Kipuka Blues

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

THE OPEN air outside felt even more oppressive than the closed air of the dead man’s house. Too much familiar life surrounded us, every scrap of it alien. The trees. The grass. The seagull-creature squawking for food in the distance. Walking down the center of the sun-scorched asphalt road towards the tool-filled pickup truck Eric had liberated from the abandoned Consumers Energy building, every living thing we saw was made of alien stuff.

Lake Huron had once been a beautiful gray and green and blue. Now a turgid neon green sludge, choked with deformed plankton and misshapen weeds and who knew what else, covered the surface. Too thick to form proper waves, the water surged and ebbed in slow, moss-scented respiration. The Great Lake smelled of deep forest. It smelled wrong.

The few yards of sand between the water and the road were free of driftwood and debris. The lake had always washed trash up from Canada or Chicago or Cheboygan, but today’s pristine sand held only shallow, surf-sculpted dunes. Where seagulls had once darkened the sky, now only two white-and-gray replicas poked among the crumbling black spars of the incinerated wooden boardwalk.

Without the summer’s teeming tourists and autumn’s hunters strewing half-eaten bags of chips and spilling fresh-cut fries, perhaps Frayville could support only two seagulls. Or maybe just Absolute hated winged rats, like every human I knew.

Houses hugged the lakeshore road, front porches and stoops right against the wide sidewalk. Most of these had been summer homes for rich people from down around Detroit or Lansing, intermixed with battered party rentals. The street should have been full of obnoxious tourists and the buskers who loved separating them from their money through the sheer power of amusement. We hadn’t found a single inhabited home down this stretch. Nobody wanted to live next to that roiling, badly sketched memory of a once-great lake, drawn in alien colors by alien imperative. Nobody wanted the reminder that we’d lost a war against Absolute, that we weren’t human.

Nobody was fool enough to face that every day. Almost nobody. I still hoped to talk Ceren, one of the two girls I’d adopted after doomsday, out of it.

None of the houses had lawns, though. That was a plus. The thought of walking on alien grass still creeped me out, even when I wasn’t running for my life over it. I couldn’t help imagining it changing form, twining around my feet to yank me beneath the ground.

Eric stayed his usual quiet self, possibly using the time to think, definitely giving me time to think.

I’d seen the black-and-white house’s set piece before, many times, in my tenure as a detective at Detroit PD. There’s a fight. Someone gets killed—pushed down the stairs, whacked upside the head with a lamp, something like that. The panicked killer gets clever and stages a suicide, forgetting that coroners treat every suicide as suspicious.

These days, Frayville housed a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people. We didn’t have a coroner, and suicide felt pretty much the same as natural causes. We had a whole group of people who’d directly or indirectly committed suicide. Instead of having the decency to sprawl out and decompose, they kept walking around and being far too supportive of each other, their very minds somehow connected over distances. “Acceptance” is what they called themselves. Collectively. Acceptance worried me, when they didn’t terrify me.

Before Absolute, Acceptance would have terrified me. People only have so much terror to go around, though, and mine was spread pretty thin these days. Alien grass. Group minds. What we would do when the canned food ran out. What other time bombs the alien Absolute had left for us, or inside us, and what would happen when we triggered them.

Mister Crispy pushed all that to the back of my brain. I—Kevin—had been a detective. I had all Kevin’s memories and skills and heartaches and passions. I’d become a cop because I wanted to help people, because I wanted to make the world a better place. Accidental death was bad. Manslaughter was worse. Conscious, premeditated murder beat all that.

But we were hard to kill. Two weeks ago, I’d been shot through the heart by an Olympic target shooter and recovered. We had people walking around who had lost their heads—literally—and their bodies had survived. Not their minds, but their bodies.

Killing someone now demanded more than passion, more than simply losing control. If you wanted to put someone in the ground so they didn’t get back up, killing required premeditation.

On my second pass through the black-and-white house, when I knew I was looking for hints, I found them easily enough.

Grab the victim. Drag him to the bathroom. I’d found a few drops of blood on the stairs and sunk deep in the upstairs hall’s white carpet.

Run a tub of water. The chrome faucets held a couple drops of blood dried into smeared smudgy fingerprints.

Grab an appliance. Find out the cord wasn’t long enough. Hunt up an extension cord. I didn’t know what the appliance was. I wasn’t looking forward to reaching into that greasy pool and prying misshapen flesh out from around it to find out.

Then throw the appliance into the water with the victim.

Most of the frantic improvisers who try this sort of scene forget one crucial detail. The circuit breaker will blow as soon as the appliance touches the water. After a bit of searching, Eric found the reason this one hadn’t. Someone had yanked the breaker, replacing it with a few inches of heavy-gauge copper wire instead. The current had stopped only when the wire melted.

This wasn’t a momentary whim, a moment of anger and a flash of violence. This killing had taken ten minutes, maybe half an hour to set up. Thirty minutes for the killer’s conscience to prey on them, to whisper about right and wrong.

Someone had rigged that house to kill an unconscious man.

I imagined the shadowy killer standing in the bathroom, holding a toaster in their hand, looking at the victim sprawled in the tub.

And deliberately tossing the toaster into the water.

Watching sparks fly, standing by while the victim flailed and stretched until the power failed.

Murder.

The first question I needed to answer: Who was the victim? Anybody could find an empty house and move in. Absolute hadn’t restored the whole population of Frayville, just a few scattered people here and there. Someone had wanted a nice house and moved into the Morpeth place, but lacked the habits or discipline to keep mud off the carpet and crumbs off the counter. Had the killer been the new tenant, or a visitor? I couldn’t ask the neighbors. Nobody lived near the lake. You’d need something a little wrong with you to walk out your front step and face the churning goop of Lake Huron every day.

Then again, anyone who didn’t have something wrong with them after being murdered, copied, and released into a dead city…had something wrong with them.

I absently rubbed my chin in thought, the way Kevin used to. At the stab of pain, I jerked my hand away. The blister had been there for a month, ever since Absolute freed us, and I was beginning to think it would never heal.

Kevin had earned that blister when Absolute had trapped him and his family in the desert. He’d killed his wife Sheila, and his daughter Julie, before the alien could eat them alive, then tried to blow his own brains out. He wasn’t fast enough.

His memories. His life.

My pain.

But the best way to deal with heartbreak, or maybe to avoid dealing with it, is doing something. The bathtub scene put a familiar pull in my chest, a fishhook tugging at my spirit.

Someone had gone through a lot of effort to commit a crime. Not just a crime…the crime. The stewed lake, my secondhand grief, the alien grass that might change shape and rise up to eat me again, the worries about survival and my two adopted daughters and all the million horrible things that might go wrong, all seemed distant now.

We had no laws. No juries, no judges. And no one who really cared. No one but me.

I could wallow in grief.

Or I could find and punish a killer.