Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  “The zombies were starting to surround us little by little. Some were broken and staying that way for some reason. We weren’t sure why. Something must’ve been happening close to us. We could hear them all day and all night, trying to get in, running into the walls, the doors, moaning and grunting, always with the moaning.

  “People were starting to lose it. I was starting to lose it. We were getting even more mistrustful of one another. We talked less and less and kept to ourselves more. I didn’t know what to do. No one did. I found myself reviving the hope of rescue in my own mind, of the government finding us and getting us out of there, something I’d long given up on. At least we had water, and it was the fall, so we didn’t have the cold to deal with on top of everything else.

  “A gang formed, made up of the six biggest people there. Chris was one of them, their leader, in fact. The idea of cannibalism began to come up in a serious way. Chris and his guys were pushing it hard, making all the usual arguments.

  “They wanted the next drawing of straws to decide which one of us would be eaten, sacrificed so that the rest could survive. There was a wall of zombies circling us outside, and a growing band of cannibals inside. Chris was able to get two more people with him, so they had eight at that point, but the rest of us didn’t want to go along with the plan.

  “The idea of eating human meat was disgusting to me then, alien, wrong. Later, when the settlements were worked out, it became almost normal, even though it was technically illegal, the government was too weak to do anything about it, and you know that when people got hungry, they’d do more than look the other way.

  “The mothers in the settlements who’d feed their kids meat, just to have the Fleshers kidnap those same kids later on, to be fed to other people in other settlements.” He shook his head. “But that was years later, when there actually were settlements. That was the one thing the government did right: trying to do away with the flesh-dealing, and regulating trade what little way they could. And good too, since it was pretty much the last thing the government did.”

  30

  Alan sighed. “Naturally, a fight broke out. I’d seen it coming, but I’d stayed. We’d all read the writing on the wall, but picking up and leaving didn’t seem like a real option. The people who’d left and stolen our food, we all assumed they were dead.

  “It got heated, and suddenly I was in the middle of it. We were all so emotional, scared and stupid. Chris and his posse picked out someone to eat, an older man named Johnston, weak and fat, who Chris said could make no meaningful contribution to us except as food.

  “Johnston tried to run. He got to the loading docks and managed to force one of the bays open part of the way. The zombies were there, waiting. They were on the ground below the bays. They couldn’t climb, so they didn’t get in, but Johnston stopped there. Caught between two evils he chose us, men over zombies.”

  “Who the hell’s place was it to say that he was for eating, anyway? Turning back from the loading docks, he seemed to accept it. After Chris and his men secured the bays, they took Johnston back to the center of the warehouse.

  They wanted to hash their intentions out with everyone present. They were setting up a regime of cannibals or something, I don’t know. It was like they needed to explain themselves, to make a case for how they were still human beings, even though they were about to eat one of their own.

  Chris was telling us why it had to be this way while Johnston cowered and wailed on the floor in front of us. Chris and Johnston were in the center of the circle. The rest of us were around them, listening. Chris’s men were in a cluster, and the rest of us were scattered at the edges of aisles. The division was real, and they were in control. No one there seemed human anymore. They all looked wild, dirty and pathetic, trying to hide their shame in Chris’s words, his logic of survival.

  “The inevitable moment came when Chris ran out of things to say. Then he just stood there for a while, looking at us, and down at Johnston. I guess he was having a hard time coming to grips with what he was about to do. Maybe he wasn’t convinced by his own arguments. Before I really knew what I was doing, I’d pushed myself off the aisle I was leaning on and was walking into the center of the circle, as if Chris’s hesitation was pulling me in. I remember what I was thinking, too. Nothing. My mind was completely blank. I had no idea what I was going to say when I got up there, or what I was going to do.

  “And then I was up there, in the middle of the circle, next to Chris, who was now glaring at me in a stupefied sort of way, and Johnston—” Alan stopped for a moment and furrowed his brow, scratching at the prominent stubble on the line of his jaw, “—he was staring up at me, his eyes red from crying. It looked like he wasn’t sure if I was going to speed up the process of killing him because I had heard enough and was starving, or if I was going to try to save him. It was a revolting moment. I began to speak. I was on some kind of autopilot, I guess.

  “I was arguing against Chris, against his plan, against cannibalism. When I first started talking, Chris interrupted me, but then he let me go on. He wanted me to say my piece, to give voice to the doubts that were in the room. ‘It’s only fair,’ he said.

  “I hadn’t known what I was going to say when I got up there, but after I began to speak, a different sort of plan—not cannibalism—was flowing out of me, and I realized that I’d been thinking about this for days and weeks, turning it over in my mind.

  “I remember my stomach growling while I spoke, gnawing at my insides. I could hear everyone’s stomach noises around me. Some people were so hungry they were retching. I don’t think any of us had ever known a hunger like that before. I know I hadn’t. I was trying to get everyone on board with moving, escaping the warehouse somehow.

  “I thought we could stage a diversion by making a lot of noise at one end of the warehouse and running out the other. We could throw crates and boxes off the roof, drawing the zombies there, and then make a run for it.

  “Looking around the room as I spoke, I could see that they weren’t interested. I tried to speak louder, more forcefully, but I guess I wasn’t convincing enough. I was never very good at speaking. Just the idea of doing more work, of getting the crates to the roof and throwing them down, and then running after that, seemed to exhaust everyone even more. These people were spent. I was, too, but I didn’t want to be part of killing another person for food.

  “Chris let me finish. Everyone did. When I had nothing more to say, when I couldn’t think of anything else, we put it to a vote. I was outvoted by a very large margin. They all had their hands raised for cannibalism, their heads bowed. No one was looking anyone else in the eye.

  “Chris said that after we ate Johnston, the next person we ate would be chosen by a drawing of straws. And if people refused to participate, as had happened this time, Chris would choose the next person himself. He gave me a look then, and I knew exactly what it meant. So much for democracy.

  “Then he seemed to realize that he may have been too harsh, and he backtracked, praising Johnston for the sacrifice he was making, even though it was unwilling, saying how it would help the rest of us survive for a while longer, and possibly even to escape. He was telling Johnston, who was now sobbing again, that his death was something to be proud of, that he should agree, that he had already agreed.

  “It was like being in a madhouse. Then Chris told his men to keep Johnston there and disappeared down an aisle. He came back with a length of pipe that he’d been hiding somewhere. Some of us had knives, and a few had guns, but no one had any bullets left. I’m not sure why he wanted to use a blunt object like a pipe. I guess it’s no worse than being stabbed to death or having your throat slit.

  “I was still standing in the middle of the circle, watching Chris walking over with the pipe. I could see him cracking, losing it just a little. He was nervous, unsure in his movements. And then my mind turned off entirely.

  “I felt my whole body sinking to a more basic level of awareness. Everything loosened up
, got a little bit slower. As Chris walked by me, I swung, and hard. My fist connected with the space just below his temple, and he crumpled. I couldn’t believe that I knocked him unconscious. His men began to move toward me, but just before reaching me, they fell on Chris. And then everyone else did, too.”

  “They all jumped on him.” Alan grimaced. “And tore him apart.”

  31

  “They ate him,” Alan said. “Raw. They ripped him open with their hands and teeth, reaching into his belly to pull out his organs. Blood was everywhere, running from their mouths, down their arms, all over their clothes.

  “He woke up and screamed and kept on screaming as they pulled him apart, until one of them ripped his throat open, I think it might’ve been Johnston, who’d taken his chance to join in and kill his captor. Chris didn’t struggle much longer after that.

  “It seemed like something I’d caused, like something I’d done.” Alan shook his head sadly. “I had. I know it wasn’t my fault, not really. Eating people became more and more normal after the outbreak, like a taboo that wasn’t talked about, but that went on all the time.

  “Except that first time, the first time I saw it happen, as a result of things I was at least partly responsible for, and realizing that was just the beginning... I don’t know. I guess the first time really leaves a mark.”

  Senna nodded. “It does. The first time I saw it, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I saw the cooked arms and legs and…they were obviously human, but my mind resisted making that connection at first. But you didn’t cause it. It wasn’t you. We all fell into anarchy, and you knocking that man out was for good reason. You couldn’t control what happened after.”

  “The worst part of it,” Alan said, “the worst part for me…” He trailed off, looking ashamed.

  She squeezed his hand, but he didn’t feel like he could continue. This was what she couldn’t know about him, what he couldn’t admit to her.

  Worst of all, he’d wanted to join in.

  He’d wanted to get down on his hands and knees with the others and add his head to the fray, to tear meat from Chris’s body and eat it, to push the hunger back for another day.

  “I ran after that,” Alan said at last. “I didn’t care about the danger anymore, about the zombies that were waiting at the loading docks. I just wanted to get out of there.

  “I waited for everyone to turn in for the night. I wasn’t going to sleep. When everyone had disappeared into their own corners or to the tops of aisles where they hid or wherever, I got some rope and some wand lighters, and went up to the roof.

  “I needed to make enough noise to draw the zombies away from the east side of the building, where the loading area was, but not enough noise that the other people, the cannibals in the warehouse, would hear, and I thought I could do it, because it took less to get the zombies going than it took to wake a person. I went to the west side of the roof, facing Route 250.

  “It might have been better to keep the zombies concentrated at the loading docks and escape to Route 250, toward the main road, instead of the way that I was planning to go, but the entrance that was closer to the west side of the building had too many people sleeping near it.

  “The loading area was deserted, because no one wanted to be that close to the zombies. It was hard enough to sleep with the hunger gnawing at your belly without having to listen to them moaning in the background, too.

  “I broke open a couple lighters and poured lighter fluid on the end of the rope. Then I lit it and lowered it off the roof, down the side of the building. I moved the rope back and forth, scratching it against the ground and the side of the building, and the noise of that and the faint crackle of the burning rope began to attract the zombies. As soon as I saw that it was working, I went back inside. I didn’t have any things to gather, so I just went. What was left of Chris’s carcass was still sitting in the middle of the warehouse when I left.

  “Had there still been zombies there when I opened one of the gates, I don’t know what I would’ve done, but they weren’t there. They were all moving to the west side of the building, so I climbed down to the ground as softly as I could and pulled the gate shut after me. Then I slipped into the forest behind the warehouse, and when I crossed the tree line, I felt free.”

  32

  “I found a place where I could be safe for a while,” Alan said, “in a strip mall convenience store. There was no one else there, and I was trying to be on my own. I felt better being alone, away from the people in the warehouse, away from people in general. I stayed in one place for as long as I could, while it was safe and there were supplies, and then I moved again. I became better at moving quietly without getting the zombies’ attention, better at my timing.

  “I went around stores and houses, going haphazardly in no particular pattern, staying in a place until I’d eaten all the canned food or stale food or whatever was there. There was some peace in that, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the people I’d left behind, to eat one another. I thought about going back a few times, but never did. I’d made some friends there, but we’d never gotten too close, and after Chris was eaten, I’d just wanted to get out of there.”

  “That’s understandable,” Senna said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way, though.”

  “Alan, you’re always too hard on yourself. None of that was your fault. People did terrible things after the outbreak. They would’ve done them had you been there or not. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “Yeah,” Alan said. “I know. Sometimes, though, and this is neither here nor there, sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if the settlement we ended up in was one with a lottery, where getting the losing ticket meant being eaten.”

  “We wouldn’t have stayed in a place like that,” Senna said. “There’s no need to live like that, anyway. There’s food we can grow, and it’s enough. I’m sure the cannibals have eaten themselves into extinction by now.”

  Alan wasn’t so sure. He wondered what the point of it all was, if people were willing to eat other people, if a virus could turn them against one another like that, when what they should have been doing was banding together.

  He shrugged and let his eyes meander over the mountains, whose greenery was becoming a brew of yellows and oranges and reds and purples and browns and all the shades in between, transformed by the sun’s wandering and stirred together by the branches of the trees.

  Senna had never seen Alan cry, and he didn’t cry now, but she recognized the sadness on his face. She stepped closer to him. He looked like a man defeated, who continued to fight even though the battle had already been lost, for some reason he himself didn’t understand.

  For a moment she sensed that he was holding something back, that there was something else, a deeper part of his pain that he wasn’t letting her see. But she didn’t press him any further. Instead, she put her arms around him and squeezed.

  She sometimes wanted to ask him when he’d last cried, or if he’d ever cried at all. At a funeral when he was a boy? At the loss of his first love? Had it been during the outbreak? Or had he last cried recently, in private? She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare ask, especially not now, after he’d at last confided in her. At this, at the fact that he’d finally told her, and even though it wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d sometimes thought, she began to tear up. He’d held out for so long, and now he’d let her have that part of him too.

  He pulled her closer and kissed her forehead, and then each of her eyes, and he let her feel the scruff of his face against hers, coarse and reassuring. Comforting her almost made him forget that he was the one she was comforting. It always made him feel good to console her, or at least to try. It made him feel like he had a purpose.

  But now, rare as it was, he was the one who was upset. It wasn’t over the men in the warehouse, or over what he’d done there, or the act of cannibalism that he may or may not have cause
d. The memory was painful, but it wasn’t what got to him deep down. What made him really upset, what hurt like hell, was not knowing—not knowing how his family and friends had died.

  You could guess at it, as he sometimes did—far less frequently now than before—but that was no substitute for knowing. There were times when he obsessed over what their final moments must have been like, and thinking about it long enough would bring him to realize an agony so sheer that it made him forget there could be any other feeling in the world. He’d never know, and he knew that he’d never know, but he could still dwell on it from time to time, and so he did. Maybe that was what he should have told Senna, but he couldn’t.

  He looked at her face and saw that her expression was brightening. She was there and alive, and they were together, and that was all that mattered now.

  She smiled at him. “Tell me the rest, Alan. Then tell me what it was like to meet me, what I was like. I know I was there for that part, but I like hearing it, from you.”

  He managed to smile. Her spirit was infectious.

  “I ran again, and again, over and over. It became easier the more people died, the fewer there were to fight with over food and shelter, the fewer there were to try to help, and to be unable to help, unable to save. I hid where I could, and I eventually ended up being picked up by a crew.

  “At the time, I thought it was the right thing to do. There were government rations, and it’s not like I was doing anything useful, anyway. I was just surviving day to day, maybe just waiting for death, I don’t know, and the crew gave me something to work toward, a goal that mattered. Some time after that our crews met, and I met you.”

  After a moment’s pause, he went on, “You were beautiful, and standoffish, too. We both were…standoffish, I mean, not beautiful.”