World War S 1-2

Chapter 2

“Ugh, not again …” she whispered and stepped out from her luxury caravan.

*

Lieutenant John Levi was still thinking about the accident, though he’d already driven to the address he was originally called to. I definitely need to visit them, he thought. He would have done so even if he hadn’t promised the injured man.

He remembered it clearly: coming from the east, from the wide-curving exit of the highway. He hadn’t switched on the blue emergency lights yet because the road was somehow more deserted than most evenings. His car swept through two red lights without encountering any traffic, when he reached that specific intersection.

The high beams switch had been having problems for weeks, so he couldn’t switch them on immediately. He was distracted by that stupid plastic switch, he couldn’t find it; so he switched on the collision warning system instead, which he normally wouldn’t use and always had switched off when he was driving. While he was fussing with it, he felt suddenly as if his brother Paul had pushed him on his shoulder, saying in his deep voice, Look out! His brother definitely could not have been there, since he lived in another state, but everything was so realistic; he could even see light shining on his hand’s brown skin, smell the sweet fragrance of it. All of these impressions were so familiar from his childhood, when they had spent those long hours playing together. Their mother had the same sweet-smelling hands; it must be the fragrance of love coming through the pores, he’d always thought. Paul was remarkably like their mother, in that sense of love anyway; he became a Presbyterian minister. John trailed far behind him in that respect—he would never be like him.

Paul—or one of the angels he was always referring to—probably had sensed there was a problem, because he jerked his head up due to that miraculous push. That’s when he saw the small black heap about five meters in front of him. There were no marked outlines, just limbs lying on the pavement. As if giant, human-sized marionettes had gone for a walk after the evening show of some puppet theatre, and just decided to take a rest in the middle of the road.

The anti-collision system braked in a fraction of a second and made an avoiding maneuver with the steering wheel. The police car skidded on the remains of the car parts scattered on the road. The smoking rubber created a huge white cloud covering the whole windscreen. While it dissolved, he tried to compose himself.

If he hadn’t switched on the anti-collision system accidentally, he would have crushed them to death. Only the automatic system could avoid an accident at this speed, he thought, I might need to use it more frequently. My brother’s saving angel won’t be here all the time.

He jumped out of the car and lifted the man’s body; a boy lay beneath him. The man was not in serious condition, but the boy may have life-threatening trauma. Blood ran out of his ears, which signaled intracranial injury. He called the emergency line immediately, meanwhile he ran to the car resting on its roof; there was a woman in severe condition trapped inside the wreckage.

The driver of the white Toyota was conscious. John asked how he was, but he just kept repeated the same sentence, “Where is the hitchhiker?”

But there was nobody with him in the car. John looked quickly around but there was no trace of anybody who might have flown through the windscreen.

Then everything had moved so fast; backup arrived with a fire truck and ambulance, and he had to go to the next case.

“John … John!” his partner Raymond, the forensic detective, called him when John was still sitting in his car inside the police line, staring at nothing. Who knows how long I’ve been sitting here, realized John, watching the running film in his mind.

“Couldn’t sleep? Or is it a new girlfriend?”

“No,” answered John, confused, shaking his head. “I just hope that family didn’t die in front of my eyes. I hope they all survived.”

“Are you talking about the accident on the 124? They just reported it to us. Terrible. But I’m sure you won’t like this one either,” said Raymond, pointing up to the building. “Do you want Jill to cover for you?”

“Jill is pregnant,” John cast a reproachful glance at his partner. “She should stay in the office. What’s up, man? You haven’t been that heartless before …”

“I haven’t been that old before either,” answered Raymond, heading towards the building. “And the older I get, the more I hate being buried with work.”

“True. With the 42% increase in the crime rate, I can see that.”

“And that’s just violent crime …” added Ray.

They groped their way up in the dim light of the building block’s staircase on South Street. The broken floor mosaic was covered in the crumbled, musty paint that had fallen from the wall. Doors cracked open on each floor and neighbors peered out at the uniformed officers.

“Did you check them?” John pointed to the withdrawing, indistinct figures behind the doors.

“We’ve started. Put a uniform at the top and one at the bottom. They should meet in the middle soon.”

“You always did have a thing for symmetry,” smiled John. “If you could, you’d arrange the corpses into some kind of geometrical shape before you take your pictures …”

“Fool …”

They finally reached the flat—the crime scene. There were four technicians in white overalls in the bigger room, looking for fingerprints and DNA samples on the furniture.

“Uhh …” that was the only word John could groan after seeing the scene.

“Uhh, right. I expected your usual ‘No way’. You haven’t deviated from that in years.”

“This is the version for very special cases. What is this? Spontaneous combustion?”

“I have no idea, but whatever combustion it is, it only affected part of the body.”

A bookcase stood at the corner of the poorly furnished living room. The spines of the books, along with all the titles, got scorched. The curtain—slipped sideways on the slanting curtain rod—was also sooty. The globe of the floor lamp looked like cowhide with its black patches. There was a rusty brown armchair, its insides totally black. A carbonized pile of human remains sat in the middle of the armchair cushion. In front of it on the floor there were a pair of polished shoes, resting still intact.

But at the armrest, they could see—John had to lean forward because he still didn’t believe his eyes—a human arm ending at the shoulder. The fire consumed the rest of the body, only the right arm stayed intact.

“I’ve never, really never …” John shook his head.

“I know, you’ve never seen anything like it before. And you’re not the only one,” said Ray, holding medical tweezers in his hand. “It looks like somebody severed it from the body with a sharp tool, though there’s no definitive separation line. All the muscles and bones got scorched, but from this line something called a halt to the fire.”

“Do we know the … owner of this arm?”

“The tenant’s name is William Ridmoore. According to the database, his last workplace was a construction site in New York. We have his cell number too. We called him, but there was no answer. But I don’t think this is his body.”

“Why?”

“Look, this is a quality suit, and there’s a starched white shirt below. Our friend, Will, wouldn’t wear stuff like this. A worker like him wears a checkered shirt and jeans.”

“I see. A stranger burned to ashes in his flat. Any flammable material?”

“Nothing. According to our specialist, the fire started inside his body.”

“I knew it. Just to make it more difficult to solve,” mumbled John and pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of a technician’s case. He crouched to the side of the armchair and picked up an object, which he’d noticed sticking out between the floor and the bottom of the old-fashioned chair.

“A fountain pen,” he said and lifted it up closer to his eyes. “With initials ‘B.A.’ It’s not a modern one, its varnish already cracked, although that could be from the extensive heat,” he added and looked around. “I don’t see any paper …”

“Are you suggesting he was making notes when a glowing ember fell out of his pipe and burned him to death?” asked Raymond smiling.

“Most cases of spontaneous combustion come from smoking while dozing.”

“But none of them are making notes in the meantime …”

“I’m just thinking out loud, and you’re making fun of me.”

“The paper could be in the charred pile,” said Ray, softening his joking attitude. “We’ll look very carefully, it might be there.”

“Right,” nodded John, stepping to the shelves sinking below the weight of the books. “So, Mr. B.A. came to visit Mr. Will Ridmoore, when Ridmoore suddenly had to leave—to buy something for dinner—meanwhile his friend, or his relative dozed while he was smoking …”

“Or Will’s fiery anger set his friend ablaze …”

John ignored his friend’s teasing, it was their usual game. If they were in the mood, they bantered back and forth like a couple of kids. But John wasn’t in the mood today.

“There’s a patrol station in front,” he said, pulling the curtain aside. “If there’s a security camera facing here, then I need the recording. But I’ll take care of that.”

“We’ll take DNA samples and check all B.A. initials in the database for a match.”

“Good idea,” said John, stepping closer to the bookshelves. “Did you see this? All of these are Bibles.” He pulled them out one by one. Some with scorched bindings could not hold the pages together, and they fell to the floor. John picked them up, flipping through them. “This is Slavonic, I think. And this one is German. This contains Cyrillic letters.”

“Our William might be quite religious.”

“Or he’s a linguist.”

John’s head started to hum sharply, as if somebody had hit him with a baseball bat. This second shocking case was too much for today. The accident itself was more than enough.

“I have to go to the hospital like I promised. I have to find out what happened with that family. Collect everything you can, and be extra thorough.”

“Why do you always say that when you leave? That’s the job, man,” said Ray, grinning. He wanted to stir John from his tiredness.

John dug him in the ribs, signaling that he understood the pointed remark. He threw the gloves on the case and headed to the staircase.

*

Julie Bond had spent the first half of the uneventful night shift browsing through files of Monday’s patients. Beyond her regular shifts at Memorial Hospital, as a young novice ER doctor, she worked as a psychologist in her own private office. Her patients tripled when she moved to Morristown. In this morally and economically falling world, more and more people needed psychotherapy. She often repeated her favorite expression when she was with her friends; the psychologists and psychotherapists had made the world collapse, in order to have enough clients for the rest of their lives. She had enough patients in her private office that she could even give up the job in the ER—but she was fond of that job as well.

These calm Sunday evenings, like today, were not the real trials; there were only two broken hands, a hyperglycemic case, and a few patients with elevated blood pressure. Nothing had happened in the past thirty minutes, only a few patients came in for bandaging—the nurses took care of them.

She checked her next day’s schedule; two in the afternoon, two in the evening. She planned to sleep until noon, then take a quick run around the Golf-and-Leisure Centre, followed by a light lunch. Then she would pop into the Hospice Centre to quickly go through the files of her patients there—she hoped that most of them would still be alive. She had started pro bono work for them a year ago—she wanted to give psychological help to the terminally ill patients to honor her mother, Lucy, who had died in her arms of cancer. It was such a peaceful and glorious moment, when my mother left, she thought.