Chapter 26: Cleaning Up
It was the next afternoon. Almost every soldier involved in the combat had dispersed once everything finished and found a place to sleep until late morning. A few had remained on watch to ensure that no stragglers caused any trouble. As fortune would have it, they either eliminated every one of them, or the few remaining enemy soldiers had also decided to bunk down. Either way, it was a quiet remainder to the night, and most of the men slept as though they hadn't for months. Rick snoozed with content, a grim smile on his face all night.
They were now working on clean-up. After the detonation, it was easy enough to finish off the remaining, disoriented soldiers, not that there were many left that weren't inches from death already. No one really wanted to go inside of the mess left behind. Even a few of the seemingly unflappable Russian soldiers came running out of Purgatory pale or various shades of green, trying in vain to not vomit. It didn't surprise Rick; he felt a little ill when he first saw it.
The Claymore mines propelled seven hundred small, round steel balls each at a speed of near four thousand feet per second. Eight of these were daisy-chained together and placed on the walls of Purgatory. When they went off, they filled the chamber room with lethal shrapnel. No one inside the crisscrossing kill zone escaped without lethal wounds, and any severely maimed survivors "lucky" enough to avoid being completely shredded by the blast were put out of their considerable misery.
Rudimentary contact had been continued throughout this time with the authority up above to simulate that all was well and that the campaign was running smoothly. Rick didn't expect the ruse to last forever, but at least it would buy them some time.
Sergei and Isaac went with Victor, who they and most others still thought to be the infamous Elijah, on a search for the locations of the remaining people in Old Haven. They wanted to use the news of their alliance and military success to recruit everyone else to the cause. Victor had already mentioned the next goal of taking the fight to the surface, and both Sergei and Isaac agreed to it.
Everyone else, with the exception of the weary prisoners and a few people to supervise their campaign of misinformation, was stuck taking shifts in cleanup detail. There were many hundreds of bodies in various locations to contend with as well as a horrid mess of gore in Purgatory. They took volunteers for that location because not everyone could stomach it. Although they tended to group together by faction, there was a shaky camaraderie already cultivating among the former enemies, and various groups scattered around to bury the dead. Everyone who lived in Old Haven understood the need to clean up in such a fashion. Otherwise, they'd invite more filth and decay and with it sickness and disease.
Rick was one of the few who stayed at Purgatory. When asked why he didn't just delegate it down, he replied, "I made the mess. I should help clean it up." Most people thought he was crazy.
The process, at least at Purgatory, was slow in going because of the presence of a great deal of blood and scattered bits of human tissue. They worked on cleaning everything as well as they could, but the floors, walls, and furniture would feature reddish-brown stains forever.
Some went out to the open park area behind Purgatory to dig a large hole to put the bodies and parts in. It was long, bloody labor, but most of them didn't seem to mind. For once, the people in down below didn't feel hunted: not by opposing factions, not by the Citizens. They knew it wouldn't last, so they enjoyed it while they could, even if it meant dealing with corpses.
Uprising Page 49
