“They won’t get you, Shelly,” I told her. “I won’t let them.”
It was getting worse day by day.
Four months now. Four months and I was still in Youngstown, hoping, maybe, that humanity would regroup and that we’d be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But it wasn’t going to happen and what was spread out on the couch was testament to that.
I knew I should have gotten out.
I should have gotten both of us out of the city?maybe across the state line into PA, my sister in Newcastle? but I kept holding onto some crazy and utterly fucked-up idea that the end of the world was going to pass like a bout of the flu. Civilization had shit its pants and vomited its guts out, but it would pass. The fever would run its course.
That’s how deep in denial I was. For when those bombs fell…and baby, they came down like rice at a wedding…the world ripped the seat right out of its pants like a fat lady bending over and there was no seamstress that could hope to stitch it back up again.
And now Shelly was dead.
Dead.
She was pale as bleached stone, her body shriveled and ghastly in death. Outside, a fearsome gonging rolled through the neighborhood. The bell of St. Mark’s: Bong, bong, bong, bring out yer dead!
But I wasn’t about to.
Not Shelly. I’d never let them get her. I’d never let them burn her in one of those terrible pits with the others. The idea was just grotesque to the extreme and I could not allow it to happen. But I couldn’t sit with her day after day. Not only because it was seriously demented, but because eventually they would come for her. There had to be something I could do. Then I got the idea of burying her in secret. Such a thing was unlawful, it was banned. If people saw you they would report you and if the police and civil authorities caught you they would shoot you. But that only made it all that much more necessary.
I was going to bury my wife, have a little service over her grave.
That’s what I was going to do and I coldly planned on murdering any asshole that got in my way. So, that godawful church bell gonging in my ears, I got my shit together, smoothed out the rough spots, and got down to it. For the first time in weeks I smiled, taking a secret, warped joy in the fact that I would bury my wife illegally. It was my way of raising my middle finger to the state. Fuck them. Fuck authority. Fuck those that had created this nightmare in the first place. Those evil, fucked-up minds, all part of the same corrupt bureaucracy that had killed the world.
I took a white satin coverlet that Shelly had loved and wrapped her up in it, kissed her cold dead lips once last time and stitched it shut. Outside, the trucks were getting closer. I could hear them rumbling, see their flashing lights arcing in the dark sky. Out on the streets there were voices.
They were coming.
Bring out yer dead.
3
Following nuclear winter, there was one nasty epidemic after another. People were dying in droves and the traditional mortuaries simply could not deal with it.
So the church bells rang.
They rang throughout the day and night and it wasn’t because somebody was going to get married in the chapel of love. No, they rang because the corpse wagons were coming to collect the dead. Dumptrucks, flatbeds, it didn’t matter. If it had a hopper it was converted to a corpse-collector. And given that radio, TV, and the internet had broken down, the city fathers decided to go with the oldest form of communication in cities and villages: the church bell. Churches were spread across Youngstown and most neighborhoods had one or two so when the wagons were rolling, the bells rang.
All you had to do was throw your loved ones’ body out on the curb with your recycling and they’d grab it for you.
Civic action. Made a guy feel good.
Bong-bong-bong-BONG! The wagons are a rolling, brothers and sisters, so let’s forget about care and decency and respect and get completely fucking Medieval on your ass. Uncle Joe vomited his guts out in bloody coils last night? Mom has drowned in a sea of her own collected waste? Little Cathy burst open with black, pustulating sores? The little missus got the spores and ulcers ate her down to a flux of cool, white jelly? No problem, my friend. Wrap him or her or it in a tarp or put what’s left in a Hefty bag, box it, bag it, but please don’t tag it, and we’ll take care of the rest! Not quite dead but damn near? Cash ‘em in anyway, no sense infecting the entire neighborhood. And while we’re on the subject, you got some ugly dig-dogged looking boils on yer face, son, better jump up in the wagon before you start shitting out the red worms and pissing yellow slime and yer eyes fill with blood and explode out of yer head and stain the new sofa.
It was ugly.
It was degrading.
It was inhuman.
But it was also quite necessary, you see.
There were corpses everywhere in the city, rotting in the gutters and piled up on the sidewalks like garbage. There was radiation sickness, of course, from the clouds of fallout drifting west from New York and east from Chicago, but poor sanitation had led to rampant outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, and the plague. New forms of influenza and pneumonia were making the rounds as well as a mutant strain of hemorrhagic fever that was devastating what was left of certain eastern cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and, according to survivor rumor, eating its way through Akron.
In Youngstown the bodies were burned, but after awhile there were just so many that people started throwing them out into yards and dumping them on sidewalks. And all those rotting stiffs, well, they became disease vectors bringing in the rats and the flies which further spread the pestilence. The pathogens were in the water, blown on the air, and people continued to die.
It was insane.
It was hopeless.
And it had only just begun.
4
As I plotted the secret burial of my wife, there was a knock at the door.
I wasn’t going to answer it…but I knew if I didn’t, the men from the corpse wagons would kick it down, come thundering forth in their white decon suits and take Shelly away before I could sneak off with her.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me,” a voice whispered. “It’s Bill.”
Bill Hermes lived down the hall. He was okay. An old railroad man and widower, we’d had him over for dinner dozens of time. Shelly was always fussing over him, making him cookies and bars and all that. A nice old guy.
I sighed. “What do you want?”
“Rick…need to talk to you.”
I opened the door a crack. “What is it, Bill?”
He swallowed. “Rick, I’m here about Shelly. Nobody’s seen her in weeks. People are starting to talk.”
“Fuck ‘em.”
“Son…the wagons are coming.”
“I don’t have anything for ‘em.”
Bill wiped his teary eyes with a hankie. “Not saying you do. I’m hoping you don’t. But…but I overheard a
