Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig Page B

way as a black kid pedals by on a BMX bike. Cason almost falls into a gum tree—literally, a tree spackled with hundreds if not thousands of smooshed pieces of gum. Couple tourists—white girls with too big sunglasses, sunglasses that make them look like old women or praying mantises or something—hurry past. Again, he’s reminded: You need to get your reflexes back, old man. That kid almost cut you off at the knees and those skinny girls’ elbows are sharp enough to make you bleed.
    It’s then Cason sees that to the left of the food counter is a plain door. No address or number listed. Maybe the guy lives upstairs. Two more stories above the restaurants. Probably full of apartments. Hell, Cason’s first apartment of his own town was above a bar. A bar that played loud shitty pop music till two o’clock in the morning.
    Fine. To the door, then.
    He tries opening it, but isn’t surprised to find it locked.
    Sure enough, a list of apartments—the labels all faded.
    He runs his finger down all the buzzer buttons, mumbles something into the speaker. The door clicks . Bingo.
     
     
    T HESE ARE NOT nice apartments.
    In the stairwell, Cason finds a grungy Schnauzer eating fast food out of a Burger King bag, chasing flies away with his tail. At a door on the second floor, he hears someone wailing and someone weeping—they call to mind the sounds you might hear at an old asylum, with madmen and women screaming at invisible intruders.
    By the numbers, the apartment Cason’s looking for is on the third floor.
    Up to it, then.
    First door on the right has an Asian girl in a leopard-print top and a zebra-print skirt pounding on it. She’s not using her hand to pound on it, though—she’s using the bottom of a bottle of Asti Spumante. She’s yelling, “Hey! You Jew! Open up! I want to celebrate with you! I got the job!” Thump thump thump . “Jew!”
    As Cason ekes past, she shoots him a look, her eyes daggers. “What are you looking at, asshole?”
    He just shakes his head and keeps walking.
    Door he’s looking for is right around a bend. Last door in the hallway.
    Apartment 313.
    Down the hall, the echoing thumps of the bottle on the door. (“Jew! Open up!”)
    Cason’s not really sure what his next move should be. What the hell was he thinking? Guy’s got a maimed face and a penchant for blowing things up with his own special brand of shrapnel panache, and Cason’s going to just—what? Knock on the door?
    Fuck it. He knocks on the door.
    Nothing.
    ( Thump thump thump, “Jew! Job! I want sex!” )
    And that ends Cason’s one and only plan.
    Well—he’s got one more item on the menu, a back-up plan that has no chance of working, because in this town, who leaves their doors unlocked?
    He tries the doorknob. The door squeaks open.
    No shit.
     
     
    L IGHT FILTERS THROUGH gauzy, tobacco-stained curtains. In the beams whirl an endless dance of dust motes and cat hairs. Cason doesn’t actually see a cat, but he smells it—the ammonia stink of spent kitty litter.
    The apartment isn’t much to look at, size-wise. One room with a kitchen and a bathroom glommed onto it. The guy’s bed is a rumpled pull-out couch, covered with the remnants of various snack foods: broken tortilla chips, Cheeto dust, M&Ms laying strewn about like the cracked, chipped teeth of a colorful clown.
    Makes Tundu’s place look like the Taj Mahal.
    What matters, though, are the walls. Or rather, what’s on them.
    Cason thinks: So he’s a tinfoil-hat type .
    All across the walls are photos, newspaper clippings, print-outs, documents, and more, all stuck to the wall with little thin carpenter nails. He begins scanning the walls—there, a blurry photo of a woman in blue walking in a wheat field. Here, an article about a man struck by lightning in his own house. Articles about bank failures and 9/11 and the Spanish Flu of 1918. Wikipedia articles covering a weird array of topics: triremes, Viking axes, volcanoes, Homeric epics, Nazi