by Eric Vall
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Chapter 1
Well, this was it.
Six-hundred-fifty East Broadway Lane, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I always hated doing inspections in this part of the city, mostly because it always made me feel like a peasant, come to do the bidding of my noble masters.
When I finally rolled up to the two-story, white-washed brick facade of my destination, my feelings were only intensified.
The exhaust pipe of the beat-up, old, two-thousand-and-four Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan sputtered and spat as I slowed the vehicle to a halt, and for a minute, I wondered if one of these bougie neighbors was going to call in a noise complaint.
Hey, at least I had a company car. Even if it was a piece of shit.
I threw the ‘ol girl into park, killed the ignition, unbuckled my seatbelt, and slid out onto the sidewalk. I tried to be discrete as I yanked open the sliding door of the red-and-yellow van and mentally prepared myself to try and find my equipment in the mess of the back.
It was always one of my favorite pastimes to watch peoples’ reactions whenever I opened the side panel of the vehicle. The Silhouette sported a large, cartoon image of a fly, flipped over onto its back and with little X marks where its eyes should be. It had been strategically placed on the van so that, whenever somebody opened up the side door, the poor little guy looked like he was being decapitated.
Cute, but a tad much.
Then again, you had to have a little bit of fun when you were an exterminator.
No… Pest Control Technician.
I had to keep reminding myself I’d recently been promoted. Now, instead of just going out and dealing with problems people already knew they had, I went around and looked at people’s houses to try and figure out what kind of problem they might have.
The eighteen dollars an hour was totally worth it, though.
Then again, that was peanuts compared to whatever the fuck the owners of this house were making.
Did they really need not one, not two, but three sets of bay windows? Not to mention, the brickwork in this place was authentically hand-laid, not the cheap, flat, plastic facade kinda shit you saw at the hardware store. Egyptian blue siding ran parallel to the ground in all the spots devoid of bricks, and white trim lined the exterior of every window, peak, and edge of the home.
This style was popular with the wealthy folk of Minneapolis. It was designed specifically to look cozy and beautiful when it snowed, a phenomenon that happened way too much up in this part of the world.
As I slid on my shoe protectors, mask, and gloves, I wondered if I was going to get a complaint about the “eyesore” of a van sitting out in the middle of the street of this community of multi-million-dollar houses. The old, rusty vehicle had apparently been with the company since it’d been brand new and had certainly seen better days. Most of the paint and graphics on the side had been worn down by a mixture of the harsh winters and countless hours of sitting out in the sun. The entire undercarriage was splotched with rust to the point where my coworkers joked it was going to fall out on us while we were driving down the road. All of this was compounded by the fact that my chump of a boss didn’t want to pay to have it repaired or re-painted, so we had to take this ‘ol rust bucket into all these fancy neighborhoods where we stuck out like a sore thumb.
Fortunately for Bugslayer, LLC, termites, roaches, and rats didn’t discriminate between rich and poor. These people needed my services just as much as anyone in the bad parts of town.
So, I picked up my clipboard and pen, slammed the sliding door shut with just the right amount of force to close the door but not break the slide track, and then beeped the key fob as I headed toward the front door.
Ugh. I never knew what to do when it came to these fancy places. Did I knock? Ring the doorbell? E-mail them again? Stand around and wait for the butler or maid to open the door?
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait for very long.
As soon as I reached the front steps, the wide brown door swung open to reveal a young woman. My heart leapt up into my throat when I saw her perfectly tan skin, dark green eyes, and chocolate brown locks tied back into a single ponytail. She was wearing a simple black turtleneck that hugged her tummy and perky breasts tightly, and on her lower half she wore a pair of tight pleated brown pants. She looked business-casual, but obviously super rich.
“Hunter Bragg!” I introduced myself as I tried not to get stupefied by her outrageous Laura Croft-like beauty. “Pest Control Technician, at your service.”
The woman’s emerald eyes stared back suspiciously as she looked me up and down, and then she motioned for me to step inside.
“This way,” the woman grumbled. “The laundry room is where the problem area seems to be. Also… what’s with the getup? It’s a termite problem, not an infectious disease.”
Well, nice to meet you, too.
“It’s just standard procedure,” I explained. “All Bugslayer employees have to wear this uniform wherever we go, even if it’s just for an inspection. You never know what kind of stuff you get into once you start crawling down in people’s basements and crawl spaces and all that.”
The woman raised her eyebrows and then let out a deep sigh.
“Look around,” she scoffed. “Does this look like the kind of place that would have bed bugs or cockroaches? My father always kept his house spic and span. If a horde of bugs or even a bunch of dust got into his shop, it could completely ruin his life’s work. I try to keep this place somewhat clean in his absence, but there’s only so much I can do when I’m always so busy with work.”
“That sounds pretty intense, Miss… ?” I began as I looked around at the inside of the mansion.
“Nash,” she finished for me. “Karla Nash.”
“Right.” I nodded. “What exactly did your father do, Miss Nash?”
“My father’s work isn’t important.” The brunette woman shrugged. “Or at least, not to somebody of your profession. There’s too many quantum theorems and kinematical postulates and other complex terms at play. It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around sometimes, so I can only imagine what’d happen if I tried to explain it to you.”
“Oh, so he’s a physicist or something?”
“Or something,” she scoffed, and then she nodded toward where she wanted me to go.
Even though the outside of the dwelling was nice enough, the inside didn’t look much different than your standard ritzy home. All of the floors were a dark, polished hardwood, and the walls were all painted from top to bottom in a sterile white hue. The vaulted ceilings were lined with large wooden beams across their lengths, and every one of the doorways I could see were separated by a set of dark blue double doors covered with tiny windows.
But there was something off about the whole thing.
Just from a quick glance around, I could see everything in the house was covered with a thin layer of dust, almost as if it hadn’t been used in years. The chandelier that dangled from the ceiling was missing a few lightbulbs, and even the windows appeared to be glazed over by cobwebs and dirt.
“A scientist, huh?” I mused. “Am I gonna find some super-secret badass lab behind one of your closets or in the garage or something?”
Karla’s eyes narrowed as her pursed lips turned into a full-on scowl.
“My father wasn’t a mad scientist,” she muttered, and I noticed out of the corner of my eyes that her right fist was tightening. “Now, shall I show you to the laundry room?”
I stifled a gulp, but my heart was starting to beat against my sternum with the force of a war drum.
&nb
sp; I didn’t know what this strange woman’s deal was, but the topic of her father was obviously a sore spot, and I knew I shouldn’t push the issue any further. I was here to do a job, not pry into this poor woman’s personal life. Even though she’d been the one who had brought up her dad, and I was just trying to make polite conversation.
Women.
“Sure,” I agreed with the fakest smile I could muster. “Take me to the termites, and I’ll take a quick peek. With any luck, I can be outta your hair in no time.”
“Great,” Karla agreed in a too enthusiastic tone, and then she began to walk down one of the mansion’s hallways. “This way, please.”
I followed Miss Nash across the hardwood floor of the mansion. It creaked under my feet with every step I took, and I instantly knew we were looking at some sort of minor structural damage, at the very least.
We passed by a large room off to the left on our way to the laundry room, and I couldn’t help but take a quick glance inside.
It was obviously supposed to be a library, and just like the rest of the rooms in the mansion, this one had ten-foot-tall vaulted ceilings atop white and blue walls. However, the entirety of the back wall was made up of built-in oak bookshelves packed to the brim with texts that looked like they’d seen better days. There was a desk at the very center of all the shelves, but I didn’t have much time to inspect it before we moved on to the next room.
Finally, Karla came to a halt at the end of the hallway, grabbed the handle of a small door, and tossed it open. Then she stepped in, turned on the light, and motioned to the interior with about as much enthusiasm as a racehorse who was long past retirement.
“Here it is,” she grumbled. “Our laundry room, in all its glory.”
My jaw nearly hit the floor. This was the nicest “laundry room” I’d ever seen. The thing was bigger than the freaking master suite in my apartment.
All along the right side of the space was a gray marble countertop that ran down the side of the wall, with a white porcelain farm sink and nearly a dozen cabinets underneath. Above the counter was a single minimalist piece of artwork, a red canvas with yellow, orange, and purple paint splatters strewn across its front.
You know, the kind of thing a dude creates in his garage with ten-dollar supplies from Hobby Lobby and then turns around and sells for two-hundred dollars a pop. Rich people always ate that stuff up.
On the other end of the room, atop the pristine white tile flooring, sat a front-loading washer and dryer.
“Wow… ” I whistled to myself.
“There seems to be an issue over by the washer,” Karla explained. “Whenever I walk over there to try and do some laundry, I’m afraid the floor is gonna fall out from under me.”
“I’ll take a look.” I nodded and pulled the pen from behind my ear. “What I’m gonna do is a full inspection of this floor. Usually, if termites are present underneath a laminate surface like this one, it’ll look like water damage. Bubbles, sags, and sometimes even little tiny holes show up where they’ve been. Have you seen anything like that lately?”
Karla lowered her eyes and let out a deep sigh.
“I thought that was just from the washing machine,” she grumbled. “The laminate around the washer has been like that for a while now, but I never really thought anything of it.”
“Uff-da.” I whistled. “If it’s been like that for a while, and you feel like your floor’s starting to sag… I can already tell you it’s not gonna be pretty when I start prying up the floor.”
“Shit.” Karla crossed her arms over her chest. “I knew I shouldn’t have let it go for so long. I just got so caught up in work lately… ”
“It’s not a big deal,” I reassured her. “We don’t know the extent of the damage yet. Let me get in there and check it out, and then we’ll go from there.”
First thing’s first, I needed to see this massive weak spot she was talking about. So, I sauntered over to the nice rug in front of the washer and dryer and instantly felt the floor groan underneath me. The wood underneath the laminate gave nearly half an inch as I stepped on it, and I physically cringed at the thought of what was under this carpet.
I took a step back, reached down, and removed the rug.
Yikes.
Staring back at me was a gash in the laminate nearly a foot long and about as wide as my hand.
Definitely termites.
“Yeah, you got ‘em alright,” I explained as I pointed to the gash in the floor.
“Fucking stupid,” Karla muttered to herself as she buried her face into her palm.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” I chuckled and pulled the flat-head screwdriver from my belt. “It could happen to anybody. But, I will warn you… it’s about to get worse. I hope you don’t mind replacing this.”
I slid the narrow end of the flat-head underneath the edge of the gash, got a bit of leverage, and then pushed upward.
The laminate strip popped up with a gnarly crack, and debris from the brittle material scattered across the floor like the world’s worst confetti. Underneath was the baseboards of the floor, and they had been chewed beyond recognition. It was so bad, in fact, that I could have sworn I saw a few pinpricks of light rising up through the floor where the termites had chewed all the way through.
This wasn’t just bad, it was downright dangerous.
“Oh, my god… ” Karla gasped.
“Yeah,” I mused, “I wouldn’t stand in this spot anymore. Like, I’m halfway tempted to move your washer and dryer right now, because I don’t know how these things haven’t fallen through already.”
“Shit,” Miss Nash grumbled. “Can you get rid of the little bastards?”
“I can set some traps and treat the soil around your house,” I explained, “but if this is as bad as I’m guessing it is, we’re gonna have to bring out the big guns. And by that, I mean the full shebang. Tent fumigation.”
“And what about the floors themselves?” Karla rubbed her temples with frustration.
“I’m not a floor guy.” I shrugged. “But I’d imagine you’re gonna have to get a contractor out here to assess the damage and see if anything can be filled in and salvaged. If not, I could see this costing a pretty penny, in my honest opinion. But I still need to see just how bad this infestation is… ”
Karla lifted up her head, dragged her hands down her cheeks as she rolled her eyes, and then turned around.
“I’m going to call my contractor,” she announced. “He’s usually really good about getting out here ASAP.”
The beautiful brunette woman disappeared down the hallway, and I got back to work.
I pried up a few more of the strips of laminate, set them to the side, and clicked my tongue.
This was way worse than I’d thought. The damage stretched almost the entire width of the room, in a giant eye-shaped pattern.
There was a silver lining, however. The damage seemed to be contained to this singular pattern, and nothing more. Strange… I’d never seen any termites chew up a floor in a perfect shape like this.
Maybe this was the only tasty wood in the house?
Either way, I prayed there wasn’t a support beam underneath this spot. Because if there were any, they would be about as useful as a femur in somebody with brittle bone disease.
Slowly, I stood back up to my feet, and then froze in place when the floorboards underneath me groaned once more. I quickly scribbled down some notes on my clipboard, slipped the pen back behind my ear, and then put away my screwdriver.
If there were termites in this room, then they were probably all over in the crawlspace, and God only knows where else. I needed to get down in there as soon as possible so I could see the true extent of the damage.
I lifted up my foot to take a step and heard a loud crack underneath my planted leg.
That couldn’t be good.
Before I could move out of the way, there was another loud crack, and the floor gave out underneath me. Much to my surprise, there was no crawl s
pace.
Nothing underneath me but a giant, open room.
I let out a gasp of surprise as I fumbled to grab onto something, anything, that would stop my fall.
But it was no use.
I felt the jagged wood and laminate scrape past my flesh as I plummeted downward and into the darkness below. The next thing I knew, my back slammed into a cold metal surface, and I bounced off it violently like a ragdoll. I slammed into a table, which promptly shattered under my weight, and then finally came to a stop on a cold, wet, concrete ground.
What the hell?
The space around me was dark, only illuminated by the soft light from the hole above.
There was a dull throbbing in my ribs as I slowly hobbled up to my feet, and a slight warm trickle of blood ran down my forehead. I wiped the trickle away with my open palm, smeared it against my jeans, and then pulled my phone out of my pocket.
When I finally switched on the flashlight app, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Before me stood a giant piece of machinery that took up the entire wall of the subterranean room. It appeared to be turned off at the moment, but even in the darkness I could see all the bells and whistles. Several red lights ran across the top, just above a massive screen equivalent to the jumbotron at a basketball game. Underneath that were a bunch of buttons, levers, and a screen with a keyboard.
I turned around and looked at the table that had broken my fall. It had been shattered straight in two, and handwritten notes now littered the ground around it.
Immediately to the right of the broken table, up against the wall, was a series of workbenches whose surfaces were covered with several small gadgets and machines, and as I surveyed my surroundings a bit more, realization started to set in.
This really was some sort of secret lab, ripped straight out of an old monster movie. All that was missing were the bubbling beakers, giant electrical conduit, and creepy mutated assistant.
“What the fuck?” I groaned as I limped over to the large machine and began to look it over.
As I glanced up and to my left, I saw a metal arm jutting out of the computer, and it had a strange, gun-like device attached to its end. The device looked like a stereotypical sci-fi blaster ripped straight out of a Marvin the Martian cartoon, complete with a ball attached to several spaced-out circular plates.
