Then the rest of us volunteers punched royal crap out of the would-be mercy killer. We’d pound away, and the Ooloms would wax frantic with horror, some managing to scream, "Stop, stop!" while most just guzzled out, "Aaaaah gaah hah kaaaa!"… a ghastly guttural wailing which was all that kept us from killing whoever fell under our fists. Even so, the beating victims usually had to be hospitalized; but we stuck them in a different part of the compound, because we didn’t want a blood-battered human marring the pretty color scheme of white patients in white beds.

Is that coping?

We made jokes about the dead and dying — none of the jokes funny, but we laughed and laughed. When Ooloms were asleep, we laid bits of crimson cloth on their chests just to see their skins change color. (Crimson was our favorite because it looked like bloodspill.) We could send each other into hiccups just by whispering the word, "Plaid." And the day my friend Peter managed to spell his name on an Oolom’s back…

The Circus also had a couple field toilets for the Homo sap volunteers working there… and you don’t want to know what rancid cartoons/graffiti got painted on the crapper walls. Someone burned the toilet shacks to the ground soon after the plague ended, and every human in Sallysweet River felt shamed-sheepish-grateful to the vandal.

You’re all welcome.

More coping? Two or three times a day, off-duty miners would carry the latest dead body to a mass grave outside town. We used an ancient tunnel for the burial site — a leftover shaft dug three thousand years earlier by some unknown alien race. This short-lived alien colony had apparently mined the same veins of ore as our own Rustico Nickel… and for all we knew, the site might have had great-and-grand significance for archaeologists. But we filled it with bloated, gas-venting corpses.