Free Campbell by C. S. Starr

sympathetic, heavy smile as he dipped his feet in the Bauman’s pool. “And your mom, and everyone else.”
    “Me too…about yours,” Tal replied, wiping his eyes, embarrassed by the crack in his voice that seemed to have formed from so much crying. “Adam’s figuring out how we…what we do with him now.”
    Joe Bauman was in the basement, under a heavy quilt. Cold. Still. One day he’d been teaching his boys how to make a few different easy meals, and the next he was shaking, shivering, unable to get warm. Then all the heat left his body and he’d stopped moving, for the first time in his life.
    That was the night before. Tal missed him already, with an indescribable ache in his heart. What didn’t help was that when he thought about his dad, it reminded him of the rest, and he found himself mourning all over again for all of them. His aunt Alex wasn’t doing well either, and they all knew it was a matter of time.
    “Do you think we’re next?” Connor asked absentmindedly. “That we’re all just going to go?”
    “I don’t know,” Tal shrugged. “Hard to say, I guess.”
    “I guess we’ll know when we know.”  
    Both boys looked up to see Adam tapping on the screen door, nodding at them to come inside. They stood and walked into the kitchen to find the Bauman/Schmidt family sitting around the table.
    “Alex is gone,” Adam said quietly. “We’ve got to do something with them. Leah was on the phone for an hour trying to get in touch with someone to take them but there’s no one. Everyone’s...” he swallowed, glancing at tiny Rachel, Tal’s littlest cousin, who was seated on the floor between her sister’s legs. “There’s no one to handle this.”
    Connor and Tal exchanged a dark look. “Okay?”
    “We have to bury them,” Tal’s middle brother Rob said, taking a deep breath as tears welled up behind his eyes. He’d been handling things worse than anyone, and Tal had found him crying more than once in the bathroom, which usually got Tal threats of punching if he told anyone.  
    “You’re just going to bury them?” Connor said in disbelief. “Just dig a hole? You can’t do—”
    “Yeah, we can,” Adam said bluntly. “And that’s what we’re doing.”
    Connor was Tal’s friend, and he’d been around since he was a toddler, but Adam thought he was easily one of the most annoying kids he’d ever met and had told Tal so several times that week. “It’s not so different from what’s done. We’ve been to enough of these things this year to be able to do one ourselves. Time for you to go home.”
    The graveyard was about five miles from their house, and an hour later, Joe Bauman and Alexandra Schmidt were laid to rest in two shallow graves beside their much more elegantly buried spouses. Each kid took their turn tossing dirt on the grave and took a minute to say their goodbyes.  
    Adam, the only one with a driver's license albeit not a full one, drove them home in silence. He, along with his cousin Mark, made dinner for everyone, and provided them with a reassuring smile or a hug if they needed it. They’d all promised their parents they’d do what they needed to to ensure life went on.  
    What that life looked like had yet to be revealed.  

    September 2012
    Campbell

    “We found them walking through town,” Joey, the big Mormon kid who had once bullied Lucy in school, announced. “They say they’re here to help.”
    Lucy glanced at her brother who, arms crossed and scowling replied, “We don’t need any help. Get them out of here.”
    Andrew Campbell was the oldest; at twenty-two, one of the oldest anywhere. He looked it. His twenty-two years were really more like forty Lucy often said, and she held onto a lot of the blame for that, no matter how many times he told her she didn’t have to. He looked like Cole and Lucy, with their grey eyes and dark hair, but was broader and stronger, with a great capacity for violence. Without anyone to keep him in check, that