Michael Collings - The Slab

The trio threaded their way down the burned-out shell of the hallway, careful not to stumble where the concrete slab had twisted and buckled from the force of the temblor. They could see into remains of a bathroom, two bedrooms-all gutted. Carpet, drywall and most of the wooden structural supports, everything of the furniture except the metal bits and pieces left over from bed frames and dressers, melted, twisted, scored and blackened.

“Hell of a fire,” Garces said. “Though from the bits and pieces of wiring I’ve seen, this place should have gone up years ago. Looks like the builder jury-rigged all of the wiring in the house, connecting whatever scraps he had on hand. So far, we’ve found no single piece longer than a couple of feet. And they vary in gauge as well.

“If it hadn’t been the gas line, an electrical spark in the studs would have done the trick.

“The people that lived here all these years, whoever they were, those people don’t know how lucky they were.”

There was nothing more in the third bedroom or the back bathroom. In the back corner room, however, they found half a dozen police and fire personnel blocking the shattered doorway.

“Make way,” Garces ordered. The uniformed figures parted, letting the trio enter.

If the rest of the house had been burned beyond recognition, this room was devastated. Even though the plans indicated that the gas line had run beneath the converted garage/family room and into the kitchen, it looked as if the focus of the blast area had been the middle of this room.

The side wall had been forced outward from the bottom, crushed against the slump-stone fence that separated this property from the neighbors’-and which, miraculously, had not fallen over when the fragments of wood, plaster, and stucco had struck it. The roof-what was left of it-lay piled on top of the wall, heaped as neatly as if some monstrous hand had positioned it there.

In the room itself, the concrete slab had erupted. It looked as if some gigantic behemoth had shouldered its way from underground, lifting wide portions of the slab up and outward, leaving a pit in the center of the room. Two men were in the pit, bent over something.

“Find anything more?” Garces called out to them.

One of the men straightened, swiped at his brow with an ash-blackened hand.

“You’re not going to believe this, sir.”

He motioned the trio closer.

They stood as near the pit as they could get, behind a buckled hunk of scarred concrete. The upper edges were jagged and worn, almost eroded, suggesting that this break had occurred long before the earthquake had forced this portion of the foundation upward.

The other man hauled himself out of the hole.

Revealing…on the far side of the break, a long, rounded extrusion of concrete that arced beneath the rest of the slab. Originally, it must have been a solid structure, eight feet long, four feet across, three feet deep, where the original excavation for the house had been deepened before the concrete was poured. In shape, it looked almost like a roughened mummy case, slightly wider at one end, narrowing at the other.

The quake had lifted it almost level with the rest of the slab, canted it until its entire length was visible from where the trio stood, and shattered portions of it. Where the old cement had blistered away, bones protruded into the open air.

“I think there’s a complete skeleton in there, sir. Must be as old as the house, though. It’s certainly not fresh.”

It took only a short while to photograph the remains in situ, then carefully remove the bones, reconstructing their original open-air arrangement on a blue-black tarp spread over the nearest nearly level bit of floor. One by one the stained, fire-blackened bones emerged into the light.

Little else was found. Whatever clothes the unknown victim might have been wearing had decayed or dissolved or otherwise deteriorated to little more than patches of muck along the bottom of the case. There was a belt buckle, unadorned and functional. A watch face but no band-perhaps the band had been leather, since a small buckle lay beneath the corroded watch. Some indefinable sludge that must have been shoes, since it still covered portions of the feet.

“No idea what would have cause this kind of damage,” one of the investigators ventured. “Usually, even after decades, more would survive. Leather. Synthetics. It looks almost as if some kind of acid or something had been poured over everything. But there’s no trace of any damage from corrosives on the bones themselves. Other than having not a trace of flesh on them, they are almost pristine.” He shook his head. “No idea at all.”

Finally, at the bottom of the concrete tomb, they located a single clue. Two bits of metal, thin and rectangular, that looked like a set of dog-tags, or a pair of medic-alert pendants.

It took some cleaning and a strong magnifying glass to read anything through the accumulated layers of grime, sludge, and almost rock-hard sediment.

Medic-alert tags.

The name on one of them was still legible, although any mention of medical disorders had been totally eradicated.

“Bryan Sidney.”

“I know that name from somewhere,” Edgar Sai said. “Give me a minute.” He placed a call on his cell phone, stepped away from the small group for several minutes, then returned.

His face was pale, and he looked shaken.

“Bryan Sidney. Disappeared November, 1989. Police figure he’d skipped town. He and a partner built this original subdivision, then got caught cutting to many corners. Talk was they were both in deep shit, probably were going to be arrested, maybe serve some time in jail.

“Then Sidney disappeared. No trace. The talk settled down for a while.

“The it re-surfaced a two years later, stronger. More evidence, I guess, or something. Indictment actually came down.

“The night before he would have been arrested, Sidney’s partner, Andrew McCall was found murdered.”

Sai stared around at the wreckage from the fire, the gutted rooms, the shattered foundation slab, the black pit lying open and revealed just a few feet away.

“He was found murdered,” he continued, “in this house.”

Later, after most of the official presence had departed, and he was alone with two men from the coroner’s office and the recovered bones, Edgar Sai stared down at the remains of Bryan Sidney, hidden for over two decades in a silent sarcophagus of cold concrete.

“If only,” he muttered, “if only these walls could talk…”

From the Tamarind Valley Times, 12 June, 2012

NEIGHBORHOOD PARK ANNOUNCED

The Tamarind Valley Planning Commission publicly announced today the planned construction of a small neighborhood park in the Charter Oaks Subdivision.

The property, which has stood vacant since September of 2010, defaulted to the city after a legal contest in which the previous owners relinquished all claims of ownership.

In an arrangement with the family, the new park will be named the Willard and Samuel Huntley Memorial Park, after Willard Huntley, a valley resident who perished in the fire that consumed the home during a small earthquake that rattled the valley on August 29, 2010. A freak gas-line fire lead to Huntley’s death. The remainder of the family survived.

A month earlier, Huntley’s 2? year old son Samuel died suddenly of a SIDS-like event.

The Planning Commission intends to dedicate the park on August 29 of this year, in memory of…