Ken and I volunteered our backs and Ken’s digging equipment for the excavation, and so the next couple of weeks were filled with a hectic, morbid activity. Amber only made it home sporadically, as the hospital was unbelievably overburdened, and she was often simply too exhausted at the end of the day to make the drive home. After the fifth day, on her second trip home since she had left, she said there were rumors circulating that they would soon have to implement a triage program and offer a euthanasia alternative to those victims with little or no hope for recovery. Two days later, the rumors proved to be true. The death toll had risen to more than nine hundred fifty and showed no signs of slowing down.
Burial detail was a gruesome but necessary duty if we wanted to minimize the spread of disease. Everyone knew it. Everyone hated it. Everyone did it.
We worked in staggered teams of ten, one day on burial duty, two days on search detail, two days on pickup duty, and two days off. Standard operating procedure for search detail was to knock on the door and hope someone would answer. If someone were home, we would introduce ourselves, explain what we were doing and why, and ask if they had any pertinent information on any of their neighbors. Then, we would mark their mailbox with a white X.
If no one answered, we would have to break into the house and search it, hoping it would be empty. If empty, the mailbox got a green X. If we found a body, a red X went on the mailbox and the door, and we made note of the address.
The following day’s pickup detail would take the “red list” of addresses, don their gas masks, and pick up the bodies. When finished, they would mark over the red Xs with yellow circles. The circles indicated the house was empty, but still a potential health hazard. Then they would deliver those bodies, along with any picked up from the hospital, to the current burial site. It was a hell of a way to meet people, but I found myself gaining many close friends as we worked side-by-side loading and unloading our gruesome cargoes.
This went on for two more weeks. Finally, all of the homes in the area had been searched and cleared, and the number of fallout deaths tapered off at the hospital. The total death count for the first month after D-day tallied two thousand, nine hundred eighty-nine, nearly a third of the town’s population.
There would have an even greater number of deaths had it not been for a swift education campaign mounted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As soon as the first explosions occurred, giant flashbulb brilliance in that clear June morning sky, the Rejas Mormon Church had begun passing out flyers describing the effects of nuclear weapons and their aftermath. People were told what to expect for those next few weeks and warned to stay indoors and seal up their windows and doors as airtight as possible. The flyers described various methods for sealing the home against fallout, inspecting, cleaning, and preserving foods, symptoms of radiation sickness, and other items of interest for the times ahead.
The ward bishop personally went to the mayor to volunteer the services of his entire congregation. It was unfortunate that more people hadn’t paid attention to him. Many, if not most, of the deaths might possibly have been avoided.
The mayor himself was one of those deaths, though whether or not his could have been avoided was debatable. He had been seventy-nine years old and in poor health to begin with. The combination of age, radiation, and the strain of the current situation proved to be too much for him, and we laid him to rest in the last of the communal graves on August seventh. On August eighth, the search teams reported that the last of the homes in the area had been searched and marked, and the ninth marked the end of the flood of deaths from the hospital.
We closed the last of those huge graves on August tenth amidst a confusing blend of emotions. Sorrow and grief for the dead mixed with relief, anxiety, and hope for the living. The townsfolk seemed drawn to the gravesite, coming in a steady stream to pay their last respects. When we finally finished covering that final, massive interment, an impromptu crowd of hundreds of mourners gathered. As Ken shut down the last dozer, the still, unnatural silence was deafening. No motors, no voices murmuring, no traffic noise in the background or power lines humming-only the sound of the wind through the trees broke the quiescence of the moment.
Then someone began to sing.
It was a hymn, of course. Anguished and mournful, and yet expressing a hope and a faith so poignant and beautiful as to be painful. Tears formed in my eyes as I looked around, searching for the source of that fine baritone. I was an avowed agnostic and had been for years, but at that moment, I envied that soul his faith in what was to come. I looked at the sea of faces gathered there at the burial mound as more and more people joined in until it seemed the very sound of their voices could wash the pain and fear from my soul. I wept openly, as did most of the others present.
I don’t know how long I stayed there listening as they sang hymn after hymn. Individuals came and went, but the crowd itself had become a living entity possessed of an angelic voice that would not be silenced for many hours.
INTERLUDE
During the next several weeks, the town of Rejas went through many changes. Weather patterns settled down, so we weren’t constantly worried about hot winds or rain. We no longer sunburned as easily, either. The ozone layer had evidently begun to replenish itself.
We discussed the subject around the barbeque grill on several occasions. Having no television or radio meant that we usually spent much of each night in deep discussion of recent events and, since the stove no longer worked, the grill out back had become our regular gathering place in the evenings. The general consensus was that it had probably been a pretty simple process for Mother Nature to manufacture the O3 once she no longer had to compete with industrial pollutants. Of course, none of us really knew for sure. It was yet another thing we would probably never know.
Of Rejas’s seventeen Ham radio operators, all but two had lost their radios to EMP. Those huge antennae had collected much more than they were designed for, passing the pulse on to the delicate circuits of the radios. The two surviving radios had been disconnected and disassembled for repairs on D-day. They were connected to a couple of generators that had survived, and so far, they could talk to one another, but hadn’t picked up any outside transmissions. The operators said they couldn’t tell if that was because there simply wasn’t anyone left with a transmitter, or if there was some kind of atmospheric interference left over from D-day that prevented it.
Chief Kelland relaxed the roadblocks around the town to allow “qualified” refugees to settle into some of the newly emptied homes, and the survivors in many of the smaller surrounding towns trickled in to take advantage. Small towns soon became ghost towns, and scouts reported more and more of the neighboring municipalities were nothing more than empty buildings. Some of the inhabitants joined us in Rejas, and some moved elsewhere to try and find friends or family in other parts of the country. But no one seemed to want to stay in a small town anymore.
Those who came to Rejas were allowed one day to fill out the good old “Assimilation Form” and three days to settle in. Five days after they passed through the roadblock, they were to report to the community labor pool, located in the parking lot across from City Hall. Failure to comply resulted in Kelland and his “boys” visiting the offending party. If they had no reasonable excuse, they were unceremoniously railroaded out of town. Rejas had no time for freeloaders.
Assuming they did follow the rules given when they passed the roadblocks, then during their settling-in period, their forms were examined to see if they had any critically needed skills or supplies. If they did, they or their supplies were sent where needed. It was considered the price of admission.
If they had no skills or supplies, they paid for their new homes with menial labor until someone in a more skilled field needed a trainee. Not many wanted to spend the rest of their days as a grunt, so trainee positions were highly sought after. Commerce was all done in barter, and if you didn’t have goods to trade, you had to have a needed skill.
Trainees were selected primarily by prior experience, and secondly by the amount of time they had served in the labor pool. But exceptions were made if necessary. For instance, to help construct and run a forge, I needed
