What They Find

They buried Eli in the hard ground behind the building, the two of them a whole day at it with a spade Henry found, because you did not leave a man who died for you to the country, whatever the country did with everyone else. Then they went inside to find what they had come the length of the world to find.

It had been a clinic once, a little foothills clinic, and then it had been something more. She saw the shape of it the way her father had taught her to see the shape of things. People had lived and worked here, and not the way the town children lived, in rot and fear, but in order. The rooms were swept. The cots were stripped and stacked. What had been taken had been taken in a plan, the shelves emptied evenly and not torn apart, and what had been left had been left on purpose, for whoever came, with a care that made her throat close, because care was the rarest thing in the world now and here was a whole building full of its leavings.