by Martin Rose
I rolled my eyes at the word. Detective sounds ancient, right up there with blacksmith.
“—this side of the coast, and if there was anyone who could locate our son, it would be you.”
“How old is your son?”
“Seventeen.”
“The police couldn’t help you?”
“No. They filed a missing persons report, and said they would keep us updated, but we weren’t satisfied with that.”
He didn’t look upset that his son was missing. Odd, I thought. Odder still, his son was hardly a boy—a grown man, really. No wonder the police weren’t worried; this couldn’t be the first time the “boy” had skipped town. Not with fashion sense like his parents had.
“Did you dress him?”
“What?” the man asked.
“Never mind. How long has he been missing?”
“A week.”
“Give me the facts. What’s his name? When was he last seen?”
“Owen was staying after school to help with their activities. He helps other kids who need someone to talk to, kids who are feeling depressed, that sort of thing. We didn’t see him after that. He was supposed to have been home in time for dinner, but he didn’t show. Didn’t think much of it—sometimes he spends time with friends, we thought maybe he was meeting a girl. And then he didn’t show up later that night. No show the next morning.”
I rolled my eyes. The kid ran away. Case closed.
I looked at my watch.
“I have his picture,” the wife said, opening her purse with a snap! She rummaged through random objects with her elbow held at an odd angle, as though she were afraid something inside the bag would bite her. Her face was forgettable and ordinary. This common ugliness in her features would have been forgivable if not for her equally forgettable and ordinary personality. When she spoke, it was in monotone.
She found the picture and held it out to me, leaning forward on the couch.
A sense of claustrophobia flirted with me. The housewife I’d taken as marginally intelligent was playing with me and wanted me to draw closer to her and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. She lifted the photo.
I gritted my teeth until the metal clicked and approached her.
Lazy, I thought, swiping the picture from her hand and retreating into the darkness before ambient daylight could reveal my monstrous features. The last thing I needed was a hysterical couple screaming, “Oh my god, what happened to your face!”
Wouldn’t be the first time, I sighed.
I looked down at the picture.
Rotten breath deflated my lungs. My throat closed and my fist clenched around the photograph. A boy stared up at me, liquid eyes all brown and soft lines of tender youth. We all begin this young, this untouched, but his innocence was not what moved me.
“I thought you said he was seventeen,” I barked. The hand holding the photograph shook. My fingertips turned white beneath black mold. “This is a young child. A toddler.”
Mrs. Rogers clucked her tongue as though to chide herself for her mistake and fanned her hand out in exasperation over her chest. There was another quick rummage and she offered me a card deck of photos—passionless school portraits of a boy moving through awkward adolescence—but I did not take them, so she was left offering them to the thin air.
“These are all we have. Will you take the case?”
“I burned this picture years ago,” I whispered, closing my eyes. My boy, my son, Clayton Adamson. I moved my thumb across his face in the photo, as though I could touch him still. I was supposed to buy him a sheriff’s badge when I got back from the service. When I returned from Kosovo. He still had his baby fat, still had his baby teeth and his round, teacup eyes.
I promised him.
And he’s dead now.
How did they get his picture?
“What were your names?” I asked, turning with the photograph in my hand as though it were an ace in a winning streak—I dared not let it go.
“Oh, I’m Suzanne Rogers,” she said. “My husband is Rick.”
I looked down at the face of my dead son, searching for a trick, an explanation in the picture itself.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, eh?”
In a better mood, I may have found that information hilarious, but faced with a picture stolen from my past, I found nothing funny.
Someone in this room was lying.
“And you say this boy in this photo is alive and well, by the name of Owen Rogers?”
“Well, yes, and we’d very much like to know where he is and have him safe at home again. Will you help us?”
Mrs. Rogers had a set of brown eyes rapidly spilling tears like an overfilled glass. I reached for the other photos and kept them before me, consumed their glossy stills with my eyes while she fumbled with a tissue, dabbing at her face so she wouldn’t smear her carefully applied mascara. Once, she must have been gorgeous. He, too, once upon a time, must have been her Prince Charming, but he had the look of a man starving himself to keep his youthful shape—a receding hairline, sagging skin necklacing his throat.
“Well,” I said, and smiled, allowing the grin to consume my face, stretching from broken tooth to broken tooth. Metal clicked inside my mouth, like the sound a hammer on a .38 revolver makes. “I’ve got a soft spot for kids.”
I have a lot of soft spots. But that’s beside the point.
*
I watched them as they left, standing from my porch in shadow, watching the video feed from my security camera as they linked hands and descended the steps to their sensible wood-grain station wagon.
Owen’s picture—the picture of the child once mine—remained on my desk, face down. I dared not look at it.
Call it a lack of courage. Monsters are not known for their bravery, after all. Here I was, a corpse in a glorified coffin I called a house, with not a single lightbulb in my lamps, for fear someone might turn them on and see me for what I really was, too petrified to look at the frozen image of my son. My smiling, blond-haired, brown-eyed, gap-toothed boy.
But it could not be my smiling, blond-haired, brown-eyed, gap-toothed boy. He’d be only twelve by now and this doppelgänger was older. What could explain away this schism?
I had no answer.
Beep-beep.
The sound of the digital wristwatch sang my personal lullaby, my siren song. I set logic aside to take my dose. I shook out a pill of Atroxipine from the orange bottle and pushed it through my decaying lips.
I’d died during the night and had forgotten to shave; now I would spend eternity with a five o’clock shadow that rasped like sandpaper every time I sucked down a pill. Parts of my face were missing, tears and striations of eaten-away flesh, gone with time and sorrow. I wandered over to the window, thinking about the boy I’d once had, the family we had once been. All over now.
Zzzzzt. Zzzzzzzzzt.
My lips curled away from my tombstone teeth, a grimace of disgust. A blue bottle fly buzzed against the window pane, throwing itself against the glass with vigor. His aggravated buzzing became a desperate wail.
There are few things the dead fear. If you lay down to sleep one night and wake up a shambling, decaying corpse the next day, the last thing on your mind is what your stamp collection will fetch in the fair market or how many points the stock market plunged. Fear of discovery? Perhaps.
One day, a guy riding high on one Romero film too many is apt to blow my head off with a shotgun, and double-tap for good measure, but when you join the army at eighteen you expect people to take shots at you. Injury poses no threat to me. Death is inevitable.
My secret fear?
Maggots.
Maggots can reduce the carcass of a deer to a pile of bones in twenty-four hours. To miss my dose of Atroxipine would be to resign myself to a likewise existence—mindlessly consuming flesh with no thought process, no consciousness of who or what I’d been before the moment I opened my jaws and shoved a living person inside. Naturally, the thought of being consumed by
a cloud of insects as disgusting as fly larvae would give me nightmares—if I were capable of sleep. They would eat me from the inside out in miniscule bites, and who knows what would happen to them in return—would they carry on as undead flies, eating their own the way I am prone to eat my own?
Would they eat their wives? Their children?
In their reduced state, would they fail to heed their families’ cries? Fail to recognize the pain they cause, see only what they once loved as a chance to satisfy this insatiable hunger that gnaws at the belly, craving a food that dare not be named?
I snapped, smashing the fly with a strike of my fist. His fat body popped like a blackberry against my skeletal hand, and the window shattered, fracturing in a spiderweb pattern. Blood spurted briefly from the resulting cut until the blood flow stopped without a valid heart to push more through.
I crushed the body of the fly with my boot, just to be sure.
We can’t be having killer zombie flies, now can we?
*
I took the Rogers case, and I should have been working on it. Working on it like a dog, fighting against a cruel world that would kidnap children, attempting to assume the role of freakish superhero, without the tights. However, morals don’t motivate me—they’re as rotten as my fallen-apart flesh. And Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had tears you could purchase at a Halloween store—manufactured and prepackaged with a money-back guarantee.
I tucked Owen’s picture into my pocket, where it pressed against my dead flesh to the dead heart beneath. Beside it, I holstered my Glock, and then came the dressing ritual, a careful inventory to protect me from the prying eyes of the public. Camouflage become high fashion. My palette composed of dark blues and grays designed to fade me into the background at a moment’s notice—coupled with a human tendency to ignore that which does not please the eye—and my transformation to a forgettable human version of myself was complete. Most work in this day and age can be conducted from home, freeing up the nighttime hours to roam in relative secrecy without too many people asking for my autograph and telling me I did great work in Resident Evil, and was Milla Jovovich nice?
Such are the risks when you’re a corpse.
Sunglasses, check.
Atroxipine, check.
Hat, check.
Attitude, negotiable.
*
Pleasant Hills Funeral Home, aside from employing an attractive mortician who looked like Bettie Page, was adjacent to the town cemetery, which was bordered by wrought iron gates. I stopped at a street vendor a few blocks down, swapping a rumpled Andrew Jackson for a dozen roses, and passed through the gates unnoticed.
Two aisles, and then three to the left, and I was home.
Three graves in a line. The weather was pleasant, and I stood there like a suitor stood up by a prom date, recalling Jessica when she had been alive.
Jessica Adamson, Loving wife, b. Sept. 14, 1978, d. July 25, 1999.
Beside her, a marker with my name on it:
Vitus Adamson, Devoted Husband, b. Feb. 5, 1979, d. July 25, 1999.
A flag denoting I was a veteran waved halfheartedly in the wind.
The grave was empty.
Beside it, a smaller one with an engraving of a rosebud, broken in half; an old Victorian image symbolizing death before the deceased was given the chance to bloom. My son, the broken rose.
Clayton Adamson, Beloved Son, b. April 19, 1997, d. July 25, 1999.
I pulled out a single rose for him, setting it against his marker.
His grave was likewise empty, but for his bones.
I knew it because I oversaw their burial. There had been nothing left of him to bury by the time my brother realized his error and soldiers burst into my house on July 25, 1999.
I stooped to set down the roses against her stone.
“You shouldn’t buy cheap roses from the street guy. We’ve got better ones inside.”
Startled, I turned, pressing my fingers against the Glock.
Niko. Long, black dress hugging her skin in just the right places. Bedroom eyes studied me in full light, assessing me in this new place. She looked like she belonged in a music video for a gloomy band. She must be at least ten years younger than me, and with half the experience and bitterness that I carried.
“The street guy doesn’t chitchat,” I replied.
“You’re a quiet guy.”
I said nothing.
“You’re also a zombie.”
I cleared my throat. Was that a piece of my epiglottis stuck there? I swallowed it down.
“Pre-deceased,” I corrected. “Zombie is so . . . inelegant.”
She studied the tombstones. Polished quartz facades reflected the sun into her eyes, and she stepped closer to read them.
“They all died on the same day,” she said.
Silence. The nice thing about death is tears become a thing of the past. My eyes are dry, desert stones pressed into my waxen face.
“No one left anything for him,” she pointed out, gesturing to my headstone.
I decided that she was hot, but annoying.
“You know, if you need help with anything else, you should just ask. You don’t have to come waving a gun around.”
“Careful. I might take you up on that.”
“Good. You need help. You’re a fucking mess.”
“Thanks. You dress like an expensive hooker.”
“Thanks. You kiss your mother with that mouth, corpse-face?”
Pretty and demented. The only bad thing about this being dead gig was the lack of dating options and ability to act on them. I glanced at the headstone, Jessica Adamson, and wondered if it qualified as infidelity to flirt in front of your dead wife’s grave.
Well, it was only good until death do us part, after all.
“No, I eat her with it.”
Niko had nothing to say after that. She left, long strides in black combat boots through the grass, and I watched the sway of her hips a moment before letting my breath escape in a hiss.
Don’t worry. My mother’s alive and well in a nursing home in Lakehurst.
*
Being an investigator—or as most people think of it, a detective—is boring as shit.
The pay sucks; there’s no vacation time. You work long hours watching people doing stupid things, like shop at a box store, pick up groceries, pick their noses, and cheat on their spouses. They all think they invented lying and they were the first to pull a fast one and no one will ever figure them out. There is nothing glamorous about toting a gun around and dropping bits of your flesh onto the pavement now and again.
The next few hours was exactly that.
I took a trip down to the high school, Westerly High. Everything was in proper order there: records showed an Owen Rogers in attendance, and as I thumbed through old report cards, tilting my head into shadow while the receptionist politely covered her nose with a tissue and wrestled her gorge back into place, I wondered if it were possible. Could my son have survived?
Everyone assumed I had eaten him.
They’d found his blood, they’d even found his bones . . . but the doubts began to multiply and creep in. My brother had been so desperate to sweep up the government’s mess, they could have missed such a detail. After all, they’d found the bones of a little boy. That did not automatically make them my son’s.
My thoughts were broken by the hiss of an air freshener. The receptionist shot a jet of Bayberry Dreams into the air, where it misted like car exhaust throughout the office.
Hint taken. I stink.
I handed her back the papers, and she waved me out eagerly. Niko might have been a smart-ass, but there was a girl used to smelling death on a daily basis. I realized I missed that kind of human interaction—you know, the sort that doesn’t require an aerosol can.
*
By all accounts, Owen Rogers appeared to be a real person. He had a social security number, excelled in his biology classes, even dated a cheerleader. According to a pizza-faced senior in his cl
ass, a twitchy kid who fiddled with his glasses every other sentence, everyone loved Owen Rogers.
“But the parents? Sheesh. Real strict. Like, he went to party where everyone was invited to sleep over, and they came at three a.m. to pick him up once they found out where he was. Benny Tuttle made a joke that they keep him in a cage in the basement, and you know what the funny thing was? Owen didn’t laugh. Those people are weird.”
“Owen ever talk about it? About the parents?”
“He never talked much. He was the kind of guy who always listened a lot. Chicks like him, ’cause he would listen to their problems. You probably wouldn’t find a person who didn’t like him, but anyone who knew him, like, really knew him? Good luck, buddy.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Mr. Adamson?”
“What?”
“Could you sign my paper, here? I really loved Zombieland. Big fan.”
“Sure kid, whatever.”
*
My son.
I looked at the picture from inside the car, the dome light illuminating a young boy’s face. I didn’t take it out often, as though my touch were a poison that could stain the photo film.
In the high school, there had been other pictures of him. I’d torn out the page of the yearbook, and there was a much older Owen Rogers there. Seeing my own picture in the hands of the Rogers had enraged me, filled me with a demon energy I could not exorcise—I had come to accept the fact that my son had died and would never be a man, gotten used to the baby face, the terminally innocent brown eyes.
Now I had a picture of the becoming man.
He’d thinned out from the chubby toddler with the baby cheeks. Replaced youth with a long, angular face. Quick and scintillating eyes above a trained smile. I felt a swell of quiet pride. Handsome, well-liked, and irreproachable. Owen Rogers looked like I had at his age; the most damning proof of my imagined paternity.
He can’t be your son.
And why not? There had never been a body. What if Jessica had been babysitting someone that day, what if Jessica had dropped Clay off at the neighbor’s for a playdate, or left him with a caregiver to escape the frenzy of motherhood for a stolen moment, a moment the fates looked the other way? I rejected such flimsy logic in the next second. No such thing had happened and hadn’t I tucked him into his crib myself? Still, I persisted in building fantasies in which a well-meaning emergency responder took Clay to the hospital, where the child fell into the social system, his origins forgotten, his slate wiped clean. I imagined alternate scenarios of those first minutes and hours in the aftermath of my turning, in which Clay simply toddled off onto the neighbor’s lawn through throngs of frantic people, straight into a new home and a new life. Each fantasy more outrageous than the previous.