I unzipped the guy’s coat and cut four huge strips of cloth from his shirt using the blade on my hook. I packed one strip of cloth into the wound on his thigh, then wrapped another around it, cinching it tight. That stopped the bleeding, at least. The wound on his side took longer to treat.
Darla had followed me down and started bandaging another victim. Dr. McCarthy brushed by me on his way to yet another patient.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Little busy right now,” he said without stopping.
I glanced at Belinda. “Why aren’t Sheriff Moyers’ men helping?”
She made a face like she had just bitten into a maggoty apple, but didn’t reply.
We worked for hours. My hand and hook dripped with other people’s blood; it caked my arms, legs, and chest. The air reeked of slaughter and terror. Darla and I looked like extras from a gory zombie movie. Our ghillie suits were ruined—they would blend in nowhere but a slaughterhouse. Some of the ambulatory victims were helping; otherwise we would never have finished. Still, many of the injured bled out before anyone could reach them.
I recognized one of the survivors: Reverend Evans, who had been the director of the Baptist relief workers, the yellow coats at the Galena, Illinois, FEMA camp. He had been leading a mostly ineffective effort to keep the kids at the FEMA camp fed. What was he doing here?
I stumbled through the bodies, looking for anyone still alive to treat, looking for more life amid the silent dead. Dr. McCarthy grabbed my arm. “Stop. We need to get the survivors into some kind of shelter before nightfall. They’re going to freeze to death.”
“Start taking them to the clinic?” I asked.
Dr. McCarthy’s face spasmed and turned fire-engine red. He looked like he’d swallowed a frog and was trying desperately to spit it back out. When he finally did speak, his words were clipped and angry. “That’s what Sheriff Moyers is here for. So the refugees can’t get into Warren. Mayor Petty won’t allow them into town.”
“Moyers and his men massacred these people, didn’t they?”
Dr. McCarthy was so angry he couldn’t speak. Instead, he gave a curt nod.
“Darla, I need you.”
She looked up from the patient she was talking to. “Alex, I don’t think—”
“You, you, and you.” I started pointing at random ambulatory people until I had seven of them picked out. “Follow Darla back to our homestead.” I turned back to Darla. “I need every blanket we’ve got plus two poles per blanket to make stretchers. Have everyone except Uncle Paul and the three youngest girls come back with you. Oh, and bring every oil lamp we’ve got. We’re not going to finish this before nightfall.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Darla whispered.
I shrugged. “No.”
“I could get back faster on my own. They’re going to be up to their hips in snow.”
“We need a trail around Warren anyway. Better to break it before we’re all carrying stretchers. And you’ll need the help to carry everything back here.”
“Okay.” She leaned in for a quick kiss. “Even though I don’t understand you. We were doing fine on our own.”
“It was never going to last. Get going.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Instead of saluting, she slapped my butt.
I organized the grisly work of sorting the dead, the dying, and those who might survive. I talked to Dr. McCarthy, Belinda, and the few dozen people left who could walk, explaining my plan. Then I started helping to move corpses.
I approached a young woman bent over an even younger man who lay in the road, clearly dead—half of his skull was missing. “May I move him?” I asked her as gently as I could.
She turned her tear-washed face up to me. “W-w-will you bury him? Properly? B-B-Brock was a Christian. He wanted me to get baptized. He’d want a funeral.”
Crap! I knew I had been forgetting something. “We’ll need pickaxes to dig the graves. We can bury them in the snow for now. We’ll come back when we can with the right tools and give them a proper burial, a real funeral. I promise.” I felt like an idiot. I wasn’t sure how we were going to
feed the living, let alone bury the dead. The solution to that problem was obvious—I know I wouldn’t mind if someone ate my corpse, but the thought of eating someone else’s made me more than a little queasy. I had been fighting with flensers off and on for almost two and a half years—I couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming one, even due to the direst necessity.
It was as if she could read my mind. “I don’t think Brock would mind if you had to eat him. You could bury his bones still, right?”
“I don’t think we’ll need to go that far. If we cover him in snow, we can come back and bury him later.” Or eat him, if things get bad enough, I thought but didn’t say.
The woman got up and helped me drag Brock across the snow berm. On the other side, the snow was softer, making it easier to bury the body. As we covered Brock’s corpse, I learned the woman’s name. “Francine, not Franny,” she said, which struck me as strange. Who worries about trivialities like nicknames during the aftermath of a massacre? She said it automatically, like it was a habit, a verbal tic that transcended the horror of the situation.
Without thinking about it, I asked her, “What happened?” Then I wished I could bite the words back out of the air. Surely she wouldn’t want to talk about it.
But I was wrong. She seemed to need to talk, and as we moved the next corpse, burying it in the snow beside Brock, she told me the whole story.
All the people in the road—dead and living—were from the Galena FEMA camp, where Darla and I had been held prisoner for eleven days, more than two years earlier. Three days ago the guards, who worked for a FEMA subcontractor named Black Lake, had disappeared—just torn down their tents, packed their vehicles so full they were nearly bursting, and left. Francine had heard a rumor that they had lost contact with the government on the East Coast. Some refugees said the guards had left to try to reestablish contact. Some said the guards were all moving to a huge hoard of wheat stored on barges on the Mississippi. I figured the second version was more likely to be true—at least I knew the part about the wheat barges was true. Darla and I had found the barges before we’d been captured by Black Lake, and later we’d told the guards about them when we were trapped in the Galena camp.
When the guards left, some of the refugees fled immediately—a group of them fastened a makeshift rope to the chain-link fence and ripped down a whole section of it. Other refugees stayed for a few days, but it quickly became clear that no more food would be forthcoming, and the guards hadn’t left any behind.
Three or four hundred refugees were already clustered on the road outside Warren when Francine had arrived. They were arguing with a row of guards Mayor Petty had sent to block the road. Some of the refugees only wanted to pass through Warren. Some of them wanted to stay. All of them needed food. A fight broke out, and then someone fired a shot, and within seconds the massacre had begun.
The shooting only lasted about twenty minutes, Francine thought. It ended when Dr. McCarthy and
Belinda charged through Sheriff Moyers’ line of riflemen and started bandaging wounds even as bullets continued to stab bloody exclamation points and periods into the lives around them.
Sheriff Moyers had called a cease-fire. Even he could see that shooting the town’s only doctor was a very bad idea.
Brock had been Francine’s fiance. They’d gotten engaged just before the volcano erupted, but they had been waiting to get married until they could find a Catholic priest to baptize Francine and officiate their wedding. Now they’d never be married.