Chapter 2

WE COULD have followed our noses straight to the cooked corpse. Eric tried, but I held him back, motioning for him to follow me so we could sweep the house for living people first.

The people who owned this place must have been important even three years ago, after humanity discovered Absolute eating Australia and nuked the entire continent to glass. On a solid oak dining room table big enough to seat twelve, I found bills and catalogs addressed to Jerome and Tabitha Morpeth of ritzy Bloomfield Hills. This had to be their summer home. The roomy kitchen featured stainless-steel cookware and wooden-handled knives dangling from chrome ceiling racks. Food crumbs and spots of dried mustard and ketchup marked the island. Something sticky had spattered the gleaming white, ripple-textured Pewabic-style tile backsplash, and smeared grease marred the chrome refrigerator handle.

On the white-speckled black granite kitchen counter I found a bunch of thick comb-bound books from Building the Future, the federal group that had supposedly helped people prepare for the aftermath of burning Absolute out of the world. A bunch had white covers: Nuclear Winter Preparations. Greenhouse Management. Core Electrical Grid Decentralization Plan, version 5.2. I remembered seeing version 6 a week before Absolute’s final attack. In blue covers, Employment-Based Dietary Allotments and the detested Gasoline Rationing Index. Kevin had wondered which of those last two books people had hated more.

Two thick books, in heavy, blue cardboard covers and stamped “For Official Use Only,” dominated the countertop. A shiver of remembered disgust rippled through me. Kevin had hated these books, hated what they stood for and what they would have meant for him. Books that had appalled Kevin even though he’d never needed either. Duplicate Detection and Destruction. Martial Law Procedures.

At the bottom of the stack of books I found one in an unfamiliar black cover, the title stamped in blood red. North American Cauterization Plan.

From the kitchen library, it seemed pretty clear one of the Morpeths was supposed to help people prepare for Absolute’s invasion. Or deal with humanity’s failure to stop it.

Had the Morpeths been rich before the bombs flew, or had they been among those bastards who turned civil disaster preparations into profits?

And what kind of person did their whole house in black and white?

I left the books where I’d found them. If I ever needed kindling—worthless, useless leftovers of a vanished past—I knew where to get them. Not that I’d needed kindling recently. These days, things had a tendency to explode into flames around me.

We cleared the sumptuous main floor, finding it empty, so I led Eric up the broad spiral staircase to the upper level. The plush padding beneath tightly knit zebra-print carpet swallowed the sounds of our steps. Eric moved quietly for such a big guy, but his massive toolbox clanked at each tread.

Upstairs, the stench of scorched carrion thickened into an almost visible fog filling the hallway from gleaming white wall to empty gleaming white wall. My lungs rebelled against each breath, and I felt instantly glad we’d skipped lunch.

The spacious guest bedrooms featured queen beds with soft, thick mattresses and too many shams and lacy comforters, all in stark black and white, and each window tightly closed and locked. I couldn’t imagine anyone hiding in a room with gelatinous air that tasted of rancid meat, but things were different now, and what I could imagine didn’t cover half of what was happening. I flung open closet doors and Eric glanced under the beds before we headed through the abandoned master bedroom to the private bath, the stink growing stronger with every step.

The bathroom must have been designed to make the rest of the house look like a down-market Detroit No-Tell Motel. Iridescent tile in blues and reds gleamed from the floor and walls, except for the frosted glass walls of the two-person steam shower and the floor-to-ceiling mirror beside the sparkling chrome sink. I almost didn’t see the lavishly appointed room, my attention immediately dragged to the mirror and the words scrawled there in bright red lipstick: I CAN’T DO THIS.

I knew exactly how the writer had felt. I stepped further into the room, glancing to my right. An octagonal window with tinted one-way glass looked out over what had once been a wonderful view of nature. Instead, the window faced the horrible green, choppy muck saturating Lake Huron, a constant reminder of the new world.

A thin strand of desiccated jerky ran around the window.

My gaze followed it down to the raised platform supporting a sunken triangular tub.

And in the tub, something that had once been human. Ish.

Maybe.

The malformed body had stretched thin and flat, hugging the inside of the tub as if squeezing away from the oily water that still filled the bottom of the tub. I couldn’t tell if it had been male or female, but the toilet seat stood upraised, so I assumed “him” until proven otherwise. Rivulets of dried corpse tracked across the area where once they crawled from the tub, leaving behind dried riverbeds of flesh. One thinned and elongated arm flowed up the wall, detouring around the octagonal window to end in a flattened hand, stretched fingers curled to dig into the grout between the tiles. The other had stretched across the room towards the sink, only to collapse in a skeletal rigor a foot short.

His head balanced on the edge of the tub, mouth impossibly stretched in an agonized scream so wide that it jammed the man’s nose up between his imploded eyes. The scalp had pulled away from the jaw, partially swallowing the short blond hair and pulling his ears towards the crown of his head.

A thick orange extension cord ran from a hall outlet and into the bathroom, where it plugged into a dark black cord snaking into the tub. The rancid, oily sheen on the water revealed only the shadow of some cube-shaped device. Probably a toaster—most people who chose to die this way used a toaster. The dead man’s abdomen reached from the side of the tub towards the dark cube, partially covering it, as if the man’s flesh had tried to safely encapsulate the appliance before he died.

Eric grunted, deep and sharp, his breath caught between sounds.

Years as a detective in Detroit had taught me to take in the whole body immediately. If I looked away, I’d never look back. I focused on the leg that had flowed out of the tub towards the steam shower. “Go outside if you’re going to spew.”

“’m fine,” Eric said. The toolbox clanked to the floor, followed closely by the sounds of Eric’s shoes pounding towards the stairs. The front door—already open from our entrance—slammed against the wall and stuck there. From outside, I heard the muffled sounds of gagging.

I covered my ears for a moment, allowing the sound to fade slightly. I already wanted to puke up everything I’d ever eaten, and listening to Eric would push me over the edge. Instead, I made myself hammer the scene into my memory. Kevin had been a cop. I was a civil servant, sort of. Besides, if I didn’t deal with this, nobody else would. I’d known fire could kill us, kill what we were now. I’d hadn’t known electricity could too.

The police department, as part of the defense preparations, had trained Kevin how to use a flamethrower. Why hadn’t they mentioned the electrical thing?

Probably because nobody made lightning throwers. And how much extension cord could you drag around behind you?

The corpse wore a black cotton T-shirt, stretched into shreds by the body’s transformation but still gently cloaking the chest and forearms. I peered through the water, and…maybe, those might be shorts under there.

Someone had written I can’t do this on the mirror. This poor bastard had ample reason to write that—but maybe it hadn’t been him. The way it looked was, after writing, he climbed into the tub, fully clothed. And pulled a radio or a toaster or something in with him.

Open and shut, really, no matter what I told myself. The only thing that made this different from a dozen scenes I remembered from before was the absence of paperwork. Or a coroner’s team. Well, that and the body smearing itself all over the bathroom. One of those fingernails had become a six-inch stiletto, sticking straight out from the wall up near the window.

Frayville had no government. No civil authority. Those of us Absolute had loosed did whatever needed doing to keep things running. Eric and I were trying to reach anyone in Frayville who might have been too afraid to leave their home. That meant visiting every single house. Every. Single. Damn. House. This was the first successful suicide in the two weeks since we’d started knocking on doors.

I didn’t want to think about the other suicides. The ones that weren’t successful.

Eric dragged himself back through the bathroom door. “Opened the back door. Found a fan, plugged it in.”

I nodded and jerked the extension cord out of the wall. “Thanks.” I’d grown acclimated enough to the stench that I was able to breath more deeply. Before going home I’d have to hit the pharmacy and grab a bottle of Vicks for the next time this happened. I let myself look away from the body. I didn’t remember getting acclimated to that distinctive decomposition stench so quickly when I’d been at other sites. Before.

Eric’s Mediterranean features had acquired a greenish-white undertone, but his jaw was set.

Opening the bathroom window would air the place out...