I paused. I smelled it too. Death. I turned toward the odor, noticing the remnants of a crash on the road a ways ahead. A tire rim. Some shattered glass. I pointed. “There it is. The pileup Neil mentioned.” Shit. It was true. There were dead bodies in at least one of those cars. And they were decaying.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked before tossing back a handful of the cereal as he trailed behind us.

“Car crash,” Emily said from behind me. “Someone obviously died. Tuck! Come on, let’s go back.”

But I needed to see. I needed to understand what we were dealing with. Because if the authorities had made the call to leave a slew of abandoned vehicles on the highway for now, because there were more pressing issues in a major blackout, that was one thing. But if there were literal dead bodies rotting in the road for three days, then that was something different entirely.

I began walking and heard Tuck and Emily follow. The crash involved five vehicles in a pileup that occurred when the truck at the front came to a halt, likely after slamming its brakes—though I was no insurance adjuster. The dead woman was in the fifth car, her bloated body slumped over the dashboard, the driver’s side door having been torn from the car. Her airbag had clearly not deployed.

I put my forearm over my nose and turned back to Emily and Charlie, who were lingering behind. “Go on back,” I said. There was no reason they needed to see this. I paused as my gaze landed on one of the woman’s sneakers that had come off during the wreck and was sitting on the floor of the car. I hesitated only briefly before holding my breath, reaching in and grabbing the one shoe and then pulling the other one off the dead woman’s foot. “Thanks,” I mumbled, feeling foolish for talking to a dead person, but also a little guilty for taking her shoes.

The fact was, however, she didn’t need them and Emily did.

Emily and Charlie were standing stoically next to an empty SUV when I approached, holding out the shoes to Emily. “Put these on.”

She gave them a look of horror and stepped back. I felt a raindrop hit my cheek, and then another. “I’m not wearing shoes that you took off a corpse,” she said, disgust in her tone. “I’m not wearing corpse shoes,” she asserted more loudly.

I grit my teeth as several raindrops hit my head and began sliding down my cheeks. I felt irrationally rejected, which was stupid on several levels, but what did she think? That I’d wanted to pull shoes off a dead woman’s body for her? “Stop being a baby, Emily.” I nodded down to her grimy slippers. “Those things are about to fall off.”