History Main / BuriedInAPileOfCorpses

** ZigzaggedTrope. After Necropolis, Judge Death hides among the mountain of corpses of his own victims to avoid the manhunt for him. However, he's already a zombie to begin with.

[[quoteright:350:[[Manga/OnePiece https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/law_under_bodies.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:He will need lots and lots of therapy.]]

* In ''Series/YTheLastMan'', Agent 355 needs to sneak Yorick out of the most secure building in the country, the Pentagon (where the rest of the Executive Branch, president incuded, holed up), and does so by hiding him under the bodies of male victims of the {{Gendercide}} as they are removed en masse. As soon as they're clear Yorick stands up as quickly as he can, clearly disgusted.

* In ''Series/YTheLastMan'', Agent 355 needs to sneak Yorick out of the most secure building in the country, the White House, and does so by hiding him under the bodies of male victims of the {{Gendercide}} as they are removed en masse. As soon as they're clear Yorick stands up as quickly as he can, clearly disgusted.

* In ''Series/YTheLastMan'', Agent 355 needs to sneak Yorick out of the most secure building in the country, and does so by hiding him under the bodies of male victims of the {{Gendercide}} as they are removed en masse. As soon as they're clear Yorick stands up as quickly as he can, clearly disgusted.

* ''Film/BillionDollarBrain''. Harry Palmer takes part in a raid with a group of Latvian members of LaResistance, gets knocked unconscious by a Soviet soldier and wakes up in the bathroom of KGB headquarters among the Latvians whose bodies have been piled into a bathtub.

* Trafalgar Law from 'Manga/OnePiece'' is the trope image provider. As the sole surivior of Flevance genocide, he escaped the borders by hiding under the corpses of his fellow countrymen.

* ''Manga/{{Berserk}}'': during the first chapter, while the Baron of Koka Castle is leading his men in massacring the outlying town, Guts hides under a heap of corpses in order to ambush the Baron's horsemen with his repeating crossbow.

[[quoteright:350:[[Manga/OnePiece https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/one_piece_law_hiding_under_bodies.png]]]]

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Trafalgar Law resorted to this by hiding in a cart of dead bodies leaving his homeland after they were attacked and entirely wiped out, not unlike François L'Ollonais.

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* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Trafalgar Law resorted to this by hiding in a cart of dead bodies leaving his hometown after they were attacked and entirely wiped out, not unlike François L'Ollonais.

* In ''Film/EnemyAtTheGates'', after a German patrol forces Comisar Damilov to crash the car he's driving, he rushes to a pile of bodies in a fountain, and puts a corpse on top of himself to hide himself from the patrol. A half track drives by and sprays automatic fire on the bodies, but misses Damilov, who vomits after coming out of hiding.

* In ''Videogame/Borderlands1'', in one of the audio-logs describing her SanitySlippage, Patricia Tannis describes surviving a skag attack by lying beneath the body of one of her colleagues as it was being devoured.
* ''VideoGame/DetroitBecomeHuman'': Kara and Alice (and Luther, [[MauveShirt if he's still alive]]) can potentially escape death in the ''Battle for Detroit - Kara Captured'' route by climbing into one of the trucks transporting dead androids to a landfill. [[spoiler:Kara can also do this on her own, leaving her family behind, if she so chooses.]]
** In ''From the Dead'', Markus can try to salvage an optical unit from the head of a dead android. Choosing this particular component results in him digging the head out of a pile of scrap, only to realise that he's disturbed a crate full of broken parts, which he then has to climb out of.

* This happens in the ''Franchise/DragonBall'' prequel movie ''[[Anime/DragonBallZBardockTheFatherOfGoku Bardock: The Father of Goku]]''. When Frieza first begins ThePurge of the Saiyans, he sends [[TheBrute Dodoria]] to kill off Bardock and his squad. When Dodoria launches a final KiAttack on Bardock, the force of it sweeps up the dead bodies of Bardock's squad and he winds up badly injured and buried beneath them. This actually saves his life, since Dodoria assumes Bardock is dead and flies off.

* This is probably the ''least'' HarmfulToMinors part of [[spoiler:the ever-smiling Q]]'s backstory in ''Webcomic/GodOfHighschool''.

* In ''Videogame/{{Borderlands}}'', in one of the audio-logs describing her SanitySlippage, Patricia Tannis describes surviving a skag attack by lying beneath the body of one of her colleagues as it was being devoured.

[[caption-width-right:350:He will need some therapy.]]

* In ''Manga/RurouniKenshin'', the young Kenshin, then known as Shinta, was briefly in one when the girls he was being held by slavers with protected him with their bodies when a group of bandits ambushed them and started killing them. This left him with a ThousandYardStare that his eventual master Hiko Seijurou took note of and made Hiko decide to take him in, since he was never going to be able to return to a normal life after experiencing that.

* In the ''Fanfic/EmpathTheLuckiestSmurf'' story "Smurfed Behind: Smurfing In Heaven", after Empath thinks he has died and has been brought to the Smurfs' version of heaven (Elysium) and there is offered the mantle of godhood, but rejects it out of disgust of what his fellow Smurfs have become in the afterlife, the Smurfs all turn into rotting corpses and pile on top of Empath so fast that he finds himself falling from Elyisum and down deep into the earth to the other afterlife destination, Tartarus. Empath eventually breaks through the pile of Smurf corpses he was buried under and reduces them all to dust, discovering that they were not really his fellow Smurfs at all, but magical constructs created by somebody.

* In ''Film/Ravenous1999'', Lt. Boyd is a coward who plays dead at a battle with Mexico, and is loaded into a wagon full of corpses. When the wagon arrives at the Mexican HQ, he has a mysterious rush of strength and aggression ([[spoiler:due to accidentally swallowing the blood of the others]]) and destroys the HQ.

* ''Literature/{{Circleverse}}'': In ''Literature/BattleMagic'', [[spoiler:Evvy, who is a child,]] is stripped, tortured and left for dead in a pile of corpses by the Yanjinyi when they are invading Gyongxe. They only failed to kill her because she used her magic to mentally flee her body to escape the pain making them think she'd died of the injures they'd already inflicted on her.

* In ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'' Guy Cecil was buried under a pile [[spoiler:of dead women for days after his family was murdered, resulting in his present day phobia of being touched by women.]]

* Mentioned on ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill'' when Cotton is accused of setting a fire on the church bathroom, which he blames on "the man with the terrible smell" (actually Bobby, who got sick from eating too much lutefisk). He talks about how he spent two weeks buried under a pile of corpses at Iwo Jima, and says that what he smelled at the church bathroom was ''much worse''.

* During the earlier days of the Holocaust, several would be victims survived by pretending to be shot during mass executions and making a break for it after they were pushed into mass graves.

* Charles de Valois, duc d'Orléans (first cousin of [[UsefulNotes/LetatCestMoi Charles VII of France]] and future father of [[UsefulNotes/LetatCestMoi Louis XII of France]]) was discovered alive and mostly unhurt after [[UsefulNotes/TheHundredYearsWar the Battle of Agincourt]] buried under a pile of corpses. He was promptly taken prisoner and spent 25 years in captivity in England.

* Charles de Valois, duc d'Orléans (first cousin of [[LetatCestMoi Charles VII of France]] and future father of [[LetatCestMoi Louis XII of France]]) was discovered alive and mostly unhurt after [[TheHundredYearsWar the Battle of Agincourt]] buried under a pile of corpses. He was promptly taken prisoner and spent 25 years in captivity in England.

* This happens in the ''Anime/DragonBallZ'' prequel movie ''[[Anime/DragonBallZBardockTheFatherOfGoku Bardock: The Father of Goku]]''. When Frieza first begins ThePurge of the Saiyans, he sends [[TheBrute Dodoria]] to kill off Bardock and his squad. When Dodoria launches a final KiAttack on Bardock, the force of it sweeps up the dead bodies of Bardock's squad and he winds up badly injured and buried beneath them. This actually saves his life, since Dodoria assumes Bardock is dead and flies off.
* In ''Anime/OnePiece'', Trafalgar Law resorted to this by hiding in a cart of dead bodies leaving his hometown after they were attacked and entirely wiped out, not unlike François L'Ollonais.

* It was only a single body, but the backstory of Hanako in ''VisualNovel/KatawaShoujo'' had this happen to her when her mother [[HeroicSacrifice shielded her with her own body]] when their house burned down. This incident left Hanako with heavy emotional and physical scarring that have left her a FragileFlower in the present day.