Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  Now it was just her and Jenny and Sasha. Jack and Rosemary, and Molly and Rad…they were all gone. Safe less than a day earlier, and now all dead, and Jack and Rosemary had been made to suffer through the turn, and Molly and Rad had been eaten alive.

  And now Alan was gone too, and one of many general philosophies of the settlements was proved correct. Never pursue. Never. Never.

  But she couldn’t know that he was dead. She had no way of knowing that. So she had to go after him. She had to find him.

  She was repeating the same thought process he’d gone through before leaving in search of her, and she would come to the same conclusion.

  “Alan,” she whispered, and the name seemed to die in her throat, its passage marked by a sharp pain in her chest and a deep emptiness in her belly.

  Alan.

  Alan Rice.

  My Alan.

  Killed by the Order of the Dead, which wasn’t supposed to fucking exist in the first place.

  You don’t know he’s dead, she told herself. You don’t know, but you can feel it.

  The Order isn’t supposed to be real. They’re not real!

  What she was doing now was pointless. She had to act, and she had to act fast, while there might still be time. She got up, got her gun, loaded it, and filled her pockets with extra clips. When she saw the Voltaire II’s box out and open, her breath caught, and she crept closer until she was standing over it, peering into the box that wasn’t hers at the Voltaire II in its nest of blankets. This wasn’t her weapon to take, but she thought perhaps Alan would have wanted it this way.

  Why else would it be sitting there like that, looking at her? It really did seem to be staring at her. It was true: Voltaire II flamethrowers and their ilk were always on the lookout for their masters, or for an interim master…anyone really, who would take them out and play with them.

  “Play with me,” Allie the Voltaire II whispered. “Take me out and play with me, Senna…you know you want to…you know you need to. Alan would play with me if he were here. Alan’s so good at playing…are you good at it? You’re good at playing with Alan, but can you play with me?”

  Of course Senna didn’t understand the Voltaire II’s sultry invitation, humans didn’t speak flamethrower, but that was okay, as long as Senna caught Allie the Voltaire II’s vibe, and it seemed like she was doing just that, because she was leaning in closer.

  “Yes,” the Voltaire II breathed. “Take me, please.”

  She put it together and took it out of the box—more like heaved it out. When it was clear of its bed and blankets Senna staggered backward one step to brace the Voltaire II’s weight. No wonder Alan’s back hurt. Senna knew she had it beat in weight by only fifty or sixty pounds.

  The Voltaire II sighed. The little flamethrower would have her wish at long last...just a few human moments more that were needed for Senna to get in position for the burning, and human moments were nothing to flamethrowers.

  Senna lugged the weapon to the door.

  She got as far as the porch, and there she hesitated.

  The Voltaire II tapped her foot impatiently.

  Objectively, this wasn’t the right thing to do right now. Senna knew that, but it didn’t matter. She had to do it. Alan would have done the same thing for her, and, apparently, he already had.

  He wasn’t the only man she’d ever loved, but he was the one she’d loved the most. For him, she would go back into the forest, and back into the Order’s camp.

  She pushed herself forward, and the momentum of her movement carried her down the steps from the porch, the Voltaire II leading the way as she struggled to keep it in her grasp.

  She wouldn’t ask anyone to come with her, because that wouldn’t be fair. She went toward the gate, which was now a work in progress, moving as quickly as her bruised body would allow, just short of a jog.

  26

  Strangeness said a greeting to Senna when she slipped out of New Crozet, passing under the netting at the site of the perimeter breach, which was surprisingly untested by the zombies. There were some carcasses scattered about, zombies that had been killed by the townspeople stationed at the gate while it was being rebuilt, but there were only four of those, and no approaching zombies in sight. Odder still, there were no zombies that Senna could sense.

  Ignoring this, she crossed the tree line, her boots tromping over some thin and wiry mushroom stems. Senna’s left boot touched down on the place where not so long ago, the zombie that Rosemary had killed had stepped on its way through the tree line. Alan had stepped there too, and Senna caught a glimpse of a shoeprint, but, afraid of what she’d see there and not wanting to be distracted, didn’t look more closely.

  Her senses were waking and rumbling into motion out of the tranqed-up Sufentanil haze, and she felt sure she’d know when Alan was near, but, at the moment, he wasn’t.

  When she was in the forest, she looked back once. No one had tried to stop her, and it seemed to her that no one had seen her leave, and that was fine.

  She turned around and slogged onward, and the distance between her and the New Crozet border grew as the Voltaire II’s heavy load set branches of sweat growing like fractals on the back of her shirt.

  Betty Jane Oswalt did see Senna leave, but she was the only one. The others were too busy with the work of securing the town, and too exhausted to notice.

  Senna had moved deftly toward the forest, considering her load—she was carrying the Voltaire II. This was odd, because Betty Jane had never seen anyone except Alan with it, still, the old woman had watched, relatively unsurprised that Senna had gone back out, and she could guess why: Alan.

  He won’t be coming back with her, Betty Jane thought. That was the way of the world.

  And yet, for some reason, Betty Jane felt that Senna would return, and that even with Alan gone, something of him would always stay with New Crozet.

  Then she rested more of her weight on the gnarled cane whose job it was to prop her up and sighed for the bit of relief it granted; the damp was doing mischief to her bones.

  Straightening up slightly, she rubbed the left side of her chest and whispered, “You’re gonna have to keep ticking a little while longer, there’s work to be done here yet.”

  Her heart obeyed and beat on as she stood in place, the foot of her cane sinking deeper into the greedy mud, her eyes trained on the speckled blur of wet foliage into which Senna had disappeared. Her old body was weary, but her mind was sharp and her will resolute. If Senna returned—and that was a very big if—Betty Jane would be waiting, and she would do all she could to help her, and the town, go on living.

  27

  Past the tree line and within the forest, the wet ground was giving way under Senna’s feet as she moved. The faint drizzle continued without signs either of weakening or strengthening, most of the new rainwater caught by the inadequate canopy of thinning leaves above the New Crozet woman. A shifting mist was floating along the forest floor, as if unable to decide where it wanted to go, and what it wanted to see.

  Something was definitely different. She could sense that the air had changed, and even when she slowed her breathing and shifted her awareness outside of herself in utmost concentration, she couldn’t sense any zombies.

  She kept thinking about the feeling she’d had at the farm: that it was already haunted, and maybe that was what was distracting her, and the zombies were still there, everywhere, around her, and soon they’d have her and it would all end.

  And yet…she didn’t sense them at all.

  The Voltaire II was straining against Senna, pulling her down by the shoulder straps as if it was trying to get her to fall and sink into the mud. Maybe there was a sinkhole somewhere that it could pull her into. How Alan had managed to carry that thing for years was beyond her.

  Back pain had caught up with him, like back trouble always did when it came to such things, sooner or later. Senna made hot compresses for his back that he’d used to refuse, but that he accepted now, and Senna thought
the pain must have become great for him to finally accept this basic treatment.

  Still no zombies around, dormant or otherwise. There had been some last night, which were easy to steer around as the storm was calling them away and running them in circles with its thunder, but now it seemed the forest had been cleared, as if the lightning had fried them up and the downpour washed them into the world’s gullet.

  Mmm, delicious, the world might have said, except that the meat was rotten, but, even so, the elements—carbon chief among them—could be used. Sometimes more rot meant better fertilizer, but zombie flesh?

  The thought of growing crops out of the ashes of the burned zombies was one thing, but to imagine them whole under the earth, propping up a peach tree or a blackberry bush, the roots encircling what had once belonged to the virus… Maybe it was a distinction without a difference, but even so, it could still be disturbing.

  When she was more than halfway to the Order’s campsite, she still hadn’t felt any zombies around her, but she’d begun to see the corpses. They were strewn and littered about in piles, as if the zombies had clung together in death, but Senna knew that they’d been together not out of camaraderie or fear or anything of the sort, but because they’d all been drawn to the same noises, in this case the crashes the sky had made by clapping its thunderous cymbals together.

  What the hell was going on here?

  She approached the corpses cautiously until she was standing over the pile. There were decayed squirrels, groundhogs, chipmunks, voles, and rabbits, with generous helpings of cardinal and a solitary foxhound for dessert. It looked as if they’d been gathered by someone who meant to return and scoop them up and carry them off for an unknowable purpose, a zombie cookout perhaps.

  Senna didn’t know what to make of this, because she hadn’t seen anything like it before. It wasn’t how this world worked. Zombies didn’t just up and die for no reason.

  They never died, because they were already dead. The virus killed them and then used their bodies to live in like a hermit crab would use a discarded shell, except that the virus also used its shell to spread copies of itself.

  And how many copies were enough? Maybe there were too many, and the virus had to cull a few of the bad ones, perhaps corrupted ones.

  But then where were the prime copies? Where was the virus now?

  She whirled, as if expecting to see the virus standing behind her in some other form, a sequence of genetic code wearing a top hat maybe, and perhaps it really was there—though without said top hat—but she could see nothing behind her except more forest, and she felt something that was akin to wonder, if wonder were an untouched spot on a piece of meat crawling with maggots of dread.

  “Alan,” she whispered, and started going again, walking very quickly, as if there were no heavy load on her back, and in fact, she’d forgotten all about the Voltaire II and its dragging mass.

  28

  When Senna reached the Order’s camp, it was immediately apparent that something had gone wrong—for the Order. The fact that the trucks were still there was sign enough.

  They should all have been long gone by now, but Senna had somehow known she wouldn’t come upon the remains of an abandoned camp, but the campsite itself. And here it was, and oddly quiet, too. Much too quiet.

  The only reason she could think of to explain why they hadn’t left was that they couldn’t. She peered past the netting, then began to circle the trucks, getting the lay of the land. She’d thought she’d gotten a good idea of where everything was on the night prior when she was escaping with the children, but the map she’d made in her head was way off.

  The Sultan and the thick rain cover had affected her judgment, and though everything was much clearer now, her thoughts were still addled and muddy, and she had a pounding headache made worse by carrying the Voltaire II.

  Senna completed one circle without seeing anyone moving in the camp, but she couldn’t really see much past the outer ring of trucks. It would have to do. She took out her knife and used it to cut through the netting that surrounded the campground.

  Now there were three places where the Order’s perimeter was breached: where she now was entering, where she’d escaped the night before, and where Alan had entered. She went inside, her expression surprisingly placid, or perhaps blank, and came upon the Tack Truck parked just beyond the outer circle of the camp, between the other trucks and the forest.

  She was seized by revulsion when she saw that truck. They had let that into New Crozet, and it had stolen Jack and Rosemary and Molly and Rad, and almost gotten Jenny and Sasha, too. She’d been inside it, also, but that was different, because she’d never become one of the townspeople, not really.

  In her third year living in New Crozet, she’d finally begun to feel like she was some part of the town, even though she and Alan lived at its outskirts and kept mostly to themselves, but now she realized she’d never really been part of it. The children were from the town, and the others who’d settled it, they all belonged, but she, she was neither here nor there, a welcome intruder at best. She and Alan had only been let in to begin with because of their skill in dealing with the zombies, and only after a protracted bout of questioning at gunpoint.

  All settlements were wary, and they were right to be so. Knocking on the door of a settlement you were more likely to be a cannibal or a marauder or both than a former rec-crew member, most of whom were dead.

  They’d almost given up on staying, and she’d wanted to go back into the forest and try somewhere else, or try life on their own, but Alan had wanted to stick it out for the possibility of something better, and he thought that New Crozet offered that. He’d been right, and the townspeople had warmed to them over time, but she’d never felt completely welcome there. She loved her part of town and her farm, but the rest of it, and the rest of them, she felt like she was an outsider to New Crozet proper.

  Maybe after she found Alan, they wouldn’t go back. Maybe there was another life out there for them to start, a new life.

  The camp somehow managed to look more surreal in the light of day than it had in the dark and downpour of the night previous, in which Senna had experienced the place from inside a drugged haze. What remained constant was the evil she felt there, which the dope hadn’t been able to quell.

  It had felt like a place of wickedness last night, and it felt that way now. Were their places of malignancy that drew groups like the Order to them, like a magnet attracts iron filings? If there were places like that, and this was one of them, then someone had fucked with the polarity after she left, because something had gone off-kilter—from the Order’s perspective.

  She came upon a body face down in the mud. Judging by the massive frame, which had sunk what looked like half a foot into the wet earth, Senna guessed it was Saul. The fair hair would’ve confirmed her suspicion, but there was too much mud caked in it to tell its true color. The ground near his midsection was painted a maroon, and there was a corpse of a zombie squirrel by his outstretched hand.

  She stood there until she was sure Saul wasn’t breathing, that he was in fact dead.

  Killing the squirrel had been his last gesture. He’d died with the image of Alan’s face burning brightly in his mind, and an afterimage of the bringer of Equilibrium Day had remained etched on his cooling brain, like a negative.

  He must have bled out, she thought. Good riddance.

  She crept past him, wondering who’d killed him, and glad in the fact that it had been done. Had Alan done it? If he had, where was he, and why hadn’t she seen him yet, or he her?

  Taking less cover and becoming more confident in the fact that the camp was empty of living members of the Order, she moved deeper into the circles of trucks and confirmed there were no other bodies outside. But where had everyone gone, and why?

  She went to the worship truck, which seemed the logical place to enter first. She readjusted the straps of the Voltaire II, opened the door, and went in.

  The inside of the tru
ck, where Jack had been turned, and where the Order had feasted on the flesh of Rad and Molly, was a drawing of death.

  At its center was Alan.

  Around him the bodies of the cannibals were fanned out, and the captive, limbless zombie was hung motionless over them.

  A bird began to sing outside, and Senna heard it. Except there wasn’t really any singing, because there were no living birds anymore, only the shells of them that the virus still kept for its own games.

  What she was hearing was her mind playing a trick on her, trying to step back into a time when Alan was alive, but going back too far and ending up in a place where the birds still flew and prattled on in their shrill voices on and on until their seemingly endless gossip annoyed her and she wished they would shut up or fly away or both.

  Now she wished for all of them back, for the chance to be annoyed at birds again, but most of all for…for him to be there again, even if they were locked inside a settlement until they died, just so long as he wasn’t here, in this truck, unmoving at the center of a fanned deck of cards made of brothers and sisters of the Order, as if they were playing cards spread out on a dead magician’s palm, and he, Alan, the bloodless wrist.

  29

  With all of her being, Senna tried to pull what she was seeing backward into unreality, tried to summon some untapped power in her soul capable of such things, and the world began to reel around her, and she thought maybe it really could be undone, but then the world regained its composure, having forgotten itself only momentarily, and Senna’s wish was denied.

  Alan remained in the state in which she’d found him.

  Dead.

  Eyes sunken.

  Flesh sallow.

  But in spite of the virus’s telltale signs, some of the glow that had made him Alan was still lingering about his body.

  He was surrounded by the still brothers and sisters of the Order, their corpses arranged in almost perfect concentric circles, a pattern that seemed too precise to have been created by chance. The smell of death was strong in the air.