is too good to walk away from. Instead he says, “At least he’ll be alone. And that’s a plus.”
Usually, we find them in houses. Most times we find bodies—stiff and swollen—pinned between the toilet and the tub. Even when they’re in the bedroom or the kitchen, the bathroom light is on, the medicine cabinet open and rifled through. The dying tend to know something is wrong, and if they can, they make their way to the bathroom. When they never come out, someone knocks and knocks until alarm becomes suspicion becomes anguish becomes a 911 call.
As soon as we enter the school, we’re swallowed by darkness. I click on my flashlight and am amazed by its uselessness. This beam of light is our lifeline, what we’ll use to get to the body and what we’ll use to get out again. Somewhere in the darkness, something moves and I swing my light. We hope it’s only a rat, but we’re not in here alone.
We shuffle through the auditorium, stepping over fallen pieces of ceiling and piles of turd that dot the floor like a dysenteric minefield. As we go deeper, things get worse. We’re in a hallway now, dark as night and shockingly narrow. The plaster ceiling sags and buckles with water damage, long strips hanging down like flypaper. The walls, also plaster, heave forward, lumpy shapeless arms reaching out to grab us as we stumble forward, tripping over debris.
All the while, we can’t see. All in a place alive with groans and creaks, the distant moaning of God knows what.
“School, maybe,” Marty says.
I stop to shine my light on him. “School?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll go back to school.” The traffic-enforcement officer shuffles his feet at the edge of our small circle of dim yellow light. Marty shrugs. “But maybe not.”
We round another corner, and for the first time we catch a whiff of what lies ahead. Decomposition is a terrible, sickly sweet smell, but at least today it tells us we’re on the right path. Our trail will end down the next hall. When we turn the corner, we’re blinded by a flash of light and immediately stop. We’re disoriented from stumbling through the darkness, so it takes a minute to realize what we’re looking at—the door at the end of the hall is half glass. My light is bouncing off and shining back in our eyes.
We continue on, the smell more intense with each step, and the traffic cop beside us begins to mumble. Five feet from the door, he says he’s never seen a dead body. When we reach the door, the smell is overpowering. Flies as thick as grapes bounce off the glass. It’s been over a week, possibly two. It’s pure Hollywood—a man in the fetal position, his skin nothing but a roiling bag of maggots. Large sections that should be there simply aren’t. When a body is left to nature, words we don’t normally associate with humans begin to apply: bloating, rotting, liquefying, bursting. These have all happened. It’s the ultimate lesson in humility. We’re nothing but meat, and if circumstances allow, we’ll end up no different than a possum lying by the roadside.
“I’m just over it,” Marty says. “The whole thing.” He peeks in the window. “Aren’t you?”
The cop groans. He, too, wants out—at least out of this building—but he wandered in without a flashlight, and now he’s stuck.
I don’t know what else I’d do, and I tell Marty that. “Have you really thought your way through this?”
Marty looks down at his feet but doesn’t say anything. He stares at the floor, forehead crinkled like he’s deep in thought, but nothing comes. He keeps looking down at the floor, and as his mouth slowly flops open, I realize he’s not thinking at all. I shine my light on the ground and there, at our feet, are drag marks. It takes a second to process this information, what the drag marks mean. Then, slowly, I trace them down the hall, back the way we’ve come. Our patient didn’t slink back here to die in peace. He was dragged, perhaps kicking and screaming, to this dark corner of a long-abandoned building and killed. The cop sees what we see. He fidgets with his keys. We’ve trampled yet another crime scene.
Outside, it’s bright. We hop in the truck to write up our short report but have to unroll the windows. There are a lot of things that stay with you when you find the dead. Glasses, canes, clothes,