After all, criminals had a right to dress well. Besides, there had been a sale on summer dresses.
As usual, after a fight with her mother, Arie ended up at her best friend’s place.
“I seriously don’t get what the big deal is. You’d think your mom would be all Kübler-Ross about dying, right? I mean, she’s a minister’s wife. And what’s wrong with being dead? It’s not like you stayed that way.” Chandra’s voice came out squished as she pretzeled around her knee, daintily polishing her toenails purple-black. Chandra was heavy into body art, although thus far, she had managed to limit piercings to her left eyebrow, her nose, and a tiny angel kiss above her upper lip. The rest of her body was her palate, although she hadn’t started on tattoos. Yet.
Arie sat on the faded floor pillows that were her best friend’s only furniture. She sighed, pulling her feet out from the cramped, crossed-leg position that had stopped being comfortable when she was twelve. Her right foot tingled one notch below falling asleep. Arie wiggled it.
“You need a couch,” she said irritably.
Chandra looked up. “You need a nap.”
“Which I could take if you had a couch. And I’m not crabby.”
Arie considered snagging the bag of Doritos that she knew Chandra would have stashed in the kitchen. Her mouth salivated. But no. She tamped down the craving. She’d promised herself she’d stop using chips and ice cream as antidepressants.
Chandra snorted, turning back to dabbing the inky liquid onto a stubby pinky toe.
“You smeared,” Arie pointed out, earning a glinting, green-eyed glare. Sighing, she thunked her head back against the wall.
Of course Chandra didn’t get it. She’d been born and raised in Southern California and had moved to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, just before middle school. She was used to being thought of as weird—reveled in it, in fact. Arie, on the other hand, came from a long line of proper, beige-y Midwestern ancestors. She had never fit in with them, but they’d never lowered their expectations.
“So let me get this straight,” Chandra said. “You don’t want to discuss the fact that you were bumped off, died, and had a layover in heaven, but you got a job cleaning up dead people anyway?” She finally untangled her long legs, straightening them across the floor.
Arie knew ignoring her wouldn’t work. Chandra would just keep vulture-circling the subject until Arie gave in.
“I don’t mind talking about the death part. I just don’t want to talk about the attack.”
Again.
Dying had been . . . beautiful. But getting mugged—killed—for the measly few tips she’d earned bartending was decidedly not. The police had grilled her over and over again about the little she could remember about leaving the bar and walking to her car and for what? They hadn’t caught the guy.
Fortunately, Chandra had a fascination with the Other Side—in all things weird and paranormal, actually. From the moment Arie had gotten out of the hospital, the NDE had been all Chandra wanted to talk about. Or maybe she’d simply been more sensitive than Arie gave her credit for.
“Obviously, I’m not afraid of death anymore,” Arie finally said. “It doesn’t bother me, so why not make money off it? I could sure use it.”
Chandra squinted at her best friend. “I think it’s an awesome job. The fact that it tweaks your mom’s butt is just an added benefit. When do you start?”
“I already did. I went in for training yesterday.”
“And you’re just now telling me?” Chandra looked stunned.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to go through with it. Besides, it’s like being on call. I have to wait until someone dies. And I won’t be on the first team called out either, unless it’s a big job. I had to go in for a bunch of hep-B shots, though, and the training is, like, three days. I guess I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing.”
“It’s kind of weird hoping that someone dies, huh?”
“I guess.” Not really. Death was wonderful. But Arie didn’t want to start all that up again. “It’s not only death scenes, though. It might be a meth lab or something. From what Basil Gallo said, there are a lot of those projects up north.”
“Geez, that could be dangerous.” Chandra met her gaze. “All those chemicals. What if you blow up or something?”
Then I die, Arie said to herself. Again.
CHAPTER FOUR
At least the first job wasn’t a murder. Leonard Petranik died all on his own, although nothing about his death could be termed natural.
“Hoarder,” Grady said.
Short, squat, and built like a stump, Arie’s new partner spoke with the authority of his senior status. He’d been with BioClean for nearly a year and was already their third most experienced employee. This did not generate confidence in BioClean being a long-term employment option.
They stood outside a small ranch-style home in one of those working-class neighborhoods that were deserted during the day. Arie looked at the call sheet and tried to figure out where Grady got the information that their “client” was a hoarder. The only items listed were the homeowner’s name—Leonard Petranik—the address, lots of insurance information, and a small box checked Unattended Death. She followed Grady to the back of the van where he pulled out supplies.
“How do you know he’s a hoarder?”
Grady pointed at the ranch’s windows. A sun-faded Dixie flag and a dingy-looking beach towel hung in place of curtains in the large picture window. In addition to the dubious decorating choice, there was something else off about it. It took a few seconds for Arie to realize that neither flag nor towel hung free. Instead of falling in loose folds, the fabric was mashed against the panes, flattened nearly to the top of the windows where it bunched unevenly. One corner of the flag had slipped off the rod, or whatever it was attached to, exposing a triangle of jumbled colors. Arie’s brain told her that something must be holding up the bit of flag, but it looked as though it was levitating. The kaleidoscope of colors added a festive splash to the otherwise dreary exterior.
A second set of windows, smaller and lacking even a towel for privacy, were situated at the far end of the house. A bedroom, maybe? An assorted mix of boxes of varied shapes and sizes blocked the bottom six inches of the windows.
“Maybe he was moving in?”
Grady pointed again, this time to the one-car garage located at the opposite end of the house. The bifurcated door bulged askew, the left side prevented from closing by layers and layers of newspapers wedged underneath.
Grady was already pulling on a yellow Tyvek biohazard suit. He leaned against the back of the van, tugging the fitted “bunny suit” up over his tennis shoes, wiggling his way into the protective gear. Arie had tried one on during training and wasn’t looking forward to the stifling heat. She wished she had thought to wear shorts and a tank top like Grady. She was stuck in a short-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of ratty tennis shoes that she had already determined could be thrown away if needed.
Her second discovery was that yellow Tyvek did absolutely nothing for her curvy hips. Arie stared down at herself. She looked like a lumpy, ambulatory banana. She copied Grady by wrapping a strip of crime scene tape around her middle to take the suit in. Now she looked like a lumpy banana with criminal tendencies. Sighing, she watched Grady pull on a second pair of disposable booties.
He didn’t explain why they needed double wrapping, and Arie didn’t ask. She had already figured out there would be things she wouldn’t want to dwell on.
The odor assaulted her halfway up the sidewalk. Grady looked over his shoulder, and Arie waited for words of encouragement and inspiration. He was, after all, her supervisor.
“If you have to puke, make sure you get the mask off,” Grady said. “It really sucks to hurl in your mask and have it wash back up in your face. And don’t puke on the scene. We’ll just have to clean that up, too.”
Words to live by.
There were tunnels. The garbage had been piled to nearly ceiling he
ight in most of the rooms, but Petranik had constructed a rabbit warren of burrows. The walls of trash were divided into stratified layers, separating into different eras like an archaeological dig. The eighties, which predated Arie’s birth by a decade, hit about shoulder high. In one small section, Arie spied the black edges of VHS tapes, a five-inch-thick VCR, a boxy gray dinosaur of an IBM computer, and a squashed-flat box that previously held “The Clapper.” A small, multicolored pyramid poked out of the wall. She grasped it, dislodging a small shower of Bubble Yum wrappers and Styrofoam fast-food sandwich boxes. The wall shifted ominously, and Arie held her breath. She had nearly caused a trash avalanche over a rescued Rubik’s Cube. Being smothered to death under a pile of trash was not appealing. Unless . . .
Unless it meant a chance to return to the Other Side. Arie wondered if Petranik was there now. A wave of jealousy almost doubled her over, making her drop the toy.
She had also lost sight of Grady. Then Arie heard him foraging up ahead. Another sound, a low-pitched humming, filtered through her mask, growing louder and louder the farther down the hall she walked. The sound, an atonal vibration, snuck past her respirator and seeped into her ears. Arie froze, mouth dry. It was almost—not quite but almost—like the sound from the OS, as Arie had taken to calling the Other Side, a pervasive, surround-sound of disparate beings joined in a harmony of noise. A green bottle fly bounced off Arie’s face shield.
Oh. This wasn’t heaven’s harmony she was hearing, but a symphony of flies doing what flies were created to do.
Arie joined Grady at the door to a bathroom. Leonard—under the circumstances, Arie felt they should be on a first-name basis—had killed himself in the bathtub. Considerate of him, really. Maybe he’d expected any spray from his sliced wrists would land on tile, making the clean-up job easier for whoever was faced with the task.
Unfortunately, Leonard must not have factored in what several days of undetected death would leave.
Or maybe he wasn’t considerate after all.
A writhing curtain of flies covered the walls and ceiling, coating the now empty tub like a roiling black rug. The bathroom floor was littered with insect husks. An entomologist’s dream: the life cycle of the fly from egg to desiccated hull and all the wiggling mass in between.
Arie stepped back into the hall to reassess her newly chosen career path.
Grady stood in the door, watching while she grappled with the horror show in the tub. Arie tried to focus on the scene in the detached way she imagined Grady did. I’m a professional.
It might have worked except when she rubbed her forehead, she jostled her face mask, letting the smell squeeze underneath. The breathing space filled with the lingering odor of rotted, decaying meat. Once it was under the rubber seal, there was no escaping it.
Grady said something. The mask muffled his voice.
“What?” Arie pointed to her ear.
He leaned in, speaking loud and slow. “Take your mask off.” He gestured at her respirator, miming raising it.
Was he nuts? “Why?”
“Come on.” He gestured impatiently and began pulling his off, which convinced Arie there must be some reason for this idiocy. Maybe he needed to tell her something.
Arie noticed his puffed cheeks about two seconds too late. The smell knocked her upside the head like a physical blow. Tears flooded her eyes—the reaction either a physical response, an instinctive flushing to protect the orbs, or an emotional one as her brain reeled in horror. If her skin could have curled back, it surely would have. Arie’s knees buckled, and she retched.
Bellowing with laughter, Grady resettled his respirator. Stomach still heaving, Arie was afraid to put the mask back on. Grady grabbed her elbow and shoved her back down the hall. Arie stumbled through the house, heading blindly for the door. Her body was in full flight mode, propelling her toward fresh air.
In the yard, she dropped on all fours, simultaneously retching and gulping for air. It was not fresh air—not by a long shot. The odor still lingered. Arie’s lungs sucked it in anyway. Her eyes continued to water, and then her nose joined in, snot running freely down the front of her suit. She shook so hard her muscles ached.
She vowed to whip Grady’s ass just as soon as she regained a minimal amount of control over her body. The bastard had followed her and was leaning against the van, still hiccupping in the wind-down phase of hysteria.
Pulling herself to her feet, Arie tried to incinerate him with her eyes. It would have been more effective, she knew, if the front of her banana suit wasn’t covered with her own snot.
“Welcome to BioClean,” Grady said. “Grab the camera.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The turnover rate at BioClean suddenly made perfect sense. But Arie had lived—and died—through scarier things than the remnants of a body recycling itself back to nature. She glared at Grady, who still grinned like a buffoon.
Dude doesn’t realize he’s dealing with the undead, does he?
Saying nothing, Arie snatched up the camera and went back through the house, documenting both the levels of trash in each room and the tiny, cramped bathroom. When she was done, Grady checked the digital display and grudgingly nodded.
“What next?” Arie asked.
They returned to the bathroom. Grady crossed to the fly-curtained window and tried to open it. It had been painted shut, so he ended up going to the van for a crowbar. When Arie had pictured wielding the tools of the trade, she had thought of disinfectant, rubber gloves, and paper towels. Her training taught her to add crowbars, Sawz-Alls, wet-dry vacs, and putty scrapers.
Once Grady got the window open, the flies dispersed. The room looked better already.
“We’ve only contracted for the blood,” Grady said. “I don’t know if his kids even know about the hoarding issue, but that’s not our job. Not yet, anyway. Since only one of us can fit in here at a time . . .”
He gave Arie an I’ve-got-seniority look that left no doubt as to just who would be working in the bathroom.
“Right.” Arie thought about what she would need and headed back out to the van. Grady followed, and Arie realized this was an on-the-job, pass-fail test. She assembled the supplies and turned to head back into the house.
“Wait.”
Arie paused warily.
“Doing the first run-through and for the camera work, we only need the light suit and the latex.” He wiggled his gloved fingers at her. “For the real work, you add the heavy ones over the top. Make sure you tape the wrists off.”
“Why the change in attitude?”
Grady grinned. “Well, you didn’t actually throw up. Guts bet me twenty bucks you would. He always bets the newbie will hurl, and he’s always right. ‘Cept for today.”
“Guts?”
“Gallo. Basil Gallo. Ol’ Blood and Guts himself. He’s gonna be ticked when he finds out he lost.”
Grabbing one of the kits—a plastic milk crate filled with a surprising number of things—Arie made a show of stomping away, but her heart lightened. Everyone else threw up the first time, huh? She decided it was a good thing she’d skipped breakfast that morning. Maybe she’d end up a legend in the biohazard-cleaning world.
Arie had only been cleaning for about ten minutes when a sense of profound sadness washed over her body. She’d been scrubbing a particularly recalcitrant streak of blood caught in the tile grout when it happened. Up ’til then, she’d felt pretty spunky, knowing she’d cost her boss twenty bucks in the will-she-puke bet. Knowing she could handle the awful things the job would dish up was a relief, too.
Overwhelming sadness. Tears pooled, and her hand rose of its own accord to clench in a fist over her heart. A thick gray fog materialized before her eyes, filling her nostrils until she thought she would choke. How was the fog getting past the mask?
Knowing she shouldn’t, Arie sank down to the closed toilet lid and curled over on herself.
What the hell was happening?
A little zing of anger flashed throug
h her body, and that really scared her. The emotions didn’t feel like her own.
Shake it off. Arie blinked and rubbed her eyes, then literally gave herself a shake and picked up the wall scraper she’d accidentally dropped. Gripping the bottle of disinfectant as though she was preparing to duel, Arie returned to the section of tiled wall she’d been working on.
Splashes and dots of blood glimmered. The edges of her vision grew blotchy as though she were about to faint. Arie took a deep breath. She sprayed and started scraping, trying to ignore the wash of sadness and . . . was that loneliness? She focused hard on the thick streak of blood.
An image of a beautiful, dark-haired woman bloomed in her mind. Sunny, a voice inside Arie’s head said. She throws her head back in laughter, that endearing gap between her front teeth flashing. My heart feels like it will explode with love.
My heart? A brilliant flash of light burst in Arie’s mind’s eye. Then . . .
A boy and girl ride bikes in front of the house. The kids . . . my kids . . . so young.
Another flash.
They kneel in their pajamas in front of the Christmas tree. My son unwraps his gift. A Rubik’s Cube tumbles in a rainbow of colors from the wrapping paper.
Flash.
A Ford F-250, a blue so dark it almost looks black. Sunny darts around the bed of it, flinging a sodden and soapy sponge at my head. Laughs.
Flash.
The house—empty, except for things. All of their belongings are all around me. Everywhere my hand reaches, I can touch them. I’m surrounded by the pieces of my family. Every bit of it as important as their heartbeats to me. Every bit of—
Arie broke out of the trance, stumbled backward, and tripped over a bucket into the hallway. Eyes wide, Grady came dashing around the corner. The hall had been narrowed by rows of boxes lining both sides. Light backlit Grady’s end, and for one brief, hopeful moment, Arie thought she was going back There.
A Scrying Shame Page 2
