Work Text:
It's not the worst place you've ever seen, but you've seen a lot of shit. Perhaps, maybe, this is the worst building you'll see today, but you can't tell until you're inside. Your task is to appraise the second-floor left side of a house that's been quartered and walled into apartments. Abandoned for at least a few months. Oripathy likely. Corpses, hopefully not. The other three apartments still have tenants, despite the dilapidated state of the building suggesting otherwise. You'll try not to bother them on your way.
You rest your gloved hand on the banister that leads up to your target, running your eyes (through a very fogged visor) along the splinters and jutting nailheads, rusty with acid rain and crooked work. The lowest step is just under your foot, weeping lopsided at the slightest application of weight. The first, or the last page to a death in reverse. Nothing special, nothing new. Just another hour in your 9 to 5.
Across the sun-bleached stairs, scattered like jacks, are unmistakable clusters of fractured crystal. Chipped off or picked from beneath the skin by busy hands like ever-growing scabs. The dark brown stains against the bone-white steps stand out: splattered mistakes against a decent canvas. Thirsty wood and old blood.
Climbing to the top, the screen door hangs lopsided, the mesh of it punched out and left adrift like a fraying flag. Floated on the dead wind of the alley below, steeped in the stink of piss and worm shit and maggot teeth. Glancing down, old tins of cheap coffee are huddled like rats against the flaking skin of the home. Labels peeling, lids popped off and stuffed full of spit and rain and cigarette butts and beer caps.
Left of the door: bags of trash amorphous at odd angles leaking a thick dark syrup onto the stoop, dripping like a river font seemingly endless between the gapped slats of wood down to the lead-poisoned dirt. Trash from on high to the trash of the streets below. The muted colours of the city and its pavement nooks, decorated gleefully with plastic bags praising Thank You!, candy wrappers in all the colours of the rainbow, used baby wipes and crumpled receipts. All spilling out the cracks of the city's infrastructure, and all that foil shining like teeth under today's crushing heat.
The city is bloated with humidity, honey-thick air clinging to your skin and throat. Especially as swaddled as you are in your hazmat suit, sweating out your morning coffee. You are eager to be done with this. You pry open the screen, grimacing as it lets out a nails‐on-chalkboard screech. The front door is unlocked, but still takes your full weight to push open, bloated with water and improper edges. You step in, over piles of unopened letters and trash, and get to work.
You've gotten used to looking around fast, first thing. Scoping out any danger, squatters or electrified standing water or Infected wild animals or fuck knows what else. Nothing. It's empty of all life, as far as you can see. And it's clear that it's the kind of place that's deadening to be in too. Oppressive, digestive of the soul. Architecture threading the definition of sufficient ignorance. Malice pooling up against the peeling baseboards. There's no corpse here; it's gotten up and made itself someone else's problem.
The whole place is blanketed in a light dusting of hair and dandruff and other pickings that show its inhabitants were human once. Coarse white hair, and softer black-red hair, not that you're looking close enough to tell. Two people, at least, you think. Fingernail clippings. Flecks of what might be more Originium but, you realize, it's flaked-off black nail polish. The bottle it came from is turned on its side on the floor, mostly empty, dark lacquer pooling thick and stuck to the linoleum. Ah, that'll be a bitch for whoever has to scrape it off.
The living room, if you could call it that, opens into the kitchen, if you could call it that. Its main attraction is a mini fridge, power cut, contents rotted. No stove or oven, but a lone hotplate shoved into the corner with a melted saucepan stuck to it. A couple chairs, a table with uneven legs.
You creep further into the apartment. It's a single bedroom, single bathroom; three doors total if you count the battered thing out front. One window, set into the wall at an odd angle, with a single drape covered in stains and tears pulled halfway off its runner.
The only thing that catches your eye in the bedroom is a pile of bright orange prescription bottles, some dating so far back the labels have faded. A small mountain of them, shoved to the side. The ceiling is a cheap stucco finish all over, prone to flaking and hell on sensitive lungs. You know this. You've seen it all before. No fan. No AC. No airflow.
You stand still a moment, less looking around the place than feeling it. Smelling the acrid stink of old mouthfuls of sick air, even through your mask, staining all the walls along with the mildew and the cigarette smoke. Tasting that instinct to suffocate yourself rather than breathe in the cloying air of rot and death that wants so desperately to slither its yellowing nails across your tongue. Hearing the way that you aren't really alone in this coffin, raised voices and slamming hands and crashing furniture rented at 1,000LMD a month on all sides. Not a moment's rest, not a place to call your own. From where you stand, it's all problems. Exposed sockets, peeling wallpaper, carpet staples, bills, bills, bills, a weekly or monthly purchase of the right to rot out of sight and out of mind. And all that under a roof that weeps more than its tenants.
But this is nothing special, nothing new. Just another hour in your 9 to 5. So you move on.
The bathroom door has a fist-sized hole in one side of its flimsy wooden body. The bathroom itself is so small you need to shimmy past the chipped sink to the toilet, past the toilet to the standing shower. A simple fiberglass square, floor joining edges poorly grouted, molded, coming undone. No window, no fan again. More stains and spatters along the floor, dried blood black and grainy thick with Oripathy. Each step across it sounds like grinding glass. Dark mold borders every corner of the room like the lace edges of a pretty dress. You don't touch any of it. Cleaning's not your job, for now.
Initial inspection taken care of, your next step is to dissect and desecrate. Carefully picking the place clean for anything that might be worth something. Valuables get left behind, sometimes, depending on what happened, and you are a very good judge of what's valuable. At least, to the local pawn shops and the Scar Market.
You start with the pile of prescription bottles. Pills can be sold, easy. Particularly these, if they had any of their contents left: mostly estrogen, plus handfuls of androgen blockers in various brand names and offshoots. Some raws you recognize from the web. One of the bottles is stuck with a note covered in crude math. Looks like they were stretching their doses thin. Twice a day into once, splitting pills with claws and takeout knives.
All of it is labeled for a ███████ Texas. It's a masculine name, but you're all too aware of who exactly would take medications like this. There's a bottle on the floor, a couple of blue pills rattling around and directions to take them more than a couple yesterdays ago. Wherever these girls are, they've missed a few doses. You're confident in saying girls; there has to be more than one if they were sharing meds. There's two, then, you imagine: the Texas one, and someone who couldn't get pills of her own for whatever reason. Probably the Oripathy, you decide.
You've heard that surname before, too. Texas. Right on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't place it.
(It will come to you much, much later, when you're safe in your own home like these girls weren't. Texas, a dead Siracusan crime family, former glory all burned away to ash.)
Next is—the flattened mattress sick with bedbugs in the corner of the bedroom. No frame. No boxspring. No headboard. No covers or comforter, just a thin sheet of a blanket crumpled and stained with yellows and reds and blacks. There are clothes all over the floor, balled-up shirts and stray socks and panties. Plastic wrappers, used condoms, cigarette butts and ashes and tiny round burn marks on the mattress.
On the side closest to the wall, there's an indent. Too big for one, too small for three. Two bodies huddled close at night, winters and summers. Growing sicker and sicker. The white-haired one, judging by how much shedding is on the mattress. Whole clumps of tail fur and pinkie-sized chunks of Originium.
You notice, tucked between the mattress and the wall, there's a book with gilded paper. A third edition Laterano Revised Bible. There's a dedication on the inside cover: Apostolic Knights Funeral Memorial Hall. Maybe worth something to an antique shop, if not for all the dog-eared and ripped pages. One of them was religious. Not surprising. You drop the book haphazard to the mattress, and sigh against your faceplate. You have to wait for it to defog before moving on.
Cramped as it is, the rest of the space makes short work of itself. No other furniture, save a ratty chair upholstered equal parts in stained fabric and duct tape tears. More fingernail clippings, a chewing habit likely, spilling out when you upend the cushion. Plenty more hair and crumbs and nothing of value. Tipping the chair gives more of the same.
By the bed, a single nightstand, dented and leaning. Flat top decorated in knife marks and more cigarette ash. Assorted bottles of dried-up nail polish (and their accompanying spills and splatters), crowding out crumpled tissues and an uncapped bottle of personal lubricant. You know better than to dig through that.
The cabinets under the sink in the generously titled kitchen hold no vacancy, mildew well at home. A spent first aid kit covered in AUS stickers. A tin full of grease. The drawers just above take some solving to open at very particular angles. The bottoms are crudely papered with floral print, scuffed and torn. Not much in the way of silverware. Errant forks and spoons. A wine opener. A single chopping knife.
Hung off the window curtain rod is a deep red button-up. Nice fabric. Brand name, even. Clearly ironed and cared for, recently-gathered dust aside. Worth something at a pawn, if not for the hole punched in the front out the back, and a faint browned stain around it. Somebody got shot wearing this. Worthless. Tossed over it is something a bit more promising: a square end necktie, blue-green. Columbia Regimental stripe. Vintage, uncommon around these parts. You fold it up and pocket it.
You find a stack of papers at the back of a tiny closet, pushed onto a shelf and forgotten about. None of it is interesting, and none of it is worthwhile. At the very bottom—you almost miss it—is a decent-looking fake ID. MARTINELLI, AJA, it says, with a photo of a wild-eyed white Lupo smiling up at you. She looks halfway in the grave, and judging by everything else you've seen, she might already…
But you did not come here to form an attachment to a stranger's corpse. That's the first rule of this kind of work. These people are gone, and they won't be coming back.
You turn to face the empty apartment, looking out no doubt the same way its last resident left it. A leaf in autumn clinging to the dying family tree. Like a good carrion parasite, you've picked the place clean of what little life it had left, ready to regurgitate it into the waiting mouth of the one who cuts your check. You step back towards the door, over piles of I'll get to it tomorrows never tended. Across a mash of letters on linoleum slowly pulping under a roof leak. Out the screeching door and down the weeping steps. You think of the white-haired Lupo and her Texas partner, cold, or lost, or dead, or it doesn't matter. And you think what you always think to make it through the day: Their suffering was nothing special. Their death, nothing new.
This was just another hour in your 9 to 5.