Order of the Dead (29 page)

75

“You’re a chronic drunk,” some floating revenant called to Knapp, “a serious alcoholic,
a beer-soaked embarrassment.”

If he’d had his wits about him, and he
didn’t, he would’ve yelled back, “You’re damn right I’m a serious drinker.
Larry Knapp ain’t one to half-ass this sort of thing. Go big or go home you
fucking ghosty ghoster.”

Instead he found that the words had
given him some fear energy, and now he was wide awake…well as wide awake as an
imbiber of his ilk could be at this late stage of prostrating himself at the
feet of Bacchus. Right now, that was way the fuck more awake than he wanted to
be.

He didn’t often hear voices, but when
he did, they always had a holier-than-thou pronouncement or two for him, and,
if we’re being honest about it, usually more than two. Fucking self-righteous
ghosty ghosters, you know how it is.

Then the room began to dance a foxtrot
that was much too fast for this hour of night, or rather, of morning. He sat
down on his ass, planting himself firmly on the floor. The room went on
dancing, oh it was very, very gay right now indeed, and it danced with so much
passion—it was almost lustful as if the room had an urge that cried out to be
with him—that it made Knapp shut his eyes and pray that it would stop, but not
out loud, because he was suddenly afraid that if he opened his mouth the
foxtrot would get in and he would be dancing too, and he didn’t want that. He
didn’t want any part of that. That would be way more action than he’d bargained
for.

After a time the room collected
itself, and Knapp was again brave enough to speak. “All I’m saying,” he said to
no one in particular but possibly to himself, “is that if it quacks like a
duck, and it fucks like a duck, then it’s probably a fucking duck.” He wasn’t
sure if he was talking about the virus or the bunkers or his whoring whore of a
slut wife, maybe all of those things, or maybe none at all. There were signs
everywhere. There were signs of things to come before the darned things came,
that was how the world worked. Things didn’t just happen for no reason without
warning. They did happen for no reason, but not without there being some
lead-up first.

“Am I the fucking duck?”

Was he? And did he deserve this? And
was it the pain he was trying to drink away, or did he indulge to escape his
cowardice, and maybe his shame, too? There were things he could’ve done. There
were things that he still could do, like raise Sasha, and be a better father to
Jack, and put a hand to building those bunkers himself. And there was the
harvest, there were never enough hands for that, and there was the matter of
the damned broken mill, and improving the power lines, and endless other tasks
in which his body and mind should’ve been engaged.

He could’ve done something to save his
first family, had he not been miles away at a fucking team-building retreat in
some Podunk Hollow. He could’ve done something to love his new woman better,
maybe, but maybe she was never really his woman, and maybe he and Jack weren’t
enough for her, or maybe she’d gone with that other man for her own reasons.
But all that shit was in the past, all the could ’a dones and should ’a dones,
too little too late, can’t change the world outside yourself, bygones and all
that prattle.

Drat. He was beginning to feel
depressed, taking yet another dip on the wino roller coaster, remembering how
he didn’t deserve this, how he shouldn’t keep on with the drinking, and that it
was no way to…

“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it,
’cept when it does. And you can’t change nobody, ’cept when you can. Got it
Knapp, you old fucker? Yes, I got it.” He nodded. “Knapp done got it alright.”

What he really needed right now, what
would really help where nothing else could, was more beer.
That
was what
he deserved.

“And served to thee it shall bee. Buzz
bee. Bumblebee. Deserve. Dee service bee.”

He drained the suds that were left in
his cup, then got up, bent down, and unceremoniously pressed his lips to the
table and began to vacuum up the lightly bubbling spillage.

What would Bacchus do? he would’ve
asked himself, had he known of Bacchus, that great Roman god of revelry after
whose example he fervently took, save for the orgy-making, but the dearth of
group sex was as much New Crozet’s fault as his own. The town was quite short
on eligible revelers, if you asked him, and let’s just leave it at that, thank
you very much. If it fucks like a duck…

He missed his cheating wife—that
damned
whore…
whom he still loved and knew that he always would—and he
missed Sasha too, even though she was just upstairs. He didn’t understand that
the town wouldn’t think any less of him if he took her in as his own. And that
was actually what he wanted to do. Raising a cup of beer to his face, and for
the second time that day, he began to cry.

76

Alan’s Voltaire II was safely tucked away in a nest of old blankets, inside a
chest in the bedroom closet. She liked being so close to Alan, and she wished
he’d take her out and play with her more often…and give her more to eat. Hunger
was her constant companion, as it was to all Voltaires, regardless of their
version number.

Allie, she was called, although she
didn’t think the name quite suited her. Still, that wasn’t for her to decide,
and if that was what her master willed, then so be it. She existed to serve, as
all Voltaires did.

But there was a reason for her given
name, her
original
name. It meant something too, and much more than
being the namesake of a dead human, if you asked Alan’s Voltaire II, which,
though she should have been slumbering peacefully, was fitful and struggling to
keep still in the position that Alan had put her in, as she knew was her duty.
She was supposed to submit to him, but that was hardly in her nature. She was,
after all, a
Voltaire II.

Tyrone Jackson, from Charleston, South
Carolina, who, before the outbreak had made his living as an auto-tinting Kung
Fu master, had put it most eloquently to the newbies, “You see, they call that
there motherfucker the
Vol-damn-fucking-taire
because you know why? No
you don’t know why, so I’ll tell you why. They call that there the
Vol-damn-fucking-taire
because you know who Voltaire was? He was a writer or philosopher or some shit
like that and he wrote books and letters, and he drank seventy cups of coffee a
day! Do you hear me?
Seventy. Cups.
Seventy-cups.
Seventy cups
a
day.
And that’s how much you gonna wish you had if you gotta carry that
motherfucker around all day. ’Cause that motha’ gon’ tear you up real nice.”

And just when you thought he was done,
he’d say, “And that’s not the only reason, oh no. No, no, no. There’s more to
this story, oh yes there is. It’s not just the Voltaire, but it’s the
Vol-damn-fucking-taire
the Second. Second.
And you know why? Because we gotta cultivate our garden,”
he’d say, paraphrasing Candide’s ending, which he’d never read but had heard
others talk about. “And you know where that’s from?
Candy-Day,
that’s
where. And I bet you don’t know what
Candy-Day
is neither, so I’ll tell
you that, too. Voltaire
wrote
Candy-Day, and it’s about how if we don’t
do shit to take care of our garden, everyone and everything gon’ get fucked to
shit. And we didn’t take care of it before, and it all got fucked to shit, so
now it’s the
second
time around. The
second Candy-Day,
so
Voltaire
Twooooo
.”

Then there would come another dramatic
pause during which Tyrone would soak in all the stares. God how he loved life
on the reclamation crew. People paid attention to him, and, not only that, but
because there were so few people left in the world, he commanded the attention of
a huge part of all the humans who were left, a large proportion. Because you
know why? Because a former auto-tinting Kung Fu master could become a learned
man and professor in a world gone completely fucked to shit. That’s why.

“And how do we cultivate our garden?” Tyrone
would say, keeping at it and not expecting any sort of reply besides their eyes
opening wider and their mouths hanging lower, which they would always oblige
him by doing. “By burning those fucking things to ash, to
nourish
the
soil.
”
And then his eyebrows would go up pointedly and his eyes would open wide and
he’d say, “Not by hiding in settlements.”

Apparently, he knew a thing or two
about Voltaire, or believed he did, and no one questioned him about it. Maybe
he really did know the secrets of the portable Voltaire II flamethrower. Maybe
the damned thing
spoke
to him. Who knows?

It wasn’t a bad show, Alan had to
admit. Given what the man had to work with, it was pretty impressive. Alan got
to see Tyrone do his routine sixteen times before the zombies decided that he
was such a good performer that they needed him all to themselves.

On one fine summer day Tyrone got a
bit too far ahead of spotting range, and the next time anyone from the crew saw
him, he’d turned and was going after them. He’d been killed without fanfare, by
a spotter named Beth Mills, who would later join Brother Mardu’s fine troupe of
merry men and, with her addition, women, too. She had put a bullet in Tyrone’s
face, which bullet had taken off the right side of said face, and then another
bullet in his chest.

Then Alan had used his Voltaire II to
burn the body, and then it was Tyrone who was
nourishing the soil,
Candy-Day
and
Vol-damn-fucking-taire the Second
be motherfucking-damned
.

Allie the
Vol-damn-fucking-taire
the Second
missed Tyrone something terrible. Her metal heart ached for him,
and the grand introductions that he gave.

There
was a man who treated her with
respect, a true gentleman. She got herself under control. Alan was the only man
for her, her true master, that was sure as her desire to consume flesh, zombie
or otherwise, with the licks of her fiery tongue, but he could be so rough and
inattentive, and, now, she was so hungry, enduring the scratch and scrape of pangs
of appetite against her metallic insides.

Why won’t he feed me?
Why?
Oh,
to eat again, to burn and consume and take.

Sure, she’d just fed the night before,
but she was always hungry, and after the great feasts she’d had in Alan’s
service, the perimeter fence drills were such a tease.

She was
so
hungry.

Soon,
very
soon, even though
there were no scheduled trainings for the children, she’d be fed, and not by
Alan’s hand.

PART TWO

Market

“It’s an outbreak, an
epidemic,
even, but what

they’re saying about it taking the
whole world can’t be true.

All the people,
and
the
animals? There’s just no way.”

Alan Rice, former Virginia Corporate Counsel for DropItOff Inc., drop shipper
to infinity and beyond,

whose profits since the outbreak were
in the amount of exactly nil.

1

Brother Remigius was kneeling on the ground, praying, as he had been for most
of the morning. The peaceful silence tugged at his nose hairs and he breathed
it in, delighting in the absence of birdsong. He’d always found animals to be noisy,
loathsome things, and it was a relief that most of them were destroyed or at
the very least quieted by the virus.

Holding the lungful of silent air he’d
pulled, he looked up at the sky, which was brimming with clouds to the east.
The sky there churned out a hotdog shape of mist, and for a moment he felt as
though the clouds were reaching toward him, beckoning for him to join them in
their seditious huddle.

Perhaps he’d achieved a higher state
of consciousness through this morning’s meditation. Maybe he’d actually communed
with the merging wisps of precipitation above him.

Have I called the rain, he wondered,
or does it seek me out of its own accord?

He grinned.
Accord,
now that’s
a good word. Well done, Remigius. Well done.

Brother Remigius was a short, stocky
man of thirty-nine. He had no hair left on his head, but enough on the rest of
his body to make up for that and more. He had a fat belly, and if it weren’t
for the robe he would have resembled a pregnant man. The belly was hard, as the
better part of the fat he stored was of the visceral nature, living around his
internal organs. His nose and sinuses were always stopped up, and he found that
his symptoms were always worse the deeper they traveled into the forest.

Upon joining the Order, he’d taken
after Mardu’s example and had made up a pious-sounding name for himself.
Acrisius had done the same when he joined, falling in step behind Mardu and
Remigius.

He heard approaching footsteps,
turned, and, pointing up at the sky, said, “A sign if there ever was one.”

“Yes,” Sister Beth said. “That it is.”

Sister Beth, who was slender and
surprisingly elegant in the dark robe of the Order, regarded Brother Remigius
with delicately-veiled contempt.

A veteran of the reclamation crews,
Beth had found her true calling with Brother Mardu’s flock. But things had
changed much over the years, and Mardu’s plan for the Order no longer coincided
with what she was now envisioning for it.

Objectively, Brother Remigius thought
that Sister Beth was beautiful, but on a personal level, he found her too
intimidating, too strong of character, to be an attractive woman.

“We’ll do it when you get back,” he
said, “after you’ve done Saul in. After our
inspired
leader and Acrisius
find their tombs in that town.”

“Speak more softly,
brother,
”
Sister Beth admonished, nervous about being overheard. Looking around, she sat
down on the ground next to him.

Just then, a brother appeared, coming
out from one of the trucks, and she bit her tongue, not getting her chance to further
chide Remigius for his loud mouth.

It was Brother Sanders who’d come out,
and he now began to dig around in the bushes for something. He was another oaf,
if you asked Beth. He still hadn’t chosen a side, electing instead to act like
a child who closed his eyes, covered his ears, and sang out loud, hiding from
what was going on around him. Or maybe he was just too stupid to notice.

Either way, Beth didn’t care whose
side he was on. He was useless, and if he chose to side with Brother Mardu, she
thought there was some satisfaction to be had in killing him.

When Sanders stopped rummaging and
went back into his truck carrying a wash bucket, Sister Beth started to rant,
as if seeing him had added fuel to the fire of dry twigs burning under her.

“Mardu’s weak,” she said, “wistful. He
lives in a state of nostalgia, lost in emotional weakness, remembering the
supposed good old days when he first got us all together. Whatever charm,
whatever influence, he had then is gone. No one wants to join us anymore, we’re
losing power. Everyone on the outside slights us. Everyone can see that we’re
all
weak.
All of us.
Because he’s lending us his weakness and we’re
taking
it. The novelty of worshipping and praying to the virus is gone. No one cares
about that bullshit anymore. No one’s cared for years. Worst of all, what we do
now is bad business. We waste good meat, the
best
meat, the most
expensive commodity there is.”