I was the one that found Jacob dead. Tucked in the corner of the parking garage his pest control truck laying idle. There is a steady humming sound in that garage from the rotating metal fans on 24/7.The Middle of summer in Virginia where the humid air makes your shirt stick to your chest helped the reason for that steady hum. Walking closer to the truck I saw his chem box[a box where we put all chemicals in for safe keeping] was open with the top flap sticking straight up.
I thought nothing weird about it because this building where we stay, it’s not just us in this company that live there. For the summer the company buys out dozens of rooms for the employees to stay. Most employees are door to door salesmen who make a living selling pest control as a same day service. Where Jacob and I and a few others come into play is after the sale. the ones who actually spray your house, the ones who click the rap traps back shut with the delicious neon blue food for the rats to nibble on and bring back to their newborns to share. We had 8-10 trucks in this parking garage and from time to time chem went missing. Sometimes us technicians didn’t want to wake up early and drive 30 minutes to the office to pick up materials, so we would steal off other trucks, every man for him self. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t steal a de weber every now and then off a truck, but I always made no trace of the thievery. I can’t speak for everyone though. So when that lid was pointing up to the rusty pipes and concrete ceiling above I wasn’t surprised, hell I might have even had a smirk on my face.
I slapped the box closed and gave the window a knock to see if he would turn around. Silence. I got closer to see if he was glued to a new series on a streaming service and didn’t hear me or he didn’t bother looking. I put my hands up on the window and smushed my eyebrows against my index fingers to get a better look. I saw the seat was fully reclined back, him laying there, still. I knocked on the smaller back door that swiveled when you opened it because it was closer to his face. Tap tap TAP. No movement. It was too dark to see so I dug my hand in my pocket to get my phone torch out and put it flush to the back airplane shaped window. That’s when I saw this face….. swollen, skin a purple hue, eyes bulging red, His Jaw open with dark fluid sitting in his mouth, streaks of the darkness rolling down his purple swollen face and met the back of his neck, dribbling down his hair onto the head rest. “JACOB” I yelled over and over with my fists slamming against the windows. In his lap the fingers of Jacobs curled around a bromadiolone chemical bottle, cap off and the liquid color matching that of what was in his mouth…
4 months passed
I’m making this entry now because i’m moving out of the building where I found jacob. I’ve wanted to get out of this building since it happened, but didn’t have the financial backing. Now I plan to stay in Virginia for the winter and move in with roommates from the pest control company. The salesmen call this time their “off season” due to them all leaving and going back home, most to Las Vegas.
I and my other two roommates run the regular routes of stopping at 14-15 designated houses a day, spraying chemicals and setting traps to take care of the contracts they sell. I used to share a room with jacob. All of his things were taken out either by investigators or the maid service. The other roommates in the building told me to combine the abandoned twin bed with mine to make a bigger bed for comfort, but I never touched his for the remaining months.
I’m making this entry due to the fact I found something. Something I believe was very close to Jacob. While on the last days of moving everything out of the building to transport to my new home, moving my mattress lazily with the sheet still on I lost grip and it hit his mattress sliding it off the box spring and hitting the wall. I let go of my mattress to fix Jacobs and found a slit in the box spring. I hesitated, staring at the unnatural slash in the cloth, Thinking about when Jacob and I would hold back our tears of laughter when the boss yelled at us not tucking our shirts in as his was flailing down covering his belt. a smile slowly disappeared from my face as I was brought back to reality with my whole forearm now in the slit of the box spring. My fingers clutched an object I thought felt like a book. I pulled it out and found a notebook. My eyes widened as I sat down on my mattress half on the ground and the other half hanging on my box spring. I flipped page after page reading Jacob’s writings about days of killing bugs and missing home till I got to the page. in big letters he had wrote “THE LADY IN THE BASEMENT IS THE REASON WHY I AM DEAD” I was stuck reading the words again and again thinking I was seeing things. There was a arrowing pointing toward the right of the page wanting the reader to flip it, so I did. For the next foreseeable pages he wrote why…. And I clinging to every word …began to read.