Order of the Dead (17 page)

40

As these thoughts were racing around his head like whippets with their tails on
fire, scorching the banked track that was the inside of his skull, Brother
Mardu was kneeling in front of the Order’s altar, which was at the head of a
narrow, windowless room. Overhead, the ceiling lights that weren’t out—a little
less than half of the total number—were beaming down a soft yellow that wasn’t
quite filling the room.

He adjusted himself, rising slightly
before settling down again, and both of his knees—the right and then the
left—crackled in mild protest as he sank lower to the floor. His right hip
chimed in as well.

Have a fucking party, why don’t you?
he thought. Just go on and break.

In calmer times, the room had reminded
him of a space capsule, all of which he figured were lost in space now, assuming,
of course, that they’d been deployed from Earth in the first place. The ones
that had never been launched were still stuck on the planet, and the room he
sat in might as well have been one. From his perspective, it contained all that
a space capsule should have: humanity’s legacy, which to him was the virus and
those enlightened enough to advance its cause.

Now, their time was perhaps running
out. Midnight was fast approaching, and his mind was struggling to trudge
through a swamp of doubt. His thoughts, rather than being clear as the waters
of the Caribbean as they’d once been, were darkened by helpless and pathetic
reflections on the past.

He was fifty-four years old, and though
he’d been twelve years younger when the virus had made its glorious debut, until
recently with each passing year he’d felt more energetic than ever before in
his life. His pursuit seemed to be making him progressively younger. That had
for a time been conclusive, irrefutable proof of the divinity and virtue of his
mission, of the truth he was spreading to the ignorant, those unversed in the
true way of the zombie.

Born Maris Dubois, he’d grown up a
homeless orphan in the Bronx. Up until the ripe age of eleven he’d whiled away
the time summering on dingy steps on streets too far north for any but the most
lost of white people to be seen, and wintering in vomit and STD-infested shelters
for those who, like him, went without. Oh, what spice variety could be, and
certainly was, in those years.

And the smells, he still remembered
those. Blood, bile, upchuck, broken glass or pavement or both embedded in skin,
all manner of cheap drink oozing out of clogged pores, body odor the likes of
which many would never have the good fortune to appreciate, and don’t forget
the shit and piss and drugs and all the cocktails thereof. He’d always had a
keen olfactory sense, sharp enough that smells could recall images, even the
faintest odors that most of his friends in those days couldn’t detect.

Friends.
Was that really the right term for
it? Maybe it wasn’t, but he could use it all the same. That wasn’t what they’d
called one another then. They were brothers, blood brothers, gangbangers, and
they’d helped him push ‘homeless’ to a lower position on his resume, to
something that was first in the recent past, and then in the look it’s really
over past, and eventually, in the distant past, but, most importantly, behind
him, and over and motherfucking done with.

Mostly, these friends were just
drug-runners, too low on the totem to have any real clout, working their way
slowly up the blood-slick pole, slipping every now and again, sustaining
permanent injuries in their falls, sometimes dying if they weren’t so good at
the pole dancing thing. Physical injuries or no, membership was itself a
permanent mark on the soul, and that was what had made the friendship run as
deep as well-used track marks on a greying junkie.

His given name was Maris, but all his
friends
,
had called him ‘Maurice,’ or, more frequently, ‘
Yooooo
Maurice.’ Not ‘Yo
Maurice’ or even ‘
Yo
Maurice’ but ‘
Yooooo
Maurice.’

He hadn’t minded. It was nice to have
someone to talk to, some kind of family-type thing, even if it was based on
drugs and the blood they shared was the blood they spilled.

It was all good, as they’d liked to
say. All
fucking
good, until the zombies showed up, that was. Hey, maybe
there'd even been some love there. Some of the days with his gang seemed to
have been the best days in his life. High as a kite, wild and free, and now, in
retrospect, lucky to ever have made it back to the ground.

They’d called themselves
The
Destroyaz,
and that’s what they did—destroy the neighborhood and
themselves, to the extent there was still room to do either. He was the last of
The Destroyaz,
a living relic, and of that he was sure. He couldn’t
really know, of course, but there was no way to picture any of his
friends
in
The Destroyaz
living past the first night after the outbreak.

They had street smarts, and all of
them were familiar with the concept of spotting as it related to looking out
for narcs, police, snitches, and other unseemly types, but zombies were another
matter entirely.

And, to add insult to injury, the
zombies undid the client base itself. That was a real problem, one that forced
Yooooo
Maurice of
The Destroyaz
to start over again, from scratch.

And it was a damn shame, too, because in
the three years before the outbreak hit, he’d really been making a name for
himself, building a brand, and gaining ground like no one’s business. He was
finally past the low as dirt, foot soldier days, when he’d always been a step
away from prison or the shelters or a drive-by or some sordid combination of
the three, and that would’ve made one hell of a story.

It was that nasty Krokodil shit
showing up that did it. Because there he was, cornering the market, owning it,
making it his bitch and exclusive domain. And that motherfuckin’ bitch
complied. She was an obedient ho, or so he’d thought. As it turned out, perhaps
she’d had her own plan all along.

It was some real mean junk, that
Krokodil. It was the one drug
Yooooo
Maurice of
The Destroyaz
wouldn’t touch, not even for a sample. He’d tried everything, but not that,
never
that.

“That shit’ll melt your face right the
fuck off,” he’d told his
friends.
He should’ve said
rot,
because
that’s what Ms. Krokodil really did to your face, and your other soft matter,
and not just the soft stuff either, but your bones, too.

The smart ones among his
friends,
which in many cases meant they already had a drug addiction they were committed
to financially and had no room in their lives or wallets for another, had
listened. They’d still been torn the fuck apart when the apocalypse hit,
whether they’d stayed away from the Krok or not, so maybe in the end, it hadn’t
amounted to anything. He, on the other hand, hadn’t been torn apart, not in the
least.

Back during
The Destroyaz’
prosperous
times, the generals and captains gave
Yooooo
Maurice leeway to run an operation
that was all his own. Autonomy, they called it on their more ambitious
vocabulary days. They wanted to be in Krokodil.

Fuck, if the bitch paid, everyone
ought to have a go, but none of them had the balls to touch it, except for
Yooooo
Maurice, who was like white on rice to the stuff. And so he’d finally found his
niche before the outbreak, as he’d similarly find his calling after it, or more
precisely, the calling would find him
.

In private, he took all the credit for
introducing Krokodil to New York. “A new street drug for a
new
New York,”
he’d confided to himself in his solitary moments. Perhaps he’d known even then,
had
felt,
what was coming, but he didn’t anticipate being in the eye of
the storm, and perhaps threading it, if his role in the outbreak was as great
as he told his Order of the Dead disciples that it was, or as great as future
scholars of the virus would have believed, if not for a woman named Senna Phillips,
who at the time
Yooooo
Maurice was turning out the lady Krok, was just
beginning her career as an elementary school teacher in Northern Virginia,
which the virus would not let her take to fruition.

Unbeknownst to either of them, their
paths would cross, and they’d leave permanent marks on each other’s lives and
legacies. Their meeting, though brief, would profoundly alter the course of
human events.

41

The virus hit New York and tore it to mold-ridden and festering shreds. It was
crystal clear to
Yooooo
Maurice, who’d broken into and hidden in the
abandoned, high-floor offices of a brokerage house, that the whole
motherfuckin’ game was changing now, and he wasn’t to start from the bottom
this time.

The way he saw it, from his lofty
perch of the former office of Landry, Davis, and Pullman, whose views of the
Hudson were only partially obstructed by other high-rises, the outbreak had
reorganized the streets, undealt all the hands and reshuffled the deck.

That put him face to face with an
incredible opportunity. He just couldn’t make out the features of that face all
at once. It was a once-in-a-lifetime shot at breaking into the big time. The
greatest buy low sell high play in the history of mankind.

Given the talent he’d been given, whatever
he was about to do would have the makings of an inside job, and that kind of
thing is bad karma to pass up, a straight-up sin. Still, he didn’t know what
that would be, but that was when you had to wait for it to come to you, poised
to execute.

There were still people to sell to, he
was sure. If he was surviving, then others must have been too, and there was
always some shit to be sold. He realized that he wasn’t
Yooooo
Maurice
of
The Destroyaz
anymore, but he wasn’t Maris, either.

He was becoming someone else, someone
in need of a name. When he was figuring out how to shape the next phase of his
life, Caribou Lou would often come back to him. That damned Caribou Lou, who’d
haunted him before the outbreak, and would keep tormenting him until hell
itself froze over and cracked.

There were sleepless nights when Caribou
Lou raced around in circles in his
head, as if his skull were a Harlem
block where an amped Lou pushed his half-broken, fully-stolen bicycle to its
limits, hovering above the space where the seat wasn’t anymore and pedaling
like a madman.

Before
The Destroyaz
had taken
Yooooo
Maurice in, back when he was still Maris and racking up his share of
SWB—Sitting while Black—and WWB—Walking while Black—and LIAGWB—Lying in a
Gutter while Black—stops and searches and arrests, Caribou Lou and he were
guests in the same homeless shelter from time to time.

Caribou’s name actually was Lou, and everyone
called him Caribou Lou for some reason, even though that wasn’t his drink of
choice and wouldn’t be even if he could get it. Of course he wasn’t going to
pass up a chance at Malibu rum, but please,
please
hold the fucking pineapple
juice, which would just take up precious liquor real estate in the glass.

On one of those fine nights, Caribou
Lou made the speech for which Maris, and
Yooooo
Maurice, Brother Mardu,
and every permutation thereof would remember him. And that, too, was the night
when it had all started for Mardu, except that he didn’t know it then.

The beginnings of it were too faint
for him to catch, as the beginnings of great things often are. But the
scratching in his skull had started, like something was taking root there, an
idea or a force or spirit that had been searching for the perfectly-fertile
soil that was suited to it, that it needed.

“You see these bootstraps here,” Caribou
Lou had said, pointing to the dingy loops on the backs of the chewed, too-big
workman boots he’d found somewhere—or perhaps pulled from the pallid feet of a
corpse—and tied to his own ashy and bunion-riddled paws. “You see ’em?”

He was swaying, his small belly full
to the brim with Aristocrat Royal Vodka and the contents of at least five—he
couldn’t remember how many with the load of drink he was carrying—varied
airplane bottles. There had been Jäger, that disgusting treasure, and Jack, but
mostly Jäger, or at least more Jäger than Jack. He didn’t remember and it didn’t
matter.

The Aristocrat had done the trick of
taking Jäger and Jack alike into a friendly huddle, and that top-hatted
gentleman with his cheap, pretty much unfiltered vodka had topped him off
perfectly well. Lou hadn’t been given a top hat of his own, he never was, but
that was okay. The Aristocrat hadn’t had a spare with him that night, the
gentleman’s usual excuse.

“I’m ’a—” he belched and put a forearm
to his mouth, and, for a moment, to him and to everyone around him, it seemed
that he was going to puke and douse the room with his stomach-warmed dinner of
half a can of refried beans. But the heat left his head, the feeling passed,
and the beans, unhappily, stayed put in their liquor infusion. He pulled a
corner of his hood to the side, straining the tired strings that had the
thankless job of holding the ancient sweatshirt together, and wiped at his
lips, picking up the blots of saliva that had bloomed there.

“I’m ’a pull up… I’m ’a pull up
myself
by these…by these here bootstraps.” He reached down and made a hooking gesture
with his forefingers, than raised his hands with the kind of dramatic flair
that Larry Knapp would’ve envied. “
All
the way up. And I’m ’a make
some’in’ of myself.”

He reeled but kept his balance. “I’m
’a—” He wanted to begin again but found his energy was flagging. He needed a
drink. “I’m ’a—” He tried again, but his audience had been lost. They’d lost
interest, and were turning away from him. To them he was just another
pontificating drunk who’d never see one red cent come out of the conviction of
his words.

“I’m ’a—” he grumbled, and then
stalked off—drunkenly—to a corner of the shelter where he could light up his
crack pipe in peace. He’d tried to make them see, but blind, rabid and lame
horses couldn’t be led to water, or something like that.