Chapter 19
Apartment complexes are all the rage since the housing market plunged and I don’t necessarily see them losing any ground in the near future. As civilizations advanced, transportation modernized and what was once only the fancy delusions of exotic dreaming has now become possible for just about anyone with modest means. Transportation has allowed people to visit exotic places and, if they so desire, move there and take up residence. But when people move they need to sell their old home if they owned one or rent it out to some stranger who may or may not be worth the trouble to hassle for rent. So a lot of people are putting off buying a home because they don’t necessarily want to make the leap of faith required with a thirty-year mortgage. Apartments fill a void allowing people who aren’t sure if they’re going to make someplace permanent the opportunity to try it out and, if they don’t like it, move away as quickly as possible through breaking their lease by either buying it out or turning in the keys at the office complex and slinking off in the middle of the night. Either way, you’re not getting your security deposit back because the apartment complex has no incentive to do so and they’re pretty sure they’re never going to see you again; so why would they?
WHY WOULD THEY WHAT?
What are you going to do?
I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT?
Hire a thousand dollar lawyer to get your five-hundred dollar deposit back?
OH, OKAY, I’VE GOT YOU NOW.
“My God, what’s that smell?” I asked.
“I don’t know but it seems like it’s coming from your place” Nat replied.
We raced up the remaining flight of stairs to my apartment after we’d decided enough time had elapsed for the group of four to get a handle on what they were up against.
“Hello! What’s going on!” I yelled as I burst through the door and was immediately hit with a stronger version of the horrid stench.
“Out of the way!” yelled Trudy as the she and Vivian raced out the door I entered.
“What’s wrong, girls?” Nat asked as the two lovely vixens of Vampirism raced by holding their cute little respective noses.
“It’s Bob!” Vivian yelled as she proceeded down the stairs at a rather remarkable rate for a woman of such small stature.
“What about him?” Nat yelled at her back.
“He’s on fire!” we heard as she hit the ground floor and started inhaling large gulps of fresh, Dallas air.
“He’s what?” I remember asking at the exact same time I heard a loud splash coming from my bathroom.
“It’s okay! He’s out now!” I heard Phillip’s voice come from the same place as the splash.
“Watch out for his arms, Phillip!” George’s voice yelled as I rounded the corner to enter my bedroom adjoining the bathroom.
“What? Where are his…? Oh, so you want to play rough do you?” Phillip answered as I finally entered my room and saw…
“Oh… hey, Johnny.”
Phillip standing over Bob’s headless torso holding its arms behind its back as the thing kicked its legs like a two-year old throwing a tantrum. George was standing in the shower.
“Hey, Johnny, um… yeah, we had a little mishap with old Bob there” George explained.
“A mishap?”
“Yeah, I think that’s what you’d call it; wouldn’t you agree, Phillip?”
“Yeah, a mishap sounds about right, George.”
“What the heck are you two talking about?”
“Well, I think Phillip can explain it better than me.”
“No I can’t.”
“Would one of you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Okay, it’s like this. We were discussing what we were going to do, you know, with the whole prison and oil-rig thing and, well, we forget to keep an eye on Bob so we think he might’ve fished around long enough to find his head and then, I guess, he got a little confused as to where he was going…”
“Because he didn’t really have his head on straight” chimed in Phillip.
“Yeah, so we think he made a wrong turn at the kitchen and sort of put his head down for a second…”
“Probably to orient himself better” piped Phillip again.
“Uh-huh, to orient himself and, well, he put his head on the burner, Johnny.”
“He what?”
“He put his head on the burner; you know, the one keeping the egg-drop soup warm” said George.
“It was probably an honest mistake” said Phillip.
“Uh-huh, you know the old guy’s been through a lot lately what with getting his head ripped off twice so it’s probably not a surprise that he would get a little… um… what’s the word…?”
“Confused?” Phillip said.
“Yeah, I guess confused about covers it. Johnny, Bob got confused and accidently caught his head on fire.”
“He caught his head on fire?”
“Yep, you know it could probably happen to anyone under the circumstances considering…”
“He... he… caught… fire?”
“Yeah, yeah he did. He lit his head on fire and spilled all of the egg-drop soup. I’m really sorry about that.”
“Me too” said Phillip.
“Where’s his head?” I asked.
“In the toilet” Phillip answered.
“In the what?”
“In the toilet. We would’ve put it out in the kitchen but Bob’s torso grabbed its head and started running around like… like a guy with his head cut off” explained George.
I moved further into the bathroom to stand next to Phillip so I could get a look into the porcelain bowl and see what’d happened to the unfortunate man.
“It’s in here?” I asked pointing to the toilet.
“Yes, it was the only place I could think to throw it in under the circumstances” said Phillip.
I looked down at the egg-white cylinder, lifted the lid and saw the head of Bob staring back at me in confusion. His eyes were darting left and right while his mouth kept opening and closing like an earthbound gold fish.
“Is he still in there?” asked Phillip.
“Where else would he be?” I replied.
“I don’t know? It’s just…”
“It’s just what?”
“Well, I flushed him a couple of times.”
“You flushed the man?”
“Yeah, he was spitting toilet water at me.”
“Sigh.”
Yep, that’s right, I sighed. I’d gotten to the point where the severed, scorched, drowned and flushed head of a former colleague would cause only that smallest of reactions.
Nat got a call he was needed back at the station and left so I walked around the apartment to get a better grasp of the situation. In the living room I found one of my fold-out chairs lying on the floor and the newspapers and magazines which once sat on it scattered around. There were cups lying on the kitchen floor and whatever liquid had been in those cups was also on the ground, on the bottom drawers, on the refrigerator, and anywhere else liquid could possibly go when a headless Zombie holding his flaming cranium decided to make a break for it. The egg-drop soup covered the entire range-top and my toaster oven, which I’d picked off the floor those many hours ago, was now back at its rightful place in my sink. Steve was still sitting on the couch.
The fire alarms hadn’t gone off because I’d removed those ear-shattering noisemakers after the first time they decided to announce their presence to me about one month after I moved in. I knew I wasn’t supposed to and I wouldn’t have if there were any way to shut the things down after I’d discerned there was no fire and they were doing their screeching-beeping thing for no reason whatsoever. The fire safety people will undoubtedly be upset with me but I ask them this; where’s the manual override? And not the stupid little button which shuts the unbelievably loud sound off for two minutes or so. No, the one which says there is no fire and the things are just malfunctioning. And why do they always malfunction in the middle of
the night?
HUH? ARE YOU ASKING ME?
Is there a timer in there?
A TIMER IN WHERE?
Are the fire-safety people mad if you don’t donate to their charity?
OKAY, YOU’RE JUST DOING THE RHETORICAL THING AGAIN, AREN’T YOU?
If that’s the case, tell us! You’ll get more donations than a Vegas call-girl. Okay, okay, I’m sure it was the batteries but, then again, I have my doubts; why?
I DON’T KNOW?
Because they all go off at the same time! What are the odds of that?
SLIM?
I use my TV remote about, oh, a million times more than my fire alarms and those batteries never go bad at the exact same time. Are you telling me one fire alarm is talking to another fire alarm?
MAYBE.
Okay, well, that actually makes a little bit of sense.
“Johnny?”
“Yes, Trudy?”
“I’m sorry about your apartment.”
“It’s okay, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Well, yes, actually it was.”
“Huh?”
“I pulled his head off, remember.”
“Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t getting my security deposit back anyway.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Huh?”
“We own this apartment complex.”
“You what?”
“We own this complex; we own hundreds of these complexes.”
Land is the great equalizer among the wealthy for the simple reason it is finite. Unlike every other product land has no competition. Fuel can be purchased as either petroleum, natural gas, coal or any other of the rapidly expanding substitutes. Food is so abundant and varied there are cottage industries designed to actually make money off eating less of it. Gold has silver, houses have condos and guns have knives… but land? Land has land.
“What was Peter thinking?” George said.
“We know what he was thinking, George, he was thinking we could be the Elders” replied Vivian.
“But Stephanie would never have allowed it” he said.
“That’s probably why he met with Melissa when he did, because she’s hibernating” she said.
“Well, what do we do now?” he asked, and nobody responded.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Yes, Sweetie?” Vivian responded.
“Where exactly do you stand right now?”
“Well, Sweetie, we’re kind of in limbo. Technically, we’re still in charge of our company but since we can’t get into our offices without a fight, and we can’t win the fight because they’ll just play defense, it’s only a matter of time before whichever family now residing in our offices will make a claim of ownership. Once they do the Clan Elders will have no choice but to accept their claim and relegate us unattached.”
“Why would the Clan Elders accept their claim? They basically stole it from you.”
“Because it showed a great deal of planning and preparation to do what they did. They attacked us in our own home, killed one of our Werewolves and occupied our occupation. No Superior could overlook the brash eloquence of what they did because it doesn’t matter how they did it, only whether they were able to pull it off or not.”
“So the ends justify the means?”
“The ends always justify the means.”
“What happens next?”
“Well, we either accept our fate and start to rebuild our family, find a way to remove whichever family has taken what was ours, or prove to the Counsel they cannot handle the duties they stole.”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“What?”
“Proving to the counsel they can’t handle their duties?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We set up Commercial Properties to be virtually impregnable to decline.”
“How could you do that?”
“We own the land the properties sit on.”
“So?”
“So, land is the most valuable commodity there is, Sweetie.”
“Okay, but doesn’t land drop in value?”
“Sometimes, in the short term, but as long as the population keeps growing land will keep its value.”
“Because it’s a limited resource, right?”
“Exactly. Land is a limited resource people must have in order to survive. Since they must have it they must pay for it and since we own it we get to decide what they pay.”
“But couldn’t someone buy land near yours and rent it out cheaper?”
“Sure, and if they have the resources we’ve built up and can lower their prices long enough, they get to win.”
“Huh?”
“Sweetie, if someone comes in and tries to undercut us then we’re going to undercut them. Now, we’ve got a significant amount of money in the bank so we could probably keep it up for a couple of decades if we wanted to and when the other person decides enough is enough we’ll buy his land and raise our prices back up. Remember, land doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t run out and it never goes out of style so we’ll recoup our losses and eventually restock our coffers.”
“You don’t think proving they’re incompetent and can’t handle their duties is possible?”
“Oh, anything is possible, I’m just saying it’s not probable.”
“So, you either need to remove the other family or accept your fate and become… what did you call it?”
“Unattached; it means we’d have no affiliation with any occupation and would need to choose one.”
“And I don’t suppose they’d just let you choose the same occupation and start near the top again? I mean, you’ve already proven you’re up to the task.”
“No, they wouldn’t. Oh, we could choose Shelter again, sure, but we’d start at the bottom just like every other unattached family does.”
“Does it take a long time to get to the top?”
“It can take forever, Sweetie.”
We decided to call it a night and I was surprised I wasn’t tired for I’d been up for over thirty-six hours but felt like I could go on indefinitely. Phillip explained because I was getting enough food my cells were perfectly fine and my body didn’t need to slow down to charge back up. The girls took my bedroom and I didn’t even need to do the whole ‘please take it, I insist’ thing which is a socially annoying nonsense developed for some reason or another, I guess to make the guest look magnanimous in declining what the host is offering only to relent after the host ‘insists’ even though everyone knows it’s a charade and they were going to take the thing anyway. I think a good way to put an end to the time-wasting exercise is to do exactly what the girls did and just say ‘Okay’ when I offered my room, which left me a bit perplexed as to what to do next because I honestly didn’t have a single other blanket or pillow in the place except for the ones residing on my bed. The pillows on the futon were out of the question. So there we were, three guys on the floor, one Zombie on the couch and another in my closet, duct-taped so his torso couldn’t move, with his head in a decorative gift-bag I’d received from someone I didn’t remember containing a gift I had no recollection of for an occasion which slipped my mind.
“George?”
“Yes, Johnny?”
“Trudy said you owned this apartment complex.”
“That’s true.”
“Well then, I’ve got a little confession to make.”
“We already know, Johnny.”
“Know what?”
“That this isn’t your apartment.”
It’s actually not hard to fall off the face of the Earth; just stop paying your bills, quit driving and sublease an apartment. If you lose your job the first two naturally take care of themselves but the third needs a little help and a pinch of luck. My luck came from the fact I have a last name shared by about ten million others and the help I received came by way of a friend of mine who’d decided a life of crime was an attainable goal. He was wrong, of course, but it didn’t stop him from gi
ving it his best shot which got him arrested and sent to prison before his lease was up on the brand new apartment I decided to take over from him while he was acquainting himself with the breed of life who go by the names of Pit-bull, Bull-dog and Ice-pick. His first name was Jason and his last was the same as mine so it was actually quite easy to take over his place by paying with money-orders instead of checks. You might think the people receiving those money-orders would maybe check the names, put two and two together and surmise I was not Jason but you’d be wrong for two reasons. First, you don’t necessarily need a legible signature on a money order for the other party too cash it and second, the other party could care less who sent the money-order as long as the blessed thing cleared whatever financial institution they sent it to. Why would my friend allow me to assume his apartment and take the chance I would burn the place down you ask?
BECAUSE HE WAS A STUPID CRIMINAL?
Because he was in prison and knew once he got out he was as likely to find the Abominable Snowman as he was to get any apartment complex not located in the deepest slums of Dallas to rent to him. How did I pay the rent without a job?
PROSTITUTION?
I sold my car.
“How did you know it wasn’t my apartment?” I asked.
“You told Vivian your address when you first met her” George replied.
“I did?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She really is quite persuasive, you know.”
“Oh yeah, I know” he replied.
“George?”
“Yes, Johnny?”
“What’s to keep Steve…”
“Steve…”
“… from attacking us in the middle of the night?”
“I never gave him his teeth back.”
“Oh, goodnight, George.”
“Goodnight, Johnny.”
“Goodnight, Phillip.”
“Goodnight, Johnny.”
“Goodnight, Steve.”
“Steve…”