Order of the Dead (43 page)

20

He didn’t turn right away. At first, all he did was scream. When the zombies
detached from him, losing interest, that was when he really lost it. Because if
they were no longer chasing you, that meant they’d taken all you had to take,
and what was left, well…

It was like being trapped in a
betraying thing, in a box that was sinking and filling with water, and which
had no way out of it, because it had been constructed around you by your own
birth. You were both the box and the thing inside it, except that there was a
taint in it now, which was feeding and growing and would soon have all of you.
And it was all you could do to submit fast enough.

Russ elbowed and punched the slinking-away
zombies farther from him and desperately hurled himself at the ladder.

Senna drew her pistol, and Alan did
the same. They were both poised about two thirds of the way up the ladder, aiming
downward.

The bitten flag that the zombies had
captured, the turning thing that was still Russ but wouldn’t be for long, gazed
up at them with a forlorn look on his face.

He began to climb, but after ascending
no more than a few feet, he seemed to give up. He stopped and looked up at
them, and though he said nothing, his face seemed to say that he understood he
wasn’t one of them anymore.

‘One of us, one of us,’ the zombies
might have chanted, if they did that sort of thing. But they’d already departed
in search of new prey.

Russ, Senna, and Alan looked at one
another like that for a while, none of them saying a word, suspended in midair
save for the ladder that led up to the safety platform. The zombies were
already beginning to circle back, and Alan could see them reemerging from
behind the woodwork of tree trunks.

Why they’d gone in the first place
wasn’t clear. Perhaps there’d been a noise, but it had been lost on the three
New Crozet townspeople in their standoff.

Senna and Alan were both faltering,
proving that it really was hard to shoot your friend, even when you knew you
should. Russ kept on watching them.

They were drawing out the suffering,
and it seemed to only be getting worse when Alan said, “Let’s get you up to the
platform,
now.
”

Russ and Senna both stared at him,
unbelieving.

“
Now,
” he repeated, and Senna
and Russ were both cowed into movement. As they all went up the ladder, he
added, in an effort to reassure as much them as himself, “It’s going slow with
you. There’s still time…”

When all three of them were up on the
platform, Russ sat down hard on his ass and began to babble something about
electrical switching stations as the fever ran wild in him.

Maybe it’s too late, Alan thought, but
I have to try.

Senna had her gun trained on Russ, and
she was standing on the platform’s edge, holding onto a steel support beam with
her free hand. Alan pulled out the long blade he kept on him for cutting
through thick foliage, sharpening stakes if they should be necessary, and this.
The gleam of the knife wasn’t what it once had been.

When he saw Alan poised over him with
the knife, Russ clapped his hands to the sides of his face and sprawled on the
floor, and with his fingers crawling between his eyes and ears, began to rant
something about hammers and sickles and the cross. Watching him, Alan knew that
he was barely there, and that was for the best, so long as he could keep the
virus at bay for a few more moments.

The hack was as swift as the practiced
snap of two fingers. He’d made no measurements, taken no run-through swings,
and given no warning.

Russ bellowed in anguish, and then the
knife came up, blood dripping from its sharp edge, and came down again, and
again, and again. It was a cruel torture, Alan knew, but he was without a
bone-saw, so this was the only option: chopping through Russ’s bones with the
large knife.

Alan would have preferred to go higher,
to increase the chances that they got all of the virus, but he knew that going
through the thigh would present a greater bleeding risk, and it would require
going through the femur, and he wasn’t sure the knife could cut it. That, and,
given Russ’s sudden loss of lucidity, it was probably too late, anyway. Still,
if there was a chance, Alan had to try.

It took some minutes to completely
sever the limb below the knee, and Alan was about to staunch the bleeding wound
with strips of clothing when everything changed.

What happened next had happened to
Alan two times before, and never since. He hadn’t been counting, but had he
been, he would’ve known that this was his thirty-second amputation, and the
first since he’d left the rec-crews.

He’d done twenty-six on the crews, and
five in the no man’s land of his life between the outbreak and the crews. He
was batting close to fifty percent, which was damned good under the
circumstances.

He pulled off his shirt and tore off a
strip, which would be the first in the series of tourniquets.

Ideally and in a pre-apocalyptic world,
you’d cut off the blood flow before severing the limb, but there wasn’t time
for that when the progress of the virus and the speed of its travel were
unclear. He was putting the finishing touches on tying off the first band amid
squirts of blood that seemed to be protesting the idea of being shut up, when
Russ attained viral lift off.

Propelling himself with his arms, he
flung his body at Alan and was on top of the former cleaner for only an instant
before there was a singular shot, muffled but convincing enough in its effect.
Senna’s bullet lifted the top of Russ’s skull off, and had Alan not been
rolling sideways to get away, the grits of Russ’s brain would’ve covered Alan’s
face and neck.

Russ stretched out on the platform,
one hand reaching off the side, and his mashed-up skull contents began to ooze
out while the bleeding of his stump went on, partially staunched.

Besides being shaken up, Alan wasn’t
the worse for wear, though that was threatening to change very quickly, because
he was now clinging to the edge of the platform by the fingers of one hand,
having gone too far in trying to fend off Russ’s attack. Senna rushed to the edge
and grabbed his forearm, then reached backward until she got hold of one of the
platform’s support bars to brace herself. With her help Alan climbed back up,
and the two of them collapsed in a heap, panting.

Then Alan pushed Russ’s body and the
severed part of his leg off the platform, to the zombies who were nipping at
the air below. They had no interest in such things as corpses or their detached
appendages, of course, but let them have a chance at changing their minds.

They’d had to stay on the platform for
days until the zombies cleared out, but that wasn’t what bothered him. There
had been enough water to make it through and it was still in the early days
after the outbreak when the safety platforms actually had some supplies in
them, so Senna and Alan not only drank, but ate some coarse and flavorless survival
wafers, too.

What drove him near crazy was that he’d
put Senna in danger, when there had been no need to. What had made him try to
save Russ at the risk of Senna’s life and his own? Some sense of human decency?
What kind of decency was that? He would replay those moments over and over
again, seeing it go differently, with Senna’s demise a consequence in some of
the imagined reenactments.

It was a stain of a feeling to know
that he’d put her in that position, and he couldn’t take that back, and he
couldn’t wash the guilt from him. He should’ve shot Russ down when the bitten
man was trying to climb up toward them, and ended it there.

It was a risk not worth taking in that
circumstance, but he’d just reacted, and his first instinct was to try to help,
to try to help his friend, but that was the wrong thing to do. It was all
fucked up, and Alan thought he’d ruined some of the magic between Senna and him
by making that choice. He hadn’t, at least not from her perspective, but he
never believed her when she insisted he’d done the right thing. She said it
plenty, but it never sounded right to his ears.

He’d never told her how he really
felt, either, because the whole feeling-sharing thing wasn’t exactly his strong
suit, because boys don’t cry and such other classic sentiments that run coursing
in the same vein.

21

The air around Alan shifted in a tumultuous movement that pulled him back into
the present. It usually would have been a relief to be taken out of that
memory, but not today. Today had proved to be worse than the ordeal of Russ’s
death, worse by miles.

Lightning flashed in the distance,
illuminating a swath of scraggly trees whose branches had given up all their
leaves. The wind strengthened, and Alan instinctively braced his body against
the cold, drawing into himself, as the entire platform shook.

The thunderclap that followed seemed
as if it might shatter the world.

Hope clattered a beat in Alan’s chest.
This could be his chance.

He held his breath, and waited.

Rows of sweat grew prominent on his
brow as the seconds sprouted legs and began to walk backward. He took the
tiniest of breaths, puttering the air in through his nose. A well-developed
sweat line on his forehead broke and tumbled over the ones standing below it.
The salty water found his eyes with its stinging nettles but he still didn’t dare
make a sound, hoping for it, hoping…

He crawled to the edge of the platform
and peered down at the zombies who’d been waiting for him in that polite way of
theirs. They’d been stalking him, of course, but that wasn’t their fault now
was it?

They were beginning to lope away
toward the source of the thunder, apparently that was the flag they were
pursuing now.

The rain was pelting what little
scraggles were left of their fur, matting it to their carcasses. The forest
floor was growing soft with mud, and the hooves and paws of the once-alive animals
sank into the earth.

They belonged there, within the soil,
a part of it, a part of the plants and trees and the new animals that should
have been living, truly living. But the virus was denying them their peace,
holding hostage a birthright bestowed by the forest itself.

There came more lightning bolts and
their thunderous counterparts, the distance between the pairs decreasing. The
electric storm was drawing closer to Alan, and for that he thanked God, and literally,
the heavens, which were now drooping above him, and made his descent from the
platform.

The thunderclaps pulled the loathsome
beasts away from the desperate man, drawing them out, misleading them into a
united pursuit of bolts of lightning, an unreachable prey even for the virus,
whose diabolical machinations had succeeded in taking the greater part of the
world. It hadn’t yet found a way to coerce the sky’s rage, but perhaps its next
mutation would.

22

Wraiths began to circle Alan after his escape from the platform. They’d been coming
around for years, so he’d learned to live with them and their relentless
prattle. The apparitions started to speak, which was par for the course, but
when Senna floated by, a piece of his world came loose, like a gap in the forest
air opening up and offering to suck him into it.

Of course he had no way of knowing
what had become of her, whether she was alive or dead, and yet, even though he
couldn’t know, there she was, circling him with…with the
others.
He didn’t
know all of them—who could know
all
of them? But he knew more than
enough: faces from different times in his life, so
many
faces.

The ghosts were questioning him, as
they always did, and, as usual, he wasn’t making any reply. It wasn’t that all
the questions were rhetorical—surely some of them were, but far from all—it was
that he didn’t have the answers.

He had some ideas—just about all the
survivors had a thought or two about why they’d survived and others hadn’t, and
of why this had all happened to the world in the first place. The virus itself
had prompted that answer, had forced it, because those who’d survived and tried
to avoid the questions could easily lose their minds and not find them again.

That was the reason for the inquiry in
the first place, to put some pattern on top of all of this, to put it into some
kind of mental coffin in its mental grave, to categorize it as this or that and
keep from going mad. But he didn’t want to think on it now, and he couldn’t
look at their faces anymore, or listen to their voices in their varied
inflections: beseeching, eerily monotonous, accusing, or covetous.

Pushing against them didn’t get them
to budge, and if it weren’t for the storm’s thunder moving the zombies around
in search of the false prey of thunderclaps, Alan would’ve been in some
trouble, because the phantoms were keeping blinders on him and obscuring the
forest, as if the pouring rain weren’t enough. They were like riders of an
infernal carousel, babbling as they rode in that pointless circle, directing
their drivel at the center of the ride, where some hapless man called Alan was
tied to the mast.

The deeper into the woods he went, the
more sure he was that he’d never see Senna again. It was like swimming toward
the deep end of the pool while the shallow end disappeared behind you and the
deep end only got farther away no matter how far you swam. There was only the
cold murk ahead…and below, and no way back.

The ghoulish floaters drew him into a
stumble, and he began to fall backward and was caught by a tree trunk whose
knotty protrusion clapped him square on the small of the back, like the tree’s
pot of a belly was righting his course.

Thanks for that, he would’ve said had
he been in higher—much higher—spirits. He grunted, straightened, and looked up
at the pignut hickory towering over him. You’re a pignut, he would’ve thought
and he would’ve chuckled—again, had he been feeling cheerier.

With the aid of the wind, the leaves
of the pignut reached for him. Then they brushed insistently at his upper back
and shoulders until he got on his way again.

The dogwoods, who were as American as
trees could be, even though the good ol’ U S of A was a fading memory in the
minds of the humans, had leaned in closer in a huddle of wet branches and conspired
while Alan stood distracted under the pignut. They weren’t sure if he was a man
to be helped, men usually weren’t to be trusted and their business was often in
principle directly opposed to that of the dogwoods, and to that of most trees,
if they were to be honest about it, but this time seemed different.

The wraiths did stop circling him and ceased
their torment of a thousand questions when Alan saw Jack, or rather, the shell
of Jack that the virus was now animating. The ghosts, or ghosty-ghosters as
Larry Knapp would’ve called them if he was in the bounce and buoy of Bacchus
worship, had dismounted so suddenly, folding up and taking the merry-go-round
with them, that Alan was disoriented by the sudden absence of spinning.

It was as if seeing Jack had reminded
them that there were things in the living world of which they wanted no part
whatsoever, and off the apparitions had gone, fleeing to the safety of the
netherworld. Alan, however, had no such haven to retreat to. For him, there was
nowhere to run.