Order of the Dead (19 page)

45

He’d attracted followers, and quite a great number at first. He’d never
imagined how many would come out of the woodwork once the viral dust settled,
but of course the virus had. She’d known all along this would work, and that
was why she was in charge.

At her direction, he spoon-fed them
the idea of virus worship. The zombies had, after all, taken over the world, so
it was fair to assume that whatever ruled them, was god of the world.

The first ones had been the easiest to
win over. Eager converts came, their cheeks wet with tears, their hungry
stomachs gnawing away at nothing but the tang of bile and stomach acid, and
Brother Mardu took them in gladly, almost lovingly.

After a time the zombies and humans who’d
survived settled into a sort of equilibrium, which had come by way of the
obliteration of most of the latter. Those who survived were desperate for
something, anything, and he gave them hope, and principles that explained why
this had all happened.

And they’d eaten the spoon-fed
bullshit gladly, and warmed themselves at his side, and helped him to maraud
and steal from others who wouldn’t join them—from other
gangs
—and they’d
killed together, and eaten their first human flesh together. It hadn’t been
necessary then, there was still a lot of unspoiled animal meat they could
gather, and the animals themselves weren’t infected at that point. They’d done
it to display their power.

What better way to show your complete
triumph over your enemy than to eat his still-warm heart? It was a very old
custom indeed.

To those who followed him and joined
the Order, Brother Mardu returned the world. So long as they stayed away from
the zombies, or, perhaps, found a way to coexist with them, he and his
followers could dominate what was left.

What the zombies had taken was gone,
off the table, but there was still so much for the Order to enjoy. Plenty to go
around.

And what did Brother Mardu ask of
those who took in with him? Hardly anything at all. Loyalty, allegiance,
fealty, deference, worship, unquestioning obedience, their eternal souls…all of
the above with a helping of more please.

As a bonus, he’d strike awe in their
hearts and lead them through the apocalypse in style. They’d have the best
meat, the best slaves, the best quarters, the best drugs, the creamiest cream
the ruined world had to offer, and everything really was for the taking now.

You’re my zombies, he’d thought. You
belong to me. And at first, they had.

Of course that was when he’d begun to
forget his place.

Now, as he was standing poised in
front of his followers, many of whom only feigned allegiance at this point,
now,
when he was supposed to tell them what’s what, his mind again began to search
for what he’d lost, like a man on all fours groping for a lost contact in the
dark.

So where the fuck had it all gone
wrong? his anguished synapses shrieked at him, threatening to rip themselves
apart under the strain.

Again and again, it was the same
relentless interrogation. He felt like he was trying to wriggle out of a
Chinese trap, and he could see his way out of it but it was holding him too
tightly, and the harder he squirmed the more firmly it held him in place, and
the more his frustration built.

Why was he losing touch like this?
He’d been over it all already, but his mind was like a broken record: over and
over and over. At least rinse before you fucking repeat.

There would be giving tomorrow, and
then they would go from there. Right now, that was all he could settle on.

The whippets of self-doubt and
disappointment were still running their brainless circles in his headspace,
their tails burned up almost to stubs now. But they ran faster, and the charred
bones on the burnt parts of their tails stood out black and crispy.

Enough, Brother Mardu mouthed, finally
gaining control of himself, and the whippets combusted in their entirety. Their
howls grew louder, but that was a brief thing. Short-lived too was the ferocity
of burning that was added to their flailing limbs as they ran.

Moments later they were smoldering and
shuddering doggy corpses scattered about the racetrack. He bulldozed them clear
of his thoughts. The track needed some re-grading now, and some reseeding as
well, because one of the dogs had veered off the path when its body ignited,
and taken out some of the grass outside the track.

Fucking dogs.

That was supposed to be reserved for
people, for
spectators.
He’d set new dogs to running later, after this
ceremony, and the next, and the next, and after some culling. Perhaps after all
that, he’d find the dogs no longer ran, whether he lit their tails on fire or
not.

Then there would be peace.

46

He was feeling truly anxious, near panic even, for the first time since the
virus had begun pulling his strings. They were all gathered in the altered
truck that was quickly becoming a home to a colony of black mold, and where
they read from Brother Mardu’s book—and
he
was Brother Mardu, a fact of
which he nowadays needed reminding—and where they did their planning, and
feasting, always under the Embodiment’s watchful, though eyeless gaze.

He’d used to call it the ‘Embodiment,’
had even coined the term himself, but now it made him sick. It was just a
limbless zombie, a fucking cut-up and cauterized dead thing that belonged to
the virus. Perhaps it was even a spy in his midst, as if he needed any more treachery
around him.

They’d all prayed here together once,
had taken their mission from Brother Mardu’s mouth to their ears, had pledged
themselves to the virus and confirmed and reconfirmed their allegiance. They’d
chanted here and sung as the Embodiment writhed approvingly, blessing them with
the gifts of the virus, giving them power, its head straining toward them as it
tried to wrench itself free from the metal bands that held it in place.

All to no avail. All of those things,
everything, it was all just useless writhing. All of it for nothing.

He looked at the zombie, which he’d
changed with his own hands, and he didn’t recognize his own work. It was
trapped there, held in place by three steel bands. One was wound around its
waist, just above the navel, another around its chest an inch over where the
nipples had been and where now only torn and bedraggled rot was left. The last one
kept the shoulders in place.

Each strip of metal was fixed by a padlock
to a steel pallet that stood vertically behind the zombie. The pallet was
movable, and could be used like a stretcher to carry its bonded load from place
to place.

Back in the good ol’ days, he’d make
them move it into the fresh air for outdoor worship, and take it into the other
trucks when a brother or sister was bedridden and required a blessing from one
of the virus’s children. But they didn’t take it out of this truck, the feast
and worship truck, anymore.

The air was squealing out of Mardu’s balloon,
hooking into his backbone in its sour rush and taking that along for the ride.

Years earlier, there’d been shackles,
around arms and legs and the diminishing stubs of the same. But the Embodiment
had been whittled down into its current shape, which required much less to keep
it safely in place. It had to be cut down, bit by bit, for the giving rituals.

He looked at them. Some really had
worshiped the virus, and a few still did. Others had just wanted safety in
numbers, and now that the numbers were so small, well, there wasn’t a whole lot
of safety left. Others had just wanted access to Mardu’s resources, of which
few were remaining.

The town they’d set up and run had
collapsed under its own weight. But that was the right outcome, because they
were natural travelers, and never should have put down roots in the first place.

Some had come to him just for meat. And
that was okay too, because all of them would serve the virus, and they had, for
a time.

Two—one a man, Brother Donnie, and one
a woman, Sister Jane—had wanted Mardu himself, to be with him, in every way,
’til death, whether by virus or otherwise, did them part. Death would have
parted them, had they ever been with Mardu in the first place, but he’d
rebuffed all their advances, and Sister Jane had been killed, eviscerated and
eventually eaten, if we’re keeping score, in a skirmish with a rival gang over
gas and water, and Brother Donnie had killed himself when he couldn’t convince
the love of his life to join him in post-apocalyptic nuptial bliss.

He’d slit his own throat and sealed
his final love letter to Mardu with the spurting blood of his jugular. Brother
Mardu had called it ‘touching,’ forcing the word out of a mouth with sneering
lips painted on it, when he’d learned of Donnie’s exit stage left.

Would the virus have loved Mardu more
if he’d entertained the wannabe lovers? Maybe, but it was too late to fix that
now.

They’d once been a robust one hundred
and seventeen. Now they were only twenty-six: twenty-one men and five women.
He’d been a real success in the business of fear once, trading the shit out of
it, as it were. And now what?

Now, he knew, was his chance to keep
it all from slipping away, like that fish that swims up to you and looks at you,
staring dumbly, while you hold the point of your spear suspended over it, ready
to strike. He had to impale it before it swam away. There could be no
hesitation, no
more
hesitation.

He didn’t know if the virus would ever
return and take up guiding him again, and how could he know? He was going to do
the only thing he could, and that was keep on trucking.

47

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, like a king addressing those privileged enough
to hold court with him, “my
dear
brothers and sisters. Equilibrium Day is
closer than ever.” His tone was almost regal, and he noted the not-quite
nobility, because years earlier the tone he was now going for was there and
easy. Now everything was a challenge. At least his voice wasn’t breaking.
“Equilibrium Day may even come this year.”

Not a small number of said dear
brothers and sisters tried to hide eye rolls. Brother Mardu noted the minute
changes in some of the faces gazing at him.

They were like figures made of stone
and worn by the rain and grit carried in the wind, changing from day to day,
from sermon to sermon, becoming less like what they were when they’d joined him,
more unrecognizable.

Frayed wires of nerves were wrapping
themselves around his bones and trying to pull him down through the floor. The
imagined sensation of his flesh uncoiling around his skeleton as it was torn
out of the bottom of the truck and into the earth was making him sway.

He searched for and found the faces of
Acrisius and Saul, and in their eyes he found some comfort. It was a measure of
encouragement, and, grateful for that, for
them,
he went on.

“It’s true,” he said. “Soon the virus
will be done with its work here and it’ll leave. It might not be within
our
lifetimes, but it’ll be soon in terms of how the virus sees time.”

More suppressed eye rolls.

Fuck you, he thought, and he almost
screamed it.

A nod from Acrisius and a
semi-paralyzed half-smile.

A slight warmth in Mardu’s belly at
that.

A real smile on Saul’s perfect face.

Now there came a pulse of courage in
Mardu, and he found a springboard in his throat from which to launch more
rhetoric. He straightened, looking stronger, and feeling it too.

“We’ve been led well by it, but times
are changing. And now we have to make some changes. As we’ve done so many times
before, we’ll adapt and we’ll go on, because it is the virus’s will that we do.
We serve the virus, and so long as we do, we are safe.”

A cough, guttural and hacking.

“You have to realize, and I know that
each one of you does, just how fortunate we are. Look around you. Look at each
other. We are the beasts of prey. We sit at the top of the food chain…just
below the virus. We
own
the world.”

Well, at least what’s left of it, he
thought, but this wasn’t a time to mince words. His voice was deepening to a
bellow. There it was, some of the mojo madness slinking back. I’ll take you in
my prodigal son, he thought. Oh yes I will.

“This is
our
world.”

The Embodiment’s torso beat against the
restraints that were holding it. Then one more time. And again. The drum solo
had commenced.

Now
he
was the one swallowing
the urge to roll his eyes. Fucking
Embodiment,
please. A gang of idiots
dancing around a mutilated zombie is what he thought they were at times—these,
these
people
who were barely listening to him now.

They’d been his but they were
changing. They weren’t just blindly following anymore. They were thinking, they
wanted more meat, they wanted for more power.

Animals, he thought, reaching for
something that wasn’t theirs to take, reaching for what was
his.
Still,
he would go on until they were back in his hand and he was squeezing them, and,
when it came to the traitors, mashing them into a paste on his palm.

“We own this world now, and the people
in the settlements, they’re for us to take and do with as we like. They are the
meat on our plates, and it has been far too long that we’ve gone without. Meat.”
His tone became almost sultry. “Meat, on our plates.” He was actually beginning
to salivate, and the crowd of his followers, now paying attention, was
beginning to feel it too.

A throaty moan from the Embodiment, as
if in counterpoint.

Brother Mardu almost lashed out,
almost took out his knife and stabbed the thing to death, or whatever passed
for it in the zombie world, but he contained himself, for what would he be if
he wasn’t master of his own urges?

He recited the plan again, taking
great pains to connect with the brothers and sisters sitting on the gnarled and
moldy carpet in the dying, converted truck, to inspire in them anything at all,
but when it came to the details their eyes barely met his, and there were
groans of pain and perhaps disapproval that blew through them like an acrid breeze
while he spoke. These were hungry times, and they, apparently, were not
optimists today.

Now deflating again, an occasional
rasp began to take his words from him as he spoke, and that didn’t help the
whole mojo thing. Even his silken voice, which had always been his bread and
butter on the streets, was beginning to desert him now, and the scratch that
filled in every so often was like a needle putting a scar into a vinyl record.

After he’d said his piece, he turned
his back on his brotherhood and the malignant fetus of betrayal in it and watched
the Embodiment—no, the fucking cut up zombie—writhe. The virus had once told
him that these dances were magnificent, inimitable performances by a perfect
being.

She’d used those words in days past to
clear his mind and make his expression a lesson in tranquility. But that was
before. He’d been in control then, his power untouchable.

Today, the damned thing wasn’t
magnificent.
It was another deceit. It was the virus laughing in his face, punishing him,
but for what? They’d hit snags, that was all, but he’d give again, he would…he
promised.

His expression, far from untroubled
today, was a rough sketch of stress, all creases and running sweat and jawbones
poised to explode outward in their grinding. The limbless zombie kept on
dancing—popping and locking with those missing appendages like it was still
going out of style—blind to Mardu’s suffering.