Michael Bunker - WICK

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.

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.