Order of the Dead (18 page)

42

The almost great man that was Caribou Lou was stabbed to death behind the
shelter on the night of his bootstrapping proclamation. Two thirty-something
men had thrown in together to see if Caribou Lou’s boldness was brought on by
new loot.

A search of his still-twitching corpse
revealed a cache of empty airplane bottles, one of which was more than a year
old, two cigarettes, one chewed and one empty of all goods, and a family Polaroid
of something that didn’t exist anymore, folded over in half twice and cracked
as a result, which Caribou Lou couldn’t bring himself to look at unless he was
obliterated on the juice.

Well, he was on the wagon permanently
after that, what with being murdered and all. His killers, disappointed at what
they’d found on his body, began to leave to look for a more profitable alley.
One of them was still holding the family photo.

Finally, he circled back a few steps
and dropped it on Caribou Lou’s body, which wasn’t twitching much at all
anymore. The one who’d had the photo turned to leave. His accomplice, whose
real name was Dwyane Moore but who went by the nickname Dwy-Dwy, picked the
picture up and pocketed it.

Dwy-Dwy was still alive and with the
photo in his possession when the outbreak hit. He was looking at it when the
zombies took him, pleading with the eyes of the man, woman, and two little
children in the picture, like he was begging them for forgiveness, or for a
quicker death, or something he couldn’t grasp, and wouldn’t have much chance to
reflect on in later years, because there weren’t to be any
later
years
at all.

The children were Deja and Javon, six
and seven at the time the picture was taken, the woman was Belinda, and Caribou
Lou’s real name was Steve Reginald, and before the alcohol took him back from
the family to which it had lent him, keyword
lent,
he’d been the father
and husband that all family men aspired to be.

Had it not been for his murder and the
worldwide zombie outbreak that followed shortly thereafter, Caribou Lou really would’ve
shrugged the alcohol off once and for all. He was undergoing a sea change in
his dreamless float on the waves of homelessness, and the tide was actually
going to come in, and for good. His family would welcome him back with
understandable trepidation, and from there they’d sail—slowly at first but then
with increasing speed—into the proverbial sunset.

None of that happened of course,
because Caribou Lou was murdered by two drug-addicted and hungry men who were
also treading the homeless water, and then the outbreak hit, and his wife
Belinda was turned by her best friend and coworker Nellia Roberts, with whom
she worked at a Chipotle in Midtown. Belinda had just been promoted to manager.

Deja and Javon found their human lives
ended at school. Deja was turned by a boy she didn’t even like named Andre, but
who always hung around her for some reason, which, being city kids, both of them
understood damn well already.

Javon was turned in the principal’s
office, by none other than the principal himself. Javon was in trouble for
fighting...yet again. He’d beaten up an older boy, Omari, who’d said he was
Javon’s mother’s pimp and that Javon’s mother had to see him every night and
pay him what he was owed before she was allowed to return home to Deja and
Javon. Javon had done a good job of it too, almost breaking Omari’s nose, and
more than almost dislocating the older boy’s shoulder.

Oh the schoolyard battles he was to
have, if not for the darned zombie virus, of course. But then a lot of things
would’ve been different, if not for the virus.

Deja would’ve found herself in a nice
and stable career first as a promoter and then as a public relations advisor in
the music industry, specializing in something called soft or light or fluff or
pillow rap, which basically meant white rap—the stuff that white guys put on
after bringing home a date and trying to set the mood for getting lucky—after
having her fifteen minutes in the spotlight as one of the final twenty
contestants on America’s Got Talent, where she showcased her impressive but less
than earthshattering gift of song.

Javon would’ve taken up boxing and
beat up Omari four more times. It was the older boy’s fault, really, he was
three years Javon’s senior and was always egging him on. Javon was happy to
oblige what seemed to be Omari’s masochistic desire to have the shit kicked out
of him by a younger kid. He’d happily do the kicking with a shrug and a grin
and a one-two combo that he was perfecting. He loved to fight.

After having his own nose broken in
the boxing game twice, Javon veered onto a different course and became, to the
shock and delight of his family, obsessed with the written word. He began to
read and read and read, stopping only when his eyes were on fire or his vision
blurred. The alcohol pixie that had been trying to get her Caribou Lou back,
frustrated that Steve Reginald wouldn’t budge, was more than pleased to alight
on his son’s shoulder, and after she landed there and dug in her claws, she
guided his journey well.

Together with her assigned human at
last, she gave him the gift of the quill or something like that and then he was
a high-functioning alcoholic high school English teacher by day and high-flying
writer by night. He wrote a book about a boy that was based loosely on his own
life. It was called Apartment 429, and it became an American classic.

It would even be read by high school
English students as part of the curriculum in some schools, where the teachers
and students alike would ascribe all kinds of non-existent and unintended
meanings to the straightforward events of his story. He was a visionary writer,
an artist at the craft even, but after that first book, he found he had nothing
left to write about.

The story he’d told was the only one
he’d ever wanted to. He kept teaching English, the only thing he loved more
than being alone with a book, and ended his life a bourbon-laced suicide at the
age of fifty-three after some great years of teaching and contented
bachelordom. Nothing if not a perfectionist in his later years, he took the
belt and suspenders approach, throwing sleeping pills—the strongest he could
convince his doctor to give him—into his bourbon filled belly, and then putting
a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

The shot made short work of his brain
stem, so he needn’t have taken the extra pharmaceutical precaution, but, better
safe than sorry. After his death, the book he’d written became a
fly-off-the-shelf sensation, people’s renewed interest in it fueled by morbid
curiosity, as if they thought they could read his words and understand why he’d
killed himself and avoid the same fate, or perhaps end up the same way, or
something. Maybe people just liked to stare at other people’s pain.

But, as you know, none of that ever
happened, because the virus didn’t let it. The virus cut short Deja’s and
Javon’s lives just like it did those of most of the people in the world, and
with it was taken the pain and suffering that was yet to be lived, but also the
joy and laughter, and the great art of those like Javon.

43

“Fuck Caribou Lou and his fucking bootstraps,”
Yooooo
Maurice would
mutter when the speech was haunting him up in the still swanky but increasingly
crusty brokerage house, unaware that Caribou Lou was dead but sure that the
piece of big-talking filth in his eternal drunken stupor would never amount to
anything,
could
never amount to anything. But, no matter how many times
he said it, he usually couldn’t get the words of the homeless tosspot out of
his head.

And those damn words of Lou’s came
back to him now, and in response he was forced to mutter, by rote: “Fuck Caribou
Lou and his fucking bootstraps.” Like he was a robot or something.

He’d been right not to listen. Of
course he’d been right. He was already on his drug-dealing path at that point,
what was he supposed to do differently? Why would one who was so set stray?

And what if he’d acted on Caribou
Lou’s words of supposed wisdom, if the words of a homeless blotto could be
called that, then what? What would
Yooooo
Maurice have done, saved
enough drug and welfare money to buy presentable clothes, gotten a job making
sandwiches or bussing tables somewhere, gotten off of welfare, and gone back to
school?

What the fuck for, to rejoin society
to be a broke nobody? Sure, he could’ve gotten away from his drug dealer
friends
and the treats they doled out for cold hard cash, and then he could’ve become
the first in his immediate family—none of whom he knew, but he assumed their
schooling was subpar by the standards of those who had any, schooling
or
standards—to graduate from high school, and then from college. But, again, what
the fuck for pray tell?

He was a businessman at heart, always
had been and always would be, and that didn’t require any schooling at all. All
he needed was the right opportunity, and the outbreak was just that. Even after
he’d risen high enough in the gang ranks and made enough money dealing, he
wanted more, but he’d hit a glass ceiling. And what do you do when you hit a
ceiling made of glass?

You put that shit in your pipe and
smoke it and tweak until it’s all run out, and then there’s no more glass, and
the ceiling is gone, and you’re above where it used to be.

And he didn’t even need to do that,
because the virus did it for him. It put more than the glass in the Krok pipe,
though, it put most of the world into it, along with the gang hierarchy and the
customers too.

Even before the outbreak tore up the
Bronx with its gnashing of teeth, he could sense that something was changing.
The foul odor in the air that he was used to had changed. It was still foul, to
be sure, it was the Bronx, which had the misfortune to be stuck to the rest of
the island of Manhattan with its Wall Street banker and Midtown lawyer stench
wafting north into the projects where brothas were just trying to make a living,
you know wh’ I’m saying?

There was a new smell in it, not quite
worse, but not an improvement either. It was just different.

It was the virus registering in the
sweat of the bipedal things—bankers, lawyers, brothas, and sistas too, the
virus didn’t discriminate—it took just before it turned them into life-sized,
but very dead indeed, Xerox machines that would replicate
it.

Replicate, replicate, replicate, ejaculate!
And don’t rinse, but do repeat.

Except it was saliva and blood instead
of semen. The white stuff probably would’ve worked too, just about any zombie
part or bodily fluid did the trick, so long as it was put inside of an
uninfected human, but the virus had ruled out sexual transmission as
inefficient,
too slow,
no time for foreplay,
no time.
Go for the neck
and belly and tear at the soft parts with your slobbering teeth.

Then the virus picked up. The
replicators and saliva-spewing robots doubled, tripled, quadrupled, spread like
domino wild fires eating up brown grass, and there was a damn lot of the brown
stuff, limitless fields of it that had been popping up relentlessly out of
itself until then.

Had the scratching in his brain shell
become a whispering by then? Almost, but not quite yet. The scurrying in his
skull was definitely louder, and more…purposeful. It was already showing him
how to move, how to go unnoticed among those infected—or was the right term
blessed?
—by
the virus.

It was as if he were the foreplay that
was missing, going as he did between the zombies, stirring them slightly, but
never taking their attention away from the task of finding uninfected humans,
not counting him. He knew when to walk, when to stop, when to run, and most
important of all, when to become deathly still.

And it had showed him how to make it
into the brokerage rooms of Landry, Davis, and Pullman, who were undeniably
great because their names were on something. In spite of that, the virus hadn’t
spared them from their ultimate fate.

There were waves upon waves of zombies
in the Bronx, and Manhattan, and all of New York, but he remained untouched,
staying comfortably out of their reach. He could’ve stayed there up high, or anywhere
in the City, really, and lived out the rest of his days like that. There was a
ton of canned food in the grocery stores to eat, and that would last a while—it
helped that the zombies didn’t eat anything—and there were plenty of places to
stay if he got tired of the executive washrooms. That was just how it was,
seeing as how all the former indoor dwellers now preferred to wander the great,
though paved but soon-to-be riddled with weeds, outdoors.

The walkers were searching for more
prey, which was quickly running out, as if it were an evaporating drop of dew
and each passing day were a fifteen minute interval of growing summer sunlight,
and the sun was growing ever brighter, turning the world into a suffocating
mire that served the virus, and the virus alone.

44

The words.

They’d come at last, soothing but also
commanding like a guiding lover who didn’t know the word ‘no’ existed. He was
told everything, and then he was no longer any of his former selves, but
Brother
Mardu,
and perhaps, if the words were to be believed—and they had to be,
there was no choice when it came to that—no longer a man at all.

In no uncertain terms, he was told the
what, how, why, and when of what to do. The who—the who that would help him to
do all of this, which was an insurmountable feat for Brother Mardu alone, was
left to him. To do it, he needed a robust following, and the terms of putting
that together were entirely his to decide.

Lie to them, tell them the truth,
force them, persuade them, fuck them into submission, it didn’t make a
difference to his master, so long as the job got done.

Mardu chose an attack on multiple
fronts, but devoted most of his resources to the truth, as he’d been told it by
the voice,
singular,
in his head. People who heard voices were crazy,
confused. He heard one voice only, and it spoke of reality.

And so Brother Mardu had ordered the
Order into existence, and thus it had followed, the obedient offspring of his
mind, his new bitch who would help him execute on the words that were playing
in his head. He needed one, too.

Now that he was the virus’s middleman,
the constant listener to its wishes, he needed his own whore to turn out, and
not just one, either. Every ho needs her own, and a hierarchy with only two
levels did not an acceptable pecking order make.

He’d called it an ‘order,’ because
Vera the Virus—he’d never have the mental courage to think of her that way,
probably because giving it a human name was worse than insulting, but perhaps
in another, braver, life he might have—had commanded it. He’d done everything
at her request, and as close to the letter of her wishes as was possible given
the whole apocalypse reality and all that shit.

The order he was calling forth would
worship the virus—it was, after all, freeing them up to do whatever the fuck
they pleased in the world—and eventually, according to the words…they’d have
meat. They’d control resources like they’d never been able to before, said
resources being
human
meat: the redefinition of ‘human resources.’

At first, they’d just prayed to the virus
and hoarded the remaining…how to put it…standard consumable fare, what the
Western World was used to, but he was made to see it as clear as the sunset
that there would come a time when the Cheerios and Sprites and doggy biscuits
ran out.

Not to mention the Little Debbie Fudge
Rounds—he could really eat the fuck out of those things.

And it wasn’t like cannibalism was a
new thing, the words had reminded him in those early days. On the contrary, it
was a very
old
thing, ancient even. It would be the obvious next step when
the cans of soup ran out, like a child putting one foot forward, then falling,
righting herself, and doing it over until her muscles mastered the fine art of
walking.

Cannibalism was just another logical
step in the progression, and it would become commonplace. The idea of eating
people never bothered him, either. Never had and never would.

But one thing was made abundantly
clear. Some of the meat, a particular sort, was for the virus alone to enjoy.

And her voice in his head had changed
him, like a parasite burrowing deeper into his soft matter and growing new
feeder tentacles that rooted outward into all of that grey
more-shapely-than-glop that made Brother Mardu who he was. The virus was not
only the voice in his mind, but the lenses on his eyes, and the firmness of his
bones, and the resilience in his muscles. It was all-knowing, all-consuming,
all-encompassing,
all.