time she finished reading it, she was so angry she wanted to split off a new personality and have her deal with it.

  She put the 1985 binder back in its place on the shelf. A bowl of matchbooks held up the binders on the shelf to the left. She picked one, Don’s Bottomless Pit: Hell Lodge #6, and put it in her pocket.

  The September document was all she needed, but she took several more papers just to be sure. It was overkill, like strangling someone, then feeding them digitalis. But she would definitely get a grim satisfaction from presenting her findings when she had the chance.

  f sat in the periodontist’s chair, fidgeting with his shirt cuff. The young, doe-eyed assistant clipped a pink paper napkin around his neck. The off-putting hygienist appeared on his left and applied the topical anesthetic. A few minutes later, the hygienist held up a syringe appropriate for tranquilizing a Kodiak bear, and without speaking, inserted the syringe in Af’s jaw.

  After that, they left him alone. He tried to make himself feel better by thinking of the small pleasures he enjoyed at Amenity Tower: taking his product photographs and writing the accompanying reviews, reading the paper while drinking coffee, making sandwiches in his panini maker. Getting his mail. Riding the exercise bicycle in the fitness center while watching interdimensional monsters fly into windows and slide down the glass.

  His relaxation technique didn’t work. His heart beat faster than usual and his stomach fluttered. The right side of his jaw was numb all the way up to his nose. He felt desperate―to leave, to ditch his stupid vessel, to flex his real muscles.

  The periodontist stepped up to the chair. “Numb?” He asked the assistant to pull the x-rays. “All right, Mr… Smith.” He tapped his finger on the screen in front of the chair. “Even after this treatment, it’s very possible that you will need surgery.”

  Af went cold. The cells in his vessel’s body felt like they were being crushed by one of those locusts at the fitness center.

  “Based on your good oral health and care, I’m strongly inclined to believe this is a genetic condition,” the periodontist added.

  More and more, Af considered his body a disconnected vessel. Why had he ever thought this could work?

  The hygienist returned and laid out the tools.

  “May I see those
?” Af asked.

  “See what?”

  “Those tools.”

  “The curettes?”

  “If you say so. But it doesn’t mean they’re not tools.”

  The hygienist held out her gloved hand with the curettes displayed on the rubber.

  “What’s that one?” Af pointed to one of the curettes with a thick hooked end.

  “That’s the sickle. It’s used for cleaning between the teeth.”

  “Between Godzilla’s teeth?”

  The hygienist sighed. “The tooth has four surfaces, and each of these curettes cleans one of those surfaces. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get started.”

  “What will you be doing, exactly? I’ve seen similar set-ups from the Spanish Inquisition.”

  The hygienist rolled her eyes. “You don’t know why you’re here?”

  “Above all, to bask in the pleasure of your company,” Af said. “Secondarily, to see what barbaric, superannuated treatment you’re getting at least some ignorant fools to pay you for.”

  “The anesthetic has obviously set in,” the hygienist said in a dry tone. She began scraping Af’s teeth. Af heard a voice from the reception desk and relief flooded through him.

  “His name is Af. How is that possibly a difficult name for you? If I knew his last name, I would have mentioned it. Look, I know he’s here. He’s tall―not Michael Crichton tall, but he’s up there―eyes the color of my favorite mushroom, typically very calm, but gets cranky when he can’t do specific things at specific times? Does that seem familiar at all?”

  A muffled response, then Kelly’s even louder retort. “Look, I know he’s here and I need to see him right now.”

  Af smiled around the sickle. Kelly pushed her way through a gauntlet of receptionist and assistant to get to the side of Af’s chair.