When the Mountain Burned Down

by Craig Rodgers

The year the mountain burned down, they found the bodies.

The fires came over the crest and rolled across the world, through trees standing centuries-long, down grassland hills uncorrupted. They ate miles and homes and lives. They washed away forest that had forever stood, and laid bare hushed secrets buried deep. And then the fires were gone.

The firemen in their neon spacesuits came. They trudged between husks of old forest and left the tracks of their boots in gray dust like the moonmen of old. When they came upon the first body, they did not know what they’d found. A burned out car and a corpse and a hole. Someone called a superior and someone else called the cops and the firemen moved on in those miles of wide desolation.

The cops came, and techs, and surveyors. Trucks of men in coveralls staking and taping and digging. They found another body, and they found another body, and they found another body. Five and ten and a dozen and more. Items were bagged and labeled with numbers and vague descriptions: 0E118 – metal object, 5L474 – soil.

Firemen came and went for days. Some reexamined the destruction, others watched the investigators go about their work. They pulled a truck to the trail’s head and opened a cooler and drank. More came. When a new body turned up, they whooped and cheered.

Detectives came. A big man in a little suit and a little man in a big suit. They asked questions and took statements. They scribbled notes in notepads and listened with a quiet intensity. The little man smoked.

Someone called the newspapermen. They asked questions that had already been asked and some that had not. Some answers were the same and some were not. They wrote down things they heard and some things they did not.

The academics came next, and then a lawyer, and then another. The academics asked questions, and the lawyers asked questions, and when the tests came back, they whooped and cheered. Soil samples, carbon dating, the way the dead were lain. The academics said this is a burial ground, ancient many times over. The detectives said it’s a depository, a big one, a single killer’s body dump. The academics said no. They said the tests say otherwise. The lawyers held up papers and cited arcane hymns. The detectives spoke in curses. The firemen cheered. The academics stopped speaking altogether. The newspapermen wrote it all down.

Some men went off to court, and some went off to wherever it is men go. People talked about the bodies on the mountain and then they went on to talk of other things, and ash blew away, and police tape broke and fell, and soon the dead were left alone together once more.

Craig Rodgers has published several books and intends to publish a few more before he fakes his own death.