Elephant Graveyard

“It’s coming isn’t it?” Grey asked.

“It’s coming.” Toliver reflected. “It’s the old adage to a more literal term.” He continued as Grey turned to face him.

“Meaning what?”

“Let the dead bury the dead.” Toliver spat a wad of dry saliva from his crusting peeling lips. It was a thick sludge, it’s color had been tinged a burnt-orange as it mixed with the desert sand. Grey began itching his arm as he casually watched Tolivers freshly spat slime crawl itself down the slope stretching thinner as it went. Grey flinched as he accidentally popped one of his sores with his nail. It spewed a small ooze of brown.

“Damn it. I didn’t have these last week.”

“They say the more of those you rupture, the faster you kick the bucket dumb ass. You probably got it from someone else here at the Elephant Graveyard.”

Yes, Grey thought. This designated camp for the diseased, this place of the undesirable living. A place to send those who are a canker to the world and must be cut out. Grey rubbed off the puss and continued to stare into the distance with Toliver.

Then he saw it, just around the corner of the mountain as it did before when they first arrived. It was a beastly looking vehicle with red stripes down the side. The metal around the wheel roared and echoed up the mountainside toward them in the distance. It has finally come. A bus full of more infected, more of those who are about to pass away and by law must be disposed of in a safe manner. After all of the posters, the voice spots, and the television inspirational announcements, no cure was found. It was determined by some that this new disease was an act of God and therefore will not have a cure. The one God for every member of the encampment was the bus trailing its dust toward the Elephant Graveyard. Augural, and full of vengeance.

“How many do you think?” Grey said aloud. Toliver spat again at the ground. “It was a civil war when our bus got here. We had a big group then, full bus. Remember? You think those guys on that there bus even understand? I know I didn’t.”

Toliver blinked, then looked at the ground. Grey glanced down the hillside behind him to the main camp. A large cement platform covered by an open metal roof sat lamely over the red rocks. North of it were the remnants of an enclosed brick and mortar building with a long chimney prodding at the sky.

“I said do you remem..”

“Yeah I heard you. It’s a sick joke.”

“I’d never seen anything like it. It’s funny, you hear about murders on the news all the time but you’ll never see a dead body unless it’s in a mortuary laid down with respect. I can’t believe I didn’t get hurt or worse. If you hadn't killed that kid who’d come at me from behind I would have been firewood in the chimney building long ago. What’s odd is that building reminds me of an abandoned factory I’d drive by on my way to Indianapolis.”

“Well welcome to middle-of-nowhere Utah.”

Tolivers brow creased into a stern look. Grey brushed off Toliver and continued.

“Back home in Indiana my little girl and I loved to go visit the city. Her favorite place to eat was always this terrible diner with the most fatty burgers you’d ever eat on the east coast. Stake and Shake. The chili cheese fries had a pool of grease that I swore would be eating through the cardboard container to the table by the time we finished them. Then right after I’d walk off the heartburn by the White River that flowed through the center of town. The best was at night in the summers, around this time of year actually. She and I would be sitting on the porch tasting the humid air, listening to the creaking of the swing. Her feet would dangle over the edge of the seat, and I’d rock us forward and backward. Fireflies would drift off in the distance of the fields and she’d call them ‘the special summer snow’ because I guess it reminded her of glowing blinking snowflakes. Who really can explain the logic of a kid huh? I sure do miss her.”

Toliver sat for a second looking at Grey, then reared his head back in a laughing mock, his lips chopped and spiked from dried cracked skin on them.

“Tasting the humid air…” Toliver said in a mocking deep voice to mimic Grey’s. Grey felt sheepish and picked up a rock half the size of his palm and began to rub the smooth surface with his thumb and forefinger. Toliver inhaled a lasting breath letting it go, feeling a deepness inside himself also let go and a darkness of thought that spread through his body.

“Shut up.” Grey said forcefully.

“You’re thinking of home? This is home now. Fifty, that’s the magic number, that’s as many beds as we got, how much rations per day, and there’s no sharing. You’d kill me if you’d thought I was better off dead before that bus gets here and starts bloodbath part deux. Although, I could kill you first. I’d finally get that bunk farther from the open side so I’d avoid all that desert rain.” Toliver gave a dark sarcastic smile. “I’m a reasonable man. I know that I’m too far along in this disease to really put up much of a fight. The bus will come and I’ll take up room in the incinerator this time around. Hell, I think it’s time I just put myself first in line.” Toliver coughed.

Grey was not amused by this speech and remained focused on the stone in his palm. Toliver continued.

“You know what we are to the rest of the world now? Walking dead is too cliché a phrase to use, but in this instance admit it, it’s a perfect fit. Your daughter, you really think she’ll take you back and still love you for the diseased misery that you are right now?”

Toliver’s smile was eerie and full of gloom. He looked toward the direction of the dirt road and the small metal bus that was slowly and subtly growing bigger.

“Where is your home, Toliver?”

“I’m Hopi, so I’m from the reservation just south of here near the Arizona border.”

“I thought the reservation was off limits.”

“Well I’m sure they were happy to tell you that. Anyone who resisted was shot. I remember seeing a barn owl the day before actually. Resting on a dried out arm of a tree. Normally I don't see them during the day.”

“Why do you remember an owl?”

“Native Americans believe they are representations of death, rebirth…” Toliver felt a racked breath rattle through his chest. “Transformation.”

“You don’t ever think about home?”

“No Grey. I don’t.” Toliver said with curt finality looking away from the road to the sky. Moments passed.

“I’m someone who can’t let go of the past. I still somehow feel like I’ve got a future ahead of me. You seem to approach this Elephant Graveyard like it is duty, destiny, or set path you are doomed to go down so you do it with dignity. I admire you for it. You’ve always been the strong one. Even when our bus got here I couldn’t kill for my life, so you killed for the both of us.”

“Some good it did us!” Toliver burst out, throwing a fist full of sand in front of him. Grey’s expression turned into alarm scooting away from Toliver a few inches. Toliver continued to speak.

“I’m flattered, Grey, but I don’t know what’s so dignified to you. I hate myself.” Toliver turned his haggard body and dry cracked lips toward Grey revealing hardship, and exhaustion in his eyes. Toliver turned away again, wrapping his arms around his torso tightly, slowly rocking himself. His voice was no longer strong and decisive but that of feeble dismay. “I have never done anything like that before. Every part of my human heart told me to let go of that teenagers neck. He squirmed and scratched at me and I held fast pressing him into the sand.” Toliver took a shuddered breath. “The worst was when he’d tried calling out.” Toliver stopped rocking. Taking out his hands he stared at his filthy skin, studying them, rubbing them together rigorously as if he wanted to scrub out the feeling in them. “I could sense his Adams apple gurgling and shifting under my palms. When he finally went limp, the knuckles on my hands were white. Blood squeezed out of my fists ringed around his larynx. I remember how cold my fingers felt until I let him go, then all the blood circulated back to them. I never forgot that feeling.” Toliver put his hands back around his body, hugging himself tightly.

Grey’s hand had enclosed around his rock, the curves digging into his skin as he listened intently to Toliver’s confessional.

“Really take a long look at this broken man you’ve clung to in this place. Describe to me what you see?” Toliver’s voice was soft and pleading, his head bent in sorrow.

Grey looked Toliver over. His skin was tan, but lacked a healthy brown look, it was thin and peeled in spots, balding him down to almost raw-meat-red from the sun and open sores. His clothes were the same ones he wore when he and Grey first arrived here on the bus together. All of which no longer resembled the colors they once were. His face was sunken and gaunt with shadows from the noonday sun above them. Toliver shook his head and placed his hands over his eyes his body shaking. As he stifled his tears with audible sniffing, he spat once more of the brownish-orange sludge to the ground.

“Alone, sick, and killer. It’s all that I am now until I die. So I welcome death.”

Grey craned his neck to see where the bus was on its path, it was closer now. So much so he began to see the outline of passengers through the window. He took a lasting breath letting it go. Grey pushed himself up off the ground standing straight up. Looking down into his hand he cocked his arm back and threw the stone as far as it would fly across the air before them.

“We’re tired and we’re sick, but I won’t let you die alone. I understand the end comes for both of us as soon as that bus gets here.” Grey turned around walking up to Toliver, crouching eye level with him. “Maybe it will be quick, maybe it will hurt, maybe we’ll find heaven, and maybe we’ll just disappear. The point is we won’t be here anymore.” He grabbed both Tolivers shoulders shaking him into attention to look him in the eye.

“I love my daughter, but a thought occurred to me just now, she remembers me the way I was. Same as I remember her, not who I am now and that’s everything to me.” Grey’s voice was beginning to crack out into echoes that every human soul recognizes as despair. Toliver nodded his head and started to take heaving breaths as free tears flowed from the corner of his eyes. Grey began to quietly cry with him. Toliver grabbed Grey’s shirt collar pulling him in wrapping his arms around Grey’s neck and back beginning to sob aloud as he embraced him.

“They’ll remember us the way we were. Not now. Not now.” Toliver panted in reverence.

“No.” Grey’s response muffled into the shoulder of Tolivers shirt.

“They won’t see me as a murderer, a leper when I’m gone?” He whimpered.

“No. They will remember you as a father, husband, son, and brother.”

“Will I be forgiven?” Toliver whispered.

They let go of one another, wiping their noses and regaining their composure. The desert wind cascaded around them from the sandy mountainside whistling in their ears. Grey looked to the road once more across the rooftop of the chimney building and felt a cold rush spike through his veins.

A while barn owl perched on its cement chimney looking at Grey.

“You’re a good man Grey.” Toliver spoke quietly into Grey’s shoulder.

“You too.” He said, turning back to lean his head on the top of Tolivers head.

They held hands in a two-fisted grip. Both of them whispered out last words and thoughts that anyone nearby would place as a prayer. But a prayer to where they wouldn’t be able to say.

The metal bus growled pulling up to the gate below the two men sitting on the hill. The gate creaked and shuddered open as the bus rolled in.