by Bobby Adair
Paul didn’t look back.
He was walking.
He was thinking.
When would his own disproportionate, deserved justice come?
Chapter 90
The second day after the beating, most of the rebels were still gone. The dozen left in camp, apparently spooked by the poison scare, didn’t put Austin to work preparing their meals.
Sander didn’t wake up in the morning, which didn’t concern Austin. Sander was hurt. He needed the sleep to aid his recovery.
By early afternoon, Austin started to worry and tried to shake Sander awake. It didn’t work. Austin told the guards that Sander needed medical attention. Neither guard cared. In fact, they looked at Austin while he spoke, then turned away when he stopped, not even troubling themselves to verbalize their apathy.
Austin took to putting damp compresses on Sander’s face. He washed the cuts and rolled Sander onto a clean mat after he’d soiled his.
Three more times before Austin went to bed that night, Sander had accidents. After each, Austin rolled him onto a freshly-cleaned sleeping mat. Through all of it, Sander didn’t regain consciousness.
When Austin woke on the morning of the third day, Sander was dead. Austin went out to tell the guards, but had to wait until late in the morning for one to show up. Austin asked, “Is it just you today?”
“Sick,” said the guard nodding in the direction of one of the huts.
Biting his lip to repress a smile at news of the guard, Austin said, “Sander died. We need to bury him.”
“You need to bury him.”
Chapter 91
The metal patio chair wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t expensive. It was resilient under layers and layers of flaking paint. The townhome’s previous owner had abandoned the table and chairs on the front porch, leaving them to be treasured to an equal measure by Paul. The chairs weren’t comfortable. The tabletop metal mesh left waffle prints on his elbows when he leaned. It stayed on the porch because it was there, presence being its salient quality.
Heidi’s corpse was also present, lying along the side railing, bundled in a sheet and favored down comforter, wrapped in the mandatory layers of plastic and tape. Paul had plenty of tape and plastic in the basement, part of his prepper hoard.
That website, with its pitiless packaging and disposition instructions, assured that the body would be collected in a “safe and respectful” manner and taken to a local interment annex. The bereaved, Paul, would be provided details of the location of the buried loved one after the pickup took place. They’d email him.
Email: subject porch corpse. Are you fucking kidding me?
In the event that the transport service became backlogged, the responsibility fell to the closest living relative of the deceased to transport the body in a sanitary fashion to the nearest interment annex. Bodies left out, especially in the suburbs, would attract vermin (rats), scavengers (coyotes), and opportunistic predators (bears).
Much was made on the webpage, of the deadlines and shifting responsibility covering that part of the process. It was ambiguous, at best. The only thing that was certain was when Paul violated the rules surrounding corpse disposition, he was subject to a punishment, including two years in jail and a ten thousand dollar fine.
The government seemed determined to stop the epidemic, even if it had to jail the entire population and ensure that everybody contracted Ebola from one another that way.
“So be it,” Paul muttered as he came to a decision. No matter what the government said he couldn’t or shouldn’t do, his heart couldn’t start letting go of Heidi until she was at least off the front porch.
He got out of his ugly metal chair, crossed the porch and knelt in front of Heidi’s body. He gently stroked her face through the layers. She was cold. The last several nights, the temperatures had dipped near freezing and the days had been cool. Feeling a shiver down his spine, Paul prepared himself for what he had to do next.
He leaned over and lifted her onto his shoulder. He carried her unnatural, cold body into the house, through the dining room, the kitchen, the TV room, and out the back door. He crossed the small courtyard and went into the garage. He squeezed his way between the two cars, and when he turned to put Heidi in the bed of his truck, he lost his balance. She fell, bouncing against the side of the truck before banging down in the bed.
“Dammit!” Paul yelled out. “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!”
He pounded the truck’s fender with his fists. The tantrum did nothing to ease the pain in his broken heart.
Paul went back into the house, locked the front door, checked all the windows, gathered up his car keys, and stopped. He looked up at the ceiling, knowing that in the room upstairs, in the closet, in the bedroom he used for an office, was the AR-15 he’d purchased in an act that he’d been ashamed of at the time. And though that choice now seemed prescient, it hadn’t saved Heidi’s life.
Paul went upstairs and found the weapon in the corner of his closet. He didn’t yet have a good way to store it, but he decided in that moment that weapon storage was a concept from the past, not for the future. From now on, the rifle would always be with him. Just let those fuckers who killed Heidi come back. Paul yearned for that to happen.
He gathered up a couple of spare magazines and checked that they were full. He ejected and checked the magazine in his rifle. He checked that the safety was set, and headed back downstairs. Once back in his truck, he leaned the rifle against the seat with the barrel pointing at the floor and the handgrip within easy reach, ready for use in the space of a few heartbeats.
Paul was stuck in the black molasses of a foul mood that nothing would wash away. He had lots of bullets, though, and thought that sharing those bullets with just the right kind of people might help free him of his sticky darkness.
Chapter 92
Paul didn’t see a single—living—person as he drove through his neighborhood. That wasn’t unusual. The townhouse residents seldom ventured out on foot, even when there was no disease. Driving out of the townhouse development and through his generically placid suburb, Paul felt like he was passing through a cemetery of house-sized tombstones, waiting for years of seasonal storms to come and grind them to shards of iridescent glass and crumbles of spotted brick. He didn’t see an automobile in motion until he reached the highway.
At the second exit, Paul followed the ramp off the highway and made a left turn at the intersection. Heading north on a road that used to be full of traffic, he saw a few more cars than had been on the freeway. At a red light, two cars lined up behind him, making this the first intersection since leaving home at which he wasn’t alone.
In his rearview mirror, he looked suspiciously at the driver behind him. He reached over to touch his rifle, feeling a measure of strength in its solid weight.
The driver leaned her head against her steering wheel and shuddered with silent sobs. Paul put both his hands back on the steering wheel. The woman behind him was probably on her way to the same place as Paul, carrying in her trunk a similar burden.
The light changed to green, and Paul rolled down the street. At Arapahoe Road—it seemed every town in Colorado had at least one street named Arapahoe—Paul turned right and started looking for the repurposed plot of land now named The Denver Southern District Interment Park. The map on the website showed it to be a short distance east of the intersection.
He crested a hill while looking down a side street and a flash of movement burned an image into his mind. Several people were beating something in the street with baseball bats or boards. He glanced at his rifle. He thought about Heidi and mashed the brakes.
Down the hill and halfway up the next, vehicles with red brake lights glowing were stopped in his lane, waiting to make a left turn.
At the head of the line, soldiers in camouflage fatigues, with gas masks over their heads and rifles on slings, directed traffic off the road. Two tan Humvees parked in the lane impressed the weight of their authority on the drivers. One of the s
oldiers pointed at Paul and was probably cursing him for speeding up to the end of the line like an idiot and almost causing an accident.
Paul settled in to wait.
The line inched forward and Paul eventually came up beside a soldier. He tapped the glass on the passenger side window. Paul rolled it down and the soldier’s gas mask-covered head angled a look toward the AR-15 leaning on the seat. The soldier tensed, but looked back up at Paul. It wasn’t the first weapon he’d seen. In a voice turned Cylon-mechanical through the filter of the gas mask, the soldier asked, “Interment?”
Paul nodded and made a feeble gesture at the bed of the pickup. “My wife.” An ache in his heart ambushed him, and he said no more.
The plastic-headed, glass-eyed, lethal thing nodded gravely. “Stay in the line. When you turn into the park, you’ll be told where to go. Do you have your interment sheet?”
“My what?” Paul asked.
“Did you print your interment sheet?”
“I—” Paul wanted to curse. What the hell was he talking about?
“Did you call for pickup?” The soldier nodded at Heidi’s body.
Paul wanted to say yes, but when he spoke, the mix of anger and grief threatened to turn into tears. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He settled for a nod.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” The soldier didn’t sound like it. He pointed forward. “Just stay in line. There’ll be someone ahead to direct you.”
Paul nodded and sniffled.
In an effort to convey empathy, the Cylon asked, “Do you have someone at home to talk to?”
Paul shook his head.
“Check the website. They have some virtual support groups. Trust me, I know that sounds like it sucks already, but it helped me.” The soldier stood back up, paused, and then leaned back into the window. “Suicide’s a thing now. Don’t go that way. Try the website.”
Paul nodded again. He didn’t dare risk a thank you. Tears might have come.
The soldier rapped twice on the hood with his knuckles and stepped away from the truck.
Chapter 93
Paul rolled along on autopilot until he found himself parked among dozens of other cars, next to an expansive field of grass, green and lush from a mild summer. Bordering the park, the tall trees were starting to show their fall colors of brilliant yellow and blazing red against a perfect blue sky. Far past the trees, the mountains touched the heavens, the tallest peaks already dusted in snow.
Paul killed the engine and sat. The parking spaces around him used to fill with cars of parents hurrying their children to soccer games as they promised them an ice cream cone for a victory. Mothers hugged their daughters and assured them that losing a game wasn’t the end of the world.
The end of the world.
The end of the world was watching the man in the next car wrestle a small, plastic-wrapped body out of the backseat of a subcompact. The body was wrapped in a too-small baby blanket, decorated with fat, pastel-colored numbers, letters, and cartoon giraffes. Clear plastic and packing tape covered most everything but a child’s white-socked foot, dangled limply from an open end.
The man trudged away with the tiny weight of the boney child, and the crippling burden of its death. He crossed the emerald grass on a path worn thin under the traffic of too many feet. He followed it toward a herd of dirty yellow backhoes, snorting plumes of diesel stink while they gouged long pits into the field. The man took up a place at the end of a widely spaced line, holding his burden tenderly in cramping arms. When his time arrived, he dropped his child into the bleak hole and collapsed as though all the life in his soul had just flitted away.
Paul wept.
Chapter 94
With Heidi’s body in his arms, Paul crossed a fading chalk line that defined the boundary of a soccer field, walked in front of a goal, and between two long, rectangular mounds of dirt. A dozen other mounds, eight feet wide and forty feet long, formed neat rows across the soccer fields. At the head of each, a stone the size of a coffee table stood, each carved with the names of the people buried under that particular mound.
Following the general path of others carrying bodies, Paul passed between more rows of mass graves, neat and straight. He arrived at a row of open pits. In front of each, a hand-written paper sign on a wooden pole displayed some letters, A-B, C-D, and so forth. C for Cooper. Paul headed for the C-D pit.
Beside each pole, one of the coffee table-sized stones lay. Seated in front of the stone by the C-D pit, a man worked at carving the names of the deceased being dropped in by family members. The carver had an assistant close by, tablet computer held in gloved hands. Soldiers and policemen posted themselves with hands on weapons, keeping things in order, standing in carefully selected spots, out of the flow of foot traffic, away from contact with any human, away from any corpse.
Paul queued up in a line behind three people, one with a baby, one with a child, and one dragging an adult. Each person in line maintained a gap of six feet between the others, the new invisible boundary of personal space, defined and mandated by the city of Denver. The federal requirement was just five.
Paul came to the head of the line and he stared absently at the row of bodies in the pit.
A thoroughly hazmat-protected man with a tablet computer and a barcode scanner in hand, said “Show me your interment ticket.”
Paul looked at him blankly, as he thought about what the traffic-directing Cylon had told him.
“Your interment ticket.” The scanner man had no patience, and had no qualms about letting Paul know it. Paul looked down at Heidi’s body, growing heavy in arms that had gone numb from the load. Did the man not understand why Paul was here?
Slowly and loudly, in a tone meant to tell Paul that he was an idiot, scanner man, said, “Your interment ticket. Did you call in? Did you register online?”
“I—” Paul had called for Heidi’s body to be picked up. They’d taken his information. “I called.”
“Did you print out your interment ticket?” The scanner man looked emphatically past Paul to remind him that others were in the line, good people who’d followed their instructions. Paul’s stupidity was prolonging their grief. “It had the bar code with your—” scanner man waved little circles in the air toward Heidi’s body.
“Wife,” Paul said.
“Your wife,” scanner man confirmed. “I scan the information from the sheet.” He pointed to the tablet computer. “The information goes here. We have to keep track of who’s de—”
Dead? Of course, that was the coarse word the scanner fuck was going to use. He’d stopped. Maybe he’d already been punched in his tactless goggled face.
A policeman walked over and positioned himself several paces behind scanner man. The six-foot gap was maintained, but he was close enough to let Paul know that scanner man had backup. Paul took the cop’s stance as a dare, and in his roiling sorrow and stoked anger, he gave a thought to taking it.
With an air of bureaucratic authority, scanner man said, “We have to keep track of the numbers. We have to have the information to track the disease. We have to know we’re beating it. And—” Scanner man let the “and” hang in the air for a moment, emphasizing the importance of what was to come. “Your wife’s information goes in here,” he tapped the screen of the tablet. He pointed to the stone carver’s assistant. “Then your wife’s information goes over there, so her name can be added to the stone. You do want to know where your wife is buried don’t you?”
“Of course,” Paul spat, wanting very much to punch the officious fuck. “Her name is Heidi Cooper. I don’t have an interment sheet. I called it in a few days ago.”
A soldier, sensing the tension, took up a position to Paul’s left.
Scanner man typed on the screen of his tablet and his expressive brows wrinkled in frustration. “There’s no record. You’ll just have to dump her in the unmarked pit.” He pointed to the end hole on the row, where no coffee table-sized stone marker lay, where no stone carver sat, whe
re the handwritten sign on the post said “Anonymous.” A line of excruciatingly sad people stood near that hole with the burden of their departed loved ones in their arms.
Shaking his head, Paul said, “You have my wife’s name. I called it in.”
“No ticket.” Scanner man shook his head to punctuate the discussion.
Turning around, Paul called, over his shoulder, “I’ll print a ticket and come back.”
“No!” A shout from behind him. “Sir!”
“Stop!” another voice ordered.
Paul stopped and turned back toward scanner man. The policeman had stepped forward, his elbow cocked out and his palm on his pistol, ready to draw. The soldier had his rifle halfway up. The policeman said, “Sir, take your loved one to the anonymous line. It is illegal for you to take a body away from the interment site. Do you understand?”
“I don’t have a ticket,” Paul pleaded. “I don’t have a ticket.” He felt his anger turning into futile sadness. “I don’t have—”
Scanner man had stepped forward again to cement his own authority. He pointed. “The anonymous line.”
“I want to be able to come back and visit my wife’s grave,” Paul begged. “I love her. Can’t you just take her name and add it to your list?”
Scanner man pointed again. “You’re slowing the line.”
Paul shook his head. Everything he felt turned to tears. He started toward the stone carver, “Heidi Cooper. Please add her name. Heidi Cooper.”
The stone carver and his tablet computer assistant jumped to their feet and stumbled away, as though Paul might be a fountain of Ebola virus.
People yelled.
Uniformed bodies ran.
The commotion was invisible to Paul. He only wanted one thing in that moment, the tiniest scrap of dignity for the woman he loved, the dead woman he still loved. He needed to have her name carved in the stone. “Please!” he shouted.