Rainclouds seeded with the week's stale antitoxins and a headless body clogging the storm drain. For this he dragged his ass out of bed at three in the morning? Everything's washed with sodium-yellow and the icy shit-water sluicing past means Carmine can't feel his feet. Mandrake's doing the dirty work, kneeling by the body to pick at it with her blue-condomed hands. "I trust you've had your shots," she says—the city's unofficial slogan, delivered with the cool detachment of someone who will never ever feel the cold. She was probably already out when the call came through, hunting nuns from Our Lady of the Grinning Epidemic into the wee hours.
"Do I even want to know?" The way the body's legs are jammed right into the vomit-crusted grate, the way the ass bobs up and down in the water, Carmine can already guess. If he was a rookie he'd be planning to skip breakfast, but even with the way things are he's picturing a bowl of hot udon and Mama's meatballs on the side. Mandrake straightens up and stands, like ceramic tiles brushing over each other. She snaps off the latex gloves and tosses them in the drink. "Tell me it's a serial killer. Tell me that's a saw wound."
Only, her response runs like, "Judging by the pustules along the neckline..." She stops, because there's no need to continue. Fuck. The city doesn't need another Walker outbreak. He doesn't need another outbreak—he remembers quite well what it looks like when you're landlord stops in the middle of shaking you down for the rent to let his head bud off in a squealing eruption before it scurries down the damn hallway on freshly formed finger-feet. The last of the great space-plagues to sputter upon the Earth. "One hopes the head drowned and didn't have the chance to spread anything."
"Fat chance." You can hope for a lot of things around here—that maybe it's nothing more serious eyelash fever or that tumour on your lungs will develop meta-cancer and die off. Hope is a wet, phlegmy cough first thing in the damn morning. "They're persistent little survivalist bastards and they don't breathe." Carmine hasn't taken his hands out of the pockets of his coat, even coming down the near-sheer embankment, but he squelches down the urge to massage his temples about the same time he surpresses a yawn. He was promised a full night's sleep and now he's staring down at a possible outbreak, which means mandatory headhunter duty—which he knows from experience does shit-all to your sex life, thanks. Hanging out the gutter waiting for the head of some housewife or city official to spider by so you can harpoon it and get blistered brain-bits all over your shoes. "This whole section needs to be sterilized, now." Up to his ankles in human waste and there's a walker out there. "Instead of a leisurely shower listening to music and massaging shampoo into my scalp, I get an hour of decontamination scrubbing with Doctor Cream leering at my damn ass the whole time." Carmine gives up and fishes his phone out of his pocket, splashing around in the slush until he's got more than a bar's worth of signal—must be some router-rats swarming through nearby tunnels—to fire off a text to Central so they can send in the clean-up crews. He scrapes rainwater out of his eyes and diluted snot from the end of his nose.
"I'll see to it they erect statues in your honour." Ugh. Perhaps creepier than the idea that some nameless fucker's infected noggin's making the rounds is Mandrake saying something that sounds passably like sarcasm.