We dragged the still-twitching corpses and threw them into a pit. I tried not to gag. Mickey was waiting there with a gas can. He baptized each new occupant as solemly as a priest, liberally shaking the can over what remained of their clothes. I don’t know of he was fearless, stupid, or just didn’t care anymore but he did his job with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Mickey took a long drag and then nodded to the most recent addition- a blonde girl that would have been a knockout except that her skin bore the unhealthy yellow tinge of the sickly and worse, the side of her neck was a mess of jagged flesh. “That all of ’em?”

I looked away from the squirming in the pit below. “Yeah.”

“Good.” Mickey emptied the rest on to the girl and took a rolled up newspaper out of his pocket. Romney grinned back from the rounded contours of the front page. Raising the newspaper up to his cigarette, Mickey waited until the fire poured like water down the paper and then threw it into the pit.

The dead never screamed.