“Yes sir, I’ll try and remember,” Thompson replied with an amused snort. “Anyhow, just a couple of quick things. First thing is my radio’s been chirping—think the batteries are shot. Second thing is about five minutes ago I think I saw some headlights down the highway to the east. By the time I got my binoculars up they was gone, though.”
Walter, Michelle, and Amy exchanged a quick look as Thompson finished. “Last thing is that it’s cold up here on this roof. Whoever you got comin’ up next needs to dress for the occasion.”
Michelle glanced at the roof of the store where Thompson was positioned as their primary scout, but she couldn’t see him.
“OK,” Walter replied, “we’ll change out the batteries in all the radios at supper time . . . should be in less than an hour. Keep an eye out for any more headlights—or anything else—that might be coming down the road.”
“Will do.” Another open-aired pause came across before Thompson spoke again. “Hey, somethin’ else. I know I ain’t sitting on the roof of a building full of ghosts, but someone should probably tell ‘em that if they keep making as much noise as they have been, they might just become ghosts.”
Michelle watched as Walter rubbed his temple for a moment before replying in a tired voice, “I know, I’ll see what we can do. Mule out.”
With another slow shake of his head, Walter changed the radio frequency back to the main channel, hooked it on his belt and looked up at Amy. “You got any suggestions?”
“I could give you about a hundred reasons—physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally—why they’re acting that way, but it won’t change anything right now.” Amy gently reached out a hand and set it on Walter’s shoulder. “Remember, everybody here has experienced a radical shift in their reality. Everybody here has experienced violence, tragedy, and loss.” With a sympathetic nudge of Walter’s shoulder, she re-emphasized, “Everybody.”
Walter frowned, “I know . . . and I ain’t saying that anybody has got off Scot free, but it sure feels like the sheep are greatly outnumberin’ the wolves we have available, and my gut is telling me that very soon we’re going to need a lot of wolves.”
“I’m not saying that you’re wrong, Walter, and I can certainly understand, given the mantle of responsibility that’s been placed on you, but maybe it’s not wolves that we need.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe . . . instead of wolves, we need sheepdogs.”
Michelle stood silent as Walter paused, considering Amy’s words. Finally, with a shake of his head and the straightening of his shoulders, Walter said, “I wouldn’t mind having a few sheep dogs either . . . but I’ve got a bad feeling that if we don’t find some more wolves, we’re not going to have any sheep left.”
With a quick glance at the luminous numbers on his watch, Walter cleared his throat and said, “We need to get moving.” He turned and walked toward the back side of the propane storage building. Michelle and Amy followed.
Stopping at a sliding metal door, Walter reached into his pocket and withdrew a diminutive flashlight, clamped it between his teeth and illuminated a large ring of keys. Shifting through the jingling mass with rapid-fire familiarity, he finally chose a burnished bronze key that fit the disk lock on the door.
“What is this ‘surprise’ that you want me to see?” Michelle asked to his back.
A few soft, metallic clangs sounded as the lock was removed and the door slid to the left. Walter clicked a button on the small flashlight several times, and the illumination doubled, and then tripled. Handing the light to Michelle, he indicated for her to step inside the building, accompanying her with three cryptic words.
“You tell me.”
Chapter 5
The bluish-white beam from the tiny flashlight cut a wide-angled swath through the darkness inside. Immediately obvious to Michelle was the large tank of propane that occupied the front half of the building. Various hoses and adapters were hanging on the wall next to the tank, and some type of electrical pump system was mounted on an elevated shelf above the adapters. Spaced evenly at ground level, a series of basketball-sized vent holes had been cut through the wall, each of them covered with a metal lattice rodent barrier. Shifting the light upwards, Michelle noted an identical series near the roofline. Moving the flashlight down again brought the cement floor into focus. An indeterminable hodgepodge of boot tracks carpeted every available square inch, giving Michelle the impression that a muddy, midnight square dance had recently been held in the building. The tracks, however, sheltered from the weather as they were, could have been here for years. It was not the serrated, lug-soled prints that kept her attention though, it was the flattened swell of the bright blue tarp that crinkled ever so slightly with the breeze coming through the vents.
“What is it? What’s under the tarp?”
Walter stepped inside the building and slid toward the wall on the right, making room for Amy to squeeze through behind him. Leaning in the corner near the door was a five foot length of PVC water pipe. Walter grabbed the narrow, white tube and approached the tarp. Flipping the first layer of the plastic-like fabric up and over revealed another level of the blue material. The thin shaft flexed into a weak ‘C’ shape as Walter uncovered the second layer.
At first, Michelle wasn’t sure what she was looking at. An oblong . . . ‘blot’ . . . of dirty grease mixed with semi-solid chunks of . . . something else. She shifted her eyes briefly toward Walter, a questioning look on her face. A silent nod of his head redirected her to take another look at the substance on the tarp.
Angling the flashlight slightly to the left and down brought a three dimensional cast to the object. Silent moments of edgy curiosity surfaced as her brain tried to reconstruct the odd pattern into something she could process.
Another space of tired, over-caffeinated indecision flew by. Finally, Michelle stepped back and rubbed her eyes, shaking her head slightly. “I don’t know, did somebody burn something, maybe plastic or fiberglass . . . and then throw the ashes in the tarp?”
Walter shook his head. “Uh-uh, nobody burned nothin’. Look again ‘Chelle, do you see it?”
Michelle shined the light towards the tarp again, impatience beginning to settle on her face. Another scan up and down triggered a vague spark of something, but no answers. She was just about to ask Walter for the answer when Amy blurt out, “Is that a . . . body?”
With Amy’s words leading the charge, Michelle’s tired eyes were able to complete the puzzle. The dark, chunky-thin blob of residue now took on the hazy, indistinct outline of a human body. The not-distant-enough memory of a search warrant her agency had served a few years ago sprang to mind. They had come up empty in their investigation of the private hunting preserve that had been implicated in the deaths, and subsequent resell of protected raptors, but a further search of the grounds had revealed something else—the burnt out husk of their confidential informant’s vehicle. Occupied. It was her first, and so far, last, flame-blackened cadaver that she had seen. Michelle could still recall the gaunt, open mouthed visage, seared charcoal black and reclining in a permanent scream. But this was different. Before she could comment, Walter stepped forward and used the pipe to flip the last fold at the upper edge of the tarp.
“Kind of like opening a giant, blue burrito,” Walter said with a cough.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, well . . . now for the ‘piece De resistance,’ which is French for ‘the stuff that will make you shoot the snails you just swallowed out of your nose and back onto your plate.”
The final over-fold of the plastic sheeting revealed a mass of platinum blond hair.
“It’s the bimbo that Bernice shot that first night when all this started happening . . . just a few days ago, really.” Walter voiced to no one in particular.
When no one volunteered an immediate answer, he continued. “What happened to her? I mean, I’ve seen a lot of dead things, but nothing I’ve ever seen ended up like this, at least n
ot in such a short time and without a lot of help from maggots and buzzards.”
Michelle, a strange suspicion beginning to form in the back of her head, spoke, “Could anybody have gotten in here and tampered with the body?”
“Don’t think so,” said Walter, “place has been locked up since Andy and I moved her here. Besides, that gal may have been a looker when she was a live stripper, but I can’t think of anybody who’d be sick enough to want to mess with a dead body that’s had half of its head blown off.”
The suspicion transcended upwards and became a slightly anxious flare of insight. “Let me see that pipe,” Michelle mumbled.
Walter silently passed it forward, making sure she grasped the same end he had been holding.
Michelle scooted closer, disregarding the quiet words of warning about getting too close from Walter. Prodding gently where her mind’s eye had reconstructed the form revealed an oddly colored, slightly curved item.
“Hmmm . . .”
“What is it?” Walter asked.
“Wait a minute, let me check something else,” Michelle voiced as she crouch-walked forward, stopping near the upper-left side of the tarp. Wielding the length of PVC like a lone, giant chopstick, she probed the general area of her hypothesis, feeling for the evidence. Scraping aside the loose, fragmented excess exposed several hard chunks. Thrusting the flashlight as close as she could get without contacting the surrounding substance brought the diminutive chunks into focus. They were teeth.
The long, lean muscles in her thighs flexed stubbornly as she stood up, briefly reminding Michelle that she had skipped too many days at the gym.
“Well?” Walter asked.
“When did you notice this?”
“I came down here today—this morning ‘bout an hour before lunch—just to check and make sure everything was still secured. When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was that the tarp that we had put the stripper in looked . . . flat. Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure,” Michelle answered slowly, “but a couple of things are coming to mind. As cold as it’s been outside—and with all the vents it’s going to be the same temperature in here—there’s no way the body should have decayed at the rate it has. It’s almost like it was submerged in a vat of acid. But then, if there were some outside caustic force that was at work here, why are we seeing hair? My first thought is that hair is one of the hardest things to digest. That’s why you always find it when you examine animal scat.” Michelle used the flashlight and pipe to indicate the tangle of whitish-blond hair.
Walter and Amy craned their necks for an attempt at a better view without approaching closer.
Michelle continued, “But look at the hair, it’s practically untouched. As a matter of fact, it looks like it’s been freshly washed. Walter, you and I both saw the body. Half of her head was blown away, and her hair was soaked with blood and brains. When you and Andy carried her down here, she was a pretty much in the same condition, right?”
“Yep.”
“So we’ve got a dead stripper who goes in to a tarp in basically one piece, covered with blood. The body then gets stored in what, for all intents and purposes in a meat locker. And yet, a few days later all we can find,” Michelle used the pipe to indicate the first area she had looked at, “is purple manicured toenails,” she moved the pointer upwards as she talked, “pearly white teeth . . . and bleach blond hair that looks like it’s just been shampooed.”
Walter looked back and forth between Amy, Michelle, and the tarp. Shaking his head, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “You got any ideas?”
Michelle mimicked his shrug. “Nothing firm, we’d have to talk to Dr. Collins I’d imagine, but biologically speaking, hair, nails and teeth all share one thing in common.”
When nobody spoke, Michelle finished, “It’s all dead tissue. Even when you’re alive, the keratin, which is the basic structure of your hair and nails, is nothing more than a dead protein. Your teeth,” she smiled and clicked her own, “are covered in an extremely hard organic compound called enamel, which is also dead. So whatever happened to the body somehow altered—chemically or otherwise, I’m not sure—all of the tissue that had been living at the time of her . . . death . . . if that makes sense.”
The three of them stood quietly for a moment, pondering Michelle’s conclusion. When no one spoke, Michelle sighed and turned towards Amy. “What are you thinking about, Amy?”
Amy let out a deep breath, and then slowly sank to her knees, folding her calves underneath her as she sat on the cold, boot print marked cement. “Honestly,” she began in a hollow, cheerless voice, “I’ve been hearing the words ‘body, stripper, bimbo, blond’ . . .” she forced in a sniffle as she stared at the remains scattered on the cheap, blue plastic, “but no matter which way we cut the pie, and no matter which words we choose to say, that girl there had a name . . . she was somebody’s daughter—maybe somebody’s mother.”
Michelle thought back to the first night when they had found the old van idling up at the store. The hippie stoner, what was his name . . . Bruce something . . . he had told them her name when he was being questioned. She closed her eyes and fought hard to remember.
“Celeste. Her name was Celeste.”
Amy looked up at Michelle questioningly.
Michelle squatted down on one knee and put her arm around Amy. “It was Celeste, I’m sure of it.”
Chapter 6
They closed and locked the propane building, and then walked over to the Mule for the short journey to the store. From the outside, a myriad of voices could be heard—mumbled talking, a few elevated shouts, and the soft but unmistakable noise of sobbing.
Faint illumination was leaking through the black plastic garbage bags that had been hastily stapled over the windows, and Michelle watched as Walter studied the dim light with a slow tilt of his neck.
“Not perfect, but I guess it will have to do.” A short, quick yawn escaped his lips as he pulled the radio off of his belt.
“Sam, it’s Walter. We’re outside right now.”
“10-4. I’ll be there in the second.”
True to the prediction, keys could be heard a scant moment later, followed by a hard click as the security bolt was withdrawn
Sam opened the door and they were immediately ambushed with dozens of questions, some asked quietly . . . others with impatience, anger, or tears.
It was, quite frankly Michelle thought, overwhelming. Two steps inside and they were surrounded by people asking for, or demanding help. As quick as a fox, Amy weaved through to the front of the crowd—ground zero for their attention.
In a calm, even voice, Amy addressed a “thirty-something” brunette who was loudly repeating “It’s about time,” over and over again. Michelle couldn’t really make out Amy’s words, but a few seconds later the brunette began directing her screeching voice toward the crowd, asking for silence. Within the space of a few heartbeats, the clatter had diminished to a low murmur, and a small ocean of faces were staring expectantly towards them.
It was the first time Michelle had been back in the store since the day they had boarded up the front door and put out the “no gas” sign. The section she was standing in was the bottom of the “L” shape of the building, and formerly contained shelves full of groceries and whatnot. It was now radically different. Several eight foot serving tables were pushed against the long wall, and the remainder of the floor was filled with a few folding chairs, three-legged stools, and a mishmash of other furniture—lawn chairs and un-split firewood included. The dividing line between the upper and lower sections of the “L” were marked with another set of the homemade volleyball net anchors. Someone had stretched a rope between the top of the poles, and a few sheets had been hastily placed over the rope. A crude, but effective divider to separate the sleeping area from the common area.
Walter stepped out into the room, directing his gaze at the assembly. Before he could speak, Sam leaned over and whispered a few sente
nces in his ear, to which Walter nodded slowly. Turning his attention back to the crowd, Walter cleared his throat and began talking.
“Evenin’ . . . as most of you know, I’m Walter Sheldon, owner and operator of Sheldon’s Marina. I’m not a man given to long winded speeches, and quite frankly I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll do what I can to fill you in on what we know.” Walter looked at his watch before continuing, “It’s almost time for supper. What I suggest is this—let’s go ahead and get everybody awake and ready to eat. I’m going to take a quick trip back to the house and fetch the food. When I come back we’ll eat, and then after that we’ll all sit down here and try and figure out what to do next.”
Before giving them a chance to object, Amy shot forward again and raised her hand. “I need some volunteers to hand out plates and napkins over here, and we’ll need some food servers over there . . .” The rest was lost in the din as the assembly, their attention momentarily diverted from its previous path, turned they’re interest towards her.
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