“That’s right, Lance,” I chided at the bipedal greyhound donning his official SantaCon hat (with little else), who had served as the bane for our building on more than one occasion. “Uh-oh seems to be a perfect fit for the situation. Do we need to call the police yet again?”

“Come on, dude,” whined the mid-twenties Zoolander, whose dilated pupils reminded me of how fun MDMA could be. “Don’t be such a buzzkill and ruin our Friendmas. We just crushed some beers and cocktails, and we’re playing a little strip poker….”

Rhonda let out a note of exasperation. “Friendmas?!? We just finished Thanksgiving. It’s not even December!”

Lance frumpled his body in an attempted simile of a shrug, taking the hallmark gesture of the lazy to a new benchmark in apathy. “Okay…so we’re just starting a little early this year…”

“Did you think that you might be annoying the living shit out of everyone else on the floor, especially the parents of the sleeping newborns next to you?” I inquired challengingly. “On top of fucking up the hallway?”

Lance rolled his eyes in obvious annoyance at being reminded of common courtesy, pouting his lips and blowing air through them in order to mimic a chatty horse. “I don’t know…it’s just some washable magic marker that’ll come off…”

I never could relate to such people, especially in my troubled youth. In some bizarre way, I had envied them…and still did, to a miniscule extent. While they had been able to experience carpe diem with a cavalier attitude, I couldn’t help tormenting my young self with the thought of my own mortality, involuntarily conjuring symbols of my limited time as an electronic clock counting backwards or an hourglass of sand that ran through my desperately grasping hands. (Contrary to being entirely the product of my imagination, I must confess that the latter was probably an amalgamation inspired by the movies Krull and The Neverending Story. I can’t take full credit.) Recognizing that aspect and other insecurities as my own foibles to overcome, though, I eventually accepted the idea of having a date with death and also learned to swim in a sea of me, no longer yearning for the shore. But other differences were not mine to correct. Then and now, I had taken note of how the notion of entitlement seemed to be spreading much like a wildfire across an intellectually arid landscape, doing just as much damage as those insidious notions known as duty and sacrifice. It increasingly permeated all spheres of society. You could find it in the belligerent shouts of the working class, who raved for an orange-haired Machiavellian and who demanded isolationism as protection for jobs which they apparently now owned. (Though, one could make the argument that by shopping at stores like Walmart for decades, they might have nourished the globalization engine and had reaped what they had sown…but that’s neither here nor there.) And that’s simply one genus of brat to chronicle, for there are many more. In the case of Lance, we had a specimen of the type proles indulgentia. Pampered from birth, they knew only narcissism by being raised in an environment void of criticism and consequences, and they would only grab for flowers that sprouted from sidewalks since they had no patience for thorns, much to the delight of me and Jean-Baptiste Karr.

I made the same sound as Lance, though with more mocking gusto. “Well, maybe you should have, dude. So, either we call the cops and your parents…or you go inside to kill the party and then get some of your crew to clean all of this shit.” I pointed at the writhing nude girl on the ground. “And get Amy inside, before the ecstasy jumpstarts her libido and makes her start humping doorknobs.”

Lance tilted his head back as he pondered my ultimatum, so far back that his Adam’s apple began to protrude through his skin like a gestating alien onboard the Nostromo. Eventually, though, he made his decision and signaled his capitulation with throwing his head forwards, letting it hang there in acquiescing defeat. It had been a mighty struggle of wills within…but with great effort, he had finally come to a decision.

“Okay, dude…you win. I’ll go in and deliver the bad news to my bros. Man, this sucks…” Lance paused as he noticed our stationary stance. “So…you guys are just gonna stand there…?”

I nodded. “Yep. Go ahead. We’ll just be out here. Waiting.”

He shook his head and turned for his door. “Whatever…”

I stood there fuming, hating his parents for leaving me with the responsibility that should have fallen on their shoulders, when Miguel tapped me lightly. Snapping my head in his direction, I spoke a bit too abruptly, not realizing it before it was too late. “Yeah? What?”

A physically rattled Miguel patiently and slowly pointed his finger to a specific spot on the wall, and I followed its given direction to one of the doodles near us. Upon recognition, it was then my turn to raise my eyebrows and feel a subsequent chill run down my spine. There on the wall was a rudimentary sketch of a man in a red suit with a bag over one shoulder. At a momentary glimpse, it could have just been easily mistaken for another sloppy image of Santa Claus, the disappointed patron of Friendmas and Santa Con who probably would have preferred being a martyr instead of bearing witness to later inspirations…but, in this case, his bag of toys appeared to have sprung a leak, dripping large crimson drops beside him. More importantly, the tall elf at his side wore an uniform of blue rather than green, with a toy gun missing the required orange tip.

“Like in the alley,” Miguel whispered, seemingly clairvoyant since he was now reading my thoughts. Yes, my friend, just like what we saw in the security cam.

“Wait!” Lance stopped before entering his unit and turned back to me. I pointed in the direction of the striking images of the diablito and his armed escort. “Tell me. Who drew that?”

“Don’t worry, dude. We’ll get rid of it…”

“Did you draw that?” I don’t know why I even bothered asking that. It’s not possible that such a dolt could be the key to unlocking some dark mystery. I apologize, Lance. That was my bad.

“Me? I don’t think so…”

“Is that person still here?” I inquired, not hesitating to interrupt him. Even though my temper had eventually dissipated, my falling temperature began to rise yet again with my accelerating pulse.

“Maybe…why do you want to know?”

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.