“As long as we remember them as people,” Ted said. “I used to live down in Saco, before all this happened. I moved up here because I couldn’t stand to be around all those eyeless people. Everywhere I’d go, I’d see someone and it wouldn’t register who they were. It’s hard to recognize someone when their eyes are blown out, running down their face.” Ted lowered his head and sat down on the edge of a chair while he rubbed his temples. “I wished I could give them all a decent burial, pay my respects, but what could I do?”
Romie rolled her eyes and shifted forward. Lisa put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from interrupting Ted’s confession.
“I got a backhoe running and figured out how to dig up our plot for my Marie, but then I just left the rest of them,” Ted said.
Pete crouched down next to Ted—“If Robby’s plan works, then we’ll be paying them the ultimate respect, because they’ll be the ones who save everything.”
“I suppose,” Ted said.
“And even if it seems a little undignified to be piled up, you’ve got to remember—respect comes from the intentions. It comes from our intentions,” Pete said. He rose to his feet and found a particular spot on the map. “I can start lining up the seven Bombardiers right here, on this bridge. It’s right on the edge where the snow starts to get deep, so we should be able to drive pickups with the bodies right up to them.”
“Shouldn’t we use something bigger than pickups?” Brad asked. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.”
“We’ll need to use maneuverable vehicles to collect the bodies,” Robby said. “So I think big pickups or moving vans are probably the way to go.”
“I can’t lift a body,” Romie said. “At least not a big one. Maybe a dead kid or something.”
Lisa gave Romie’s arm a light smack.
“What?" Romie asked.
“We’ll go in pairs,” Brad said. “One strong person per pair.”
“I know a place where I’ve seen a few big trucks,” Sheila said. “I’ll get them over to the garage so we can start first thing in the morning. Ted? You want to come with?”
Ted was still looking down at the floor, not making eye contact. “Sure,” he said. He rose and headed for the door. Sheila waved to everyone and followed him out.
“You have the list from last night, or did it burn up?” Pete asked Robby.
“Burned up,” Robby said, “but I can remember it.”
“Good,” Pete said. “I’ve got some stuff to add to it.”
“You guys want spaghetti for dinner?” Lisa asked.
“Sure,” Brad said. Pete and Robby agreed also.
“Good,” she said. “Romie and I will make dinner.”
“How did I get conscripted?" Romie asked. “I hate making pasta.”
“Just come on,” Lisa said. She took Romie’s hand and led her to the door. “We’ll be back.”
BY THE SECOND day, Brad and Romie achieved a decent working arrangement. Despite her objections to lifting, Brad found that Romie could easily shoulder her share of the burden. For the first day, they cruised the streets, stopping at derelict cars and pulling out the drivers. Most were easy to extract—their slumped bodies were stiff from the cold and Brad slid them out to the street with one hand. Then, he took the shoulders and Romie the feet. Together they transported each body over to the moving van and loaded the person into the back.
For the heaviest bodies, they sometimes stopped to rest. For anyone even moderately fat, they used the van’s lift-gate to elevate the person to the van’s height.
Brad found he liked Romie a lot more when she wasn’t talking. She looked to be a few years older than Brad, and carried a sour expression on her face matching the band of extra weight she carried around her midsection. While they drove, he wished they had a way to play music in the moving van, so she wouldn’t feel the need to fill the silence with her angry commentary about everything that crossed her mind. Only when they were carrying a body, did Brad actually welcome her diatribes as a distraction from the horror of the dead.
It didn’t matter how many corpses he saw, something about the dead appalled Brad’s eyes. He couldn’t see them as chunks of meat, as Romie professed. He couldn’t see them as former friends and neighbors, as Ted described. To Brad, the corpses looked like broken puppets; like marionettes with the strings cut. He kept imagining them fluttering their eyelids over empty sockets, or working their jaws up and down in hitches and jerks. Each time he touched a corpse, he expected their hand to reach over and grab his arm.
Only Romie’s constant talking kept Brad rooted to reality.
“You think the birds would be back at least,” she said as they hauled a middle-aged guy out from a convenience store.
“Back?” Brad asked. Since they carried a corpse, this was one of the times he wanted her to talk. He gripped the guy under the armpits, and the man’s head flopped back and kept hitting Brad in the knees.
“Yeah,” Romie said. “I mean after a fire, or a flood, or something, you always see birds on the scene right away. It’s been months and there isn’t a bird around. Where are they? Did that thing really kill all the birds in the whole goddamn world?”
“Maybe the birds are afraid of something?” Brad asked. “Or maybe the food is better somewhere else?”
“It’s like Noah’s Ark, you know?” she asked.
Brad did not know what she meant, but he kept his mouth shut figuring she would continue. He was right.
“They gathered up all the animals two-by-two,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of that horse shit, but it might just be a story they put around something half-remembered. What if almost everything disappeared, like now, and they just made up the story about the flood and Noah’s Ark to explain it all away.”
“The genetic record would reflect it,” Brad said. “DNA would be less diverse.”
“Oh, so we’re taking as gospel the word of a whole lot of scientists not smart enough to survive the apocalypse? We’re the ones who got through it. Doesn’t our survival give our opinions just a tad more weight?” she asked. She didn’t wait for a reply. “So I think the kid is right. This thing he’s talking about has tried to take the Earth before. The birds ain’t coming back, because they’re all dead. Maybe there’s a couple around, like us.”
“Or like Luke’s horse?” Brad asked.
“If you ask me, I wish Luke hadn’t made the cut,” she said. “He strikes me as a jackass.”
When they got to the back of the moving van, they didn’t bother to engage the lift-gate; the guy was too small to bother. They moved into their positions and swung the man like a hammock: one, two, three times. On the third, they both let go and his stiff body skidded quickly to a stop in the bed of the van. Brad jumped up to drag the corpse towards the front of the vehicle with the other bodies. When they had a few more up there, Romie would clamber up to help him stack.
“So everything is dead, right?” she asked, but didn’t really ask. “At least everything that used to move around is. Seems to have left all the plants. I wonder if there are any fish left. But how long are the plants going to last if there aren’t any animals around? I mean, maybe the plants don’t really care about animals, but the bugs, they must need the bugs to pollinate all the flowers. That’s how they reproduce, right? So maybe we make it until summer, then the grocery stores start to run out of food, and then we’re done.”
“There aren’t very many of us,” Brad said. “I don’t think the grocery stores are going to run out of canned goods.”
“Yeah, but we can only get to so many of them,” Romie said. “There’s too much snow up north, and worse things down south.”