The naked man stood in the doorway, eyes unblinking. A portion of the left side of his skull was gone, but there was no blood, no gore. Gene tried to outstare him, afraid to look away, and was about to give up from the pain of the attempt when the naked man began to disappear, first his chest, then his legs and dangling bits, his pale lips and whatever lay in the cavity beyond those lips, and finally those eyes, still rigidly, defiantly staring.
They’d been told it was a double suicide but knew few of the details. Gene heard the shriek of distant sirens, and close by the soft bubbling of writhing maggots. The bittersweet stench had been overpowering at the front door, but here, outside the clean zone, they wore respirators. The two bodies had been here undiscovered for weeks, long enough to liquify in a massive meltdown, and although they’d been removed, fat deposits still pooled along one of the baseboards. There were rat droppings. Perhaps the rats had eaten off the bodies. He didn’t know.
Fluid had wicked up into the drywall. The floor had an eastward slant. Decomp had travelled into at least four rooms. The event began in this room, but the couple had moved around, panicked, or determined, coughing and bleeding. Alcohol, poison, knives, and a gun were involved. Bio contaminated much of the house.
“Did you see something?” It was the new employee, Ed something-or-other.
“What do you mean?” Even though Gene knew exactly what he meant.
“The others, they say you can see them sometimes. Ghosts, whatever.”
“They’re just hazing you. Ignore them.”
“Ha! That’s what I thought.”
He hadn’t yet decided if Ed was reliable or not. More than once, Gene had seen a new employee run out of a job. The work had a rapid burnout rate. Besides, Ed didn’t radiate competence.
He could see Ed’s red-rimmed eyes through the googles. Maybe the fellow was taking drugs. Gene could have told him that only helps for so long.
Gene rarely got enough sleep, but he didn’t use drugs, not sure what he might see as a result. What he saw on just a regular day was bad enough.
They both wore blood suits, boots, two pairs of gloves, goggles, respirators, but Gene could still tell the fellow was new on the job. A little too eager to prove he wasn’t disgusted by the cleanup scene, moving nervously, clumsily, spreading biomaterial further than necessary. More than once, Gene had stopped him from tracking remains into clean areas. “Focus, Ed. That’s the key. Just follow my lead.”
Ed sprayed water over the floor, re-hydrating the blood to make it easier to clean. “At least they were together, right? This couple? At least they weren’t alone.”
Most of their cleanups were single bodies, the unattended dead, left alone to die. “I try not to think about what happened here. Our goal is to make the location look normal again, as much as possible. Sanitized and ready for repair. I want to know as little as possible about the families or the circumstances, Ed. I suggest you do the same. I know the others like to gossip, but I don’t recommend it.”
“So, it’s just a job to you?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s a sad situation. But we can’t feel their pain. All we can do is clean up after them. Somebody has to do it and that’s what we’ve chosen to do. It’s what we’re paid for.” Gene was talking too much. Sometimes he did that on a job.
The naked woman appeared behind Ed and to the left. She was probably beautiful once. She appeared to be running, screaming a silent alarm. Most of her hair was still by the couch, stuck to the floor. Her body was riddled with ragged holes. Gene could see through some of them to the shredded wallpaper behind her. The two of them, they must have clawed at the wallpaper in this room. He found a piece of fingernail embedded in the drywall. Much of the wallboard in this room was contaminated and would have to be removed.
“Are you married, Gene?” Ed used a long-handled scraper on the field of rust-colored human debris layering the floor. The decomp had pooled in places, travelled in rivulets down the hall, created additional pools in other rooms, spread under carpeting. There was contaminated tile and porous grout in the kitchen, and the floor in this room was soft pine not well sealed. The demo crew would have to remove a great deal. The couple’s landlord was in for an enormous financial hit. “You got kids? Family? What do they say about what you do? I haven’t figured out how much to tell mine. I just tell them the pay’s good.”
“I live alone now,” Gene said. “No girlfriend. No prospects.” Ed didn’t reply. Gene picked up broken liquor bottles, a shattered lamp, a sticky hairbrush, and dropped them into red hazardous waste bags inside cardboard hazardous waste boxes. He sprayed and scooped dead maggots into a separate bag.
Gene didn’t want to be found like this, people in hazmat suits cleaning up after him. But for now, he couldn’t see how to avoid it. “We clean up life’s unfortune mishaps,” was the way the company’s owner put it, a man who no longer went out on jobs. He’d named the company “Bio Genies.” Their logo was three identical genies with tornado bodies leaving sparkling stars in their wake. It was embarrassing.
“Why do you think they did it?” Ed asked, rolling in the extractor, a powerful bio-hazard vacuum.
“Ed, please. I don’t—” But Ed had already started up the machine, apparently not interested in the answer. Suicide was a small word for everything this couple had done. They had committed rage here.
Flies were everywhere. At one point he turned around and was confronted by a cloud of flies in the vague outline of a man. He turned around and walked the other way. He checked all the corners where debris tends to gather. In one he found small chunks of jellied flesh like rotting fruit.
They found where a few footprints tracked through the blood. The cops said someone robbed the place afterwards, even with all this carnage spread through the house.
At the end of day one, they cleaned up their equipment in the clean zone and slipped out of their gear. Before leaving Gene switched on the ozone machine to purify the air overnight. He posted a warning on the door.
After a day like this Gene was reluctant to spend a long evening alone in his apartment. He couldn’t talk about what he did for a living. It repulsed most people.
He retreated into the library at the end of the street. Gene knew the neighborhood well. This was their fourth case on Alphabet Row in two years, a large number for such a limited area. With small brick bungalows built in the late twenties and early thirties, it was meant to be a cute, fairytale-like neighborhood with large letters on the houses to help teach the local children the alphabet. Maybe at one time it had been exactly that charming, but many of the homes were now in poor repair, and many of the letters which had given the neighborhood its name were missing or replaced with lettering of more modest size. But the current client’s house still had its enormous R mounted on the outside by the door, painted a bright candy red.
Gene imagined these old bungalows were cheap enough, and small enough, they might seem the perfect places to house elderly relatives in their final years. But bad things can happen when you’re left alone, when there’s no one around to find you. But Gene wasn’t the one to point out other folks’ isolation.
The library appeared full. Gene found it calming to be around a large group of people. Of course, seeing several people wasn’t the same as being with them. He didn’t like to think of himself as a recluse, but he supposed he was. He’d lost the knack for talking to people.
Numerous chairs were placed in and around the checkout area and the stacks. They were famous here for never turning vagrants away. Like most libraries Gene patronized this one contained large numbers of the dead: lounging, sleeping, reading, and re-reading the same page. It always made him curious, what that single page might be, but he kept his distance out of respect, or maybe fear.
A few ranted silently to themselves. Several mimed dramatic scenes, a reprise of their final moments, played again and again.
Many of the dead were obvious about what they were. They wore their torn cheeks, empty eye sockets, and missing ears almost proudly, as if they were carefully selected ornamentations. Gene thought of these as the honest dead. Others were more challenging to distinguish, their scars and stains easily mistaken for the evidence of careless, difficult lives.
An elderly man whose multitude of facial wrinkles made him appear fractured had a newspaper over his lap. Gene wondered if he were hiding something there. He appeared unable to keep his tongue in his mouth.
A woman in an ill-fitting green sweater sat hunched forward, staring at her shoes, an unmatched pair. As Gene walked past her, he noticed the chunk missing from the back of her neck.
One fellow’s ballcap was crushed and splitting at the seams. He turned around and stared at Gene with huge, bloodshot eyes. This one, apparently, was alive.
A few nudes were present as well, wandering the aisles. Sometimes they reached out and touched the ones who were seated. There were also people lying in the middle of the floor spreadeagle. Gene assumed all these folks were dead. Some were bodies he had helped remove or cleaned up after at various crime scenes. Some he recognized from bedside photographs at the sites of suicides.
He found his wife and his beautiful little girl in the children’s section, reading together. He tried to ignore their obvious wounds, where the car he’d been driving had crushed, or tore their bodies. At one point his daughter looked up at him, but with no signs on her face she recognized him, or even that she registered his presence. Instead of being traumatized, he was grateful for the reminders: how his wife tilted her head when reading, how his daughter folded her hands into her lap while listening.
He walked out to his van and drove to his apartment. He knew if he didn’t do something soon, he’d one day become one of the unattended, lying undiscovered for days, for weeks, for months.
On the morning of day two Gene felt restless, anxious to begin. Their boss called a couple of times, wanting to know when one or both of them would be free. They had other jobs to go to, other human messes to clean up. But seeing the house with fresh eyes, Gene found hundreds of examples of further contamination, hundreds of spots requiring a thorough cleaning.
Gene wouldn’t go on jobs in which dead children were involved. He was a good employee, so his boss made allowances for him, although not always happily. A two-person demolition crew arrived to remove flooring and chip away at the tile. His boss was trying to rush him, but there was much more cleaning required in those rooms before any demo could take place. Many spots were stubbornly resistant and might require hours, but Gene refused to walk away prematurely. His task, wherever possible, was to turn back the clock.
What he did here would not redeem him, but it was responsible work, and it filled the time. For him personally, he knew there would be no fix, no matter how much effort was applied. Remorse was too small a word for what he felt.
Ed worked with the radio tuned to a country station, the volume turned loud enough to grate on Gene’s nerves. But he didn’t complain.
He scrubbed one wall in stages, spending hours on it. He sprayed on industrial strength disinfectant, wiped off switch plates, door frames, any place they might have touched or coughed on while running through the house, dying. He climbed a ladder and cleaned the ceiling fan blades, top and bottom. He examined anywhere flies and other insects, or rats might have carried the biological material. He sprayed blood indicator onto surfaces and followed the results throughout the house. He rubbed and scrubbed until no traces were left.
There were few pieces of furniture in the room they called location zero. A couple of old chairs, a small table, a floor lamp. They were contaminated by the decomp drawn up from underneath them and would have to be thrown away. There was also a sideboard sitting directly on the floor. That, and everything inside it, would also be thrown away.
The demo team cut the wall about halfway up and removed the bottom portion of drywall. They removed all the baseboards in the room. They began removing floorboards and subflooring. In spots the floor joists were exposed. The room appeared frozen in deconstruction, but at least it would be clean.
Ed continued to ramble on about sports, news, weather, arguments with his wife, how his kids misbehaved. Gene found those latter complaints particularly hard to take. But at least Ed kept working. Gene could tell he had a talent for the job. They both tried to be thorough. They took turns making rounds looking for things the other might have missed.
So, Gene was startled to discover a large spread of decomp in the middle of the bare bedroom floor. They’d been through this room dozens of times, sprayed and scraped and sprayed, but somehow this enormous stain had reappeared. He could see how the dying couple ran through the room, both trailing blood. Maybe one stumbled and fell and this was what he or she left behind.
But Gene cut the blood stain out of the carpet yesterday, as well as the portion where it leaked into the pad. He put those pieces into a biohazard bag and the rest of the carpet was disposed of as solid waste. The blood had not reached the floorboards underneath it. There had been no stain left on the floor.
Yet here it was, rusty red and crusted with human grit.
A hand rose out of the stain. This was not the first time Gene had witnessed such a thing. He struggled not to react. He had worked hard to regain some limited composure. Now he felt on the verge of relapse.
The hand did not go away. The fingers separated as it tilted in his direction. Unable to resist, Gene walked over and grasped the hand and pulled. He continued to pull until he’d pulled the woman out of her own remains.
She swept past him, and even though he wore a respirator he could still smell her.
Gene waited in his van parked on the street until the others left. Ed was the last to leave, waving to him and shouting that he would see him in the morning. Tomorrow would be a full day. There was both a murder and a suicide on the schedule. Gene didn’t expect they would have time for both. Gene and the boss would argue, and Gene would win.
He stepped out of his van and walked across the street. He could see the dead lying on the sidewalk in a variety of distressed poses. Bodies lay up and down the lane in differing degrees of brokenness, their fluids leaking into the gutters.
He didn’t leave the house until the flames were well established and unlikely to stop by themselves. He’d stashed cleaning fluids in several closets, and when the flames reached them, they went up with a gasp.
This wasn’t the first time he’d done such a thing. But he always made sure the homeowner had insurance. They needed insurance to pay the company what it charged for these extensive cleanings.
But sometimes despite everything they did, they couldn’t get a house clean enough. He knew he’d get caught someday. He didn’t care.
Gene waited to make sure the fire remained contained and until he heard the sirens. He watched the dead walking the streets as the house burned, a sloppily organized parade of regrets. A pale figure paused and stared at him through the windshield. It was like gazing into a mirror.
Originally published in Black Static, Issue 82/83, 2023.
