Larry: “Amen.”

Stu: “There’s a motion to adjourn on the floor. Do you like it, people?”

The motion to adjourn was voted, 7–0.

Frances Goldsmith, Secretary

“Why are you stopping?” Fran asked as Stu slowly biked over to the curb and put his feet down. “It’s a block further up.” Her eyes were still red from her burst of tears during the meeting, and Stu thought he had never seen her looking so tired.

“This marshal thing—” he began.

“Stu, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Somebody has to do it, honey. And Nick was right. I’m the logical choice.”

“Fuck logic. What about me and the baby? Do you see no logic in us, Stu?”

“I ought to know what you want for the baby,” he said softly. “Haven’t you told me enough times? You want him brought into a world that isn’t totally crazy. You want things safe for him—or her. I want that, too. But I wasn’t going to say that in front of the rest. It’s between you and me. You and the baby are the two main reasons I said okay.”

“I know that,” she said in a low, choked voice.

He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up. He smiled at her and she made an effort to smile back. It was a weary smile, and tears were coursing down her cheeks, but it was better than no smile at all.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

She was shaking her head back and forth slowly, and some of her tears flew off into the warm summer night.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “No, I really don’t think it is.”

She lay awake long into the night, thinking that warmth can only come from a burning—Prometheus got his eyes pecked out on that one—and that love always comes due in blood.

And a queer certainty stole over her, as numbing as some creeping anesthesia, that they would finish by wading in blood. The thought made her place her hands protectively over her belly, and she found herself thinking for the first time in weeks of her dream: the dark man with his grin… and his twisted coathanger.

As well as hunting for Mother Abagail with a picked group of volunteers in his spare time, Harold Lauder was on the Burial Committee, and on August 21 he spent the day in the back of a dump truck with five other men, all of them wearing boots and protective clothing and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves. The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to, with an almost grisly calm, as Burial Site #1. It was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal. The site lay as bleak and barren as the mountains of the moon under the burning August sun. Chad had accepted the post reluctantly because he had once been an undertaker’s assistant in Morristown, New Jersey.

“There’s no undertaking about this,” he had said this morning at the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut, which was the Burial Committee’s base of operations. He lit a Winston with a wooden match and grinned at the twenty men sitting around. “That is, it’s an undertaking but not an undertaking undertaking, if you get my meaning.”

There were a few strained smiles, Harold’s largest among them. His belly had been rumbling constantly because he hadn’t dared eat breakfast. He hadn’t been sure he could keep it down, considering the nature of the work. He could have stuck with finding Mother Abagail and no one would have murmured a word of protest, even though it had to be obvious to every thinking man in the Zone (if there were any thinking men in the Free Zone besides himself—a debatable question) that looking for her with fifteen men was an exercise in comic relief when you considered the thousands of square miles of empty forest and plain around Boulder. And, of course, she might never have left Boulder, none of them seemed to have thought of that (which didn’t surprise Harold at all). She could be set up in a house just about anywhere beyond the center of town and they’d still never find her without a house-to-house search. Redman and Andros hadn’t raised a word of protest between them when Harold suggested that the Search Committee be a weekend and evening sort of thing, which told Harold that they accepted it as a closed case, too.

He could have stuck with it, but who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.

“It’s going to be like burying cordwood,” Chad told them. “If you can keep it on that level in your mind, you’ll be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it. Once you’ve puked, you’ll find it easier to think that way: cordwood. Nothing but cordwood.”

The men were eyeing each other uncomfortably.

Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the two odd men out went to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom, houses with one floor aboveground and a second below.

Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling; it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-Day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.

“Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him. He went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.

It took them two trips and most of the afternoon to empty the church. Twenty men, Harold thought, to get rid of all the corpses in Boulder. It’s almost funny. A goodly number of Boulder’s previous population had run like rabbits because of the Air Testing Center scare, but still … Harold supposed that, as the Burial Committee grew with the population, it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall (not that he himself expected to be around by then), and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic—one they weren’t immune to—had been.

The Free Zone Committee was full of bright ideas, he thought with contempt. The committee would be just fine… as long as they had good old Harold Lauder to make sure their shoelaces were tied, of course. Good old Harold’s good enough for that, but not quite good enough to serve on their fucking Permanent Committee. Heavens, no. He had never been quite good enough, not even quite good enough to get a date for the Class Dance at Ogunquit High School, even with a scag. Good God, no, not Harold. Let’s remember, folks, when we get right down to the proverbial place where the ursine mammal evacuated his bowels in the buckwheat, that this is no analytical, logical matter, not even a matter of common sense. When we get right down to it, what we end up with is a frigging beauty contest.

Well, somebody remembers. Somebody is keeping score, kids. And the name of that someone—could we have a drum-roll, please maestro?—Harold Emery Lauder.

So he came back into the church, wiping his mouth and grinning as best he could, nodding that he was ready to go on. Someone clapped him on the back and Harold’s grin widened and he thought: Someday you’re going to lose your hand for that, shitheap.