The Last Death Worm of the Apocalypse (Kelly Driscoll Book 3)

by Nina Post

  She went back to the main walkway, suspecting the lap pool was the reason the portal opened. Because when she last saw the lap pool, it was empty, and she knew for a fact that the cicada brothers hadn’t filled it.

  The problem was, you couldn’t siphon water from it because it was filled with the gefilte fish suspension. What was she supposed to do, destroy the pool? Knock a hole into it with a sledgehammer, and let the walkway get soaked and smell like the suspension forever? That would never come out.

  She used her walkie. “Dragomir?”

  “What!” He sounded even more impatient than usual. Did he have a home theater in the storage room the board approved?

  “Come down to the first parking level, please. The building and the city may depend on it.”

  “Building and city can burn to ground.”

  “I get it. Come anyway.”

  Tamales in Molé

  ragomir rubbed his face as he stared at the lap pool. He walked around the end of it to look at the other side and was about to stick his finger in the goo when Kelly waved a hand wildly. “No! Trust me.”

  “Who filled this,” Dragomir asked. “Those cicadas?”

  She sighed and switched on her walkie again. “Tom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you bring Crocell down to the first parking level? Tell him you’re not supposed to say, but there’s a surprise party for him down here.”

  “What kind, a birthday party?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You got it.”

  If Kelly had wanted to talk to Raum, he would have egressed from the elevator already switched on, the guest of honor at a party; because why wouldn’t there be a party for him? Crocell, however, fidgeted, and darted his eyes around, which pleased her. That’s how she wanted him, edgy and anxious.

  Tom brought Crocell over to Kelly. “Thanks, Tom.”

  Both Kelly and Dragomir stared at Crocell. Seconds passed. Finally, Crocell ran a hand over his forehead. “What seems to be the problem here?” Falsely cheerful.

  She knew Crocell, of all of Raum’s group, would break the easiest. Though all of them were more attached to the material comforts of their new human forms and of the building than they would admit, Crocell was probably the most attached. He didn’t particularly want to be “free” or get back to anything or anywhere. He had his comfort zone—in his condo, in the fitness center—and didn’t like to be away from it.

  “Who filled the lap pool?” Kelly said.

  Crocell shrugged, but looked conflicted.

  “Was it Raum? Did Raum tell you to fill it?”

  Crocell scratched the back of his neck and grimaced.

  “Did Raum talk all of you into filling the lap pool with the suspension? Did he tell you why?”

  Crocell rubbed his mouth, holding back.

  “Crocell.” She waited a second. “I already know.”

  Visibly pained, Crocell ran his nails down his cheek. “Raum said he read somewhere in the apocrypha that if we connected Amenity Tower to Ultra-Amenity Tower with liquid, that we could unbind ourselves and open a portal, or whatever. And he made us get the barrels and fill the pool. I think most of us threw up, over there,” he pointed, “over there, over there, and over there.”

  “Not my problem,” Dragomir said under his breath.

  “OK, Crocell. Go back to—wherever. Thanks.”

  She and Dragomir were alone. “How can we drain this thing?”

  “We have industrial pressure washer. We set up hose assembly, use washer to suck out suspension. Feed into series of makeshift hoses that empty into sump pit in sub-basement.”

  “Let’s do it. You get it started; I’m going back to the terrace. Give me fifteen minutes, and radio me when you’re ready.”

  The Jackal rode Elnett Satin out of the west-facing parking garage exit, followed by the wasp-headed moth wearing antennae warmers, riding Pestilence, the Jackal’s other white horse.

  “I’ll try to lead her down the street,” the Jackal told Kelly, “but I want one year’s worth of stable spaces comped.”

  “Three months,” she said. “Why is everyone extorting deals with me tonight?”

  “I am not extorting; I’m asking! But you have a deal.” The Jackal clicked at Elnett Satin with a heel nudge. The horses pranced down the street and the Jackal flipped his hair as he looked over his shoulder at Charlotte. “Over here, Charlotte!”

  The Charlotte-monster roared and the Jackal recoiled, grimacing. “You really should floss once in a while, honey.” He kicked Elnett Satin into a canter and rode a circle around Charlotte. “I can’t say I’m too surprised,” the Jackal yelled to Charlotte. “There was always something off-putting about you.”

  In a movement that seemed to come out of nowhere, Charlotte reached down and swiped the Jackal right off the horse.

  Kelly shouted to Tom to help her and went for one of the big shards of glass from one of the destroyed windows and sliced it across what would have been Charlotte’s Achilles tendon. A grayish-green liquid spurted out and Charlotte shrieked. She dropped the Jackal and Tom and three other residents banded together and held hands/claws/paws to form a net.

  Tom pushed the chair across the terrace and as Charlotte opened her pincers, the Jackal dropped, struggled to get up, and shook off Charlotte’s touch. “Ugh. That is it! I am going home, and I am going to take a long bath while I watch Trampy Jumpers, and I’m going to look into the prices at Ultra-Amenity Tower, and I’m—”

  “You can’t go that way,” she said, keeping a wary eye on Charlotte.

  Shaking his head, blond hair bouncing back and forth, the Jackal turned and started toward the parking garage again. “And I’m going to wear my new silk robe, and I’m going to have a flavored iced tea and try to forget this ever happened.”

  Her walkie chirped. “It’s Tom. We got the bags up to the balcony. Now what?”

  She gave a signal to the Jackal to wait.

  She looked up and saw Tom along with one of the engineering staff, and two of the janitorial staff, peering over the balcony above Charlotte’s head, bags piled behind them. “Keep pouring and don’t stop until you’re out of bags!”

  They opened the bags and poured one after the other onto Charlotte.

  She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but it looked like Charlotte hated it. As the salt sizzled and smoked, Charlotte snapped her jaws and writhed in pain.

  “They’ll never love you like they love Roger,” Charlotte told her in a crackling voice. “You’re wasting your time…”

  “Keep going!” Kelly said on the walkie.

  “We’re almost out,” Tom shouted.

  She dug her nails into her palms. Why didn’t they get all of the salt the first time? “Get more.”

  Tom tasked one of the staff to go get more bags.

  “You’re no leaderrr! No managerrr!” That Charlotte could still form words was disturbing.

  Kelly got aggravated to a boiling point, there was no sign of the salt, and Charlotte appeared to be regenerating. “The resssidents don’t ressspect you! They don’t even liike you! You’re nothing compared to Roger, Kelly Driscoll.” Charlotte’s voice sounded like someone balling up a sheet of aluminum foil. “Thisss job isss too muuuch for you. Do evvveryone a faaavor aaand let meee kiiill you…”

  “And you’re nothing more than a parasite,” Kelly yelled up at her, “no better than that zombie fungus, which, by the way, I fixed. I didn’t see you fixing anything—you made everything more difficult.”

  Finally, to her great relief, Tom and the rest of them showed up on the balcony with the salt. They tore open the bags and poured them onto Charlotte.

  Charlotte’s exoskeleton cracked and even started to shrink until she finally collapsed on the patio, desiccated, immobilized, and emitting a continuous, high-pitched wail.

  “Get everyone down here, Tom, and pick up some rope or anything similar from Dragomir’s office on the way back.” Several minutes later, Tom s
howed up carrying lengths of rope, and they restrained Charlotte as much as possible. “Tom, call Pedro. Doesn’t he volunteer to snowplow?”

  “Yep, he’s got an attachment on his car.”

  “Ask him to drive out to the street here. We’ll have to push her.”

  She held up her walkie. “Dragomir, can you take a minute and open the loading dock doors?”

  She cast a disdainful look at Charlotte. “And you’re not good with spreadsheets!”

  Pedro sat at a folding table in the mail receiving area, taking a dinner break during his front desk shift, listening to a soccer game through his earbuds while he had his food: enfrijoladas, tamales in molé (both homemade by his wife Maria), steamed in banana leaves; chapulines, with lots of garlic, and an orange soda from the vending machine.

  When Tom asked him to attach the plow to his car and push a woman from corporate—who had turned into a horrific insect monster at the holiday party—through the loading dock doors in the parking garage and into the freight elevator, he sighed, put the leftovers in the mini fridge, and put on his jacket, ready to ask Clementine to cover him again.

  Kelly found three residents who were willing to help her and Tom push the incapacitated Charlotte across the terrace and onto the street one floor below. “Ew, ew, ew,” one of the residents said.

  They figured out that they could roll her more easily than pushing her. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Kelly said. “None of us wants her to get her mojo back.” As the remaining monsters rampaged across Pothole City, they pushed and rolled harder until they had her on the edge of the terrace, but they had to lift her over the short concrete ledge.

  “Everyone have a good grip?”

  They nodded with murmured assents. “Heave up on my count: three, two, one!” They pushed up hard at the same time and got her to the top of the ledge. “We’re clear!” She ran back to help push her off.

  Charlotte fell to the street level with a crunching thunk that made all of them make a revolted face in response.

  “Oh, gross,” the one resident said and hurried back to the building.

  Kelly clicked on her walkie. “Okay, Pedro. Push her through the loading dock doors on the fifth underground floor and up to the freight elevator.”

  She looked down from the terrace; Pedro drove his old Saturn coupe, slowly, a snowplow attached in front. He went south and circled wide so he could face the plow north toward the large insulated overhead doors that Dragomir had opened. The loading dock was big enough to accommodate deliveries, moves, and waste pickup, as well as a fixer from corporate who had turned into a gigantic insect monster.

  Pedro slowly but steadily pushed Charlotte up the slight increase in floor height to the parking lot area. Eventually, he reached the parking area, went a little wide again and turned to the left, maneuvering Charlotte to the front of the open freight elevator and in a position where she could fit inside.

  He eased on the accelerator, pushing Charlotte most of the way into the elevator. She separately pushed Charlotte when she got stuck until she was clear of the doors. After Kelly went to the other side of the doors, she managed to push right through Charlotte’s exoskeleton. She extracted her hands, disgusted, shook them off, and wiped them on the wall. But Charlotte had fit in enough to let the doors close.

  “OK?” Dragomir said.

  She gestured at the elevator controls. “Light the rocket.”

  Dragomir pressed the button and the elevator went up.

  “Nice job with the driving, Pedro,” she said. “I know it wasn’t exactly what you wanted to do tonight.”

  “Oh, no. It was close to what I wanted to do tonight,” he said with a grin.

  The building shuddered, like there were hurricane-force winds outside, and they could hear a sound like a jet taking off from a runway. A boom reverberated through the concrete foundation of the building.

  “Did it work?”

  Dragomir grunted and pressed the button again. A short time later, the doors opened. They all made a face and stepped back.

  On the roof of the freight elevator was a thick, sludgy layer that dripped some kind of corrosive acid onto the limestone floor, eroding it with a sizzling noise.

  “This will be out of order for a while.” Dragomir headed back to the lap pool.

  “Thanks again, Pedro.” Kelly followed Dragomir inside.

  An industrial pressure washer sat next to the pool. A series of hoses led over the edge of the pool to another hose that led out to the doors to the parking level, and connected to a hose attached to the ceiling that led to the back wall. “Those hoses ultimately terminate in the sump pit?”

  “Yes,” Dragomir said, arms crossed. “I turn on washer now, OK?”

  “OK.”

  The pressure washer pumped the suspension in the lap pool through the hose and the level gradually went down. It seemed to be working. But when it was close to done, when most of the suspension had drained from the pool, the hose choked and bucked.

  “What’s it doing?” Kelly said, frowning. The washer sucked up the rest of the suspension and gurgled. Dragomir and Kelly went out to the underground parking area.

  “Sump pit is, ah, not exactly designed for something like this,” Dragomir said. “Gelatinous.” He really leaned into the word.

  “Why didn’t you mention that earlier, before we did this?”

  “This only solution,” he said, annoyed. “And I thought you knew about sump pit.”

  She should’ve known, probably, but she still would have done it. What other choice did she have?

  The hose gurgled and retched, pitching violently, and went ominously still and silent. Kelly and Dragomir backed away from it and backed away even more, until they were almost to the downslope that led to the loading dock.

  The hose burst directly over a three-walled parking space that contained a shiny black Mercedes G-Wagen parked in the designated board president spot, and completely engulfed the vehicle with gefilte fish suspension.

  “Uh-oh!” Dragomir said, almost cheerfully.

  Even though Raum couldn’t leave the building unless he found a heck of a loophole, he had still bought a car, which he kept parked in the board president spot, and which he liked to drive around the five parking garage levels. As Raum had explained to her once, it was a matter of dignity.

  Kelly covered her nose and mouth—it smelled awful—but stifled a laugh. Dragomir turned to look at her with the closest thing to pure joy she had ever seen on his face. “Raum’s car?”

  She nodded, and he actually clapped his hands in glee.

  She went inside to check on the lap pool. It was completely drained, so unless Raum’s loophole was incredibly persnickety about it being totally dry, it could well have closed the portal by now.

  She unclipped her walkie. “Tom?” She waited. “Tom?” No answer.

  Worried, she waved to Dragomir, took the regular elevator up to the lobby, and greeted Clementine as she ran through. She took the stairs up one floor and ran toward the club room and terrace, taking stock of the situation.

  The pavers were coated with all kinds of things in various puddles and smears and lines, and what looked like pieces of Charlotte that had cracked off. Snow covered the pavers with a dusting of white. It was colder, too, and the wind had picked up, but it felt good against her face.

  The rip in the sky was gone. Monsters were still flapping wings and screeching at a distance, but that was really the city’s problem now. Pothole City’s Office of Incident Response and Messaging had added staff at all levels of the organization since the recent Amenity Tower incidents, but they weren’t of any help until much later, which seemed beside the point. Kelly didn’t think they suspected that every major city-threatening incident came from Amenity Tower and hoped they wouldn’t figure it out.

  She could almost hear the snow fall as long as a monster from another world wasn’t shrieking at the time.

  She brought up her walkie. “Tom?”

  A
moment later, he responded. “We’re good. I got everyone into the Claw and Crutty building. The walkie doesn’t work that far, but I’m coming back now.”

  I Knew It Was Too Good To Be True

  ith help from Claw & Crutty and the condominium’s attorney, Kelly dismantled the board structure and made it so that going forward, everything would be put to a vote by the residents, which she announced on What’s On Your Mind, Amenity Tower. And she punished the board members with a full amenity ban for two weeks.

  “A full ban? That doesn’t include the fitness center, right?” Raum said.

  “It includes all of the amenities, so yes, the fitness center,” she said.

  “And what about the club room?” Imamiah said. “I joined the bridge group.”

  She shrugged. “Host them in your unit, if you want to play bridge.”

  Imamiah gaped incredulously at her. “Are you saying we’re grounded?”

  “What does that mean?” Crocell said.

  Vassago said, “I read some middle grade and young adult fiction. Grounding is when—”

  Raum cut him off. “We’re not trying to be difficult. I’m just saying that Amenity Tower has a lot of amenities.”

  Certainly more than Ultra-Amenity Tower, she thought, which had been humped to rubble by an other-dimensional monster. Insurance-wise, that probably met the requirements for force majeure.

  “I’m not going to list every amenity individually,” she said.

  “Does this include the Internet service?” Raum said. “The conference rooms? The vending machines? Does this mean that I can’t receive any packages or that the doorman can’t greet me in the lobby? Should I not use the electronic key fobby things? Should I take my things out of storage?”

  She exhaled in frustration. “Fine. I will specify which amenities you are banned from using. Look for that under your door.”