Order of the Dead
Order of the
Dead
Copyright © 2015 by Guy James.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the author.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity
to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the
author.
Survivors
“The virus runs its fingers over us, grinning at the bloody trail it leaves
behind. It speaks through our mouths, pushing pointless gusts of air through a
leather bellows with torn lips. Yearning, it delights in the movements of our
flesh and bone as it breaks us, over and again, in its relentless push through
the world, toward the Equilibrium.”
Brother Mardu, Order of the Dead.
1
It crossed the tree line, trampling a cluster of fairy ring mushrooms and
leaving the branches of a holly bush shuddering in its wake. When it was just
barely inside the clearing, it stopped, still out of reach of the spotlights. There
it tilted its head skyward, seeming at the same time to lean into the night, as
if it were drawing the power of the moon’s sallow gaze into itself by drinking
of the ashen glow.
It did this the way you might put a
hand against a wall to regain your strength or find courage, and this was when
it would have taken a breath to steel itself, were it still a breathing thing,
which, of course, it no longer was.
Instead, what the prideful moonbeams
lit up was a creature foul and sagging, not alive but still moving in spite of
the laws of nature—well, the
old
laws, anyway. The night was brave and
just-hatched, and it knew better than to take account of the past or its rules.
The dark had its own way of doing things, and it was keeping score now.
The spell of stillness broke, and the
zombie set off on a clumsy lope toward New Crozet.
Senna Phillips, Rosemary Preston, and
Alan Rice were inside the perimeter, watching. They were standing on a well-flattened
patch of ground that Senna and Alan’s boots knew well, but which Rosemary had
never visited before.
Alan’s face was sun-swept, rugged,
and, at the present moment, emotionless. The Voltaire II was heavy in his hands,
its shoulder strap, which should have borne most of the weight, hanging slack
at his side. The weapon was the revamped model of the Voltaire I, the great
numero
uno
of Voltaires
,
which had been state-of-the-art nine years ago, back
when the fine artists had all turned in their trowels for good.
A gust of wind caught Senna’s hair,
shifting the long strands about her face, but she gave no sign of noticing. She
appeared to be entirely within her element, so self-possessed and calm that
even the metallic luster the moon gave her hair seemed like something she’d
arranged. Poised inches from her sidearm, her right hand was starting to feel
that familiar, tugging itch.
Senna was New Crozet’s best spotter, a
master at predicting the break, the critical point when a zombie moved from a
state of dormancy to rampage. Few others in the world, and no one in town,
could match her skill. She had a gift, and that was why she, and some of those
fortunate enough to have been around her, had survived.
Breathing slowly through her nose, she
regarded the thing outside the perimeter coolly. It was getting closer to New
Crozet’s fence, and nearer to breaking.
And that’s what we’re here for, she
thought.
Alan was a cleaner, a former foot
soldier of the reclamation efforts that had come after the zombie apocalypse,
and some thought that he was the best at what he did, but he believed that
‘longest-lived’ was the more fitting term for it.
He didn’t think there was that much to
killing and burning zombies other than being careful about your routine, and,
above all else, having the benefit of a talented spotter like Senna. What he
did, he knew, was nothing like spotting.
If you asked him, he’d tell you that he’d
been lucky more times than any man deserved.
You take what you get, he thought, and
you keep on fighting.
Out of the corner of his eye, Alan saw
Rosemary’s ponytail trembling, and, as he firmed up his resolve—they were doing
the right thing by having the girl here…it had to be done—he briefly took one
hand out from under the Voltaire II’s chassis and pushed his black-framed glasses
back up to the top of his nose.
The tension in Alan’s body was growing
by the moment: his stomach muscles were starting to contract, and his mouth was
becoming uncomfortably dry. Though he’d been with the reclamation crews, the
rec-crews, for years, the fear had never gone away, and, he was sure, it never
would.
2
Rosemary was nine years old, and, unlike the adults at either side of her, she
was visibly nervous, chewing on her lip, shifting from foot to foot, and
pulling at the loose strings of her jacket sleeve with the fingers of her left
hand.
The girl looked up at the night sky, where
thick, wispy clouds were floating dreamily, as out of place on the world’s rim as
she felt now, trying to stand with purpose so close to the fence.
The moon yellowed at her as she stared
at it, offering up a jaundiced grin, as if it knew the punch line to it all,
and thought the joke to be not only funny, but maddeningly so. Having found no comfort
in the sky, Rosemary lowered her gaze and looked through the window in the
fence.
Following her eyes with its wan, smirking
stare, the moon watched the creature stumble closer, stirring up dust and rocks
and clods of dirt, uncovering damp soil and setting the worms that had been
crawling there to search for shelter deeper in the earth.
Rosemary looked over at Alan, and in
his face she saw none of what she herself was feeling. All she could see was
the light of an intense focus, what looked to her like an almost-otherworldly
determination.
But, under the surface, the pit of Alan’s
belly was filled with concern for Senna and Rosemary. The feeling was a gnawing
discomfort that lived in the background of his being, like a tunneling animal,
and now it was popping its anxious head out of its hole, and in its
dirt-clotted paws it was holding a bow-tied gift of dread.
Senna wasn’t Alan’s wife, and Rosemary
wasn’t his daughter, but they might as well have been. They were like his
family now—no, they
were
his family now because they were all he had
left, and he was all they had left. He would die for either; would endure the
cruelest torture to spare their lives.
As he looked at Senna, a familiar
longing passed through him, a need to never be apart from her, to touch her and
hold her and kiss her scars and listen to her talk about anything in that high,
melodious voice of hers. Lust colored the feeling a light shade of red, like a
crayon dabbing its essence in between shapely lines and want reached him even now,
folding the depth of feeling he had for her into it, and then the physical
desire was overturned and subsumed in the fullness of his affection for his
everything, his world, his Senna.
She turned and looked at him, appearing
to have read his mind, and she probably had, because she was good at that, or
at least at seeming to do so. Her eyes accepted his love and want, and returned
her own, and her gaze glimmered with a stubborn will to live and love and keep
on living, even in a world they didn’t control anymore, a world that was
limited to an area inside a fence.
Not a cage, she thought, a home.
The corners of her lips twitched
upward, the movement nearly imperceptible, but Alan saw it, or felt it, or
something, he wasn’t sure. She turned back to the gate.
Behind the townspeople, the Blue Ridge
Mountains stood looming over all of New Crozet, framing the town within great,
undulating curves of the muted shades of autumn. Opposite the mountains, the clearing
of dirt beyond the gate was glowing under the spotlights, and a twenty yard stretch
of road could be seen leading into the forest until it disappeared, swallowed
by the tree line and the shadows of wooded limbs that minded the toll there.
The forest interior was obscured fully in night, the moon’s forays out from cloud
cover unable to reach past the darkled canopies of turning leaves.
An orchestra of unseen insects was now
in the third act of its musical backdrop, and Alan wasn’t sure whether complete
silence would have been more or less unnerving than the melody, whose eeriness
the critters had perfected over millennia. Practice makes perfect, and when you
have ages for it, the practice doesn’t have to be perfect, just ongoing.
The drone, a mélange made up of the scrapes
of insect limbs and punctuated by staccato wing beats, had fallen off
noticeably in the moments before the zombie materialized out of the forest’s
gloom, and since then, the insect song had recovered most, though not all, of
its previous volume, and was now playing on in muted fashion.
Rosemary’s eyes ran over the
pockmarked surface of the concrete slab in front of her. It was one of many
blocks that made up the bottom third of the eighteen foot high fence encircling
New Crozet. The concrete was there to keep out the smallest zombie animals,
which would have been able to squeeze through the chain link that protruded
from the concrete’s top like an overgrown hedge, lousy with rust.
The girl’s asthma said a greeting to
her then, as she was staring at the fence and trying to grapple with what she was
about to do. She drew the air in, but it wouldn’t connect properly, and when she
tried again, it still didn’t get to where it was supposed to go.
It was probably fear squeezing her
chest, and she knew that, so she tried to calm herself by focusing on the
imperfections in the cement seal between the concrete blocks in front of her,
on the cracks and rough spots and flecks of dirt. She found a large crack,
gazed at it, then shut her eyes tight, watching the image’s afterglow burn in
her mind’s eye.
It was closing in on a minute since
her last breath had connected, and she could feel the choking, panic tears
building behind her eyes, but she couldn’t let them out,
wouldn’t,
because
that would just make it worse.
With her eyes still closed, trying to
apply all of her focus to the image of the crack, a jagged, stretched-out, not-quite
rectangle, she tried to breathe in again. This time, thankfully, the air filled
the far reaches of her lungs with relief, and the tension that had been
building up in her slowly-suffocating body loosened its hold.
She opened her eyes, being careful to
look only at the fence, and not at Senna or Alan, not wanting to look at them,
or more precisely, not wanting them to see her looking, because they might see
the horror written on her face.
The noises coming from the clearing
grew louder, and she realized that in her terror-fueled asthmatic gasps, the
sounds of dirt being scraped and kicked up, the hollow, lung-rattling moans,
the feral bleats, they’d all been drowned out, but even so, the relative quiet hadn’t
been enough to pretend that this was a bad dream that would unravel upon
waking.
She balled up her left hand, the one
that wasn’t holding the gun, the one that had been fidgeting and crawling about
her body like a spider, looking for loose strings to pick at, into a fist, and
that helped her get some control over her shaking.
Alan glanced at Rosemary and saw that
she was staring at the concrete. She looked anxious, but she was holding the
pistol, identical to Senna’s though out of its holster, in a determined grip,
the barrel pointing downward.
Before the concrete, the whole fence
had been made of chain link, and that had proven to be bad for business. Mice,
rats, voles, squirrels, chipmunks, and small birds, all of the zombie
persuasion, as luck had it, had wriggled into New Crozet on occasion, and,
because not all of these could be found and killed in time, some had made their
way into New Crozet homes, ensuring the town population’s steady decline.
It was fortunate—thank goodness for
small miracles—that the virus made its victims into automatons, brainless
robots, which staggered and crawled, putrefying as they went, with most of
their prior coordination gone. Had the birds held onto their ability to fly after
infection, the concrete would have been useless, and all but the underground settlements
would have been lost.
After the concrete was finished, the
population stabilized, and the people who’d been guarding the fence were freed
up for other tasks, and then New Crozet had prospered, in a post-apocalyptic,
trapped-in-a-confined-space-until-you-die sort of way.
Locked up for all these years, Alan
thought. If that’s prosperity…
He looked at Rosemary again, and this
time he frowned because she looked extremely tense, more so than the other
children usually did at this point, and on seeing that, a weight of sadness alighted
on his shoulders, making the Voltaire II feel instantly heavier. He turned away
from the girl, straightened, and tried to force the guilt from his mind.
A fear nagged at him then, as he
stared blankly at the ground between Senna and Rosemary’s feet and the fence: what
if a zombie burrowed under and got in?
The concrete was buried to a depth of
three feet, but that didn’t seem enough when he obsessed over it—no depth did—and
although he’d never seen any zombies burrow, the virus could mutate again, and
who knew what the next viral iteration would bring? A digging trait, or some
return of dexterity, weren’t out of the question.
Alan was sure that if there was
another mutation, it would be the last, the end, regardless of what changes it
brought.
Though he never spoke about this with
the other townspeople, he suspected that they shared his feelings on the
subject. The virus had grown stronger with time, and it was poised to take
everything, to take all of them. It was simply a matter of when.
He shook his head.
It’s no good to think this way, he
thought. Least of all now.