Clear Water, Hidden Danger

Chapter 17 - The Trench

The morning after the attack started quiet, but nobody trusted the silence. The plan was simple: turn both gates into kill zones. Two trenches—one north, one south. Five feet wide, eight to ten feet deep. If anything came through again, it would fall before it reached the yard.

We had the tools. Two backhoes, two crews, and enough diesel to run them around the clock. Rourke and Stacks took the north gate. Burns and Hawk handled the south. Each pair worked with two armed guards at their side. Neal was finally down for a few hours of sleep. Lin and Jenn held comms. Wolf watched the west, Burns the east. No one was unarmed. No one worked alone.

The machines bit into the earth, teeth grinding through wet clay. The smell of mud and diesel filled the air, thick and metallic. Every few minutes, someone stopped to scan the tree line, rifles raised. Dave and Mateo rotated with the engineers to keep the digging constant. The trenches weren’t just defense—they were therapy. Every shovelful of dirt buried the night before.

Before we started the cuts, we took care of the bodies. The three Zerkers lay where we dropped them—twisted shapes that didn’t look human anymore. The sight turned stomachs. We wrapped them in tarps, hooked them to the loader chains, and lifted them toward the trench.

Neal watched, arms crossed. “Drop them in.”

The chains rattled. One by one, the bodies fell, hitting bottom with dull, wet thuds.

Jacob grabbed a shovel and dug into the storage bins near the settling tanks. He began dropping thick lime on the bodies, the white powder coating them until they looked ghostly. The dust rose in small clouds, catching sunlight like smoke.

The lime hissed when it hit damp flesh, releasing a sharp, chemical sting that bit the throat. At the plant, hydrated lime—calcium hydroxide—was used to adjust pH and condition sludge before drying. Now, it served a new purpose: sterilizing death itself. The heat it generated stripped moisture, neutralized decay, and raised the pH high enough to kill anything that might still live inside the meat.

We covered the pit layer by layer until the ground looked clean again. The smell faded fast. The memory didn’t.

We stood there a while, just staring into the pit. Steam rose off the lime like breath in cold air.

“You think it hurts them?” Alex said. “What’s left of them?”

Carmen shook her head. “If it does, let it. They’d have done worse to us.”

Mateo didn’t answer. He just kept watching until the lime crust turned white. “My boy’s out there somewhere,” he said quietly. “Not like them… not yet.”

“You don’t know that,” I told him.

“Then I need to,” he said. “When this place is secure, I’m going back.”

Alex looked at me, waiting for me to say something that would stop him. Nothing came.

“You go back now,” Carmen said quietly, “you don’t come back at all. And then I lose both of you.”

Mateo’s eyes never left the pit. “Then I’ll wait. But I’m not leaving him to rot in that trailer.”

The backhoe engine fired again, drowning us out. For a second, the noise was a mercy.

Neal exhaled and turned away. “Not much of a funeral, but it’ll do.”

“They came here to kill us,” Dave said quietly. “That’s enough.”

The backhoes roared again. The trenches deepened foot by foot. The work carried on until the sun stood high.

At 13:09, the pulse hit.

The vibration started low, crawling under our boots. Work stopped instantly. The air thickened with static, and that metallic taste filled our mouths again. The generators whined, lights flickered, and the tree line quivered in waves though there was no wind. Dust lifted from the ground as if the earth itself was breathing.

Then the screeches came.

They rose from both directions—north and south—high, sharp, layered. Not cries. Signals. They echoed through the woods for forty minutes, bending, stretching, trading pitches like something communicating in code.

Jenn’s voice came over comms, steady but tight. “Logging pulse at thirteen-oh-nine. Forty minutes sustained audio. No movement yet.”

Lin answered, “Copy. Eyes on the tree line until it’s clear.”

The forest eventually went still again, but none of us believed it. We went back to work—slower now, watching the trees more than the trench.

By dusk, each cut stretched nearly a third of the perimeter. Five feet wide, nine deep, lined with scavenged rebar and wire. Tin cans strung along the top clinked softly in the wind—our improvised alarms.

Neal came out for inspection, running on maybe an hour’s sleep but sharp as ever. She leaned over the edge of the north trench, nodding once. “If they breach the fence, let them fall in. Don’t waste ammo till they’re trapped.”

Dave smirked. “You’d make a hell of a general.”

She cracked a tired half-smile. “Smells cleaner than war ever did.”

By nightfall, the engines went quiet. Guards rotated to the new posts. The rest of us finally sat down, muscles trembling, lime dust crusting our hands. Jenn updated the pulse log, marking every tremor. Lin tuned the comms, static washing over the quiet yard.

I walked the trench one last time before heading inside. The lime had hardened into a pale crust, sealing what lay beneath. The air was clean again, but the ground wasn’t innocent.

The wind pushed through the trees. Somewhere out there, something shifted.

Then—clink.

One of the tin cans on the south trench swayed in the dark. Just once. Then stillness.

The trenches wouldn’t save us forever. But for now, they gave us one thing that mattered more than safety—distance.

And distance, in this world, meant life.