****
Clive and Red Beard saw the candle flicker and noticed, in the flickering, their shadows dance on the wall. They looked up, and in the hallway, the figure of Veronica flashed by, going down towards the kitchen to make her morning coffee. Red Beard lifted his chin in the direction of the hallway. “She turned out to be a good one,” he said. He thought of how Veronica had seemed to fit perfectly into their little household. Had it only been a week ago? Only a week?
Clive reached up, pulled at the corners of his mustache and nodded his head in agreement. “She sure did,” he said. His head nodded even more emphatically. “A strong, smart woman.”
They listened as she bustled around in the kitchen down the hallway humming to herself as the pots banged in the glow of her camping light. Clive and Red Beard were just about to blow out the candle to preserve the little bit of wick left for some other talk, some other morning, when Veronica called down the hallway to see if either of them wanted coffee. The suggestion in her tone indicated that she had asked this question before and that she knew what the answer would be. She was right.
“No, ma’am. We’ve got to get moving.” The reply was in precise, practiced unison, and with it, Clive and Red Beard were out the front door of the farmhouse.
****
To where? Where were they going? These two had been veritable whirlwinds of activity during the last week. Had it been a week already? They’d been inseparable as they went about their work, preparing some business of Clive’s—some business known only to themselves—and in their activity they had burned their candles at both ends.
It was never clear to anyone else just what, exactly, the friends were up to. The two were everywhere: directing the militia who patrolled the farm; arranging a number of convoys in and out of the complex; loading unspecified goods and materials onto and off the trucks; leading the convoys along the grid of farm roads and down a ridge of trees to… who knows where? No one knew. Or, no one was telling if they did know.
This was what happened every day, this coming and going, and everyone else watching, working, and not knowing.
****
In the evening, Clive and Red Beard discussed philosophy. They cooked meals and organized chores and played hosts to their guests. The two men had also taken to sitting up in the evening, having a scotch, and smoking cigars. That’s what they called it. Having a scotch. It had become a private joke between Clive, Red Beard, and Veronica. “You ‘drink’ water, or tea, or juice,” Clive was fond of saying, “but you ‘have’ a scotch, just like you ‘have’ coffee. It implies relationship, and a time set aside for something more than just refreshment or sustenance.”
Last night, they ‘had a scotch’ well into the night. Veronica joined them, and they’d argued (in a friendly way) about just exactly where one might find the world’s Archimedean point. It was the first real conversation the two men had had with Veronica. They found themselves looking forward to more.
They’d reached a happy little moment when preparations were just coming into order. They could see the results of, and perhaps an end to, their work, and they redoubled their efforts. The two men pushed themselves to feats of durability they had not previously thought possible. They didn’t sleep much. Truth be told, neither man seemed to notice the strain. They were just two friends, passing time, talking about ideas, going about their business.
The odd little community of Clive, Red Beard, Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin, had formed in a weirdly organic way, in the way that such communities must form in the end times. Everyone naturally fell into a specific role, using his or her own talents, insights, and experiences. Clive and Red Beard had their private business, and they didn’t feel the need to talk about it. The others didn’t feel the need to ask them about it either. The two odd friends seemed to be directing and steering some larger concern—a global one maybe—and all the time they held firm hands on the tiller of their local preparedness. Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin had their own small little family to contend with—a family within the larger family. Everyone knew that the group was preparing themselves around the farm for something, and knowing that fact gave impetus to their activities. They were all preparing… but, for what?
****
During the talk over scotch from the night before, Veronica argued a theory that botany would necessarily play a role in leveraging the future. “Talk about your Archimedean point!” she’d said.
She spoke on like she was giving a TEDTalk, but with nothing to show for slides. She was convinced—still—that knowledge of plants held the key to the future. She said that, whether in foraging for food in the forest, or planning a nursery, or feeding a population, all of these things would require knowledge, and an understanding, of plants. She was passionate about this. Clive and Red Beard were impressed by both her ideas, and her passion.
“And also…” Red Beard said, interrupting the thought. “Calvin especially interests me. For some reason I feel very fatherly toward him.”
Clive smiled under his mustache. He, too, felt a paternal urge toward the young man. He’d heard Calvin tell stories about his childhood; how his father had come to be persecuted by the Chinese for his participation in Falun Gong; how his father had died rather than take a kidney offered by the state, because he thought it was an organ taken from one of his brethren. Calvin had called his father a “kind of hero.” Clive recognized the hurt in the boy’s voice when he discussed his father. Like Red Beard, he’d felt the desire to give fatherly advice to a bright young man who’d lost his father.
Last night, finishing off their scotches, Clive had also thought of the church, and the jails, the government, and the state. It had occurred to him that all of them, in one way or another, were giving fatherly advice to young men who had lost their fathers. There is a world of difference between advice given by someone who cares for you, he thought, and advice given by an institution interested only in its own preservation.
“Yep. I agree,” he had said in reply to Red Beard, and the southern drawl came out. “Jonathan Wall done good when he sent that young’un.”
****
Observing that it was ‘never clear’ whether Clive and Red Beard were coming or going – it should be noted, of course, that this is not to be taken as exhaustively true. If one were watching carefully and paying attention, one might have figured something out.
A person, invisible, watching from the tree line at the crest of the hill, might have surmised things by the movements of the odd-shaped RV on its many ventures in and out of the farm complex. Sitting just above the tree line beyond the northwest fence of Clive’s farm, one might have seen that the two friends had, in fact, been coming and going. There, nestled along a stand of trees that started near the river and stretched along the edge of the farm where it rose in elevation, one would have been able to see, without obstruction, the amount of activity going in and out of the farm. Standing there in the snow and paying close attention, one would have seen all of the coming and going, and would have known without any doubt whatsoever, that something was about to occur. Something Big Was Coming.
Whatever it was hadn’t come yet.
Still, all of this is speculative, because there was no one there yet, standing and watching among the trees, to try to put it all together. There was only the buzz of the whirlwind, the military precision of the convoys, the crisp intersecting lines of the field at the fences, covered in snow, as the cold hung in the air like a mystery.
CHAPTER 37
Burying thousands of bodies in the frozen earth by hand had become untenable with only human labor and rudimentary tools, so, instead of digging thousands of smaller graves, the commander of Carbondale had ordered the planters to work for days digging one very large one. Then, he’d ordered them to fill the hole with bodies, and then to burn the bodies. This would serve to warm and thaw the earth. The planters would then be ordered to dig both the remains of the bodies, and more of the dirt out again, in order to make the pit deeper. The
ashen remains were then separated out, when possible, and formed into smoldering piles to serve as kindling for the next fire. When the warmed earth was sufficiently turned over and dug out, the hole was again filled with bodies, doused with fuel, lit afire, and the process would begin again. Eventually, in this way the commander had built an efficient human incinerator. On the grounds near the burning pit, piles of waiting bodies spread out like spokes from the fire that burned at the center, hot like Gehenna, or hell itself. The bodies of the dead, piled and waiting, sent the stench of decaying flesh across the valley. In addition, there was the problem of the ashes, floating gently down, adding to the air’s aroma, sticking in the nostrils.
Most of the planters had become draggers, and rather than digging holes sixteen hours a day, they were engaged for the same number of hours in dragging corpses and stacking them in piles where they waited for their turn in the huge burn pit.
Natasha Bazhanov and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev worked as a team in body dragging duty. Despite the natural enmity that Natasha had for Sergei (for security reasons she still called him Steve when she needed to speak to him), she, strangely, felt more comfortable working with someone from their hometown of Warwick. If she had to make the choice, she would rather work with Steve than with a complete stranger. At least she knew what Steve was, and she didn’t constantly have to evaluate his behavior for signs that he would turn aggressive. She didn’t have to worry that he might turn out to be some kind of pervert or something. Besides, Steve hardly ever talked, and when he did, he was all business.
Natasha adjusted her facemask. The two Warwickians grabbed another corpse with gloved hands and hauled it to the wait pile. Natasha could feel the slip of the flesh against the wet slick surface of her glove.
It was days ago when the announcement had arrived that most of the planters would become draggers. How many days ago was it? She couldn’t say. The camp commander had simply done what commanders do. He’d commanded. He’d walked to the center of the crowd near the burn pit and announced that they would now stop digging individual graves and begin wholesale burning. Even his guard detail had bristled.
Eventually, there was a lot of gagging and even vomiting among everyone on burial duty, including the soldiers who had to watch over everything. Historic images had come to their minds, and none of the guards desired to be compared or likened unto the monsters of the past. Each guard, though, was able to rationalize his position, because the human mind can rationalize any behavior if it wants to badly enough. This was nothing like Nazi Germany, they told themselves. They weren’t killing these people (they said to themselves) – at least, not most of them. These people were dying from disease, cold, and malnutrition. What the guards did not admit to themselves, was that the people were actually dying of a more deadly contagion. They were dying of spiritual entropy and unviability, a condition that evidenced itself in a sense of entitlement, helplessness, and a severe deprivation of the basic survival intelligence that man had developed over the millennia.
Most of the dead had been raised in the modern world to believe that it was someone else’s duty to take care of and protect them, and based on this fallacy, they’d decided that life was more dangerous and deadly outside the wire. That disease—the disease of dependency and unviability—was what was killing these people. But none of the guards admitted that fact to themselves. Instead, they dodged responsibility, no matter how sick the whole thing made them feel. Any tyranny, any abuse, any apostasy, any atrocity, can be rationalized if those in power can only convince the people that the alternative would be much worse.
As bad as everyone had it, the draggers had it the worst. After all, they didn’t have a choice. In addition to the filth and disease that came with the job, the draggers had the certain knowledge that the snapping underneath their feet was the crackling of human bones that hadn’t burned in the last fire.
Back when they were planters, they’d only had to worry that if they paused too long to arch their backs from the strain of overuse, the guards would threaten them. Now, as draggers, they had it still worse. While both jobs were physically strenuous, draggers had to contend with the fact that disease was already making headway and cutting the numbers of available draggers day by day. Hour after hour they dealt with the grotesque task of hauling decomposing and rotting human corpses, piling them up to be burned, leaving them in lines as if the bodies were waiting patiently for a bus—in the last queue they’d ever form on earth. The decaying skin of those corpses often pulled free from arms and legs. Sometimes, heads fell off. It was too much to think about, and so, after a while, one didn’t.
****
Most of the time, Natasha was able to stop thinking of the bodies as human remains. No matter how good she got at pretending though, the thoughts were always there, just under the surface, waiting to overwhelm her. On those occasions, her mental defenses would slip, and she’d notice a little girl’s dress, or a man’s tattoo. She would start to wonder who these people were, what their lives had been like before it all came to an end. She wondered that now.
Natasha was glad that Cole wasn’t here. Her brother didn’t have the make up for it. Dragging duty, if you avoided dying from disease, or crumbling with insanity, was a sure ticket to a lifetime of nightmares, and probably to a permanently damaged mind.
Having been born and raised in Warwick, a Russian spy school in the heart of America, she’d learned to reject the erroneous and dangerous idea that life was supposed to be ‘fair.’ Still, she couldn’t really get her mind around the absolute and complete lack of any vestige of fairness at all in the world. As she dragged bodies, she thought about people who had lived their whole lives within the historically rare epoch of American prosperity. So she imagined a nameless, faceless someone. The face she summoned was just someone she made up so that she’d have some element for comparison. It was almost exclusively through her imagination that she’d managed it, since she’d been born in a time and place that did not allow for direct experience.
The person Natasha imagined was a woman, born in New York City in 1963. Perhaps she’d died under the mushroom cloud that had recently erased The Big Apple from the map of history. This imaginary woman had lived her entire life in relative prosperity. Period. End of Sentence. Don’t even bother arguing the point. Doesn’t matter what problems the woman had faced in her life. Doesn’t matter if she’d struggled to find a job, if she’d had relationship problems, if she’d developed cancer, or if she’d lost a finger in a trash compactor. In the big scheme of things, her hardships were inconsequential. This woman that Natasha was imagining had never been tasked with dragging rotting corpses to a hole to be incinerated. Hundreds of rotting corpses. Thousands. That woman had lived in luxury her whole life, and then she was incinerated in a flash of light.
Why were some people subjected to horrors beyond imagination, while others lived in relative comfort, and then disappeared into light, without such suffering? Why were many people still out there somewhere, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened? Natasha could not easily comprehend this detail, this suffering. She wasn’t foolish enough to demand fairness, but she did feel like she had a right to ask why.
Anyway, she was glad that Cole was not a dragger. That bit of unfairness she could appreciate. Cole’s billet wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there was no job worse than that of dragger, and she was relieved that her brother, at least, had escaped death duty. Cole had drawn garbage detail. He was hauling trash (mostly human waste and kitchen refuse.) Not human bodies, though. The stench in Cole’s job was bad too, she imagined, but his job had the advantage that he wasn’t hauling bodies that would come apart and spill their contents across the ground, causing you to slip in the guts as you dragged the lumps of flesh to the fires. Handling kitchen refuse was worse than the worst day of any job ever held by the imaginary woman in New York City who’d died in the flash of light, but at least Cole didn’t end up covered from head to toe at the end of
the day with gooey remains of what once were people. Natasha thought about the fairness of that and how fairness didn’t even matter when it came to her brother. Humans are capricious and hypocritical that way – always demanding fairness and justice, but never really wanting it.
She wasn’t ignorant of this hypocrisy in herself, so she just hauled bodies all day.
Mike, she thought. Mikail Brekhunov. Talk about unfairness. Mike was another thing altogether. Being a master manipulator, after only a few days in the camps, he’d already wormed his way into a position of power. Cozying up to authority, he’d gotten in with the guardsmen. He’d done it with a pack of cigarettes here, a pretty prisoner girl there. Perhaps someone needed a payback murder or a targeted beating—Mike knew how to get those things done if the right person needed it. His years of practice covering his tracks benefited him greatly now, as he found ways to work his agenda without ever letting anyone know his true intentions. Now, he very nearly ran the place. He was the official spokesperson for the prisoners, even though not a single prisoner trusted him. He’d found that he could do without trust recently. He preferred rather that the people fear him. If the prisoners feared him, he cared not whether they trusted him.
Wait, that word isn’t to be used. It is not ‘prisoners.’
Natasha laughed to herself as she thought of it. They’d been told over and over again that no one here was a ‘prisoner.’ Mike was the official spokesperson for the refugees. Or the settlers. Those terms were officially acceptable. In any case, Mike Baker (that was Mikail’s name… for now. Names become fluid when the world melts down.) was the man in charge.
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