Sunrise

At the end of the road nearest Warren, two figures worked frantically over a prone form: Dr. McCarthy and Belinda, I thought. Beyond them, I could see a line of men stretched across the road, guns held upright against their shoulders. No one else appeared to be armed. I rethought my first assumption—there was no sign of Red or any of his disciplined, black-clad troops.

“Come on.” I tugged on Darla’s sleeve and ducked back behind the snow berm as we worked our way toward Dr. McCarthy. Strange, I thought, that there would be another battle in almost exactly the same location where we were ambushed by the Reds holding Warren eighteen months before. The same place where my Aunt Caroline and Mayor Petty had been shot. Wind and snow had resculpted the surface of the cemetery, hiding all evidence of the earlier fight. From this side of the embankment, the cemetery seemed almost peaceful, its gravestones mostly buried, their tops dusted with snow. But I couldn’t undo the carnage on the road alongside us; the moans of the dying prevented a moment’s solace.

We reached the edge of the cemetery and climbed back to the top of the snow berm. Dr. McCarthy was below us and a little bit to the left. His hands flew over a young man’s body, trying to affix a makeshift tourniquet to his arm. The guy’s wrist had been completely smashed by a high-caliber bullet—the hand appeared to be attached by nothing more than ripped skin and gristle.

Farther to our left, there was a gap of about a hundred yards, followed by the line of men carrying rifles that I’d seen earlier, maybe thirty or forty of them in all. I recognized all of them—they were residents of Warren. Some of them shifted from foot to foot; a couple of them sat in the road or leaned against the snowbank; and others, including Sheriff Moyers, seemed to be a little green around the edges as if they were fighting the urge to vomit.

I wondered where my mom was. None of the victims looked familiar, and none of the armed Warrenites were women, so I hoped that meant she was safe inside the village.

“This wasn’t a fight,” Darla whispered, “it was a massacre.”

“Dr. McCarthy needs help,” I said.

“Alex, wait.” Darla grabbed my arm. “Go slowly. You remember that you’re not the most popular guy in Warren, right?”

“Yeah.” I needed to get down to the road fast. To do something. To help. People were dying down there. But Darla had a point.

I raised my head a little higher, ready to quickly duck back below the lip of the snow berm if any of the men went for their rifles. “Sam!” I yelled. “Sheriff Moyers!”

He turned toward me, holding his rifle low. I raised my hand and hook to about the level of my shoulders and called out again. “You going to shoot me if I help Doc McCarthy?”

Sam shrugged and yelled back, “Suit yourself.”

That wasn’t really an answer, but I guessed it would have to do. I clambered over the berm and slid down to the road. Some of the riflemen eyed me uneasily, but none of them leveled their guns. “Strange outfit you’re wearing,” Sam said, “and what’s up with the hook?” I ignored him.

The person closest to me was bleeding from wounds in his thigh and side. I needed bandages. I looked toward Belinda—she was cutting a strip from her patient’s own T-shirt. Right, we had no bandages.

I unzipped the guy’s coat and cut four huge strips of cloth from his shirt using the blade on my hook. I packed one strip of cloth into the wound on his thigh, then wrapped another around it, cinching it tight. That stopped the bleeding, at least. The wound on his side took longer to treat.

Darla had followed me down and started bandaging another victim. Dr. McCarthy brushed by me on his way to yet another patient.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Little busy right now,” he said without stopping.

I glanced at Belinda. “Why aren’t Sheriff Moyers’ men helping?”

She made a face like she had just bitten into a maggoty apple, but didn’t reply.

We worked for hours. My hand and hook dripped with other people’s blood; it caked my arms, legs, and chest. The air reeked of slaughter and terror. Darla and I looked like extras from a gory zombie movie. Our ghillie suits were ruined—they would blend in nowhere but a slaughterhouse. Some of the ambulatory victims were helping; otherwise we would never have finished. Still, many of the injured bled out before anyone could reach them.

I recognized one of the survivors: Reverend Evans, who had been the director of the Baptist relief workers, the yellow coats at the Galena, Illinois, FEMA camp. He had been leading a mostly ineffective effort to keep the kids at the FEMA camp fed. What was he doing here?

I stumbled through the bodies, looking for anyone still alive to treat, looking for more life amid the silent dead. Dr. McCarthy grabbed my arm. “Stop. We need to get the survivors into some kind of shelter before nightfall. They’re going to freeze to death.”

“Start taking them to the clinic?” I asked.

Dr. McCarthy’s face spasmed and turned fire-engine red. He looked like he’d swallowed a frog and was trying desperately to spit it back out. When he finally did speak, his words were clipped and angry. “That’s what Sheriff Moyers is here for. So the refugees can’t get into Warren. Mayor Petty won’t allow them into town.”

“Moyers and his men massacred these people, didn’t they?”

Dr. McCarthy was so angry he couldn’t speak. Instead, he gave a curt nod.

“Darla, I need you.”

She looked up from the patient she was talking to. “Alex, I don’t think—”

“You, you, and you.” I started pointing at random ambulatory people until I had seven of them picked out. “Follow Darla back to our homestead.” I turned back to Darla. “I need every blanket we’ve got plus two poles per blanket to make stretchers. Have everyone except Uncle Paul and the three youngest girls come back with you. Oh, and bring every oil lamp we’ve got. We’re not going to finish this before nightfall.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Darla whispered.

I shrugged. “No.”

“I could get back faster on my own. They’re going to be up to their hips in snow.”

“We need a trail around Warren anyway. Better to break it before we’re all carrying stretchers. And you’ll need the help to carry everything back here.”

“Okay.” She leaned in for a quick kiss. “Even though I don’t understand you. We were doing fine on our own.” “It was never going to last. Get going.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Instead of saluting, she slapped my butt.

I organized the grisly work of sorting the dead, the dying, and those who might survive. I talked to Dr. McCarthy, Belinda, and the few dozen people left who could walk, explaining my plan. Then I started helping to move corpses.

I approached a young woman bent over an even younger man who lay in the road, clearly dead—half of his skull was missing. “May I move him?” I asked her as gently as I could.

She turned her tear-washed face up to me. “W-w-will you bury him? Properly? B-B-Brock was a Christian. He wanted me to get baptized. He’d want a funeral.”

Crap! I knew I had been forgetting something. “We’ll need pickaxes to dig the graves. We can bury them in the snow for now. We’ll come back when we can with the right tools and give them a proper burial, a real funeral. I promise.” I felt like an idiot. I wasn’t sure how we were going to

feed the living, let alone bury the dead. The solution to that problem was obvious—I know I wouldn’t mind if someone ate my corpse, but the thought of eating someone else’s made me more than a little queasy. I had been fighting with flensers off and on for almost two and a half years—I couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming one, even due to the direst necessity.

It was as if she could read my mind. “I don’t think Brock would mind if you had to eat him. You could bury his bones still, right?”