Order of the Dead (32 page)

9

Jack was walking around the town center looking for a place to bury the last of
the crocodile parts, the wooden snout, now that he’d gone about the work of
dismembering the toy and burying its other parts in separate, unmarked graves. The
snout was in the right pocket of his pants, the top row of teeth biting at his
leg. The bottom row was inset from the top, so it couldn’t get at him.

Absentmindedly, his eyes focused on
the ground, he wandered over to the outer gate. There he looked up at the
watchtower where Rad Rodgers was in mid-throw, casting weighted netting down
from the tower.

While the heavy mesh was in the air,
the two men in the waiting truck jumped out and dashed into position. When the
netting landed in a bundle the two men grabbed it while it was still settling
to the ground, before it had the chance to get the last bounces out of its
system.

They worked at a feverish pace to
unravel it as they ran behind the back of the truck, pulling the netting apart
to make a shroud around it. Then each of them came up the sides of the truck until
they reached the outside of the New Crozet gate and attached the net to hooks
on the town fence.

No zombies had come while the men were
doing their practiced market dance, and if any came now, they wouldn’t be able
to get through the mesh. If nothing else, it would at least slow them down and
allow the townspeople to pick them off with rifles while the traders got
inside.

The men had jumped back into the truck
and were now pulling up to the gate.

Corks sighed heavily. As far as he
could tell, these would be the last traders for the day. There were no caravans
in view behind it, and it was getting late in the morning. There weren’t likely
to be anymore, and even this one had come on the later side, after he’d thought
no more would.

“This better be the last of them,” he mumbled
under his breath.

He was exhausted, and he was getting
hungry, and on top of it all, his mood was beginning to dip. Hopefully these
guys would have something good and be a quick let-in, and then he’d be able to
leave his post every now and again, taking shifts between Connie Williams and
Lester Mills, and get some market time—and most important, market food
eating—in.

In the town center, the market was
ratcheting into gear. All the expected traders had already been let in, along
with two newcomer outfits. The traders who were at the gate now were also new.

All the fresh faces were good, because
depending on what goods they’d brought, they could make the market better. The
heavy turnout also meant that New Crozet was solidifying its place on the map.

It wasn’t just a forgotten outpost
now, but a real human settlement, and it mattered. The people Corks was
protecting mattered. He was doing something that would’ve made his son proud,
and in the end, that was the only thing that was important to him.

“Don’t let them in,” a voice in his
head admonished.

Corks stiffened. Was he really going
to lose it now, in the middle of the day? These episodes were supposed to be a
nightly affair. He was used to that, at least.

“Spare me the day,” he grumbled.

“Don’t you dare let them in your town,”
the voice went on. “They’re the devil’s children. The
devil’s
spawn.
They’re going to ruin
everything.
”

He put his hand on the butt of his gun
and an electric shock seemed to travel up his fingers when he touched it,
setting first his fingers and then his wrist to trembling.

“They’ll take all you’ve got left. And
that’s not very much, is it?”

He shut his eyes for a moment, trying
to clear his head.

“
Devil’s
children.
His.
”

A frown line appeared between his
eyes. It deepened with each step he took toward the gate, toward the
devil’s
children.
That damn voice wasn’t shutting up now, so he tried his best
to ignore it.

He walked closer.

“Devil’s
children. Devil’s
children.”

The men smiled at him.

“Devil’s
children.”

A cricket chirruped.

“Devil’s...”

The voice in his head was growing
quieter.

“Children.”

“How many are with you?” he asked.

“It’s just the two of us.”

“Devi—“

“And what did you bring?”

“Potatoes, sugar, shoes.”

“How’d you hear about…
here?
”

They pointed inside and mentioned two
veteran trading outfits, which they claimed had shared New Crozet’s location
with them. Supposedly, they were licensed and had been at it a long time, but
had never ventured this far east. The story was plausible.

“IDs?” New Crozet’s last line of
defense said.

They handed their IDs to Corks, who examined
them, doing a painstaking comparison against the acceptable forms of ID that
the settlements had agreed upon when trading had just begun.

The IDs checked out, and the voice in
his head was gone.

“Okay,” he said. He gave the OK signal
to Mills and Williams, and they opened the gates in sequence, first opening the
outer gate, letting the traders in and closing it shut behind them, then
opening the second gate to allow them into the next fenced-in compartment, shutting
that gate, and then opening the last gate to let the potatoes, sugar, and shoes
into New Crozet, and then shutting that one too.

Maybe they’d have Nikes, Corks thought
as they went by. The random thought pinged in his brain, wanting him to wonder
where it had come from, but he didn’t care one way or another.

Just as the traders passed into the
town center, woodland zombies, having been attracted by the scraping of the
gates—peanut oil could only do so much—threw themselves against the outer gate.

Corks, from his place in the alley beside
the gated compartments said, “Hello again, old friends.” Then he promptly
launched a noisemaker up into the woods.

The popper—not to be confused with one
of Nell’s Poppers—went on its merry way, arcing over trees before reaching its
zenith, giving a great bang, and then beginning its descent, rattling the whole
the way like a pesky flame-free firework.

The zombies at the fence turned
abruptly and began to lope back toward the tree line and over it. Corks
followed their progress and his eyes were met with something he didn’t expect
to see—another truck.

“Shit,” he said. “This had better be the
very
last.”

Who was in this truck that the rotten
deer, rabbits, foxhounds, mice, squirrels, and Labradors and Goldens—once
much-loved pets—were now passing on their way into the woods? Corks didn’t
recognize it.

Uneasy, he looked behind him.

Jack was standing at the last of the
inner gates, watching him.

There was something in the boy’s eyes.

“What is it, Jack?”

Jack only stared at Corks, saying
nothing. He was trying to remember something, it was the crocodile snout that
he’d meant to bury.

It was outside of his mind now,
displaced by what he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the curious and extremely
dilapidated truck outside the fence. Who were these traders? What did they
have? And how far had they come for the truck to look that bad?

The wooden snout with its reptile mouth
kept biting at his leg, but he still didn’t remember it, fascinated as he now
was with the rolling relic that was slowly approaching. If there were channels
of other-than-human communication in the world, a message was now racing on
them, trying to reach this boy, to convey a rough sketch of the coming hours,
not to warn him off or scare him, but just to be seen.

Try as they might, they were failing
to reach him, and only hit the snout and its teeth and stuck to it like jam.
The message in the invisible bottle was simple. It came first as words, then as
feelings, then as pictures, then as feelings again, then as a tingling
sensation—which Jack almost did feel—and then as a final coloring book page,
but a blank one without outlines.

On the page, a teal crayon began to
smear itself clumsily across. It drew a small boy with wavy, uncombed hair,
teeth marks in his leg, and a fence, and his house, and he…he was on the wrong
side. On the wrong side of the fence.

And there was more, there were…

It kept drawing, cutting itself down
to small teal strips stuck to paper to show him, just to let him see, because
that was what it did, what it was made to do if it had ever been made at all.
There was a lot more that even the crude crayon piece could convey, but it
didn’t matter, because it was outside of human comprehension. But, perhaps its
existence in that outside place, was exactly why it did matter.

Feeling a strange tug in the pit of
his belly, Jack retreated from the fence, making his way to the center of New
Crozet, where the unfolding market would welcome him with its county fair-like
ambience. No pig races at this one, but some good post-apocalyptic delicacies
and refried chunks of gossip to be had.

10

Brother Acrisius was looking curiously at the man’s face, which was covered with
mosquito bites. Some of them were so inflamed that they were red, semi-bloody
welts. That made Acrisius feel a certain kinship with the man, but only for
that moment, as they each raised a hand to the rebellious skin of their faces
and rubbed.

New Crozet’s most senior watchman had been
scratching at the itchiest of them all morning, raising the bumps up higher and
higher and overturning barely-formed scabs. The sun was in his eyes now and he
was squinting, and the crinkling of his skin made the itch worse.

As he dragged his nails down one cheek
he got some momentary relief, and then the itch returned, crawling back with
its barbed legs. A spot of blood surfaced in the nails’ wake, like a forming
nipple on a pink, mosquito bite breast.

Groaning, he put his hand back on the
butt of his sidearm—which he’d holstered again after letting the last group
through—and glared through the window of the outer gate. He didn’t recognize
the men or the truck, which was more broken to bits than vehicles that were
still in working order usually were.

The truck puttered along for a few
yards and then stopped again, punctuating the halt with a few spits of exhaust
that sounded more like an old man hocking phlegm than an automobile, even a
tired and grumpy one such as this.

Now Corks could see that the truck had
the words ‘Tack Truck’ written in big block letters on one side. The thing
looked old and dilapidated, like a turd on wheels that had suffered more rounds
of flushing than even it deserved.

But that was all a ruse, a façade. The
outside was shit, and the muffler was more rust and holes than metal, but what
was inside, that was a different story entirely. The truck was really a young
man in old man’s garb, a dire wolf in a sheep grandfather’s clothing. And the
apparent frailty was almost too good to be taken for true,
almost.

Jack looked at the truck, and the men
sitting in its cab, and he turned around and bolted. Corks watched the boy
sprint toward the town center, the dust his shoes turned up settling in his
wake. The ground was dry and flaking apart, and even the weeds were drying up.
They were due for some rain.

Corks turned back to the gate and
winced, almost drawing back. The traders were now pulled up to the window, and
the one in the driver’s seat was disfigured. Corks was disturbed, but only
briefly. It was just a man with a skin problem and some paralysis, not a
zombie.

The pustules on the man’s face parted
to let some teeth poke through. It took a moment for Corks to register what it
was: a smile.

“Hello,” the man with the pustules
said. The word was contorted by stroke-stiff muscles, but only slightly.

Corks offered up a close-mouthed smile
and nodded.

Silence ping-ponged between them for a
long moment, Corks standing firm with his paddle.

“We’re Tackers,” the man with the skin
disease said. “I’m Albert, and this is Ronnie.” He gestured to the man beside
him in the passenger seat.

He does look like an Albert, Corks
thought, unsure of where that thought had come from.

Albert’s face seemed to sour, but
maybe that was just the pustules moving along with his face, as if his
expression were rotten milk with curds floating to the surface.

The man called Ronnie put a hand up,
palm directed at Corks, waved slightly, smiled, and said, “Hi. We’ve come a
long way to find you. Heard you’ve got some good trade here.”

He had chiseled features and teeth
that were too white and looked too pointy in places. To Corks, there was
something unreal about him, not like he was a Claymation that was trying to
pass for a person, but more like he’d been airbrushed. Ronnie flashed another overly
bright, vampire’s smile and waited.

Corks sighed. “Tackers, eh? So you’re
bringing what, exactly, to market?”

Ronnie’s smile grew broader, and Corks
had an urge to turn away from the increasing dazzle playing off the shiners in
Ronnie’s mouth, but he didn’t. “Hardtack, of course, the very best kind that’s
left. We make it ourselves, live on the stuff.”

“Uhuh,” Corks said. The blasted flying
leech bites were driving him crazy. Why’d they have to go for the face? What
the hell kind of mosquitos did that, anyway?

“Is that all?” Corks said. “Tack?”

Now was it just Corks or did the man
in the driver’s seat stiffen a tad at that? Never mind, they were probably
hungry and eager to trade their tack—no matter how good it actually was and
Corks doubted it was any better than average, which wasn’t much good at all—for
anything else in the world to eat.

Ronnie nodded. “The best tack you’ve
ever tried. We
guarantee
it.”

“Sure, sure.” Corks was finding it
easier to keep his gaze averted from Albert with the soup of boils covering his
face, and look only at Ronnie. “IDs?”

Now, hold on there, did the man in the
driver’s seat stiffen at that, too? On top of being hungry, he was probably
nervous about being out in the open with his window rolled down for this long.

“Nothing to worry about,” Corks said.
“I sent a noisemaker cracking into the woods just now, fire-less, of course,
wouldn’t want to burn the place down and us in the middle of it. The zombies
are going after it now. You’re safe here, for the time being.”

“Yes,” Albert said, nodding and arranging
the lumpy puree of his skin into an attempt at something pleasant, which only
looked like he was bearing a small load of discomfort. Still, it was an
improvement.

“IDs?” Corks repeated more firmly.

Ronnie reached in the glove box,
pulled out two small documents, and handed them over to Corks, who took them,
and, with the documents in hand, pulled the set of Government Issue specimen
IDs from the small leather satchel on his belt.

The glorious leavings of our
government, he thought, and examined the specimens against what the new traders—Ronnie
and Albert, he reminded himself—had given him.

Less than a minute later, he’d
determined that the IDs were good, put the specimen IDs away, and handed the
IDs back into the truck.

“You check out.” Corks said. “Pull on
through.” He turned away, noting the sigh of relief that had been emphatic
enough to shake Albert’s entire body, clumpy rind and all.

That wasn’t unusual either, not
really. No one wanted to be left outside to try to make a go of returning home
or to the previous settlement they’d visited.

Who knew how much more hardtack these
guys would be able to eat on a return trip without losing their minds and
running out into the open? They needed something different to eat, and a rest
from the zombie elements in the safety of New Crozet.

Ronnie nodded, and when the gates were
lifted, drove through them one by one.

Mardu had hardly expected it to be
this easy. So far so good.

Now if only they could get a more
steady supply of the Sultan, and the viral sprite would resume her place on his
shoulder, all would be put right. It was the trading that had driven her away in
the first place, and he knew that, but he needed the Sultan’s powers to give to
the sprite. It was so fucking frustrating.

Stop it, he told himself. The giving
tonight will make it right again. It’s out of balance, that’s all, and only for
the moment. The giving will outweigh the…other things.

Maybe, he began to think, if he put it
out of his mind, the source of the Sultan and how they obtained it, that is,
then that knowledge might somehow be shielded from the virus. Probably not, but
it was worth a try.

As he watched the gates part for him,
he imagined a Chinese wall going up in his brain, partitioning off the
knowledge of what was traded to get Sultan from the part of his mind where the
antenna was that received transmissions from the sprite. He would make a more
concentrated effort of erecting that barrier later, and at mending the
relationship with his god. Now, he had to focus on the task at hand.

As Corks watched the Tackers drive
into New Crozet, he patted the pouch into which he’d tucked the Government
Issue specimen IDs. What little was left of the government—if it could still
even be called a government, being made up of several dozen people spread out among
the settlements—had seen to updating the specimen IDs regularly after the towns
were established.

They’d posted instructions online, and
there had been some updates before the internet turned to rot and fell off.
Since then, the several dozen federal
employees
—though volunteers was
the more correct term for what they did—had done little but keep records of
where the settlements were and which had gone under, and they speculated among
themselves as to which would be overrun next, whether by zombies, outlaws,
hunger, suicide or some combination thereof. Now, for all practical purposes,
the towns were self-governing.

In the beginning, there’d been no
local arm of the government in New Crozet, and that had been a subject of a
mild near-uproar, but the government folks had had a point: New Crozet was in
the middle of nowhere, and not all the traders went there, which meant
inconsistent communications after the internet’s fade to black. It wasn’t quite
Bum-Fucking-Egypt, or BFE for short, as Ginny’s home of Balleston had been
before the sprawling trailer park had started twerking to the zombie beat, and
then the place had quickly become Bum-Fucking-Everywhere, zombie style, because
they’d gotten the run of the place, and all the other places, too.

Watching as Ronnie and Albert trundled
their piece of shit truck toward the center of town, having passed through the
last gate, Corks wondered if their tack was any good at all, or if it was just
like all the other tack he’d eaten: hard, bland, and a real painful fucking mess
on the way out.