Dressed in generic white athletic shoes, chinos, and a red-and-green plaid shirt, the dead man was flat on his back, his left arm at his side, the palm turned up as though seeking alms. He appeared to have been fat, because his clothes were stretched taut over parts of his body, but this was the result of swelling from bacterial-gas formation.
His face was bloated, opaque eyes bulging from the sockets, swollen tongue protruding between grimacing lips and bared teeth. Purge fluid—produced by decomposition and often mistaken for blood by the inexperienced—was draining from the mouth and nostrils. Pale green with areas of greenish black, the flesh was also marbleized by hemolysis of veins and arteries.
Bobby said, “Must’ve been here—what?—a week, two weeks?”
“Not that long. Maybe three or four days.”
The weather had been mild for the past week, neither warm nor chilly, which would have allowed decomposition to proceed at a predictable pace. If the man had been dead much longer than four days, the flesh would have been not pale green but green-black, with patches that were entirely black. Vesicle formation, skin slippage, and hair slippage had occurred but were not yet extreme, enabling me to make an educated guess as to the date of the suicide.
“Still walking around with Forensic Pathology in your head,” Bobby said.
“Still.”
My education in death dated to the year I was fourteen. By the time they enter their teens, most boys have a morbid fascination with gruesome comic books, horror novels, and monster movies. Adolescent males measure progress toward manhood by their ability to tolerate the worst gross-outs, those sights and ideas that test courage, the balance of the mind, and the gag reflex. In those days, Bobby and I were fans of H. P. Lovecraft, of the biologically moist art of H. R. Giger, and of low-budget Mexican horror movies full of gore.
We outgrew this fascination to an extent that we didn’t outgrow other aspects of our adolescence, but in those days I explored death further than did Bobby, progressing from bad movies to the study of increasingly clinical texts. I learned the history and techniques of mummification and embalming, the lurid details of epidemics like the Black Death that killed half of Europe between 1348 and 1350.
I realize now that by immersing myself in the study of death, I had hoped to accept my mortality. Long before adolescence, I knew that each of us is sand in an hourglass, steadily running out of the upper globe into the stillness of the globe below, and that in my particular hourglass, the neck between these spheres is wider than in most, the fall of sand faster. This was a heavy truth to have been carried by one so young, but by becoming a graveyard scholar, I meant to rob death of its terror.
In recognition of the steep mortality rate of people with XP, my special parents had raised me to play rather than work, to have fun, to regard the future not with anxiety but with a sense of mystery. From them, I learned to trust God, to believe I was born for a purpose, to be joyful. Consequently, Mom and Dad were disturbed by my obsession with death, but because they were academics with a belief in the liberating power of knowledge, they didn’t hamper my pursuit of the subject.
Indeed, I relied on Dad to acquire the book that completed my death studies: Forensic Pathology, published by Elsevier in a series of thick volumes written for law-enforcement professionals involved in criminal investigations. This grisly tome, generously illustrated with victim photographs that will chill the hottest heart and instill pity in all but the coldest, is not on the shelves of most libraries and is not knowingly provided to children. At fourteen, with a life expectancy thought to be—at that time—no greater than twenty, I could have argued that I was not a child but already past middle age.
Forensic Pathology covers the myriad ways we perish: disease, death by fire, death by freezing, by drowning, by electrocution, by poisoning, by starvation, by suffocation, by strangulation, death from gunshot wounds, from blunt-instrument trauma, from pointed and sharp-edged weapons. By the time I finished this book, I’d outgrown my fascination with death…and my fear of it. The photos depicting the indignity of decomposition proved that the qualities I cherish in the people I love—their wit, humor, courage, loyalty, faith, compassion, mercy—are not ultimately the work of the flesh. These things outlast the body; they live on in the memories of family and friends, live on forever by inspiring others to be kind and loving. Humor, faith, courage, compassion—these don’t rot and vanish; they are impervious to bacteria, stronger than time or gravity; they have their genesis in something less fragile than blood and bone, in a soul that endures.
Though I believe that I’ll live beyond this life and that those I love will be where I go next, I do still fear that they will depart ahead of me, leaving me alone. Sometimes I wake from a nightmare in which I’m the sole living person on earth; I lie in bed, trembling, afraid to call out for Sasha or to use the telephone, fearful that no one will answer and that the dream will have become reality.
Now, here, in the bungalow kitchen, Bobby said, “Hard to believe he could be this far gone in three or four days.”
“Exposed to the elements, complete skeletonization can occur in two weeks. Eleven or twelve days under the right circumstances.”
“So at any time…I’m two weeks from being bones.”
“It’s a quashing thought, isn’t it?”
“Major quash.”
Having seen more than enough of the dead man, I directed the flashlight at the items that he evidently had arranged on the floor around himself before pulling the trigger. A California driver’s license with photo identification. A paperback Bible. An ordinary white business envelope on which nothing was written or typed. Four snapshots in a neatly ordered row. A small ruby-red glass of the type that usually contains votive candles, though no candle was in this one.
Learning to live with nausea, trying to will myself to recall the scent of roses, I crouched for a closer look at the driver’s-license photo. In spite of the decomposition, the cadaver’s face had sufficient points of similarity to the face on the license to convince me that they were the same.
“Leland Anthony Delacroix,” I said.
“Don’t know him.”
“Thirty-five years old.”
“Not anymore.”
“Address in Monterey.”
“Why’d he come here to die?” Bobby wondered.
In hope of finding an answer, I turned the light on the four snapshots.
The first showed a pretty blonde of about thirty, wearing white shorts and a bright yellow blouse, standing on a marina dock against a backdrop of blue sky, blue water, and sailboats. Her gamine smile was appealing.
The second evidently had been taken on a different day, in a different place. This same woman, now in a polka-dot blouse, and Leland Delacroix were sitting side by side at a redwood picnic table. His arm was around her shoulders, and she was smiling at him as he faced the camera. Delacroix appeared to be happy, and the blonde looked like a woman in love.
“His wife,” Bobby said.
“Maybe.”
“She’s wearing a wedding ring in the picture.”
The third snapshot featured two children: a boy of about six and an elfin girl who could have been no older than four. In swimsuits, they stood beside an inflatable wading pool, mugging for the camera.
“Wanted to die surrounded by memories of his family,” Bobby suggested.
The fourth snapshot seemed to support that interpretation. The blonde, the children, and Delacroix stood on a green lawn, the kids in front of their parents, posed for a portrait. The occasion must have been special. Even more radiant here than in the other photos, the woman wore a summery dress and high heels. The little girl flashed a gap-toothed smile, clearly delighted by her outfit of white shoes, white socks, and a frilly pink dress flaring over petticoats. So freshly scrubbed and combed that you could almost smell the soap, the boy wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. In an army uniform and an officer’s cap—his rank not easy to determine, perhaps a captain—Delacroix was the definition of pride.
Precisely because the subjects were so visibly happy in these shots, the effect of the photos was inexpressibly sad.
“They’re standing in front of one of these bungalows,” Bobby noted, indicating the background of the fourth snapshot.
“Not one of them. This one.”
“How can you tell?”
“Gut feeling.”
“So they lived here once?”
“And he came back to die.”
“Why?”
“Maybe…this was the last place he was ever happy.”
Bobby said, “Which also means this was where it all started going wrong.”
“Not just for them. For all of us.”
“Where do you think the wife and kids are?”
“Dead.”
“Gut feeling again?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
Something glittered inside the small red votive-candle glass. I prodded it with the flashlight, tipping it over. A woman’s wedding and engagement rings spilled out onto the linoleum.
These items were all Delacroix had left of his beloved wife, other than a few photographs. Perhaps I was reaching too far for meaning, but I thought he had chosen the votive-candle holder to contain the rings because this was a way of saying that the woman and the marriage were sacred to him.
I looked again at the photograph that had been taken in front of the bungalow. The elfin girl’s wide smile, with one missing tooth, was a heartbreaker.
“Jesus,” I said softly.
“Let’s split, bro.”
I didn’t want to touch these objects the deceased had arranged around himself, but the contents of the envelope might be important. As far as I could see, it wasn’t contaminated with blood or other tissue. When I picked it up, I could discern by touch that it didn’t hold any paper documents.
“Audiotape cassette,” I told Bobby.
“A little death music?”
“Probably his last testament.”
In ordinary times, before a slow-motion Armageddon was unleashed in Wyvern’s labs, I would have called the cops to report finding a dead body. I would not have removed anything from the scene, even though the death had every appearance of being a suicide rather than a homicide.
These are not ordinary times.
As I rose to my feet, I slipped the envelope—and tape—into an inside jacket pocket.
Bobby’s attention snapped to the ceiling, and he took a two-hand grip on the shotgun.
I followed his gaze with the flashlight.
The cocoons appeared unchanged, so I said, “What?”
“Did you hear something?”
“Like?”
He listened. Finally he said, “Must’ve been in my head.”
“What did you hear?”
“Me,” he said cryptically, and without further explanation, he moved toward the dining-room door.
I felt bad about leaving the late Leland Delacroix here, especially as I wasn’t sure that I would report his suicide to the authorities even anonymously. On the other hand, this was where he had wanted to be.
On the way across the dining room, Bobby said, “This baby’s eleven feet long.”
Overhead, the clustered cocoons remained quiescent.
“What baby?” I asked.
“My new surfboard.”
Even a longboard is rarely more than nine feet. An eleven-foot monster with cool airbrush art was usually a wallhanger, produced to lend atmosphere to a theme restaurant.
“Decor?” I asked.
“No. It’s a tandem board.”
In the living room, the cocoons were as we had last seen them. Bobby cast wary glances upward as he went to the front door.
“Twenty-five inches wide, five inches thick,” he said.
Maneuvering a surfboard that size, even with two hundred fifty or three hundred pounds aboard, required talent, coordination, and belief in a benign, ordered universe.
“Tandem?” I said, switching off the flashlight as we crossed the front porch. “Since when have you traded wave thrashing for cab driving?”
“Since never. But a little tandem might be sweet.”
If he was going to do some tandem riding, he must have a partner in mind, a particular wahine. Yet the only woman he loves is a surfer and painter named Pia Klick, who has been meditating in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, trying to find herself, for almost three years, since leaving Bobby’s bed one night for a walk on the beach. Bobby didn’t know she was lost until she called from an airliner on her way to Waimea to say the search for herself had begun. She is as kind, gentle, and intelligent as anyone I have ever known, a talented and successful artist. Yet she believes that Waimea Bay is her spiritual home—not Oskaloosa, Kansas, where she was born and raised; not Moonlight Bay, where she fell in love with Bobby—and lately she claims that she is the incarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surfing.
These were strange times even before the catastrophe in the Wyvern labs.
We stopped at the foot of the porch steps and took slow deep breaths to purge ourselves of the reek of death, which seemed to have permeated us as though it were a marinade in which we had been steeping. We also took advantage of the moment to survey the night before venturing farther into it, looking for Big Head, the troop, or a new threat that even I, in full hyperdrive of the imagination, could not envision.
Rolling off the loom of the Pacific, two strata of cross-woven clouds, as twilled as gabardine, now dressed more than half the sky.
“Could get a boat,” Bobby said.
“What kind of boat?”
“We could afford whatever.”
“And?”
“Stay at sea.”
“Extreme solution, bro.”
“Sail by day, party by night. Drop anchor off deserted beaches, catch some tasty tropical waves.”
“You, me, Sasha, and Orson?”
“Pick up Pia at Waimea Bay.”
“Kaha Huna.”
“Won’t hurt to have a sea goddess aboard,” he said.
“Fuel?”
“Sail.”
“Food?”
“Fish.”
“Fish can carry the retrovirus, too.”
“Then find a remote island.”
“How remote?”
“The sphincter of nowhere.”
“And?”
“Grow our own food.”
“Farmer Bob.”
“Minus the bib overalls.”
“Shitkicker chic.”
“Self-sufficiency. It’s possible,” he insisted.
“So is killing a grizzly bear with a spear. But you get in a pit with a spear, put the bear in there with some tortillas, and that bear is going to have Bobby tacos for dinner.”