Breakout (Final Dawn) by Darrell Maloney

four full sized caskets of various types. Some were metal, some were oak or mahogany. Some were plain and some were very ornate.
         They selected a plain white casket to bury their mother in. It suited her personality, they thought. Now they were trying to figure the best way to retrieve it from its nest in the center of the trailer.
         “Can we help?” Hannah offered.
         The boys hadn’t even realized that Hannah and Sarah were there.
         Mark looked at his wife, standing at the door of the trailer.
         “Oh, hi. How long have you guys been there?”
         “We just walked up. I guess it’s time to bury Mom and Bill Meyers?”
         “Yes. This was Mom’s favorite time of year. I think she’d want it to be now. And yes, you can help, if you can drive the forklift for us.”
         Sarah said, “Let me. I’ve had more practice on it. We don’t want to drop any of these and damage them.”
         Her implication, of course, was that they’d need all of them eventually. Everyone expected to live out the rest of their lives at the compound, since the world outside it had become an unfriendly and dangerous place.
         But she didn’t elaborate further and no one else felt a need to comment.
         Sarah retrieved the forklift from the opposite side of the pad of pavement and brought it to the rear of the trailer. Bryan and Mark unstacked t he first of the caskets, turned it sideways and slid it onto the forklift’s tines.
         Hannah went after two pieces of 4 by 4 lumber and laid them side by side on the pavement, about six feet apart. They would serve as dunnage, allowing Sarah to lower the casket down on them so that she could drive out from under the casket and go back for the next one.
         Within an hour, they removed the white casket and set it aside.
         Now came the hard part.
         “You girls are tighter with Roxanne and Rachel than any of us will ever be. Would you mind asking them to come out to pick one out for their dad before we put them back in?”
         The boys took a break, sitting on the back of the trailer and reliving memories of their mother, and how she kept everyone from going nuts their first months in the mine. She was the glue that held the group together, and her passing had been hard on everyone.
         T en minutes later Hannah and Sarah came back out of the building, Rachel and Roxanne in tow.
         The boys watched silently as the girls went from crate to crate, peering into fold down inspection widows precut in the cardboard linings. As they neared the last of the caskets sitting in the lot, Mark offered, “If you don’t like any of those, we’ll help you up here and you can look at the rest.”
         Rachel, the youngest of the two, looked up at him, and he noticed for the first time that there were tears in her eyes. Rachel was eighteen now, and had turned into a fine woman since she and her sister had joined the group. They were both an integral part of their family now, and Mark’s heart hurt at what she must be feeling.
         Roxanne said, “I like this one over here. The dark oak. I think he’d like it. What do you think, Rachel?”
         “I agree. I think if he were to pick out his own casket, it would look something like that.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 21
     
         The boys took the two caskets to the large storage building in the center of the compound and then went back to put the remainder of the caskets back into the trailer. The four of them, Mark, Bryan, David and Brad, spent half a day moving the bodies one at a time through the tunnel and to the caskets, and laid them gently inside.
         They were amazed at how light the bodies had become. The salt mounds that had covered them since their deaths had absorbed all of their bodily fluids and had mummified the corpses. There was a