“What have you got, Sherlock?” I asked in a slightly mocking tone.
Lawrence walked back toward the bedroom, looking at the floor as he went. After a few steps, he turned back to me. “It seems pretty clear that this one,” he nodded toward the body. “could not walk and crawled out here to the door. There’s no blood, but you can make out smudge marks on the floor as if someone dragged herself.” For the first time, I noticed the marks on the tile floor. “The wheelchair would be hers, and my guess is that whoever cleaned and took care of her didn’t show up for the last few days. That’s why she isn’t dressed.”
“Very impressive,” I commented. “So what do you suppose killed her… it?”
“That’s the most important question, isn’t it?” He asked and got that faraway look in his eyes again. “A few days shouldn’t have been long enough for her to die of starvation.” He looked around the room as if looking for something in particular. “I wonder how long since she had water. Little known fact, the human body can go without food for at least three weeks before it basically starts to eat itself, starting with the muscle.” He paused to check if I was listening and found me concentrating on his words like a good student. “Anyway, the thing that kills people faster than hunger is thirst. After only about five or six days, the body starts stealing water from organs and shutting down important functions.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’s been long enough for either of them to kill this one,” I said. “But we can’t really be certain that the shells have the same biology as us, can we?”
“No, I guess we can’t, but they can’t be too far off. I mean, they were human a couple of days ago. Couldn’t have changed too much.” He continued staring at the body with an expression of frustration on his face.
He kneeled down next to the body and slowly turned it over. The sound of the dead flesh slapping the tile almost made me gag. Lawrence stayed so absorbed by what he was doing that he did not notice my reaction. The detective did not move for nearly a minute. Then his head tilted a little to the right, and he reached out to open the mouth. Clearly, the mouth did not open as easily as he had anticipated, and he put his other hand over to push down on the forehead at the same time he pushed down on the chin. There was a distinct pop sound as the mouth came open. The big cop smiled.
“Okay, are you going to check for cavities?” I asked.
He shook his head and said, “No, I want to find out if she ate anything. I mean it’s possible she did die from starvation. I don’t notice a bunch of medicine around here like for her heart or any-thing.”
Once again, the detective’s observation skills impressed me. I had not even thought to check for the presence. Suddenly, the mention of medicine brought a thought to me, and I suddenly found myself rushing to the kitchen and yanking open the door of the refrigerator.
On the shelf inside the door, I found what I was seeking. I found a half-empty bottle of cough syrup. I lifted it off of the shelf and could feel the stickiness of the fluid on the side of the bottle as well as catch its strong sweet cherry odor.
“Looks like might have been okay, but she had a cold,” I said, holding the bottle up to show Lawrence and being pretty pleased with my own powers of deduction.
“Could be, but who knows how long that’s been in the fridge.”
Lawrence’s words knocked the self-satisfaction right out of me. Of course, he was right. Simply knowing about a bottle of cough syrup in the refrigerator did not tell us whether it had been used.
He looked at me for a moment, but I could tell his focus had gone somewhere other than me. An instant later, he opened the dishwasher and peered inside.
“Luckily, the lady of the house didn’t run the dishwasher for the last couple of days.” He pulled out the lower rack out and lifted the white plastic utensil basket.
Spoons, forks, and knives stuck out from the basket. The detective studied them carefully.
Finally, I could not stand it anymore and said, “I did not realize what an aficionado of flatware you are. But don’t we have more important things to do?”
Lawrence glanced back over at me as if he had forgotten that I was in the room. “Well, I figured it might be kinda important to know what killed her.” He looked at me nodding before continuing, “It looks pretty obvious that the lady had someone who came to take care of her, and that that person hasn’t been here for a few days.” He paused while he took a couple of spoons out of the basket and sniffed each of them. The big man smiled and said, “What’s that smell like to you?”
I moved closer to sniff the spoon that he held out to me. I easily caught the distinct odor of sweet cherry.
“Looks like you were right the first time. She had a cold, but who dies from a cold?”
“I think we’ve both seen enough to know that this isn’t any kind of cold like were used to,” I said, acting overly confident once again like I was some kind of expert on the illness. “But we still don’t know what killed her.”
“What if she died from the cold?” Lawrence asked.
I considered his question for a few seconds before answering, “Sure would make things easier, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re not buying it though,” he sounded a bit disappointed, and I felt a bit guilty for squashing his hope.
“I usually the most optimistic guy in the room,” I started in my attempt to restore Lawrence’s hopefulness. “It’s just that… after all I’ve seen today… But, hell, what makes me such an expert? I don’t know anything that everyone else doesn’t know. I hope that I am wrong… I guess, we’ll know in a couple of days.”
Lawrence considered my words for a few seconds before replying, “No sense worrying about it right now. We gotta lot of apartments to get to before dark. Better get moving.”
After pausing beside the door to listen for any sound, we stepped back into the hallway. The place had not changed. It was still unnervingly quiet. Then again, I suppose even the slightest sound would have made it unnervingly noisy. Given the choice, I would definitely go for quiet.
I walked across the hall to listen at the door, but Lawrence was motioning to me from down the hall.
“These places will be easy to check later. I wanna get a look around the whole place.”
He made sense, so I followed him down the hall back to the entrance where we had been the previous day. This time there was no sound outside the front door, which pleased me. The only light in the foyer came from a large skylight. As if acting in some army movie, Lawrence motioned with two fingers towards the stairwell to the left of the door. I followed closely behind. The bodies from the previous day were still scattered around, and we silently stepped over them.
We stood on the third step at the base of the dimly lit stair well, staring up into the gloom and stillness.
“Ready for this?” Lawrence asked quietly.
“Ready for anything!” I answered with all the false bravado I could muster.
Lawrence showed no reaction but instead grabbed the metal handrail and started to climb the stairs. He held his gun in front of him stilted upward. Each slow and deliberate movement was made with muscles tensed.
I crept closely behind, straining my ears to catch even the slightest sound. Until then, I had not been aware of my own heavy breathing. The blasts of air from my mouth seemed to echo through the stairwell. As we continued to climb the stairs, I focused on quieting the noise. I tried to hold my breath in, letting it out only a portion at a time. The result of my effort was that I ended up gasping for air and sensed Lawrence’s eyes trained upon me. He simply shook his head and continued up the stairs.
There was no sound in the stairwell other than the steps creaking as we stepped upon them and my heavy breathing, which had now been joined by breathing from Lawrence.
We reached the second floor to find an open doorway to another short dimly-lit hallway. Lawrence put a hand up as a signal to stop, and I did.
“What?” I started to say more, but he stopped me with a
finger to his lips.
He was absolutely still with his head tilted slightly. It was clear that he had heard something, but whatever it was I had missed it. As I started to move by him, I heard something as well.
It was the faint sound of someone sobbing. Despite the faintness of the noise, it seemed to fill the hallway and make it difficult to tell from where precisely the sound came.
Lawrence crept up to the side of the first door on the right side of the hall. He stood there straining to hear if the crying came from the other side. We made eye contact as he shook his head. I moved slowly to a door on the left side of the hall. It only took a second with my ear pressed to the door to tell that the sound was not coming from this apartment.
Lawrence moved slowly up the wall to the next door. After a moment of listening, his eyes opened wider and he waved me over. The sound seemed to grow louder as I approached the door. I could now make out some words being spoken by woman amid fits of crying.
“Gary…Gary, wake up…wake up right now,” the words were hissed between sobs.
Lawrence glanced at me with an expression of curiosity. I stared blankly at the door and wondered what to do next. The detective reached down and twisted the knob. As expected, he found the door locked. He looked toward me as if to confirm that the door was locked.
In the next instant, I stepped forward and knocked on the door. The big cop appeared to be amazed by my action.
“Ma’am, you need to open the door so we can help,” I said quietly.
The crying stopped immediately.
I knocked again. “Ma’am, we’re here to help. My friend…I have a policeman with me.”
Silence was the only response.
“You have ten seconds before I shoot this lock and bust the door down,” Lawrence stated flatly.
So much for sensitivity.
A few seconds later, we heard the click of the door being unlocked. Suddenly, a very thin, middle-aged woman with long black hair wearing a light blue bathrobe stood in the doorway. She lunged forward and grabbed Lawrence’s arm.
“He needs CPR!” She yelled as she pulled the stunned detective into the apartment.
I followed close behind as he moved through the doorway.
The interior was dark, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. What I saw was a scene of some destruction. The cliché would be that it looked like a bomb went off, but just because an expression is overused does not mean that it is not a perfect description. Broken glass crackled beneath my feet as I walked down the hall after Lawrence and the woman. A shattered coffee table and an overturned sofa and a single chair decorated the living room.
As the woman tugged Lawrence toward the back corner of the room, she was quietly babbling something, but I could only make out a few of her words. “Sick…my sweet boy… third
grade… help.”
Lawrence stopped so suddenly that I ran into his back. He did not react as his attention was completely held by what he saw on the floor in front of him.
The woman’s voice rose until she was nearly shouting, “You have to help him! I know that he’s not gone. You can save my sweet boy!”
Lawrence pushed her aside and moved close to the small body on the blanket covered with cartoon blue and red puppies. The head was turned at an unnatural angle. It looked as if someone had poked a hole through the boy’s left eye and out of the back of his head. Blood soaked the blanket and pooled on the floor around.
The sight made me gag. I turned away sure that I was going to throw up, but the woman’s sobs stopped me.
“He’s just a little boy…Joe said he was already gone, but I know he’s not. You can save him. You must know CPR. My sweet--” She lunged toward the body.
In a single sweeping move of his arm, Lawrence stopped her forward movement and brushed her back. The sudden change of direction left her stunned, and she simply stared straight ahead as Lawrence demanded, “Who shot him?”
The woman did not respond for a long time, but finally she began sobbing again and said, “Joe…my husband…said he was already gone. Billy tried to bite him…but he was scared…he is just a little boy…my sweet little man.”
“Where’s your husband?” I asked.
I thought that she had not heard me and started to repeat my question, but she cut me off. “He’s in the back room.” She nodded toward the hallway off of the living room.
“Show us,” Lawrence ordered.
Without any further response, she simply turned and began walking slowly down the hallway. Her bare feet slid on the white tile floor, every once in a while making a squeaking sound. She stopped in front of a doorway on the left side of the hall. Lawrence pushed by her to enter the room. I watched from just outside.
The small bathroom held a toilet, shower stall, and what I assumed was a basin. The reason I had to guess at the presence of a basin was due to the fact that there was a motionless body filling the area where a basin should have been. Lawrence reached up to touch the neck of the body. As he made contact, the body simply slid back and down to the floor. The basin and the surrounding counter were covered with blood.
The body on the floor was an older man in light green pajamas. Actually, only a light green area on one shoulder revealed the original color of the pajamas. The rest was dark
with blood.
“We were all under the weather for a few days… under the weather,” she let out a laugh filled with bitterness. “I gave Billy some of that orange-flavored baby aspirin…” Her words trailed off into silence.
Lawrence was examining the two bullet wounds in the body, one in the left side of the chest and one in the lower abdomen.
“You shot him?” I asked.
“He said Billy was gone, but he wasn’t!” She screeched as if that explained everything.
“Get her out of here!” The big detective bellowed at me.
She was now silent. I turned and guided the woman back down the hallway toward the living room. She meekly moved along as directed until we were once again in the living room.
She stood still as I straightened the couch. I then moved her to sit down. Her gaze was locked straight ahead, and I wondered if she had gone into some sort of delayed shock.
“Can I get you some water or something?” I asked but got no reaction.
We sat on the couch like that for about five minutes. I wished there was something to do in such a situation, but I could not think of anything. Finally, I reached over to touch her hand as a feeble attempt at condolence. The absolute coldness of her skin shocked me and brought a memory.
I was instantly back on the airport tarmac, the butt of a rifle pushing my head to the pavement. A muscular soldier with skin so dark it was almost blue stepped forward. He handed his automatic weapon to another and kneeled down near my head. He fished a blue plastic box about the size of a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket. I had expected him to offer a cigarette to the other soldiers, but instead he slowly touched my cheek with the plastic thing. After a few seconds, he pulled it back and announced, “Ninety-eight point six!” At the time, I had wondered why checking my temperature was so import-ant to them. But it soon got buried under the million other unanswered questions I had.
Now the idea of body temperature became important once more as I sat next to this woman on the couch. I sat there wondering just what to do. Finally, I simply stood up and left her sitting there on the couch by herself as I walked back to the bathroom.
“I think there’s something wrong with her,” I told Lawrence.
My words startled him out of his deep concentration on the body. He looked over at me and said, “Well, that’s understandable. She’s probably in shock or something, donchya think?” He paused for a moment as if considering the question. “Here’s what I figure happened. All three of them were sick for a bit. Finally, the kid…uh…Billy turns. Momma isn’t gonna take out her little boy, so that left his guy. He’s the stepfather, I’m guessing. Anyways, he has to shoot the kid, but Momma freaks o
ut and shoots him while he’s washing the blood off.”
“All of that makes sense and all, but I think that she’s already dead. I mean, does any of this really matter at this point?”
He looked at me for a few seconds before shaking his head. “You’re right. The whole world’s taken a huge shit, and one more turd isn’t gonna make a difference. I’m just so used to going through the motions, you know?”
I nodded and said, “It’s still important to know what happened.”
“The only thing that’s important right now is to find out what happened to the gun,” Lawrence said flatly, and, as if on cue, a shot rang out from another room.
We were both in the living room in a matter of seconds.
The woman was draped over the body of her son, her body twitching and the pistol sticking out of her mouth.
I wondered briefly about the idea of a shell still having enough of a conscience to have a sense of remorse and loss.
“Shit,” Lawrence said as if all energy had been drained from him. He knelt down near the bodies and picked something up off the floor. He held up the little white thing between two meaty fingers. At first, I thought it was a small rock. Then I realized it was something else.
“Most people don’t realize that your jaw clamps down when you shoot yourself. So if you gotta gun barrel in your mouth, you’re gonna lose some teeth.” He smiled as his state-ment before looking over at my squeamish expression. “Probably not something you needed to know.”
I nodded and wondered why the woman still had the ability to talk when so many of the others were silent. Then I noticed the clock on the wall, and all such considerations were pushed aside in favor of the more practical matters at hand. It was almost noon. “Crap! We need to get moving. We’re never going to get finished at this rate.”
We quickly went through the apartment looking for things of use. Lawrence found a couple of flashlights and a stack of coloring books for Christina. I managed to pry the pistol out of the woman’s mouth and even found a box of bullets for it in a desk drawer. In the kitchen, we filled a pillow case with some apples, oranges, bread, milk, and even a six pack of beer.
Surviving When the Dead Have Risen Page 3