When the hole was deep enough Marisol just knew it and she put her shovel aside. She held out her arms and Sarah picked up the boy's tiny body. Jackie weighed next to nothing but he didn't feel like a corpse in Sarah's hands. She knew what it was like to hug a skeleton like her father or a mummy but Jackie felt different. His flesh was cold but still soft and pliant. The winding sheet didn't cover his head very well and she got an unwelcome look inside. She saw the hole in the middle of his forehead.
Sarah knew what that hole was for. In Somalia, in her first years under Ayaan's tutelage when she was still too young to carry a gun Sarah had been given the task of sanitizing the dead. She had a little hammer and a chisel for the task and she'd learned to be quick about it'the dead didn't take long to come back, not long at all. When a soldier fell you paid them the final respect. You sent them off to rest by destroying their nervous system. So they could be dead, truly dead, not the restless kind.
She couldn't imagine what it would be like to do it to your own flesh and blood. Your only child. Wouldn't you want, despite all wisdom to the contrary, to just see them move again, to see their eyelids flutter open? Wouldn't that stay your hand even just for a moment?
But of course Marisol was tough. Ayaan had recognized it when she'd stood on the Island and looked at the bleak future facing the survivors. Marisol was tough and she could make hard decisions. Sarah handed the woman her son and watched as she laid him down gently in the worm-riddled earth. Then Sarah reached down and helped Marisol climb up out of the grave. Together they pushed the dirt over the boy, concealing him forever from view.
Marisol didn't say any prayers or offer the boy a eulogy. Her obvious grief, written in the streaks of dirt on her face, was eloquence enough. Sarah sat and watched her and wondered why she didn't feel just as strongly about Ayaan. Maybe because it wasn't real to her yet. Maybe it was because Ayaan hadn't stopped moving yet. After about half an hour of just sitting and mourning Marisol turned and looked at her. 'What do you want?' she asked.
Sarah understood what she was being asked. Why had she come to Governors Island, and what would it take to get her to leave? 'I won't lie to you. I'm on a dangerous journey and no good is coming of it. Originally I was on a rescue mission. Now I'm after revenge.'
Marisol smiled, a quiet, overworked smile. 'Jack taught me about revenge. He said it was the only form of suicide accepted by the Catholic Church.'
Sarah shrugged. 'Okay, maybe revenge isn't the word I want. We used to call it sanitation. The woman who raised me is dead now. Undead. It's my last duty to her to put a bullet in her head.' She looked down at the fresh grave. That had been Marisol's last duty to her son. It was the same. She wanted to say as much but she knew the words would profane Jackie's death. 'I need guns, and I need soldiers. Right now though I need some meat to feed my father.'
Her father'wasn't it also her duty to sanitize him?
No. She would never think about that again. Anyway. Ayaan had told Sarah a hundred times what she wanted done if she ever turned into one of the walking dead. She had left explicit instructions. Her father seemed to want to go on.
She refused to explore that thought any further.
Marisol helped her find what she needed in the main stores. An economy-sized bag of pork rinds, guaranteed not to spoil for decades to come. They brought it north, into the half of the island where a bonfire was already being built, where lights were coming on in the houses and the sound of playful violins and acoustic guitars hung in the air like the music had gotten caught in the tree branches. They found Dekalb slumped forward across his own knees, still sitting in his lawn chair, while all around him living people set about making a communal dinner. The lich took the pork rinds from his daughter and tried to tear open the bag but he just didn't have the strength. Sarah did it for him. As she handed the bag to her father she looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked back. It was a lot more comfortable, the silence that passed between them, than it had been before.