The Fright Train

The Glow Part 14

Laszlo slid her gun back into it's holster and began to blindly feel around, fingers sliding over the ancient floorboards in a vain attempt to locate the keys. The dark sky was no help to her, still cloudy and brooding from the earlier rain showers, and now that the Glow had been extinguished, she could only make guesses as to where to look. It was almost easy to imagine that she was the only living thing that had ever walked into this room.

The bodies of the Silas and the old women were already starting to reek, mixed with the stench of rat droppings and other trash. Laszlo had smelt corpses in her day, much more than she'd care to remember; bloated, sickly-sweet things that had been hacked to bits, drowned, or disembowelled, crawling with flies and stomachs filled to bursting with maggots, but this was not like anything she'd ever encountered before. Laszlo took a deep inhale, and her mouth— which seemed like it had been perpetually screwed into a frown by this whole situation— unwillingly twitched up into a confused smile.

Without any explanation as to why, it was the scent of Laszlo's old friend, who had died on duty last year. Officer Hannah Kingsley had been a heavier-set woman who was notorious for her green thumb. When she wasn't on the job, Hannah was almost always in the little flower garden they kept behind the old station, weeding and planting new flowers and keeping the garden in tip-top shape. That woman didn't go anywhere without smelling like she'd stuck her head in a bunch of those little red hummingbird flowers that she loved so much.

That was what the corpses smelled like. Hannah's hummingbird flowers.

Laszlo hadn't been to Hannah's old station since Hannah's death and her assignment here, but she could imagine that the garden was now a wild, tangled mess without Hannah there to take care of it. Maybe it wasn't even there at all anymore.

The low rumble of thunder shook her out of her recollections. Laszlo blinked rapidly, the sweet smell of the hummingbird flowers making her eyes water. What am I doing? Laszlo mentally slapped herself for slacking off. This isn't a good time to feel sorry for yourself. Get yourself together, woman. You can think about her later. The seemingly never-ending action of the night was wearing thin at her common sense.

Luckily, while she'd been reminiscing about her dead friend, the sky had cleared just a little, and the moon peeked out from behind the security of the cloud cover, glowing pale blue—almost like a reminder— and illuminating the inside of the decrepit building through a few holes in the wall. As her eyes adjusted to the new light, she was able to make out more than just the shapes of things. The five trunks were arranged in a lopsided pentagon at each corner of the room, and the fleshy puddles of what had once been Glowers sat in the center of it all, the stench of those tiny red flowers filling the air as thick as any smoke. Small heaps of trash and vermin droppings covered the extra space between the corpses, staining the floor and parts of the wall as well. Everything was damp from the broken sprinklers, which were still dripping slightly.

Wasting no more time, Laszlo began to move around, searching for the keys to the trunks. A tiny voice in the back of her brain told her that she should probably go back to the car and check in with the station, but she found herself ignoring it. Laszlo walked lightly over the decaying floorboards, careful to not agitate the broken building any more than she had to, and began feeling around any pocket of shadow that looked like it could be hiding the keys to a bunch of antique trunks—trundles, as Silas had called them. There was nothing.

As she made one more pass by the corpses, an interesting detail suddenly caught her eye. When the Glowers' flesh had began melting off, it hadn't affected their clothing, which stayed basically intact. So there were five grubby white gowns and Silas's overalls and flannel shirt lying in and among the gooey piles of flesh and bone. Laszlo's nose wrinkled as she imagined herself digging through that with her bare hands, but she didn't want to waste any more time than she already had. She could only pray now that the Glow wasn't contagious now that the infected were dead.