Chapter 46
The industrial park sprawled over four acres north of the commercial strip, a collection of single-story buildings with corrugated roofs and loading docks facing an access road.
Charlotte approached from the south, dog by her side, its leash gently wrapped around her wrist, where her bandages had become soaked.
As she made her way, she followed an unsettling smell to find the morgue.
It wasn’t the familiar stench of decomposition.
The gas had altered everything, leaving behind a chemical odor that felt wrong and lingered in the air.
The scent was sharp and metallic, with undertones that stirred uncomfortable feelings within her.
Building C housed a warehouse that had once been filled with garden supplies, as indicated by the faded sign above the roll-up door.
The door hung partially open, revealing a space transformed with unsettling efficiency.
Charlotte gently secured the dog outside, looping the leash around a pipe beside the loading dock.
She could see the concern in its eyes as it watched her closely.
After a soft whine, the dog settled down, remaining faithfully at her side as she prepared to face the unknown within.
She stepped inside and stopped. The warehouse held perhaps sixty bodies, laid in rows on tarps across the concrete floor, each covered with a sheet weighted down with rocks, toolboxes, or sections of pipe.
Some sheets were white and medical. Others were bedding pulled from homes, floral patterns, and cartoon characters covering the dead.
Volunteers moved between the rows with clipboards and gloves, lifting sheets, making notes, and working quietly and with focus.
No one spoke above the necessary minimum.
A woman approached Charlotte. “Family?”
“Yes.”
“East sector?”
“Maple Street. Near the cul-de-sac.”
The woman’s expression didn’t change. She handed Charlotte gloves that would fit over her bandages and a small notepad. “Write down names if you find them. We’re building a registry. Take your time. It’s not easy.”
Charlotte pulled the gloves over her bandages and started at the nearest row.
The first body was a man in his seventies.
She recognized the face, noted the wallet and driver’s license on his chest, copied the information, and moved on.
The next body was a child, a boy in a Spider-Man shirt.
Charlotte’s hand froze above the sheet. Her breath caught in the mask, and a cough bent her double.
She covered the boy without writing anything down.
Her hand was shaking too badly to hold the pen.
The third body was a woman in her forties with a wedding ring and a medical alert bracelet.
Charlotte copied the information and moved on.
She worked through the rows with precision.
Each sheet lifted revealed a life interrupted.
Where possible, personal effects had been gathered beside each body.
The volunteers had done their best to preserve the means of identification.
Charlotte checked each face, each set of hands, each license, each scrap of paper with a name.
At the end of the fourth row, Charlotte sat on an overturned bucket with her head in her gloved hands.
The mask amplified her breathing. Fever haloed the warehouse lights at the edges of her vision.
A volunteer brought her water, and Charlotte drank through the mask’s port, then stood.
Two more rows remained. She checked them.
The work took hours. Afternoon light shifted through the high windows.
When she reached the last body in the last row, a woman in her eighties with arthritic hands that had long been arthritic before the gas reached her, Charlotte set the notepad on the tarp beside the woman’s covered feet and stood very still.
None of them were her family. Sixty-three bodies, according to the clipboard by the door, and not one matched the names she had carried since the first alert chimed on Connie’s porch.
The absence wasn’t a relief. Her family wasn’t there.
They were either alive somewhere beyond the shelters and camps, or among the thousands not yet recovered from the crater, the fire, or the contamination zone.
She returned the notepad to the volunteer at the door.
The woman scanned the names Charlotte had written, nodding at each one and adding them to the master list. “Thank you,” the woman said. “Every name matters.”
Charlotte nodded, collected the dog, and walked back toward the access road with the afternoon sun at her back and the realization that she had eliminated exactly one possibility from a field that remained catastrophically large. The morgue had given her nothing. No confirmation or closure.
She had searched shelters, camps, the crater where her house had stood, and now a warehouse full of the dead, and at the end of it, she still knew only that the people she loved were somewhere in the path of disaster.
She reached the road and stopped. The dog sat at her feet, looking up at her through the faceplate.
Charlotte put her bandaged hand on its head and felt the animal lean into the touch. “Now what?” she said through the mask.
The dog whined softly, and she knew that neither of them had an answer.