The apartment was completely silent by this point. All I could hear was some kind of dull tubal thumping from inside the place, that same dull bass noise I heard earlier. Remembering my crack training at counterstrike, instead of going further in, I limped over to the kitchen area and flung shit around to make sure that nobody was hiding under the newspapers. I could see that he had gotten a lot more crap since the last time I was here. There were mason jars of urine in the kitchen, along with gallon jugs of the stuff. There were a lot of things he had obviously stolen from longs drugs. There was a crate of sour patch kids all over the place. On one wall was a poster of homer simpson naked drinking beer, and a bunch of knives had been stabbed into it. I was too angered and pumped up to be frightened. I opened the refridgerator and stomped the shelves apart while I was at it, just to be sure he wasn’t hiding in there.
I had a huge floodlight but it couldn’t illuminate everything all the time, especially with the dank murk of mold spores and the smoke, so I ended up trying to shine it everywhere at once as I proceeded. The common closet was closed, so I kicked that in and swung my wrench into the dark area within. I hit something soft so I kept pounding at it, but it wasn’t human. It was a trash bag full of something soft and yielding. I gave it a kick and moved on.
I ripped the doorway off of the hall closet and swung my wrench inside, but I only hit a few canned goods in there.
I could hear high pitched shrieks coming from the interior of his room. His hallway was pretty fucking well blocked with shit, so I started grabbing things and chucking them into the common room. He had a gigantic stuffed pluto doll, about as big as a gorilla, which I chucked. Among the other things I hurled was a futon I recognized as salvaged from the end of our block, some patio furniture, a bag full of mcdonalds playpen balls, and something which was big, black, disgusting, soft, covered in growht, which I cannot, even to this day, identify.
I crawled through the remaining debris with the wrench in front of me.
…
This is embarassing, but I forgot to mention. As I was hurling stuff, I had my wrench in my hand still, and so I hit myself in the face with it. It required some stitches, and, since I had hit the trashbag full of feces with the wrench, it got infected.
So to tally it up, we have one broken foot, one twisted ankle, one gouged and splintered shin, and one bleedingassed face.
So anyway, I am crawling through the hole I’ve made in the blockaded hallway. I finally realize why he has been making so much noise. The fucker has made some kind of evil fortress. If my room is the fortress of light, his is the fortress of evil. And feces.
I crawl through the hole and pop out in his room. My strategy when playing doom 3, when I knew something bad was about to happen in a room I dropped into, was to run around like crazy in the dark and fling grenades. Well, instead of doing the slick commando thing and dropping into a crouch and assessing the situation, I popped out of that hallway barricade with my wrench and flashlight, and ran like crazy into the pitch black room, swinging around at anything and everything. I connected with some stuff but nothing human. My foot failed me and I fell over and crawled like mad to a corner. I dove for my flashlight, picked it up, and assessed the room.
This place was full of fucking hostess products. The guy must have stolen at least two crates worth of the damn things. They were still in their wrapping. Twinkies, hostess cupcakes, all kinds of stuff. There was nobody in the room, but there was blood all over the place. I could hear that strange bass ressonance from inside the bathroom. There was actually a light coming from there, it was rosy red, coming from a crack in the bathroom door.
I’m splicing this in because I was a lazy fucker and failed to describe the guy’s room:
Martin Random came out of the closet to say:
…the very air in Jed’s room was absolutely thick with mold and smoke, which I couldn’t smell from the vix, but it still stung my eyes anyway. He had smeared all kinds of crazy gibberish on the walls with what looked like red lipstick, and the walls themselves were absolutely covered in growth. The barricades in the hallway must’ve been there for a while, because they essentially kept a lot of moisture in the air in Jed’s back section.
Also, I forgot to mention this as well, but as I was running like a sissy through Jed’s room, I knocked into his mattress which he had leaned against the side door a few weeks prior (my estimate). The mattress was completely soaked and very heavy, and the instant it hit me I thought I had fallen into an insidious trap or something, so I further injured myself by trying to struggle out from underneath it. Jed was making these freaky noises the moment I burst into his room, but the echo chamber effect of the bathroom and ventillation system, and the strange nature of the noises, made it difficult to determine where the hell they were coming from. Also, there were tons of boxes of hostess cupcakes and other similar products.
The carpets in his room were really rank. The previous water leak had made them dank with mold, and I can only imagine what the high fecal content of the air did. It was difficult to breathe, and nearly impossible to see, which really added to my panic. It was almost like I had been buried alive. The scrawlings on the wall, though I didn’t really get to see them in much detail because I was far more concerned with other things at the time, were just… creepy. The vibrations made me think for a second or two that he had tunnelled under the apartment and I’d have to go into some kind of underground basement he’d made.
Edit: Scrawlings on the wall from what I saw consisted of nonsense latin words, tons of triangles within triangles within triangles trailing all over the place, and a few goatsatan faces made of triangles.
I got to my feet and regained my composure. I stomped over the hostess cupcakes and other misc crap he had lying on the ground. I would limp every time I remembered I had a hurt foot, but really, by this time, I didn’t give a shit about the pain. I heard the shrieking from inside the bathroom, like some kind of high pitched wailing, and the strange bass resonance. I kicked open the bathroom door and screamed at the top of my lungs,
“YOU FUCKING FUCK SHIT”
I wasn’t in the right mind to come up with awesome catch phrases, so let’s pretend I screamed something bannable like, “The juice is loose!”
I stomped into the bathroom and was immediately PHYSICALLY STRUCK by the most powerful odor I have ever, ever encountered. My nose was pretty vixed up, but somehow, my eyeballs felt like they could smell the odor. I swung my wrench before I really looked to see what was going on and totalled what was left of the sink. In the corner of the bath tub I saw Jed writhing around with a golden metallic object in the shit lasagna. He was freaking out and screaming. The other thing I noticed was the fire. In the remains of the toilet tank was a bunch of flaming papers, right next to a can of paint thinner. I figured that Jeb threw in the thinner thinking it would burst into flames, but he neglected to uncap the thing. So I grabbed the can of paint thinner and in one swift motion clocked Jeb in the head with it. He started freaking out even more, and at this point I could see that the object he was writhing with in the tub was a saxophone. He seemed to be bleeding all over his head but it was hard to tell because of the shit smeared everywhere, coming out onto the floor. The lightbulb was covered in either nail polish or blood.
I backed out of the room and grabbed a jug of urine, and threw it at the fire. Remembering I should probably uncap the jug before using it to extinguish flames, I grabbed another one and actually poured it out. By this time Jeb was trying to get out of the bath tub, so I stomped at him with my boot, closed the bathroom door,and jammed the fuck out of there after one final check for any hostages in the bedroom.
Then I got the fuck out of there, rammed the exterior door with a patio table, and called the cops, the fire department, an ambulance, and, after getting back into my place and looking up the number, the landlord.
There. Done.
Oh, and aftermath, there was some court action for back rent, but all said and done they couldn’t prove I was witholding rent because I paid Jed with cash on the barrel head, and I ended up actually getting paid money to stay there in the long run. I still have Jed’s things to this day and to my knowledge he is in a nutbarn or something.