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

by Nina Post

  “But we need gravy to breathe!” Twin amphibious fishes with bulbous eyes protested from the back row of chairs.

  Af didn’t think that was strictly true. He figured that they could breathe through their skin when in a moist environment, but didn’t require it. Otherwise, they’d be dead right now.

  “And to lay our eggs!”

  A shocked murmur rippled across the room. Roger scribbled down a quick note.

  “Regardless,” Roger said in his reasonable tone. “It’s not fair for the residents who don’t need gravy to breathe and who restrict their egg-laying to their own apartment. Until we can update the rules and regulations to prohibit residents from filling the hot tub with a non-standard material, or laying eggs anywhere in the common areas or outside a resident’s own unit, I will make a plea for you to be neighborly.

  “Moving on, ah, treadmill repairs, $220, because the Anakim giant tried to use it despite the sign on the door expressly discouraging use by Anakim giants; and club room furniture cleaning, $750, from the ‘Unbound’ party.”

  A bound angel in front of Af leaned toward his seatmate and whispered, with precise diction, “Worth every penny.”

  An Anakim giant huddled in the back raised his hand. “Can the board consider adding a giant-rated treadmill in the fitness center? Any giant-rated cardio machine would be great.”

  “We’ll add that to the agenda for next week,” Forcas said.

  “We’d have to replace three weight machines to fit in a giant-rated cardo machine,” Vassago said. “Plus, the vibration would affect the other machines.”

  The Anakim giant started to get up from his chair.

  Roger put out a hand. “Watch the ceiling! We’ll see what we can do. The next item on the agenda: Be it resolved that the Board approves a $120 fine assessed to an owner for excessive shrieking.”

  “Yeah, what the hell is that?” Crocell said. “I can hear it five floors up.”

  “I believe it’s the resident’s death worm,” Roger said.

  “Wait, are we even allowed to have those?” asked a beetle resident with overlarge red eyes who joined the meeting late.

  “Technically speaking, yes,” Roger said. “Though admittedly, the building wasn’t designed for death worms. There’s not enough space for them to play outside, there’s not a special death worm elevator, and we’ve had a number of noise complaints. Also, a fine was assessed last month when a resident took his death worm through the lobby. As you all know, death worms are only allowed to go out the side door.”

  “Residents shouldn’t be allowed to have death worms,” a marmot-porcupine monster said. The marmot had been annoying Af for some time, sitting on the floor sprawled out like a small bear, eating flowers with his mouth open. “They’re a menace!”

  Af put down his pen and spoke up. “I agree that short-term tenants, bound or not, should not be allowed to have them. Death worms are a violation of our right to quiet enjoyment.”

  “Imamiah, what are you for?” Raum asked.

  “I’m for whatever makes this meeting over,” Imamiah said.

  “We should vote on forming a death worm sub-committee under the aegis of the rule and regs committee,” Forcas said.

  The vote passed.

  “This brings up another matter,” Raum said. “Where are these monster things from? I see them coming in through the gas lines and living in the stairwells. I have to sprinkle salt in front of my stove.”

  “And I had to stop stair-climbing for exercise,” Gaap said.

  “Roger, are there any nearby buildings with a similar profile to ours?” Vassago asked. “Maybe they’ve done something with their monsters that worked.”

  “Are you joking?” Roger said, letting his diplomatic facade slip for a rare second. “This is the only building with monsters, let alone cast-down angels. And Raum, you’ll have to talk to the building engineers about your gas line problem. I’ll check with Dragomir and bring it up at the next meeting, but in the meantime, fill out a maintenance request.”

  “Do these monsters pay assessments or are they just squatting?” Crocell asked.

  “They’re residents,” Roger said, rubbing his eyes. Af thought he looked exhausted.

  Af didn’t have any interest in the remaining agenda items, so he quietly snuck out to the open patio for some fresh air. He pulled the edges of his leather jacket closer in the dry cold and watched people walk around their lit offices in the surrounding buildings.

  He knew Raum was determined to get out, even though this prison had to be the best one in their experience―better, for example, than Raquia, where fallen angels were imprisoned waiting final judgment in complete darkness, without the benefit of a backup generator or a grocery store on site that sold rotisserie chickens.

  A thousand years in one place rarely included maintenance, services and amenities, let alone company, though Af could often do without that.

  ’m here to facilitate the hamster and hermit crab memorial.” Kelly told the woman behind the front desk.

  The memorial notice on the Amenity Tower website gave her the info. For the occasion, Kelly wore a badly-cut brown suit in a fabric apparently sourced from tree bark, an auburn wig styled in a long braid, green contact lenses, and padding in her chest, which came across as maternal and comforting.

  The woman behind the desk seemed to serve as a gargoyle or chimera, with a stout body, mercilessly ponytailed hair, and cold FARC eyes.

  “Hello,” Kelly tried. This could be a while.

  “Oh, she’s on the cleaning crew,” said Clementine, walking out of from the mail room in back. “What’s that you’re carrying?”

  Kelly held up the object. “It’s a car for hamsters. I find it helps with the grieving process.”

  She was buzzed in.

  On the second floor, she found the club room, closed for the hermit crab/hamster memorial. Somber-looking angels and monsters sat quietly in lined-up chairs, listening attentively to an angel who looked as though he didn’t care abut things like eating or showering anymore.

  “Then I found out that Mr. Cromwell’s sweat gland got infected. A doctor picked him up for an operation, but he never woke up again, and when he came back to me, it was in a box. It’s not easy being physically bound to anything, and Mr. Cromwell was my best friend. I took him with me everywhere in Amenity Tower.”

  She shut the door.

  Since she didn’t have an electronic fob, she had to wait by the fitness center until a resident opened the door, then went in behind him. It was empty, but she took a quick look around and walked by the magazine racks on the way out. Residents could read Revelations, Lodge & Camp (“For demons or fallen angels interested in time-sharing any of the seven lodges of Hell”), and Other People’s Success, which she took with her.

  She returned to the memorial. A different angel was addressing the group. He held his note cards with shaky hands and read, “I’m so sorry, Edgar. I should have written a better checklist or flowchart in case you molted. My partner thought you were dead, but you were just molting.” He couldn’t hold in a hitching sob. “I’m just a dumb, cast-down angel incapable of caring for anything with a beating heart. Please forgive me.”

  The angel sat down. “This is too hard. I don’t like being quasi-human.”

  On the other side of the H-shaped floor, past the elevators, she found a long beige hallway. On the door was a sign, ‘Angry Dance in Progress, Do Not Disturb.’ She opened the door.

  The room was much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside, with big oil drums, ductwork, a cement floor, and dripping roof. An angel contorted himself and leaped and jumped in what appeared to be the middle of an angry dance.

  Just before she closed the door, she reconsidered. Did he really need to stay here, just doing an angry dance? Opening the door all the way, she held out a vial and the fervently dancing angel was sucked into it just as he jumped on one of the barrels. After all, he could be the fugitive Don was looking for. But then
, anyone could be.

  Just down the hall, in a small library, two angels played cribbage, but the game had turned violent. Blood had spattered in dots and pools over the books, the walls and the table.

  Kelly dug two more vials from her pocket. “Time to go home, boys,” she murmured, and within seconds, the vials filled with a carbonated green foam. “Calm down,” she told the foam in the vials. “You can finish your game later.”

  At this rate, she would need more vials, but she couldn’t wait for her target to go into one of the common areas, and couldn’t canvass every apartment in Don’s insane timeframe.

  A pudgy maintenance engineer walked by and paused as his radio crackled. Her voice distorted by static, Clementine said, “Bogdan, one of the residents is trying to give me a dead dove he found. Do we still accept those without a pre-filed maintenance request?”

  Bogdan rubbed his forehead and grimaced.

  She took the radio from him. “Clem, get some paper towels and a brown bag. Take the dove from the resident using the paper towels and put the dove in the bag. Then call wildlife rescue to pick it up.” It was too large a bird for Tubiel, and probably didn’t have an owner.

  Bogdan smiled and nodded (it wasn’t far from a curtsy) when she handed back the radio. Dragomir interrupted and started arguing with him in Romanian and English, with the odd interspersed Anglo-Saxon curse word.

  From what she could gather, a plumbing situation was festering on the fifty-eighth floor―one of the penthouse units. Dragomir gave a frustrated gesture and stalked off. And while Bogdan had his back turned, she slid up behind him and applied pressure to his carotid artery until he passed out.

  elly gripped Bogdan’s short body under the arms and dragged him to one of the doors in the hallway, hoping no one was looking at the footage from the hallway camera. She clipped his two-way radio and key set to her belt, then put on his shirt with the sewn-on Amenity Tower decal over hers. Bogdan was an unflattering name for a female, but ambiguous enough, she guessed.

  “Bogdan,” Clem said over the radio. “Can you go up to 1204 for a plumbing call?”

  Making her voice low, Kelly clicked the radio and said “Got it.”

  Keys jangling and radio constantly chirping―these guys didn’t suffer from a lack of work―she took the stairs to twelve. The resident who called in the maintenance request was a lanky angel with an impressive parachute collection hanging on the walls.

  He pointed to his toilet with a grimace of derision. “That device is leaking! I hate the requirements of this mortal substrate.”

  A simple problem to fix. She flushed the toilet, and water leaked over the basin by the flush valve. She put the top of the basin back on, turned a valve by the wall, and flushed it again. “You’re all set, sir,” she said, handing him a maintenance receipt.

  “What, uh… what was the, um…”

  “Your water pressure was set too high. The water actually sprayed up in a fountain when you flushed it, which caused the leaking. I lowered the water pressure just enough and the leaking stopped. It shouldn’t happen again.”

  Another satisfied customer.

  Her radio crackled.

  “Can you check out a noise complaint concerning unit… 4102?”

  Kelly confirmed that and took the stairs two at a time to the forty-first floor. She vowed to throw the radio down the trash chute or leave it on an elevator floor after doing this task.

  4102’s music reverberated all the way down the hall. Kelly knocked.

  When the door opened, she stuck her foot out. A puffy toad monster opened the door with a beer in his hand and she caught the resident in a very painful arm lock.

  “A society,” she said, “like this building, operates on rules. What most of those rules boil down to is: don’t be a selfish d-bag. Are you aware that other people live in this building, some just down the hall?”

  He didn’t respond. She made the lock even more painful.

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Do you want to see me at your door again?”

  “No!”

  “Then have a nice day.”

  elly set Bogdan’s toolbox down on the alcove window by the elevators and sagged against the wall, worried that she was actually terrible at hunting monsters for bounty and at finding fugitives and at everything else.

  The legendary coach Jay Vanner would understand: it’s discouraging to discover that what you do well isn’t what’s needed to get the job done.

  She could get into the building, sure, but didn’t know how to find something that could be anything. Vanner would remind her to adapt and be flexible, even when that meant you couldn’t use your strengths.

  Grabbing the toolbox by the handle, she leaned over and pressed the button for the elevator. She didn’t have the energy to take the stairs, even if it was only twelve floors going down.

  When the doors opened, she was surprised to see an elevator attendant, a giant water scorpion holding a ukulele and a bottle of margarita mix.

  “Which floor?” It reached out one of its six limbs to hold the door. After a moment, the elevator made an insistent beep.

  “Quickly, Miss―holding the door could cause a malfunction.”

  Kelly stepped into the cab just as the attendant poured tequila, lime juice, orange liqueur, and ice into a blender using his topmost two limbs.

  When the elevator stopped at the first floor, she looked down. One of the scorpion’s arms shined her shoes while he kept working the elevator buttons and the blender.

  A man who seemed familiar stepped in after a polite wait, when he determined that the passengers inside were not getting out.

  “Which floor, sir?” the scorpion asked.

  “Forty-two, please, Tom.”

  The man glanced at Kelly then did a double-take, then a third take at her shirt and toolbox. “Aren’t you the window washer?” He snuck a glance at her shirt. “Er, Bogdan? That sounds like my favorite brand of paper towels: Brobdingnagiany Towels.”

  “Right,” she said. “I saw you photographing those paper towels, in front of a Swiss Alps backdrop.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “What are you doing here, again?”

  “I’m looking for a job at the World Wicket Company,” she said.

  He tilted his head and gave her a hint of a smile. “You’re in the wrong place. This is Amenity Tower, Pothole City’s Finest Luxury Condominium Building.”

  She took a map from her pocket and unfolded it. “No wonder. This is a map of Copenhagen.”

  “My name is Af. I live here.”

  “Nice to meet you.” She held out her hand for him to shake. Several seconds passed.

  Finally, with a shake of his head, realizing, he took her hand.

  “Kelly.” She closed her eyes, wishing she hadn’t screwed up like that. But he had this amused, kind expression, like he was naturally empathetic, like they were in on a joke together, and it just slipped out. She wanted to be honest with him, and thought she could be honest with him.

  “Not Bogdan?” He smiled.

  “Mm, no.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  She tried to force-calm the fluttering warmth in her chest, but Tom and his table dominated the right side and much of the center of the elevator cab, so they pressed up against the left and back wall. One more resident could get in, but at the expense of close personal space.

  “Margarita?” Tom poured ingredients into the blender. At her nod he pressed the start button.

  “I don’t understand,” Af said, still shaking her hand. “Are you a window washer or a maintenance engineer?”

  “Neither. I’m looking for someone. But he’s proving hard to find. He could be anyone in this building.”

  She accepted a salted glass from Tom and reluctantly let go of Af’s hand.

  The elevator stopped on floor forty-two, but no one got out.

  “Which floor, sir?” Tom asked.

  Af gestured to indicate any floor.

  Tom pressed th
e second floor button and when the elevator started to move again, handed Af a margarita and strummed his ukulele. “I take requests. Song, not drink.”

  She tilted her head to look at Af. “You’re bound here, aren’t you?”

  Af deflected his gaze. “How did you―? You make it sound so―”

  “No, no.” She held up her palm. “I just meant―”

  “It’s true. I am one of them.” He cleared his throat. “Fear not.”

  “Requests?” Tom asked again.

  “What are you in charge of?” Kelly asked Af. “Whole grains? Men’s ties? Card games? The protection of jockeys?”

  “I’m in charge of this vessel.” Af swept his arms down the front of his broad shoulders and lean legs. “And barely keeping up with that.”

  “Obviously.” She turned to Tom, who was delighted at the prospect of providing another service, possibly a song.

  “You have a request?” he asked, black eyes blinking.

  “Do you know the theme to Ultraman, the 1962 version?”

  Tom clacked his claws a few times in thought. “No.”

  “How about the vocal theme to the Six Million Dollar Man? The Dusty Springfield version?”

  Tom looked physically pained. “No.”

  An awkward moment passed. “I’m out of songs with ‘man’ in the title. What do you know?” Kelly asked.

  Tom brightened. “I’m Happy to Be Your Manager,” by Roger Balbi.”

  he elevator stopped at forty-two, where agelatinous green sea slug, taller than Kelly, squeezed into the limited space on the side against the wall. It faced Af and somehow gave a cold shoulder to Tom at its left.

  “Afternoon, Elysia,” Tom said to the slug in a tight voice.

  “Tom,” the slug replied, with a nod.

  She did not want to think about the subtext in that little exchange.

  Af touched her, arm to arm, out of necessity. Kelly started to feel flattered he would rather be pressed up against her than a gelatinous slug. She reconsidered and wondered if she should be annoyed instead. Finally, she settled for flattered.