“Burn her?” The words explode out of me before I can stop them. “We can’t burn her. That’s—”
Raven whirls around, eyes blazing. “Yeah? Well what do you want to do? Huh? You want to leave her in the sickroom?”
Normally I back down when Raven raises her voice, but this time I hold my ground. “She deserves a burial,” I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t shake.
Raven covers the ground between us in two long strides.
“It’s a waste of our energy,” she hisses, and then I can tell how full of fury and desperation she is. I remember what I heard her tell Tack: Everyone stays alive. “We don’t have any to spare.”
She turns her back to me again and announces loudly, so the others can hear, “We have to burn her.”
We wrap her body in the sheets Raven scrubbed clean. Maybe all along she knew they would be used for this purpose. I keep thinking I’m going to be sick.
“Lena,” Raven barks at me sharply. “Take her feet.”
I do. Her body is heavier than seems possible. In death, she has become a weight of iron. I’m furious with Raven, so furious I could spit. This is what we are reduced to here. This is what we have become in the Wilds: We starve, we die, we wrap our friends in old and tattered sheets, we burn them in the open. I know it’s not Raven’s fault—it’s the people on the other side of the fence, it’s Them, the zombies, my former people—but the anger refuses to dissolve. It burns a hole in my throat.
A quarter mile from the homestead there is a gully where at one point a stream must have flowed. We place her there, and Raven splashes her with gasoline: just a little, as there isn’t much to spare. The snow is falling harder now. At first she won’t light. Blue begins to cry, loudly, and Grandma pulls her sharply away from the fire, saying, “Quiet, Blue. You’re not helping.” Blue turns her face into Grandma’s overlarge corduroy jacket so the sound of her sobbing is muffled. Sarah is silent, white-faced, trembling.
Raven douses the body with more gasoline and finally gets it lit. The air is filled right away with a choking smoke, the smell of burning hair; the noise is terrible too, a crackling that makes you think of meat falling away from bones. Raven can’t even speak the whole eulogy before she starts to gag. I turn away, tears stinging my eyes—from the smoke or from anger, I can’t tell.
Suddenly I have the wild urge to dig, to bury, to hack up the earth. I move blindly, numbly, back to the burrow. It takes me a little while to locate the cotton shorts and the old, tattered shirt I was wearing when I came to the Wilds. We’ve been using the shirt as a dishrag. These are the only items left from before: the remnants of my old life.
The others have now gathered in the kitchen. Bram is stoking the fire, coaxing it to life. Raven is boiling water in a pot: for coffee, no doubt. Sarah is shuffling a pack of water-warped and dog-eared cards. Everyone else is sitting in silence.
“Hey, Lena,” Sarah says as I stalk past her. I’ve stuffed the shorts and the T-shirt under my jacket and am keeping my arms tightly crossed over my stomach; for some reason, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, especially Raven. “You want to play Spit?”
“Not now,” I growl at her. The Wilds turn us mean, too. Mean and hard, all edges.
“We could play something else,” she says. “We could play—”
“I said no.” Then I’m running up the stairs before I can see I’ve hurt her feelings.
The air is thick: a white blur. For a moment the cold stuns me and I stand, blinking, confused. Everything is sprouting a layer of snow, a fuzzy growth. I can still smell Miyako’s body burning. And I imagine that with the snow there is ash blowing over us. I fantasize that it will cover us in our sleep, seal us into the burrow, and suffocate us there, underground.
There is a juniper bush at the edge of the homestead, where I start and end my runs. Underneath it the snow has not accumulated. There is a bare dusting on the ground, which I sweep away with the cuff of my jacket.
Then I dig.
I claw at the earth with my fingers. The anger and the grief is still throbbing behind my eyes, narrowing my vision to a tunnel. I can’t even feel the cold or the pain in my hands. Dirt and blood are caking my fingernails, but I don’t care. I bury those last, tattered parts of me there, under the juniper, in the snow.
Two days after we burn Miyako, the snow has still not stopped. Every day Raven scans the skies anxiously, cursing under her breath. It is time to move. Lu and Squirrel, the first of the scouts, have returned. The homestead is mostly packed up, although we are still gathering food and supplies from the river, and trying to trap and hunt what we can. But the snow makes it hard. The animals stay underground.