Gone

book up and threw it across the room. It skidded across the polished linoleum floor.
    Dahra tried taking several deep breaths. The little girl, Ashley, was crying. Mary was looking at Dahra like she had lost her mind. Cookie was alternating between crying for pills and crying that he needed to pee.
    “Ta care mm buh er,” Bette said. She grabbed Mary’s arm. “Mmm il buh.”
    Bette’s face contorted in pain. And then her features relaxed.
    “Bette,” Dahra said.
    “Bette. Uh-uh, don’t do this, Bette.”
    “Bette,” Dahra whispered.
    She placed two fingers against Bette’s throat.
    “What did she say?” Elwood asked.
    Mary answered. “I think she was asking us to take care of her brother.”
    Dahra lifted her fingers from Bette’s neck. She stroked the girl’s face once, a lingering good-bye.
    “Is she…” Mary couldn’t finish the question.
    “Yes,” Dahra whispered. “There was probably bleeding inside her head, not just outside. Whoever hit her in the head killed her. Elwood, go find Edilio at the firehouse. Tell him we have to bury Bette.”
    “She’s with God now,” Mary said.
    “I’m not sure there is a God in the FAYZ,” Dahra said.

    They buried Bette next to the firestarter in the plaza at one o’clock in the morning. There was no place to keep dead bodies, and no way to prepare the bodies for the grave.
    Edilio dug the hole with his backhoe. The sound of it, the straining of the engine, the sudden jerks of the shovel, seemed horribly loud and horribly out of place.
    Sam was there, along with Astrid and Little Pete; Mary; Albert, who came over from the McDonald’s; Elwood, standing in for Dahra, who had to stay with Cookie; and the twins Anna and Emma. Bette’s little brother was there too, nine years old, sobbing with Mary’s arm around him. Quinn opted not to attend.
    Sam and Edilio had carried Bette’s body the few dozen feet from the church basement to the plaza.
    They couldn’t figure out a gentle or dignified way to lower Bette into the hole, so in the end they just rolled her in. She made a sound like a dropped backpack.
    “We should say something,” Anna suggested. “Maybe things we remember about Bette.”
    So they did, telling what few stories they could remember. None of them had been close friends of hers.
    Astrid began the Lord’s Prayer. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Little Pete said it along with her. More words than anyone had ever heard him speak. The others, all but Sam, joined in.
    Then they each shoveled a spadeful of dirt over her and stood back while Edilio used the backhoe to finish the job.
    “I’ll make her a cross tomorrow,” Edilio said when he was finished.
    As the ceremony was breaking up, Orc and Howard appeared, ghosts in the mist, watching. No one spoke to them. They left after a few minutes.
    “I shouldn’t have let her go home,” Sam said to Astrid.
    “You’re not a doctor. There was no way you could know she had internal bleeding. And, anyway, what could you have done? The question is, what are we going to do now?”
    “What do you want to do?” Sam asked.
    “Orc murdered Bette,” Astrid said flatly. “Maybe he didn’t mean to, but it’s still murder.”
    “Yes. He killed her. So what do you want to do?”
    “At least we can demand that something be done to Orc.”
    “Demand of who?” Sam said. He zipped his jacket. It was chilly. “You want to go demand justice from Caine?”
    “Rhetorical question,” Astrid commented.
    “Does that mean it’s a question I don’t expect you to be able to answer?”
    Astrid nodded. Neither of them had anything to say for a while. Mary and the twins, with Bette’s little brother in tow, headed back to the day care.
    Elwood said, speaking to no one in particular, “I don’t know if Dahra can keep this up much longer.” Then he squared his shoulders and marched back toward the hospital.
    Edilio came and stood with Sam and Astrid. “This can’t just be something that happened,” he said. “You hear me? We let this go, where does it stop? People can’t be beating each other up so bad, they die.”
    “You have a suggestion?” Sam asked coldly.
    “Me? I’m the wetback, remember? I’m not from aroundhere, I don’t even know these people. I’m not the big genius, and I’m not the one with this power thing, man.” He kicked at the dirt, hard, like it was someone he wanted to hurt. He seemed like he might say more, but he bit his lip, spun,