Chapter 1

After bouncing about jobs for a months and my landlords nagging I decided to take a couple extra odd jobs, one of these was at a biohazard remediation company.

My work was mostly on people who died alone, lots of people don’t know how bad of an issue it is, but a majority of these maggot infested homes are just regular people.

The job wasn’t so dissimilar to the typical lonely person dying and not being noticed, this time it was a eighty year old grandmother, we got notified by her neighbours after they went to check on her. They said that they thought she was on holiday or at a retirement home, so they never bothered, her family didn’t bother just leaving her to herself.

It was me and my coworkers Rob, me and him had been on a couple jobs together, I could tell the job wasn’t really taken out of desperation by him more just morbid curiosity. When we opened the door the smell hit us instantly, through the door was a tunnel made of bin bags boxes and blooms of fungus on rotten food. On her records it never said anything about being a horder, rob got on his knees and giddily trailed through the house to where the police told us her room was.

The tunnel got narrower and the cigarette density on the floor grew more and more, the thought of how long she must’ve been left alone caused me to mope about and think, what could the family be doing that’s more important. Rob on the other hand had his head down like a bloodhound and was worming his way through the tunnel at an athletic pace, at one point he turned back to me and near licked his lips saying, “you wanna be done today?” To that I didn’t even have words, we got paid by the hour.

About halfway through the house a chair had collapsed dropping down a large amount of wet bin bags and boxes, it only left a tight gap where a rat had died of poison and given birth to an ecosystem, Rob of course paid no mind to the sickly churning of cockroaches and maggots as it passed his face. Instead continuing his eagerness and pushing through the mounds of filth.

When we reached the room the door handle was coated in a thick brown sticky goop, Rob said ladies first, and patted me on the back as i was able to get up to a half crouched stance. I pushed open the door feeling the disgusting unstick of my gloves and finally getting a glimpse of the scene.

The room was entirely coated in cigarettes, broken ashtrays and alcohol. The woman was lying face down in the sea of vices, Rob immediately brushed past me and got into taking the photos so he could begin the deep clean. I got to take in more of the surroundings, pictures of her grandkids, notice boards and her private diary.

I looked over the boards and they were filled with pension notices with receipts for fast foods stapled over top of them. The diary was locked unfortunately and finding that key would be impossible in this house.

Now I’ll tell you why I quit, it was the single cigarette lying outside her window. Rob had hollered out at this point that he was going back outside to get more equipment, as well as telling me that he was going to leave the camera outside. I kept perusing the room when I found an odd engraving, “Keep for you have nothing, lest you want for nothing more than to spoil”.

That’s when my head started to churn and when I heard the door open again I rushed out to tell Rob what I saw. But Rob wasn’t anywhere to be found, the full day I searched I only found one piece of evidence he’d left, the camera at the front door.

I still imagine Rob lying supine under a shower of cigarettes, I pray for the person who has to crawl through the blood stream of rot next to fish out the bodies. I just hope they find the engraving in their house afterwards.