The smell hit them hard.
“Oh, man, what died in here?” Quinn said, like it was a joke.
The joke fell flat.
Just inside the door, on the hardwood floor lay a baby’s pacifier. The three of them stared at it.
“No, no, no. I can’t do this,” Brooke said.
The three of them stayed on the porch, no one willing to go in. But no one was willing to close the door and just walk away, either.
Brooke’s hands were shaking so badly, Sam reached for them and held them in his. “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to go in.”
She was chubby, freckled, with straw-dry reddish hair. She wore the Coates uniform and had seemed, up until this moment, almost a cipher. She never joked or played around, just did what she was supposed to do, following Sam’s lead.
“It’s just, after Coates…,” Brooke said.
“What about Coates?” Sam asked.
Brooke flushed. “Nothing. Just, you know, all the adults disappearing.” Then, feeling like she had to explain some more, she said, “It’s, like, I don’t want to see any more creepy stuff, okay?”
Sam shot a significant look at Quinn, but Quinn just shrugged and said, “There’s, like, a dead little kid in there. We don’t have to go inside to know that.”
Sam yelled, “Is there anyone in there?” as loud as he could. Then to Quinn, “We can’t just ignore this.”
“Maybe we should just report it to Caine,” Quinn said.
“I don’t see him going house-to-house,” Sam snapped. “He’s sitting on his butt acting like he’s the emperor of Perdido Beach.”
When no one took the bait, Sam said, “Give me one of the big garbage bags.”
Quinn peeled one off.
Ten minutes later Sam was done. He dragged the bag with its sad contents across the carpet to the front door. He hefted it by the drawstrings and carried it out to the wagon.
“Like taking out the trash,” Sam said to no one. His hands were shaking. He felt so angry, he wanted to hurt someone. He felt angry enough that if he could have gotten his hands on whoever caused all this, he would have choked the life out of them.
Mostly Sam was angry at himself. He had never really known this family. It was a one-parent home, the mom and various boyfriends. And the little boy. The family weren’t friends, or even acquaintances, but still, he should have thought to check on the baby. That should have been his first thought. He should have remembered, but he hadn’t.
Without looking back at Quinn and Brooke, Sam said, “Open some windows. Let some air in there. We can come back when it’s not so…when the smell is gone.”
“Brah, I’m not going in there,” Quinn said.
Sam quickly closed the distance between them. Seeing his face, Quinn took a step back. “I picked the baby up and stuffed him in a trash bag, all right? So go in there and open the windows. Do it.”
“Man, you really need to step off,” Quinn said. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“No, you take them from Caine,” Sam said.
Quinn stuck his hand out, almost taunting. “I’m sorry, am I annoying you? Why don’t you just burn my hand off, magic boy?”
Sam and Quinn had had many arguments over the years. But since the coming of the FAYZ, especially since Sam had told Quinn the truth about himself, simple disagreements had turned quickly poisonous. They were in each other’s faces now like they might both start swinging. Sam was mad enough to.
Brooke said, “I’ll do it, Sam.”
Sam, his face still just inches from Quinn’s, said, “I don’t want it to be this way between us.”
Quinn relaxed his muscles. He forced a grin. “No big thing, brah.”
To Brooke, Sam said, “Open the windows. Then go tell Edilio to dig another hole. I’ll go do my house. It would be nice if you could pull the wagon downtown. But if you can’t, I’ll understand.”
Without another word to Quinn he stormed off but stopped short at the end of the walkway. “Brooke, see if you can find a picture of him and his mom, okay? I don’t want him to be buried alone. He should have…”
He couldn’t say any more. Eyes half blinded by unexpected tears, he marched down the street and stumbled up the steps to his own home, the house he hated, and slammed the door behind him.
It took a while before he even noticed his mother’s laptop computer was gone.
He went to the table. He touched the tabletop, right where the laptop had been, as though to reassure himself he wasn’t imagining things.
Then he noticed the open drawers. The open cabinets. The food hadn’t been taken, just tossed around, some of it ending up on the floor.
He bolted for his room. The light was still there. His weak attempt at camouflaging it had been torn down.
Someone knew. Someone had seen.
But it didn’t stop there. In his mother’s bedroom the drawers and the closet had been ransacked.
His mother kept a locked, flat, gray metal box in her closet. Sam knew because she’d pointed it out to him on more than one occasion. “If anything ever happens to me, this is where my will is.” She was very serious, but then she’d said, “You know, in case I get hit by a bus.”
“We don’t have any buses in Perdido Beach,” he’d pointed out.
“Hmm. I guess that explains why they’re never on time,” she’d said, and then laughed and hooked him in for a hug.