“How come the kid gets to be in charge and not me, Nanci?” whined Jeff Thomas.
“He’s good and you’re not, Jefferson.” She patted him on the shoulder with a mock display of affection. “Well, you’re real good at some things, but I don’t need them right now.”
Nanci led the three others down the hill, instructing them to spread out into a skirmish line, fifteen paces apart. She motioned to them to have all their weapons ready. She handed the Heckler & Koch to Carrie, telling her to keep the little .22 bolstered. “This’ll be more of a stopper, if you need it. Mac, watch what you’re doing with that 16-gauge.”
“Sure. Maybe I should have had the P-111 rather than the scattergun.”
“No. I have a feeling that they might have abandoned the place some time ago.” She looked carefully down at the picturesque, snow-covered scene below them. “We’ll still step real cautious, but I don’t think there’s anyone there.”
Nanci was sort of right and sort of wrong.
“OH, JESUS!” Carrie Princip turned away, gagging, as Jim Hilton slowly eased open the main, steel-shuttered door of the big farmhouse.
Mac put his free hand over his nose and mouth, closing his eyes, as though that might somehow protect him from the sickly sweet stench.
Nanci Simms nodded slowly. “It figures,” she said. “Seen it plenty of other places after Earthblood came calling. Folks give it a try for a while and some float, like the Mannheims maybe did. And some sink.”
“We going in?” asked Jim.
“I’ll look around. No need for anyone to come in with me. No need for the guns, either.”
“I’ll come in,” said Jim Hilton.
“We can look around the barns and stuff,” ordered Mac. “Me and Carrie.”
They walked off, clearly glad to be away from the scent of death that seeped from the building. Nanci half smiled at Jim. “Sure about this? You don’t need to prove anything to me. Not going to be pretty.”
It wasn’t.
“I remember reading something like this, years and years ago,” said Nanci. “Place called Smithstown or Jonestown, I think. Kind of religious camp. And another one in the boondocks of Texas. First one they had a sort of leader who said that the only future was through death and then rebirth. So they all drank Kool-Aid spiked with poison.”
The place was a charnel house.
Corpses lay everywhere around the single-story building, all of them in a fairly advanced state of decay.
“Three or four weeks,” suggested Nanci. “Not so many blowflies and maggots as I’d have expected. Guess the bitter cold slowed them down.”
“They all took poison?” asked Jim. “Couple of bodies in that kind of assembly room looked like they had bullet wounds in the head. And all of the babies were shot.”
“Right. Must have been one or two who didn’t take to the idea of being shoved into eternity. And the little ones couldn’t drink whatever it was they used.”
Most of the bodies showed signs of having died in extreme agony, doubled up, limbs contorted, fingers turned into swollen black claws.
The process of decomposition had darkened skins and burst bellies, swiftly taking away all of the visible soft tissues like eyes and lips. It wasn’t possible to tell, in most cases, which had been female and which male. All of them wore identical uniforms of pale blue shirts and jeans, with white sneakers. All had very short hair.
Nanci found a large glass carboy in the open-plan kitchen, with a sticky residue in its bottom. She stepped carefully over a body and circled two younger corpses, locked forever in each other’s arms.
She sniffed at the bottle. “Cyanide,” she said.
“It did the job.” Jim looked around at the dust-free stripped pine and the neatly handwritten religious texts pinned to the walls:
Thou seest me, Lord. I begin with Thee and I shall end with Thee.
Those are not with Thee are against Thee, Lord, and are my and Thy enemies.
“Wonder where they got the poison? I guess maybe stole it from some industrial place that had been abandoned. Electroplating or fluxing or case-hardening of steel.”