Order of the Dead (31 page)

5

It had been a few minutes past midnight and Saul was still in the early part of
his shift when they’d started coming. At first, he hadn’t understood what they
were.

How could he have? How could anyone?

The first one seemed to Saul just the
run-of-the-mill raving lunatic, though he was more the moaning than the raving
sort, until he stumble-ran into Saul’s mill, which proceeded to chew up the
lunatic, moans and all, and gladly. Saul was still processing this—and his mill
was still spitting out chunks of the man who’d jumped into it—when the next
ones came.

There were a good many next ones.
Where were all these crazy people coming from? And what was wrong with them?

They ran at him, and he didn’t need to
read a pamphlet to know they meant him harm. They were snapping at him like
turtles, trying to get up into the mill with him, and they were also trying to
stick their nails in him, and there was something very,
very
wrong with
the way they looked, and how they moved, and that grinding, moaning sound they
were making. Come to think of it, everything about them was wrong.

Without even thinking about it, he
began to bonk them with his wrench. And it was only bonking at first, just to
keep them away from him. But it didn’t, and the hands kept reaching, and the
mouths, too.

There was no talking to them either,
so his bonks became firm blows, and then crushing ones, and when he got down to
examine the bodies of the four people—if they were still that and he was beginning
to have his doubts—whose skulls he’d smashed in, his body was still vibrating
from the rumbling of the mill.

The involuntary trembling made him
doubt, though only for a moment, that this was really happening. Dreams could
be very convincing at times, especially the vivid ones that Saul had, but he
knew that this wasn’t a dream. And the way he knew was the strangest thing of
all, perhaps as strange or even more so than what would happen in the coming
years, after the virus was fully grown, its puberty and all the awkwardness
that came with it stamped into the past.

He knew because—

The way he knew wasn’t something he
wanted to think about then.

There were more of these people in the
distance, except they weren’t sick, they were what they were: zombies. And they
were getting closer to Saul, edging clumsily toward him.

With his thumbs hooked into his
pockets and the wrench hanging onto the fingers of one hand, Saul gazed at the
group coming toward him. There were eight. Five men, two women, and a child—a
little girl who must have been five or six. They were all in their nightclothes
except for one of the men, who was completely naked. They were coming from a
new housing community growing along the highway where single family homes were
popping up like weeds.

Saul saw something then that any good
spotter would’ve seen, and that was because he could spot with the best of
them, except the term ‘spotting’ hadn’t been thought up yet. To him it was a
combination of seeing and feeling, more like sensing than anything else, like
perceiving a building pressure by putting your hand on the lid of a heating pot
that was just barely beginning to think about rattling.

At that moment, the pressure behind
the lid had built up too much, and then it wasn’t a circular lid with some
almost-boiling water under it, but a dam with the weight of a great lake on the
other side, and fissures were beginning to run through the dam’s skin like
precocious roots, and it would only be a short time before the inevitable concrete
fragments began to fall, mostly downward at first—slipping and sliding and
taking chips with them on their ski down—but then outward, being flung with the
force of furious water that had been kept in a container too long. Well, now
was its chance, and the whole fucking structure was done for.

Out of the rupturing shell the water went
and ate the world, leaving behind strewn splinters of the dam, which, when
they’d been part of a whole, had held the evil back.

6

It was clearest on the naked man and the redheaded woman who were stumbling
along beside the little girl.

That was another thing: different
zombies showed it differently, and the changes in some were more pronounced
than in others. Each zombie was unique, just as each person was, even though
all the zombies were controlled by the same puppet master.

For one thing, he saw the naked man’s
extremities begin to twitch. It was slight, but he caught minute up and down
movements in the tips of his fingers, an odd hopping like the cold pavement was
pricking his toe pads, and the teeniest of bobs at the end of his penis, like
it was starting to retract, then changing its mind, rinse and repeat.

In the redhead, who he’d thought of as
Poison Ivy as soon as he saw her, he saw the tips of her fingers and the points
of her clavicles and her eyes do the same thing.

When he zoomed out and made his vision
a bit fuzzier, he could see that it wasn’t just the super-villainous redhead
and the nudist who were doing these things, but all of them were, albeit each
in his or her own unique way. Then the smell of putrefaction seemed to grow
wings and fly over to him, and the air grew thick with it as if a bellows had
sucked all the breathable air into another world.

They staggered closer to him, but
their movements were now even more clumsy, and the sounds coming from them were
changing too. The moans and grunts were becoming faintly less guttural, softer
in a way that only a certain endowed kind of ear could catch.

A good spotter would have seen and
heard all of this, and Saul did just that. They were the hints of a coming
chain reaction. The flat end of an exponential phenomenon that was just now flirting
with the idea of unflattening.

Not much to it, you might say, but oh,
yes, yes there was. Most people couldn’t see a thing, and it had more than a
little to do with the fact that being composed enough to observe details in
this sort of situation was beyond the grasp of most. Just keeping yourself from
screaming would’ve been hard enough.

Of course Saul didn’t know that he was
supposed to stay quiet at that point, this was all new to him, and he still
didn’t quite understand what he was seeing, except that he knew he really was
seeing it, and in his waking life, no less.

Then, a spasm took hold of Poison Ivy
and her entire body seized up and shook until her eco-terrorist spine did a
violent sideways twist and crunched, audibly enough for the sound to carry over
to Saul, who was still a good distance away.

Startled, more by the suddenness than
by fear, Saul lost his grip on the wrench. It fell and clanked against the
flayed nerve endings of the pavement, which he hadn’t finished profiling. There
was still a half mile stretch of road surface that needed removal before he
could have in good conscience taken so much as a juice break.

The clank seemed to have hit the
world’s slow motion button, or Saul’s slow motion perception trigger. Whichever
it was, the effect from his perspective was the same. Even on their decelerated
reel, the zombies became an explosion of movement.

7

Bones snapped apart into ragged shards and tore through putrefying flesh to
breathe in the air for the first time. Saul stared as bone and flesh went in
different directions—a hardcore disagreement was being had on where they should
live relative to each other. And they were really far apart on terms. The
middle ground that they came up with was ghastly, and all Saul could do was watch
the negotiation play out.

Bones wanted out. Skin and muscle and
internal organs and tendons and ligaments and all the flesh in between, rotting
though it was, wanted said bones to stay damned well in their place. It wasn’t
so much that the flesh cared about preserving its appearance. No, it was a
structural argument, a practical question of how the hell are we going to keep
moving around if you break the skeleton all over the place?

Fuck you and your argument and go
pound dirt, the bones said, and then they went ahead and did what they wanted.
They didn’t have a choice really, because it was what the virus commanded, and
in the end, flesh and bone served the same master.

The zombies, unbelievably, after
splintering their skeletons as if their bones were made of dried wood, charged
at Saul, closing the distance to him at a speed that, quite frankly, was
surreal. They’d broken free of their sleep, and they wouldn’t slow again until
they’d done their work of spreading the virus to new hosts, or until the noise
coming from the humans in the area stopped, the latter of which usually
happened as a direct result of the former, and not on its own, because staying
still and quiet long enough in the presence of zombies so that they would
forget you were there was, insofar as the outbreak and the months soon after, a
challenge that was beyond measure. The rec-crews would master it eventually,
the ones who survived, anyway.

The breaking of a large horde was a
sight so alien, and so disturbing, that it left many unbitten humans frozen
like deer in the headlights, too horrified to move, too involved in trying to
process what they were seeing to do anything. And so they were made easy prey.

But not so for Saul, in part because
the group of zombies he faced was somewhat short of a horde, and because fully
active zombies had already tried to attack him while he sat in the mill, and
he’d briefly seen their spines of broken bones poking through, and that had
lodged itself somewhere in an active part of his subconscious, which added that
element to the slow-moving zombies without any bloody porcupine quills poking
through their skin. He’d been able to see that there was something about these
zombies that was missing, an unfulfilled promise that had to be kept before
they engaged him.

After they slipped into dormancy,
their bones would break again when they were reactivated, and the quills on
them would jut out further, and new porcupine points would be added, and their
bone structures would become more and more abstract, and less human, like what
Picasso’s version of a zombie might look like.

Saul had broken into a run—he was very
fast, which was impressive considering his great size—after he’d stared, almost
too long, at the compound fractures hurtling toward him. Of course the bones
couldn’t just be broken. They had to be poking through the dead skin, having
fractured so suddenly that it seemed the zombies had sprouted bristles.

And that was why it was called the
break.

8

When Sister Beth looked up at Saul, he was looking at her and beaming with
merriment.

He
is
retarded, she thought. No
fucking doubt about it.

He wasn’t, but his brain chemistry was
tweaked just right so that he was an eternal optimist, regardless of what life
presented to him. He’d been happy as a slave, and he was happy now, and he’d be
just as happy if Brother Mardu and Brother Acrisius decreed that he was to be
eaten by the Order. He’d smile until the muscles that allowed him to show joy
on his face no longer worked, until they themselves were eaten.

There’d be pain in it, he was sure,
but he’d bear it gladly—no,
more
than gladly—to help his brothers and
sisters go on. After all, with each passing day, they were getting closer and
closer to their goal, to the Equilibrium, to Equilibrium Day.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She nodded.

In the next two hours they would
travel stealthily by foot through the forest. They were out in the open with
the zombies often, Beth more often than Saul, as she was the better spotter.
She’d been a parole officer in her prior life, and she’d had a knack for
spotting misbehavior then, too, if the telltale signs of the break could be
characterized as a form of misconduct.

It wasn’t though. It was just the way
the zombies expressed themselves before they did a certain other thing.

It was all part of a routine, just
like truancy or assault or battery or worse were part of a parolee’s program.
Zombies were predictable machines just like criminals were, just like
settlement dwellers were, just like ’tards like Saul were, just like Mardu was.

She was convinced that she, on very
much the other hand, was entirely unpredictable. She wrote the fucking program
as she went and she coded it as she saw fit. No one knew what was coming, not
even she did. It came to her as the days unfolded, showing her uncharted forks
in the roads and lanes of her mind.

The toll for the bridge she was trying
to pass over now could only be paid in lives, and in particular ones at that.
She had to fork over the lifeblood of Saul, Mardu, and Acrisius, who together
represented the holdouts of the old way. A gangrenous curmudgeon of a limb that
needed to be amputated for the good of the whole. The fact that she would enjoy
it, too, didn’t make it any less right.

She stood, avoiding his gaze, and
followed him to the edge of the campground. They were to make it to the town after
the market was already underway, after Mardu and Acrisius were well enough
inside, and there was no point wasting time.

The forest beyond the netting was
quiet, the only sound besides the insects and burrowing worms that of the last
bits of dew turning to vapor, which was a pop and sizzle too faint for most
human ears to catch.

Beth stole one look at the camp behind
her, and then, boring her death glare into the back of Saul’s skull as he
worked on making an opening for them to cross through, took pride in knowing
that after she’d done her deed, he wasn’t to come back here, and neither were
his masters. Her only regret about the future—because her imagination was
fruitful enough to have such regrets—was that she wouldn’t be able to take
their bodies back to put on display in gibbets.

If she’d had more on her side, she
would’ve liked to execute them all publicly, to make an example of them, but
that wasn’t an option right now. She’d make do, however, as she always did. The
bridge keeper’s toll had to be paid, and she wasn’t one to turn back from a new
means of passage, no matter how great was the entry fee.

As she left the campground following
Saul, the sun’s growing heat wiped out the last of the dew that had settled in
the woods.