Order of the Dead (20 page)

48

Senna was thinking of Alan. They were spending the evening apart.

Well, relatively so—he was in the
kitchen and she was in bed. She turned over, trying her left side again. The
springs were wearing down, and the mattress was getting a little too soft.
That, and she was always restless when he wasn’t there with her.

She could hear his footfalls as he
paced up and down the length of the kitchen, could feel the vibrations moving
through the floor and finding the legs of the bed. The subtle reverberations
were helping to reassure her.

It wasn’t as good as having him there
lying next to her, but it was a reminder that he was close by, moving in the
world, alive and well. There was a warmth in that feeling.

It was rare for them to go to bed separately,
and Senna didn’t like it one bit, hard as it was for her to fall asleep without
him there. But she knew that she had to give him his space on the nights before
market. She had her rituals, too, after all.

For one thing, she preferred to do
most of her farm work alone. The work gave her a feeling of peace, and though
she could have used the help—anyone’s at all—her experience working the farm
with others made her stop the practice. She wanted things done her own way, and
quietly. Some parts of nature were just better enjoyed alone.

She also had an odd habit of watching
the sunrise. That was why she so often got up before Alan, leaving him to
slumber on by himself. She loved the sunrise, and she loved being alone when
the sun did rise. It gave her the feeling of being offered a fresh start, to do
things over and to draw her life across a clean slate. There couldn’t be such a
thing the way the world was now, and she’d never want a slate that was
completely clean—every slate in her mind included a stick figure rendition of Mr.
Alan Rice.

And he had to watch his videos before
each market day. She still wasn’t sure why. It was as though he was preparing
himself for something, or torturing himself for not having been better on the
crews, for not being able to save more of those who’d served with them.

It won’t bring them back, she thought.
Nothing will. You have to focus on what you have now, on what
we
have
now.

She closed her eyes and imagined that he
was hugging her, then gently rubbing her back, and then finally covering her
back with kisses. Her body flooded with relaxation and contentment, but it
wasn’t as good as when he was really there, doing those things to her. If he
were there, he could clear the restlessness from her with the touch of his hand.

Frustrated and wanting the comfort of
Alan’s real presence, Senna opened her eyes and sat up in bed.

She sometimes wished she could be
without emotion, bereft of feeling, and free. Now was one of those moments.

If she could be like that, then she
wouldn’t miss him, and she wouldn’t find such pleasure in his company, such
comfort, because she wouldn’t need any love or consolation, physical or
otherwise, to be happy or to help ease the pain of what she’d seen before she
met him, and of what she’d done.

49

Alan’s face was so close to the monitor that his nose was almost touching the patch
of dead pixels just to the left of center on the prehistoric HP Pavilion laptop.
The playfully flickering pixels—the ones that weren’t dead—tried to push him
away, but he didn’t give up his position. In some things, as it turned out, he
could be just as stubborn as his better half.

Senna had left a candle burning on the
kitchen table for him. He wasn’t sure why she did it, but it was her way, the
touch she imparted to things, like a goodhearted footprint. The flame was
beginning to gutter, and was casting an unsteady glimmer on the plate of crumbs
sitting beside it, the remains of a slice of apple crisp with a side of canned
peaches that Senna had left out for him.

It was a bit too fancy for a regular
night, he thought, but of course there was no way he could know that this night
was far from normal.

At first he hadn’t wanted to eat it
without her, but she’d insisted, and she could be very persuasive. She’d wanted
him to enjoy it tonight, and she hadn’t been that hungry anyway. ‘You’re the
one staying up,’ she’d said, and, according to her, he was always wasting away,
and she had no problem keeping meat on her bones.

So he’d given in, and not unhappily
either, and enjoyed every last morsel. Now he licked the plate clean of the
crumbs and shallow smears of peach preserves. He’d been uncomfortable about
wasting food before the outbreak, and now it was entirely out of the question.

Their two peach trees had given a lot
of fruit this year, and they’d eaten and shared as many as they could, while
canning the ones they couldn’t keep up with. He loved eating the things she
made, and now that he was done with the snack she’d made for him, he missed her
even though she was just in the other room, and he would’ve gone to her and
sidled up next to her if it weren’t for not wanting to wake her, and, of
course, his sick need to watch the damn videos again.

When they’d first moved into New
Crozet, the video-watching had started as a way to keep training himself to
look for the signs, even though his eyesight wasn’t good enough, and, in any
event, he could never become a spotter now.

Well, that’s how it had started,
anyway. He’d done it for a year or so, and then it had just stuck, and remained
stuck even after it became clear they wouldn’t be venturing out much anymore,
if at all, and his spotting abilities were a lost cause.

Now, he probably did it out of inertia,
or to remind himself of what was out there, or maybe for no reason at all. The
older you got, the more stubbornly your habits kept you driving on the same
track, in the same piece of shit, used-up lap car, sweating into the same seat,
which was saltier and more vinegary with each curve. Tangy seat cushions, there
ain’t much better ’an that.

50

Spotters had to have perfect eyesight, quick reflexes, and, above all else,
talent.
It was a gift that Alan hadn’t been able to find in himself, though not for
lack of trying. But talent wasn’t something you could
find
in yourself,
now was it?

It was one of those things that if you
had it, you’d know, because it would make you know. And spotters weren’t needed
now, anyway. If the perimeter broke down or if the town had to be moved for
some reason, they’d become extremely important, but at this point, that all seemed
unlikely, and with each passing day, more so.

Still, he watched the videos before
each market. It used to be that he’d watch all six of them, and then, over
time, he’d watch fewer and fewer. Last time he’d watched three, and the time
before that, two.

Today, he wouldn’t get through more
than one and an untidy sliver of a second. That was okay, he’d seen them all a
hundred times, and, at any rate—in this case, free, except for his time—they
were all pretty much the same.

Senna didn’t prod him about the habit,
and he was glad of that. She understood him, and, when it came to this,
understood that he needed this time to himself, to go through the ritual, for
whatever reason, even if there wasn’t a clear one, or any at all.

Maybe he did it because focusing on
the screen gave him hope, misguided though it was, that he’d see some kind of
pattern and come to a better understanding of what had happened to the world.
Maybe that would let him do more for the town, and then all these late night sessions
would finally be worth it. He wasn’t a fighter, and he knew that, though he’d
had his stint on the rec-crews, for what that was worth. What he really was
deep down and at heart, was a thinker. His core competency was in finding
solutions, and he felt like he hadn’t really done that since the outbreak.
Maybe he no longer could.

He paused the first video and got up
from his seat at the kitchen table. The chair let go a croak of obvious relief,
as if to say, ‘I give up. Please, no more.’

“Yeah, yeah,” Alan muttered softly,
and went to the cupboard, where he took out a jar of oatmeal and a clean bowl.
He unscrewed the jar’s lid—it wasn’t like ripping open a packet and drawing
from it that soul-pleasing sound that paper made when it was torn, but it would
have to do—and poured the oatmeal out into the bowl.

The jar didn’t have a label, because
post-apocalyptic oatmeal makers weren’t so big on the whole branding thing.
Quaker the flake maker was no more. The only other oatmeal brands he could
remember were Nature’s Path and Arrowhead Mills: also gone.

The other, other brands, whatever they
were, weren’t around either. Alan thought on this for a moment. There probably
was some name brand oatmeal somewhere. There must have still been something
left of shelf stable—or, in the case of the Twinkie, indestructible—foods from
before the outbreak. The Twinkie, he decided, would live forever in the minds
of the survivors, however long that was.

What he wouldn’t do for a Twinkie
right now, or anything resembling one, even though he wouldn’t have been caught
dead eating one before the outbreak. It would have wreaked havoc on his
midsection, something he’d been trying to avoid in his former life as a
seldom-exercising office dweller.

And then there were the hungry days
and months after the outbreak when he’d wished to God that he had some more
padding on his body, when he’d have eaten just about anything that held the
promise of a few extra calories, and he’d eaten more than a few questionable
items to try to stay alive. Every survivor had a list of unsavory perhaps-edibles
that they’d eaten tucked away in some dark corner of the mind, and he was no
exception.

Could a food really go for twelve
years without going bad in some way? Alan wasn’t sure, though he knew it depended
on the fat content, the amount of processing, and the preservatives that had
been injected in the stuff.

Be that as it may, had he been a
betting man and had there been anyone to bet with, he would’ve put his chips on
the card that said that some of tomorrow’s traders would bring a food relic and
try to sell its expired—but supposedly still edible—goodness. He shrugged. He’d
be in that line too, and he knew it.

The HP Pavilion’s motor buzzed
unhappily, and Alan looked over his shoulder at it. There was a woman’s face on
the screen, her expression somewhat dulled but speaking clearly of pain and
fear, her cheeks crisscrossed with the paths of tears that had run out and
dried. She knew what was being done to her, in a vague, drugged-up-to-hell sort
of way. She was being studied, and her time was about to run out.

51

The virus was taking its time with her. Usually, if you were infected you’d die
and reanimate within minutes. The turn was startlingly fast,
usually.
But, with this woman who’d lived on in Alan’s HP laptop for going on twelve
years after her actual death, it was taking hours.

In the field, Alan had never seen
anything like it. There were a few times he’d seen it take longer than normal,
but never more than five minutes. This was dragging out for hours.

The scene he was watching may have
been the result of a slow-acting strain of the virus that the government had
been able to isolate or develop, and sometimes he suspected that was the case, but
he’d never been able to confirm that theory. It would never matter, anyway.

All the experiments and attempts at
cures and antidotes had come to nothing. The only good that had come out of all
the tests was a set of data points for survivors to use, and the more they knew
about the virus, the better job they could do of staying away from it, but that
was really all.

The woman offered few clues, if any.
She was barely lucid, and the close-up shots of her face revealed that her
teeth had been extracted and her tongue removed, leaving cauterized gums and a
blackened nub as reminders of what had been there before. She wouldn’t have
been able to speak to tell Alan what it felt like, not well, anyway, but she
didn’t try, either.

The body…modifications were typical precautions,
except that they were usually done after the turn, not before. Nails were often
removed or whole fingertips severed, but the hands of the woman were whole.
Maybe they were trying to spare her some pain, or maybe they’d just been too
rushed to do it and would see to it later.

Just make sure you chop off the
fuck-you finger first. It’s the longest, after all, and the better to scratch
you with, my dear.

Zombies always clawed at their prey,
that was true, but if you had a zombie tearing at you with its nails, then its
fingers and nails, no matter how sharp they might have been, were the least of
your worries. It was the saliva-spewing and biting mouth that you were most concerned
with.

Alan turned back to the bowl of
oatmeal and stared at the flakes. He hated oatmeal. He hated everything about
it: the taste, the texture, and the lack of satisfaction that he felt after
eating it.

The light was mostly faded from the
world outside, and he had a peripheral awareness of the creeping darkness as it
got braver and braver in its forays through the window and into the kitchen. He
walked to the solitary window and looked out.

The moon was up, looking sickly as
ever, and it made him remember looking up at it long before, before all this
had happened. He could remember wondering up at it from a different time, but
that time was long past. The moon, and the oatmeal, got him missing the old
foods.

It had been more than nine years since
he last had real meat for dinner. There had been the occasional wild bird in
the years immediately after the outbreak, but that had only lasted so long. The
virus had found a way into the birds, too, as if the people and cattle and fish
hadn’t been enough. The menu had been completely revised before he and Senna
ever stepped foot in New Crozet, but not since then. They could be thankful for
that much.

Senna had a lot of success with the
fruits and vegetables and grain she grew on the farm, but those things didn’t
fill him up the way meat used to, and that was why he was making oatmeal now,
even though he’d already eaten dinner and the snack Senna had put together for
him.

There was a constant gnaw in his
belly, his body crying out for something it wasn’t getting. Nell’s stuff
would’ve helped, but he could barely keep it down. Oatmeal had some protein in
it, and it would sit in his stomach and distract it from what was missing, at
least for a while.

He turned on the burner on the stove,
lifted the kettle and turned it from side to side so he could hear the water
sloshing, then set it back down and stood over it for a moment while the water
heated up. Then he began to pace between the window and the stove, looking at
the moon when he was by the window and glancing at the burner coils turning
orange and red under the kettle as they got hotter.

The kettle emitted a meek rattle, like
the bleat of a very shy sheep, except tinny. The water was beginning to boil,
that was what that usually meant.

Alan stopped at the window and
regarded the moon’s surface.

He’d missed it again, and he knew it. The
instant just before the rattle had come and come without his knowing. It was the
instant that had in it the telltale sounds that heralded its coming. Telltale
sounds were everywhere, but he wasn’t able to spot them.

The rattle grew louder, but the
kettle’s whistle was open so there was little chance the faint noise would disturb
Senna. Alan went back to the stove and watched the steam rise upward. It was an
inkblot of normalcy in an overthrown white parchment of a world, and he let
himself be sucked into it.

After a few moments, he turned the
kettle off. He poured boiling water over the oatmeal and watched the flakes
swirl and settle into new positions. From a cupboard he took a mason jar of peanut
oil and set it next to his bowl.

The kettle’s rattle was almost
imperceptible now, but the water was still moving it slightly. He opened the
jar and used a scratched tablespoon to measure out three tablespoons of oil,
each of which he poured over the steaming oatmeal, whose flakes were growing as
they soaked up the hot water.

The better to fill your stomach with. And
that was all they were: filler.

From another cupboard Alan took a bag
of coarse, brown sugar, unclipped and unfolded a corner of the bag, and tilted
it so that sugar poured over the surface of the oatmeal until only sugar was
visible at the top of the bowl.

He looked at his creation and sighed.
He didn’t understand how there had been men and women who’d lived this way not
out of necessity but by choice, but that was a long time ago, and now just
about any man or woman might jump at the chance to eat any sort of meat, so
long as it was uninfected, and turn a blind eye to its source. Others would even
take their chances with untested meat.

Alan picked up the bowl, keeping his
fingers at its edges, and returned to his seat at the table. He set the flakey
snack down in his lap, then pressed play and the video blinked back into action.

There was one physical sequence that
spotters had been trained to look for, and that sequence was the entire point
of this video. It was the break.

The break was the transition from
dormancy to rampage. It was an abrupt change from feigned weakness to strength,
speed, and savagery; a viral trap, ingenious in its ability to spread the
disease. And the disease had spread, like a wildfire of blight and damnation.
It had been near unstoppable.

But then, Alan knew, the spread had
never been stopped definitively. It had never been stopped at all, only slowed.

It was called the break because—the
mouthful of oatmeal had suddenly become a lump of sour clay in his mouth—he didn’t
want to think about that, not right now, and if only he could change the world
and its past, not ever.