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flyblown heap of corpses that had to number in the hundreds. The scavengers had been at them and had dragged bits and pieces off in every direction.
    “ Okay, Fuckhead,” Weeks said. “Take Shit-fer-Brains with you and wade in. Ain’t gonna smell any better ten minutes from now.”
    “ This is ridiculous,” Specs said. “They’re all soft…we’ll need shovels.”
    “ Shut the fuck up, Mama’s Boy. Get in there. You, too, Mr. Fucking Useless. Load that hopper. Let’s go!”
    When we didn’t move fast enough, one of the soldiers cracked a few shots over our heads. But even that only made us drag ourselves forward. When we got to the perimeter of the heap, staring at all those rotting husks and bird-pecked faces and trailing limbs, the rest of the crew just looked at me. Lately, they’d been looking at me a lot. I guess I was the leader of the revolt that we all knew was coming. And I could feel it gathering momentum…electric with potential, just waiting to explode. I think they could, too. We were waiting for a catalyst to light the fuse and it was coming, God yes, it was certainly coming.
    “ Let’s do it,” I told them. “Let’s load that fucking hopper. Then we’ll see.”
    We went at it.
    It was revolting even by the standards set by other such jobs. The corpses were so ripe they pulled apart like boiled chicken. Arms came off, legs came off, moldering flesh pulled right off the bones beneath. We backed the truck up close as we could because this rank, evil-smelling mess had to be thrown in the hopper piecemeal. It took hours. We sweated in our filthy biosuits, enveloped in a gagging cloud of flies and grave-stench.
    Somewhere during the process, Specs lost it.
    He usually didn’t so much as clear his throat around the soldiers, but today was different. Maybe he, too, was feeding off that potential. He was all assholes and elbows, crouched over and digging into the cold cuts, just lost in his work. Sinking his gloved hands deep into that seething, crawling rot, firing it behind him, arms pinwheeling, letting it fly into the hopper. A corpse-worm slid out of the remains of a child and he stomped it to white mush before it could do so much as writhe in the sunlight.
    “ That’s it!” Weeks told him, keeping his distance, his carbine balanced over one shoulder. “That’s the way, Mama’s Boy! Get that shit in the hopper! Got to it, you sonofabitch!”
    This spurred Specs into greater feats of corpse clearing. He dug into the mess, letting limbs and bones and globs of offal fly, almost knocking me on my ass with a stray femur. Then he happened upon a head. The head of a teenage girl. The face was nothing but fungus and corpse jelly oozing from the white skull beneath…but it stopped him dead.
    He held up that head and it had long red hair hanging from the scalp. Hair that was greasy and clotted with filth, but red all the same.
    “ Fuck you doing, Mama’s Boy?” one of the soldiers asked.
    And everyone was kind of wondering the same.
    Specs stood there, trembling, holding that decayed head up. Slime dripped from it and loathsome black beetles crawled over the backs of his hands and up his arms.
    With a gagging, strangled cry, he dropped it.
    It hit the pavement like a moist, soft pumpkin and broke right apart at his feet. Beetles poured from the shattered skull, a crawling flood of them.
    Weeks stepped back even further, of course.
    Specs kept making that gagging sound.
    The head was the catalyst we were waiting for.
    I stood up from the carrion pile. My white biosuit was smeared gray and black with corpse waste. I brushed some stray maggots off my sleeve. “Hey? You okay, Specs… Specs? You okay, man?”
    “ Get to work!” Weeks shouted.
    But we were ignoring him. Specs was having an episode and maybe we were filthy with decaying flesh and corpse slime and maybe we spent our days juggling human remains at gunpoint, but all this bonded us together. Made us stronger. Made us care for each