The Liddy Scenario Page 2

  Brody followed slowly behind her as she walked to several places in the cemetery and pointed out what she wanted. After the fifth spot she motioned for Brody to join her on the ground. He stopped the engine on the backhoe and hopped down.

  “This is the one I want you to start with. Come back to the car with me. I have gloves, masks, and Tyvek coveralls for you. You’ll have to help with the bodies. We’re short of body bags so many of the deceased will be in the clothes they were in when they died.”

  “But I didn’t…” Brody started to protest. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be handling dead bodies. Even with personal protective equipment.

  “Look, mister, if you don’t want to do it let me know right now and I’ll get someone who will.”

  Brody suddenly noticed how haggard Julie Anne looked. Despite the professional business clothes, the perfect makeup, and tidy bun her hair was done up in, Julie Anne was on the edge of collapse. Brody felt sorry for her.

  “No. I’ll do it. But I want a couple of things in return for going well above and beyond the job description.”

  Julie Anne’s lips were pursed angrily, but she said nothing.

  “I want all the PPE required. If you don’t have a large enough supply, I suggest you get one. I won’t work without it. And bottled water. It’s go-ing to be hot. I’ll need a very large supply. Finally, things may get way out of hand here. I want to be paid in pre-1965 US junk silver coins.”

  “You have to be kidding me! Why pre-1965 coins and where am I supposed to find them, even if I did agree to this… blackmail?”

  “Careful throwing around words like blackmail. You need me more than I need you. I’m not out to gouge you. You can convert at whatever the last spot price was on silver. Several of the local coin stores have junk silver coins.”

  “You’ve worked temp before. You know we don’t pay you. We pay the temp agency and they pay you. You’ll have to work out that deal with them.”

  “See ya,” Brody said and started walking toward the parking lot.

  “No! Wait! Okay, okay! I’ll see what I can do.” She joined him and the two continued toward the parking lot to get the initial set of PPE for Brody. When they got to the car Julie Anne used the remote and opened the trunk.

  Brody was satisfied with the quality of the PPE. The protective hooded and booted coveralls were the good stuff, as were the rubber boots and gloves. There was a box of 3M P-100 masks. “Try to get me a Millennium full face CBRN mask and a box of filters. I’m afraid the P-100’s might not be adequate.”

  Julie Anne’s brow wrinkled. “You seem to know something about personal protective equipment.”

  “I’ve used it before. I want the best. This is going to be a risky job before it’s over.”

  “That’s fair. I’ll see what I can do. The water shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll pick up a case…”

  “Three cases to start, at least. It’s going to be over a hundred for days, I expect. I’ll drink almost a case a day. I’ll stick with you as long as this takes, if you look out for my needs. I’m not going to have the time, it looks like. That includes food. It’s hard to come by. MRE’s are okay if you can get them. They can come out of the pay.”

  Julie Anne had started to frown, but at Brody’s assertion he’d stick with her made a difference to her. She believed him. “Okay. I’ll make it at least a case a day, and some food, for each of you.”

  “Each of us?” Brody asked.

  “Isn’t Dwayne here?”

  “Didn’t see anybody else. Oh. You must mean the guy that was here yesterday. No. I haven’t seen him today.”

  “I’ll have to try to find someone else if he’s left. Emit I understand. He’s way past retirement age. No need for him to endure this situation.” Julie Anne sighed.

  “Um… I know someone that will probably do it. Same terms. as me.”

  “If you can get at least one more reliable, hard worker, I’ll do everything I can to get you the silver coins in payment. If I have to take it out of my own salary.”

  “One I can pretty much guarantee. Two maybe. More than that, I don’t think so, though I’ll ask if you want me to.”

  “Please do.”

  Brody took the boxes out of the trunk and carried them to the garage. Julie Anne carried the rubber boots. There were six pairs, two pairs of three different sizes, still tied together in pairs from the store.

  “Will you trust me enough to go ahead and start working?” Julie Anne asked. “The first two or three… deliveries… will be going in the private graves.”

  “Give me your word you’ll give it a real try, then we have a deal,” Brody said.

  “I do. Give you my word I’ll do my best.” She held out her hand.

  Brody just said, “Your word is good enough. Don’t wait too long on that water.” He turned and headed back to the Case to start digging. As he walked he pulled out his cell phone, mentally crossing his fingers that cell service was still up. It was.

  “Hey, Ranger! Yeah, it’s Brody. Got a gig for you if you’re interested. Hard, nasty work, PPE provided, possibly pay in silver. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  Brody laughed at Ranger’s response and then told him the address of the cemetery. Next he called two more of his acquaintances. Neither one was interested. They preferred to stay holed up where they were and wait out the troubles. Both were well enough equipped and supplied to do so.

  It was almost noon when Julie Anne and Ranger both showed up within minutes of each other. Ranger introduced himself there in the parking lot and Julie Anne had him carry the water and other items. from her trunk to the garage.

  “Please tell Brody that I made the arrangements he wanted. You should be able to find him. He’ll fill you in on what you are required to do.”

  “Very good,” Ranger replied and took off at an easy trot, despite the heat, to find the source of the sound he was hearing. It didn’t take long.

  When he trotted up to the Case backhoe Brody saw him and shut down the machine. “Hi, Ranger! I see you found the place. You still okay with the work?”

  “Why not? Just a job. Met the boss lady. She said she’d made the arrangements you wanted. That the silver?”

  Brody nodded. “You want to take over. I need a break, a bottle of water, and a bite of lunch.”

  “Sure, buddy. Looks like an eight foot wide slit trench. Going to be a mass grave, I take it.”

  Brody nodded, and climbed down off the backhoe. The ROPS threw a little shade, but it sure would have been nice to have an air conditioned cab instead of the open framework of the rollover protective system.

  Ranger was an experienced heavy equipment operator and went right to it after getting on the backhoe. Brody didn’t have to worry about him and headed for the parking lot to get his lunch out of the truck.

  He saw three hearses pull in as he was walking. They were headed for the individual graves that were still open. After getting his lunch box from the truck, Brody went up to the garage. He saw the six cases of bottled water and three cases of MRE’s. There were two boxes, each containing a Millennium CBRN respirator, and two boxes that contained ten replacement filters each.

  “You really came through,” Brody said aloud. He sat down after pulling one of the bottles of water free from the case and slowly ate his sandwich. It was the last of the fresh food he’d had in the fridge when the power went out.

  The freeze bottle in the insulated lunch box was still cold and he ran it luxuriously over his face and his arms., relishing the coolness as he ate. He used the porta-jon that sat on the back side of the garage and washed his hands with water from the bottle he’d been drinking.

  The hearses were leaving when Brody headed back to where Ranger was working. He stopped at each of the three graves. The caskets were still sitting on the lowering apparatus at each one. Brody checked it out and figured how to operate the equipment. He lowered the caskets in turn and took the equipment back to the garage, making several trips to get everyt
hing moved, including the mats covering the mounds of dirt.

  After that, Brody used his truck to carry stuff. Apparently Emit had used the backhoe bucket to move the stuff around, but with it tied up constantly, Brody decided he could invest a little in the effort. The diesel tank by the garage was full, so he could get replacement fuel.

  The dreaded sight of a semi-truck pulling into the cemetery came just as Brody was going to join Ranger, in the truck, after getting sidetracked with the graves. The driver of the truck saw Brody and drove up and stopped beside him. “Where do you want me?” he asked.

  “Follow me,” Brody said and headed for the first slit trench. He’d loaded the PPE he and Ranger would need to handle the bodies safely.

  Ranger saw them coming and moved the backhoe out of the way. He met Brody at his truck on the narrow lane that ran through the cemetery. “Got the… Oh. I see it in the back. Fun starts now, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Brody said, giving a bit of a sigh.

  The semi driver was getting parked where it would be the easiest to un-load the bodies from the trailer into the slit trench. He was opening the trailer doors, wisps of frozen vapor trailing out as they opened. Brody and Ranger had the protective equipment on and began to move the bod-ies.

  “Aren’t you helping?” Brody asked the driver through the voicemitter of the Millennium respirator.

  “Not bloody likely,” replied the man. “These are all yours. I’m just the transport. Here’s the manifest.”

  “After we’re done,” Brody said. It was a struggle to get the body bags out of the truck and carried down the slope at the end of the trench and laid out side by side. Brody managed not to gag at the idea of the frozen bodies inside the body bags and wondered how much worse it was going to be if the coroner did run out of body bags.

  With the last body in the trench, Brody and Ranger each took an independent count, both of which matched the manifest the driver handed Brody. Brody signed it and the driver hurriedly left, having closed up the trailer as soon as the last body was out.

  Brody wished he’d waited. It would have been nice to spend a few minutes in the reefer trailer to cool off. But he couldn’t so he went back to work on the backhoe, giving Ranger a chance to go get water and take a rest.

  Brody covered the bodies they’d just laid out, leaving a ramp so they could do the next batch. When he’d finished that he filled in the other three graves and met Ranger back at the slit trench.

  They took turns running the backhoe and resting, unloading one more truck late that afternoon. Julie Anne showed up to tell Brody that it was the last load for the day, but there would be more the next day. “Can you work a while long and get more trenches dug?”

  Brody looked at Ranger, who nodded. “We’ll get done what we can. It’s actually easier on us to do the digging in the cooler hours of the evening. Not that it’s that much cooler. But it helps. Is there any chance you could get us a rental machine? Just a Bobcat if not another backhoe. We waste quite a bit of time moving the hoe back and forth. If we had something with which to backfill that we could leave at the trench in use, it would be easier.”

  Julie Anne nodded. “Makes sense. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Julie Anne left and Brody and Ranger went back to work.

  The two men switched off and on until midnight, taking turns napping and digging. Since Ranger lived quite some distance away, he went home with Brody and stayed at his place. They were back at the cemetery, working, when Julie Anne showed up the next morning.

  “My! You two have done an amazing amount of work! How late did you work last night?”

  “Midnight. It was a lot nicer, even at eighty-five degrees, than it was earlier in the day. Not as hard on the Case, either.”

  “That should be better. The Bobcat skid loader should be here any mi-nute. Is there anything else you need?”

  “I’m a little uncomfortable burying these people with no good ID to each location.”

  Julie Anne’s face fell and she looked about to cry. “I know. But we just don’t have the means. The manifests indicate which trench, but that is all. We have to be careful to make sure the trenches are marked as to which each is.”

  “There is a map in the garage I’ve been marking with what I know,” Brody said.

  “That’s good.”

  All three turned when the rental delivery truck showed up, right on the heels of the first reefer tractor trailer. With sighs that Julie Anne noted, Brody and Ranger suited up for the handling of the bodies.

  “Just have them park it here,” Brody told Julie Anne. “We’ll come get it when we need it. Oh. And I’m using my truck to get around faster. Just replacing the fuel from the cemetery tank. I hope that’s okay. Speeds things up a great deal.”

  “I suppose that will be all right. But just what you use. Fuel, even for the city services, is almost gone.”

  Brody nodded and he and Ranger got into the pickup and led the semi to the slit trench. It was as hard as Brody thought it would be when the body bags ran out and the frozen bodies were in only the clothes they’d died in, in most cases. A few were wrapped in bed sheets or blankets. It made the bodies much harder to handle, too. The body bags had handles. The bodies didn’t.

  Julie Anne, good as her word, showed up Monday morning with several tubes of silver coins. “I thought we’d better just do it and I’ll work out the required financial details with the city later.”

  “Excellent!” Ranger said, as Brody counted out his share and then pocketed his own.

  “Thank you,” Brody told Julie Anne. “I know this was a bit out of the ordinary, but it was important to us.”

  Julie Anne shrugged. “The price of things is going up and even cash isn’t taken everywhere. I’ve already seen one service station that has their sign posted ‘No checks. No credit cards. No cash. Gold or silver coins only.’ I guess you aren’t the only one with the same idea.”

  Brody and Ranger exchanged a glance. She had no clue.

  “What is the cause of all these deaths?” Brody asked the question that had been on his mind for days.

  “Heat and dehydration for the most part. Without power there’s no AC or water. The cooling shelters are full, but even they are limited as to what they can provide. Without fuel the generators aren’t running. There have been several deaths from people on electrically powered respirators and other critical life support systems.. Even those with battery backups are dying as their batteries die and can’t get recharged. The hospital gen-erators are out of fuel for the most part and the city hasn’t been able to get more.

  “I was in the EOC this morning before I came out here and it’s like this all over the region. All over the country.” She looked down at the ground for a long moment. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep our bargain. I’ve got all the water I could round up, and MRE’s. The silver… Well, to be honest, I bought all the junk silver, as you called it, three coin stores had. Two more didn’t have any. They’d already sold out. Only numismatics were left, and I didn’t think you wanted those at that value. “What I have is only enough for another full week for the two of you.”

  “Well,” said Brody slowly, “Let’s just get through this week and see where we stand.”

  “You’ll continue to work this week?” Julie Anne asked. Her body language was saying she had her doubts.

  “I said I’d stick by you for this,” Brody said. “Ranger?”

  “I’m good. As long as I can stay at your place,” Ranger replied. “My rig is half full, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to get more fuel.”

  “Okay. That’s settled,” Brody said. “You have your crew for the week.”

  “Thank you,” Julie Anne replied. “It means a lot to me.”

  So Brody and Ranger worked the week, putting in ten to twelve hour days, through Sunday. Julie Anne hadn’t shown up much. Only once with three more cases of water and a case of MRE’s.

  Brody and Ranger lost several pou
nds each over those few days, between the work and the heat. They conserved water and food as they could, but couldn’t take the chance of becoming dehydrated or lose strength due to lack of food.

  They used only a case of the water between them per day, and one MRE each per day, supplementing both from Brody’s prep stocks. Ranger would give him some in return, once he could go to his place and get them. To save fuel, Brody was leaving his truck in the garage at the cemetery and riding his bicycle back and forth. Ranger had his bike locked down in the back of his truck and they both rode.

  It was a month after the attacks, and Brody had put in two weeks and three days at the City Cemetery, along with Ranger. The number of bod-ies they were burying went up every day. Fortunately the city had re-cently enlarged the cemetery and there was enough room for the slit trenches.

  Monday after the two full weeks rolled around Julie Anne showed up at the cemetery right after Brody and Ranger rode up on their bicycles.

  “You don’t look good,” was the first thing Brody said when she got out of her car.

  “I guess I haven’t eaten in a couple of days…” her words faded away as she stood up outside the car and swayed slightly.

  Brody grabbed her on one side and Ranger the other. They got her sitting down on the edge of the back seat of her car. Ranger ran around to the other side of the car and opened the doors on that side to collect what little breeze there was.

  “Why haven’t you said something, for heaven’s sake?” Brady asked. He turned to Ranger. “Get one of the MRE cookies and a bottle of water.”

  With a quick nod Ranger was off like a shot to the garage and was back only a couple minutes later with the requested items.. Brody was fanning Julie Anne’s face. The heat wave hadn’t broken and it was already nine-ty-five degrees at seven in the morning.

  Ranger handed Brody the water first and Brody wetted his bandanna with it and bathed Julie Anne’s face gently. She finally came around and Brody helped her get a sip of water and then took the cookie that Ranger had unwrapped. “Nibble on this,” Brody said and guided her hands with the cookie in them up to her mouth.