Zombie Tales: Primrose Court Apt. 502

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ZOMBIE TALES

PRIMROSE COURT

APT. 502

By

Robert DeCoteau

A

ZOMBIE TALES
PRESS

Publication

APT. 502

Tommy slammed the door behind him with
a hard thrust. He tossed his backpack on the floor next to the
broken down, coat rack that his mother had forced him to haul home
from a garage sale years before. The thing was chipped and dented,
two of the four hanging pegs were missing, and it canted to the
side like a drunken sailor, leaning against the wall for
support.

“Mom, it’s all busted up,” Tommy had
told her.

“I know Thomas, but that is part of its
charm,” she had replied with a little smile, never taking her eyes
off the ancient varnish.

He should have seen it then. All the
early warning signs were there. Tommy hadn’t realized it at the
time, but his mother had been slowly slipping away from reality,
even back then. What sane person buys a busted up coat rack for ten
dollars and then makes an eleven year old kid lug it fifteen blocks
and five stories up to prop it in the corner?

“Is that you, Thomas?” his mother
called from the living room.

“Yeah, Ma,” Tommy yelled on his way to
his bedroom. He knew if he didn’t answer, she would just keep
asking. She would slip into a loop, like a broken
record.

Is that you,
Thomas?

Thomas, is that
you?

Thomas?

Is that you,
Thomas?

Thomas, is that
you?

Thomas?

Tommy kicked off his Giovanni dress
shoes, letting them sail into the closet to be lost in the pile of
miscellaneous junk there. He yanked off his pale blue, Comdex work
shirt and added that to the pile as well. He wouldn’t need that
shirt anymore. He wouldn’t ever need that shirt again, fuck
Julio.

“We need to talk,” Julio had told him
that morning.

Tommy had followed his boss into the
little closet sized office next to the sorting room.

“Close the door,” Julio had said,
moving around the rickety desk and planting his ass in a worn
office chair.

Tommy had been forced to stand. There
wasn’t room for another chair in the little office. Tommy tried not
to breathe in the awful stench of cologne, hair gel, and body odor.
He let his eyes wander the room, pretending to be interested in the
décor so he wouldn’t have to look his boss in the eyes.

“We got the results of your UA back,”
Julio had stated with a smirk.

Julio had always hated
Tommy, since his first day in the mailroom nine months earlier;
Julio had been looking for any reason to can him. His boss had
developed a reputation as a ladies’ man and it was common knowledge
that he only kept enough men on the mailroom staff to keep the
Comdex mail moving. The rest of the employees were attractive,
young women. Julio worked diligently to get each one of those women
on
his
staff. If
a girl was willing to put out occasionally, she could glide through
the work week in the pharmaceutical company mailroom without
licking so much as a single stamp.

“The results were positive for THC,”
Julio had said, leaning back in his chair, “You a stoner,
Tom?

“No, sir,” Tommy had replied, he had
been anticipating this moment and had prepared a response in
advance, but all that had gone out the window, “It’s my mom. She’s
real sick, she has a prescription card.”

Tommy pulled out his wallet and began
to shuffle through it.

“Look, Tom,” Julio leaned forward and
laced his fingers together. “Comdex has a very strict no tolerance
policy. You can claim whatever you like, but the fact of the matter
is, you tested positive for drugs and that means I get to issue you
your walking papers.”

“I’m not a pothead, Mr. Garcia,” Tommy
had protested, he hated the job, but he needed the paycheck, “My
mother has medical issues and needs it for pain.”

“Turn your ID badge into Barry at the
security desk,” Julio had instructed, rising from his chair, “We
will send your last check to the address we have on file. After you
leave here this morning, you are not allowed back on the premises,
understand?”

All Tommy could do was nod.

Tommy pulled his black, Nirvana
tee-shirt over his head and pulled his hair tie out. He flipped his
head around until his stringy, black hair hung loosely over his
shoulders. Tommy stomped across the room and punched the wall next
to his vintage Black Sabbath poster. His fist went through the
drywall with a dull thud and he growled like a rabid pit bull on a
playground.

Julio was such a smarmy piece of shit.
Who did he think he was, using the mailroom as his own personal
meat market? Fuck him.

Fuck Barry too. That fat bastard had
been a prick from the beginning, eyeballing Tommy every morning
like he was a drug dealer or mass murderer or something, always
inspecting his ID badge intently like he had never seen it before.
Well, Barry had the ID now and he could shove it up his ass for all
Tommy cared.

Tommy pulled his fist out of the wall
and inspected the damage; he would have to rearrange his posters
again, before the next property management inspection. Tommy shook
his head and plodded off towards the kitchen.

“Thomas, there’s lunch on the stove,”
his mother told him as he crossed through the living room, “I know
you don’t like tomato soup, but it goes so well with grilled
cheese. If you eat it all, I’ll give you a treat.”

It was 9:53 according to
the clock next to the microwave; too early for lunch. Tommy could
hear Neil Patrick Harris trading witty banter with Kelly Ripa on
his mother’s old Zenith. Regis was gone now, why they hadn’t
changed the name yet Tommy couldn’t say. If they planned to keep
the name, they might as well change it back to
Regis and Cathy Lee
.

There was no lunch on the stove, Tommy
knew. The old bat was living in some obscure day in the distant
past. There couldn’t be lunch waiting for him because, before he
had left the apartment that morning, he had pulled the stove out
and jerked the large, three prong plug from the wall. In her state
of mind, she couldn’t be trusted to use the stove, the oven, or
even the microwave.

Tommy couldn’t remember a time when she
had actually made him tomato soup and grilled cheese, but it must
have been an important day for his mother, she re-lived it about
three days a week. Usually she informed him of the meal when he was
helping her into her nightgown or getting her bath
ready.

Tommy kicked his stepping stool across
the linoleum floor. He slid it up against the fridge with one foot
and stood up on his toes to reach the cupboard above the
refrigerator. He found his little cigar box with his finger tips
and pulled it down. After transferring it to his free hand, he
carefully extracted his bong.

At the small kitchen table,
Tommy flipped open the box and began to sort through its contents.
Under the Zig-Zag rolling papers, he found his three small
roaches.
Not nearly
enough
, he thought,
I’ll have to get Grinder to front me some
more
.

Tommy jammed the little, scorched
leftovers into the bowl of his water pipe and sparked up his Bic.
His bong gargled and he sucked in the sweet smoke, holding it until
his face was red and he thought his eyes might pop.

Celie, from
The Color Purple
, was
spewing her gibberish in a deep baritone from the Zenith.
The View
was next in his
mother’s daytime programming.

Tommy exhaled with a huffing cough and
leaned back in the tattered, vinyl covered chair. He huffed again
and used a toothpick to poke at the ashes in the bowl, it was
spent.

“You shouldn’t smoke in the house,
John,” his mother said from the recliner parked in front of the TV,
“we have the baby now. It’s not good for the baby.”

John was the piece of crap, junky,
guitar player who had knocked Tommy’s mother up. He had skipped
town with his band when Tommy was three. John C. Taylor thought
that one day he would make it big and play for sold out crowds. In
the tradition of all the Rock and Roll legends, he delved deep into
drugs, looking for his inspiration and his own unique
sound.

The problem was, Johnny C. was far
better at cooking a hit of heroin and finding a vein that he ever
had been at strumming his guitar. Someone finally found him
overdosed in a stall of a rest area men’s room. The medical
examiner said he had been dead for two days. The police found the
rest of his band three towns over, in a dive motel room. They were
brought in for questioning, but no charges were ever
filed.

Tommy stared at the bong sitting on the
table in front of him and waited for the effects of the weed to
kick in. One hit just wasn’t going to do it. He thought about
scraping the resin from his pipe and the stem of the bong, but knew
he wouldn’t get enough out of them for more than one more
toke.

Iris hated that he got high
every day, but she put up with it because he was a decent guy and a
good boyfriend. He held down a job and that was more than any of
her other boyfriends had ever accomplished. Well, he
had
held down a job
anyway.

Iris was fond of saying that they were
like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a happy couple with the world by
the balls, showing up at parties like they owned the place and
rubbing their happiness in the faces of all those losers who would
never find love. He didn’t know how he was going to break it to
Iris that he was unemployed again.

Tommy wasn’t high. The three roaches
hadn’t even been enough to make him a little fuzzy. He looked up at
the clock again, 10:14. Grinder would throw a fit if he called this
early. Selling a twenty sack wasn’t nearly a good enough reason for
the drug dealer to get out of bed before noon. Still, Tommy needed
to take the edge off if he was going to have to face Iris later.
Maybe he would wait a while.

“Did you finish your soup, Thomas?” his
mother asked.

“Yeah, Ma, it was good,” Tommy replied
absently.

“Good boy, now you can have your treat.
Go ahead and get yourself two cookies from the jar on the
counter.”

There hadn’t been a cookie jar on the
counter for about ten years; not since Tommy had dropped it during
a late night foray with a serious case of the munchies.

“Thanks, Ma,” Tommy said, fished his
pack of Camel Lights from his pocket and crossing to the living
room window. Flipping the top open he saw that there were only
seven left, he would have to remember to grab a pack later when he
went to see Grinder.

He produced a small key from his pocket
and worked the Master lock holding the window closed. He wasn’t
worried about his mother jumping. She was crazy as a loon, but she
wasn’t suicidal; she just liked to set her house plants out in the
sunlight when it managed to break through the dreary Seattle
clouds. Every now and then, one of the large pots would plummet
five stories to the concrete courtyard below. Once she missed
hitting another of the tenants by inches.