The Green grave

Pencil note in the margin of the archival copy:

“Supplies terminated. Cashbox empty. Forget.””

Cat woke because she could not breathe.

The air in the barracks had become as thick as cotton wool. It settled on her tongue like a heavy, damp lump, smelling of rotting leaves and stagnant river water. The ceiling had disappeared — the rafters were swallowed by gray, sticky mist. The sheets she had wrapped herself in during the night felt wet, as if they had just been pulled from the river. The skin beneath them itched with a fine, irritating rash. Cat ran her hand over the bed. The fabric breathed the cold, corrosive mold of the Amazon, which turns cotton into dust in a single night and wool into rotting felt.

She sat up, touched her face with her palm. Her fingers caught a sticky gray coating — a mixture of sweat and coal dust that had seeped through the gaps in the walls. Her dark tangled hair stuck to her temples in wet strands. Cat pushed it back with effort. The moisture penetrated her pores, filled every cell, turning her body into a sponge. On her neck and collarbones, her fingers left dark smears. They did not dry — they only grew greasier, as if she had slept at the bottom of a muddy swamp.

Rick sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her, staring at the wall. He had not slept all night. Cat could tell by his shoulders, locked in a dry muscular cramp, by his fingers rolling the rusty greasy nut in his trouser pocket. His unbuttoned collar revealed shoulder blades with purple stripes from the hard back of a chair. The man turned his head. His bloodshot eyes were laced with a web of red veins; the dark hollows beneath them looked like the imprints of someone else’s fingers pressed into his face. His cheeks were overgrown with stiff gray stubble. Droplets of mist gleamed on the hairs like dew on dead grass.

“You didn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, cracked.

“Couldn’t,” Rick forced the words out with a metallic note of exhaustion. “Noise all around. Every minute I heard knocking. Thought they were breaking into the depots, stealing tools. Lay there and counted axe blows. Thirty-seven. Counted thirty-seven while telling myself it was just the wind snapping dry branches. And then another thirty-eight when I realized the truth. I just listened to this forest swallowing the camp piece by piece.”

Cat sat down beside him, pressing her forehead to his shoulder. Under the engineer’s skin, tight knots of muscle rolled. His heavy, ragged breathing mingled with her inhalations. Rick smelled of iron, soot, and sour sweat. A familiar smell of home. But now a new scent was mixed in — pungent, raw, the smell of fear. It could not be mistaken for anything else.

“What are we going to do, Rick?” Cat’s voice broke into a whisper, exposing a crack in her voice. “What now?”

“We leave,” he rose, his tone hardening into steel. “Right now. Before they get to the depot. Before the Black Maria is stripped for scrap for the copper. We have a few hours left. Maybe an hour. Maybe thirty minutes. We have to make it.”

He yanked his jacket from the hook, pulled on his shirt. His fingers trembled, missing the buttonholes. The engineer growled deep in his throat, clenching his fists. His knuckles responded with a dry, bony crack. At that sound, Cat felt a dull ache in her temples.

“Let me,” she said softly.

Cat took his hands and moved them aside. She began to button his shirt — slowly, carefully, as she had done hundreds of times in Boston before the theater or formal evenings. Her fingers slid over his chest, wet with sweat. His heart beat fast, unevenly, like a hunted animal.

“Remember the shirt before the governor’s ball? You insisted that only I could manage those damned buttons.”

“Yes,” a faint shadow of a smile flickered in Rick’s voice. “I added that you would have made a fine maid, had your father not been a banker.”

“And you replied that I was too proud to be a maid.”

“You’re too proud for anything, Cat. That’s why I love you.”

She finished with the collar, looked into his eyes. Deep within them, a spark from the first night they met still lingered. At that Boston ball, he had approached her by the column and said: “You look bored. I could offer you a conversation about structural mechanics to save you from tedium.” She had laughed then. No one had ever spoken to her about structural mechanics before. But he had spoken, his eyes blazing, and Cat had fallen in love with that inner fire.

“We’ll do this,” she said firmly, squeezing his hands. “You and me. As always.”

“As always,” he repeated. The familiar steel had returned to his voice.

Rick released her and began gathering their belongings. Tools, a map, a compass, matches, candle stubs flew into an old rucksack. Cat watched his sharp, hurried movements. The old world had ceased to exist. Only the mist remained, alien sounds, and this man trying to save them both.

She turned to the table with the remains of last night’s dinner. The glazed cups were covered with millions of tiny reddish ants. The insects moved in a solid rustling crust, devouring the remains of Boston syrup — the last particle of civilization. Cat stared at this living mass. A suffocating nausea rose in her throat. The ants had occupied the chairs, the floor, crawled over the curved legs of the table, covering the silver cutlery. Their rhythmic, relentless motion seemed like the selva itself, digesting their past life, turning it into brown biomass.

Cat lowered her feet to the floor, found her shoes. Expensive Boston leather pumps, with elegant buckles and thin soles, in which she had walked no more than a mile in her former life. She picked them up and froze in horror. In a single night, the leather had become covered with a dense layer of gray, damp fuzz. The mold had eaten into the seams, turned the delicate backs into dust that crumbled between her fingers.

“Take work boots,” Rick tossed over his shoulder without turning around. “Quick. We leave in five minutes. No excess baggage. Only what fits in the rucksack. And forget about the dress, Cat. It’s useless here.”

She pulled on the heavy, rough footwear, reeking of someone else’s mud. Her feet immediately grew heavy, as if rooted to the earth. Cat caught her reflection in the murky mirror: a pale face, tangled strands, deep shadows under her eyes. The emerald dress looked like rags on the ghost of a woman who had begun dying long before her heart stopped.

“Ready,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly steady.

They pushed the door open, and the mist descended upon them with all its damp weight. Moisture instantly soaked their clothes, made their hair wet and greasy. The air in the clearing was thick as jelly. The smell of spilled kerosene, wet wool from workers’ shirts, and the cloying, nauseating stench of rotting orchids hit their nostrils. Cat coughed, pressing her palm to her lips, and at that moment froze.

From the open window of the office, twenty paces from their barracks, a hoarse, crackling gramophone sound tore through. The record was spewing a jaunty, wild melody. Over the orchestral crackle, an unnaturally cheerful voice with a pure Boston accent extolled a hygienic product:

"...Gentlemen and ladies, try the new “Dr. Parker’s Tooth Elixir’! Your teeth will be whiter than the snow on the Alps, your breath fresher than the morning breeze in Boston Harbor! Only three dollars a jar. Three dollars, and you will forget about cavities, bad breath, and all those minor inconveniences that plague the modern man! Dr. Parker guarantees…”

The mechanism jammed. The needle began to repeat the same phrase with an unpleasant dull hiss and a regular click:

"...freshness of Boston… click… freshness of Boston… click…”

To this mechanical, mocking rhythm, a crowd of workers stormed the food depots. People smashed doors with axes, dragged crates through the mud, overturned barrels of corned beef.

Cat froze. The earth was slipping from under her heavy boots. A suffocating haze came over her, like a nightmare where her legs refuse to obey and a strange mechanical voice sounds directly in her ears. The people she had politely greeted in the square yesterday were losing their human form. They did without furious cries or brandished weapons. The crowd moved fast, greedily, with the feverish ferocity of a frightened pack of dogs at the sight of meat.

“My God,” Cat whispered. A nauseating spasm rose to her throat. “What are they doing?”

“Surviving,” Rick said dryly, as if exhaling ash. “Doing what we would do without a plan or hope. Grabbing loot before someone else takes it. Tomorrow the camp will be empty. Remember this moment, Cat. Fear turns people into voracious insects.”

Cat watched a man in a torn shirt. He was dragging a canvas sack, but the fabric split. Gray beans poured into the red mire, mixing with clay and manure. The heavy boots of the marauders instantly trampled the grains into mush. No one slowed to pick up a handful. A little further on, a woman tried to move a box of salt pork. The load was too heavy, she fell in the mud, and those following stepped over her head with cold indifference. A small child nearby was choking on tears, but that thin cry was completely drowned by the cheerful wheeze of the gramophone and the dense tramp of hundreds of feet.

“They only see food,” Cat’s voice was laced with bitter salt. “They’ve forgotten everything else. Without fuel, tools, and coal, they’ll rot here in a week. Beans won’t save them.”

“They’re not thinking about a week,” Rick pulled her along, drawing her away from the crowd. “Their horizon is one minute. They’re fighting over boxes of sugar as if they’re going to live here forever. Fools. In this selva, gold weighs less than a pound of dry coal for the boiler. But they’re blind.”

They moved along the wall of the barracks, hidden in the gray haze. The mist wrapped around their shoulders like a cold shroud. Its damp fingers settled on their faces, necks, and arms. Cat glanced sideways at her husband. The engineer scanned the space, calculating safe zones to the nearest buildings, assessing obstacles. His fingers squeezed her palm painfully. Rick remained a mathematician even at the epicenter of a collapsing world.

They slipped past a broken warehouse. A burly man with a purple face and wet, sweaty hair was dragging a heavy chest of tools from the doorway. Nearby, a skinny worker with a sparse beard and darting rat-like eyes fussed. The men argued fiercely. Their words were swallowed by the strained mechanical howl of the gramophone grinding its damned Boston record.

"...click… freshness of Boston… click… freshness of Boston…”

At that moment, Cat saw him.

A man sat on an overturned wooden crate by the entrance to the main warehouse. Large, broad-shouldered, with a heavy bull-like nape. His dirty canvas shirt was open on his chest; his greasy trousers were patched with gray at the knees. With a broad hunting knife, he lazily picked at his own fingernail. His right thumb was swollen, reddened, and oozing yellowish pus at the base. The marauder moved slowly, with the complete, monotonous indifference of a man engaged in his habitual routine.

“MacGregor,” Rick breathed out. His tone mixed exhaustion with contemptuous disgust.

“You know him?” Cat pressed harder against the planks of the barracks.

“Everyone knows him. He ran the loading. Now he’s in charge of the looting.”

MacGregor scraped off a crust of pus, wiped the blade on his trouser leg. From the warehouse door, an old storekeeper stumbled out — gray-haired, hunched, with trembling hands. The old man clung desperately to the padlock that a tall worker was already smashing with a crowbar. The gray-haired man wheezed in broken Spanish, but that feeble squeak was drowned in the noise of the square.

MacGregor raised his head. He looked at the storekeeper — without rage or malice, with the same bored thoughtfulness with which he had examined his own finger a moment earlier. He spat a brown tobacco saliva through his teeth and turned to the man with the crowbar.

“The porridge was undersalted today,” the marauder’s voice hissed with a guttural rasp. “Yesterday I told the cook to add more, and the idiot skimped again. As if salt came out of his own pocket. And you talk about provisions. What provisions? Porridge without salt is pig feed.”

He pinched his left nostril with his finger and noisily blew his nose right at his feet. The mucus fell into the liquid red clay, mixing with the trampled beans. No one turned their head — the crowd was gutting the sacks.

The storekeeper broke into a hoarse, barking cough. He begged, grabbed the workers’ sleeves, babbled that without tools the camp would die, that the coal in the depot was their only chance of salvation. MacGregor was not listening. He was squeezing the last pus from the wound. The old man’s screams occupied him less than his own flesh.

“Can you hear me, old man?” MacGregor said without raising his eyes. “I’m telling you about the undersalted porridge, and you’re talking about iron. Tools won’t feed people. My men need meat. And salt. And you’re offering them a fast because you’re shaking over your lousy wrenches?”

The storekeeper tried to speak — his jaw trembled, spitting out incoherent Spanish sounds. MacGregor rose from the crate. Slowly, heavily, bear-like. He towered over the old man by a full head, covering him with his shadow. He looked down. In his eyes — not a trace of anger, only an empty, oily indifference. The way you look at a fly before clapping your hands.

“Get out of here,” he said, not even raising his voice. “I said so. Move.”

“But, señor… p-please listen…” the old man held out his dry palms. “The coal… the coal in the depot… Without it, the trains… the locomotives won’t move! We’ll all… we’ll all rot here, señor!”

MacGregor breathed out noisily, with a whistle. The way you sigh when you’re sick to death of listening to someone’s whining chatter. He raised the knife, spun the blade lazily in his dirty fingers, and then — without a wind-up, without changing his sleepy face — swung the heavy bone handle squarely into the old man’s temple.

A dull, bony crunch. “Hek!” — the storekeeper gasped and collapsed into the red mire without a sound, like a half-empty sack of potatoes.

“I keep telling him to back off, and he…” MacGregor muttered, not even looking down. He turned to the man with the crowbar, jerked his chin: “What are you standing there for? Well? Break the damned thing. Don’t spare the iron, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Cat watched from the gray haze, biting her own fist. Her fingers cramped. It seemed to her that these were not people but ugly puppets. MacGregor had already sat back down on the crate and was picking at his inflamed nail with his knife. A cold fury boiled in Cat’s chest. She wanted to leap out, to scream, to dig her nails into that complacent, indifferent face, but Rick yanked her elbow, pressing her hard against his shoulder.

“Shhh… Back!” he exhaled directly into her ear, his hot rasp scorching her skin. “Are you insane?! He’s not worth your bullet! Quiet. Follow me. To the depot. Run!”

Cat obeyed, but inside a tight, cold knot formed. Fear and hatred. This lump would swell with every hour, with every mile of the road.

“Did you… did you see that?” she forced out when they burst into a narrow alley between the barracks. Her heart pounded against her ribs. “Rick… He just… hit him and… and went on sitting there! As if… as if there was nothing at his feet!”

“Forget it,” Rick did not slow down, dragging her over the slick planks. “Forget him. Our task is… we must not become like them. Hear me? If we become like that scum — that’s it. We won’t even need the jungle to die. We’ll devour ourselves.”

They rushed onward, weaving between smoking barrels of tar and splintered crates. The mist tore into shreds, revealing the morning. The selva was crawling onto the station from all sides: lianas as thick as arms were pulling down the warehouse roofs, roots were splitting the decking, and gray mold was swallowing the wet wood, turning timber into rotting pulp. The jungle was hurriedly, greedily reclaiming its own.

“We… we won’t make it,” she forced out through her teeth, clutching his wet sleeve. “Do you hear me, Rick? This… this damned forest will swallow us first! Before we even reach the depot!”

“It can’t,” Rick spun around sharply, his face twitching, soot creeping through the folds of his skin. “The selva swallows only those who… who get on their knees and whine. Those who stop. But we… we’ll keep running. Move, Cat! Quick!”

They dashed past a split barrel of kerosene. The stench of fuel hit their nostrils, and Cat was seized by a dry, barking cough. The fuel had flooded the mud, mixing with slime, trampled beans, and rotting straw. In the puddle, right in the rainbow slick, fat gray rats scurried feverishly. Their long, bald tails left trails in the oil. The world around was warping, turning into an alien, predatory place. Cat looked at her husband and understood: Rick was the only piece of Boston, the only stronghold she had left on the entire earth.

“Rick!” she yanked him toward her, forcing him to stop right by the rusty water tower. Her boots squelched in the clay. “Stop… Wait… What if this is it? What if… we die here? In this red mire, like… like that old man by the warehouse?!”

The engineer froze. He turned to her. In his bloodshot eyes, a wild, blind expression appeared — a mixture of hunted fear and obstinacy. He stepped close, with a jerky motion cupped her face in his calloused, soot-stained palms. His fingers pressed painfully into Cat’s cheeks.

“Listen to me!” his voice cracked into a hoarse, furious half-whisper. “No ‘die.’ Understood? I… I gave your father my word at the wedding. I said I’d drag you out of any hell. And I will! We’ll get that damned engine running. We’ll break through the thicket. To hell with Blackwood’s blueprints — I’ll throw your Boston trunks into the firebox if we run out of wood! We just… we just have to get to the depot.”

“But if the boiler…”

“Quiet!” he cut her off, shaking her shoulders. The rusty nut in his trouser pocket clinked dully. “No ‘ifs.’ Forget them. There’s you, me, a piece of steel, and the rails. That green glowing strip in the mist. That’s our road. Straight into the inferno if we have to. Standing still is certain death. And we… we’re not ready for the graveyard yet.”

Cat searched his face, etched with wrinkles and grime. The fire in his pupils burned exactly as it had in Boston. Rick was right. They would survive. They would be saved by that blind, almost ugly stubbornness that makes you move forward when the entire world around you is crumbling into brown dust.

“Alright,” Cat drew in the sticky air noisily through her nostrils, her jaw clenching with grim determination. “Let’s go. But if… if we do rot here, Rick… I’ll find a way to curse you in the afterlife. Forever.”

“Deal,” Rick gave a short, crooked smirk. “Let’s go. The Black Maria is waiting. And the boiler won’t stoke itself.”

They broke into a run again. The camp had ceased to be human habitation altogether — it had become a smoking dump. A worker was hauling a sack of sugar on his back, tearing the canvas on sharp corners of rafters. An empty-eyed woman sat on a split crate with an infant, staring blankly ahead. Someone had lit a fire from office chairs in the middle of the passage. Bitter clerical smoke mingled with the swamp mist, creating a suffocating, acrid smog that Cat would remember to her dying day.

“Listen,” Rick broke the run with a hoarse exhalation as they pressed against the rotting planks of the rusty water tower at the camp’s edge. “Yesterday… yesterday at the ball we drank to progress from crystal. Remember? And today this… this damned progress is trampling mud under the windows of our barracks. Some kind of wild… wild mockery.”

“No, Rick,” Cat shook her head, gasping for air, the corset preventing her from breathing. “This… this isn’t mockery. This is the truth. The real truth. We thought… we were building a road to the future, right? But we cut a clearing to nowhere.”

She stopped, digging her fingers into his shoulder. Her pale face, etched with dirty streaks, was lit by feverish eyes.

“Do you know… do you know what I realized just now? Right now, Rick?”

“What?” he turned warily toward the roar of the crowd behind them.

“Civilization… all our great culture… it’s just a habit of brushing your teeth in the morning. That’s all. There in Boston, I thought it was laws, some kind of ethics, morality… Nonsense! Rubbish. It’s just a habit of order. Cleanliness. Of knowing that tomorrow… tomorrow will be exactly the same as yesterday. But when that order breaks — everything crumbles. To dust. Only the red mire remains. Mire and animal fear.”

Rick turned abruptly, a heavy astonishment appearing in his inflamed gaze.

“Perhaps,” he forced out, his jaw muscles tensing tightly. “But we still have the track. Our train. The depot. Even if this road leads straight to hell — we’ll follow it. We have nothing else.”

He firmly grabbed her hand, dragging her into the sticky gray haze that hid the mainline. In the square, mired in the mist, the gramophone still convulsed on one mechanical phrase: "...freshness of Boston… click… freshness of Boston… click…”

But they ran. To stop was to surrender. And ahead, in the rotting haze of the swamps, the Black Maria awaited them. The switching engine. Their only refuge. This train was supposed to carry them into the very heart of darkness — into the green grave from which no one returned alive.

“Rick!” Cat breathed out, as the heavy work boots clattered on the station platform planks. “What… what are we burying at this station?”

The engineer paused for a second, turning around.

“Everything,” he cut off, and the rusty nut clinked dully in his pocket. “The past. Foolish illusions. Faith in the justice of this world. Boston is back there, Catarina. Our civilization is dead.”

“And what… what do we take with us?”

“Only steel,” Rick pulled her toward the tracks. “Steel and each other. That will be enough to survive.”

He squeezed her fingers with his calloused, machine-oil-scented palm with such fierce force that Cat momentarily lost feeling in her hand. But she did not whimper, did not try to free herself. On the contrary, she clung to his hand in return — with a dead, convulsive grip, as if clutching the very last, ghostly chance of salvation.

“Let’s go,” she breathed out through her shortness of breath. “Run, Rick. Faster to the train.”

They lunged forward.

Behind them, mired in the gray shroud, the gramophone continued to spew its damned advertisement. The crowd ransacked the warehouses. MacGregor lazily squeezed pus from his inflamed finger. The marauders had no idea that in a couple of hours the Claytons would weld the doors of their steel bunker, and the Black Maria would drag them into the epicenter of hell. Toward the green grave on the rails, pulsing with phosphorescent fire.

The fugitives did not know the ending either. It was just as well. Sometimes knowledge wounds more deeply than ignorance. Especially when it foretells imminent death.

The jungle made a deep, wet exhalation. The mist thickened to white, turning the world around them into a predatory, hostile morass. But they ran. They pushed through the green corridor to nowhere.

“Man is stronger than death,” Cat thought, her eyes fixed on her husband’s soot-grimed shirt, his tense shoulder blades, his confident, heavy stride. “He knows the ending, but he keeps stubbornly putting one foot in front of the other. The meaning is in the movement itself. You just have to keep going. Even when the rails end at the edge of a grave. Even when that grave is green, and flowers will never grow on it.”