“If you think it’s a hearse,” I said.
We passed the dozer, and sure enough, tucked in beside it was a black Cadillac hearse. I’d seen a lot of hearses in my day, but this one was the only one I’d ever seen that was covered with dust and pocked with rust. All four tires were flat, and the windows were nearly opaque with grime.
I waved off a fly that was buzzing around my head, and then another, and another. I noticed Art swatting the air, too. Then I noticed that the entire vehicle was surrounded by flies. I walked to the back of the vehicle, leaned close, and took a sniff, and when I did, I knew what the flies had come for. I tried the latch on the back door, found it unlocked, and pulled it open. The opening door unleashed a wave of odor so strong it almost knocked me down, carried on the wings of thousands of blowflies. Inside the back of the hearse, stacked one atop the other, were half a dozen decaying corpses.
The bodies on the bottom were virtually skeletonized; the ones on top still had tissue on the bones, and I knew—in this heat, with all these flies—that the uppermost bodies couldn’t have been here nearly as long as the hearse had been collecting dust and rust and blowflies. They had to be recent additions. Beneath the bodies the floor of the hearse glistened with black, greasy goo, the volatile fatty acids leaching out of the bodies as they decomposed. A writhing mass of maggots covered the entire mess.
Art had stepped away from the vehicle as soon as I opened it, and as the fumes roiled out, he continued to backpedal. “Woof,” he said. “I guess we know now what we were smelling, huh?”
“I guess so,” I said, but then an unsettling thought occurred to me. “Actually, I’m not so sure.” He looked puzzled. “This is part of what we smelled,” I explained, “but I don’t see how this could account for all the smell. The vehicle was closed, right?” He nodded uneasily. “And we didn’t notice a lot of odor till I opened it.”
“So you think there’s another body or two up near to the edge of the property?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see where this bulldozer track leads.”
Beyond the hearse the dirt track sliced through the woods toward where I guessed the house or the crematorium might be. I headed the opposite way. Before long I got another whiff of decomposition coming from somewhere ahead. I followed my nose along the red-dirt road, and in less than a minute, in an area where the road ended in a broader circle, I walked into the most surreal scene of my life.
It was as if I’d stumbled into a massacre from Bosnia or Rwanda or Iraq—someplace where ethnic cleansing or mass murder had been unleashed. Bodies—dozens of bodies—lay half hidden in the woods on either side of the bulldozed circle. Some were partially buried in trenches; others were tucked behind trees; still others lay beneath bulldozed brush piles.
“This is very, very creepy,” said Art.
“If we were anyplace other than the grounds of a crematorium,” I said, “I’d swear we’d just discovered the world’s worst serial killer. Instead I’m thinking we just discovered the world’s worst crematorium.”
Some of the corpses were missing arms and legs, and I noticed that a number of the long bones had been reduced to shafts, their ends gnawed away. A few of the bodies were nude, but most wore the tattered remains of what appeared to be church clothes. Funeral clothes. Art and I did a quick count of the bodies ranged around the circle. He counted eighty-six; I counted eighty-eight.
“You think this is it,” he asked, “or do you want to look around some more?”
“What difference would it make,” I said, “if we found ten or twenty or even fifty more? Let’s get out of here while the getting’s good.”
Art nodded, and we began retracing our steps back through the woods. We were picking our way through the blackberry bushes when I heard a dog baying somewhere down the gravel drive. Then I heard a chorus of baying, from a chorus of dogs.
“I think the getting just got less good,” said Art.
We tore through the blackberry bushes and sprinted up the gravel driveway, clearing the gate just as a pack of dogs leaped against the inside of the bars. Art fished the Taser from his left ankle and handed it to me, then pulled a pistol from his right ankle. “Press the end against the dog and hold the trigger for two seconds,” he said, without offering any guidance on how to persuade the dog not to rip my throat out during those two seconds. It was difficult to be sure, for all the leaping and lunging, but I counted seven or eight dogs. If they all managed to leap the gate, either Art or I would be dog food. But the dogs stayed on the inside, milling and snarling. We got into the truck and hightailed it for U.S. 27. It wasn’t until we’d reached the Tennessee border that either of us spoke.
“I guess we should call the law,” said Art.