Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  Senna wasn’t going to abide by this. She would make different choices.

  She’d see the inflection points, the forks in the road, and she’d go down the correct paths this time. No more children would die on her watch.

  No more.

  It was a brave thought, and considering her current status, futile as well. But that wasn’t how she saw it.

  The way she looked at it, she could change her mind now, and when the forks came, when the time for action was upon her, she’d spring to life and go sprinting into the proper road. It was just a matter of seeing the choice at the right time, and knowing which path to take.

  It’s a matter of will, she told herself, trying to firm up her resolve. I’ll take this, because I earned it, and then I’ll find a way to get the children out. What happened in Arlington won’t happen again.

  Not again.

  Spots began to burn holes in her field of vision.

  No more.

  Her mind was tottering, trying to shut down, but the force of the blows kept her from losing consciousness.

  Not again.

  After some time, she did pass out, and her mind tumbled into a darkness scattered with invisible boulders that she was being flung into, one by one by one by one.

  No more.

  35

  Brother Saul was feeling unhappy, which, for him, in normal person terms, meant neutral. His exuberance with respect to every darned thing in the world had suddenly dropped off. He suspected why this was, but he didn’t know for sure.

  He thought it had to do with that thing that sometimes happened to him, like the time when he knew with certainty that the outbreak wasn’t a dream, and that the things coming at him were not part of a nightmare dreamscape, but were real, and that his road-working days were over, and that he was to go west, and to stay away from the large cities, and to move quietly, and to strike the sick people in their heads if it came to it.

  When he’d stepped off the mill during the outbreak twelve years before, he’d known it was real—though it felt very much like a nightmare—because he’d had that exact dream already.

  And Brother Saul never had the same dream twice. Well, had never had the same dream twice, until now.

  More often than not, the events of his dreams did occur. He didn’t know that they did, except when he found himself in it, like what had happened on zero day and other, smaller events of his childhood, like a pants-ing at school, or a friend’s newly dead pet, or an affair between a teacher and sixth grader, the sixth grader in that instance being Saul himself.

  He knew what the dreams were, and hey, what can you do?

  As he grew older, the subject of the dreams became more serious, more grave, and he didn’t want confirmation, because that was what he knew he’d get, so he didn’t read the news, and stayed away from everything and everyone as much as he could. What he did know, was that what he saw couldn’t be stopped—perhaps shouldn’t was more in line with what he believed, but the truth was somewhere in between—and that no dream ever repeated itself.

  Until the one he’d just woken from.

  Getting up from his cot, to which he’d turned for some rest after their work with the female prisoner was over, he caught sight of his wrench, which was in the corner of the room. It wasn’t the one he’d used to defend himself on the day of the outbreak, but one he’d found in an abandoned camp some years ago, after being taken in by Acrisius and the Order.

  It reminded him of what it had felt like to crush the first few skulls. They were new zombies then, and he’d killed more than his fair share of zombies, and men, and women, since. He’d never felt much about it, good or bad, but it had become increasingly unremarkable over time.

  He picked it up, felt its weight in his hand, which was what an average person felt on lifting a toothbrush, and then dropped it back in its place in the corner of the room. There were two other brothers who lived in this truck, Brother Samuels and Brother Fitzpatrick, each of whom had their own rooms, but they weren’t there now. They were in the worship truck, meeting about something or other, or perhaps deep in prayer, devout as they were.

  Saul was excused from most of the formalities of the Order, had been from the start, and for that he was glad. It wasn’t his cup of tea.

  Considering the dream, he turned out his lamp and went outside into the rain, wearing only a shirt and shorts, wanting to be soaked. As the rain quickly and earnestly put its wet arm around him, the discontent that was keeping his usual cheerfulness under its thumb began to crawl, very slowly, away.

  36

  A short distance from where he’d encountered Jack, Alan arrived at an encampment of trucks that was cordoned off from the woods by netting.

  Examining it, he found that it was a finer grade of net than what New Crozet used. The fibers were so sheer they left marks, not quite cuts, on the pads of his fingers.

  This was where the traders had gone, he was sure, and he saw no need to waste time going around the camp to see if there were fresh tire tracks leading into it. This had to be it, and this had to be the reason the perimeter fence was so quiet on the night he and Senna had taken Rosemary out for target practice, or rather, desensitization training.

  He gritted his teeth and the rain that was washing down his face began to run down the right angle of his clenched jaw toward his neck, dripping off under his chin. He was soaked to the bone, and he’d had a close call at the platform, but he’d made it. He was here now, and Senna and Rosemary were inside—had to be. And maybe, just maybe, unlike Jack, they were still alive.

  Sasha was probably there too, perhaps along with others, but it had been impossible to do a proper accounting of the missing before leaving New Crozet, so he wasn’t sure. The town had been a mess, and it was more important to seal it up again before figuring out precisely who’d been taken.

  What had happened to the men and women of the town, Alan wondered, that he was here at the kidnappers’ camp, and he was alone? Most of them hadn’t served on the rec-crews, that was true, but all of them had survived the outbreak, and for a long time, and that meant that they all had been out among the zombies and lived.

  Someone could’ve gone to help. Anyone. Someone could’ve at least volunteered, or put up a fuss about one other able-bodied man going along with him.

  When had New Crozet gotten like this, that they wouldn’t pursue their stolen children? To Alan, that was inexcusable.

  Yes, the zombies were coming, and a temporary barrier had to be put up, but there were enough people to handle that. They had plenty of firepower, too.

  When had cutting losses this large in exchange for the mere hope of a few more years in New Crozet become the policy? Their refusal to come, to try to get back those who’d been taken, that wasn’t what Alan had been working to make for nine years in the town, and for three years before that on the rec-crews.

  This wasn’t the humanity he’d been trying to help. He felt betrayed, and ashamed that he’d given so much of himself to these people. What was the point if they let their children be taken?

  If that was how they went about it, then life would end in New Crozet, and that would be the final word. Maybe other settlements would fare better, but he doubted it. People were the same everywhere, and there was something wrong with most people, something cowardly that kept them from standing up for themselves when life was at stake.

  Maybe that was normal, but for him, life would be too painful to try to keep at if he didn’t do this. Dying tonight, even in the next few moments, was better than spending his remaining years carrying the weight of the world in guilt, piled on top of the grief of losing all that mattered to him.

  “How can you just do nothing?” he whispered. “You have to fight. Because if you don’t, what the hell are you? You have to…”

  With his knife he cut through the netting at its seams, and, just when he’d put the blade away again, something in the periphery flickered—or seemed to, which was a common visual disturbance experie
nced in the night specs. He turned and saw a yellow leaf on the ground, underneath a cluster of mushrooms with striated, semi-transparent caps that were sparkling feebly in the washed-out moonlight.

  Then, suddenly, it wasn’t a leaf anymore, but a Post-It Note. He could see what it said clearly: ‘You make me so, so, so happy. I’m so grateful for you. I love you more than I ever thought I could. You’re my heart.’

  A chill brushed its cool finger down his spine. What he was seeing was a love note that Senna had passed to him years ago, which he still kept in a drawer in their bedroom. She’d left a great many notes for him over the years, and still did, or…still had, and he’d kept all of them, but none outside the perimeter, of course. Yet, here it was, winking at him in the storm.

  The flickering went on while he stared and then, as if turned by the rainwater, the note became a leaf once more, a darker yellow than the Post-It Note, with traces of orange running through it like veins, parched and withering in spite of the water that was running all over them.

  What did the note mean? Was it a marker on his path? Was it telling him he was on the right track, or was this just grief getting the better of him?

  His wound offered up a timid pulse from under the bandage. Absentmindedly, he brushed his fingers over the dressing. Then he dug his fingernails under the bandage and pressed into the raw wound, hard.

  The pain rallied, and it seemed to set the storm’s snare drum on a mad, sprinting rhythm that couldn’t be kept up for long. He went on pressing into the raw flesh until tears were standing ramrod straight in his eyes and all he knew was that he was alive and the drums were tearing up the world with the darkest solo there could be and he knew then, without the faintest glimmer of doubt, that he’d been made for revenge.

  He pressed onward, because the vengeful master commanded it, and wriggled inside the encampment. Moments later, a squirrel of the zombified variety used its broken limbs like oars to drag itself in after him.

  It made pathetic crawling noises against the wet earth that you’d only have heard if you’d bent right down to it because of the pounding rain’s noisy backdrop, but then the thing would’ve bitten you square on the nose or cheek, depending on the relative prominence of those two facial features on your particular face, and then you would’ve been on the ground, turning while bullets of rain sprayed the body that had been yours seconds earlier but was now a chess piece captured by the virus, except in this game of chess, you could never get your piece back, no matter how many pawns you managed to get behind enemy lines.

  In this game of chess, where the pieces were genetic code, the virus took no prisoners.

  PART FOUR

  Prophecy

  “Senna, be my woman, my wife, my everything.

  I want to spend the rest of my life with you…I love you so, so much.”

  Alan Rice, former rec-crew cleaner, citizen of New Crozet,

  rehearsing his engagement speech, which he could never get to sound quite right.

  1

  Rosemary’s eyes were wide with horror as Acrisius reached for her mouth. She screamed, and the sound that came through the gag—a crude strip of towel that had been stuffed into her mouth—was a muted nothing that sounded pathetic to her own ears.

  She strained to open her mouth wider so that his fingers wouldn’t touch her, and only one did, brushing against the inside of her lip as he pulled the rag out. She screamed again, and this time the sound came through, shrill, loud, and full of terror.

  “Now, now, Rosemary,” Brother Mardu said. “Don’t you go playing that tune because there’s no one around to keep the beat. Know what I mean? Why don’t you just go ahead and calm down?”

  The semi-paralytic was holding a knife in one hand and his other hand was balled up in a loose fist, palm facing up, like he had something hidden there and was being careful not to drop it. His face, as always, was a half-working mask of anger and hatred, a contorted visage that seemed to always be trying to express some internal malignancy, and with great success at that. Mardu was standing next to him.

  She screamed again, struggling against the ropes that were binding her to the chair. It was the same chair that Jack had sat in earlier that day, the same chair he’d been in when they… Her mind revolted at the thought of what was about to happen to her, of what they were about to do to her, and she dry-heaved.

  “You’re hurting yourself, Rosemary,” Mardu said. “Please try to relax.”

  A moment later Brother Mardu must have experienced a mental misfire, because he suddenly wanted to stop all of this, and to tell Rosemary it was going to be okay, and that she could be okay on her own, that she could make something of herself without anyone’s help. She was so young, and beautiful, and terrified, and for some reason that made him think of potential, the limitless kind. The churning of second thoughts began to show on his face.

  “Are you…” he began. And that was all he said before stopping himself.

  Rosemary looked through the blur screen of her tears at Mardu and saw something in his expression that didn’t belong there. It was a disquiet she thought she recognized because she imagined that was how she herself looked on the nights when she couldn’t sleep and spent the early hours of the morning trying to squeeze from her mind an answer for why this was to be her lot, why this was the life she had to live. He was obviously upset, in spite of his words, and in an abrupt and unwelcome turn of emotion, she felt sorry for him.

  She looked down, feeling inexplicably ashamed, and anger began to simmer inside her at the thought that this man, the leader of the cannibals who’d killed Jack and who was going to kill her and Senna and Rad and Molly and Jenny and Sasha and who knew who else, could make her feel this way.

  How on Earth could she feel bad for him?

  Acrisius’s expression was so different from Brother Mardu’s that it looked like the two men belonged to different species. There was nothing close to compassion in Acrisius’s face, only contempt and…pleasure, the contempt directed at her, and the pleasure seemingly derived from her condition.

  She stared at the knife and the sallow thing that Acrisius was holding clutched in the gloved, gnarled claw of his fist—his bad side, or his paralyzed side rather, because he didn’t seem to have any part that wasn’t bad, only different degrees of it. As he moved closer, Rosemary’s eyes went wide.

  Horror and comprehension sat down next to each other in her brain and strapped themselves in. They were in it for the long haul now.

  2

  In that moment she knew exactly what was about to happen to her, and all she could think was: where had the virus come from? Where was the missing coloring book that showed its origins? There were so many blank spaces that needed to be filled in. Where was it from, and am I about to find out?

  She’d asked the adults about it a lot, but she’d never gotten a real good answer. Did they really not know? How could something like the virus have come out of nowhere? There had to have been signs, or clues about where it came from, or something. And there was something else filtering into her thoughts now. It was that word she sometimes caught the adults saying, though less and less over the years. Something like… Kro… Kro… Something.

  “Wait,” Rosemary said, the steadiness of her voice surprising her, “I have a question. Just one last question, please.”

  Acrisius frowned, then grinned, revealing a mouthful of teeth speckled with rot. The knife and what Rosemary understood to be a sliver of zombie meat stopped their progress toward her.

  “Well?” he said. “Get it out of your system…while you can.”

  Rosemary swallowed. “Where does the virus come from?”

  Acrisius raised his eyebrows and looked pleased. “A wonderful question. A smart question. How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  Licking his lips, Acrisius said, “The virus, little girl, is God.”

  Rosemary didn’t follow this. God was largely a foreign concept to her, devoid of religion as the post-apocalypt
ic world she’d grown up in was. She’d heard of God, and had a vague idea of a benevolent supreme being who lived in the sky and controlled everything, but the notion seemed utterly preposterous to her.

  There was almost no good in this world, only suffering and death. If a compassionate and all-powerful being truly did exist, he wouldn’t allow for that. Therefore, no God. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  But what this man was saying made no sense in that context at all. The virus was pure evil, and he was saying that it was God?

  “God?” she said. “But it kills, it killed most of the world.”

  “That is its will.”

  Acrisius leaned closer.

  “Wait,” Rosemary said, her voice quavering. “If you keep doing this, there won’t be any people left.”

  “If that’s what the virus wants,” Brother Acrisius said, “so be it. We’re chasing Equilibrium Day, and we know we might not live to see it. It might come when we’re all gone. It’s all up to the virus, to God.”

  Rosemary looked at Mardu, who seemed happy to let his henchman answer all the questions. Mardu nodded, in apparent agreement with the words that had been spoken.

  Then Acrisius made his move. Using his good hand, he roughly pulled up Rosemary’s shirtsleeve, exposing her upper arm. He stared at her smooth skin, licking his lips again, then ran the tip of the knife lightly from the inside of her elbow to the outer tip of her shoulder. The blade lifted off a fine layer of cells, leaving a faint trail of red behind it.

  That didn’t help Rosemary’s breathing. No, on the contrary, it made it get all messed up again. Her lungs began to seize, and, at this rate, she’d be dead before they could do anything to her. The way it felt right now, she didn’t think she’d be able to calm herself again in time before her body closed up its own airways and asphyxiated. She’d come to in the chair, after the last attack, which she’d truly thought would kill her, but the beginning stages of that one hadn’t been like this.