Order of the Dead (30 page)

2

Sister Beth had been around the block a time or two before, and after leaving
her rec-crew she traveled with some minor flesh-dealers—nowhere near the
caliber of the Fleshers—before joining the Order. Following her initiation, she’d
learned quite quickly that Mardu was both crazy gaga
and
crazy like a
fox.

The latter was the kind of crazy you
wanted running your business or gang or post-apocalyptic religion what-have-you,
the former not so much. But that was assuming you were rational, and the zombie
zeitgeist wasn’t big on lucid leadership or levelheaded followership, or any
sort of sensibility, really. And it was true that some of the craziest, wildest
and most ruthless of the gangs had become the richest.

Be that as it was, Mardu seemed to
have lost his crazy like a fox whiskers. He still had the completely-fucking-out-of-his-gourd-crazy
eyes, but his business sense, if he’d ever had one to begin with—and Beth was starting
to have her doubts—had run away from the family farm with its tail on fire.

“We should’ve done something a long
time ago,” Remigius agreed.

“It’s just a matter of survival at
this point,” Sister Beth said. There’s no central leadership, no worthwhile message,
and no
food.
All the others, outlaws or not, have settled down already.
It doesn’t make sense to keep moving like this. If we nailed down a base we
could at least grow some of our own food, send raiding parties out to get meat,
but not all of us travel together all the time. It’s a complete waste.” And,
she added through clenched teeth, her anger reddening her cheeks, “Almost as
much of a waste as the
offerings.
”

Brother Remigius nodded. He was
thinking about the annoying squawks that birds had used to make, back when
there were living birds. Perhaps it would have been better to hear that sound
again and be irritated by something as mundane as that, rather than have the
plotting Sister Beth at his ear. He wasn’t sure, but thinking about the birds made
him think of chicken, and that made him think of white meat.

His mouth began to water. He hated
dark meat, and that was all that humans had. He didn’t care for human flesh at
all, but it was a trader’s world, and human meat was sought after, and that meant
that it could be traded for more palatable items, like fruits and vegetables
and grains.

“We barely have food to eat,” Sister
Beth said, “not to mention next to none of the flesh that we deserve, and no
good supplies. The little meat we do have is hardly shared.”

Brother Remigius frowned.

“I want flesh,” Sister Beth said.
“Supple flesh. I need it. I’m sick of this precise butchery. And there are too
many of us to enjoy what little meat they let us have.”

Brother Remigius was struggling to
find something to say. If she went on like this, he was afraid he might get
sick. He did want to get rid of Mardu and get some proper leadership in place,
but to get more bread, not that sickening, gamey stuff that came from people.

“Mardu is a dinosaur,” Brother Remigius
finally said. He looked around nervously, checking to see if anyone had heard
him. Bolstered by the usual go-around of the world that he saw continuing
without interruption, he went on. “If we don’t change, adapt, we won’t last
another year. The problem is that everyone here has gotten complacent, but what
worked in the first few years after the outbreak doesn’t work anymore. You’re
right that no one cares about the virus now or what it
means,
they just
want food to eat.”

People want to die in peace, he wanted
to add, but said nothing. It pained him to say these things about Brother
Mardu. Remigius had been of the Order’s first disciples, but he didn’t love
Brother Mardu or his ideals anymore.

They’d grown much older in their years
together. It had been twelve years, but felt to Remigius like forty. Mardu was
too distrustful now. He was closed off in a way that he’d never been before,
and hardly spoke to Remigius these days.

Instead, their leader was always off
by himself. Or plotting with Brother Acrisius and Brother Saul, the jealous
whisper that was creeping into Brother Remigius’s mind added. But it wasn’t
that, he knew, it was mostly that Brother Mardu was a solitary soul, if a man
like that could have a soul, that is. He had his ways, and he didn’t share
himself with others.

I don’t think he loves anyone, Brother
Remigius thought, not even himself. At least those abominations that he’d kept
as pets are gone. Those things…and the way they roamed around the campsites and
into and out of trucks, it was enough to make you lose your ability to sleep,
for the rest of your life. They were like the deformities of the universe that
Mardu had found, added his magic touch to, and put on parade.

3

“We have to do something while we’re strong,” Sister Beth said, breaking
Brother Remigius out of his thought trance, for which he was thankful. The dead-but-not-quite-dead
creatures that Mardu had made haunted him enough in the night, surface out of
the shadows as they tended to do. It was really better not to obsess over them
in the daylight. After all, he had the rest of his evenings and nights and
too-early morning to be visited by visions of the cauterized and stitched-up
zombies, child-proofed, as it were, by Mardu’s disturbingly steady hands.

And if he catches us, Remigius
thought, what he wouldn’t hesitate to do…

“All of this is just a front for
cannibalism,” Sister Beth said, on the verge of seething, which was usual for
her, “and it always has been. But twelve years after the outbreak, why are we
still beating the fucking bush? It’s beat to shit already, there’s nothing left
of it, so why are we still going on with this virus garbage? And infecting the
children? The
children?
That’s the best meat of all!”

Brother Remigius shrugged. He’d heard
this a thousand times before and was glad it would finally come to a head today.

“I mean it’s one thing to infect an
old person,” Sister Beth went on, “but the children? It’s fucking unthinkable.
We’re not trying to find new vessels for the virus, we were
never
trying
to do that. It used to be a trademark, a way to show how bad-ass we were. Now
it’s a liability. No one in their right mind would show force like that
anymore. People—their meat, is a precious resource. We show up to the off-grid
markets with less and less meat. Every time we have less.
Every
time.
There’s less to go around in general, and here we are destroying good,
young
meat.”

She spoke even lower now and said,
“Last I heard, there are hardly any
slaves
left. They’ve all been eaten.
We may well be on the brink of starvation, and you know just as well as I do
that there’s no way we can lie our way into a settlement. We’re stuck out here,
outside, and the food’s running out.”

“Yes,” Brother Remigius said. “That’ll
change soon. We’ll manage it all better without him, and I think I’ve got
enough people on our side now.”

“This has been in the works for a long
time, and
he
has had plenty of time to do something about it, but he
hasn’t, so it’s our turn to take over and do it for him.”

“As long as we get rid of Saul first,”
Remigius said, “then we can do Mardu, and that we should be able to do on our
own, and the rest should be cake, or close to it.”

“I’ll take care of Saul today,” Sister
Beth said, “and with any luck, the settlement people will get rid of Mardu and
Acrisius for us, but I wouldn’t count on that too much, you know how soft the settlement
type is. Saul and I are their escape plan, after all, and I’ll see that it
fails.”

“And we’ll be in the clear,” Brother
Remigius said. “The Order will be ours.”

He wanted to add, ‘And then what? A
few more months? A little bit more food to go around?’ But he kept it to
himself. Maybe Beth really would pull a rabbit out of her hat and surprise him,
she certainly talked like she had a rabbit-endowed hat, or at least was
expecting one to show up any day now.

Sister Beth eyed Brother Remigius’s
bald head, shiny with sweat. “Mine,” she mouthed, too quietly for him to hear.
“
Mine.
”

“Let them eat meat,” Sister Beth said
in her normal volume, a wry expression on her face. “We’ll be swimming in it
again. Plenty for everyone.”

She began to imagine murdering Saul,
which, thankfully, was on the agenda for the day. She’d waited long enough. She
would drink his blood there, in the forest, while it was still warm, and she
would taste of his flesh. The thought made her lick her lips.

“I’ve gone too long without meat,” she
said. “I’ll eat damn near anyone these days.”

“I know, I know. It used to be better.
I think he really had us hoping for the Equilibrium, but it never happened.”

“Wait, you never believed in that
religion
shit, did you?”

Brother Remigius shrugged. “Oh, I
don’t know. It’s nice to have something to believe in now and again.”

Sister Beth’s expression darkened.

“But now,” Brother Remigius went on,
without looking at Sister Beth’s face and completely oblivious to the bile
rising in her belly, “all I care about is keeping the meat for us and having
more for trade. We won’t survive like this, and what he’s doing may as well be
taking the food out of our mouths.”

Sister Beth relaxed, and her eyebrows
flattened some, but her irises were still full of malicious promise. She stared
into the forest through a narrow gap between the Order’s trucks, which were
arranged in two circles, and there, where the netting was set up to keep the
zombies out, she saw a black bear cub, which in some moments would be called
away from the Order’s campground by the growing noise around the New Crozet
market.

It was pawing at the netting with a
gnarled stub of arm that ended only a few inches from its shoulder, if that
could be called pawing. Its jaws were opening and closing, and sometimes the
netting got in its mouth, but that didn’t matter. The strands keeping it out
were too strong for it to bite through.

It was blind and pathetic and though
its kind owned the world at present, they wouldn’t for long. Sister Beth was
the rising star now, and she was going to put a word in about renegotiating the
supposed pact the Order had with the zombies.

By which she meant the zombies’ days
were numbered.

After she gained control, she was
going to end all of them, and not because she wanted to help humanity, no,
nothing of the sort—she wanted to consume what people were left—but because the
fucking things were keeping her closed in, and she needed out of tight
quarters, to get out and walk and think and clear her head.

For that, for keeping her in close quarters,
she reviled them almost as much as she reviled Mardu and those who believed his
lies.

First things first, she reminded
herself. First things first.

4

Sister Beth was watching Brother Saul amble toward her. He wasn’t wearing the
dark robes of the Order, and, for that matter, neither was she. Instead, they
were both dressed in clothes that were similar to those that had been worn by
the rec-crews. Sound camo.

The materials were supposed to cover
up and dampen the noise they made when they moved. They worked some, but that
didn’t stop Sister Beth from summing them up in her mind as dog shit.

Dog turds would probably have done
most of the job at least as well. But, she remembered, said droppings, when it
came to the fresh variety, were no longer in production. Out of stock,
discontinued, and all pooped out.

Saul got closer and smiled, grinning
from ear to ear like a perfect idiot.

That’s what he is, after all, Sister
Beth thought, an idiot. He’s only here because he’s Brother Acrisius’s pet. She
eyed Brother Saul’s marked wrist with open disdain.

He’s a slave, she thought, unworthy of
being a brother, and now
I
have to work with him, to be around his
baseness. The notion was loathsome. She’d hated many people in her
life—cultivating hatred was one of her favorite pastimes—but few to the degree
she hated Brother Saul.

“Greetings Sister Beth,” Brother Saul
said cheerfully. “And greetings to you also Brother Remigius.”

Remigius hid a sneer, poorly, and got
to his feet. “Good morning, Brother Saul.”

Sister Beth got up too, but she said
nothing.

“Well, I’ve got to be on my way to
help…prepare,” Brother Remigius said. Then he tried to scrunch his face up into
a look of concern for his comrades—it was more raised eyebrows and
befuddlement—and added, “Good luck on your mission today, and may the virus be
with you.” He went on his way, toward the inner circle of trucks.

“Thank you, and with you also,”
Brother Saul said, calling after him and smiling, then, when Remigius was out
of earshot, he said to Beth, “He still says that, doesn’t he? May the virus be
with you. It’s nice to hear once in a while.” He furrowed his brow slightly.
“It seems to be going out of style.”

Sister Beth stared at the ex-slave.
How much did he know? Was he trying to screw with her? Because if he was, she’d
make sure it was the last screw of his life.

“Don’t worry about things like that,”
Sister Beth said. “Just because the lingo’s changing doesn’t mean we believe in
the virus any less.”

“Lingo is words, right? Language?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling instantly
exasperated. “Yes.”

“I like that word,” he said, then
repeating it slowly, pronounced, “Lin-go, lin-go, lingo.”

Sister Beth wanted to strangle him—not
that she could if she tried, his neck was wider than her waist. She’d have to
settle for shooting him.

Why did he always have to talk so
slowly, and enunciate every single fucking syllable? Her gaze wandered down to his
wrist, where her eyes often went and liked to linger, to soak in his
humiliation.

There was a permanent indentation on
his left wrist, much like a notch in a bedpost, Sister Beth liked to think. It
wasn’t from being shackled, though he’d worn shackles for much of his stint
with the slavers, but it was literally a piece of—not a pound or even an ounce,
it was perhaps half an ounce—flesh that had been cut out of the side of his
wrist all the way to the bone. It was the mark of the post-apocalyptic slave.

She couldn’t imagine how he could be
more beneath her, except he always managed to outdo himself in this regard.
Right now, for example, he wasn’t rubbing at the notch on the side of his wrist
or bowing down to her or groveling or any like behavior that would have suited
him. No, instead, he was standing tall and proud—as if he had anything at all
not
to be ashamed of—and his hands were at his sides and his hips were thrust
slightly forward in a posture that was so open as to verge on the obscene.

Her mind wandered over into a dark sex
dungeon, lit by the sultry glow of red lamp-shaded Coleman lanterns, where Brothers
Acrisius and Saul played their unspeakable games. The thought was more than nauseating,
it actually put a painful squeeze on her liver.

A too-bony hand went to the sore spot.
There the fingers met too-prominent ribs, and Beth was reminded that if this
was allowed to go on much longer, her bones might actually cut through her skin
and breathe in the air. Perhaps that was precisely what her skeleton wanted to
do, and maybe that was Mardu’s ultimate plan for all of them, to break like the
zombies.

She was hungry, but she refused to
subsist on tack and half-rotten vegetables. She would eat meat or starve, and
that was precisely why she’d join the cursed Order, whose upper management was
clearly no longer qualified to pursue the group’s mission. She looked Saul over
again, reminding herself that all of this would soon be solved. The answer was
hers to give, and today was the time.

It was the old pervert Acrisius who’d
bought Saul in the first place, convincing their
great and
fearless
leader that the overgrown slave would benefit the entire Order, but Sister Beth
knew that Saul had been brought on as a plaything for Acrisius, and for little else.
He could do some manual labor here and there, but his main role within the
Order was—her lips twisted in revulsion—
pleasure.

Brother Saul, in his seemingly
infinite and dumb optimism, however, was extremely happy to be here, and to
have been granted the honor of going with Sister Beth to assist in the Order’s
business of the day. If you asked him, he wouldn’t be able to say, not honestly
anyway, though he would try if you requested it, that this life was any better
or worse than his life with the slavers.

He’d been happy there, and with his
previous master, another slaver, before that, and in his pre-outbreak life as a
night construction contractor who moved in and around South Carolina, North
Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, following the work.

A night owl of hooting proportions,
he’d preferred to work the night shifts building town and county and state
roads under the moon’s watchful eye, and sleep during the day, though he could
be roused for daytime tasks and didn’t mind them, either.

In that past life, he’d mostly slept
outside during the day, finding a way onto the rooftop of the motel
du jour
or making his way into a field where he could lie undisturbed. Sometimes he’d
worn shorts, but often he’d slept naked, taking in all of the sun’s rays into
each and every fiber of his being.

Sleeping under the sun, he’d had the
best dreams, and maybe that was why he’d been so happy, and continued to be
now, because he’d spent so much time outside, wearing little to no clothes and
away from electrical distractions.

He’d had no family, having been
disowned after he dropped out of high school, and few friends other than a small
number of regulars on the night crews, as regulars were quite rare in the first
place. He’d been pavement milling the left lane of Highway 20 just outside of
Dentsville, South Carolina, when the outbreak reached him.

He was thinking, as he often did,
about which of the terms ‘pavement milling,’ ‘cold planing,’ ‘asphalt milling,’
‘carbide grading,’ or ‘profiling,’ he liked the best for describing his work.

On that day the preferred term for
Saul Byron Jeffries II was ‘cold planing.’ He wasn’t sure why, but that was it.

Then the strange people had come for
him, and his cold planing days were over for good.