Zombie Tales: Primrose Court Apt. 502 (3 page)

He lit his Camel and set the pack and
the lighter on the ledge next to him. His entire life had fallen to
pieces in one day. He lost his job, his girlfriend, his drug
dealer, and then found out that the pictures of Johnny C. all over
the apartment might not really be pictures of his father at
all.

Tommy leaned forward and
spat, watching the spit as it curved in the slight breeze and
splattered on the sidewalk five stories below.
It would be that easy
, he
thought.
Just one second of resolve and
all of my problems would disappear, no more worries, no more bills,
no more anything.

Tommy thought about all the time he
wasted listening to Tony Lommi and Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and
Jimi Hendrix. He had purchased an old Fender Strat at the pawn shop
and taught himself some cords. He had strived to be like his
father. Tommy held his hands out in front of him and studied his
sausage fingers. They were not the fingers of a guitar player, more
like the fingers of a drummer.

He took another drag from his cigarette
and tried to think of famous drummers. There was Travis Barker,
Tommy Lee, and Lars Ulrich. He liked Bonzo from Zeppelin, but there
weren’t many from back in the day that he would consider great.
Drummers weren’t known for changing the direction of music like
lead guitar players were.

Tommy finished his cigarette and
flicked it out into the street, not caring who saw or complained.
He took another couple of swallows from his bottle of gut-rot and
lit up again. As he placed the lighter back on top of his pack, he
noticed a police car pull to a stop in front of the
building.

The officer got out of his car and
looked directly up at him. The courtyard below was empty and there
were only a few people moving around on the street, most were
quietly watching the squad car, wondering what was going
on.

“Dispatch, this is Charlie 14,” The cop
said into the radio attached to his shoulder.

“Go ahead, Charlie 14,” the radio
crackled back.

“Do we have an apartment number on that
noise disturbance?”

“Caller said apartment 305,” The radio
replied.

“That’s what I thought. Listen I need
you to get someone from psych down here. I got a guy out on the
ledge of the fifth floor, looks like he’s planning to
jump.”

“Copy that, Charlie 14.”

The cop stepped around his door and
closed it. He approached the building, careful to stay out of the
area where Tommy would splat if he decided to take the
leap.

“Hey, buddy,” the cop called up to him,
“are you alright?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

When he had first crawled out jumping
had been the furthest thing from his mind, but the longer he sat
there staring down, the better the idea seemed. Crawling back
through that window would mean crawling back into the shambles that
his life had become. Tommy didn’t want to go back to that life. He
didn’t want to go back to those problems.

“Listen, buddy,” the cop said,
“whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. Just stay right there. I’m
going to come up and talk to you, alright?”

Again, Tommy didn’t answer.

The cop’s partner got out of the
passenger’s side of the car, “You people need to move back,” he
told an Asian couple that had stopped on the sidewalk below and
were looking up at Tommy with their hands pressed to their eyebrows
to block the sun. “Move along now. Yeah, that’s right, move over
there across the street.”

“I’m coming up,” the first cop said,
holding his hands, palms out, “Don’t move okay, buddy?”

The cop jogged to the front door and
Tommy downed the last of his bottle. Another couple and a bicyclist
had stopped across the street. Tommy watched the second cop open
the trunk and get a roll of crime scene tape out. It only took him
a moment to cordon off the splatter zone. That cop was a
professional.

“Hey,” the first cop said, leaning out
the window a few feet away.

Tommy had known the guy was coming up,
but to have him appear like that startled him. This guy obviously
hadn’t dealt with many jumpers in his time behind the
shield.

“Jesus Christ, man, you trying to give
me a heart attack?” Tommy said.

“Sorry,” the cop told him, then looked
down at the street below, “So…umm… what’s going on,
kid?”

“What’s going on? Is that the best you
got?” Tommy asked, “Don’t you watch TV, you’re supposed to start by
telling me your name and asking what mine is. You’re supposed to
get me talking with a little friendly conversation. If you lead off
with getting me to talk about my problems, I’m way more likely to
take a nose dive.” He held the empty bottle out in front of him
with one hand and spread his fingers wide. The bottle tumbled
through the air and shattered on the hard concrete
below.

“I’m Officer Bradley,” the cop
stammered, “What’s your name?”

“That’s better, but you should’ve told
me your name was Carl or Rick or whatever, it’d help you to make a
more personal connection and start building a level of trust
between us. My name is Tommy.”

“Well, Tommy, my name is Henry,”
Officer Bradley told him, “You seem to know a lot about this, you
been in this situation before?”

Tommy could see in the cops eyes that
he hoped that Tommy had been in this same situation before, the
more times the better. If he had been talked down before, he could
be talked down again.

“No, Rick,” Tommy replied, “this is my
first time. How about you?”

Officer Bradley shrugged.

“Come on, Carl, its okay to say you
never dealt with a jumper before… or better yet, this is your
fifteenth time, but none of them actually jumped. Whatever, you do
tell me, just be sure you keep it all straight; don’t let me catch
you in a lie, that’s a big “no no” when it comes to building
trust.”

“Are you a psych major or something,
Tommy,”

“Naw, nothing like that, I just like to
watch cop shows after I put my mother to bed. I did about a year of
community college, but couldn’t do that and work too.”

“I know how that goes, I was supposed
to have finished law school by now, but I started working longer
hours and missing my night classes, eventually, I just stopped
enrolling in them.”

“There you go, Ricky,
that’s how you do it. I’m already starting to feel like we have a
lot in common. Only, I hope you didn’t call
your
drug dealer this morning and
have your girlfriend answer the phone. That would make me see the
police department in a whole different light, my
friend.”

The whiskey was doing its job on Tommy
now. His cheeks were feeling numb and his words were starting to
slur.

“Dang, sounds like a shitty day,”
Officer Bradley said.

“No no, Carl,” Tommy said, waving his
finger at the cop, “You can’t swear unless I do. If I was a Bible
thumper or something, you would be alienating me and you don’t want
that. I might take the plunge.” Tommy pointed past his dangling
feet at the sidewalk below. Several more people had gathered across
the street. Many were taking pictures with their cell phones,
probably praying he would actually jump so the video would go viral
online or they could sell it to one of the news
stations.

Officer Bradley took a seat on the
window sill and watched as Tommy lit another cigarette.

“You obviously know more about this
stuff than I do, Tommy,” he said, “It probably shows that I’ve
never been in this position before. I’m usually down there doing
crowd control. If you don’t want to talk, I’d understand. I could
just sit here and wait quietly with you until they send a
psychologist down.”

“Oh come on now, Ricky, are you really
going to give up that easy? You have a chance to be a hero here.
You should be telling me all about how I have people who love me
and how hurt they would be if they had to live without
me.”

“Well, would that work? Would that get
you to crawl back inside?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m sure your mother loves you,”
Officer Bradley offered.

“My mother doesn’t know who I am half
the time,” Tommy told him, “The other half the time, I’m Thomas,
but I’m Thomas from fifteen years ago.”

“That’s got to be tough,” the cop said,
“My mom suffered from Old Timers for a few years before she
died.”

Tommy looked at the cop’s face and
tried to focus, “If you’re going to lie to me, Carl, make sure you
know what you’re talking about. It’s pronounced Alzheimer’s; you
would know that if your mother really had it. I bet she’s still
alive living in some retirement home in Florida.”

“They call it a retirement community,”
he confessed, “and it’s Sacramento.”

Tommy huffed and turned to stare off at
the buildings to the south. He could see smoke near downtown and
thought he heard gunshots. When he turned back to confront Officer
Bradley about his ineptitude, the cop was gone.

Down below Tommy saw cop number two
doing his best to keep the crowd on the opposite sidewalk and keep
traffic moving. The crowd had grown over the last few minutes.
There were probably thirty people gathered across the street and
Tommy could see a group of six or eight more working their way down
the block. They must have come from a bar or something, most of
them were staggering and none of them was even bothering to look up
at the jumper on the ledge.

“Hey, Carl, what the hell are you doing
man? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to leave me out here
alone?” Tommy yelled at the window. He could hear the TV; the
DUN-DUN DUM- BREAKING NEWS prompt came on.

“We’re getting reports that
there is a riot taking place on 2
^nd
Street in downtown Seattle,
we’re going to go live to Jim Redgrove in our traffic 4 chopper…
what can you tell us Jim?”

“Well, there is no word yet
what exactly incited the riot,”
Jim yelled
over the sound of helicopter
, “From what
we have seen so far the situation is escalating. We’ve had reports
of several citizens as well as a few officers being attacked. There
is still no word on the condition of the victims, but from what we
can see the responding off… whoa, did you see that back there in
the studio… it appears that Seattle police officer just bit that
little girl…”

“Sorry, Jim we’re having
trouble understanding you here in the channel 4 newsroom, did you
say a police officer
hit
a young girl?”

“Hey, Tommy, I got to go,” Officer
Bradley said, reappearing in the window, “The shrink should be here
any minute.”

“What? You can’t just leave, Carl,”
Tommy said.

There was a scream from down below and
they both looked in time to see the group of drunks join the other
crowd down on the sidewalk. There was another scream and the Asian
lady’s white blouse quickly turned burgundy as a fountain of blood
ran from the gaping wound in her neck. One of the drunks was biting
her.

“What the fuck?” Officer Bradley
whispered.

“Get your hand up!” cop number two
yelled at the woman’s attacker.

Two more people screamed in pain and
the crowd started to break up, everyone running in a different
direction, everyone that is, except for the new group. Most of them
staggered along after the others, reaching. Two of them had the
Asian woman trapped between them. She screamed like an opera
singer, while they tore at her with their teeth.

Officer number two pulled the trigger
and dropped the closer one with a shot to the head. One of the
drunks from the new group, who had wandered away chasing the
runners, had circled back and crept up on the cop from
behind.

“Adam, watch your back!” Officer
Bradley shouted, aiming his gun down at the scene below, but not
daring to take the shot.

Whether Adam heard his partner or not,
Tommy couldn’t say, but he did manage to roll away from the drunk
just as the guy was grabbing him. Cop number two sidestepped and
backed out into the street. He got another shot off, taking the
Asian lady’s second attacker right above the eye.

Officer Bradley ducked back inside and
Tommy could hear him yelling frantically into his shoulder radio as
he raced out of the apartment, “This is Charlie 14, we have shots
fired, I repeat shots fired, multiple suspects, send
backup!”

Tommy lit another cigarette as he watch
a speeding taxi race down the street and sideswipe Officer Adam.
The cop was struck by the side mirror and the hit to the kidney
vaulted him down the road, tumbling him precariously close to the
wheels of the taxi. Finally, cop number two came to rest on the
concrete twenty feet from the drunk who was again staggering
towards him.

Mr. Grimly appeared from the front of
the building carrying two large suitcases. Apparently, he had had
enough of being the husband of a stripper. He seemed not to notice
the fracas going on right in front of him, or maybe he had just
decided it wasn’t any of his business. Officer Bradley nearly
knocked the man to the ground as he charged out of the front door
and took the five steps in one stride. The middle-aged man stumbled
and one of the suitcases tumbled down the stairs. He stumbled down
after it and managed to wrangle it in. Mr. Grimly stepped up to the
trunk of his giant old Lincoln and fumbled with a set of
keys.