Monster Planet(84)

When the kerosene lamps were turned on up in Nolan Park, in the old half of the Island, they looked natural, they looked normal. In the gingerbread houses a little flickering light was a welcome thing. Down on Tango Pier an open flame looked altogether different. It looked wrong in front of all those broken unpowered light bulbs. It was no surprise people rarely came down so far'the survivors tended to stay on the north side except to work in the fields or if they needed something from the general supplies down on Lima Pier. Even then they usually sent a slack to do the job.

Sarah was a little surprised then when she saw Marisol standing in front of the main warehouse. The Mayor had a shovel in her hand and a small bundle wrapped in white cloth over her shoulder. Sarah stopped in her tracks and didn't move, embarrassed for some reason to be caught in such a quiet place.

They just looked at each for a while, and it wasn't a particularly friendly look. Marisol, after all, had threatened Sarah with summary execution the last time they'd spoken. For her part Marisol's bundle was readily discernible, from closer up, to be a dead human body.

'Did you come to help me bury my son?' Marisol asked. Her voice was rough with crying but it lacked much in the way of emotion.

Sarah sought out her own voice. 'He didn't make it?' she asked.

'He wasn't magic, like you. Dekalb's daughter lives and my Jackie dies. We're just normal people, you see. He didn't have any magic.'

Sarah started to object, to say that she had no magic, but it wasn't true. Her father could have saved the boy. If he hadn't rushed to Manhattan to fix her broken arm, he could have stayed on Governors Island and saved the boy. If he'd even known that he had that power'if Sarah had told him, if she had broken her promise to Gary and told the secret'

There were too many ways to feel guilty, and too many possible excuses, for Sarah to make any moral sense out of the boy's death. She said nothing and hoped her silence would sound like solemnity.

The two of them entered the field of winter wheat and hacked out a narrow space for a grave. The Islanders always buried their dead in their fields, just as a practical measure'the bodies returned certain nutrients to the soil. If the corpses were sunk deep enough the health risks were minimal.

They didn't waste time getting started. Marisol dug and Sarah pulled and pushed and carried dirt out of the hole. It was horrible, draining, sweaty work and neither of them had brought any water or food. Sarah's sweatshirt turned into a stained rag almost instantly. The dirt got into her eyes, into her nose. It coated her lips and stuck to her hair. She didn't complain once.

At first she just thought she was being polite. That she was helping Marisol because she'd been asked to do so. She figured it was the right thing to do and she was a good person. She even considered that this would get her in good with Marisol, whose help she would probably need in the future'she was earning credit at the price of her own sweat. After the first hour though when her arms started to burn and her hands cramped up and her back became one fused bar of glowing heat and pain from bending down and then rising up over and over and over, after all that, she stopped thinking about herself.

Burying Jackie wasn't a political maneuver or a gesture of apology. It was an ugly necessity and she was there when the time came. It was just one more task on a list of things that had to be done.

When the hole was deep enough Marisol just knew it and she put her shovel aside. She held out her arms and Sarah picked up the boy's tiny body. Jackie weighed next to nothing but he didn't feel like a corpse in Sarah's hands. She knew what it was like to hug a skeleton like her father or a mummy but Jackie felt different. His flesh was cold but still soft and pliant. The winding sheet didn't cover his head very well and she got an unwelcome look inside. She saw the hole in the middle of his forehead.

Sarah knew what that hole was for. In Somalia, in her first years under Ayaan's tutelage when she was still too young to carry a gun Sarah had been given the task of sanitizing the dead. She had a little hammer and a chisel for the task and she'd learned to be quick about it'the dead didn't take long to come back, not long at all. When a soldier fell you paid them the final respect. You sent them off to rest by destroying their nervous system. So they could be dead, truly dead, not the restless kind.

She couldn't imagine what it would be like to do it to your own flesh and blood. Your only child. Wouldn't you want, despite all wisdom to the contrary, to just see them move again, to see their eyelids flutter open? Wouldn't that stay your hand even just for a moment?