Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  It’s my fault, he thought. I let them in. In the end, this is all my fault. Again. I’ve given to the virus, again.

  He looked around at the other townspeople at the fence, at the people with whom he’d shared this safe haven for so many years.

  I’ve let all of them down, he thought. Finally, after all this time, I cracked, and the children are dead. Molly and Rad, Alan, they’re all dead, too, and it’s my fault.

  He looked into the eyes of the people around him. They all seemed to be looking at him, their eyes placing blame on his shoulders.

  “I betrayed all of you,” he whispered. The tears were gathering behind his eyes. His son was in his mind, the zombie prison of his body a twitching and staggering mass of rot.

  Corks reached under his raincoat and took his pistol from its holster. He brought it up slowly. The hurt had to be stopped. The shame had to be removed. It wouldn’t go away on its own, Corks knew. If that were possible, it would have left by now.

  There were days when he didn’t feel it, but rather than increasing in frequency, days like that were becoming less common. The torment had metastasized over the years, the fights between father and son replayed, distorted, and amplified by time, guilt, and the imperfections of memory.

  All those times you were hard on Remy, Corks thought, now you can never take back, you can never say you’re sorry. Maybe you think you were trying to teach him something, but what the fuck was it? How to be a man? How to live in the world? What fucking world? He’s a monster now, rotting aboveground, and it’s your fault. You made him. You did this to him. You gave him a life that the virus could take. You gave to the disease, you enabled it, you made your son a fixture of hell’s stony corridor, in the darkest reaches of malignancy, a servant of the devil. You.

  Does Remy still feel? Does he remember you? Does he know what you did? How bitter is his hatred? How expansive is his fear?

  Facing this internal barrage, Corks expected there would be no more respites from the pain, not after today, not with the weight of the prior day’s failures pressing him down and down and lower still. The load was just too much. He passed judgment on himself, deciding that he hadn’t borne the trial well—the facts were dead-set against him—and, as such, he’d bear it no longer.

  The gun’s barrel parted his lips and clicked against his front teeth. His belly relaxed for what seemed the first time in years.

  They—his friends—were rushing toward him, trying to stop him, when he pulled the trigger and put into his world a maroon inkblot that spread and darkened on fast forward. Then no rewind or replay, just static.

  23

  Senna was limping toward her house, her mind in a fog, when she heard the gunshot. She turned and ran back to the perimeter to help, biting back the pain. When she saw the new body on the ground she stopped.

  Corks was still twitching. Blood was oozing from the hole in the back of his head and soaking into the ground. A small group of townspeople that had crowded around him was already dispersing to go back to mending the fence.

  Senna stared at the body, wishing only that he hadn’t done it, that he could’ve found a way to hang on a little while longer. But it was his choice and he’d made it. At least it had been quick and on his own terms.

  With muted horror tiptoeing its way around the insides of her belly, she thought on what she’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, of the horrors done to the children and Molly and Rad.

  The night watchman’s body stopped its snap, crackle, and spasmodic pop.

  Maybe that’s the way out, she thought. Maybe that’s what we all ought to do. Instead of going on like this. In here. Surrounded by fucking cannibals and zombies.

  Her lip twitched involuntarily and she felt a pressure behind her eyes. Maybe Corks’s death was a good one in the broad spectrum of deaths, but he was her friend. He was Alan’s friend. And now Corks was gone and Alan was likely gone too. She wondered who she had left in the world. Who was she supposed to live for now?

  The children, she admonished herself. You’ll live for the children. While they live, there’s hope.

  And Alan’s not dead yet. You can still find him. And if he were dead, he would want you to, to— Her thoughts faltered as she stared at Corks’s unmoving body.

  Seeing him like that, uncovered, made her feel naked. She began to look for something to cover him with, but someone beat her to it, taking a piece of tarp from the building materials and laying it over Corks’s upper half, covering the watchman’s face, contorted by death.

  She slowly backed away from the body, and turned toward home.

  On the way back to her house, she saw a large group of people gathered in the church, and she guessed they were taking turns at shifts by the outer gate as it was being repaired. A shadow appeared in the doorway and called out to her as she passed. She didn’t answer or turn to see who it was.

  It could’ve been Ned Klefeker, she thought, or maybe Chad Stucky. Right you are the second time.

  It was Chad, who hadn’t the heart left to go back home and face the empty house. He’d buried his final wife in her garden two hours earlier, and then he’d come to the church.

  Senna went on without acknowledging him, and he was about to go after her when he saw some men coming from the fence. They were carrying someone on a stretcher, someone who was squirming in what looked like an attempt to get away from his own body.

  When they got closer, Chad could see the strain in the men’s faces and the considerable sag of the stretcher. They were asking sternly, but not quite in yelling voices, that the occupant of the stretcher stay still, because his squirming was making it near impossible to keep the thing upright. It was Chase Ham. His right pant leg was soaked with blood. He’d managed to drive a bolt through his leg, and it was still there, lodged in his thigh.

  “Shit,” Chad breathed when Chase Ham was closer. He was losing too much blood.

  “Bring him inside quickly and set him down,” Chad said to the two men, who were Bill Meyers and Sal Hendrix. Sal’s look made it plain that he couldn’t wait to do just that. How anyone had made it this far into life after the outbreak and was still squeamish was beyond Chad. There were a few people like this, and it always baffled him that they’d been able to survive amidst the carnage long enough to make it into a settlement.

  Chad stepped aside and followed them into the church. He’d have a look at Chase’s leg, because that was his duty. He was the only one left in town—besides Knapp, who was too drunk to be any good—with some semblance of real medical training, having been a paramedic in his college years. Nell could’ve helped too, but she was missing—probably at home, dealing with the loss of her son. Then, when he’d put Chase at ease to the extent he could, he’d go to Senna and see if he could help her. That was what he planned to do, but Senna wasn’t going to be there when he came looking.

  When he walked into the church, he was blindsided by what he saw there, and had his wife not just died, he would’ve gaped, slack-jawed at the sight. Knapp was there, in the soberest condition Chad had ever seen him, and he was attending to the injured. Sasha was a few feet away, passed out on a cot, whatever shit drug the kidnappers had given her working its way out of her system.

  Knapp had once—long before the outbreak and not for a very long while—been a registered nurse, so he knew what he was doing. Chad saw that he needed help, the man was still working off enough booze to kill a horse, probably would be for days, but he was being productive for once. As Chad made a beeline behind Chase and over to Knapp to help treat the wounded, he wished it had been something else that had snapped Larry out of his self-flagellating dungeon of drink, something that didn’t involve Laura’s death and the atrocities of the previous day.

  As Chad joined Larry, who accepted the help of the newcomer with sincere gratitude, Senna quickly walked home. The rain weakened from a pour to a weaker pour to a drizzle, and then fog began to simmer up from the ground. She’d left the outer gate just moments before Chase
Ham had injured himself, and Chase had traveled on his stretcher following her toward the church, but she hadn’t turned around to see him.

  She went back to the farm and into the home that she and Alan had made in New Crozet.

  Dazed and unthinking, she went to the bedroom. It still smelled of him.

  He’d gone to rescue her. Alone.

  Alone.

  She thought of the struggle inside the campsite hours earlier.

  Had that been him? Had he been there then, just a few feet away, trying to fight all the… She couldn’t finish the thought.

  Senna was leaning on the unmade bed. They’d left it a rumpled mess after their quickie the previous day, before heading to market. They’d already been late, and that, she realized, had been the last time they’d shared their bodies, perhaps the last time they ever would. She pushed herself upright and stood trembling for a moment. Then she ran from the house.

  24

  Senna went to the magnolia tree like a person stumbling blindly through a dream. The corners of things were fuzzy with mist. Her thoughts were indistinct, their sharp defining lines still finding their way free of the Sultan’s dungeon.

  A haze was drifting over her farm—their farm, Alan’s and hers. Tendrils seemed to reach for her, the limbs of shapes that were trying to form out of the floating motes of water. She pushed through the fog, and her thoughts became more vague and disconnected.

  Clarity was seeping out of the world like water through a colander.

  A wraith of mist contracted and drew itself closer to Senna, touching her skin with its cold fingers, bringing on flare-ups of goose bumps as if by magic, guiding her along.

  She wasn’t running anymore. She was standing somewhere, under something.

  Her body was cold, shivering, and suddenly, falling. The soft, moist earth met her, and she was under the magnolia tree that had drawn her to pick that spot in New Crozet for a home for Alan and herself.

  Rainwater was dripping from the lowest layer of thick, glistening leaves and falling on her. The floating haze gathered up around her and the tree, forming an ellipse of vapor. There, surrounded by mist under the cover of her beloved tree’s leafy boughs, she submitted entirely to grief.

  After some time, when her tears had dried and it seemed there was no moisture left in her body, she put her arms around the magnolia’s trunk and leaned her forehead against it, closing her eyes. The bark was smooth and slick with rain against her skin.

  Every time she closed her eyes and they were shut, it felt like when she opened them, he would be there again, by her side, as if nothing had happened. But each time she did open her eyes, he wasn’t there. She was alone in the farm, sitting under that beautiful tree, in the spot where she and Alan had made love so many times. They’d made love everywhere, but that was a special place. It was always a little different there, more heartfelt, and it was also where…

  The wan light of the world drained from Senna’s vision, and, under the weight of the Sultan’s poison that her body was still working overtime to metabolize, and the upheaval of her whole life, her head began to tilt lower and lower, her eyelids drooping, and she faded until a dreamless sleep took her in.

  25

  The last of the heavy clouds floated over Senna’s farm, sending rainwater to pound away at the ground, forcing more and more steam from the soil’s depths. The raindrops became smaller, and the haze more indistinct. Soon, the water in the air was mostly a floating fog, fractured by drizzle and cold air currents that came and went in patches.

  A cluster of sopping wet indigo peeked up at Senna and watched her lie unconscious under the magnolia. This patch of indigo hadn’t flowered this season, and so it had gone unnoticed while the rest of its kind revealed their brilliant coats of blue, and so, finally, it had snuck past the border.

  It was the first indigo plant to make it inside Senna’s farm. Feeling triumphant in spite of the unacknowledged victory, it looked at her curiously, and wondered what the woman would do next. Alan was gone, any sapling could tell that much, and he’d obviously been made for her, so the indigo couldn’t help but be stumped—not literally though, God forbid—failing in its cleverness to suspect that perhaps Alan had been made for more than one purpose, and not just for Senna.

  After some hours, the sun began to rub at its sleepy eyes, and under its squinty gaze of morning, Senna was roused from her heartache by a thought that made her insides feel like they were being slashed to shreds.

  What if, she thought, he’s out there living—no, existing—as one of those things, as a...

  She stood up too quickly and had to steady herself by putting a hand on the magnolia’s trunk. The dizziness was so overwhelming that she doubled over, stopping just short of vomiting.

  The mist had gathered closer around her, as if its motes were going to her in search of rescue from the threat of frying by the sun’s rays. Two wispy tendrils pushed her, ducking, out from the tree’s canopy, and then back into the house, where she went to the kitchen. She filled a glass and drank greedily, then refilled it and drank again, and again, until she’d downed five glasses of water.

  The water was helping. The Sultan’s generous drug haze seemed to be lifting more and more with every passing moment. While she stood there, she found herself recalling what it had been like to realize that she was able to sense the break before it happened. It had happened twelve years ago, when the virus broke.

  No, Senna thought, it wasn’t when the virus broke, it had been before that. It now dawned on her, for the first time, that she’d sensed the frenzy of flesh hunger and spreading un-death before people had recognized the plague for what it was, before the outbreak.

  She’d felt strange and off balance for weeks leading up to it, and she was now surprised that she hadn’t yet reflected on her feelings of that time, but it was understandable given the state of the world.

  Reflecting on the past was a luxury that few could afford, and that could cost those few their lives. Time was better spent growing food and defending the perimeter, and reflection was best spent devising new and better ways of doing the same.

  Still, she’d sensed the coming carnage before the outbreak. What did that mean? Had she smelled the virus as it was brewing, but before it mutated into that first stage of genetic abandon, the one that tore the human world apart?

  She’d felt strange just before the later mutations, too. Each time, for some weeks before another species or another group of species was taken, she’d felt… she’d felt the same thing she’d been feeling in these weeks leading up to the market, in the weeks leading up to now.

  But how could that be, and why?

  It was only now, when she felt the absence of the feeling that she realized it had been there in the first place. How had she not noticed it sooner?

  Alan.

  The Order of the Dead.

  Equilibrium Day.

  Equilibrium Day?

  What fucking insanity.

  Cannibalism.

  That was their true purpose—eating people, just like Krokodil’s purpose, admitted in the tagline Ginny had found: ‘It eats people.’

  But if that really was the only reason for their existence, then why spread the virus to new hosts? As a cover? As a way to keep the brothers and sisters aligned? Was it just to scare people?

  Their leader—that Brother Mardu—had been obsessed with the idea of fear and putting it into people and keeping it there. That was how he controlled everyone.

  He styled himself and his way as the only escape from the fear, the only way out. It was government by terror.

  That was why they infected children whole, because it was sick and gruesome and a man who could do that was capable of anything, and that was worthy of dread.

  It was a display of power: I take the meat and wealth and offer it to my god—the virus—as I see fit; my god gets the best of their organs, the youngest, freshest ones: the brain and heart and liver and kidneys and spleen; we eat some but the res
t are for my god, and my god is your god and our god owns the world. It was primal and effective.

  Was it so insane? Did it even begin to be insane? The virus did rule the world, there was no arguing with that.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Senna whispered. Answers didn’t matter now. Maybe answers didn’t mean anything anymore and never would again. And if that was true, that didn’t matter either.

  What mattered was finding Alan. Following that, they could go after the Order and kill every single cannibal who was a brother or sister or whatever the hell they called themselves, and then they would go after all the cannibals in the world, and they would get the crews going again, and they would take the world back, they would take it all back.

  “But I can’t… We can’t…because—enough. Find Alan. I just need to find Alan. Together, we’ll know what to do.”

  Her mind turned to Tom and Corks, very able men in their time, and the other townspeople who were young and strong enough to go after the fake Tackers, but who’d stayed behind.

  “Those damned cowards,” she said, her lips curling with rage. She felt guilty as soon as she said it, because they’d been right. They were supposed to stay behind. That was the understanding. Don’t give chase. Cut your losses. Protect the town.

  Leaving New Crozet meant almost certain death, and those who’d been taken could be considered dead already, so why pursue them at the risk of one’s own life, and at the risk of the exposed townspeople who needed their fence repaired and protection in the interim?

  Alan had been the only one to come. Why had he done that? He’d come, throwing his good after their bad, risking his life for people who were as good as dead, for her and the children, and for Molly and Rad.