Super
Things this far down have felt heat more often than they’ve seen the sun....
Happy Friday, folks.
This one’s a bit outside my usual milieu, but I’m going to skip the preface on this one and let it speak for itself. If anyone knows what genre this is, let me know in the comments, because I’ve had a hell of a time classifying it.
Super
by J. Kyle Turner
At six foot six, the building superintendent shrinks the doorway by virtue of standing in it. He’s built like a hippopotamus, with wide shoulders and a wider gut. The denim hatchweave of his boilersuit strains against muscle and fat, and the veins in his forearms are thick as pipelines. No way is light from the hallway getting in past this bastard.
In his left hand, a black flashlight brims with raw sunlight from the ground level, sixty floors above. Its beam is narrow and focused, just how he likes it. On slow days he carries a flamethrower instead, which isn’t as good. Things this far down have felt heat more often than they’ve seen the sun.
In his right hand, he’s got the broom. Its polished handle is alder, twice-blessed and engraved with ancient runes. There’s a battery pack along the shaft with enough juice to jump start a Humvee. Its flared end has more bristles than you can count: bristles on bristles, all the way down to the microscopic. It exorcises as it sweeps. Banishes as it brushes. Tapping it against the ceiling has been known to kill upstairs neighbors in their beds.
In this line of work, there is no such thing as overkill.
He steps into the room. “Someone called about a spider?”
“In the bedroom,” comes the trembling hiss from the far corner. It’s pitch dark in here, but the super doesn’t dare shine the light. Calderids live on these levels, and they’re sensitive to just about everything until their first molt. Supers have been known to kill kids on accident by flicking a switch.
“How many?” he asks.
“Just one,” says the tenant. “It’s really big, though.”
The super smiles. In his thick gorilla skull, there are floor plans by the hundreds. He tromps off in the direction of the bedroom.
“Stay put,” he says to the corner as he passes. “Be done in just a minute.”
And then it’s just business.
Back in the maintenance office, the super emerges from the chrysalis of his suit. Underneath it is sweat and tattooed skin and the kind of scar tissue you can see in the dark, but nobody bats an eye. This is simply his resume, his list of qualifications on display. They knew what they were hiring when they met him. If he’d been less than this, someone else would’ve gotten the job. He tosses the suit into the corner and reaches for his time card.
“Not so fast,” says the shift supervisor, a mean-eyed drill sergeant by the name of Sheri. “You got a call a minute ago.”
“Christ, Sheri. I just got outta the suit.”
“You won’t need it,” she says. “Third floor job, nice and easy.” She grins at him, and the expression is somewhere between flirty and malicious.
A previous head injury keeps the super from rolling his eyes, but he gives it his best effort. “What, did their hot water go out?”
“Close. Toilet won’t flush.”
The super slides his time card back into the slot and reaches for his tools. “You know, we really oughta unionize.”
“We did unionize.”
“Somebody oughta tell the landlord, then.”
Sheri looks over her desk, past the receptionist, and out across the lobby to the black door marked ‘OFFICE,’ where smoke is currently billowing like fog out of the keyhole. “Who’s gonna tell him? You?”
“Why not me?”
“Don’t do that to me, sweetheart. I don’t wanna hire your replacement.”
The super grabs an auger from the mop room and tugs on a pair of rubber gloves on his way out the door. The third floor is just two floors down, but the service elevator won’t take him there. The top five floors have their own staircase, cut off from the rest of the building. They also have their own plumbing, their own hot water system, their own ventilation, even their own building codes.
But most of all, what the top five floors in any apartment have is money.
They come down here to get away from the pristine noise of the upper city, to walk on the wild side, to slum it up for a weekend. They meet call girls down here, where no one among the upper crust would ever think to look. They come here on vacation, these slick bastards with their tan skin and filtered cigarettes, and they piss away a fortune every month fortune to do it.
But that’s not why the super hates working the top five. At least, it’s not the only reason.
The super hates working the top five because he is, above all else, a specialist. And he gets paid a very specialized salary for risking life and limb in the pursuit of a very specialized career. But when he does janitor work, he gets paid like a janitor. And at five o’clock on a Friday, no less.
He knocks on the door. A man answers.
“You here about the toilet?”
The super lifts the auger.
“Fantastic,” says the guy. “I need to piss.”
The super steps over the threshold, and right away the room is so clean he almost needs to cough. His eyes go blurry as he adjusts to the extra oxygen in the air.
“You all right?” asks the guy.
“Super,” says the super.
The guy is wearing a towel and nothing else, and on his way to the bathroom, the super sees why. The girl might be fifteen or sixteen, pale as a corpse but pretty in spite of it. She’s stretched out on the bed like a cat, but when she sees the super, she tenses up. In that one moment, the super knows her story—born not far from here, in a sublevel just like this one, and the only way she sees the sun is when she’s riding around town with a guy like this, and maybe, just maybe, it won’t be this way forever, but for now it has to be, because that’s how they made the world, all those people she’s never known—and she knows that the super knows, and she hates him for it. She’s got the duvet pulled up to her shoulders, but she pulls it even higher before she rolls over to face the far wall. The super ignores her and gets to work.
“Just about quittin’ time, huh?” says the guy.
He’s leaning against the door jamb of the bathroom, watching the super work. His bare feet are sweaty and covered in carpet lint. The towel is so close to falling that it’s offensive.
“Just about.”
“Any plans this weekend?”
The super turns on the auger. At the far end, the cable snakes out into the pipes, plowing through excrement and wadded tissues and used condoms with cold fury. “No.”
The guy stretches, and the towel exposes another inch of stomach muscle. He yawns. “I’m thinking of taking the girl to see a movie.” He jerks his head in the direction of the bedroom. “You know anything good out?”
Down in the pipes, the auger slams into a blockage and starts twisting it around like a dog worrying a slab of meat. “Couldn’t tell ya,” says the super.
And suddenly the guy notices how terse the super is being, and you can tell he’s playing back the conversation, to see if he’s being made fool of. He rolls his shoulders once, twice. Considers whether or not he should get indignant about it. Cause a scene in front of his girl. Show the help who’s boss.
But when he opens his mouth to say something, there’s a sound like a weight dropping into a shallow bowl, and the water rushes through the pipes.
The super stands up, auger dripping cloudy water all over the floor. He’s so tall his head almost brushes the ceiling. He’s just as wide as the door, with a bull neck and knotted forearms. And the guy gets a dose of something cold from way back in the primal part of his brain, and he slumps his shoulders and leans back against the door frame…
…and smiles, suddenly nervous. “Great!” he says, and lets the super through.
Out in the bedroom, the girl is pretending to be asleep. The guy clutches his towel with a white-knuckled fist on the way to the door. Beneath it, he’s shriveled like a handful of prunes. They get to the door and the guy pauses to take a good look at the name tag on the suit. “Thanks again... Larry.”
The super pauses in the hallway, his hand still on the door frame. “Larry’s dead, pal,” he says over his shoulder. “We reuse the suits.”
A week later. Quitting time. And what a week it’s been.
Monday had him down in the trash chute with a construction grade jackhammer, chipping away at the detritus of half a dozen underworld species in the dark: plastic bottles and wadded up newspapers; glass pipes and steel syringes; the flaking exoskeleton of a Calderid junkie; chitinous skin and discarded bones; filth. All of it fused together, sulfurous, warm to the touch even as it decayed.
Tuesday through Thursday, he served eviction notices down in the Black. Tenants that far down had a tenuous grasp on leasing agreements, but they all respected one rule: if you could stick the paper to the door, they cleared out without another word. Emphasis on if. The super started on the 200th floor and worked his way down. By the time he got to 250, there was less skin on him than there were scars and bruises.
And Friday? Don’t even get him started on Friday.
When the super goes to punch his time card for the week, his hands shake so bad that almost misses the slot. His jaw is all but splintered, his arms cut to ribbons. For a moment, he’s not sure if he can make it down the stairs to his apartment, but he’s sure as hell not sleeping in the lobby, so he fights through it.
With Sheri gone (sick day, flu) the super’s got to hand in all the time cards for the maintenance crew. He stumbles to the door marked OFFICE, which swings open beneath the weight of his knock. Thick, black smoke pours out of the room as the super steps in.
In the corner, the landlord is lying pupate in the sun. Interlocking granite scales lay open, exposing its molten innards. The landlord is something the super has never seen before, not even below the 300th level, and this alone keeps him wary. Six white eyes stare fixedly at the ceiling while the super crosses the room to the massive desk. Asleep, or something like it. It’s been this way for weeks.
The super tosses the time cards onto the desk and turns to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices two things.
The first, a stack of employee insurance claims in one corner of the desk. Innocuous. Boring, even. Notable only in the sense that one folder is thicker than the rest put together.
His, of course.
The second pile is a stack of resumes with photos attached. The super flips through them with his free hand. Some of them even have the same scars he does.
Wordless, the super leaves the office. The door swings closed behind him. On the floor, there’s a stack of time cards, crumpled, almost unrecognizable in the dark.
Slide thirty years back and the super is just a kid in a one-room with his mom, eking out playground space between the narrow corridors of an apartment building built a hundred meters below sunlight. He goes to school via subway, mail orders his comic books with quarters taped to the forms. In his sock drawer, he’s got enough action figures to qualify as a franchise. No boy scouts here; we’re talking lava demons that chew rocks and spit black mortar. His favorite comes with its own wall to crash through, and you can hear the plastic clattering on the floor from across the hall. To him, laser vision seems fun, but dangerous. The notion of flight is as foreign as the moon.
When his mom tucks him in at night, you can tell that she’s exhausted, but since when does an eight-year-old notice? She asks him if he needs a night light, but he tells her that he’s never been afraid of the dark and he means it. She looks down at him, and she can’t help but worry about how thin he is. But when he brushes his teeth, he flexes his muscles in the mirror, and you can almost see something, just there, on the bicep...
Meanwhile, the construction crews tunnel, ever downward.
One day, she thinks she’ll save up enough to move into one of the domes. Get something small—smaller than this, even—and keep a window box by the sink. She could grow herbs in it, or flowers, or grass, or anything. Just something to catch the sunlight and show her something green. At this point, she’d be happy to see mold.
When her son closes his eyes, she kisses his forehead and crosses the room to her bed against the wall. She slides out of her dress for the night and tosses it on the foot of her bed.
And when her breathing starts to slow, you can almost see something, just there, on the lung...
Thirty years forward—in the now part of the story—the super kills time in front of his television. Beer bottles lie like casualties on the floor. A thin haze of something red obscures his vision. There are words for this level of self-destruction, but the super doesn’t know them. He takes a drink.
The bulbs in his room are always on, pounding ultraviolets and vitamins into his pores. There’s a mask on the wall for when he sleeps, but he doesn’t use it anymore. He’s used to the light. In the corner, his air filter chugs on mightily. It’s the best he can afford, but even so, he spits up black phlegm when he coughs.
The trade magazines all talk about supers who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as he does. They offer night courses on words of power, weekly seminars on tackling elder wyrms and lesser dragons. Brooms and dustpans that kill magma spiders in their eggs without even stepping off the lift. Certified Bad Dude Kits with a money-back satisfaction guarantee. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.
And sometimes he thinks about what it would be like. A new broom, a new suit. Maybe a lightning wrench or two just for the hell of it—the kind of ordinance that causes rolling blackouts when you plug it in. He’d get a place in the lower levels and battle demons in the boiler rooms. The air wouldn’t be any better down there, but he could afford better filters, maybe. Better bulbs. Better channels. A better life.
But what it comes down to, in the end, is time. Time, money, and a stack of resumes on a hardwood desk.
Far below, the earth rumbles something indistinct. The bulbs hum an answer as the super falls asleep.
In the morning, he wakes up with the kind of headache you measure in liquid volume. Liters of pain—gallons of it—slosh behind his eyelids as he stumbles into his kitchen. His gums are so loose they bleed when he eats his breakfast. His knees feel like someone stapled them together, and his shoulders pop as he worms his way into the suit. He needs medicine. Better yet, he needs a vacation. But he knows he can’t afford either, so he gets to work.
The lift keys hang in the office on the first floor, bronze and brass and rusted iron, mismatched against the cardboard backing. Next to the key cabinet, there’s a stack of work orders for the day. His vision blurs, focuses on one marked ‘42.’ Geothermals have been acting up on the whole level, boiling tap water in the pipes. Wouldn’t be a problem if the landlord would invest in some fucking ceramics already, but the super’s a cheaper alternative and he knows it.
And suddenly there’s blood boiling up his spinal column and into his hypothalamus, swelling it to the size of a grape. One heavy fist slams into the keys, and they scatter to the ground. Chest heaving, he stands over them. The veins in his neck are pumping magma. The tendons in his jaw might be tectonics, the noise they’re making.
“Something wrong?” The receptionist is standing next to the coffee maker. She looks worried.
The super turns to look at her. Human, but with the kind of all-over tan you never see anymore. Part-time worker, top-fiver for sure. The super spits black phlegm onto the carpet. “Anybody late on rent?”
The tan face pales. “Just a few on 317, but...”
The super grabs the key before she finishes. He pauses at the door of the lift. “When I come back,” he says over his shoulder, “tell the boss I’m looking for a raise.”
The lift door slams closed and he punches the button marked ‘317.’ Beside the rows of buttons there’s a scrap of paper, the top of which reads ‘--rranty’ in faded letters. The bottom corner mentions a date that might have been on his grandfather’s tombstone. As far as the super can tell, it’s the only original part of the machine. The rest is just spit and chicken wire, with protective wards etched into the flat surfaces via blowtorch.
And yet, it creaks slowly downward.
Floor 317 smells like brimstone set out to curdle in the swamp. There’s no music down here, no conversation. Just the steady rumble of the earth grinding against the sheath that encases the building. At one end of the hall stands the super—feet set, shoulders wide. At the other end of the hallway, a door.
The super walks the length of the hallway, his pain receptors in open rebellion. He reaches the door and knocks. It opens, just a crack. A serpentine eye the size of a grapefruit looks him up and down.
“Rent’s due.”
A clear eyelid flicks horizontal over the eye. “You’re not the landlord.” The door closes.
Something like adrenaline lifts the super’s foot and sends it crashing through the door. He steps into the room. Already the equipment at his side is buzzing with anticipation. “No,” he says. “Just the super.”
And then it’s just business.
The beam on his flashlight throttles wide, bathing the room in sunlight. This tenant has guests, half a dozen things the super doesn’t even have names for. Must’ve come in through the sublevels, which means it’s illegal for them to even be on the premises. Hell, as far as he knows, the tenant’s probably subletting the lot of them.
Most of them go up in smoke in the first second. The tenant shrieks, covering his saurian face with a scaled arm. Tables clatter. Someone sends a scorpion tail toward the super’s face, and a casual flick of the broom sends it sailing over his shoulder. Horns glint in the darkness, and he’s pushed against the wall, his arm pinned to his side. The flashlight drops to the floor, spinning wildly.
The super curses, and swings with the broom.
In a closed space like this, the force multiplier on this thing is exponential. Horns go flying into the air, flinging ribbons of gore that sizzle against the walls. His boilersuit is ripped now, but he barely notices the heat creeping into his flesh, cauterizing his cuts. Everything is snarling and snapping and ripping and tearing and spitting acid and flame and Hell itself knows what else, all the time and in every direction, and if the super’s heart beats any faster, he knows it’ll burst through his fucking chest, but it doesn’t matter right now because he’s alive and everything else is dead, and he’s king here, and it’s all heads off but his.
And the room is quiet.
The tenant is cowering under the remnants of a television stand. The super kicks the charred pile aside with a booted foot.
“Rent’s due,” he says, and the tenant nods once. Then he stumbles out the door and back into the lift.
Back on the service elevator, the super’s neck starts to itch. He traces the bare skin with his finger to where the lymph nodes have swollen to the size of golf balls. Within the puckering flesh, he thinks he can feel the scratch that did him in, delivering the poison to his veins. The numbers on the display read 127... 124... 121... and he knows he won’t make it to the top.
His legs give out, and he settles onto the floor of the lift. He checks the battery panel on the flashlight’s side, and there’s just enough sunlight left for something like a cloudy day. He thinks about the last time he saw clouds, and realizes that he can’t remember what they look like, not even in pictures. With a shaking hand, he flicks the flashlight on, and dies with the sunlight on his face.
A hundred floors above, six white eyes flicker open and flare to life.
The sun is gone now—the landlord can only stand its light during a molting trance. Even now it shudders at the thought of those hideous rays, its thick granite plates retracting to cover its exposed vitals.
Another week, maybe two, and the cysts will begin to form along its spine, ready to encase the critical parts of its nervous system during the next molt. And then it’s down into the Black for another dozen years, shifting and squirming in the heat while its body forges itself anew. Its broodmates have already begun their cycles, but the landlord is in no hurry. Its extra time in the sun will save it a year in the fires. Only a hatchling rushes such unpleasant necessities.
With its outer shell reformed, the landlord shifts into place behind its desk. Arrayed in front of it are two stacks of papers. The first, an army of new superintendents: the ones who will carve the way down into the pits. Their scars are numerous and vile, their expressions grim. They’ll protect its softened outer shell during the early stages of the molt, and it will make special dispensations for them in return upon its rebirth.
And in the second stack, the general who will lead them, his mettle already proven.
The landlord leans back in its chair, content for the moment. The trade magazines talk about landlords who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as it does. They offer online courses in expansion strategies and maximizing profit margins. Weekend conferences that promise a three-fold return on your investments every quarter. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.
Sometimes the landlord thinks about what it would be like—the pursuit of profit, that mad subservience to the bottom dollar. It is, after all, a creature of relentless determination and considers itself well-suited to the work. But for now, it’s content to manage what it has and lay its own plans for the future.
Out in the lobby, the service elevator dings as it reaches the top.