Gravedigger
It started out small. Disasters usually do.
One person got sick. Didn't feel so good. Maybe they stayed home, maybe they went to work.
Either way, it had started, and it started to spread. From one sick person to ten, then a hundred, then an entire city. People say it started in New York City, and that's how it got across the ocean. Spread to Europe, to Africa and Asia and the Americas. They're saying NYC destroyed the world.
It took about a month for it to reach us. Airborne, so barricades didn't keep it out. It floated its way down to us, following the coast, and we had no way to cope.
People started dying.
At first, the city had enough to at least deal with the dead. City people had hazmat suits, gasmasks, all the things needed to keep from getting infected. They could manage to get to the bodies, to take them away and bury them.
When they couldn't bury bodies anymore, they burned them. Even after the city fell apart, they kept burning bodies. People just dragged their own relatives to the fire pits and tossed them in.
But once the fires went out, no one knew what to do. The pits weren't burning, so the bodies just piled up until the pits were full, then people started leaving bodies in the streets, maybe just hoping someone would come and take them away.
It was Jake's idea first. He used to work for the city, so he knew the bodies couldn't just stay there. He told us that even if the bodies weren't contagious, they were dangerous. Dogs had gone feral, and they'd eat the bodies and maybe attack healthy people looking for food. And Jake was always the sort to look for a chance for profit.
It was just me and Jake and Adam at first. We buried our first body for nothing, without being asked. It was a kid, just lying in the yard and decomposing. We took it out to a lot, dug a hole in the far corner, and buried it.
The second and third ones, a girl probably fourteen found us and told us her parents were dead. She offered us two bottles of water each to bury them, and we took it.
Word got out. We staked claim to that lot and started burying bodies. Sometimes people brought them to us, sometimes they asked us to come get the bodies from them. Adam had a truck and we all had shovels, and that was all we needed. People gave us food, water, clothes, gas, anything they could spare.
Jake got sick. Adam and me, we'd both gotten sick but lived through it. Jake wasn't so lucky. We carved his name on the boards at the front of the lot and buried him, and then it was just me and Adam.
Our city was huge when the infection hit, and it had still been big when the government stopped working. Just Adam and me couldn't handle it all, so we started recruiting.
Orphans, mostly, kids who'd had to do it all themselves and grew up strong. Bodies were heavy, and the ground was hard to break. Even on the coast, it got cold, and the ground froze solid, but there were still bodies to be buried, so we picked the strong ones.
Adam liked to say we were heroes. That the disease stopped spreading because of what we did. Adam wasn't all that smart, but he was a good digger. We had almost a dozen kids working for us, so I had to keep track of pay and who got buried in which lot, and by the time people stopped dying, me and Adam were rich.
When you hear the word gravedigger, you think of some old guy with a dishonest face digging holes in the dead of night. But we were proud to be gravediggers, and the city was glad to have us. Even after the disease wound down and everyone started to rebuild, people would bring their dead to us. The new city mayor gave us a nice big plot of land and we turned it into a proper graveyard. I learned to carve headstones, Adam made us a fence, and his wife, who was the most religious person in town, started saying prayers over the graves.
Before the disease struck, I was just an ordinary person with an ordinary job selling pizzas. I didn't like death, I didn't like dead bodies. I wasn't trained or anything. Someone just told me something needed doing, and I did it.
I replaced the boards with stones at all the lots. There are seventeen lots all over the city, all with fences and stones next to the gates. The smallest one has 63 bodies in it. The biggest one, the one right near town hall, has 152. We buried some 5000 bodies in about four months.
The power plant started working again last month. We've got a mayor. There's word some big truck full of oil's headed our way, that the country's got a government again. Life's going back to how it used to be.
I'm a stonemason and a carver. I make furniture, headstones, steps, statues, anything people want me to make them. I'm an artist and an upstanding member of the community. But I plan to carve my own headstone, and when I do, I'm not putting any of that on it.
I'm carving my name, my date of birth, and the one word that means the most to me: gravedigger.
One person got sick. Didn't feel so good. Maybe they stayed home, maybe they went to work.
Either way, it had started, and it started to spread. From one sick person to ten, then a hundred, then an entire city. People say it started in New York City, and that's how it got across the ocean. Spread to Europe, to Africa and Asia and the Americas. They're saying NYC destroyed the world.
It took about a month for it to reach us. Airborne, so barricades didn't keep it out. It floated its way down to us, following the coast, and we had no way to cope.
People started dying.
At first, the city had enough to at least deal with the dead. City people had hazmat suits, gasmasks, all the things needed to keep from getting infected. They could manage to get to the bodies, to take them away and bury them.
When they couldn't bury bodies anymore, they burned them. Even after the city fell apart, they kept burning bodies. People just dragged their own relatives to the fire pits and tossed them in.
But once the fires went out, no one knew what to do. The pits weren't burning, so the bodies just piled up until the pits were full, then people started leaving bodies in the streets, maybe just hoping someone would come and take them away.
It was Jake's idea first. He used to work for the city, so he knew the bodies couldn't just stay there. He told us that even if the bodies weren't contagious, they were dangerous. Dogs had gone feral, and they'd eat the bodies and maybe attack healthy people looking for food. And Jake was always the sort to look for a chance for profit.
It was just me and Jake and Adam at first. We buried our first body for nothing, without being asked. It was a kid, just lying in the yard and decomposing. We took it out to a lot, dug a hole in the far corner, and buried it.
The second and third ones, a girl probably fourteen found us and told us her parents were dead. She offered us two bottles of water each to bury them, and we took it.
Word got out. We staked claim to that lot and started burying bodies. Sometimes people brought them to us, sometimes they asked us to come get the bodies from them. Adam had a truck and we all had shovels, and that was all we needed. People gave us food, water, clothes, gas, anything they could spare.
Jake got sick. Adam and me, we'd both gotten sick but lived through it. Jake wasn't so lucky. We carved his name on the boards at the front of the lot and buried him, and then it was just me and Adam.
Our city was huge when the infection hit, and it had still been big when the government stopped working. Just Adam and me couldn't handle it all, so we started recruiting.
Orphans, mostly, kids who'd had to do it all themselves and grew up strong. Bodies were heavy, and the ground was hard to break. Even on the coast, it got cold, and the ground froze solid, but there were still bodies to be buried, so we picked the strong ones.
Adam liked to say we were heroes. That the disease stopped spreading because of what we did. Adam wasn't all that smart, but he was a good digger. We had almost a dozen kids working for us, so I had to keep track of pay and who got buried in which lot, and by the time people stopped dying, me and Adam were rich.
When you hear the word gravedigger, you think of some old guy with a dishonest face digging holes in the dead of night. But we were proud to be gravediggers, and the city was glad to have us. Even after the disease wound down and everyone started to rebuild, people would bring their dead to us. The new city mayor gave us a nice big plot of land and we turned it into a proper graveyard. I learned to carve headstones, Adam made us a fence, and his wife, who was the most religious person in town, started saying prayers over the graves.
Before the disease struck, I was just an ordinary person with an ordinary job selling pizzas. I didn't like death, I didn't like dead bodies. I wasn't trained or anything. Someone just told me something needed doing, and I did it.
I replaced the boards with stones at all the lots. There are seventeen lots all over the city, all with fences and stones next to the gates. The smallest one has 63 bodies in it. The biggest one, the one right near town hall, has 152. We buried some 5000 bodies in about four months.
The power plant started working again last month. We've got a mayor. There's word some big truck full of oil's headed our way, that the country's got a government again. Life's going back to how it used to be.
I'm a stonemason and a carver. I make furniture, headstones, steps, statues, anything people want me to make them. I'm an artist and an upstanding member of the community. But I plan to carve my own headstone, and when I do, I'm not putting any of that on it.
I'm carving my name, my date of birth, and the one word that means the most to me: gravedigger.