Order of the Dead (13 page)

32

“I found a place where I could be safe for a while,” Alan said, “in a strip
mall convenience store. There was no one else there, and I was trying to be on
my own. I felt better being alone, away from the people in the warehouse, away
from people in general. I stayed in one place for as long as I could, while it
was safe and there were supplies, and then I moved again. I became better at
moving quietly without getting the zombies’ attention, better at my timing.

“I went around stores and houses,
going haphazardly in no particular pattern, staying in a place until I’d eaten
all the canned food or stale food or whatever was there. There was some peace
in that, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the people I’d left behind, to eat one
another. I thought about going back a few times, but never did. I’d made some
friends there, but we’d never gotten too close, and after Chris was eaten, I’d just
wanted to get out of there.”

“That’s understandable,” Senna said.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It doesn’t feel that way, though.”

“Alan, you’re always too hard on
yourself. None of that was your fault. People did terrible things after the
outbreak. They would’ve done them had you been there or not. Don’t beat yourself
up over it.”

“Yeah,” Alan said. “I know. Sometimes,
though, and this is neither here nor there, sometimes I wonder what would’ve
happened if the settlement we ended up in was one with a lottery, where getting
the losing ticket meant being eaten.”

“We wouldn’t have stayed in a place
like that,” Senna said. “There’s no need to live like that, anyway. There’s
food we can grow, and it’s enough. I’m sure the cannibals have eaten themselves
into extinction by now.”

Alan wasn’t so sure. He wondered what
the point of it all was, if people were willing to eat other people, if a virus
could turn them against one another like that, when what they should have been
doing was banding together.

He shrugged and let his eyes meander
over the mountains, whose greenery was becoming a brew of yellows and oranges
and reds and purples and browns and all the shades in between, transformed by
the sun’s wandering and stirred together by the branches of the trees.

Senna had never seen Alan cry, and he didn’t
cry now, but she recognized the sadness on his face. She stepped closer to him.
He looked like a man defeated, who continued to fight even though the battle
had already been lost, for some reason he himself didn’t understand.

For a moment she sensed that he was
holding something back, that there was something else, a deeper part of his
pain that he wasn’t letting her see. But she didn’t press him any further. Instead,
she put her arms around him and squeezed.

She sometimes wanted to ask him when
he’d last cried, or if he’d ever cried at all. At a funeral when he was a boy? At
the loss of his first love? Had it been during the outbreak? Or had he last
cried recently, in private? She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare ask, especially
not now, after he’d at last confided in her. At this, at the fact that he’d
finally told her, and even though it wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d sometimes
thought, she began to tear up. He’d held out for so long, and now he’d let her
have that part of him too.

He pulled her closer and kissed her
forehead, and then each of her eyes, and he let her feel the scruff of his face
against hers, coarse and reassuring. Comforting her almost made him forget that
he
was the one
she
was comforting. It always made him feel good
to console her, or at least to try. It made him feel like he had a purpose.

But now, rare as it was, he was the
one who was upset. It wasn’t over the men in the warehouse, or over what he’d done
there, or the act of cannibalism that he may or may not have caused. The memory
was painful, but it wasn’t what got to him deep down. What made him really
upset, what hurt like hell, was not knowing—not knowing how his family and
friends had died.

You could guess at it, as he sometimes
did—far less frequently now than before—but that was no substitute for knowing.
There were times when he obsessed over what their final moments must have been
like, and thinking about it long enough would bring him to realize an agony so sheer
that it made him forget there could be any other feeling in the world. He’d
never know, and he knew that he’d never know, but he could still dwell on it
from time to time, and so he did. Maybe that was what he should have told Senna,
but he couldn’t.

He looked at her face and saw that her
expression was brightening. She was there and alive, and they were together,
and that was all that mattered now.

She smiled at him. “Tell me the rest,
Alan. Then tell me what it was like to meet me, what I was like. I know I was
there for that part, but I like hearing it, from you.”

He managed to smile. Her spirit was
infectious.

“I ran again, and again, over and over.
It became easier the more people died, the fewer there were to fight with over
food and shelter, the fewer there were to try to help, and to be unable to
help, unable to save. I hid where I could, and I eventually ended up being
picked up by a crew.

“At the time, I thought it was the
right thing to do. There were government rations, and it’s not like I was doing
anything useful, anyway. I was just surviving day to day, maybe just waiting
for death, I don’t know, and the crew gave me something to work toward, a goal
that mattered. Some time after that our crews met, and I met you.”

After a moment’s pause, he went on, “You
were beautiful, and standoffish, too. We both were…standoffish, I mean, not
beautiful.”

Senna laughed. “You’re too hard on
yourself. You weren’t too bad looking, in your youth.” She smiled wryly.

“Funny,” Alan said. “We both kept to ourselves
for a while. No one liked to make friends on the crews. It usually ended in a
bad way. But you kept sidling up to me, asking me questions and such.”

“Didn’t,” Senna said. Her grin was
broad now.

He laughed. “Sure did.”

“Not me. It was you chasing after me.
You were cute.”

“Either way,” he said, “we got to
talking. We had nothing in common.”

“Nothing. Nada. Nanka. Zilch.”

“Nothing in common,” he said, “but
we…”

“Clicked,” she said.

“Right. And then you got to liking me
and you just couldn’t let me go.”

“You’re so yummy,” she said, “can you
really blame me?”

“Guess not.”

“We were great together,” Senna said,
“even on the crew, doing what we were doing.”

“Agreed. And the rest…is history.”

From then on, he thought, you and I
stood together, against the world.

Senna regarded the Blue Ridge
Mountains in the distance. She said nothing for a few moments. “Thank you,
Alan. Thank you for telling me about the warehouse.”

He’d taken down another wall for her,
and what they had was deeper now. There were more walls, many more, and he had
no plans to take those down, no plans to delve into the scorched earth that lay
beyond. But then he hadn’t planned on taking this wall down either and now he
was in the field beyond it, naked and standing on the human debris that was there,
with Senna’s strong presence at his side.

Frowning, he considered how he really hadn’t
intended to tell her all he just had, but she always managed to get a little
bit more out of him, more of what he didn’t want her to know, more about his
past. He sighed. The past itself was manageably painful now, a sore that would
never heal but whose nervy whine was something he’d grown used to.

It was the loss of control that
disturbed him more, because he was giving up a part of himself by telling her,
and even though he knew he could trust her, he didn’t want to tell her about any
more of his past. Sometimes he thought he wanted her to know everything. She often
said that herself…that she did want to know everything about him.

But he didn’t want to reveal it all
because that was an act that couldn’t be taken back, and anyway it was better
to live in the present and keep some things unsaid. So he resolved to keep the
rest locked away, and pictured his mouth being made of the sealed lips of a
vice, his head painted a cheap lime green shade to hide the bare, rusted metal
underneath.

Alan stroked Senna’s arm.

Then a gust of wind rustled its way
through the farm and billowed their clothes, setting the corners of their
garments to flapping. It brought with it the smell of damp leaves and soil, with
a subtle undertone of petroleum.

Alan’s nostrils flared in recognition,
but then Senna was pulling him after her, toward the house. He could tell what
was on her mind by the way she was walking, and he forgot all about the smell
the wind had carried to them.

33

A spider was crawling toward the church and its own death. It would be squashed
by Larry Knapp, who would take a little too much pleasure in the pointless act.
Oblivious to its fate, the spider moved on, completing the literal last legs of
its journey.

It had had a good life, having spent
some time in Senna’s great magnolia, and more than a week crawling all over
Senna’s fig tree, which was done giving fruit for the season, but was still a
fun place for a spider to hang out and spin webs and go on spider frolics in
the late afternoon.

When the figs were in, it was a fig
free-for-all, a frig for all, if you were feeling adventurous in your naming
and admitted what always seemed to happen after a session of fig eating. Let
the frigging commence. It wasn’t like Senna and Alan needed an excuse, or a
reason, or a particular fruit, anyway.

Good as the times there were, the
spider had left the comforts of their farm as if called away to a
soul-searching journey. There were other things in the world for it to find,
other trees to crawl, other afternoon frolics awaiting it in yet unvisited
spots.

This particular scuttling in the sun
occasion, however interesting the journey was now, and it was quite engaging
what with new weeds and blades of grass and clods of dirt to creep over and
scraggly corners of human buildings to skulk about in, as wondrous as it was,
it would end with death under the shoe of a middle-aged and bitter boozer.

Just like the spider, said embittered
boozer was also part of some unknown and unknowable grand plan, even if he was
just a signpost or diversion along the way. Or was he more? If he was a way
station or a marker, was he inside the lines of the drawing that was the
schematic of everything, or was he outside them, and did it ever even begin to
matter? These were the sorts of things the spider would marvel at when it found
itself under the shoe going splat.

Made of black brick and beige mortar,
the church façade was unusual for the town, whose buildings were mostly red
brick and white mortar. For the first three years of New Crozet’s existence, the
black and beige church had sat moldering, until the town meetings began to grow
too large to keep on being held in people’s houses.

It wasn’t population growth that had
increased interest in the town meetings, as the town had grown by only two
people in those years, but it was that the town’s food production had
stabilized, and the perimeter had been improved enough that more people were
freed up from the tasks of feeding and protecting New Crozet. The church had
been cleaned and a modicum of repairs had been inflicted upon it, and then the
meetings were moved into it.

There was a sign outside of it that
read ‘New Crozet, Population 203,’ in aluminum lettering that was more
sun-swept and mottled with each passing day. There was no sign outside the town,
though, because the perimeter was sign enough, and it was no one’s damn
business how many people were inside—that wasn’t something to advertise in the
post-apocalypse.

From his position at the pulpit, Tom
Preston, the town’s head peacekeeper, called the meeting to order. Tom was a
big man, six-and-a-half feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. He too had
worked on the rec-crews after the outbreak, and toward the end of his tour he’d
worked on the same crew with Senna and Alan.

He’d been one of the few to walk the
line between cleaner and spotter, being proficient at each task. He wasn’t at
Senna’s level as a spotter, but he was good enough to be used as spotting
support, especially in the most volatile of infected zones.

Tom’s wife, Elizabeth Clark, was in
the front row with their daughter, Rosemary. Elizabeth was watching Tom closely.
Rosemary was looking around some, but mostly just resting her head on her
mother’s shoulder. Tom was as close as the town had to an official, though he
had no more power in the town hall than anyone else. The town was ruled by
popular vote, and everyone had the right to speak their thoughts and propose initiatives.

Alan and Senna were there, sitting
together in the second row. They were holding hands, their fingers interlaced.
Senna appeared calm, while Alan fidgeted, and every so often she’d put a
calming hand on his knee to stop it from bouncing, and that would work for a
minute or two, and sometimes even three.

Like the other settlements that were
still around in the United States, New Crozet had sprung up in a place where,
by luck and by chance, a large enough group of survivors had found refuge. It
seemed an odd place, isolated as it was even before the outbreak, but it made
sense that a settlement would have taken root there because it was so quiet.
While the zombies had been seeking larger clusters of prey in the cities, the
outskirts were left relatively safe for the few who were fortunate enough to
live there or to escape there.

In the years after the outbreak, New
Crozet had used the internet to keep in regular contact with the other
settlements in the U.S., and what had passed for the post-outbreak government,
headquartered out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The transmissions were brief and
focused on matters of survival and trade. There was little point to much else.

Over time, something had broken down,
and the web had gone silent. The green servers that had kept information
flowing went dead, and without the manpower needed to restore them, news and
updates kept going around only if they were carried by traders to the markets.

There was rarely any word from Santa
Fe anymore, and never anything meaningful when there was. The settlements were
now policing trade themselves, with Senna, Alan, Tom, and Nell as New Crozet’s
points of contact for the leaders of the other settlements.

And all the safety procedures that had
needed working out were long in place. It came down to: build a perimeter and
never leave it. Outside, in the no man’s land of the virus, there were probably
no more reclamation vigilantes, and the Fleshers’ and slavers’ and other
outlaws’ numbers had been whittled down by the virus over time, and they were
now all but unheard of.

Alan glanced around nervously, and the
bouncing of his knee started up again. Churches had always made him
uncomfortable, but was this place even a church anymore?

Was it still a place of worship? And
if so, of what?

No, he decided. No. It had been
before, and that was it. It was just a cultural snapshot now, of a time that
was long past.

Though he’d just dismissed the
thought, his mind brought it to the fore again. No, he thought, more fervently.
This isn’t a place of worship. What we meet about here is real.