(Page 1 of 2) Fish Tale pt 1 from Betrayed By God by Tristis WardSUMMARY: Another tale of random chaos from the book Betrayed By God.The Animal Control officer hustles out of the building with his hand still covering his nose. He does not speak for a moment, letting the fire chief wait until he gets his gag reflex under control.
Peter Lambert has been doing this job a few years now, and knows that decomposition cases are always hard on the gut, but this mess is so much worse than anything he has ever encountered that for the first time he thinks he might just vomit right here on his shoes. He can see why the tenants moved out. The question is how they stood it for so long, demanding an inspection day after day until his overworked department had to finally be summoned into action by a call from the fire department.
The brownstone is not in a good part of town, but it is not a slum. The tenants are not squatters who might bring some weird thing in from a dumpster. And yet, the whole place, rafters to cellar, is filled with decaying fish carcasses. Some of the animals are large – too large to be secretly carried in, even at night. They are all exotics. He is not up on his deep-sea fish species, but he thinks he can recognize lantern fish among them, even though their bodies have exploded from rapid depressurization and having been left rotting for three days.
The giant squid was a puzzle for a minute. It has been cut into sections and left in a couple of apartments on the second floor. He got the picture of what the joker was trying to achieve only after he got to the end of the line. It started in the hallway with a barrier of thick tentacle sections across it. In the apartment to the left smaller tentacles complete with wildly splayed tips were stacked against the wall, and in the apartment directly across on the right, the bulging remains of the soft body dripped offal from where it partly lay on a dining room table and what must be a chair leaning back on two legs against the wall.
There were a few oddities in the rest of the building, too. Some fish corpses have been inserted into the walls. One end or the other sticks out, and when he took what little time his stomach could tolerate to pull at a couple of them they came apart, showing a meat and liquid saturation of the wall behind.
"That -" he holds back another gag, "- is a hell of a mess."
The Fire Chief's last name, pinned above his designation badge, is Brandon. His otherwise neat uniform has several sploshy marks from dripping fish matter on its shoulders. He is not very happy with Animal Control right now, seeing their lack of involvement as the primary reason why he will smell like bad fish for days. "What the hell happened in there, Lambert?"
"I – I don't know. Art?" Lambert looks around at the crowd of tenants and gawkers. "Some art student's idea of a joke or protest or something?"
"That's not good enough. You're going to have to give me somebody to charge, because the cleanup on this is going to be through the roof. It's not my department's job to investigate animal abuse cases and I don't want to have to answer any more phone calls about this damned building!"
Lambert is aware of how the buck is being passed around here.
| 
