As darkness fell upon the low hills of the horse farm, I wove a recharged null pen through my bra strap, dressed out in a clean blue uni, stuffed the handkerchief coated with mentholated gel into my mask, and put a mint into my mouth. Not that anything helped. Trooping inside and down the stairs, trying not to breathe the death stench of the house, I carried three cameras in my pockets: a mechanical 35mm autofocus camera that used real film, an old video camera, and a sturdy digital camera. “My mama had one of these,” I grumbled, holding up the film-based Canon.
“Which is why you’re down here with us,” T. Laine said cheerfully. “Among your many talents is the ability to use old-fashioned equipment. Competency comes with repercussions.”
“Do not ask me to milk a cow or darn your socks.”
“You know how to do that?”
“No,” I lied, stern faced. T. Laine laughed as if she knew I was lying. I hadn’t spent a lot of time lying, so she probably knew. I took a breath and the stench was horrible; it was all I could do not to gag even with the air-conditioning turned on high. The stench was also a problem for the witches. They were showing signs of eye-watering gastric distress, which made me feel better if only because I wasn’t alone in my misery. Working hard at not vomiting, I grumbled, “Can’t you cast an antiscent working down here?”
From the bottom of the stairs T. Laine answered, “Not with powerful energies already on-site. And the null pens make it impossible to use personal wards against the smell. So in case you think I’m holding out, no. I’m not dealing with this reek any better than anyone else.”
Feeling as green as the witches looked, I joined T. Laine in the basement. I wondered how much face I’d lose if I upchucked in the corner. I wondered if zombies stank like this, not that zombies existed. So far as I knew.
Stella Mae was no zombie. She was greenish mush and brittle bones and horror. The carpet under Stella had dusted and slimed away and the concrete slab beneath was cracked. I took photos as the witches set a protective circle around the body in preparation for a magical wyrd that they would speak once the null pens were gone. They were talking the arcane math of spell casting, which had never made any sense to me beyond the basics I had learned in Spook School. Geometry. Math. Not my forte. Astrid suggested a shield to contain the energies, until they could learn how to take them apart.
A shield sounded like a good idea to me.
As they worked, a guitar snapped and fell down the wall with a discordant twanging, leaving the instrument in pieces. The piano looked as if its legs had been attacked by termites and would collapse at any moment.
Unlike the witches, I had a specific job and didn’t have to stay down here once the photos were taken, so I worked fast. My fingers clumsy through the null nitrile gloves, I took pics of everything with the old Canon, changed out the film, and took more. Then I videoed everything. And then I took digital photos, sending the digital shots to JoJo at PsyLED HQ every few minutes. Jo would compare the timed shots with similar shots from when the first LEOs arrived and with those taken by the early arrivals of Unit Eighteen. If the cameras worked. If the energies didn’t degrade the digital shots. If Wi-Fi still worked down here.
In the room for swag, the racks that once held hats, MP3 players, and small speakers were now rickety, rusted metal. The swag on the racks was rotten, riven, plastic cracking. The empty shipping boxes were crumbled, except for the plasticized labels, which were, so far, merely curled and yellowed. The T-shirt box in the middle of the floor was decaying into crumbled rot, but the T-shirts inside were decaying more slowly, which seemed odd.
But worse was the DB. I concentrated my cameras on Monica Belcher’s body. She was mostly dissolved, except for the smell, into thin brownish bones and minuscule green soap bubbles that sludged across the floor. I took shallow breaths through the mask. It didn’t help. As fast as humanly possible, I finished my photography and raced away, up the stairs. Gagging.
T. Laine didn’t try to keep me in the basement, thank goodness.