Order of the Dead (58 page)

31

When Senna woke, she breathed, and it felt like breathing in as a new woman, a
different one, in another life. The mud that was caked in her hair and smeared
on her face, hands, and clothing had begun to dry.

The loss she felt was pervasive and
irreversible, containing within it the braided threads of all of life’s beauty
and ugliness, woven together in an animalistic and loveless passion that made
them inseparable.

She tried to get to her feet but couldn’t.
It wasn’t time yet.

The feeling, which was the epitome of
its kind in complexity and depth, was keeping her in place and running its
pencil point dull with underlining its message: you’ll never feel more, never
feel so alive again, and thank all of the heavens for that.

The daylight was beginning to fade
from the world, and as the glimmers retreated from the wet campground, they
persuaded the weight on Senna’s soul to flow with them.

She’d slept for hours by her dead
lover’s side, and, somehow, even in death, he’d been able to draw her into a
deep and restful sleep, as if his ghost had been covering her back with kisses
while her mind tried to find some temporary relief from the world, the one from
which he’d passed.

He really was gone.

Tears began to flow again, but they quickly
ebbed. She felt different,
was
different. She’d become the pain, and that
made her feel alive again.

This, she understood—had always known—was
life. This was all there was: love and suffering in a self-perpetuating cycle.

She thought of Corks, who had hours
earlier removed himself from the equation. She wouldn’t do that. She
would
not.

Pain and suffering were to be borne,
and bear them she would. The weight of Corks’s grief and his actions were not
for her to judge, but she’d never take her own life, as much as she’d thought
about it in her worst times, and as much as she wanted for oblivion right now.

Crickets began to chirp their scratchy
calls in the background. There were still the crickets. Maybe Alan’s sacrifice
had saved
them
from the virus, or maybe the virus would never have taken
them anyway, having enjoyed their prickly song.

Senna was parched. She drank from her
canteen and pushed herself up off the ground, rising unsteadily to her feet.
Shuddering, she wiped at her cheeks and wrapped her arms around her midsection,
rubbing at her sides.

It was cold and damp. Senna took off
her jacket and covered Alan’s body.

She stared at him like that, covered
with her jacket.

He could be sleeping, she thought,
just exhausted from too much manual labor, he’d never been cut out for it, not
really. He could just be sleeping under my jacket, because he likes how it
smells, because it reminds him of me.

If anyone deserved a proper burial, it
was Alan, and his final resting place shouldn’t be inside New Crozet, but
outside it. He’d freed all of them somehow, and his body should be free, too.

She hesitated. For a moment she
considered burying him in her farm, under the magnolia tree in the spot where
they’d made love so often, and then she realized that she didn’t know where to
bury him, didn’t know what was appropriate, or what he would want.

The feeling of indecision was so
foreign to her that she felt lost. How did anyone decide something like that
for someone else? He’d loved her there, in the farm, but he’d also fought to
free the world from the virus and reclaim humanity’s birthright. Where should
he rest, outside the fence or in?

Molly and Rad deserved proper burials
too, as did Rosemary and Jack.

She dragged Alan’s body from the
campsite first. She pulled him up a short hill that was more a mound and propped
him up against the trunk of a tall oak. Then she went back down into the camp without
a backward glance, making her way quickly toward the butchering truck. She
stepped inside, feeling no need to steel herself for what she expected to find
there.

The intermingling smells of bodily
fluids and the beginnings of decay inside the truck were overpowering, but only
in a physical sense. She’d smelled these smells, and worse, before. It was what
it was: more death.

She went to Molly’s body first. She
examined the corpse and hesitated, feeling uncertain again. There was little
left of her: a torso, apparently organ-less, most of its skin missing, the naked
ribs and hipbones prominently exposed.

Some of Molly’s face was still there,
mostly just her scalp, the skin of her forehead and her teeth. Would the
townspeople want to see her like this?

The woman had no relatives in New
Crozet and had, for the most part, kept to herself. Perhaps that would make it
easier for the others, somewhat easier.

She went to Rad’s body and looked at
him. There was more left of him than of Molly. Senna thought of Nell,
considering if the woman could go on after seeing her son in that state, seeing
what had been done to him by other people. Senna thought about burning them
with the rest of the Order so that New Crozet didn’t have to see the horror
that had been done to them. She stood there in the human butcher’s stall,
confused for some minutes, trying to find the right answer in her weary mind.

No, she decided. Molly and Rad had to
be buried right, like people. She wouldn’t burn them with the Order, with those
fucking cannibals. The townspeople were good, and deserved to be separated from
the devil, in death, and always. Now she realized that she’d already decided
what was to happen to the campground.

Fire. The Order was to be consumed by
flames.

32

She looked around the truck for something to help remove the bodies. Not seeing
anything useful, she went outside, stopping at the truck’s entrance where the
fresh air washed over her.

Tension rippled through her body, and
yet, she couldn’t sense any zombies. It seemed that they were dead and gone,
one way or another.

She went from truck to truck until she
found some blankets and a plastic tarp with handles. She spread the tarp open
on the ground and went back into the Order’s butcher shop. There she wrapped
the remains of Molly and Rad in separate blankets, and carried them out and
placed them on the tarp, which she then dragged up the hill to where Alan was
sitting, lifeless, under the oak tree.

Stealing a heart-rending glance at
him, Senna turned and jogged down the hill, back into the campground. Her body
was pulsing with pain, but she didn’t care anymore. It was nothing compared to
what she was feeling in her heart, that unfillable hollowness. She went through
the camp searching for the bodies of Rosemary and Jack, but found no trace of
either.

Fuel was what she wanted now, so she
went through the trucks one by one, gathering what she needed. Then she entered
the worship truck, the coffin of the brothers and sisters and their relic, and
doused them with gasoline.

The smell of the gasoline was
satisfying, intoxicating even, especially when layered over the sight of it
spilling on the faces of Mardu and his disciples, coating them with the promise
of burning.

The corpse of the limbless zombie,
still trapped in its encasement, lent Senna its unseeing stare as she placed
fuel canisters under the shrine.

After dousing the inside of the truck,
Senna went out to the spot where Brother Saul was. She couldn’t move his body
much because he was too massive, so she turned him on his back and upended a gasoline
canister over his face. The rolling fluid tugged at the flaps of his eyelids
and lips, forcing his expression into a momentary, snarling half-glare.

“Fuck you,” Senna said, and spat on
his body.

New Crozet could use the fuel, the trucks,
and the other supplies that the Order had, but these were tainted things. The
townspeople were owed a fresh start, and salvaging the things the Order had
brought…the notion was repugnant.

Senna took particular care in dousing
the books that contained Brother Mardu’s scripture. She would see to it that
all evidence of him was erased.

That was how she could continue to
hurt him, even after his death. He would be forgotten, expunged from history,
rubbed out by her hand. His possessions and all the things that showed the
impression of his will on the world, his fucking book, would be destroyed.

After she’d let free the contents of
the last of the fuel containers, except for the canisters sitting under the dead
limbless zombie that Brother Mardu and his followers had worshipped, she went
up the hill and picked up the Voltaire II, then descended the hill partway and took
position. There she aimed the Voltaire II at the still campground. It was a
thing already dead, but in need of purging.

The forest seemed to quiet and become
calm, as if holding its breath.

She pulled the first trigger, letting
the stream of fuel fly, and then the second, igniting it. Dual trigger action,
baby.

Flames touched down in the center of
the campsite and the air lit up with burning.

Still spraying fire at the encampment,
she walked purposefully backward, laboring up the hill. The heat rising from
the thrower was pulling sweat from her body with a vengeance. If any part of
her clothes hadn’t been soaked during her work of arranging the fuel, they now
were. Hair was sticking in clumps to the sides of her face. Sweat ran into her
eyes and she blinked it away. Had Alan been there he would’ve jumped her bones,
and she knew that, and she tried to blink that thought away too.

When she was almost all the way to
Alan and Molly and Rad, she released the double trigger and let the Voltaire II,
which felt like it had tripled in weight, drop to the ground, offering the
stinging muscles of her arms and back some relief.

Steam began to rise from the wet earth
under the flamethrower’s barrel.

Senna went to the bodies lying in the
shade of the great oak, then turned to look at the blaze and sat down next to
Alan.

“This is for you, Alan,” she
whispered, feeling the utterance of his name stab her heart. “Watch those
fuckers
burn.”

As she watched the campground burn
with him, she saw the flames weren’t reaching all the gasoline she’d poured, probably
because she’d failed to properly connect the fuel lines, but it was too late to
go back in with the Voltaire II now.

Unsurprised by this flaw—fire setting
was not her forte—she removed her sidearm from its holster, took a deep breath,
aimed at the corner of the campsite where the fire needed to go to consume
Saul’s corpse, and fired twice in rapid succession.

Her first bullet made a spark, and
flames erupted and spread, igniting the untouched fuel. Seconds later,
explosions followed, tearing what was left of the day apart, rocking the
Order’s shrine, and setting the Embodiment alight.

Body parts were flung into the air by
the blasts, but none left the campsite’s borders before falling to the ground.
After the explosions, the fire settled to a steady state, eating the brothers
and sisters of the Order, its burning mouth crawling over them like a swath of righteous
maggots.

This was her revenge, inadequate and
pathetic compared to what had been done to her and her people. Was it even
her
revenge? Alan was the one who’d killed them. Somehow.

And burning was too good a washing
from this world for these monsters. They were worse than zombies; they deserved
to be stuffed and put on display as a warning to others tempted toward such
evil.

Too late. The fire was going, and burn
from this world they would.

33

What was left of the Order time would sweep away with its waves of forest.
Senna thought on this, and she pictured the digging roots and creeping foliage
reclaiming the charred leavings of the brothers and sisters, taking them back
into the earth from where they’d come, absorbing what nutrients they had to
offer, and transmuting their evil into greenery that would nourish what animals
remained.

The bugs would eat the leaves, and the
humans, were there to be any alive at that point, would breathe the oxygen. The
thought of breathing that air was odd—would there be evil in it, or would all
of that have been converted by nature’s magic into something inert, clean food
and air and nothing more?

But of course these couldn’t be all of
the cannibals. There were bound to be more out there, hunting children, other
children like Jenny and Sasha and Rosemary and Jack. Her children.

But, she thought, Brother Mardu hadn’t
wanted the children for food, he’d wanted them for the virus,
solely
for
the virus. Had he been right? Had this been the culmination of the Order’s
plot? Had Mardu succeeded somehow?

No, that was impossible. That
had
to be impossible. But when she turned to look at Alan it seemed that it was not
only possible, but true. She’d always sensed an indescribable something about
this man, and that had been one of the things that had drawn her to him, and
she could still feel it now, in the presence of his body.

He was unlike anyone else, but, the
key
to the virus? The man to prove the Order right?

That was something she couldn’t wrap
her mind around, not now, and maybe not ever.

The Order had been a group of virus-worshipping
cannibals. How could they have been right about anything at all?

She took a deep breath.

Some poorly-drawn feeling made her
look in Alan’s pockets. There she found a small tin. Puzzled, she pried it
open. Inside it was a folded piece of wax paper.

She began to unfold it and the wind
blew, stirring some powder into the air and flinging it at her face, adding a
clumsy orange-brown blush to her cheeks. In that instant, the last of the
cinnamon’s aroma came out.

Dazed and with a mixture of soot and
old cinnamon on her face, she got up from beside Alan’s body and went a short
distance in the direction of New Crozet before returning to the hill. She went
to the Voltaire II and dragged it from the spot where she’d dropped it, then
set it next to her dead lover’s corpse. She put his left hand on its cooling
hull, sank to her knees, and the tears took her again.

“Take me away,” she begged. “Take me
away from all this. I can’t. I don’t want to anymore. Take… Make it stop,
please, God make it stop. Everything’s gone,
everyone.
God, please,
fucking please, make it stop.”

She pleaded for some time longer, and it
didn’t stop, but it did get a little better. Feeling slightly numbed, she found
a way to stand up.

Moving like a woman in a trance, she
began to walk toward New Crozet again. She couldn’t carry the bodies back
herself, so she’d have some townspeople come back with her to help move them,
and to try to find what was left of Rosemary and Jack.

The wind breathed, stirring some of
the wafting smoke after her. It stank of burning flesh, petroleum, and rubber.

The fire wasn’t closure. There would
never be closure. What the Order had done was senseless, unforgivable,
something only the human mind could envision.

Sodden leaves and small clumps of mud
clung to her boots as she walked. The ground was covered in a multi-colored mat
of leaves that reached toward her, as if trying to be noticed, to distract this
woman from the tragedy that was her lot.

It had taken millennia for the Virginia
woods to arrange themselves in the current pattern, dropping the leaves just
right and timing their work with that of the rain and the insects, creating a startlingly
beautiful forest floor that had taken ages of coordinated effort by many
parties, and was by a longshot no accident.

Senna saw the leafy carpet, but it
didn’t register. It would return to her in the future, in daydreams, but
faintly, like the furtive caresses of a nervous apparition.

Right now, although it had been made
just for her, all she could do was walk on it.

As she went, she rubbed at her sides,
steeling herself against the new chill in the air. The world had grown cold,
and, she felt, so it would remain.