by Dale Mayer
He would come and visit. There were too many people here to forget.
Herman tugged at the old t-shirt tied around his nose and mouth, his black skin blending with the poor light. Nothing kept the smell out. He’d already gone through a half dozen pairs of gloves. But without the makeshift bandana the breath caught in his chest, making him gag. His clothes would have to be burned after this. There would be no way to clean them.
Bertha struggled forward. Darkness hid the evidence of what they were doing. What he’d done. He only hoped he wouldn’t have too many more loads to haul.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, everyone had been numb, in shock or frozen with grief. No one had been able to make decisions. There’d been no army to take care of the problem. The government buildings and staff had been as decimated as the rest of the population.
Herman hadn’t been able to leave his people lying exposed like that. Determined to do what he could he’d taken command and had done something. Something so awful, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the stares of the dead – blaming him.
So far, close to sixty people had gone into this pit. The natural depression, a ready-made burial spot, was a godsend to the desperate survivors, a fast answer to the bloated dead rotting on the sidewalks. He didn’t know how many more were to come, maybe hundreds. Later, much later, if someone cared, they could open this mass grave and do the right thing. But not now. Now they had to get on with the business of survival.
Mother Nature was a bitch.
Chapter 1
One year later…
Jade Hansen twisted in the cool sheets. Her sweaty panicked body searched for a way out of the endless nightmare of bloated bodies, desperate people and cries for help – pleas that would never get answered. She turned in the fog as one more person, caught among the fallen rocks, cried out to her. She came face to face with a woman – blood congealed in her hair and streaked down the side of her face, a chunk of concrete crushing her legs. She begged for Jade to find her son.
Screaming, Jade took off to the safety of the tent, the tent filled with the dead…and the living that searched for their families.
She couldn’t help them all.
She couldn’t help any of them.
She couldn’t even help herself.
With tears streaming down her face, Jade woke in a panic as if the demons of her nightmare had followed her into the present.
Shuddering, she recognized the hanging lamp overhead as the one in her apartment. The Aztec print couch she’d fallen asleep on was hers, a gift from her brother. And she finally understood that the evening’s in-depth television coverage of a small earthquake in Haiti had been the trigger for her nightmare.
Jade curled into a ball, pulling her throw higher up on her neck. She winced at the images still flashing on the news. Another earthquake in Haiti. Only a little one this time. Not that the size mattered. The memories of her one and only humanitarian trip to that area, after the major earthquake almost a year ago, had etched themselves permanently into her brain. A horrible time, a-praying-on-your-knees-for-help kind of horrible time. In Haiti, nightmares had destroyed her sleep. The shortage of food for those suffering had destroyed her appetite.
She’d lost weight over there, but nothing compared to the pounds that had slipped off after her return home. Sure, that had been almost a year ago. It didn’t matter. With the nightmare fresh in her mind it felt like only two days.
So much pain and suffering. So much torment. She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even begin to make it right. There’d been nothing she could do to help – or so little relative to the scope of the problem, it might as well have been nothing. If she’d been offered a ride out of that hell on any given day, she’d have jumped over her colleagues to grab it.
She wasn’t proud of that.
In fact, it made her feel small and ashamed. Her colleagues had done so much better.
She’d wanted to be better. She’d tried to be better.
She’d failed. Failed her colleagues. The victims. And herself.
The memories still haunted her.
She had her nice safe lab job back in Seattle. She drove to work every day in a nice car and returned home every night to her clean safe apartment with running water, heat and electricity. All the comforts denied the Haitians still struggling through the devastation.
After she’d locked her front door behind her that first day home, the tears had started to pour. It seemed she’d been crying ever since.
Her life had gone from bad to worse for a while before she’d picked up – somewhat.
And now another earthquake.
If a small one like that triggered her memories what was the reality doing to all those poor people still living the horror?
The phone rang.
She ignored it.
It wouldn’t quit. Finally, she couldn’t stand it so picked up the receiver. She didn’t even bother to check the caller ID. Duncan called every night at nine.
“I’m fine, Duncan.”
“Hey, Kitten.” Her brother’s pet name for her made her smile as he’d probably intended. She used to be like him. Upbeat, funny and carefree. Until life had dumped her on her ass at the top of the slide and given her a hard kick downhill. She wasn’t sure she’d hit bottom now either.
“I’ve got a job proposition for you.”
His cheerful voice made her want to smile. The job proposition didn’t. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He laughed, a buoyant sound that rang around the room. He never failed to raise her spirits. The effect just didn’t hang around after his calls. “Maybe you don’t, but maybe you do. How will you know if you don’t hear it? It’s a good one.”
His wheedling tone made her smile in spite of her horrible mood. “Not if I don’t want to hear it.”
“You don’t know what you want.”
Jade groaned. “If I don’t know, then how do you?”
That laughter pealed again. She shook her head and felt the lightness – the joyful spirit that was her brother – ease the ache in her soul. “I know you keep trying to save me, Duncan, but I’m fine.”
The laughter and joy cut off suddenly. Duncan’s voice, sober and sad, whispered, “No. No, you’re not.”
Tears choked her. She rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry, damn it. Not tonight. Not again tonight.
“This has to stop, Jade. You’re going to collapse and I don’t want that to happen.” Love slipped through the phone receiver making it harder to hold back the tears. Jade didn’t trust herself to speak. She sniffled ever so slightly.
“I know you’re hurting inside. I feel it and I hurt for you.”
“I know,” she whispered, starting to shake, knowing she had to stop – only she didn’t know how. And once again – couldn’t deal with it. “Look, I’m really tired. I need to get to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
She didn’t give him a chance to say good-bye and hung up instead. As soon as the receiver clicked down, the tears rolled. Hot and steady, they streamed down her cheeks. She snuggled back into the couch and let them run.
The point of stopping them was long gone – besides she no longer knew how.
*
“Hey Dane. That guy called again.” John called out.
“Yeah, which guy?” Dane walked over to stand beside his stepbrother who’d stopped by the site for a visit.
Dane tugged his hard hat off to wipe the sweat running down his forehead. Christ it was hot and humid here. He surveyed the hospital construction site in front of them. Not bad at all. They were ahead of schedule, but completion of the new wing was still months away. Jacmel hadn’t recovered from the last big earthquake and with smaller ones continually causing setbacks, the country would be years getting back on its feet.
It had taken weeks to convince John to let him come over after the quake. When he’d realized how badly in need the town was, Dane had stepped in. But John had refused Dane’s help to fix John�
��s small engine repair shop that had been decimated in one of the smaller more recent earthquakes. John said he wanted to fix things himself.
“The guy about the grave.” John said, “Remember they want to open it and retrieve some guy’s family?”
Dane glanced over at his brother. There were only the two of them left in the family. Both stubborn. Independent. And family oriented. It had only taken one phone call with something odd in John’s voice to catch Dane’s attention. He’d put his Seattle construction business in the hands of his capable foreman, an old school friend, and without his brother’s invite, he’d flown to Haiti two days later. That had been months ago.
Shielding his eyes from the hot sun, Dane said, “I have to admit, never-ending sunshine and warm, dry weather is hardly a hardship. Of course we haven’t hit the humid summer season, yet.”
“See? Isn’t this much better than the wet misery of the coast? Seattle is probably still buried in snow – even in March.” John grinned with satisfaction.
Dane couldn’t argue that. His foreman had been complaining of just that in the last phone call. “Not everyone hates the rain like you do.”
“Come on, admit it.” John reached over and smacked Dane’s shoulder. A cloud of dust rose, making him step back hurriedly. “You love it here.”
“I love visiting you and of course, I adore Tasha.” Dane grinned over his white lie. There was no arguing that Tasha obviously adored his brother so that was good enough for him. It had, after all, been the call of family that had brought Dane here.
John had a terrible history with relationships. His long-time high school sweetheart had walked out the door of her home one day just weeks before graduation and had never returned. A few years later, John had married the witchy Elise. That marriage had been a walking disaster right from the wedding reception. Dane hadn’t been able to stand the woman and the feeling had been mutual. John was just a big teddy bear who attracted unscrupulous people.
After that fiasco, John disappeared for years before finally setting up housekeeping with Tasha in Haiti. Dane’s antennae went off at that and given the past, he could be forgiven for worrying about his brother. Only John appeared to have stabilized, was flourishing even. Dane had been delighted.
The major earthquake had changed all that, sending John back into the same morose angry man as before.
“Hey, are you in there?”
Dane started.
John smirked at him, a sign his light-hearted kid brother was showing through the more cynical angry one of recent years. “What’s the matter; Felice getting to you?”
Heat washed over Dane’s throat. Felice was too hot, too willing and way too young. She was also the daughter of one of Tasha’s friends who’d visited yesterday. He didn’t know the specific laws in Haiti relating to that sort of thing, still he was pretty damn sure he’d get jail time back home and that was deterrent enough for him.
“She needs to be locked away for a few years.”
“Not here. Girls her age are often married and pregnant.” John added thoughtfully, “And not likely in that order.”
Dane shook his head. “As long as it’s not to me.”
John changed the subject abruptly. “What am I going to do about the call…about this guy’s request for help at the mass gravesite? Sounds crazy to me.”
Easily following the lightning shift of his brother’s mind, Dane said, “What’s to do – he’s a grieving man. His request isn’t unreasonable. And it’s done all the time.”
John visibly shuddered. “I never expected to feel so strongly about it, but after that earthquake… I don’t know Dane. I saw too much death. More than I should have – more than anyone should have. It seems wrong to dig up those poor earthquake victims again.”
“You’ve been living here too long. Some weird Haitian’s beliefs are rubbing off on you.”
John snickered, making Dane laugh. “Or not long enough. According to Tasha, Mother Earth claimed them and she won’t be happy if she’s forced to give them up again.”
With a sigh of disgust, Dane said, “That’s crazy talk. This guy lost his family. He wants to take the three of them home to Seattle and bury them properly. He needs closure. That’s all. What’s so wrong about that?”
John kicked a stray rock in the dirt. “I don’t know that anything is wrong with it. I guess if it were me and mine, I’d want to take them home, too. But it’s a mass grave. There are other bodies to consider. Other families who will be hurt.”
“Really?” Dane stared at him. “Like how mass?”
John shot him a look before grimacing and staring off in the horizon. “I stopped counting at sixty. We did what we had to do. The dead…they were everywhere. Herman, our old neighbor, used his loader…Christ it was bad.”
Dane scrunched his face. John rushed to explain.
“God, there were children playing beside bloated bodies. They’d become dulled to them; there were so many. Oh don’t blame the children. They stayed close to the people they knew because they had no one else. That a dead mother or sibling lay within a few feet didn’t seem to matter. Even dead, they were a comfort.”
Dane closed his eyes as terrible images flooded his mind. He couldn’t imagine the horror. “I wasn’t judging. I just can’t envision what you went through. And to think of children sitting there, so lost and alone… Well…it’s a terrible thought.”
Shadows darkened John’s eyes. Dane was sorry for what John had been through. “That’s the thing about family.” Dane patted John on the shoulder and noticed his brother cringe.
“So you think this guy should be allowed to come in and remove his kin?” John wasn’t backing away from this one.
“I don’t have any say in this. I wasn’t aware that you did, either. I’m sure this man has already gone through the authorities. I’d suggest that you accept that this is going to happen whether you want it to or not. The team of specialists is going to be here soon. When they arrive, be nice to them. Helpful. They will probably be there for a day or two, a week or two max. Then they’ll be gone, leaving the others to rest in peace.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I know. There are other people with loved ones in that grave. Maybe someone should suggest that all the victims be identified and even…” Dane pursed his lips and nodded his head, pleased with his idea. “Reburied properly. This guy has money. Maybe some of it should be put toward assisting the community to help them deal with disaster.”
John shook his head. “You don’t understand the full scope of the problem here. There could be hundreds of bodies there. We just kept putting them in then piling dirt and rocks on top to make sure they weren’t disturbed. We probably went overboard on that part.”
Dane blanched. “Hundreds?” He swallowed heavily. “Okay so maybe the team will need a little longer. Still something could be done for the other remains.” Dane winced. “Or at least the remains they can find and identify while they search for the ones they are shipping back to Seattle.”
John stared at him, and gulped. “That’s not helping.”
“Yeah. I know. Sorry about that.”
The two men stared at the half-completed building in front of them. Dane took an involuntary step back. Right now the damn thing resembled a skeleton reaching out of the ground.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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