Order of the Dead (45 page)

26

“What?” Senna said, but as soon as the word floated from her lips, she
understood, and her cheeks flushed with rage, disgust, and helplessness—it was
true, and couldn’t be undone.

Mardu explained happily. “All it took
was some
ersatz
tack traders with passable IDs to make your people see
the light.” He paused to look at Senna—he’d forgotten Rosemary by now—then went
on. “Do you know what ersatz means? I’ll tell you. It means fake, false, a
simulation,
a
poor substitute.
” He stopped and looked at her again. “Don’t you get
it? That’s what your town is. Your New whatever-the-hell you call it. It’s a
fake, a relic, a
poor substitute.
The world you pretend still exists is
completely
gone.
You must know that.”

“They didn’t know what they were
eating,” Senna said through clenched teeth. In her head, she was seeing the townspeople
eating the tack and enjoying the hell out of it, remarking about the slight
smoky tang it had.

They’d said it was the best tack
they’d ever tasted, and no wonder. It turned the knot already in her stomach,
tightening it, seeming to put new braids in the drugged-up cord that was living
there.

Mardu went on. “It was just some fat,
some delicious human grease. No need to get all bent out of shape over it. And
they should’ve known it was human. When has tack ever tasted that good? Never.
Never.
They knew what they were eating, even if they didn’t want to admit it to
themselves. You knew. You just didn’t want to think about it. You all loved the
delusion. Willful ignorance. Ecstasy.”

“Why are you doing this?” Senna said.
“Why the children?”

He stared at her, and the frustration
almost ate him whole. She was just like everyone else. Or at least she was
acting that way.

What the fuck was wrong with them all?
How did they not understand it?

He took a deep breath, and, when he’d
found some calm, said, “Because I have to. This isn’t a religion. If I give answers
or patterns or drugs and take away the not-knowing, which can be the worst fear
of all, it’s only a side effect. I move because the virus moves me, and
everything else is the wake, the trail, the
afterbirth.
Fear is the
purest emotion, and so the virus teaches, and I take it gladly and use it, for
the good of the virus, and for the good of myself.”

He gestured at Rosemary. “She’s got the
purest fear of all: the fear of a beautiful child. Maybe that’s why the virus
takes the children for itself, but I don’t know for sure. It tells me so I do.
It says it needs the children, that they’re sacred and only for the virus and
not to be eaten…then so be it. All I can do is obey.”

He was speaking very calmly now, as if
outside of himself. The virus was jabbering on and on in his brain, hard and
fast, in and out, go, go, fucking collect two hundred dollars and go.

“Fear was always how I made my money.
Fear
is
money. The crackheads were terrified of facing the world without
their drugs. We’re all scared to death of our own reality. Some of us can deal
with it. Others—a lot of others—can’t. They have to trick themselves with drugs
or God or gods or human settlements like yours or whatever the hell the order
of the day is. Fear is what makes people tick. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick. Tock.
I know that, and the virus knows it better than anyone. And that’s why I have
to use it, because the rest of you, you just don’t see any other damned way.”

Try coffee, the virus said from her
perch on his shoulder, so he did.

Coffee flows, he thought, and flies,
like fluid.

Fluid.

“Reality is fluid,” he said, “and so
is right and wrong.” The virus hadn’t needed to teach him that. He’d learned
that lesson all on his own, and a long time ago too. If it helped you survive,
if it served the higher purpose, whatever that was in your world, it could only
be right.

“Right and wrong are
relative.
You think that what the Order does is wrong, because you don’t get it. You need
to take the teachings. You might be able to see. Maybe. What we do is the
greatest good there is. The highest calling. The rec-crews, the researchers who
tried to find cures, those are the heretics, the blasphemers, who don’t even
deserve to be taken by the virus. But, the virus, unlike humanity, forgives sins.
It takes even those traitors who tried to remove it from the world.”

“It’s like a
deal,
okay?” he
said, remembering his former life on the streets and the things Acrisius had
told him about Wall Street. “And we gotta
close
the
deal.
The Equilibrium—when
the virus has taken enough—Equilibrium Day is the
closing.
”

The coffee, the virus spat at him.

The.

Coffee.

“And you know what else? We have
coffee. Just a little and stale, but enough to get some kick out of it. The
real stuff. Not what you people drink in the settlements. And you know why we
have it? Because coffee’s for closers. Coffee’s for closers!”

The virus was screaming it too, the
declaration pinging around the inside of Mardu’s skull like he was a fucking
pinball machine in a dive bar. Glengarry Glen Ross held that gem, and he’d
watched the movie soon after the outbreak, in the lying low days. He’d watched
a lot of movies then, had read a lot of books too. He’d learned, and he’d
waited for his chance to come, for his master, to come.

Now, he was the closer. And people
like Senna, regardless of how beautiful some might be, were the opposite.
They’d run away to the settlements, putting their hands over their eyes as they
refused to see the world for what it had really become, daring not even to peek
through their fingers.

He almost added, ‘And I’m the best
motherfucking closer of all time.’ But he held back. He did say, “I’m going to
let you join us, and once you give to the cause, that black gold will flow free
from the spigot, and you’ll be able to drink from it too.”

Senna spat. The idea of following this
man in his mission was beyond revolting, but as soon as the saliva was out of
her mouth and before it had reached the floor, she wanted to take it back.
She’d been given a hand to play, and she’d muddled it up already.
Fuck.
How did she keep screwing everything up? she wondered.

“You’ll regret that,” he said, “dried
out and hollow as you are. That was probably the last of what was in you
keeping you together.” He licked his lips. “That’s all we are, after all, flesh
and bone held together by spit. Some prettier than others, but all the same
gummy tack in the end.”

“The children aren’t tack,” she said.
“You’re sick. You’re all sick. The virus isn’t a god. You’re out of your mind.
You’ve betrayed the human race.”

The unadulterated hatred in her tone
was so plain that Brother Mardu could taste the vitriol in the air. He could
really fucking taste the stuff, and he found it quite pleasing.

This won’t do, he thought. Not at all.
His face grew dark with anger, and his eyes narrowed to crusty slits.

“How stupid you sound,” he said. “Look
around you. Of course the virus is a god, the
only
god, the
one
god. And you worship the virus just as much as we do. The way you lock
yourselves away from it, you devote your lives to the virus. But while you run
from it, we embrace it. You
have
to respect the virus to survive in the
world, and we do more than respect it, we
give
to it, we
love
it,
and in return we’re given more than just
survival.
We
thrive.
We
live damn fucking well, while you live harvest to harvest and the virus picks
off more and more of your number. It takes for itself, and it gives to us, so
we can eat and push it forward, advance its soldiers.”

He grinned. Now he wanted coffee. Now
he wanted to go and drink all of the Order’s stockpile. Because it was his.
Because he’d earned it. Because he was the greatest motherfucking closer of all
time!

“Seventy-cups! Seventy-cups!” Tyrone
would’ve yelled had he been in the Order and had he and Mardu both been
familiar with the great ‘Coffee’s for closers’ speech. He would’ve bellowed it
with his bass trombone-like wind pipes, the two words mashed together and made
into one, just like he’d done in his patented Voltaire II speech, before the
zombies tore his vocal cords out.

“Seventy-cups! Seventy-cups!”

“Seventy-cups!”

“Seventy-cups!”

And Mardu would’ve knocked back and
slurped down all seventy. Because he could close that, too. He could close
anything,
and this woman would be no exception.

This was enough for now, however. It
was time to send these un-seers back to their cage, where they could think
things over, and, if they were wise, come to terms with the Order’s reality.

Brother Mardu called for Acrisius, and
the right-hand man—who was literally that because that was the only side of his
body that could be made to do much at all—came back to take the prisoners away.
With the last of the dope of the Sultan other than what Acrisius had allotted
for his own revelry with Saul, Senna and Rosemary were loaded up with one more weak
shot each and returned—half-dragged—to their cell.

27

The boy with the unkempt red hair and the questions that hadn’t been a torment
but a pleasure, mostly at least, except when they’d forced Alan to confront
those parts of his past that he’d always worked so hard to avoid, was not a boy
at all anymore. He was just the virus’s pet, his master abominable and set on
one task and one task only: to spread copies of itself to those who are alive
and to use their corpses as virus factories.

Frost bloomed at the junctures of
Alan’s vertebrae. The cold blossomed in his chest, and some of it must have
spread upward because his mind didn’t so much slow as it stopped processing
entirely.

Jack was standing in place, barely
moving except for tremors in his fingers and ankles. Then a serrated bolt of
lightning that was lined with the rust of ages cracked like a whip through the
sky, and the boy began to move away from Alan, obeying the electric master that
was capable of so displaying his might.

Without hesitation, but with a seeping
chill that was now spreading to every part of him, Alan drew his pistol and
shot twice.

Each bullet smashed the raindrops in
its path, which relative to the bullets’ paths were lazy, floating mirages.

Coffee’s for closers, each of the
bullets thought, and cut through the airborne water in pursuit of their prize.

The first hit Jack in the small of his
back—too low, and an uncharacteristically bad shot, even for Alan. The second
hit Jack in the back of the head.

The boy fell face first into the mud.
The fingers of his right hand twitched, like they were trying to grasp
something, but all they managed to do was grab some wet earth and fling it slightly
backward in Alan’s direction. To Alan, Jack’s corpse seemed to deflate, but it
was only sinking into the mud. Then the boy was still.

Alan put the gun away. He no longer
felt like a man, but like a predator, cold, mechanical, and without feeling.

Except that wasn’t quite right,
either. Not just a killer, he was on a course to save Senna if that could still
be done, or to give out vengeance liberally, like a dealing of cards. He was
the dealer now.

He worked for the house, and, on
balance, the house always won. But what in all of hell did that mean?

All he knew was that he had to move
toward Senna and the Tackers, and he was sure he’d reach them now.

After that it wouldn’t be up to him,
because the world and its mutating cancer would sort out the rest.

28

“It’s all unspoken,” Rosemary said.

The words sent a chill running up Senna’s
spine. She and Rosemary were alone in the holding cell again, to which they’d
been returned after their meeting with the great Brother Mardu. They were
sitting side by side with their backs against the wall.

“What is?” Senna said, turning to look
at the girl.

Had you been sitting beside Rosemary
in Senna’s place, you would’ve tried to jump out of your skin when you saw the
child’s haunted eyes. Her pupils were dilated and glazed with something that
told of her loss, her lack of something she’d never had in the first place, but
was now sure she never would.

You would have wanted two things then:
to help Rosemary, and to run away. The second desire wasn’t an option, but the
first wasn’t exactly easy, either.

It was the sort of thing you knew you
had to do, to be there for the girl, to try to make her feel better. But it
would feel like if you got closer, or, God forbid, dared to put an arm around
her, you’d be sucked into those too-dark pupils into that inescapable place we
all fear, where nightmares are the only reality and dreams—the nice ones—never,
ever,
ever
come true.

“Between you and Alan,” Rosemary said.
“It’s unspoken, like, you look at each other and just understand.”

“Yes,” Senna said. She knew exactly what
Rosemary meant. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

“I’m never going to have that,”
Rosemary said flatly.

“Rosemary, don’t say that. You will
have that. You will…one day.”

“No. Even if I get out of here, I’ll
never have that. You two are, like, stupid or something when you’re together.
Like dumb, happy children. I’ve never seen anyone like that, not that I’ve seen
much of anything, I guess. Still, it’s not normal. I mean, I don’t think it’s
normal.” She took a deep breath. “Where does it come from? Why is it there?”

Senna looked at her for a long time
before speaking. “To be honest, I don’t know. Alan and I…we just… I really
don’t know. It’s just something that happened.”

Senna’s heart sank as her mind turned
to Alan. She thought of the way he made her feel: young and foolish again,
doe-eyed. And she knew, from the silly twinkle in his eyes when he was around
her, that she made him feel the same way. It was a clean feeling that she didn’t
have to convince herself of because the love was there, and it was real.

There was a magnetism between them
that the other townspeople saw and spoke about. They stoked the fires of some
kind of carnal but also love-filled madness in each other.

That was something that couldn’t be
denied. Even after the apocalypse, they’d found ways to be stupid and wild
together.

What if Rosemary was right and she
never would have that herself? Other than being a shame, did it matter in the
grand scheme of the world? Did it even
begin
to matter?

Sadness crept into Senna’s belly and
made a nest. She put an arm around Rosemary, and the child wrapped her arms
around Senna’s waist.

Rosemary was breathing evenly again.

Thank God at least for that, Senna
thought. As for Alan…I’ll never be stupid for him again, because I’ll never see
him again. Her breath caught in her throat. And Rosemary…poor Rosemary.

The Sultan—muscular and dressed in no
more than an oily loincloth—was tugging Senna back into sleep.

Rosemary, Senna thought, we have to
get her out. We have to make sure she has a chance at… At love, Senna’s mind
reaffirmed.
Love.
That did matter. Of course it did. It might have been
the
only
thing that still mattered.

Senna took hold of the taffy strings streaming
out from the Sultan’s wrists—like Spiderman’s webs—and leaned backward with all
her weight, trying to remove herself from their clutches. But they were so
sticky, and she was so, so tired, and they just clung more tightly the more she
struggled, and the more she struggled, the more tired it all made her.

The room dimmed. Apparently, someone
was cutting their power.

The shadows clinging to the walls grew
longer and were pulled apart until they became a spider’s web, ensnaring two
people who hours earlier had thought themselves safe within the confines of New
Crozet.

One was the second greatest spotter of
all time. The other was the smartest child born after the apocalypse, whose
life, until this day, had been set on a course to revolutionize the way that
trade was done among the settlements.

Sorrow settled over Rosemary, who was
feeling the Sultan’s presence to a lesser degree than Senna was. With the
feeling came a literal heartache. She was sad not just for the obvious
reasons—they were captured and would probably die, that much was clear—but
because she’d only now realized something about the dreams she’d been having.

They all rushed back at her at once
like a door flung open by a gale-force wind in her brain, and she knew that the
lowing of the cows and the singing of the birds and all their movements were
wrong. They’d
always
been wrong. Not necessarily wrong-bad, but more
like wrong-incorrect.

She reconsidered this. Maybe it was
wrong-bad.

There were no more cows, but she
really wanted to see one and hear one…and touch one, maybe just through an
enclosure. She wanted to touch a baby cow or baby goat or…or a puppy.

The adults rarely spoke of dogs they’d
had, but sometimes they did when they thought the children weren’t listening,
and it seemed absolutely wonderful.

She wanted something small and alive
to take care of besides herself and besides the other townspeople. She wanted
that thing that animals had that humans didn’t. She was certain that animals
did have something on people, and she needed to feel it, but there was no way she
could.

The Sultan pulled at her until he’d tugged
her into a rubbery sleep in which she dreamt she was walking through a moonlit desert.
There were dimly-lit, town-shaped mirages over every sand dune, but they were
as unreachable to her as the happy feeling that only an animal could impart to
its human pal.

Snakes were slithering over the sand,
hissing along the dunes as Rosemary walked, but their chatter and slinking too,
were imagined and wrong.