Apocalypsis 04 - Haven

done he threw the mask back over his face. The smell had to be unbelievable.
    I sighed. “Well, I guess we can cross Jamal off the shoveling bodies crew.”
    Derek reached out and took it. “I’ll do it. Someone hold the bag open for me.”
    Winky stepped up with a bag and tried to hold it open. She was struggling, so I moved over to help. Between the two of us, we were able to make it ready so Derek could put the shoveled gore inside.
    “Well, dis is an ugly business, but soon it will be done. Come on,” said Bodo, gesturing to Gretchen. He grabbed a black bag and walked over to a short stack of bodies. After setting the bag down on the ground he reached up and wrestled the top body off.
    Gretchen jumped to the side as it fell into a messy pile at his feet.
    Bodo looked down. “I don’t pray very often, but today I am gonna pray for every one of dese poor peoples in here. Dis is a bad way to be dead. Dis is a problem for me.” He pulled the bag over and worked with Gretchen to get it around the person’s upper body.
    When they were done, the legs were still outside the bag. The only way they were going to fit inside would be if they were bent up in weird ways or taken off, and none of us were prepared to do that.
    I stood up straight, abandoning my bag-holding duties. Derek was already breathing heavily from the shoveling and dumping, and we hadn’t even finished one body clean-up.
    “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “It’s too much. We don’t have the right tools.” I put my hands on my hips. “What the hell are we going to do?”
    “We could just light the whole thing on fire,” said Flick. He was standing in the entrance, looking inside.
    Bodo stood and stepped away from his task. “Yes. Let’s make a fire. It is faster and better for da environment.”
    “Except for the whole breathing bone-smoke into our lungs part,” said Gretchen, sarcasm lacing her words.
    “It’s not a bad idea, really,” said Ronald.
    I looked at him like he’d left a critical piece of his common sense in the lobby. “Dude. We can’t set fire to our home .”
    “We can set fire to this fridge unit, though. I mean, it’s metal all around. It’s totally insulated. We’ll never use it as a fridge again, and we have fire extinguishers to keep it from getting out of hand.” He pointed to several spots on the wall where the red canisters were mounted.
    I really wanted to know what Peter thought about this idea. I didn’t feel confident noodling through all the ramifications on my own.
    “What’s the matter?” asked Winky. “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m thinking I want to know what Peter thinks.”
    “You don’t need Peter, just ask us. We’ll vote.”
    Everyone stepped out of the fridge and gathered by the door, Jamal too once he’d re-donned his hood.
    We stood in a circle. “Okay, so we need to vote. I don’t feel comfortable making this decision without you guys weighing in. We can torch this whole thing and burn everything inside if you want, but the problems I see are that there are no windows in this room and there’s going to be a lot of smoke. Plus, the fire could get out of control and then we’d burn our whole house down.”
    “Talk about screwed,” said Winky.
    “Exactly,” I said, searching the others’ faces. “Anyone else have any input?”
    Derek was looking up on the ceiling. “There are exhaust vents in here. Smoke rises. Maybe we could open them up a little more and get the smoke to go in those?”
    “How do we do that?” I asked.
    “I have no idea,” he said.
    “How about this …,” said Gretchen, “… we start the fire and see what happens. If it gets out of hand, we put it out. We’ll stand here in our masks, which should help against the smoke, and be ready with the extinguishers.”
    I looked around and no one seemed to be shooting the idea down. It wasn’t ideal, but I couldn’t think of anything better.
    “Okay, let’s take a vote. Fire or no fire. Yes? Raise your hand.”
    All of the hands in the circle went up.
    “Okay, fine. Fire it is. We need to each have at least two extinguishers. And someone needs to tell the group out front what we’re doing, so they don’t panic when they see or smell the smoke.”
    “I’ll do that,” said Jamal, disappearing out of the room in a flash. He seemed very anxious to put some distance between himself and the fridge, and I didn’t blame him one bit.
    “We’ll go find some extinguishers. Come on,