by Nina Post
May as well rename the holiday party now so they know what to expect: The Amenity Tower Zombie Infection Holiday Party.
“The good news is that the fungi species can specialize,” he said. “So maybe they only affect ants. But maybe not.”
I should unload this onto Charlotte, tell her that I’m caught up in exactly what she wanted from me—strategizing how to bring up the reserve and spearheading the creation of more amenities. But she didn’t trust Charlotte to handle a situation like this. First, there was Charlotte’s pathological level of denial, and second, her apparent aversion to the dirty work of managing a condo tower full of dimension-hopping monsters and other creatures.
Jay Vanner popped up in her mind, saying, Kelly, even if you’re behind by double digits, you’ve gotta make up ground one point at a time.
“What can you do?” she asked him.
“We have a proprietary spray. We find patient zero, quarantine them, and spray them down. We do the same to anyone they’ve infected or have had any contact with, and we fumigate the building.”
Surrey with the fringe on top, no. “You can’t. You can’t fumigate. Is there any other way?”
“There is one other way.” He looked at her somberly, as though about to suggest that they detonate the building.
“What is it?”
“You’d need to get every single organism in the building to eat something we get directly from the CDC.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s safe to consume by anyone,” he assured her. “The information’s right online. It comes in Cluck Snack form, for greater acceptance and palatability.”
“But Cluck Snack has so many permutations.”
“You won’t find this product in any other form. It’s exclusive to the CDC, and it’s called Cluck Snack Cake Flav’r Ophiocordyceps Cookee.” He wrote it down for her on his notepad and ripped off the sheet.
“It’s made from Cluck Snack Dry Mix?”
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
She did not mention that she was the Clucking Along Holdings heir. Saying it to herself freaked her out because she’d never thought of it that way before. But her father was the founder and the majority stakeholder of a huge holding company that had its hands in everything from commercial property to pharmacies to food.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
She blinked. “Yes. This is a lot to take in.”
“I know,” he said, his face sympathetic. “But we should have enough of the cookie for everyone in the building. Remember, that’s every organism, so you’d need one for every plant, too.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “We’ll have enough.”
She sighed. “How soon can you get it, and how much is it?” The story of her life, these days.
Charlotte refused to help with the handing out of the special CDC Cluck Snack cookies, claiming that this was Kelly’s problem of her own making.
“Oh? So I’m the fungus zombie master, Ophiocordyceps?” Kelly said.
“I’m going to make sure Claw & Crutty know about this,” Charlotte said.
“You want to tell on me? Go right ahead, Charlotte, because I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“I’d be worried if I were you because I recommended that they let you go, and sooner rather than later.”
“You know how in the movies,” Kelly said, “when someone tells the villain that they know about their plan and they’re going to turn them in, and the two of them are always alone?”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Nope. I do think it’s a bad idea. I mean, why not keep your intentions to yourself? Why don’t they do what they say they’re going to do instead of telling the other person? Don’t they know it’s dangerous? That it could easily backfire? It’s ill-conceived and foolish, because you don’t want someone to know that you’re responsible for stopping them.
“No, you want to be the person in the shadows, unsuspected, until it’s too late. At most, you give an ambiguous indication that it could have been you. You don’t admit to anything. You let them think on it, let them wonder, let it occur to them as a possibility. If you’re a real pro, you bide your time, wait years. You do something completely unrelated to anything, something innocuous but unsettling. Have their phone number and address memorized, and use it whenever you travel.
“That’s how a pro does it, Charlotte. An amateur, a fool, tells the person what they’re going to do.”
Charlotte was speechless, for once.
At the door, Kelly said, “And hey, don’t forget to refill the Brita.”
They set up the stand in the lobby, like Girl Scouts, with boxes of the cookies in stacks. She and Tom marked off the name of each resident, guest, and employee after they ate the cookie right in front of them. It took hours. Even Tom’s multiple arms couldn’t be of help because Kelly didn’t want him to get confused about anything. Each of them tended to one resident—or one organism—at a time.
This was hardly the only problem the day brought her: the camel spider hadn’t shown up for work on the flashing project. The remora accused her of ‘spider favoritism’, and quit halfway through.
“I hope that does it,” she said, when they had served the last resident and plant their CDC cookie. “This is news you really don’t want to get out. Everyone would break their leases or abandon their condo units and move to Ultra-Amenity Tower.”
“Ooh, I hear they have spin classes!” Tom said.
The first of two food deliveries from Cockatrice Catering arrived ten minutes early and Kelly opened the patio door to let them in. This particular delivery included beverages, a seemingly vast amount of cookies and brownies on huge platters with clear lids, and cakes and certain insect treats in carriers. The delivery workers wheeled everything into the kitchen and placed everything on the counters. Some of the cockatrices flew the food in.
“The next delivery is coming tomorrow,” Kelly told Tom as they moved out of the way. “Italian: antipasti platters, Caesar salad, pasta. It’s the most cost-effective option for a large group.”
Another night without Af. Kelly made dinner, watched a movie with the SPs, and read some Murakami.
The next morning, Kelly went into the club room kitchen to double-check the number of wine bottles delivered. Kelly wondered how many of the residents actually drank wine, though Elysia had it on her list. Maybe it was for the board.
She stopped in the middle of the kitchen, hands out flat in front of her as though to protect her mind from the reality of it.
Almost all of the food was gone. The plastic lids were scattered across the counters and on the floor. Only crumbs were left in the containers. Clicking on her walkie, she said quietly, “Tom? Can you come to the club room kitchen, please?”
It took him a while, as it usually did, but when Tom came in and gaped at the aftermath, she extended her arms. “It’s gone. All of it.”
“We don’t have cameras in here,” Tom said.
“But we do have key card access. I’ll check on every entry between eight p.m. yesterday and now.” She walked out in a hurry, Tom next to her. “But the kitchen was locked. How did they get a key to the door?” She wished it had been Charlotte. That would be sweet, sweet justice. But she knew it wasn’t her.
Back at her office, she brought up all key card access records since eight the previous night. “Ohhh,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “I should’ve known.” Tom looked at her expectantly.
“The bee hummingbird. Last night there was heavy snow, meaning she definitely couldn’t feed, and she needed to consume a lot of energy to keep her body temperature, and she probably had some reason involving her kids that she couldn’t go into torpor.”
“But how did she get in the kitchen?”
“Picked the lock with her beak.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
Tom scratched his head with one of his arms. “What do we do about the food? The
party’s tonight.”
She picked up the phone and hit a number on speed dial. “Hey Medusa, it’s Kelly. Is it too late to place a bulk delivery order for tonight? Yeah, something happened with our catering delivery, and we really need a hero.”
Medusa started singing “I Need a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler.
The Lunchbox Bar
hen Kelly reached the lobby, she noticed some of the tree ornaments were on the ground, a trail of sparkling green glistened on the limestone floor, and an unattended death worm turned in circles with the wreath on its head.
All she wanted was to leave, but she detoured to the desk. “Tom, get the cleaning crew to take care of that trail. Put that wreath back on the entrance doors and get those ornaments back on the tree. I don’t know what happened here, but let’s set it right.”
“I looked away for maybe five seconds.”
She looked at him.
“All right, a few minutes. But I’ll get it sorted right away.”
“Thank you.”
She went outside and a frigid wind assaulted her. She crossed the street and went down a flight of stairs to the park where Tubiel found the yellow warbler and took the sinuous path through the park to the empty retail space on the other side. A construction crew worked inside, but she opened the door and walked through.
“Miss. Miss! You can’t be in here without a hard hat.”
She grabbed a hat from a ladder and put it on, smushing the padded hat over her head and even fastening the strap.
“What are you doing in here?” another one of the men said.
But they completely stopped their activity when she seemed to disappear.
The passageway from the retail space was located in the unisex bathroom. It was convenient to have a shortcut. The only other way to get to the hell lodges, as far as she knew, was to take the biomorphic train, where you paid your fare by giving canisters of oats to the train’s persona.
They had built more lodges, so she went into one of the new ones, which had an exterior sign for The Lunchbox Bar.
Unlike other bars, this one was well-lit, with white walls. On the shelves that covered almost all of the walls were metal lunch boxes from the early sixties to the late eighties, from cowboys and spacemen, from Zorro to The Simpsons and everything in-between, like Pac-Man and The Incredible Hulk, separated here and there by brown paper bags with different names written on them.
“Good morning!”
She recognized him from the huge oil painting of the three SSI execs she’d seen in their treehouse, but she’d met him once. “Mr. Yellow?”
“That’s right!”
“I’m Kelly Driscoll.”
“Archie’s daughter!”
“Yes.”
“Doing some construction nearby?” he asked, which confused her. He indicated the hard hat, which she’d completely forgotten about, but she wanted to leave it on, wanted an extra buffer between her and the world.
He took on a somber mien and leaned on the counter. “Are you training with your father to learn how to mix the flavors?”
She came here to get away from her problems and found someone who was going to give her a lecture. “Flavor mixing isn’t my thing, it’s his. I have a different job.”
“Oh?”
“I’m the building manager at Amenity Tower. Well, sort of.”
Mr. Yellow perused a wall of lunch boxes, holding up a finger. He selected a box and paused, looked over his shoulder. “So you know, we have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds represented in our lunch boxes. France, Italy, Finland, Brazil, Japan…”
“I’ll take basic suburban American,” she said, though she grew up in a forest in the middle of nowhere and her usual meal was venison and vegetables that her mother canned herself.
He put the lunch box in front of her on the counter and unlatched it for her, and set down a matching steel-vac thermos, filled with hot tomato soup. Inside the lunchbox was a Juicy Juice box, a ham and cheese sandwich, a chocolate Hostess CupCake, and a snack bag of potato chips.
“Oh, sorry,” Mr. Yellow said, turning to the shelves but still looking at her. “Would you rather have a brown paper bag? I write your name on the bag, and it comes with a Capri Sun instead of a juice box.”
“Maybe next time.” She started on the sandwich.
He leaned on the counter, settling in talking mode, and she knew he’d be asking a question. “You’re only ‘sort of’ a building manager?”
“The previous manager was really good,” she said, still trying to eat the sandwich. “The Platonic ideal of the manager of a condo tower. He wrote his own songs about how great it was to be their manager, and how he wanted them to be a community.”
“Ugh,” Mr. Yellow grimaced, and she liked him for that.
“Yeah. He had his own motivational posters, beach towels, mugs, daily calendars, stickers. He’s written books, mostly non-fiction.” She took a long sip of the juice box. “He recorded his own albums to sing for the residents and gave them out as rewards for resolving conflicts peaceably. He had his own local-access variety show, which is still more popular in the building than any other network or basic cable or pay cable show. I took it over and even kept the name because the residents were all up in arms about stopping it—practically rioting. But all they can ever talk about are episodes he did. They ask me to sing his songs. They love him. It’s… I don’t know… demoralizing.”
“How many times a day do you tell yourself “It’s OK”?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Five? Is that a lot for any given day?”
“I think five sounds perfectly reasonable,” Mr. Yellow said. “I used to be at fifty, maybe more.”
“Fifty!” She realized she shouldn’t have sounded so surprised. “What are you at now?”
“Between eight and a dozen. I don’t think it’ll get much lower than that. I tend to be a worrier.”
She nodded.
“Do you like your work?”
She smiled around her juice box straw. “Yeah, I do. Most of the time.” Her smile faltered, and she picked at the sandwich.
“Corporate sent someone to check up on me and now she wants them to fire me, even though I don’t even have an assistant and I’m juggling all these projects. She’s always telling me how terrible I am as a manager. Everyone still wants Roger back, and I’m trying to keep the board members from formulating another escape plan, because if they pull it off…” she clapped her hands together and made a canon sound.
Mr. Yellow looked to be considering what she’d said. Kelly ripped the CupCake in half, and took off pieces by quarters, wondering why she was unloading on Mr. Yellow of all people. But why not Mr. Yellow? She kind of knew him, and he gave her a lunchbox. Plus, she had a hard hat.
“I think your real problem—if you don’t mind me saying—is that you’re too concerned with what people think of you,” Mr. Yellow said. “Clearly, you want to distinguish yourself from this previous manager and be accepted, but you’re not doing yourself any favors by going to such lengths to continue his legacy.”
“It’s for the residents.”
“I can tell that you’re deeply committed to this building.”
“I used to track down monsters and bring them in for a bounty. I was good at it. But I don’t know if I’m good at this. Sometimes I think I am, but other times, I think I’ll never be as well-liked or valued as Roger.” She glanced at Mr. Yellow. “Roger’s the previous manager. There was also a telepresence robot, but only briefly. And to be honest, sometimes I wonder if I should be doing something else.”
But managing Amenity Tower seemed, to her, more than a job. It was a burden, yes, but also an important responsibility.
She let out a long breath. “Why am I telling you all this stuff?”
He shrugged. “The only thing I can say is believe in yourself and your own value. I’m sure you have things to offer that this Roger fellow doesn’t.”
“Thanks.” She ate the rest of her sandwich
and drank some juice. “By the way, are Murray and Don still in the same hell lodge?”
Mr. Yellow grinned. “Yes, and you can hear them yelling at each other from down the street.”
She nodded, satisfied.
“How did you know?”
“I did that,” Kelly said, smiling a little. “Special software.”
Using AngelRoute Pro, Roger’s angel rerouting software, she had routed Don, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit and King of the Demonic Locusts, to the same hell lodge as Murray, the angel in charge of the protection of traders, as in futures traders, and the angel who killed her family. They were both bound to the same lodge. She took her revenge where she could.
Her phone rang. “Excuse me—I’m going to take this outside.”
It was Af. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Everything. I couldn’t have imagined anyone this annoying, even at Amenity Tower,” Af said, his voice low. “Even those locusts at the fitness center weren’t this annoying. And we still have the whole trip back ahead of us, which… I can’t do. I can’t do it. But I know a way out.”
“Af, no.”
“It’s the only way.”
“There has to be another way.”
“I won’t need to stay near him. I can be free of the loophole, and I can come back on my own.”
“Remember last time? How much work that was?”
“I know. And believe me, that’s the only thing that’s stopping me.”
“Good, because I really don’t—”
“Though I’m still going to do it.”
“Let me think of another solution, OK?”
“I’ve already been in jail; I don’t even want to imagine what he’ll do on the trip back. And look, I am well aware that I got myself into this situation because my expensive mantra didn’t help me with living at Amenity Tower, and that the steps I took to fix that are leading to me turning back into the angel of destruction. It’s funny, actually, the recursiveness of it all. But I get to come home!”
