If it can go wrong...

Chapter 5.

My days off tend to be fairly rare. A true day off, one in which I am not required to either deliver a pizza or risk my life in some obnoxiously overcomplicated and probably silly bit of spooky stupidity. Like all connoisseurs of the finer things in life, when I do happen to get one of these delectable delights I guard it jealously, militantly even. Thus, the day after Tiff's birthday party I can be found in my s****y apartment, sitting on my s****y recliner, eating a s****y cup o' noodles I made for no reason other than it was already here and I refused to leave to get anything better. I am steadfast and devout in my belief that if I watch the TV long enough this glorious afternoon I will be rewarded with something that is actually worth watching. All the while I am glancing occasionally at the most vile betrayer of my days off in the past, the cell phone sitting on the end table. It is a deceptively simple and innocent looking device that nonetheless fills me with dread to even contemplate on these rare occasions when my time is not already spoken for. It sits in silence, allowing me the privilege of this time to myself without it's customary complaint of beeping mockery. But I don't trust it. I never trust it.

From the crack of noon until eight o'clock, I am left in peace. Then at eight o'clock there is a loud screeching of tires from the complex parking lot, followed by a loud crunch. Like every other human here I peer through my blinds and see an old blue Chevy pick-up has come off the road and slammed into a telephone pole, downing the pole and smashing the front of the truck into a taco shape. There are already people down there helping and talking into cell phones, so I go back to my TV and take a stab channel surfing again. Surely, there must be something on. The industry makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year, some of it has to not suck. The sirens of the approaching ambulance and police notables are drowning out that guy with the show that wants you to answer everything in the form of a damn question. I shut my eyes, getting drowsy.

At eight forty-five my TV goes on and off a half of a dozen times in two seconds, accompanied by my lamp flashing a few times. Immediately after that I hear a scream from somewhere in the complex. I step out of my door and I see that there is a crowd of people gathering at the unit on the ground floor, people that were looking at the Chevy and are now looking into the new disturbance. From the mumbling and murmurs I hear from below, it sounds like somebody in that apartment was clever enough to be taking a bath with their stereo, and when they tried to get up dumped it in the water, shocked themselves, and cracked their head open on the faucet. I step back into the apartment and shut the door. I look at my phone. It is still silent. But for some reason the silence is becoming ominous to me.

I decide I am probably getting entirely too silly and paranoid for my own good. I grab the phone, plug it into the bedside charger and decide to just crash out early today. This will be the third time I have gotten to bed before midnight in two or three years. Somehow it almost feels naughty, although I couldn't tell you why. At ten o'clock, I am awakened by a loud cry and a thumping sound outside my window. At first I try to convince myself I didn't really hear it. Then I can once again hear through my open window the tell tale murmuring of a group of people playing “poke the dead thing” while they call for the third set of cops and ambulance to hit this apartment complex in two hours. I step outside and see that the railing that the kids like to slide down has literally broken away from the stairs, pitching some poor kid about forty five feet down onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

One is happenstance. Two could be circumstance. But three? No. I don't buy three. I get up, put on some clothes and grab my things. I drop to shadow and I immediately know there is something wrong. There is a thick, greasy fog outside thats smells of burning rubber and overdone meat. It permeates everything, and my skin feels defiled for having touched it. I step out into my main room, the one that includes my living room, kitchen, and computer. I see that my apartment is in dire need of a solid cleaning. Any amount of dust or clutter tends to be compounded in shadow, and my place is filthy.

I stop, and stare. I hear whistling coming from under my sink. Happy whistling. A “whistle while you work” kind of whistle. I armor up and reach for the cabinet door that leads under the sink. There is a soft clanking sound and the whistling stops. I freeze. I strain my ears but I hear nothing but the ticking of my armor.

Oh yeah. Not exactly a stealth mode.

I rip the door off the under sink cubby and I see a small hunchbacked figure, probably a foot and a half tall, with glowing red eyes that are narrowed to slits. It has a sharp, pointed nose and prominent canines. Other than white teeth and red eyes the thing is shiny and dark gray, like it was made out of malleable hematite. It has it's ears towards the top of its head and they are both flattened against its skull as it looks at me with it's mouth agape. It is wearing a tool belt and a pair of blue pants. It has a wrench out and is doing something with my garbage disposal.

I make a grab for it and it ducks back into the far back corner, then seems to become somewhat fluid and steps through the wall to the other side.

The next door lady is about a million years old, mostly blind and all the way deaf. I run around to my door, drop the armor, open it, step outside, close my door, armor up, and plow my way through the neighbor lady's door without breaking stride. I see it, once again looking at me, having already popped the cover off of an electrical outlet. I dive for it and it smirks at me, then slips through the floor. I punch right through the damn floor trying to catch it, but I don't have any luck. When I look through the hole I see the thing balancing on tip toe as it walks around the top edge of a baby's playpen, it looks right up at me and puts it's finger to it's lips in a “shush” gesture, then continues it's trek around the play pen towards an AC unit in the wall above it.

I use the claws as scissors and start frantically cutting my way through the floor while the damned thing is slowly, meticulously, and ironically enough, carefully, loosening the bolts that keep the AC unit attached to the wall. Just before the unit falls, I do, and I reach out with a claw and simply punch the unit out of the building and down into the bushes outside. The miserable thing walks through the wall again while I am doing this, it's eyes blazing and starting to make a hissing sound when it breathes. Tired of this game, I simply dive after it through the wall.

Well, the wall gave way just fine but the fridge on the other side of it stopped me cold, although I did knock it over so I can see around the room. We are back underneath my apartment now, and while I am trying to disentangle myself from the fridge and the wall, I can see the thing poking around behind the stove. I break into a cold sweat at this point, this place has gas stoves in it. I am almost out when I see him wave as he falls through the floor, then see the damage wrought by the explosion. I don't see the fire, and I can't feel the heat. But I can see the room around me beginning to blacken, and I can see the damage the fire is causing as it begins to consume things all around me. I back out the way I came and run back to the front door of this apartment, then exit, leave shadow, and kick in the door where the explosion was. I search the place but only find a frantic dog who bolts out of the place pretty much as I open the door. I call in the fire with a quick dial to 911 and head up to my apartment to collect up what I need to that would otherwise be quite incriminating when the police and fire department go through the wreckage of the building later.

I dump all of that crap into my car, and then start trying to get people out of the building. By the time the fire dept is here the other tenants and I have accounted for pretty much everybody. We move out cars away from the building and some people who's units are not already engulfed try to get a few last things out before the authorities crack down on the scene. It doesn't take long once it is going. A couple of hours and the fire dept. has put it out but it is pretty obvious nobody is ever going to be able to live here again, no amount of repair would make it fit for human habitation. I do drop back to shadow and try to find the little b*****d, but I knew I wouldn't. Gremlins are almost impossible to find unless you catch them in the act, and this one probably moved on as soon as the fire dept showed up and wrecked his fun. But I bet I will see him again. I got the impression he didn't like me much, and those little b******s were supposed to hold grudges like nobodies business.

Just to add insult to injury, at 11:59, my phone rings. It's Tiffany.

“Hey Tiff. What's up?” I am walking towards my car, getting out of ear shot of all the civilians.
“I just heard something crazy on the radio. I just heard that the apartments you live in burned down. Crazy huh? I know it is crazy because if, God forbid, your place was to burn the first thing you would do is call me so I wouldn't have to worry whether or not you were still alive.”
“Yeah, pretty crazy.”

There is a pause for a few seconds.

“So, they didn't really burn down then? Did the radio have it wrong?”
“Oh no, burned all to hell. My half of the building burned right into the ground.”
“So it did? I thought you said that was crazy?”
“I think we are working with different definitions of crazy. I think it is pretty crazy when a gremlin sets up shop in my apartments and when I try to stop him his response it to burn it down. Maybe it's just me.”
“A gremlin? You mean like the little green thing in the bugs bunny cartoons?”
“More like the ones in the movie. They like to mess with things, cause chaos and mayhem. I didn't know they could walk through walls though, that was new.”
“Walk through walls? “
“Yeah. Couldn't pin the little punk down, every time I got close he would just walk away. An apartment complex is definitely not the right venue for a showdown with one of those. Look, I think we are going to need to cancel movie night tomorrow, I seem to be lacking a TV or a place to plug it in at the moment.”
“You know you could always stay at my place, until you find something else.”

I start my car and plug in the headset on my phone.

“Tiff, you don't have a place. You live in the loft over your Mom's garage. A loft, I may add, that is a one room affair and has no plumbing. I am completely not comfortable with shacking up with you at all, much less having to go into your Mom's house to take a dump.”
“Hey, I pay rent. My mom doesn't get into my stuff. The arrangement is mutually beneficial. It's not like you would be the first guy I ever brought home you know.”
“No but I might be the last.”
“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I pause for a second. I really wasn't looking forward to this conversation and I sure as hell wasn't expecting to have to have it over the phone.

“Look, You have known me for what, four years right?”
“Yes.”
“How many places have I lived in that time? How many cars have I wrecked? How many jobs have I lost because something at the job site caused them to “close for renovations?”
“I see where you are going with this Kyle, and I think you need to get over yourself. You are not cursed, you are just a guy with a dangerous job that occasionally follows you home. Cops all over the country deal with this all the time.”
“Really? Does it look like a towering inferno when they do? Because it does for me, I just got a reminder about an hour and a half ago.”

Then I run a red light.
I didn't mean to. I was stomping on the brake and the stupid car would not stop. It hits me like a cold splash in the face and I start looking around for somewhere I can go that has an incline that I can use to stop, but about that time the engine roars and starts picking up speed.
That puke is in the damn car.

“Look, something has come up and I need to let you go.”
“What is it?”
“Can't talk now call you later.” I say fast into the phone with a squeal of tires as I am swerving to try not to plow into the side of a minivan at the next intersection. I shake off the headset and make a beeline for the park. I start talking to myself, near screaming. “OK YOU MISERABLE LITTLE S**T, YOU WANT TO PLAY, LET'S PLAY.” I careen through a third intersection and hit the curb that surrounds the park going about seventy five miles an hour.

I should hire the damn gremlin as a mechanic, I don't think this “thing” has ever managed seventy five before in it's existence.

I aim for one of the big trees around the kid's playground and drop to shadow just before impact, armoring up as the front bumper flattens. I am flung through the windshield and into the tree, hitting my shoulder with an impact that is going to feel like hell in the morning.  Right now I can't think about it. I push away from the tree and see the gremlin running across the park at insane speeds for something with no legs to speak of. I can't catch it, but I don't have to.

My car has seen it's last day as a conveyance of convenience, but it has a brand new, albeit short, career as a projectile weapon.

I pick up the “thing” by grabbing the back of it with the claws, putting most of the pressure against the rear right and left paneling until I feel frame. Then I swivel it over on a hip and throw it in a long bombing arc that intersects the gremlin while it is skipping over the hand powered merry-go-round, the impact smashing the handles down into the frame and then the whole thing spins wildly with a grinding noise that tells me that this particular piece of playground equipment was not long for the world. I run up to the mess and see the gremlin pinned, and bleeding some kind of pink frothy substance from it's mouth. It looks a little confused, like it is not sure what exactly it did to deserve all of this. I don't leave it wondering. I take off it's head.

It takes me about ten minutes to collect all of the car and get it all in a package I can move again, except the glass of course. But I imagine when they either repair or replace the merry-go-round somebody will clean all of that crap up. I must look pretty silly, carrying a car over my head all the way to the river, but fortunately nobody can see me here.

Before I toss it in I dig around in it and collect anything that looks like it might be serviceable still and pile it up, then I get to see the big splash as the poor damned thing hits the water and starts to sink.

As soon as it is gone, I drop out of shadow and collect up my things. I end up crashed out under a bridge downtown next to a guy that scratches and mumbles a lot.

While I am doing so my phone rings again.

My apartment is gone, my car is gone, everything else I own is burned or at the bottom of the river and that cell phone is still working. My disgust overwhelms me.

“Hello?"
“Are you OK? You didn't hang up before and I heard you yelling something, then there was a loud crunching sound and the phone went dead.”
“Hi Tiff. I am fine. No car anymore, but fine.”
“What happened to your car?”
“It nobly sacrificed itself in the pursuit of justice, defending the memory of my apartment.”
“Huh?”
“I ended up throwing it at the gremlin, nailed the grem but the car is toast. That makes car three this year. Apartment number two. I am working on job four. That discussion we were having before? Don't bring it up again. Please.”

There is silence for a few seconds. Then I hear:

“On one condition.”
“What?”
“You have to come over for dinner and movies tomorrow.”
“I am probably going to be kinda busy, you know, finding a place to live and all. Reporting my car stolen. Maybe I will see if I can get some overtime in using the loaner at work.”
“Nope. That is my condition. You show up or you will never hear the end of this. Cross my heart.”
“Fine. Eight o'clock OK with you?”
“Dinner is at six. Don't be late or you are gonna get it.”

“OK, d****t I get it. Six o'clock. I promise. Goodbye.”

I hang up the phone and turn over. My fellow bridge camper, whom I am going to call itchy, is looking at me through a mostly empty bottle of some manner of rotgut, shaking his head in disbelief.

An hour later my stomach reminds me that all I have had to eat today is a cup o' noodles and I find myself wondering what is for dinner tomorrow.