ADHD

Before she even passed under the crime scene tape, she knew this would be bad. She took the bottle of peppermint oil from her trunk, saturated her surgical mask in it, and passed it to her partner, who did the same, and they gazed up at the house. Two stories, some sort of old catalog home, and a terribly unkempt lawn.

"Come on, we have to do this before the local dicks investigate this one."

"I really don't want to have to do any corpse extraction."

"If we're here, there's absolutely going to be corpse extraction." She was already wearing her mask, but she wished it had a hole for a cigarette; never minding the fact of the reminder banging in her head, there were her ex-wife's last words to her there in custody court: "maybe if you'd stop chain-smoking, you'd get to see the kids." She hears that snippet of thought at least twenty times a day. She pulls a small manila envelope from her pocket, with an address, and extracts a single silver house key.

"Gentle now, easy does it." The door eases open quietly, not so much as a creak, and almost immediately the peppermint oil tries to yield.

Standing in the doorway, there was a living room that was well-lived in, but with two people that couldn't negotiate a building garbage problem. She was only here because she was sure those two people were dead, and she just had to figure out why.

A laptop on the coffee table, still plugged in. She tapped the space bar, and up came some internet video about a musical singer being puked on, with commentary from some random influencer. Notably, the keyboard wasn't dusty, just dirty, and the rest of the computer felt like it hadn't seen so much as a damp paper towel in a decade.

Her partner went up the stairs, saying, "there's prolly one of them up here, I'll check this out, you hit the kitchen," and she went upstairs, leaving the woman alone amongst hundreds of roaches and tens of mice. She wished she wore boot covers.

As soon as she nudged the kitchen door open, she saw the epicenter of the odor: a corpse slumped over the dining table, holding a note. She couldn't identify the race of the corpse, her academy days were far off. This guy here though, had a bald head, a wide head that never tapered into a chin and a neck, and six mouths, hundreds of teeth. The only thing she could remember was that these folks were obsessed with singing choral music, singing all the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts, at once, cause they could. They were probably legends elsewhere in the galaxy.

Slipping some latex gloves on, she gently parted his largest mouth: his gums were recessed and bloody, his teeth in disarray. Did they never get hygiene supplies? She left the man in his chair, slumped him back over the table, and inspected the kitchen. Not a single grain of food to be seen in any cupboard, not a single clean dish either. Just yet more garbage bags, and impromptu garbage containers for when they ran out of bags.

He could have never left the house to do any shopping, he was on Earth, and the people of Earth are notoriously racist, they'd have an absolute fit if anyone else was seen who wasn't human. That means the shopping fell to the other occupant of this house, some human girl in her twenties. She immediately felt bad for the dead man slumped over here, only able to experience his oncoming demise, cause if he were to take one step outside, he'd get dissected by a hundred governments.

"Hey," she called up the stairs, "did you find her up there?" She tentatively climbed the stairs to find her partner in a bedroom at the back of the second level, staring at a corpse in bed. A human corpse. The girl, the one in her twenties.

"I've just been standing here, asking myself, why couldn't she leave? Why couldn't she get out of here?" The dead girl was on her side in the bed, dirty blankets pulled over her shoulders, the room in as much shambles as anywhere else in the house. "Had she gotten off her ass and tried to clean or get food or anything, none of this would have happened."

"I'm not so sure of that. I'm sure something more had happened, but I'm not eager to dig through the evidence. Wanna just say she had agoraphobia, bag up the guy downstairs, bring him in and see if we can't get his body repatriated to his people, and just close this one out?"

"Sure, I guess so, sounds like a--hey, check this out!"

Written on the hallway wall, opposite the door to the dead girl's bedroom, where they'd be seen every time she left her room, were the following words:

(this fragment cuts out prematurely)