by James, Guy
Senna shrugged out of the Voltaire II’s shoulder strap and the flamethrower clanged heavily to the floor, a lifeless tool of the apocalypse.
She turned back to Alan, and her face wilted into an expression of unfettered sorrow. She still couldn’t believe that it was real.
How can this be? How can he be dead? How can he be gone? This is our world.
The world had made them for each other, and had shaped and reshaped the course of its events so the two of them should meet and build a life together. She’d built something extraordinary in New Crozet with him, and she knew that had they landed in a different settlement, they would have built something equally remarkable there.
Senna took her lover by the shoulders and dragged him out into the open air, then went back in for the Voltaire II and carried that out to him. She realized, suddenly, jarringly, that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.
Then she looked up from the Voltaire II and saw Alan, and it all came back like a sword being thrust into its sheath, except she was in the sheath, and there wasn’t room around the quickly-approaching blade to get out, and…and she was cut in two.
Trembling, she reached out a hand to touch his blue and muddy lips.
They felt cold.
She noticed for the first time that he was covered in blood. It was dry on the fringes, of which there were many, but there was still some wetness to it, especially in the center of his stomach.
She put a hand to his chest. No heartbeat. Stillness.
That strong, resilient pounding that had always been there for as long as she’d known him, was gone.
But it had to be somewhere, didn’t it?
How did something like that just go away?
How?
Her mind seemed to be flying away from her, except the birds didn’t fly anymore, now did they?
It was like she was in some place that was never supposed to exist and she’d dared it into reality by being too happy, and now she was stuck there forever.
There was a doorway back, but it was locked, and, worse yet, invisible from this side. This was the wrong side of it, the wrong side of everything.
She’d been thrown out and locked out of her only real home. Home was with this man, but he wasn’t alive anymore.
But he has to be!
Taking his hand as her mind kept on circling, she felt the fingers, damp and cold, and tried to uncurl them. Resisting at first, they opened. Then she grabbed the Voltaire II by the shoulder strap and dragged it closer through the mud until it was beside him.
She knelt there and put his hand on the grip.
“Why did I bring it?” she asked herself. “What was it for if not for…this?”
She looked at his face, but it only seemed more dead than it had moments before.
She looked from him to the Voltaire II and back again.
Why was this happening, and why now?
Why did it have to be now?
She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook.
This isn’t real.
This can’t be real.
“Wake up!” Senna screamed. “Wake up!”
He didn’t. And no matter how hard she shook him or how many times she put his hand on the thing with which he’d brought some order to this world, he’d never wake again, and he’d never hold the Voltaire II again.
He’d never hold her again, either.
And they’d never make love again or watch the leaves turn as they had just this season, or see the otherworldly pictures that the sun sometimes painted in the sky when it set, like an alien paintbrush set to work on the canvas above them.
“Wake up! Wake up goddamn you!”
It was louder this time, but why was she still trying?
She kept thinking: How can this be real? It isn’t real. It isn’t. It can’t be.
Her man was alive. Her man would be there to take care of her, and she would take care of him, and they’d do that until one of them died of old age, because that was the deal.
That was the goddamned plan. That was the point of all of it.
That was the fucking deal!
Suddenly, she reached up and began feeling around the air with her hands.
Some minutes ticked by while she enacted the pantomime of a woman who was trying to open an invisible door to some other world. She groped in the air looking for the frame, and there were a few times when it looked like she’d found it, because she tried to grasp an unseen handle and turn. She turned and turned and pulled and pulled, and nothing.
There was no door, no handle, and no way to go back, but she must have wrenched something free, because his voice came to her as if blown in by the breeze.
“It’s okay babe. It’s gonna be okay.”
And his smell was there, and the sound of his pacing, and the glint of his glasses in the firelight, and the strength of his arms when he held her, and the strange way he’d always looked at the spot in their farm where the apple tree used to be, like he’d been looking in a mirror.
“I promise,” he said. “It’ll be okay. I love you. I love you forever.”
“Alan,” she whispered, stretching a hand out toward the voice, which wasn’t where his body was, and that, that said more than words ever could. “Alan, please.”
The footfalls grew more distant and there was a sound like the sigh he sometimes made when he was falling asleep by her side.
Or was it just the wind?
There were no more words, and no matter how much she begged, they didn’t come again.
30
Her strength faltered, and she sank down into the mud, her face pressing into the cold ground. She turned over, and when she did that, the earthly remains of the man she loved entered her field of vision.
They’d cultivated the magic between them and transformed their corner of New Crozet into a place of unearthly happiness, and they’d touched the townspeople with their joy. Their love was what others hoped for, and what gave others hope in the good inherent in women and men and the bonds that they formed.
All of that would remain in Senna’s memory, and in the memories of those who’d known them, and, above all else, in Senna’s soul. Alan and the reality of her past with him could never be wiped out, and Senna knew that she would feel the absence of that magic until the day she died.
As that understanding migrated down from her brain and filled the depths of her bones with its certainty, the tears came, stinging her eyes with confirmation, and her sobs grew into howls, soul-rending in their expression of anguish.
There were no words for some time, just animal noises that needed no explanation. The Order’s shrine echoed with her screams, and had there still been living birds in the world that were perched near the campsite, they would have taken flight and left empty, swinging branches and small blasts of autumn leaves floating down to the ground.
They would have sought the farthest refuge to which their wings could carry them, and some would fall dead in their effort to escape, because the agony that Senna was voicing was something to which no living thing should bear witness, for the memory of such despair could never be erased, and would be relived over and over in life, and would not be wiped out in death either, such were the scars that hearing this woman’s pain would have left on your soul.
Senna’s throat closed up as she cried. It was stifling, but the implied promise, of death, was oddly comforting.
She could join Alan.
She and…
No.
No.
She spit and breathed, choking on the air but forcing herself to take it in her lungs as she looked at him, at what was left of him, this beautiful man, the most amazing, strangest person she’d ever met. He was a mystery, an onion she’d never gotten to the center of, not even after nine years. And now he was…now he was gone.
“I can still tell you more,” she pleaded. “I can still love you more.”
She thought desperately of something to tell him about her that he didn’t know,
as if that could somehow breathe life into him again. She was scrambling in her mind for it, and she didn’t have to go far. Her heart sank at the thought of what she was about to say, and the tears she was crying began to slow, as if they were themselves unsure if they should be there for this.
“I kept waiting for the right time to tell you,” she explained, “but, you see, it was never the right time. At first, I wasn’t sure, and then I was, and then I didn’t know how to tell you, and then all of this happened…and now…”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and touched his stubbly face with her wet hand. “Damn it, Alan, I’m telling you now.”
“I’m telling you now,” she said again, and this time it was so distorted by her sobs that Alan, had he been alive, would have been the only person able to understand, and only because he knew her better than anyone else in the world.
She collected herself, sniffing and rubbing at her eyes. “We’re having a…a baby. We’re going to—”
The soul-rattling sobs were on her again, and Senna wasn’t able to restrain herself any longer.
The feelings that were now moving through her were a torture from which she’d not recover. No one could. They were calling forth unrepeatable memories and hopes that would now remain forever unfulfilled. It felt like being crushed, the air squeezed out of her, her lungs reduced to pinpoints that couldn’t be inflated again.
There was anger there, too, compounding the grief. She was furious with him for leaving her alone, for leaving her and their child alone. She was terrified of being a mother, especially without him there to care for them.
If it was true, and the virus was gone and Alan had played some kind of role in that, then perhaps that had been his calling, his fate, as it were. Still, even if his genetic makeup had transmuted the virus into something harmless and even if he’d saved what was left of the miserable world, Senna wished she could have him back, even if it meant that the virus had to take everyone else.
He wasn’t for the taking, he wasn’t free to give himself up like that. He was supposed to be hers, he was supposed to be her only respite from the distortion that they’d come to call life. He had no right to leave her like this.
“Always being so fucking righteous,” she cried. “Saving the rotten, disgusting, fucking world. What about me? What the fuck about me? You were supposed to stay here with me. We were made for each other, so you can’t leave. We were made to be together, and you can’t undo that, it’s not…not allowed. I won’t allow it. I won’t fucking allow it. I won’t.”
When it dawned on her that she was pleading with her lover’s corpse, all her remaining strength left her and she slumped down next to his body.
The cold, damp ground sank under her weight, seeming to take her in. Her body was shaking with each breath.
“You’re my world, Alan, you’re my world.”
She thought of how she’d never give herself to him again and an unfillable void seemed to enter the camp and draw closer to Senna, threatening to swallow her with its emptiness.
No one had ever touched her like he had. No one had ever been so completely in control of her. No one had ever been so kind.
Her tears became relentless in their need to pour out of her. The sorrow felt boundless. The void or whatever the hell it was drew nearer until its limits were touching her quivering skin and lapping at her tear-streaked face.
She wanted to give herself to it then, as she’d given herself so completely to Alan, to lose herself in nothingness and be removed from this place of insufferable cruelty.
The emptiness reached for her more fervently. It could smell her weakness, could see that she was flirting with defeat, or perhaps only on the verge of encountering it, but drawing closer to the last fall, regardless.
Then she gave in, and it was like falling into a chasm filled only by dark. The void that was there engulfed her, choking the last breath out of her will. The murk of sorrow filled her lungs with blackness and she lost consciousness.
The world around her, made of wet trees and ground and colorful leaves and old trucks containing dead cultists, and a clearing sky, and the lifeless love of her life, looked on in silence. Not even the insects dared make a sound.
31
When Senna woke, she breathed, and it felt like breathing in as a new woman, a different one, in another life. The mud that was caked in her hair and smeared on her face, hands, and clothing had begun to dry.
The loss she felt was pervasive and irreversible, containing within it the braided threads of all of life’s beauty and ugliness, woven together in an animalistic and loveless passion that made them inseparable.
She tried to get to her feet but couldn’t. It wasn’t time yet.
The feeling, which was the epitome of its kind in complexity and depth, was keeping her in place and running its pencil point dull with underlining its message: you’ll never feel more, never feel so alive again, and thank all of the heavens for that.
The daylight was beginning to fade from the world, and as the glimmers retreated from the wet campground, they persuaded the weight on Senna’s soul to flow with them.
She’d slept for hours by her dead lover’s side, and, somehow, even in death, he’d been able to draw her into a deep and restful sleep, as if his ghost had been covering her back with kisses while her mind tried to find some temporary relief from the world, the one from which he’d passed.
He really was gone.
Tears began to flow again, but they quickly ebbed. She felt different, was different. She’d become the pain, and that made her feel alive again.
This, she understood—had always known—was life. This was all there was: love and suffering in a self-perpetuating cycle.
She thought of Corks, who had hours earlier removed himself from the equation. She wouldn’t do that. She would not.
Pain and suffering were to be borne, and bear them she would. The weight of Corks’s grief and his actions were not for her to judge, but she’d never take her own life, as much as she’d thought about it in her worst times, and as much as she wanted for oblivion right now.
Crickets began to chirp their scratchy calls in the background. There were still the crickets. Maybe Alan’s sacrifice had saved them from the virus, or maybe the virus would never have taken them anyway, having enjoyed their prickly song.
Senna was parched. She drank from her canteen and pushed herself up off the ground, rising unsteadily to her feet. Shuddering, she wiped at her cheeks and wrapped her arms around her midsection, rubbing at her sides.
It was cold and damp. Senna took off her jacket and covered Alan’s body.
She stared at him like that, covered with her jacket.
He could be sleeping, she thought, just exhausted from too much manual labor, he’d never been cut out for it, not really. He could just be sleeping under my jacket, because he likes how it smells, because it reminds him of me.
If anyone deserved a proper burial, it was Alan, and his final resting place shouldn’t be inside New Crozet, but outside it. He’d freed all of them somehow, and his body should be free, too.
She hesitated. For a moment she considered burying him in her farm, under the magnolia tree in the spot where they’d made love so often, and then she realized that she didn’t know where to bury him, didn’t know what was appropriate, or what he would want.
The feeling of indecision was so foreign to her that she felt lost. How did anyone decide something like that for someone else? He’d loved her there, in the farm, but he’d also fought to free the world from the virus and reclaim humanity’s birthright. Where should he rest, outside the fence or in?
Molly and Rad deserved proper burials too, as did Rosemary and Jack.
She dragged Alan’s body from the campsite first. She pulled him up a short hill that was more a mound and propped him up against the trunk of a tall oak. Then she went back down into the camp without a backward glance, making her way quickly toward the butchering truck. She stepped inside,
feeling no need to steel herself for what she expected to find there.
The intermingling smells of bodily fluids and the beginnings of decay inside the truck were overpowering, but only in a physical sense. She’d smelled these smells, and worse, before. It was what it was: more death.
She went to Molly’s body first. She examined the corpse and hesitated, feeling uncertain again. There was little left of her: a torso, apparently organ-less, most of its skin missing, the naked ribs and hipbones prominently exposed.
Some of Molly’s face was still there, mostly just her scalp, the skin of her forehead and her teeth. Would the townspeople want to see her like this?
The woman had no relatives in New Crozet and had, for the most part, kept to herself. Perhaps that would make it easier for the others, somewhat easier.
She went to Rad’s body and looked at him. There was more left of him than of Molly. Senna thought of Nell, considering if the woman could go on after seeing her son in that state, seeing what had been done to him by other people. Senna thought about burning them with the rest of the Order so that New Crozet didn’t have to see the horror that had been done to them. She stood there in the human butcher’s stall, confused for some minutes, trying to find the right answer in her weary mind.
No, she decided. Molly and Rad had to be buried right, like people. She wouldn’t burn them with the Order, with those fucking cannibals. The townspeople were good, and deserved to be separated from the devil, in death, and always. Now she realized that she’d already decided what was to happen to the campground.
Fire. The Order was to be consumed by flames.
32
She looked around the truck for something to help remove the bodies. Not seeing anything useful, she went outside, stopping at the truck’s entrance where the fresh air washed over her.
Tension rippled through her body, and yet, she couldn’t sense any zombies. It seemed that they were dead and gone, one way or another.