“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.
Back on the march, they occasionally talked to one another, but only barely above a whisper, while their eyes still scanned the surroundings.
“We were married for 24 years,” Elsie told Natasha. “I can’t say it was perfect, but what marriage is? It was better than anyone else’s that we knew, for most of those years, anyway. I loved Glenn, and I know that he loved me and our children.” Her voice trailed off as she thought about her children. They walked on in silence a few steps, then she continued.
“Two girls and a boy… two women and a man now… they’ve all moved away. We were all raised to believe that children leaving and going out into the world is the way it’s supposed to be, you know? I don’t believe that anymore, but that’s the way it was and we didn’t know any better. Anyway, they went to college first, and then to distant jobs. The two girls are in New York City, and our boy, Glenn, Jr., he’s in Idaho. Boise, we think.” Natasha looked at her, as if to ask the question, and Elsie answered before she could. “We don’t get to talk to him much. He was different.”
“What do you mean ‘different’?” Natasha asked.
“He talked about all this… stuff,” Elsie said, indicating all around them with her hand. “You know, the stuff that’s going on right now. He was a survival nut. I guess you’d call him that. We called him that anyway. You know, in trying to reason with him. But he wouldn’t be reasoned with. He was always going on about something. Anti-government is what I thought, though he always denied it. He was always predicting the end of the world, even though he denied that too. I guess, thinking back on it now, I heard what I wanted to hear — anything that would allow me to reject the things he actually said. What he did say was that some bad things were going to happen, and that we should change our lifestyles and be more preparedness minded. I didn’t understand it all, but… well…” She let the implications of that hang in the air, still unwilling, entirely, to believe it.
“I’m sorry that you didn’t get along,” Natasha said.
“We just took everything he said as a rejection of us personally, as people, as parents, as Americans, whatever. When someone tells you that your way of living is unsustainable or foolish, it makes you mad as hell, you know? Not in a way that is measurable though, it’s more like a burning in you that really gets to you. It makes you want to lash out and defend yourself, your worldview… your… I don’t know how to say it. Anyway, I know now. I figured this out when I watched your men here bury Glenn. All that anger I felt was not at anything Glenn Jr. ever said. I was angry that what he said made my conscience burn.”
Elsie was quiet awhile, thinking as she walked along, and Natasha did not interrupt her thoughts.
“The things I said about my own son, the things I did behind his back, well, they were shameful. I wanted to have a relationship with him, but it was like having this accuser around, looking me in the eye all the time. Even when Junior wasn’t around, I felt him accusing me.”
Natasha walked, and listened. She reached her hand out to steady Elsie as she became aware that the older woman was breathing hard.
“I mean, he wouldn’t do it directly… not directly. He just said these things. And he believed them. I mean, he’d let other people take them or leave them, but he was so damned sure of himself. He never said, ‘you are a bad person’ or ‘you shouldn’t do this or that,’ or anything like that. But when he talked about the world and the problems in it, then I felt like he was talking about me. I took that personally, wouldn’t you? I felt it was a personal attack.