Ashes by Haunted Computer Books

hurry the
private along. The lieutenant finished with the Union officer and
joined them.
    "Tibbets," said the lieutenant.
"Eighty-Second New York."
    Tibbets. Wilkie tried the name on his tongue,
pushed it against his teeth. Tibbets, a man with family somewhere,
a man who may have enlisted under the same sense of duty that had
brought Wilkie to their shared destination. A man. A name.
    A corpse.
    Flies buzzed about them. They reached the
front gate and laid the corpse out in the line of the twenty other
fresh dead just inside the wall. Tibbets would rest there until the
morning, feeding flies in the company of his cold comrades. Wilkie
and the other Confederates left the compound as the Union soldiers
dispersed. A single death was not the subject of much rumination,
not when thousands had already made their final exit through those
gates.
    Wilkie had grave detail the next morning. He
had slept fitfully, his dreams haunted by Tibbets's rigid face. He
waited by the wagon while Union soldiers tossed the corpses as
casually as if stacking cordwood. Another fifty had died during the
night, and the air was ripe with disease. When the first wagon was
full, it began its trip to the dead-house, where the corpses were
counted.
    The Union volunteers marched in the wagon's
wake, Wilkie bringing up the rear. When they reached the
dead-house, the corpses were unloaded and brought inside for
identification. This gave the prisoners a little free time. Some
sat against trees, smoking, but a few slipped into the bushes
surrounding the dead-house. They were the hucksters, ones who
smuggled goods inside and profited from the hardship and
deprivation of their fellow soldiers.
    Guards were scattered around the grounds, and
escape was rare. The Confederates turned a half-blind eye to the
trading. An unwritten rule was that a huckster had to share a
portion of his trade goods, slipping some eggs, tobacco, or the
occasional greenback to the captors. It was a system that worked
well, the kind of thing befitting a civilized camp. Except for
those on the inside who had no money or barter.
    Wilkie went into the shade of the woods and
rested his musket against an oak. To the left of him was the mass
cemetery, a long shallow ditch waiting for the day's dead. The thin
layer of loose clay over the bodies did little to quell the stench
of decay. Five thousand were already buried here, according to the
corpse counters.
    Wilkie lit his corncob pipe. The tobacco was
stale, but at least it burned the smell of death from his
nostrils.
    He heard a rustle in a nearby laurel thicket.
"Is that you, Yankee?" he said, to warn the prisoner not to attempt
escape.
    The bushes shimmied and the waxen leaves
parted. A man in a shabby Union uniform stepped out. Wilkie first
saw the toes protruding from the boots, then his gaze traveled
slowly past the bloodied rips in the tunic to the man's face. The
top of his skull was peeled away, but Wilkie knew that face, those
eyes.
    Tibbets.
    Wilkie grabbed for his musket, accidentally
knocking it to the ground. As he fell to his knees and scrabbled
for it among the leaves, the boots approached, crackling in the
dead loam and forest detritus. Wilkie gripped the musket and
brought it to bear. What good was a musket ball against a dead
man?
    Tibbets stopped several feet away. His hands
were spread wide, palms up. The dark eyes were solemn, the lips
pressed tight. He was waiting.
    "I . . . I didn't mean to kill you," Wilkie
sputtered.
    Tibbets said nothing.
    A single sentence flew out from the chaos of
Wilkie's thoughts: You can't talk when you're dead.
    But neither could you walk. Neither could you
stand there before the man who had shot you and make some silent
pleading demand.
    Tibbets raised his arms higher, then looked
briefly heavenward. Wilkie followed the dead man's gaze. Nothing up
there but a rag-barrel's worth of clouds and the screaming orange
eye of the sun.
    When Wilkie looked again at Tibbets, the
corpse's hands were full of