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Unit 435 hadn’t fared any better than the rest of the decaying houses. The key stuck in the front door lock and the knob turned grudgingly. Dampness had swollen the door in its frame. The interior was a bland duplex model; living room, kitchenette, bath, and matching coffin bedrooms. Gloomy at midmorning. I flipped the light switch to test the power. Juice flowed, although the globes were chock full of mummified insects and the effect was ghastly and I killed it after several seconds. Desiccated corpses of mice and bats were strewn about. Mold spread in blue-green glaciers across the carpet; it had eaten into the drapes and ceiling tiles.

“That’s a fuckton of dead rodents.” Lionel played the beam of his flashlight across the floor.

“Pesticides,” Bellow said. “Can’t you picture the corporate overlords driving through town in trucks, dosing the neighborhood with gas? That’s how they deployed DDT when my parents were little. Children played in that poison.”

As he spoke, my personal vision of it was a crop duster with a Redlick emblem bombing the town. Another part of my inner self worried that the answer was something entirely worse.

“My advice is don’t lick your fingers after you touch anything,” I said.

The long-dead fridge contained a nauseating mess of gray fuzz. Cabinets contained boxes of oatmeal and cereal shredded by mice. One of the bedroom windows had shattered inward. Branches of a dogwood choked by bittersweet vines twisted over the threshold and clutched the bedframe. Water had eroded patches of the ceiling. Moldering magazines, moldering clothes, moldering furniture, mouse shit. A common atmosphere pervades abandoned property that varies by age and particular violence, not dissimilar to the spectrum of aged scotch. Standing among ruins is an eerie reminder of mortality. We are meat and Mother Nature must eat.

Herzog wasn’t kidding that the residents had vacated in a rush. An occupant must’ve been busy packing when he received the order to vamoose. His suitcase lay sprung on the bed, trailing socks and pants like guts. Nothing sinister happened to the former occupants of Jeffers Colony. Records indicated they’d transferred to other jobs or returned to local unemployment rolls. This wasn’t the scene of a mass disappearance or slaughter, but a snapshot sans context. Even so, it got under my skin. The implication felt unreasonably pointed, unnervingly profound. Yes, yes, these weak fucks escaped on a technicality. The polar caps are melting, bitches. Prehistoric viruses are awakening as permafrost softens into mud. I’m coming, ape. I’m coming and my jaws are wide enough to swallow you whole.

Lionel studied a torn poster of vintage Cher in a two-piece bathing suit. Mold had warped the beloved superstar into a demonic monstrosity from a medieval woodcut.

“Friends, what in the blue fuck are we hoping to find here?”

I hadn’t quite thrown in the towel and Bellow was switched into another mode entirely. He silently and methodically toured the apartment, poking at coagulated laundry and assorted detritus with a busted broom handle. Scratching on a closet door caught his attention. He slid the panel aside and a large possum hissed as it waddled backward into the shadow of its lair.