A body.

Ilse nearly screamed, holding a hand against the sweater pressed over her lips. She began to dry heave, sobbing into her sweater.

“Doc, please. Alive?” Already, Sawyer was pressing his radio, and as she moved in, she heard him speaking crisply and clearly over the speaker, contacting the police back at the precinct.

For her part, a small little portion of her wanted to say something like, “I’m not that type of doctor.” But passing the buck now wasn’t an option. No one else was there.

She leaned in with trembling fingers, pressing them against the neck of the victim, feeling for a pulse. A man. Not Samantha. Someone she didn’t recognize.

No pulse at all. Cold skin. The smell alone should have been notice enough.

She reeled back, wiping her fingers angrily off on her pants, and then feeling the urge to burn her sweats. “Dead,” she said, suddenly. She reeled back, but then tripped with a shout, yelling as she landed against something soft, like a pillow.

Something that also smelled.

Ilse scrambled to her feet, whirling, and this time she screamed; a full-throated, horrified sound. Sawyer’s light wheeled around and illuminated the horrible scene. Rats crawling, creeping, slinking. They scattered all at once, leaving behind the corpses they’d been nibbling on.

Five other bodies, as far as Ilse could tell. Bodies arranged strangely. Despite the panic, the horror, the terror, another part of Ilse realized someone had gone to great lengths to arrange the bodies against the ground in a pattern.

It looked like a smiley face. Two corpses for eyes, three for a leering grin. All of them motionless, cold… dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

“Sawyer!” Ilse screamed. “Sawyer!”

“I see them,” he said, quickly. “I see. Same as the first?”

“You can check for a pulse just as well,” she snapped back, her temper flaring, prompted by smoldering fear turned to actual terror.

Sawyer swallowed once, then slowly holstered his weapon, though Ilse wished he wouldn’t. The flashlight shuddered and swung as he approached the bodies. One at a time, he bent down, checking wrists and throats.

After each body, he gave a faint little shake of his head. His radio crackled and he gave a quiet response Ilse didn’t even catch, standing in that horrible, horrible basement. She spotted the window vaguely, doing her best to look anywhere but in the direction of the bodies. The window, indeed, had been covered up. Not with boards, though, but rather with a curtain. For a moment, Ilse wondered if there might have been another entrance into the basement, through that window. By the direction it faced, it would have led out of the side of the shack, toward the woods. Enough to give a glimpse of any approaching truck, but also directed away from the main road, save the portion nearest the farmhouse.

“Sawyer,” Ilse said, shakily. “Sawyer, I think I’m going to be sick.”

The agent was on his knee next to the final body, arranged in the left corner of the mouth. And then he stiffened. A soft, gasping sound echoed through the room. Then a weak, tired little voice. “Help me… Help me, please!”