19th Century Forensics!
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“How long, gentlemen?” At their looks of confusion, Carlotta shook her head as she knelt herself, to get a better look. “My pardon. How long have these bones been here?”
“At least a season, Your Grace,” said Jimmy. “No skin, the hair’s all blown away, and see the muck underneath the bones? Somebody left the bodies to rot where they were tossed.”
“Tossed? How do you know that, Mister Jimmy?”
But it was the lieutenant who answered. “No clothes, Your Grace. Not even a rusty belt buckle. They were either unclothed when they died, or stripped afterward.”
Different is bad.
The road was deserted.
It stayed deserted for the quarter-mile the group shadowed it, and stubbornly remained empty when they finally stepped up into the roadbed. This particular stretch had been metcalfed, so it was a slight rise from the drainage ditch up to the top. Not enough to call getting up there a ‘climb,’ but certainly dangerous in a world where the walking dead waited to swarm the clumsy.
But there were no shamblers wandering the gravel-and-stone road. No corpses, either: just a few patient weeds, and a number of weathering bones. Witherby knelt to look at one pile of scattered ribs and femurs.