Michael Bunker - WICK

Before long, and with some water and attention, Elsie was able to give her name and ask where she was. Slowly, she began to piece together her new reality. Peter noticed right away that this lady was made of stern stuff.

Elsie knew that her husband was dead. She’d seen as much before she lost consciousness. Even though she’d been struck in the head with a rifle butt at the onset of the attack, she didn’t lose consciousness immediately, she told them. Her husband, before being shot to death, and in the midst of the confusion from the raid, was able to hide his injured wife in their tent. She was peeking through the tent flap with her hand over her own mouth to stifle her cries and her overwhelming need to scream, and she’d started to lose consciousness when she saw one of the men shoot her husband in the head. That’s when she passed out. Now, here she was awake, only to find out that her nightmare was very real.

As she told her story, Natasha sat down beside the woman and placed an arm around her waist. She could tell that Elsie wasn’t sure what the intentions of these three people were, and she wanted the woman to know that she was in good company now. With the telling of her story done, through sobs and tears, Elsie collapsed into Natasha’s arms and the men fell silent with nothing to say that might even begin to help.

Peter and Lang had their guns at the ready, torn between allowing this woman space to grieve for a short moment, and the need to get moving before more trouble came through the woods or up the greenbelt.

Elsie’s sobs faded, and now she seemed to draw strength from somewhere unknown. She placed hands on her knees and tried to push herself up, falling woozily back into Natasha’s arms as Peter reached out to lend a hand.

“We have to bury my husband.”

Lang and Peter exhaled in unison, and Peter’s jaw tightened as he drew in another breath. He consciously scanned the horizon in every direction for the trouble that he knew was surely coming. The two men stepped to the side to confer, leaving Natasha to comfort Elsie.

Peter and Lang stared into one another’s eyes for a moment, recognizing the difficulty of the situation. Neither man said a word for one, two, three seconds… then Lang’s eyes softened. He shrugged and nodded, and Peter’s jaw tightened again, but this time the older man closed his eyes and nodded his head in agreement.

“Ma’am,” Peter said as gently as he could manage, kneeling down in front of her so his voice would be soft and low. “I am sorry about your husband. I know that doesn’t help you, hearing me say that, but it’s the truth. The three of us have lost more friends in the past couple of days than you can possibly imagine. None of us is immune to loss… but,” he paused and searched for the best words to say what he had to say, “there are some things… I need…” He paused again and took a deep breath.

“Ma’am, we’re in the middle of cataclysmic meltdown. The whole country and, really, the whole world as far as we know — it’s never going to be the same. I can’t explain entirely, but let’s just say that I have an uncle, he was a friend to all of us. His name was Lev. He was… well… let’s say that he was a highly-placed official. He wasn’t really, but that’ll help you believe what I have to say. Lev told us that there are probably going to be 300 million people dead or dying in the next year, and… well… frankly…” he hesitated for a moment, looking at her to see if she was willing to believe him, “…we can’t bury 300 million people.

“All of them are real people, and they all have loved ones, but we just can’t do it. Nobody can.”

Elsie looked into Peter’s eyes without anger or hatred or even confusion. He saw that she believed him, even with his roundabout way of telling her the truth. But then something else flashed in her eyes.

“I’m not asking you to bury 300 million people,” she said. “I’m merely asking you to bury my husband.”

The attempted burial was difficult to an extreme. The hard ground, frozen solid in the north in winter, meant that in the old days, bodies were simply placed in a back, unheated room to wait for spring. Burials happened after the thaw when the ground softened and shovels could break it more easily. However, you try telling that to a woman who just saw her husband murdered before her eyes. Tell her that you can’t bury the body because the ground is frozen.

Peter looked into her eyes and determined that she was an intelligent woman, and reason would return to her in good time. Nevertheless, for right now, Elsie needed a token that would let her turn her back on her dead husband and walk toward the rest of her life. She needed to have closure, and so Peter needed to find some way to bury the man that would give her that token… but it needed to happen quickly, and they had nothing even approximating the proper tools.

Peter had a mini camp shovel in his pack, and Lang had the knife and a stick. They quickly located and dragged Elsie’s husband into the woods. She’d pointed out the area where he had gone down and described what he was wearing, and they had rushed quickly out into the clearing to retrieve him; so quickly in fact, that they had pulled off his shoes while they were dragging him.

Glenn was his name. Peter seemed to be intent on noting that as they collected his body. Lang just noted aloud that he was tired of digging graves.

They set themselves to digging. They couldn’t go very deep. To do so would just be impossible with the tools at hand. They scratched down a few inches under the snow, and when they could go no further, when all of their efforts resulted in nothing at all, they dragged Glenn’s body into the indentation and searched around for twenty minutes to find enough rocks so that they could pile them on the body. They ended up with an above ground burial. The rocks would serve—as much as possible—to keep the animals away from the corpse. Elsie would just have to understand, because, well, it was winter and the ground was now frozen. They had no tools. What else can you say?

They gathered around the grave with Elsie, and no one said anything. What do you say in such moments, standing at a stranger’s grave with a woman you don’t know who has just lost her husband? Peter thought of his wife and children. Lang thought of his town and felt the pain shooting through his arm. Natasha thought about her brother.

After a few minutes, Elsie just nodded and walked away. Peter and Lang once again caught one another’s eyes as they turned their backs on Glenn and the specter of needless, wanton death. Natasha lingered for just a moment and looked into the night’s sky. She saw in a patch of blue-black darkness a line of geese flying overhead through the stillness. She would have sworn that the geese’s Ya-honk was an accusation, but for the life of her, at that moment, she could not have explained just why.

They picked up their trek to the southwest, and Natasha walked along near Elsie, asking her questions as they passed through the snow. Elsie stayed behind Natasha, and the men were on each flank, stationed ten yards to each side of the women. When the way narrowed, Peter would go first, Lang would bring up the rear, and they had learned to be more diligent and aware, as they were a larger group now and it was more likely that someone might spot them from a distance. Twice they properly spied out other travelers and were able to hunker down and wait in cover until the walkers passed by. On one of those occasions, five men carrying guns walked through in single file and at close ranks, oblivious to their surroundings, within yards of our four travelers who silently hid in the brush—Peter and Lang with their own guns at the ready.