The Weight of the Dead (2 page)

He was headed for the tree line, every step as ponderous as if he carried on his shoulders not just the weight of a dead man, but the weight of a dead world.

She watched him go by, as slow a passage as the midday sun across the sky, until he was headed away from her again, and all she could see was Tom Harkin's livid back and slack limbs. Once they got far enough away, weaving between the first spindly trees of the woods, it seemed as if the dead man was floating, and she supposed that was true enough, because now he was a ghost that would probably haunt her father to his grave.

*   *   *

Over the past two days, she'd learned all there was to know about the punishment known as the Rot, starting just after the men had showed up to detain her father for braining Tom Harkin. She'd feared what was coming even before the village council had rendered the judgment official.

The way her grandfather remembered, it had begun in the years after the Day the Sun Roared, and the World Ago shut down. Nothing ran anymore, he said. Three generations later you could still see the wooden crosses along the roads, at least the ones that hadn't fallen down, many of them now green with plants that liked to climb, and some of them still dangling thick cables, like dead snakes. “Power lines,” he called them, and they'd fed just about everything.

Except one day they stopped working. Everything that ran on them stopped working too. Even everything that didn't feed off the lines but ran the same way, like the cars, all that stopped working too. “Fried,” they called it. Everything had fried. All because the sun had had an angry day.

“Back then,” her grandfather explained, “everything came from someplace else. Then all of a sudden there was no moving anything anywhere, if you couldn't move it on foot or by bicycle or with a horse.”

Melody had always had trouble imagining a world where there was that much to move, and how far it all had to go, at least until she'd seen pictures in books, but it was apparently a big deal. The way her grandfather told it, people used to go to war over big things, with big armies, and you always knew who was who, because the people who had to be killed were always far away, some godless people way over there, but now it was everybody going to war against everybody else, in a fight over what was left because there was no more coming.

They died in numbers so big she couldn't imagine why you'd ever need to count that high. They died in such quantities that people got so sick of killing they'd do almost anything not to have to, except when they had no choice, or when they forgot.

Most, anyway. There were always the ones who still didn't mind the deed, and never would.

And when it happened, however it happened, it was a problem. You couldn't just let a murder go, because if there was no paying for it, that was like saying go ahead, do it again, we won't stop you.

But coming right out and killing the killer? Nobody had the stomach for it, to be the one to wield the gun or knife or noose. It wasn't like killing a deer, or putting down a crippled horse. Nobody was going to eat a murderer. It hadn't come to that.

But there were no jails, either, not when people lived as nomads, survivors who'd gathered into tribes and kept on the move to scavenge what they could before moving along. They hadn't learned to settle again in those days; hadn't learned to stay in one place and grow and make what they needed and stop depending on people from way far away to send it.

Melody wondered who'd been the one to think up a punishment like the Rot. Who could've been that cruel, that wise? Someone had realized it didn't matter if nomads had no jails, not when the killer had made his own, a prison he could carry with him.

That first night, when she'd finally fallen asleep after they'd taken her father away and cuffed him to the Thieves Pole—all the punishment the village needed, since stealing was normally as bad as it ever got—she dreamed of what she'd just learned. She'd dropped him back in time into those early days, a dead body chained across his shoulders like a deer carcass carried from the woods as he trudged along after the tribe, downwind, up and down the rolling hills and over the fields and across the crumbled scabs of the old black roads, barely in sight of them, barely able to keep up, and forced to spend the night alone as he stared in longing at the distant fires of their camp, never quite able to sleep as he lay with the corpse and listened for the feral dogs and other predators who'd come to fight him for it, and he would gladly have let them have it, if only he could.

But that was then and this was now.

Now he'd stick to the woods, she supposed. No need to travel.

More time to just sit and think of all the ways things might have gone differently.

*   *   *

She was determined to visit him in the early days of it, as often as she could. Family was allowed, and somebody had to take food out anyway, although the guards at the gate would always search her first, to make sure she wasn't carrying any tools capable of cutting through leather and chains. Which stopped making sense to her almost as soon as it started. She wouldn't need to sneak a tool out
with
her, just toss it over the wall somewhere private and fetch it later.

Sometimes it seemed the men around here weren't half as smart as she was.

Still, if they were to find Tom Harkin cut free and rotting all by himself, they would know who'd helped, and she'd be even more of an outcast than her father was now, because the banishing would be permanent. She'd have no home here anymore, so the two of them would have to run off, and the world wasn't a safe place for a man alone with an almost fourteen-year-old daughter. He'd never allow it. Never condemn Jeremy to that kind of life either, or to never seeing his big sister again.

She would stop at the woods' edge, calling until he heard her, then called back so she could follow the sound of his voice.

She got used to it soon enough, the sight of Tom Harkin strapped to his back, pale here, purple there, blotchy everywhere else. His corpse wore dirty undershorts and nothing else, which somehow seemed more undignified than buck naked. Flies buzzed around the pair of red, crusty-dry, chewed-up-looking wounds on his skull. By her second visit, though, there seemed to be more of him than before, and his arms and legs seemed to jut where before they'd only dangled.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Because he's swelling up. It's the gasses inside him,” her father said. His hair was lank and greasy, and he kept pushing it behind his ears. “You've seen dead animals puffed up out here in the woods, you know it happens.”

“Oh,” she said. “I didn't think it happened to people too. That doesn't seem fair.”

“We're animals same as the rest.”

She looked him over, Tom Harkin like a giant, stretched-out waterskin grafted to her father's back. He still didn't smell so bad that she minded it, but then, it
was
October, which might have seemed like a blessing, the cool days and chilly nights helping to preserve the body. But everybody she'd talked to had concluded that this was just a subtler form of punishment. It made the ordeal last longer. Better, some thought, to have this happen at the height of summer, and get it over with quicker.

“Will he just fart it out?” she asked.

He looked her in the eye a moment, and immediately she knew, no, it wasn't that easy. Nothing about this was that easy. “You shouldn't hear about this.”

“I want to know.”

“I'm going to have to poke him soon. Through the side of the belly. I've just been trying to work up nerve to do it.”

“Poke him with what? Do you need me to sneak you a knife?”

“No, don't get yourself mixed up in my troubles any more than you already are.” He turned, a cumbersome move, and pointed deeper into the woods. “I found a tree that fell not long ago, trunk still green, all split apart. There's a long, jagged shank sticking out level with the ground, and I worked on it with a rock to sharpen it up more. That should do.”

She imagined him jogging sideways, building up enough speed to ram Tom Harkin sideways onto this skewer. He must have noticed the look on her face.

“If I don't, Tom's apt to swell up until he bursts on his own, and that'll be worse. It's the only way to ease off the pressure.”

She nodded, solemn. That's when the ugly part of all this would truly begin. That's when Tom Harkin would start turning inside out. That's when the Rot would really take hold.

“Somebody told me this didn't have to mean a death sentence. That there's been some people survive it,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“Daniel Hunsicker,” she said, then instantly wished she hadn't.

“You stay clear of him, promise me.” Her father looked like he could boil water just by staring at it. “Him and any of that trash he hangs out with. Anything he thinks he's got to say to you, you tell him to come out and find me and say it to this ugly head looking over my shoulder, and we'll see how it goes from there.”

“Daddy,”
she said sharply.

“Well, what are they going to do, tie another corpse on the front of me?”

“I promise, okay?
I promise.
Anyway, what he said, about it not having to be a death sentence, I didn't believe it at first. But then I got to talking to Miles McGee. You know how he is about books. He's worse than me, even.”

“As if such a thing was possible,” her father said, and sounded like his old warm self.

Miles McGee was a year older than she was, and most of his life had been the closest thing she had to a big brother, although now he was starting to look at her differently. Which she liked and didn't like, at the same time. Wanting things to stay the way they were, knowing nothing ever did.

“Miles has this book he says came from that sheriff building some of them explored a couple years ago. Not a book, exactly, but a manual? I guess they had to keep it handy after the Day the Sun Roared. It's about how to deal with a bunch of dead people after a disaster. It says you don't have to hurry up and bury everybody in a big grave, because dead bodies don't actually spread disease. People think they do, but they don't.”

It was the one thing that genuinely felt like betting their hopes on, and Melody watched her father's face to see how he reacted. If this news was as amazing as it sounded. For a while he just watched a beetle trundling across the forest floor, slow slow slow, like it wasn't going to get wherever it had to be before winter came on.

“This is different,” he finally said. “No matter how careful you try to move with something like this on you … these straps, they rub you raw. Right through the shirt, they rub you raw. It makes it easy for an infection to get started. Do you get what I'm saying?”

“I … I don't know.”

“It poisons the blood. Now do you understand?”

There was no good answer to this, so she just held herself tight.

“It means don't get your hopes up. It means every time you come out here, we've got to treat it like it's the last. Because there's probably going to come a day when you're going to stand at the edge of these woods and call for me and I'm not going to answer. Maybe it's because I can't. Or I don't want you to see what it's come to. Or it's because while I still could, I went too deep into the woods to hear you. You've got to be ready for that, do you understand?”

Under her sweater, she pinched the thin skin of her belly hard enough to leave a bruise, because it was easier to deal with that than trying to imagine such a day. It was easier to stop herself from crying over the one thing than it was the other.

He seemed at peace now, resigned to whatever might happen, and in these moments when it was quiet, she would listen and wonder what her father heard in the night. If anything. Maybe he was too old to hear it, or not yet old enough. Maybe she was too, even at not quite fourteen. But there were those who said the woods whispered, or something inside them did, something that only the very young or the very old seemed able to hear.

And maybe those closest to death.

“I'm going to help you,” she said. “Somehow, I will.”

“I heard that Linda Gallenkamp's dog is about to have pups,” he said. “Why don't you check with her about taking one off her hands?”

Was he not even paying attention? “I don't want one of Linda's pups. I want Patches back.”

“I know.”

“Just like I want you back. And if I can't have Patches, I'll settle for you.” She stopped and, in spite of everything, had to laugh, because so did he. “That didn't come out right.”

“Not much ever does,” he said, then seemed to wish he could take it back.

“I'm going to
help,
” she insisted again, and that settled it.

When it was time to go, she wasn't ready to give up the woods yet, because she wanted her own time to pause and listen. She took the long way home, keeping inside the trees deep enough that she couldn't see the back wall of the village, still plenty of leaves on the limbs in the way. They no longer blazed with the colors she loved best, though. All the reds and oranges and yellows were muted now, and dull. Even the woods felt like they were dying.

Might as well start wishing for spring, and green. It seemed the only good thing she could count on, if only it weren't so far away.

*   *   *

There were the in-between times, too. In between visits, between sleep, between chores, between distractions. That was when Miles McGee found her on the third day, which was just like him—more often than not, he knew right when to show up. He caught her after her turn cleaning out the poultry houses, when she was amenable to most anything that would stall her from going back to what she vowed would only be a temporary home. Which wasn't all that different from the coops, either, because her grandmother could cluck as bad as the hens.