The Nothing Men, page 2
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
A thumbnail photograph of Ben took up the left half of the card. The right half was dedicated to Ben’s biographical details, including height, weight, hair and eye color, and of course, his antibody status. It was this last field for which he had paid so handsomely, for which he had exhausted his last dollar, the field before R. Kincaid’s eyes indicating that his status was Negative.
Ben sat stone still as the bureaucrat scanned his registration card, reminded of the time he’d used a fake ID for the first time. Upon hearing the satisfying beep from the wand, he concealed his relief like he was tossing a blanket over a delicate archeological site. When it came to passing yourself off as someone else, it was all about confidence. As though this review was just a mindless waste of his time. As a bartender, he could detect whether was someone was of age within seconds, almost always by the level of interest in his review of the driver’s license.
“This job opening we’ve got, it’s not an easy one,” Kincaid said, leaning back in his chair and tapping the tips of his slender fingers together.
“Truly, sir, I’d be happy to have any job,” Ben said. “I’m ready to work.”
Kincaid made a clicking noise with his tongue as he considered his applicant.
“Do you know how many people died during the Panic, Mr. Sullivan?”
It wasn’t the question that took Ben by surprise as much as the manner in which Kincaid asked it, flatly, with no emotion. As if he were reading it from a Trivial Pursuit – Apocalypse Edition card and was waiting to see if Ben could earn a little plastic wedge for his wagon-wheel game piece.
Ben didn’t know how or whether he was expected to answer. He didn’t know the etiquette for discussing the Panic with government officials. Like everyone else, Ben had heard all kinds of casualty figures, presented in every conceivable form – bar graphs, charts, three-dimensional maps created by the Freedom One Network. The actual number didn’t really matter all that much, not to know how bad it was. The smell told you that. The rich, deep smell of death, like a hunk of roast beef forgotten in the back of the refrigerator, blanketing the big cities for weeks and months afterwards, getting into everything like rancid cigarette smoke.
“More than one hundred and fifty million Americans, Mr. Sullivan,” Kincaid said, breaking the silence. “Half the population. Three billion worldwide.”
“Wow,” Ben said.
The number didn’t surprise Ben in the least, but Kincaid was obviously trying to dazzle him with his grasp of the material.
“I didn’t know it was that many.”
“Goddamn Reds were nearly the end of us,” Kincaid said, as if Ben hadn’t been there for it, as though he might have been vacationing on the polar ice caps of Mars while the world had nearly come to an end.
“That they were,” Ben agreed. “That they were.”
“And now we have to live beside them every day, as if nothing happened,” Kincaid said. “No way to know if the infection will come back, if it’s just lying dormant.”
“Right,” Ben said, nodding, trying to maintain his very best poker face. He spent every day wondering that very thing.
“Anyway, I’m going to assign you to a HARD Team,” Kincaid said, using a piece of government nomenclature that meant absolutely nothing to Ben.
Kincaid turned to his laptop and began tapping away. The room was quiet but for the clickety-clack of the keyboard and the drone of the air conditioner.
“That’s Human Asset Recovery and Disposition,” Kincaid said, apparently picking up on Ben’s confusion. “We’ve been using these acronyms so long we forget that the general public might not be familiar with them.”
Ben puzzled over this for a moment and then a flash of heat swept up his back, the words registering with him. A government euphemism for something unspeakably awful.
“What will I be doing?”
“Simply put, more than a hundred million corpses are dotting the American landscape,” Kincaid said. “The administration has made the disposal of these remains a national priority. There are HARD teams in every city and state to recover remains and transport them to disposal facilities. It’s a long, tedious project. But this country can’t fully move beyond the Panic until this matter is attended to.”
Ben sensed that Kincaid was reciting a well-memorized script, but his stomach fluttered anyway. In his mind’s eye, he saw a three-dimensional map of America, a camera sweeping over the nation, zooming in on hospitals and churches and schools and houses, choked with the bodies of the dead, piled up like firewood in some places, strewn about like debris in others.
“These teams have been working for nearly two years, but we’re seeing tremendously high turnover and progress has been slow,” Kincaid said. “Not everyone has the stomach for the work.”
A ripple of annoyance at that. Kincaid had said it as if he weren’t some paper-pushing bureaucrat. Ben wanted to ask Kincaid if he had spent a single moment on a HARD Team but thought better of it.
“You think you can handle it?” asked Kincaid.
“Yes, sir,” Ben said. “I used to be a prosecutor. Saw a lot of crime scenes.”
“Good,” he said. “This job isn’t for the faint of heart. Any questions?”
“How does it work?”
“You’ll be assigned to a four-man team working a specific grid here in Henrico County,” Kincaid said. “Are you from here?”
“No,” Ben said.
That was true. But for his three years in law school here in Richmond, Ben had spent most of his life in North Carolina. He’d moved north after the Panic, deciding to start over where he was an unknown, just another hardcase trying to get by in a world that was like a haunted funhouse version of its former self. Someday, he hoped to reunite with his wife Sarah and son Gavin, but they weren’t ready for that yet. They had made it through the Panic without becoming infected, a fact that cleaved Ben from the two people he loved most of all.
“We use standard garbage trucks for collection. Once you’ve got a full load, you return to Central Processing to offload the cargo. Lather, rinse, repeat. The crematoriums are running twenty-four hours a day.”
Cargo. He reminded himself that Kincaid had probably been at this a while, had become desensitized to it all, by necessity. He’d experienced the same thing during his years as a prosecutor because after a while the cases and victims and carnage and ruined lives started to run together and you couldn’t even remember the name of the little girl who’d been molested by her grandfather even though you’d promised yourself that you’d never, ever become like that.
“You know how pay and benefits work?”
Ben shook his head. Three years on, the global economy was still a mess, still struggling to recover. No one knew what to do because there was no model for what to do. During those apocalyptic eight months, nearly half of the world’s workforce had died or become disabled. Demand for goods and services had dropped significantly, but it was still there, relying on wrecked supply chains. Entire industries had disappeared virtually overnight. Leisure and travel and dining were still things of the past, although the government was trying to push people back into their former lives like they were old clothes that still fit. Other industries had risen in their wake as the corporations rushed in to fill the void. A number of the larger companies had started buying construction and manufacturing interests as the world turned its attention to reconstruction.
“We pay in cash, per truckload, at the end of each day. The more cargo your crew clears, the more you make.” Kincaid said. “That’s all we can do right now. No benefits. No paid vacation. Twelve-hour shifts. You get one day off per week. You get hurt on the job, you might lose it. Forget worker’s comp. You were a lawyer, you said? This is probably blowing your little lawyer mind.”
“No, I get it,” Ben said. “State of emergency and all that.”
“Exactly,” Kincaid said. “I know the Act isn’t the most popular thing in American history, but I’m sure you know how tough it is out there right now. Welcome aboard.”
Kincaid clicked a button on his mouse, and his printer began revving up like an aircraft warming up its engines. Ben stared at the machine, rapt, unable to remember the last time he’d heard a printer warm up. Things that had been lost. The ordinary and mundane. What was once background noise suddenly seemed like black magic. Electricity. Printers. Hell, maybe Kincaid still had a Facebook account!
A moment later, the printer spit out a single sheet of paper. He handed it to Ben, whose fingers trembled as he accepted this passport to a new life.
“You start work immediately,” he said. “Captain Kendrick will escort you to the bus, which will take you to Central Processing for orientation. Give this document to the superintendent.”
“Thank you,” Ben said.
Kendrick led Ben back to the bus; he followed without a word, careful to avoid a misstep when he was so close, so agonizingly close to turning the corner. Because no one was hiring Redeyes.
And Ben was one of them.
3
The first two weeks on the HARD Team were the worst.
Each twelve-hour shift began and ended at the Eastern Henrico Processing Center, as it was officially known in government documents, or the Dump, as it was unofficially and more accurately known. The Department had slapped the facility together in an industrial section of the county’s east end, bracketed to the south by a residential neighborhood and the interstate to the north. This particular installation serviced several dozen HARD crews operating in the central Virginia area – the city in the middle, like a baseball, Henrico wrapping around it to the north, west and east, like a glove, and the less-populated counties on the far sides of Henrico and farther south. The crematorium chugged like a steam engine twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, belching its tragic smoke into the skies.
Ben arrived at the depot each morning at five-thirty, making extra certain he was never late, as tardiness was grounds for immediate termination. The early start really didn’t present much of a problem; he suffered from intractable insomnia and slept little at the refugee camp at the Richmond International Raceway about a mile away. He’d pitched a small tent there about a year ago, trying to make a home out of polyester and dangerous, slippery hope.
The scope of the cataclysm was never clearer than when Ben pulled a shift on his HARD crew, scouring each structure for victims, moving door-to-door through neighborhoods and commercial districts like a salesman hawking vinyl siding. Behind every door, in every backyard and two-car garage and shed, tucked into every convenience store and gas station and commercial office park, lay bodies waiting to be reclaimed and placed into eternal rest. There would be no funeral for these people, fate casting them the most meager of final dispositions. Day by day, hour by hour, Ben’s crew forded a river of bodies that had no end.
And yet, like anything else that human beings had found themselves subject to during the course of their history, working on the HARD crew became, in time, part of his reality, part of his routine. The Panic, and Ben’s role in it, were never far from his mind, and so it wasn’t like body recovery had him thinking more about the Panic. Such a thing wasn’t possible; it would be like trying to top off an already full fuel tank.
Over time, he began to derive a certain grim satisfaction of doing something productive for every minute of every twelve-hour shift. No down time for the mind to wander. From the time he clocked in until the moment he clocked out, like the wolf and the sheepdog from the old cartoons, he and his crew were studying plats or en route to a site or processing bodies.
He grew numb to the grisly nature of the work, the way doctors became immune to the deaths of patients, the way he’d become numb to the horror of crime as a prosecutor. In an unexpected but not unwelcome way, it was a reminder that the Panic was over. There was something cleansing and therapeutic about cleaning up a mess, especially when the chaos that had created the mess had been so horrific.
And in a way, it was penance. Penance for his own terrible contribution to the Panic.
As Kincaid had promised, the turnover rate on the HARD teams was quite high. All but one member of the crew he’d shoved out with on his first day had already washed out, apparently preferring unemployment and possibly starvation to the burden of harvesting bodies. For the past week, though, the rotation had stabilized, leaving Ben as the second-most senior member on his crew.
The senior guy was a beefy guy named Danny Brooks. Rounding out the crew were a young woman named Ellie Campbell and a quiet fellow named Randall Holland. Randall and Ellie were pleasant enough, but Danny gave Ben the creeps. He stank of beer and cigarettes and sweat. Ben pictured him as the kind of guy who spent his pre-apocalypse days beating up his girlfriends and telling racist jokes.
When Ben arrived for work on that Wednesday morning, Ellie was already there in the staging area, pulling on her biohazard suit over her small but athletic frame. Her wire-straight brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. She was about thirty years old, quiet, didn’t say much. She seemed content to observe the things going on around them. Every now and again, Ben would catch her watching him and the others, almost studying them. Nothing escaped her keen eye. She didn’t engage in small talk, which Ben found rather appealing.
“Morning,” Ben said, setting his bag in the cab area of the truck.
“I’m going to grab a cup of coffee,” she said without looking up. “Want some?”
He nodded, pleasantly surprised, almost proud of himself. He felt like he had impressed her in some small way, and this, he was embarrassed to say, delighted him immensely. She wandered off in search of their morning brew, leaving him alone to pull on his suit. He tried telling himself that he was nervous around her because he was afraid she’d discover his secret and not because he’d developed a schoolboy crush on her. Just the thought of being attracted to another woman made him feel guilty on so many levels, not the least of which was that he was still technically married. Granted, he hadn’t seen Sarah or Gavin in more than a year, and the last time they’d spoken, Sarah had told him that she never wanted to see him again, but it didn’t make him feel any less guilty. He missed them terribly, but he respected her wishes. Maybe there were things that you could not undo.
“You want the coffee or not?” she said, her harsh tone quickly breaking him out of his trance.
“Oh,” he said, looking up and seeing her fresh, clean face hovering over him. He hadn’t heard her come up on him. “Sorry. Just zoned out for a second.”
She handed him the Styrofoam cup, and they sat on the back bumper of the truck, enjoying a last few minutes of peace before their day devolved into an endless wave of tragedy washing over them, an ocean delivering its eternal beating to the shoreline. The coffee was actually decent and, even better, high-octane. A single cup had his body buzzing.
“Some job, huh?” he asked.
“I guess,” she said.
He tried to think of something else to say, but everything he considered sounded stupid in his head, and he cast them off, one at a time, like a quality control inspector carefully inspecting a new load of widgets rolling by on an assembly line.
“Not a huge fan of the old Double-R,” he said, “but you have to admit that it is an important job.”
“I suppose,” she said.
She looked down at her coffee for a minute and then dumped the contents onto the ground.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” he said.
“Yeah,” she replied, finally cracking. “How long you been on this team?”
“Just a week more than you,” he said. “Couple folks washed out since I joined.”
“It’s easy to get rattled,” she said. “Gotta find some way to stay sane.”
“Got any suggestions?”
She held his gaze for a moment, apparently considering whether to continue this bonding moment.
“I like to be outdoors,” she said, breaking the gaze and staring off into the distance. “Away from the city. There’s this place off the Appalachian Trail I like to go. The Priest. You ever heard of it?”
Ben shook his head.
“It’s really pretty there,” she said. “Away from all this. You almost forget how things are now. There’s a logbook in the shelter where people write their confessions. It’s something else to read them. Especially these days.”
A metallic clang interrupted the conversation; Ben looked over to see Danny Brooks banging a golf club against the bumper of the truck.
“Let’s go,” he called out to them. “This ain’t no goddamn Starbucks!”
Ben felt his skin tighten with heat. The man pushed his every button, the way a child might slide his hand across all the call buttons on an elevator of a very tall building.
“I’ll see you on the truck,” she said.
At six sharp, Ben’s truck pushed out from the depot, groaning and belching diesel smoke as it headed north on Glenside Drive toward the northern part of the county. The air was sticky, and thick clouds hung over the area like a gray blanket. The atmosphere seemed ripe for a thunderstorm at some point in the morning.
Ben rode shotgun while Danny drove; the newbies rode on the back of the truck. Danny was a heavyset, twitchy man, sporting the look of a guy who considered the easy access to porn as the great achievement of the Internet. Under his suit, he wore jeans and a cutoff t-shirt that accentuated his thick but undefined arms. Ben’s dislike of Danny was growing by the hour and was directly proportional to the amount the man talked.
“So we were camping in this trailer park,” Danny was saying. “Up the road a piece, actually. And the Reds are swarming around like flies on shit.”
