Order of the Dead (10 page)

23

“How long do I have to wait?” Jack asked.

Senna was silent for a moment, then
said, “As long as it takes. They’ll go to sleep eventually and wander away. You
may be able to get some clear shots in and kill them, but if you keep missing,
save your bullets, and never give up your safe position for a better shot. The
way they move when they’re broken, they’re very hard to hit.”

“That’s why you have to get them
before that,” Jack said, “like you did.”

“Yes, while being careful not to cause
the break.”

“That’s what you’re good at,” Jack
said, “spotting the break before it happens, right?”

“Something like that,” Senna said.

“How do you do that? How do you know when
they’re going to break?”

She pursed her lips and considered how
best to answer. It was hard to describe what she saw in the zombies’ movements,
or what she sensed when they were around, and she knew that she never did a
good job of explaining it to anyone.

“Senna?” Jack said.

She looked at him and realized that
she’d been thinking it over for some time. Sasha was watching her and looked
worried. In her hand the girl had a few layers of Jack’s onion, which she’d
been peeling apart while they talked, finding layers in the layers and
separating them out.

“Well,” Senna said, “it’s like when
you’re about to sneeze. Do you know that feeling you get, like your nose is all
itchy on the inside?”

Jack nodded. The expression on his
face was growing more serious, and he appeared to be aware that he was
receiving information that most people weren’t privy to, and that might one day
save his life. Sasha, on the other hand, seemed to be absorbed entirely in the
mysteries of the onion.

“Okay, good. There’s a point when the
itchiness is at its worst and you know you’re going to sneeze, or at least that
it’ll be very hard not to. That’s what it’s like. The zombies begin to move
differently when they’re about to break, but the changes are slight, and there’s
a lot of them, and a lot of levels. Like, more and less itchy, I guess.”

“Okay,” Jack said, “I think I get it.”

“And how do you kill a zombie, Jack?”
Senna said.

“You have to get the brain.”

“That’s right. A well-aimed shot, a
hard strike with a blunt object, a stab, they’ll all do it.”

Jack looked to be deep in thought for
a few moments, then he turned to Alan. “Do you think I could be a cleaner one
day,” Jack said, “like you?”

“Like I
was,
you mean,” Alan
said. “There aren’t any active crews right now, and I’m not sure there will be
anytime soon.”

“Why not?” Jack said.

“Well… You see, Jack—” Alan glanced at
Senna, uncertain. She nodded, as if to say ‘Go for it. Why not?’

“At first,” Alan went on, “you had to
be on a crew if you were a certain age. But, after a time, the crews were stopped
because it got too dangerous.”

“What do you mean,” Jack said, “even
more dangerous?”

Alan sighed. “I mean it became
dangerous to the survival of the human race. We were losing too many people trying
to burn the virus out, so we had to stop, and go back to the settlements. All
the crews were disbanded, and I don’t think that we’re in a position to start them
up again because the human population hasn’t recovered enough.”

Alan had left the crews too early to
know firsthand, but there had been spotters and cleaners who’d refused to
disband, some of whom he’d worked with, had fought with, side by side before he
and Senna went off on their own way. They’d left before the official end of the
crews was announced, but it had been obvious already.

They’d taken out tens of thousands of
zombies, but it was only a small fraction of all the zombies out there. By
contrast, the number of human survivors who’d died doing it was not at all a
small fraction, more like a very large and bloody chunk of the pie, which had
already been made too small by the outbreak.

After the government ordered the crews
to scatter, vigilante teams formed, and they’d continued to fight the virus. Alan
felt a pang of shame for having left the cause, even though it had been
officially shut down soon after he left. He’d wanted to start a life with
Senna, not a normal life, of course, but some kind of life, all the same.

They’d tried to convince their best
friend on the crew, Charlie Moody, to come with them, but he’d refused to give
up the fight. They agreed they’d target New Crozet as their retirement spot and
meet there someday, after Charlie was satisfied that he’d done his part. He’d
never come. On market days, Alan had for some years been in the habit of asking
after Charlie, but no word ever came.

The traders only confirmed what
everyone in New Crozet had experienced: no one who’d joined a vigilante team
had ever made it to any settlement. Perhaps that didn’t mean they were all dead,
although it was hard to imagine what else it could mean.

Alan couldn’t believe that men and
women so skilled would all have succumbed to the virus. He was certain that
some still lived, somewhere, in a faraway settlement, maybe, having joined it after
realizing that the battle they were fighting was unwinnable.

Jack didn’t need to know about that.
There was no sense putting wild ideas into his head at his age.

Jack looked uncertain. “So you had to
stop,” he said.

“That’s right,” Alan said.

“We
will
get the world back
soon, though, won’t we?” Jack asked.

Alan pursed his lips, looked at the
boy and said, “Of course, Jack. It’s just a matter of time. We’ll regroup and…”
He trailed off.

While Alan was regaining his
composure, Senna said, “We’ll regroup and get rid of the rest of the zombies.
We’ll burn them up in a huge bonfire and then we’ll be able to take down all
these fences and run in the forest and be free again. Just you wait, Jack,
there’ll come a day soon when the virus is gone, and all of us will be around
to enjoy it. You, and me, and Alan—” she glanced at Alan, “—we’ll go pick
berries in the forest and meet people from other settlements, and you, Jack,
you’re going to have a large role in rebuilding the world. You too, Sasha. You
both will.”

“Me?” Jack said, his eyes growing wide
and onion juice pooling at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes,” Senna said, “You’re going to
help rebuild civilization, and you’ll have children one day, and you and they
will be the future of the world. You’re very important, Jack.”

Jack smiled shyly. He stared down at
his hands. “Wow. I hope I can do all that stuff.”

“You can,” Senna said, “and you will.”

Sasha looked like she was considering
the grandeur of what had been said. Then she popped the sectioned onion bits
into her mouth and began to chew.

The conversation was starting to make
Alan uncomfortable. He’d gone over many of these points with Jack before, and
although he understood that repetition was necessary for Jack to learn and
remember, the conversations dredged up memories that Alan preferred to keep in
the cobwebbed recesses of his mind. He would have to go through this again with
Sasha when she was older and he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

Repression is bliss, he thought. Then
he said, “I think I’m going to take a walk through the farm.”

Senna and Jack both looked up at him,
surprised. Sasha was preoccupied with chewing and swallowing the last of her
breakfast, intent on chewing each bit of onion ten plus ten plus ten times, a
technique that Jack had taught her.

“Unless you have any more questions
for me, of course,” Alan added quickly.

Jack shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

“Bye Alan,” Sasha said, piping up
suddenly. A masticated piece of onion popped out of her mouth. She caught it in
her hand and peered at it skeptically. Escaping bits of food weren’t to be
trusted.

Alan said, “See you later, Sasha.” He
smiled and began to walk away.

“Alan?” Jack called after him.

Alan turned around and looked at the
boy. Doing his best to smile he said, “Yes, Jack?”

“Uh, why do they call it a Voltaire?”

Alan pressed his lips into a line, then
took a deep breath. “I think that’s a story for another time.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned
and walked around the back of the house, leaving the children with Senna. A
cool breeze greeted him there, and he was grateful for the way it washed over his
body, seeming as it did so to sweep some of the unease from him.

It helped to get his mind off the rec-crews
where he’d been a cleaner and had overfilled his mental image bank with blood
and death and burning. He knew that he’d be thinking about the past a great deal
this evening when he went through his pre-market ritual, and he wanted to at
the very least put ancient history out of his mind for the present moment. The
daytime should be filled, to the extent it can be, with the present.

It wouldn’t leave him, however.

How had they all been so stupid to
think they could root the virus out? It had taken hold of the planet, there was
no getting free, and that should have been obvious back then. It
was
obvious, but they ignored it. All the lives that were lost, Allie’s and
Charlie’s included, were for nothing.

So many of them should still have been
alive, and in New Crozet. The wisest thing to do would have been to admit
defeat and go into hiding earlier, much earlier. Was there shame in that? Was
there shame in giving up to the virus if it meant surviving a little while
longer?

It doesn’t matter, Alan thought. None
of that matters. There’s only life and prolonging it.

Worse than considering the past was
imagining the future. Would Jack and Sasha ever rebuild the world? Would
anyone? It was an unknown. For now, there was only the present, with Senna and
the children and the other townspeople. The present was real. The future, on
the other hand, was just a bleak and mostly hopeless blur.

The world sent the wind to rustle its
leaves, drawing itself up to prepare for the transition to the latter part of
the morning. To Alan, it was a world alive, though it dwelled in the shadow of
the virus, it did live, steeling itself in a stance of primeval resilience, in
which it would remain steadfast until the final moment, awaiting the virus’s
ultimate mutation.

24

Suddenly, Alan felt loopy, as if he were looking at the world not from within
the confines of his own body, but from the viewpoint of someone or something
that was at the same time larger and smaller than he, a being that was neither
alive nor dead, existing in a space without space, seeing the world and its
disease for what they truly were. It was like being somewhere else, and apart
from everything.

In that place of detachment where he found
himself, seeing the human events of the world from an inhuman distance that imparted
triviality to everything people did, he saw Senna and himself, and what there
was between them, and for some reason it couldn’t be made small or unimportant.
It—
they,
were burning with a fire brighter and hotter than any inferno he’d
ever set.

The flames representing their love
shone mightily upward from the surface of the world, as if the planet was proud
of them and wanted all of the universe to see. Then Alan’s focus broadened and
he moved away, taking in the larger picture as clarity increased by degrees,
illuminating dark corners and their unique arrangements of dust.

They were marvelous dust piles,
meticulously placed to give the illusion of randomness, but that was all they
were: clever ruses, deceptions. He felt that he was a mere inch away from
understanding, from stepping into that awareness of the meaning behind the
struggle he’d endured, the moments he’d lived, the family and friends he’d lost,
the great love he’d won, the…

25

“Are you okay?” Senna asked.

He stepped back into himself without
knowing it, and it felt like what daylight must feel in the final moments of
dusk, fading away into nothingness.

“Yeah, I…yes,” he said, without
turning to look at her. “I’m fine.”

He looked around. All the colors
seemed to be gone from the world, to have been drained out of it. He squinted
up at the sky, then at the farm, then up at the mountains. Everything had lost
its luster.

Then he turned to Senna and swallowed
hard, his eyes going wide in disbelief. She was radiating all of the world’s
brilliance, as if she’d absorbed it all and it was inside her. He’d always
thought she glowed, but not like this.

Senna was on the verge of asking Alan
if he was alright again, but she stopped herself and locked eyes with him instead,
smiling a warm inviting smile with a hint of coquetry that reminded him of the
previous night’s activities. He grinned, and the hues of the world and Senna
restored themselves to their normal states.

The odd things he’d just seen left his
mind, sweeping up their trails as they went.

He walked farther from the back of the
house and surveyed the farmland. Senna grew turnips, tomatoes, onions,
potatoes, peaches, corn and sweet corn, snap beans, cucumbers, apples, and
grapes. She’d picked the produce for the farm herself after talking to the
other townspeople about what grew best there. When she’d made up her mind about
what she would grow, that had been the end of the story. She was a very willful
woman.

Not all of the willful had survived,
but all of those who’d survived were willful. Smiling weakly, he thought on how
he was a passive sort compared to most of the others, and especially compared
to Senna.

His gaze roamed over the farm, its crops
arranged in neat rows with blackberry bushes scattered between them. The
blackberries made Alan think of the preserves Senna made, and he pictured her
in the kitchen, in her old, flowered apron, crushing and sugaring the fresh fruit,
sometimes wearing something under the apron, and other times not. The thought
put a lump in his throat.

“Jack’s left to do his chores,” Senna
said, startling him out of his reverie, “and Sasha’s gone with him.”

He turned and saw Senna standing
beside him, looking up at the Blue Ridge Mountains. Grey clouds were brooding
just over their tops, the many shades of grey coalescing as if in contemplation
of an alliance.

“Not storm clouds,” Alan mumbled,
“just…” he trailed off.

“What?” Senna said, looking at him with
a quizzical expression on her face.

He shook his head. “I have no idea
where I was going with that.”

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ll
make us some breakfast soon. I need to start using up that honey I got from
Nell. Better to eat it while it’s fresh.”

Nell Rodgers had a house at the
western edge of New Crozet. She kept bees there, whose honey she harvested. She
was New Crozet’s premier trader, and probably the only reason the town got any
traders for market at all. Besides the honey, which was prized by all within
trading distance, Nell also made a number of protein-rich products, most of which
Alan found disagreeable.

“I’m getting there,” Alan said.
“Whenever you want to eat is fine by me.”

Senna smiled. “No protein slurry for
you this morning?”

He cringed. The idea of eating insects
mashed up in a paste of corn, honey, and mushrooms made his stomach turn.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“It’s not so bad, really, once you get
over what’s in it. The one with the dragonflies and beetles that she’s made
this month is actually very tasty. I don’t like the one with the bees as much,
though.”

“It’s not the taste that bothers me,” he
said. “You know that.” Nell’s bug and insect products could be surprisingly
satisfying. They had an earthy attribute that Alan found pleasant, but it was
the concept of
what
he was eating that made him uncomfortable.

“I know,” Senna said. “But it’s one of
the healthiest things in town. Just look at what it’s done for Nell’s son.
Rad’s already the tallest person in town, and he might grow to be even wider in
the shoulders than Tom.”

“I’m trying to eat more of it, really.”

“It’s a good thing you’re a fully
grown man already.” She grinned. “
My
man.”

“And you’re my woman, woman,” he said,
putting his arm around her shoulders. “Now and forever.”

She sighed and her back muscles relaxed,
giving her stance a deeply contented look. Turning to him she pressed her body
against his, then took his free hand and placed it on the curve of her hip and squeezed
his hand there and sighed again, more lightly this time. He caught the scent of
her hair, decadent, as always, and he found that the lump in his throat had
grown. Then her hand was suddenly in his pocket, reaching for him.

She let out a slight moan. “Looks like
you’re good and ready to earn that breakfast.”

“Uhuh,” he managed.

She grabbed him and led him after her
into the farm. Between the rows of corn, Senna pulled Alan down on top of her
in the wet grass. There, on the uncovered ground, they expressed their open
love for each other, while above the Blue Ridge Mountains, the gathering clouds
set a course for the rising sun.