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“Bury them!”
“Incinerate them!”
“Throw them out for the wolves!”
Marcus Kane stood up and banged on the metal table with his gavel. Once everyone in the room had returned to their seats, he said, “We’ve returned to the earth. It’s the least we can do for them.”
“No,” a man Bellamy didn’t recognize stood as well. “With all due respect, General, it’s more than we can do for them. By they time we get back, they’ll have been rotting up there for a day and half already. Unless we can bury them deep enough, scavenger animals will just dig them up again.”
Bellamy didn’t stand up. But he was sitting at the front table so he didn’t have too. He pitched his voice low and deep, filling the room but speaking softly, knowing this was a voice that people responded to. Listened to. Were persuaded by. He said, “They dumped grounders out with their trash. Dumped ours out with the trash. Whether or not they were completely dead. Left them to feed the reapers and the rats.”
Kane looked at him, an appalled expression on his face. “They did what?”
Bellamy raised his eyes to look directly at Kane. “You heard me.”
“We burn them.” Chancellor Griffin’s expression was grim. “It’s all we have time for.”
Kane looked around the room. “Any objections?”
He was met by a sea of cold eyes and set jaws.
“Okay then. Everyone has their instructions and their maps. Team leaders? Let’s go.”
Bellamy had never expected to go back to the mountain at all. He’d certainly never expected to be standing again in the middle of the Mountain Men’s luxuriously appointed dining hall, directing the removal of scores of bodies gone soft and swollen, bowels tearing open, bones ripping through fragile skin if they were lifted too quickly.
He’d thought the children would be the hardest. He was wrong. They could be lifted easily into their funeral sheets, and it was no hardship to treat them with gentle hands.
It was the elderly. Their skin already thin with age and genetic weakness, their bodies dissolved to squishy puddles that required dustpans and shovels, then sand and sawdust to absorb the stinking goo left behind.
He lifted and swept, the work all-too familiar. The irony so rich it gagged him as it slid down the back of his throat. His twelve months as a janitor were turning out to be the most practical experience he’d drawn on since he hit the ground. Bellamy Blake. Captain of the Broom Squad. Hero of the disinfectants. He kept breaking out into entirely inappropriate fits of more than faintly hysterical giggles.
The teams working with him looked at him with tender and sympathetic glances, finding excuses to pat his arm or squeeze his shoulder whenever they passed him. Some stupid ass advice passed on by medical for dealing with battle shock, no doubt.
When the room was nearly cleared of the rotting dead and the spoiled, uneaten food from their last meal, Octavia appeared in the grand doorway. She’d washed the paint off her face, but her fierce braids were tighter than ever. “Bell,” she called. “You’re scaring everyone. Turn the job over to your second and get your ass outside. Now.”
Outside wasn’t better, he thought. It wasn’t any better at all.
Kyle Wick and a few Mecha-heads had found the tool rooms, broken out chain saws, wood chippers and some kind of enclosed-cab, mower thing he kept calling a Brush Master Beast. Then he’d laugh and pat it affectionately while making heart eyes at Raven Reyes, who had her hands wrapped firmly around the controls. And yes, Bellamy thought to himself, he did mean that in all possible permutations of entendres.
It was loud outside. So, so loud. Chain saws roaring and screeching as they dropped tree after tree. Trees falling with sharp cracks, sudden whooshes as their leafy crowns sliced the air, and then reverberating thuds as they hit the ground. The Brush Master Beast growled and whirred as it ate up the ground cover, leaving disgorged chop in it’s wake.
And it smelled. Blue puffs of exhaust, burnt and acrid. Intensely green, spicy and fresh, trees in their death throes. The wet ground, churned and sliced, giving up musty dirt and roots and growing things.
Tree by tree, ring by ring they were clearing out a wider and wider space on the plateau in front of the main gate to Mt. Weather.
Others had brought out shovels and axes and dug and sliced a deep, lopsided oval in the middle of the open space and then filled that with branches and bushes, deadfall that teams of kids were dragging in. They’d tossed the bodies into the pile as they came up. One after another, dozens, then scores, then someone yelled, “Stop! Wait until it’s burning to toss in the rest.”
They pilled them up. So much fuel.
At last, as the purple dusk was turning to full dark, Kane stood up on a rough platform, quickly nailed together from logs and thick branches, and whistled for quiet.
“It’s time. If you’d like to stay, please do. If you’d rather not, I understand.”
The forty-six stayed. So did their parents. Those few who were still alive. So did most of the crews who’d worked to clean out the fortress.
So did Bellamy. He stood with Lincoln and Octavia as several of the delinquents stepped forward to help drench the pile of bodies and brush with gasoline. Others passed around makeshift scarves, pulling fabric from bags until everyone held one in their hands.
Abby Griffin limped forward and tossed a small burning brand onto the top of the pile, followed by two guards who lit the pile more systematically, from below.
The gasoline didn’t catch right at first. The only sound was the faint crackling as the fire snaked up the smallest branches, curling the tiniest leaves. Then, with a sudden “whump,” the blaze sucking the air in so fast sound had to race to catch up, the pile burst into flame, a burning crown dancing along the top of the heap, consuming the streaks of gas.
It took a surprisingly long time, Bellamy thought, for the fire to truly catch. But once it did, it roared. Which wasn’t a metaphor, he discovered. It had a sound. And that sound was a gusting wind as the air around them reacted to the heat, feeding the fire, carrying sparks and half burned bits high above them on its own thermal coils.
Great walls of white flame burned now at the base, shading to yellow and orange and red as the tendrils licked at the star-filled night.
It stank. Burning wood smelled clean and hot. Burning bodies did not. Neither did burning gas.
It burned so hot that tossing the rest of the bodies in was something they had to do in turns, stripped down to their shirtsleeves as they ran in pairs to fling on the next. Other teams, armed with two meter long rebar in their hands, poked and stirred, making sure everything burned into bits.
They kept the fire burning hot all night long, adding wood and gas along with the bodies, until all the bones had cracked and fallen into the coals and turned red, then purple and finally black.
Finally, some time just before dawn, dry eyed, exhausted, covered in fine black soot, those who’d lasted the night agreed it was done. They let the fire burn out.
Volunteers arrived with barrels and hand pumps in the pre dawn light, soaking the ashes until the steam finally stopped.
“Bell. Bellamy.” Octavia shook his shoulder. “It’s done. Come inside and rest.”
“Can’t,” he croaked. He gestured impatiently for the water bottle in her hands. He drank half of it, then poured the rest over his face and hands, his skin tight and dry from the heat of the fire. “We have to be ready.”
“You really think they’ll come today?”
Bellamy looked at Lincoln. “What do you think?”
“I think Kane lit a beacon. They’ll come today.”
“Then at least take a shower, Bell. And eat something. You look like hell.”
“What should I look like?”
“Like a victor,” Lincoln said.
Bellamy had no idea if he looked like a victor or not, but he felt a hell a lot better. Unlimited hot water, courtesy of the Mountain’s geothermal heat pumps, and a bowl of some sort of lentil-y stew and he was, if not a new man, a much more presentable one.
When he and Lincoln stepped outside again there was no sign of the burn pit. It had already been filled, tamped down, rolled smooth and covered with wood chips.
Next to it they’d set up a big tent pavilion. It was really amazing – or maybe not, they’d meant to survive Armageddon after all – just how much crap the Mountain Men had stashed away. All tagged, cataloged and stored in well-organized stock rooms.
Kane was already there, and Abby Griffin, and a handful of other senior leaders he barely knew.
They were looking down at a pair of small computers.
“When did they cross the perimeter?” Bellamy asked.
“Two hours ago,” Kane answered.
“Huh. They must have been on their way before we even lit the bonfire.”
“Yes.”
“We got here just in time.”
“The animals aren’t the only scavengers in this world.” Griffin remarked.
“How long do we have?” Bellamy asked.
Kane looked at Lincoln.
“Two hours. Maybe less.” Lincoln answered the question in the General’s eyes.
“Okay. Hold on to your hats,” the chancellor said. “Phase two begins.”