To get to the warehouses Sarah had to pass by the strangest of the Island's structures, the commercial facilities off Tango Pier. There was a hotel, a laundromat, even a supermarket with shelves bare so long they sagged under their own emptiness. Vending machines once full of ice cold Pepsi stood forgotten or vandalized on every corner. Weirdest of all was the burnt-out shell of a Burger King restaurant, something Sarah had only heard of before in her father's bedtime tales of a decade earlier. Metal signs creaked in the evening breeze down there and old neon tubes stood lifeless and cold. The soft and rusted shapes of cars lurked in the weed-choked parking lots.
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.