The Weight of the Dead by Brian Hodge Page B

as her father’s back was turned, opposite her baby brother, as though Jeremy didn’t count. Hunsicker, that was his name. He always stood like he was in a saddle, and had the littlest eyes she’d ever seen. The girls had a joke about him: he calls you “hon” and you just feel sicker.
    â€œHow do you figure that?” Melody asked.
    â€œThere’s been some that survived it. They didn’t catch nothing from the Rot that they couldn’t get over.”
    â€œYeah?” By now Jeremy was peering around from her other side, red faced and snuffle nosed and ready to grab on to anything that smelled like hope. She let his hand go and wrapped her arm around his head and pulled him against her and trusted she’d covered his ears. “Were they anybody you knew? You sat down and talked to them after they got to come back?”
    Hunsicker worked his tongue inside one cheek. “It was a little before my time. But they say it’s happened.”
    â€œYeah, well, they say there’s been men that have walked on the moon, too, but do you believe that?”
    His eyes got so narrow they almost vanished and he seemed to bristle, and even though she didn’t want to, she imagined what the weight of him had to feel like, and the smell of him under his clothes. Then his face relaxed again and he reached out to twirl a lock of her coal-black hair around his finger, and when it started to tug tight against her scalp, he gave it one last yank and let it go.
    â€œYou keep the faith, little sister,” he said. “And if there’s anything you need…”
    She told him he’d be the first to know, because that’s what you did. You didn’t outright tell them no and make them mad enough to think they had to teach you a lesson in manners and being neighborly.
    Then her heart seemed to stop awhile, and plunge from her chest through to the bottom of her belly as she watched her father struggle through the gate, but really, from behind, all anyone could see was more corpse than living man, until the gate closed and there was nothing to see at all.
    Melody ran for the wall, dragging Jeremy at her side. He stumbled along to keep up, blind with tears and the back of his free hand smearing everything across his face. When she got to the north wall watchtower, the one her grandfather manned, she told Jeremy to stay at the bottom and not move, then she raced up the steps made of logs shaved flat, up and around again, like a square spiral, until she stood at the top platform, looking down on the fields and forests, and her father trudging resolutely in between.
    He was headed for the tree line, every step as ponderous as if he carried on his shoulders not just the weight of a dead man, but the weight of a dead world.
    She watched him go by, as slow a passage as the midday sun across the sky, until he was headed away from her again, and all she could see was Tom Harkin’s livid back and slack limbs. Once they got far enough away, weaving between the first spindly trees of the woods, it seemed as if the dead man was floating, and she supposed that was true enough, because now he was a ghost that would probably haunt her father to his grave.
    *   *   *
    Over the past two days, she’d learned all there was to know about the punishment known as the Rot, starting just after the men had showed up to detain her father for braining Tom Harkin. She’d feared what was coming even before the village council had rendered the judgment official.
    The way her grandfather remembered, it had begun in the years after the Day the Sun Roared, and the World Ago shut down. Nothing ran anymore, he said. Three generations later you could still see the wooden crosses along the roads, at least the ones that hadn’t fallen down, many of them now green with plants that liked to climb, and some of them still dangling thick cables, like dead snakes. “Power lines,” he