Order of the Dead (53 page)

16

The world spun around Alan like a top filled with trees and darkness and
falling water, lit only by the meager lights escaping from the trucks in the
campsite, their dim emissions rotating around him at the speed of encroaching
madness.

Or was it an ornamental globe in which
he found himself? If so, who’d shaken it? And if someone had taken it and moved
it up and down rapidly enough to cause everything inside to move as erratically
as it was now moving, why was Alan still standing on the ground, as if glued to
it?

What was the glue? Was it blood, dirt,
a blood-dirt mixture, or the decaying, severed root of a plant, or of many
plants, which had found something new—his weary legs—to tie to the surface of
the forest while the rest of the landscape quavered?

Glue fraught with decay, he thought,
crumbling in the rain, coming undone.

He closed his eyes and tried to push
his guts back into his body. They resisted.

Blood was rushing from him. He
imagined that when it hit the ground, it would begin to do the circular dance
of the top as well.

Everything outside him seemed hell-fucking-bent
on rotation now. Or was it the other way around? Was he the one who’d
stopped
spinning, and who was now standing still for the first time?

He opened his eyes.

“Fuck,” he mouthed, and a dribble of
blood passed over his bottom lip and stopped halfway to his chin, putting a
streak of red in his stubble. Rainwater mixed with it and washed it away. His
body was drawing itself up to heave, but he stopped it, willing it to relax, to
cooperate, if only for a few moments longer.

This was the worst physical pain he’d
experienced in his life, but, somehow, it was still a great distance beneath
the height of anguish he’d felt upon losing Senna.

He stumbled toward the truck that the not-quite
unbreakable giant man had tried to keep him from.

He’d seen wounds like his in the field
before and knew that even if treated, given current treatment and
rehabilitation options, recovery was unlikely. The pain was deep in there and
ragged, and imagining the current state of his intestines made him wince. The
countdown had begun.

He was brought back by a recollection
of the previous day’s torment when he’d cried, and framed within that memory,
the current pain was trivial, no more than a maroon blot on a white sheet. The
idea of death itself seemed inconsequential, a formality of an improbably long
journey.

This was it. This really was
it.

The end of the line. No more
passengers beyond this point. The train is going back to the motherfucking
station to be mothballed for good, so when you get off, mind the fucking gap.

Okay, he thought. I get it. Okay. I
accept, so long as I can have a few more minutes, just a little bit longer to…

After having cheated death so many
times before, this was fine. Though he didn’t have time to wonder about it, the
surprising speed with which he accepted dying was probably a result of having
been almost killed so many times and having been proven wrong over and over
again.

He’d made peace with death a long time
ago. He’d never expected to live this long, to find so much happiness, if only
for a while, and to have the chance to do so much good.

Now there was just one more thing he
had to do, one more thing to set right.

The searing ache in his belly pulsed
with each of his heartbeats, radiating barbs of pain to the tips of his toes
and the roots of the hairs on his head. It was making it hard to think. The
sheer hurt was remarkable, and that was appropriate given that it was marking his
passage out of the world that he’d fought so valiantly to secure for coming
generations, few though there may be to inherit it.

But the pain should have been felt by
those mourning his death and reminiscing on his great accomplishments, and not
by him. But that wasn’t to be, and Alan was a man who, though he wasn’t capable
of killing a dying friend in cold blood, would fight to save those he loved
with the last of his fading being.

His mind clouded over and it became
more difficult to focus his eyes on anything at all. The urge to vomit was
becoming harder to bear.

Reality lurched around him, as if the
fabric of the world was coming undone in a shimmer of white and black spots
that were like flying amoeba that showed themselves and went invisible again,
but not in time with each other, and in no particular order.

Everything was becoming unhinged. He
coughed and his mouth filled with the taste of pungent metal. His chin grew wet
with something thicker than rain. He coughed again, then choked and spat. The saliva
that flew from his mouth and clung to his lips was more parts blood than spittle.

The world was fading. Had it ever been
real in the first place?

No, he thought, of course not. How
could it have been?

There were more and more of the
amoeboid shapes, flickering and blocking out his vision. What were the fucking
things?

He was so thirsty that for a moment
the thought of water made him forget about Senna and the children and the other
townspeople he needed to help. He’d been stranded without water in the heat for
days and survived, but he’d never known a thirst like this.

It felt like the water had been
flash-dried out of him, if such a thing were possible. He could feel the
longing for moisture in his eyes and fingernails, like a dryness that was
threatening to catch fire and make his body go up in a puff of smoke if he
didn’t drink soon—no not soon, now, an hour ago,
yesterday.

A thin rivulet of blood dribbled over
his lips and found a path down his chin.

Dryness raked the inside of his
throat.

His hands relaxed over his wound and
his body slumped lower to the ground. He felt as if he were being sucked into a
sandy vortex of thirst. He would drink all the water in the world, he decided.

This was it. This was what it felt
like to be dying.

The pain was still immense, but it was
becoming a pendulum, swinging in and out, distancing itself and then coming
back to throb in full force, then swinging away again, then back...

The ropes that were Alan’s intestines
raged outward, taking advantage of his relaxed pressure on the slippery hole in
his belly. His hands became slick with blood and ruined cords that were—oh my
God he knew exactly what they were—but he couldn’t find the strength to push
them back into their place.

Then the cold came, and he could
barely feel anything at all. His senses numbed, motion became impossible, and
his mind became a barren tundra. His insides were freezing, and the frozen
shards were poking through his skin. The break. It had found a way to get him
after all.

17

Almost unbeknownst even to himself, Alan began to move again, the fingers of
his left hand pressing into his stomach, because that’s where they needed to be
to keep those damned ropes in place.

He was almost there.

Almost.

There.

The truck—that was where they all
were. That was where they—the people he’d come for—would be. That was where
Senna would be. Where she had to be.

And then he was forcing his way up
into the truck, and he was in it. He was there. He’d made it in spite of the
worms trying to wriggle their way through his fingers.

When he was in the worship truck, the
first thing he did was to look back out into the night. Through the glass he
saw Senna.

She was outside with the children. Was
she really there, or was he looking through some porthole into his wishful
imagination?

It seemed real, because Senna was
there and so were Sasha and Jenny, and no others, and that seemed sadly real.
He remembered Jack, and realized the boy wouldn’t be here in this truck…and he
stopped himself before his mind dove into that dark place where Rosemary
probably was, with Jack, restless but not alive. Wasn’t that where she had to
be, if she wasn’t out there with Senna now?

Who else had been taken? Who else had
been turned?

The chill of it all gripped him by the
shoulders, lifted him, and shook, as if he were being held up in front of a
picture, his feet dangling inches from the floor, and whatever it was that was
holding him there was trying to make him see.

Look at the picture damn you! The
pieces are all there. Look at the fucking picture!

Okay, okay.

He looked.

There were people in the painting—actors.
But they weren’t immobile as characters frozen to canvas should have been, no,
not at all, they were moving, doing something like a stationary twist and
inaudible shout that emphasized just how alive they were.

There was Senna and the children.
There was the altar.

They were the only townspeople. They
were
all
the townspeople.

At the center of it was Senna. She was
looking at him, speaking to him through her eyes, helping him to see.

She would lead the children—no, not just
the children, but all of New Crozet—back to safety. She was their spotter, the
best of all time.

Alan now saw that he was in the
picture too, but he was behind them, his doppelganger positioned behind Senna
and New Crozet and all of its people.

Behind him was a muddy darkness of
watercolors. He looked from his own rendering to Senna and back again, until
his eyes settled on her. She nodded at him. Of course she understood.

That Alan, the one in the back of the
painting, whose face looked slightly pained but was otherwise unreadable, was the
Order’s loose end. He was the seed of their unraveling. And then there was Saul
to Alan’s right, a faint, transparent apparition behind the wheel of an equally
translucent steamroller, and he was riding toward the painting at a painfully
slow speed, and then he was there, on top of the image, his great tumbling
rollers pressing Alan into the paint.

Alan’s eyes snapped open to their
widest as if he could breathe through them and they were gasping for air, and
then traveled up the Order’s nave, following the red and green diamonds threaded
into the carpet and careening back and forth to stay off the diamonds and
regular splatters of blood, which, together, left scant room for error. Had the
diamonds been pressed into the fabric by a steamroller as well? And, if so, was
it Saul, too, who’d piloted it?

And what about the blood? No, not the
blood. That had been put there by Brother Mardu’s machinations.

Seconds ticked away somewhere in a
faraway place that was actually quite near, a spot Alan passed often, in a part
of New Crozet.

Four-and-a-half miles away, the wind
puffed up its chest and blew. It tried again, huffing and puffing with all its
might this time to try to blow down what little was left standing of the
blown-down barn that was the dividing line between New Crozet proper and the
New Crozet that was unofficially Senna and Alan’s homestead.

I have you now, the wind thought, and
it was right. The raggedy and half-rotten boards that had for years continued
to poke up out of the ground like gravestones finally relented and spilled onto
the weedy earth. There the rain began to push them deeper while the wind, its
work done, flew off in search of other manmade guideposts to topple.

Alan was at the Order’s altar, another
grave marker, and now, it was his turn to be the wind.

18

Alan heard a voice whispering in his mind: “You’ve come to pray at the
headstone. It waited for you all this time, for all those years that you stole,
that
she
stole. That was all something you weren’t supposed to have,
something you didn’t deserve, something
no one
deserved or should be
allowed to have after the outbreak. You stole and you took but now you’re here
where you belong. You can’t steal from the grave forever, all you can do is
delay.”

“Now kneel and pray.”

“Pray.”

“Fucking pray.”

He heard the screams around him, but
they cut off in an instant, all at the same time, and the only thing Alan could
hear after that was the electric hum of the overhead fluorescents.

The buzz was a punctuation, an order: the
order of the Order of the Dead.

So be it, he thought. So fucking be
it.

Hum, diddly-um, the fluorescents said.
Hum on down, Alan! Hum on down to the Embodiment and see if you can guess the
price. We think you can…you’re paying it now, after all, and you’re a halfway
smart guy, so hum on the fuck down and spin the wheel and see where it lands.

He coughed, spraying blood. It fell in
an arc, spattering the Order’s holy prayer floor as he began to totter up the
nave.

I gotta come on down, he thought. Spin
the…

He was vomiting bile as he went, but
he didn’t notice, so great was his focus at that moment. A small length of cord
that was a disconnected part of small intestine found a way to slide out between
Alan’s fingers. It leaked its contents over his hands and down his pants and
white hot pain tore a line of fire through him. He staggered onward in spite of
it.

More fires inside him, as if they were
set to light by the previous one, branching out, burning him alive.

No, he thought. Fuck, not now. I still
have to…

He looked down—it was more his head
drooping than a conscious move to look—and saw metal sticking out from the base
of his sternum. It was the point of a dagger, covered in blood.

The fluorescents seemed to beat down
on him harder.

Hum, diddly-um, they roared, spitting yellow
bile on his head. Hum, fucking-diddly-the-fuck-um. Now get your lazy ass moving
and hum on down!

Collateral damage. That was all the
stabbing was at this point. That was all anything was now.

Behind him, a snarling Sister Beth
withdrew the knife and readied it for another go. Alan stumbled forward.

Wait, was it the lights or the Embodiment
that was egging him on? Whose voice was that, and was there even a voice at
all?

There must have been something,
because Alan heard it loud and clear, bright, too, like those damned harsh
overhead glares. And that was when he realized they were all watching him, not
just the lights and all the brothers and sisters of the Order who’d piled into
the worship truck like it was a clown car, but the Embodiment too, and
something else, something that was connecting all of it together, like a line
moving from dot to dot to dot, but it was more than one line, it was a whole
group of them appearing behind a brush. And it was high time for him to catch up
with the hand guiding it.

Sister Beth was one of the spectators,
and Alan would have recognized her as Beth Mills if he had more of his
faculties about him. But he didn’t do the former, because he hadn’t the latter.
She’d served on the crews with him, and with Senna too.

She was a cunning one, and if not for
Alan’s darn meddling, she would’ve now been in the midst of her coup, taking
the Order for her own to refashion it into the most profitable cannibalistic
venture of the post-apocalypse. But here was Alan, trying to ruin everything.

She
did
recognize him, and she
remembered him all too well. Her snarl became more feral, more filled with
malice. She
hated
him, had
always
hated him. He and Senna and the
way they were together was exactly what she loathed most in the world.

All they cared about was love.

Love.

There was no such thing, and the very notion
and the way people worshipped it disgusted her. To Beth, the way Alan and Senna
behaved was sheer and brazen vileness.

All she wanted to do at that moment
was tear his fucking lover-boy throat out. Someone had gotten ahead of her in
line and done a number on his face, but that was okay. She had no problem
finishing the job, as long as she had a hand in his death.

Death to Romeo, you fucking
better-than-thou fuck, she thought triumphantly.

And now, she’d finally been given the
chance to kill him and get away with it, and she’d do just that. He and Senna
had always kept too close to each other for Beth to risk killing them on the
rec-crew. They were mistrustful of others, and rightfully so. Beth had killed
half a dozen cleaners and two spotters before going off on her own. The murders
were chalked up to the zombies, which were convenient scapegoats.

Now, finally,
he would die by her hand.

Wait, why was he still moving? She’d
just plunged her knife into him to its hilt, and yet here he was, stumbling
away from her, toward that thing that Brother Mardu worshipped, that rotten
carcass to which she’d feigned tribute, the so-called Embodiment. She moved
after Alan, readying herself for another stab, aiming this time for his neck.

He was in front of the altar now. The
zombie torso was towering over him, writhing erratically, its flesh hunger
directed at Alan, the closest uninfected human.

A brother—it didn’t matter who, just
another spectator to Alan’s spectacle, but for the record, it was Brother
Duncan from New Jersey, born-and-raised—inserted his body between Alan and the
altar. Alan reached upward, grasped the brother’s head in both hands, and
twisted. There was a crunch, like the sound made by the breaking of a thick magnolia
branch, and the brother went limp. Alan staggered forward, stepping on Brother
Duncan’s body.

The Embodiment’s grey flesh pulsed, as
if reaching down. It was sickening, how alive the thing was in death, how much
it managed to thrash and writhe without limbs, using only its torso and head.

The brothers and sisters fell upon Alan.
They were moving in a flurry of desperation, trying to protect their sacred
relic.

What was this bleeding madman trying
to do? Balled fists pounded on his back, untrimmed nails scratched at his face
and neck, hands tried to pull him away by his clothing.

But they were too late, or, rather,
from Alan’s perspective, they were precisely on time.

He opened his mouth wide, thrust his
face forward, and bit.

One of the brothers, a Lawrence
Anderson from Houston, Texas, had time to wonder what kind of lunatic, even a dying,
post-apocalyptic one, could do a thing like that?

The revulsion Alan felt was muted by
the diminishing strength of his nervous system, but there was still enough there
to bring tears to his eyes.

He turned around, and there was Mardu,
the Tacker who’d stolen from him. Alan seized him by the cloak and pulled him close
with the last of his human strength.

Mardu, like any good evangelist with a
sprite sitting on his shoulder and singing into his ear—from the virus’s mouth
straight to his brain—imparted a cuttingly shrill flavor to his most reverent
voice and cried, “It’s you. The Equilibrium. It’s you! Equilibrium Day! Equilibrium
Da—”

Alan’s teeth tore into the flesh of Mardu’s
neck, and it was good, because it was what the virus wanted for its most pious
disciple, and for Alan, and for all of them.

Mardu could actually feel the virus
shifting around him. Everything was changing. The voice in his brain…it seemed
to be wavering in and out now, like a fading and increasingly scratchy radio
station that he was driving away from, or that was being driven away from him.
He would have wanted to say his piece, one that he would have fashioned to be
appropriately reverent given the occasion, but he didn’t have the time to think
on that, because the time for thinking was over.

Alan tasted blood and pulled back,
letting the weight of his clumsy, fading body lend him momentum. He took with
him a sizeable chunk of Mardu’s neck meat, liberating a severed vein to spurt
blood to its heart’s content. Alan let go, and the piece of flesh dribbled over
his bottom lip as if it were a large pool of saliva.

Somewhere, someone howled in pain, but
Alan was beyond understanding who it was, or who he himself was, or where, or
much of anything now. The wail belonged to Brother Mardu, or Mardu, or
Yooooo
Maurice, but probably just Maris at this point, sad, lonely, pathetic, and most
significantly in his view of the world, powerless, weak, and now utterly
helpless, and his cry voiced this feeling quite well.

Alan staggered backward, and then he felt
as if all of his body were opening up at once, as if all of his flesh and bone
were a singular orifice. He felt a split second of excruciating pain, and then
it was gone and he was somewhere else. He looked around, and it wasn’t with his
eyes that he saw, but with some other, greater awareness.