THREE
Over the next hour, the sunlight failed and the landscape and security lights came on. Mosquitoes appeared. Unit Eighteen made progress and learned things, not all of them good.
The not-so-wonderful part had started when the driver of the vehicle transporting Stella’s housekeeper—the one in the cooler with the null pen—started feeling sick outside of Farragut. The vehicle itself broke down minutes later on I-40. The rubber parts of the engine and tires disintegrated all at once in a massive failure that nearly resulted in an accident. Within minutes of the near accident, the cooler cracked and dissolved, slopping the contaminated human remains all over the back of the vehicle, which was now on the shoulder of the interstate, surrounded by caution cones and Highway Patrol officers and a biohazard vehicle, all keeping way back.
T. Laine feared it would start breaking down the interstate there and the foundation of the house here, and then the energies might begin to leak into the ground beneath. That situation tied up T. Laine and the witches, trying to figure out how to contain or neutralize the energies that were destroying everything they came into contact with. There was no way to safely transport dead bodies, not without time spent in the null room and we needed it for the living.
To figure out how to fix thedeath whateverenergies, T. Laine requested a visit inside the house by the entire coven of the Nashville witches. This would use up almost all of the unis, until the delivery in the morning, but Lainie convinced everyone it was necessary. I would be joining them in the basement studio to video and photograph everything, though my presence was more along the lines of an order, not a request.
As darkness fell upon the low hills of the horse farm, I wovea 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 anantiscentworking 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 magicalwyrdthat 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 myforte. 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.
On the upper landing, I stripped off the uni, put it in the bio container, and made my way outside. The fresh air was such a relief that I nearly threw up anyway, just getting out of the reek. Crunching my mint, I made my way to a camp stove one of the sheriff’s deputies had set up and poured coffee from an oldmetal percolator into a foam cup. It wasn’t the thick black sludge for which cop-shops were known, but strong, aromatic coffee. I breathed the steam and scent.
Holding my cup under my nose, cameras in the crook of an arm, I retired to my car to write up reports, package the film for mailing to the lab, and send the last photos to JoJo. Too sick to actually drink the coffee, I popped another of the super-strong mints and sucked on it for a while to take the stench out of my mouth and calm the nausea. When I could hold down the brew, I sipped, studying the photos. I was halfway through the cup when I noticed some odd things, small incongruities, but any peculiarity could be important. Cases were often solved by small observations and irregularities.
I went back and forth, comparing the digital photos submitted by the first LEOs on the scene to the ones I had just taken. There were opened boxes of swag in the room, one of them T-shirts. It was the only full box. Why full? Why not half-full? Or nearly empty? Did that matter? Was it important? And... all the empty boxes in the corner were marked with plasticized shipping labels. But in the original photo, the box beside Monica Belcher had no label. I went through dozens of cop-photos from every angle, to make sure. No shipping label, not even fallen on the floor. Had the label been torn off when the box was opened? Or maybe it was on the bottom. That made sense.
In one photo taken by a cop of the inside of the box, there was a second oddity. Resting on top of the shirts was a green glass bottle holding a length of wire, like coat hanger wire. In the bottom was a skim of what looked like pale green liquid. The shirts were not folded or neat, but crushed and wrinkled, shoved into one corner as if to hold the bottle upright.
I compared that photo to mine. Sitting amid the T-shirts, upside down in mine, was a bottle, but in my photo the glass was blackened, the color hidden among the black shirts. The wire was a corroded black twig. The clear, pale green liquid was gone.
I edited out a section of the pic to show only the T-shirts and went to find a band member. Instead, I found Etain. The witch was draped across the four-board fence, her head resting on her arms, breathing through her mouth, carefully not moving.Horses’ hooves pounded in the darkness, moving upwind and away from the stench of death we both carried.
“This helped for me.” I held out one of the extra-strong breath mints. I wished I had candied ginger, but hindsight was useless.
She pushed herself slowly away from the fence, took the small package, and opened it, the plastic crinkling. Gingerly, she put the mint on her tongue as if she feared even that much might make her vomit. “How d’ya stand such a sight an’ stink wit’out puking up your guts?”
“I don’t stand it very well. Hence my ignominious rush from the basement and a pocketful of mints.”
“Och.” She met my eyes, hers rueful. “Ivomit teilgtheall over the garden,” she said, the words clearly Irish. “Probably killed whatever I puked on. Have you another mint?”
“Crunch it,” I advised, holding out more.
