Order of the Dead (56 page)

26

Strangeness said a greeting to Senna when she slipped out of New Crozet,
passing under the netting at the site of the perimeter breach, which was
surprisingly untested by the zombies. There were some carcasses scattered
about, zombies that had been killed by the townspeople stationed at the gate
while it was being rebuilt, but there were only four of those, and no approaching
zombies in sight. Odder still, there were no zombies that Senna could sense.

Ignoring this, she crossed the tree
line, her boots tromping over some thin and wiry mushroom stems. Senna’s left
boot touched down on the place where not so long ago, the zombie that Rosemary
had killed had stepped on its way through the tree line. Alan had stepped there
too, and Senna caught a glimpse of a shoeprint, but, afraid of what she’d see
there and not wanting to be distracted, didn’t look more closely.

Her senses were waking and rumbling
into motion out of the tranqed-up Sufentanil haze, and she felt sure she’d know
when Alan was near, but, at the moment, he wasn’t.

When she was in the forest, she looked
back once. No one had tried to stop her, and it seemed to her that no one had
seen her leave, and that was fine.

She turned around and slogged onward,
and the distance between her and the New Crozet border grew as the Voltaire II’s
heavy load set branches of sweat growing like fractals on the back of her
shirt.

Betty Jane Oswalt did see Senna leave,
but she was the only one. The others were too busy with the work of securing
the town, and too exhausted to notice.

Senna had moved deftly toward the
forest, considering her load—she was carrying the Voltaire II. This was odd,
because Betty Jane had never seen anyone except Alan with it, still, the old
woman had watched, relatively unsurprised that Senna had gone back out, and she
could guess why: Alan.

He won’t be coming back with her, Betty
Jane thought. That was the way of the world.

And yet, for some reason, Betty Jane felt
that Senna would return, and that even with Alan gone, something of him would
always stay with New Crozet.

Then she rested more of her weight on
the gnarled cane whose job it was to prop her up and sighed for the bit of
relief it granted; the damp was doing mischief to her bones.

Straightening up slightly, she rubbed
the left side of her chest and whispered, “You’re gonna have to keep ticking a
little while longer, there’s work to be done here yet.”

Her heart obeyed and beat on as she stood
in place, the foot of her cane sinking deeper into the greedy mud, her eyes
trained on the speckled blur of wet foliage into which Senna had disappeared. Her
old body was weary, but her mind was sharp and her will resolute. If Senna
returned—and that was a very big if—Betty Jane would be waiting, and she would do
all she could to help her, and the town, go on living.

27

Past the tree line and within the forest, the wet ground was giving way under Senna’s
feet as she moved. The faint drizzle continued without signs either of
weakening or strengthening, most of the new rainwater caught by the inadequate
canopy of thinning leaves above the New Crozet woman. A shifting mist was
floating along the forest floor, as if unable to decide where it wanted to go,
and what it wanted to see.

Something was definitely different.
She could sense that the air had changed, and even when she slowed her
breathing and shifted her awareness outside of herself in utmost concentration,
she couldn’t sense any zombies.

She kept thinking about the feeling
she’d had at the farm: that it was already haunted, and maybe that was what was
distracting her, and the zombies were still there,
everywhere,
around
her, and soon they’d have her and it would all end.

And yet…she didn’t sense them at all.

The Voltaire II was straining against Senna,
pulling her down by the shoulder straps as if it was trying to get her to fall
and sink into the mud. Maybe there was a sinkhole somewhere that it could pull
her into. How Alan had managed to carry that thing for years was beyond her.

Back pain had caught up with him, like
back trouble always did when it came to such things, sooner or later. Senna
made hot compresses for his back that he’d used to refuse, but that he accepted
now, and Senna thought the pain must have become great for him to finally accept
this basic treatment.

Still no zombies around, dormant or
otherwise. There had been some last night, which were easy to steer around as
the storm was calling them away and running them in circles with its thunder,
but now it seemed the forest had been cleared, as if the lightning had fried
them up and the downpour washed them into the world’s gullet.

Mmm, delicious, the world might have
said, except that the meat was rotten, but, even so, the elements—carbon chief
among them—could be used. Sometimes more rot meant better fertilizer, but
zombie flesh?

The thought of growing crops out of
the ashes of the burned zombies was one thing, but to imagine them whole under
the earth, propping up a peach tree or a blackberry bush, the roots encircling
what had once belonged to the virus… Maybe it was a distinction without a
difference, but even so, it could still be disturbing.  

When she was more than halfway to the
Order’s campsite, she still hadn’t felt any zombies around her, but she’d begun
to see the corpses. They were strewn and littered about in piles, as if the
zombies had clung together in death, but Senna knew that they’d been together
not out of camaraderie or fear or anything of the sort, but because they’d all
been drawn to the same noises, in this case the crashes the sky had made by
clapping its thunderous cymbals together.

What the hell was going on here?

She approached the corpses cautiously
until she was standing over the pile. There were decayed squirrels, groundhogs,
chipmunks, voles, and rabbits, with generous helpings of cardinal and a
solitary foxhound for dessert. It looked as if they’d been gathered by someone
who meant to return and scoop them up and carry them off for an unknowable
purpose, a zombie cookout perhaps.

Senna didn’t know what to make of
this, because she hadn’t seen anything like it before. It wasn’t how this world
worked. Zombies didn’t just up and die for no reason.

They
never
died, because they
were
already
dead. The virus killed them and then used their bodies to
live in like a hermit crab would use a discarded shell, except that the virus
also used its shell to spread copies of itself.

And how many copies were enough? Maybe
there were too many, and the virus had to cull a few of the bad ones, perhaps
corrupted ones.

But then where were the prime copies?
Where was the virus now?

She whirled, as if expecting to see the
virus standing behind her in some other form, a sequence of genetic code
wearing a top hat maybe, and perhaps it really was there—though without said top
hat—but she could see nothing behind her except more forest, and she felt
something that was akin to wonder, if wonder were an untouched spot on a piece
of meat crawling with maggots of dread.

“Alan,” she whispered, and started
going again, walking very quickly, as if there were no heavy load on her back,
and in fact, she’d forgotten all about the Voltaire II and its dragging mass.

28

When Senna reached the Order’s camp, it was immediately apparent that something
had gone wrong—for the Order. The fact that the trucks were still there was
sign enough.

They should all have been long gone by
now, but Senna had somehow known she wouldn’t come upon the remains of an
abandoned camp, but the campsite itself. And here it was, and oddly quiet, too.
Much too quiet.

The only reason she could think of to
explain why they hadn’t left was that they couldn’t. She peered past the
netting, then began to circle the trucks, getting the lay of the land. She’d
thought she’d gotten a good idea of where everything was on the night prior
when she was escaping with the children, but the map she’d made in her head was
way off.

The Sultan and the thick rain cover had
affected her judgment, and though everything was much clearer now, her thoughts
were still addled and muddy, and she had a pounding headache made worse by carrying
the Voltaire II.

Senna completed one circle without
seeing anyone moving in the camp, but she couldn’t really see much past the
outer ring of trucks. It would have to do. She took out her knife and used it
to cut through the netting that surrounded the campground.

Now there were three places where the
Order’s perimeter was breached: where she now was entering, where she’d escaped
the night before, and where Alan had entered. She went inside, her expression
surprisingly placid, or perhaps blank, and came upon the Tack Truck parked just
beyond the outer circle of the camp, between the other trucks and the forest.

She was seized by revulsion when she
saw that truck. They had let
that
into New Crozet, and it had stolen
Jack and Rosemary and Molly and Rad, and almost gotten Jenny and Sasha, too.
She’d been inside it, also, but that was different, because she’d never become
one of the townspeople, not really.

In her third year living in New
Crozet, she’d finally begun to feel like she was some part of the town, even
though she and Alan lived at its outskirts and kept mostly to themselves, but
now she realized she’d never
really
been part of it. The children were
from the town, and the others who’d settled it, they all belonged, but she, she
was neither here nor there, a welcome intruder at best. She and Alan had only
been let in to begin with because of their skill in dealing with the zombies,
and only after a protracted bout of questioning at gunpoint.

All settlements were wary, and they
were right to be so. Knocking on the door of a settlement you were more likely
to be a cannibal or a marauder or both than a former rec-crew member, most of
whom were dead.

They’d almost given up on staying, and
she’d wanted to go back into the forest and try somewhere else, or try life on
their own, but Alan had wanted to stick it out for the possibility of something
better, and he thought that New Crozet offered that. He’d been right, and the townspeople
had warmed to them over time, but she’d never felt completely welcome there.
She loved her part of town and her farm, but the rest of it, and the rest of
them, she felt like she was an outsider to New Crozet proper.

Maybe after she found Alan, they
wouldn’t go back. Maybe there was another life out there for them to start, a
new life.

The camp somehow managed to look more
surreal in the light of day than it had in the dark and downpour of the night
previous, in which Senna had experienced the place from inside a drugged haze. What
remained constant was the evil she felt there, which the dope hadn’t been able
to quell.

It had felt like a place of wickedness
last night, and it felt that way now. Were their places of malignancy that drew
groups like the Order to them, like a magnet attracts iron filings? If there
were places like that, and this was one of them, then someone had fucked with
the polarity after she left, because something had gone off-kilter—from the
Order’s perspective.

She came upon a body face down in the
mud. Judging by the massive frame, which had sunk what looked like half a foot
into the wet earth, Senna guessed it was Saul. The fair hair would’ve confirmed
her suspicion, but there was too much mud caked in it to tell its true color. The
ground near his midsection was painted a maroon, and there was a corpse of a
zombie squirrel by his outstretched hand.

She stood there until she was sure
Saul wasn’t breathing, that he was in fact dead.

Killing the squirrel had been his last
gesture. He’d died with the image of Alan’s face burning brightly in his mind,
and an afterimage of the bringer of Equilibrium Day had remained etched on his
cooling brain, like a negative.

He must have bled out, she thought.
Good riddance.

She crept past him, wondering who’d
killed him, and glad in the fact that it had been done. Had Alan done it? If he
had, where was he, and why hadn’t she seen him yet, or he her?

Taking less cover and becoming more
confident in the fact that the camp was empty of living members of the Order,
she moved deeper into the circles of trucks and confirmed there were no other
bodies outside. But where had everyone gone, and why?

She went to the worship truck, which seemed
the logical place to enter first. She readjusted the straps of the Voltaire II,
opened the door, and went in.

The inside of the truck, where Jack
had been turned, and where the Order had feasted on the flesh of Rad and Molly,
was a drawing of death.

At its center was Alan.

Around him the bodies of the cannibals
were fanned out, and the captive, limbless zombie was hung motionless over
them.

A bird began to sing outside, and
Senna heard it. Except there wasn’t really any singing, because there were no
living birds anymore, only the shells of them that the virus still kept for its
own games.

What she was hearing was her mind
playing a trick on her, trying to step back into a time when Alan was alive,
but going back too far and ending up in a place where the birds still flew and
prattled on in their shrill voices on and on until their seemingly endless
gossip annoyed her and she wished they would shut up or fly away or both.

Now she wished for all of them back,
for the chance to be annoyed at birds again, but most of all for…for him to be
there again, even if they were locked inside a settlement until they died, just
so long as he wasn’t here, in this truck, unmoving at the center of a fanned
deck of cards made of brothers and sisters of the Order, as if they were playing
cards spread out on a dead magician’s palm, and he, Alan, the bloodless wrist.