CHAPTER NINE
Linda Carson wasn’t exactly pleased that she was now approaching unit ten to figure out what exactly had died and left the place smelling like a rotten sewer that was now growing some unique species of jackfruit genetically engineered to smell even worse than regular Durian.
Bobby in unit twenty directly above ten had a point though. Good Lord, this place reeked.
For the five hundredth time (give or take) Linda Carson asked herself why she had taken the job as manager of the New Acres Apartment Complex. First of all, New Acres was barely “acres”, and you had to include the easement behind the complex to push it over the two-acre mark.
Second of all, she was the manager of an apartment complex.
That meant that she had to deal with every single complaint brought forward by all one hundred fifty tenants in sixty units in a forty-year-old building that spent its first sixteen years as a motel run by a particularly run-down branch of the Boston Mafia.
That meant that when Westmoreland Property Management purchased the property, the smell of cocaine, marijuana, and prostitution was literally baked into the walls.
So, what exactly did these tenants expect?
This was aside from the fact that half of them would be a week late with their rent and five or six just wouldn’t pay it.
There would be a reminder, a warning, a notice, a final notice, a notice of adverse action, an eviction notice, and then a thirty-day eviction order.
Then, probably four or five months after the rent was due to be paid, the police would finally show up to find the place trashed and abandoned.
Linda would get chewed out by her boss, remind him that legally, there wasn’t jackshit she could do about it, get grumbled at by her boss, and then released to repeat the cycle.
Another month, another dollar. Before taxes.
Linda took a deep breath and knocked on the door. It occurred to her that choosing not to breathe was a short-term strategy unlikely to pay off in the long run, so she exhaled and resigned herself to inhaling Satan’s most rotten farts for a little while.
“Jesus Christ, Thomas.”
The tenant in ten, Thomas Webb, was the longest-tenured resident save for a seventy-five-year-old retiree named Dolores who’d lived in this complex since the day it opened and was rumored to have been the girlfriend of one of the mafia bosses who owned the place previously.
Other rumors suggested she ran a brothel out of this place back when it was a motel, but that was information Linda filed in Shit I Don’t Care About somewhere between the name of Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend and the origin of the word malaise.
Thomas was also, oddly enough, the resident who ordinarily gave her the least trouble.
Rent paid on the first of every month through the online app, no complaints or work orders of any kind, never had visitors, kept his 2009 Volkswagen Jetta in his own parking spot and never anywhere else, and didn’t interact with his neighbors enough to have friends or enemies.
Except now he’d gone and…
Linda’s hand paused over the door. Why did it smell so bad in here.
A powerful urge to not find out gripped her. Excuses raced through her mind: not my business (it was), he promised he’d clean up (he hadn’t), just get over it, Bobby (if she had to live above this, she wouldn’t get over it either).
The rebuttals came right on top of the excuses, so Linda took another deep breath, promised herself she’d find another job (she wouldn’t), and knocked on the door.
“Tommy? It’s Linda. The manager.”
There was no answer. Linda sighed and rubbed her temples. “Tommy, we’re receiving complaints about an odor. Can you come talk to me please?”
No answer.
“Oh God, don’t make me go in there,” she said to herself.
But Thomas didn’t answer, and deep down, Linda knew she’d have to go in there. Someone did, and if she found what she was starting to expect she would find, she’d have to call nine-one-one and let them take care of it.
Please let me be wrong. God, please let me be wrong.
“Okay, Tommy,” she called, voice starting to waver. “I’m coming in. If you’re indecent, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”
No answer.
Linda fumbled with the key. It took three tries, but she finally managed to push it into the lock and turn it.
She pushed open the door, and it swung open with a soft creak.
The smell hit her, rich, sweet, pungent, fungal.
She gasped and staggered backwards, head literally swimming.
For a moment, she genuinely expected to pass out and grasped weakly at the rail behind her.
She breathed through her mouth but imagined (she really hoped it was her imagination) that she could taste the smell, so she closed it and endured the assault on her olfactory nerves.
The smell had drifted up to twenty, and Bobby Martin stepped outside, muttering curses. “What in God’s name is going…” He paused when he saw Linda. “Linda, what the hell is going on? What on Earth is that smell?”
Linda swallowed. She couldn’t find a way to answer Bobby. She walked into the house, head swimming, though she wasn’t sure anymore if it was the smell or the knowledge, still simmering beneath the surface, of exactly what that smell was.
The living room was a mess. Styrofoam packing peanuts were scattered across the floor.
A service animal vest sat halfway out of a box that she assumed contained more of the same.
The television was off, and a liberal coat of dust decorated the screen.
The couch was an ancient cloth model, torn, scuffed, stained, and unappealing.
A computer screen on the opposite side of the room was also off though a red light blinked at the bottom indicating the machine was still receiving power.
A foot stuck out from behind the couch, and Linda’s knees knocked together twice, a sharp rap-rap that had the twin effect of snapping her to alertness and assuring her that this wasn’t a dream.
She was really looking at Thomas Webb’s foot, and if it smelled this bad, and he hadn’t answered when she knocked, then he was dead.
“Oh, Christ,” she muttered, grabbing the back of the couch for support.
She’d never seen a dead body before, not in person. She’d watched that YouTube video that got those kids in trouble years ago, but that was the closest she’d ever come to actually seeing a dead body.
“Linda?” Bobby called from a comfortable distance outside. “You okay in there?”
“Fine,” Linda lied.
Just get this over with. It’s going to be unpleasant, but you’ll get through it.
She stepped forward, three stiff, long strides.
She looked down.
She realized with shocking calm that this was going to be far beyond unpleasant, and she was unlikely to ever get through it.
Then she gave into the horror.
In the end, Bobby Martin called the police, about a minute after half-dragging a shrieking, incoherent Linda from the apartment. His own voice was barely intelligible as he explained to the officer that his downstairs neighbor had been torn to shreds by something and then left to literally rot.