Boneyard

A boneyard is a place on Nuclearth that has been used for the disposal of the skeletons of those who died in the war. Generally, when people move into a part of a city or ruin that has formerly stood uninhabited since the apocalypse, the omnipresent skeletons of the dead are cleared out by carting them to some ditch or vale outside the town and dumping them there. As more and more of the city is settled, the boneyard grows as well, especially in those cases when several nearby cities share a boneyard between them. Since even a mid-sized preapocalyptic city could contain tens of thousands of people (the largest cities contained millions, but most of them were irradiated into uninhabitability), boneyards can grow quite large, some of them covering thousands of square meters. The largest boneyard, the White Sea in northern India, is more than a kilometer across and four hundred meters wide.

Boneyards may be very far outside a city, but much more often they're very close to the boundary of the settlement, to avoid the necessity of carting bones through kilometers of treacherous territory. There is generally a road leading the boneyard—if the boneyard isn't built on top of a preapocalyptic road, which it often is, then a new one is constructed—though after the city is completely cleared out of remains and frequent visits to the boneyard are no longer necessary, the road may fall into disuse.

In many cultures, boneyards have a reputation for being haunted and mysterious. This notoriety may have led to the boneyards' having more visitors than they otherwise would have; children sometimes dare each other to spend a night there, and some gangs and other organizations may impose spending one or more nights in a boneyard as a part of initiation, or a requirement for advancement. While it's true that many of those who do spend nights in boneyards don't return, one need not turn to vengeful ghosts as the explanation; there are plenty of dangerous living creatures that wander the wilderness.

Sometimes boneyards are also used for the disposal of the more recently dead, fresh corpses being thrown on top of the much older skeletal remains. Such places are known as living boneyards, and are filled with pestilence and rot.