Laszlo slid her gun back into it's holster and began to blindly feel around, fingers sliding over the ancient floorboards in a vain attempt to locate the keys. The dark sky was no help to her, still cloudy and brooding from the earlier rain showers, and now that the Glow had been extinguished, she could only make guesses as to where to look. It was almost easy to imagine that she was the only living thing that had ever walked into this room.

The bodies of the Silas and the old women were already starting to reek, mixed with the stench of rat droppings and other trash. Laszlo had smelt corpses in her day, much more than she'd care to remember; bloated, sickly-sweet things that had been hacked to bits, drowned, or disembowelled, crawling with flies and stomachs filled to bursting with maggots, but this was not like anything she'd ever encountered before. Laszlo took a deep inhale, and her mouth— which seemed like it had been perpetually screwed into a frown by this whole situation— unwillingly twitched up into a confused smile.

Without any explanation as to why, it was the scent of Laszlo's old friend, who had died on duty last year. Officer Hannah Kingsley had been a heavier-set woman who was notorious for her green thumb. When she wasn't on the job, Hannah was almost always in the little flower garden they kept behind the old station, weeding and planting new flowers and keeping the garden in tip-top shape. That woman didn't go anywhere without smelling like she'd stuck her head in a bunch of those little red hummingbird flowers that she loved so much.

That was what the corpses smelled like. Hannah's hummingbird flowers.

Laszlo hadn't been to Hannah's old station since Hannah's death and her assignment here, but she could imagine that the garden was now a wild, tangled mess without Hannah there to take care of it. Maybe it wasn't even there at all anymore.

The low rumble of thunder shook her out of her recollections. Laszlo blinked rapidly, the sweet smell of the hummingbird flowers making her eyes water. What am I doing? Laszlo mentally slapped herself for slacking off. This isn't a good time to feel sorry for yourself. Get yourself together, woman. You can think about her later. The seemingly never-ending action of the night was wearing thin at her common sense.

Luckily, while she'd been reminiscing about her dead friend, the sky had cleared just a little, and the moon peeked out from behind the security of the cloud cover, glowing pale blue—almost like a reminder— and illuminating the inside of the decrepit building through a few holes in the wall. As her eyes adjusted to the new light, she was able to make out more than just the shapes of things. The five trunks were arranged in a lopsided pentagon at each corner of the room, and the fleshy puddles of what had once been Glowers sat in the center of it all, the stench of those tiny red flowers filling the air as thick as any smoke. Small heaps of trash and vermin droppings covered the extra space between the corpses, staining the floor and parts of the wall as well. Everything was damp from the broken sprinklers, which were still dripping slightly.

Wasting no more time, Laszlo began to move around, searching for the keys to the trunks. A tiny voice in the back of her brain told her that she should probably go back to the car and check in with the station, but she found herself ignoring it. Laszlo walked lightly over the decaying floorboards, careful to not agitate the broken building any more than she had to, and began feeling around any pocket of shadow that looked like it could be hiding the keys to a bunch of antique trunks—trundles, as Silas had called them. There was nothing.

As she made one more pass by the corpses, an interesting detail suddenly caught her eye. When the Glowers' flesh had began melting off, it hadn't affected their clothing, which stayed basically intact. So there were five grubby white gowns and Silas's overalls and flannel shirt lying in and among the gooey piles of flesh and bone. Laszlo's nose wrinkled as she imagined herself digging through that with her bare hands, but she didn't want to waste any more time than she already had. She could only pray now that the Glow wasn't contagious now that the infected were dead.

Rolling up her sleeves, she knelt down at the edge of the pile and grabbed the edge of one of the crone's gowns, hauling it out of the pile. Chunks of fresh, juicy, not-yet-spoiled meat and unblemished scraps of bone fell out of the dress's sleeves and hit the floor with ugly "splats". A fine spray of blood and pulpy muscle splashed over Laszlo's pant legs and bare ankles, and she felt the rational part of herself recoiling and gagging with disgust. But she kept a mostly-straight face and shook out the dress as much as she could, the previously-white fabric stained a gaudy pinkish color. She laid it out on a non-spoiled part of the floor, and began feeling the dress for pockets or anything that felt like metal, and found that there was one pocket on the chest area, but nothing was in it though, much to her disappointment.

Balling it up and placing it off to the side, she repeated the process, taking all five identical dresses and searching them, but when she'd gotten through all of them and nothing had caught her attention, she was beginning to lose hope. She'd even sifted through Silas's clothing, but all that had been in there was an old leather wallet, a couple of squashed cigarettes, and a strange-looking book, which had been under his shirt. But she couldn't read anything it said in the dim light, so she kept a hold of it for later.

Laszlo looked around, her hands on her hips, wondering if there was anything she might've missed. The smell of the hummingbird flowers was getting overpowering, and she was seriously considering punching a hole through a wall to try and get some more fresh air in there.

Her eyes bored into the Glower's corpses. The keys had to be here. There must be something—

Then it hit her. She didn't know why it hadn't occurred to her sooner, especially with that particular smell filling the air.

She instantly moved over to one of the corners of the room and looked up at the space where the wall met the ceiling. There was a noticeable bulge in the mottled wallpaper, just out of range of the light, one that she would've never seen without knowing where to look. Climbing onto the trunk below it, she reached up and patted the area lightly, making sure that she was right about her hunch. The wallpaper had obviously been meddled with, and a thin line of what felt like hot glue was sticking the paper closed, sealing a very hard thing inside. Laszlo lifted a foot and slid a concealed pocket knife out of her boot, daintily holding it between her thumb and forefinger, and cut a slit in the bottom of the bulge.

The paper cut cleanly, and a small plume of dust fell out of the slit, along with something that clinked and rattled as it landed in Laszlo's waiting hand. She blew on it, and a few loose particles of dust leapt into the air, slowly sinking to the ground in the weak moonlight. She'd found the key ring.

They were obviously rusted and antiquated, just like the trundles that the five keys belonged to, and they were tied together with a piece of frayed string, instead of a proper metal ring. Laszlo lifted them up to get a closer look, another uncharacteristic smile spreading over her face.

She was remembering her last mission with Hannah. They had been trying to figure out a series of kidnappings and deaths of multiple released felons in the area. The evidence had led Verity Laszlo and Hannah Kingsley to a seemingly abandoned house in the woods, decrepit and overgrown, but with clear signs of squatters and was unusually well kept. The two made their way around the house as silently as possible, before busting in the ancient door and searching for the killer. Nobody was home at the moment, but Hannah was convinced that there was something else to find in that house. After looking around for a spell, she suddenly got an idea, and asked Laszlo to check in all of the ceiling corners for anything that might look like a hiding place. She didn't explain why, but Laszlo did as she asked anyways. And sure enough, Hannah found something that looked exactly like where those Glowers had kept the keys. Laszlo was taller and was able to reach the spot, and they'd gotten the culprit's phone, a wallet, and even his ID, thanks to Kingsley's intuition. Apparently, the psycho was sentimental, and didn't want to burn his credentials. When Laszlo had asked Hannah how she'd known to look there, Hannah had smiled, and subconsciously ruffled her hair, sending a wave of flowery odors in Verity's direction.

"That's where I keep my important things in my house. Things that I'll need. Things that other people may need. I'm honestly surprised that more people don't do this." She'd explained in her smooth Minnesotan accent. "Props to this guy, though. I betcha' that he was pretty proud of himself too. I would've been. If I was a serial killer, this is definitely where I'd hide things."

Laszlo stared at the keys, her grip getting tighter and tighter around the cool metal. A plume of painful memories was taking hold. She got more and more angry, until the only thing that she could think about was Hannah. They had been so close. So close to catching him. She felt her nails digging into her own palm. Laszlo could still hear the gunshot. Still hear the shout for backup, before it was abruptly cut off. See the perfect arc of red droplets land— splash, splash, splash— across her face, running into her eyes...

A low, almost inhuman growl rumbled in the back of her throat, snapping her out of those dangerous thoughts. No matter how much you grieve, you can never forget some things. But now was not the time to brood. Laszlo shook herself and got off of the trunk, beginning to sift through the different keys and trying them out in the padlock.

On the third one that she tried, there was a satisfying "click" as it slid into the keyhole and prepared itself to turn. Laszlo took a deep breath, glancing back at the reeking puddles of corpse piled up in the center of the room for a moment. She barely even heard the sound of police sirens steadily getting closer, outside the abandoned building. It was as if her head was suddenly swaddled in wool, and her brain was only aware of this task.

I need....

With a trembling hand, she twisted the key to the right and yanked off the padlock with the sound of cartilage grinding, and slowly lifted the lid off of the first chest....