Disclaimer: I am not Michael Grant and do not own the Gone series. If I did, I would be spending less of my free time speculating about how Light will end.
Edilio Escobar was sick of death. He knew every single kid who had died since the FAYZ. He knew their names, how old they where, how they died, who they left behind. He'd buried all of them.
They haunted his nightmares. All these kids he'd failed to save. All these kids he'd buried.
At first it was just the little girl who died in the fire. The fire where Edilio first discovered Sam's power. The fire where all of them stepped up, took leadership for the first time. Edilio buried the girl with the backhoe down the road because nobody else would.
Her unmarked grave was the beginning of Edilio's graveyard.
Gravedigger wasn't a profession Edilio- or anyone, for that matter- would have dreamed of before the FAYZ. It just happened. He buried that little girl out of respect, and it became his job.
It was incredibly ironic, actually. The town marshall, leader of the militia, the one who helped lead the battles that got everyone killed, was the same kid who buried the dead afterwards. A killer and a gravedigger.
Maybe it was the fact that he'd killed that made burying the kids so much worse. He hadn't killed often. But enough. He had to, really. He couldn't ask his soldiers to kill, and then refuse to himself.
The kids he'd killed haunted his nightmares as well.
Edilio hadn't been afraid of ghosts before the FAYZ. Now they terrified him. Because he saw them, every night.
He hoped the lives he saved, the kids he'd buried out of respect, would make up for the blood on his hands.