Order of the Dead (46 page)

29

“No!” Rosemary cried.

Senna was being dragged from the cell
by her hair. Her shackled hands gripped the wrists of her assailant, easing the
strain on her scalp.

The cords of muscle in Brother Saul’s forearms
were taut, but he was holding back. He could have tossed Senna across the room
and through the doorway, and he wanted to, because it would’ve been more
efficient, but he didn’t because he knew that Brother Acrisius wouldn’t like
that.

He paused momentarily and thought on the
pain he was inflicting on the woman prisoner. Acrisius wouldn’t like it if she was
hurt, but wasn’t Acrisius’s intent also to hurt her?

He wants to hurt her first, Saul
thought. He nodded. Yes, that must be it.

If I hurt her now and put marks on
her, he thought, then Brother Acrisius will be unhappy with me, and maybe Mardu
will be too, with both of us, and I can’t let that happen.

The giant of a man had to keep
reminding himself to be gentle. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted to hurt
her, or that he didn’t either, that was what they were going to do soon anyway,
but he was supposed to get her to the other room first, and he often was too
rough with people when he didn’t mean to be. He had to be firm, but not leave
bruises on her, so that meant being even more soft-handed than he was with
Brother Acrisius on the
extremely
rare occasions when Acrisius let him
be the dominant one.

“It’s okay,” Senna mouthed. “It’s
going to be okay.”

“No!” Rosemary screamed again, and when
she drew in breath her lungs rattled. Tears stood up in the corners of her eyes
and fell. She screamed again and again and again until there was no more scream
left, and then she was trying to breathe, struggling for air like a fish out of
water.

It felt like the last time, like the
final attack. Horror drained the blood from her face, and the dread stirring in
her heart told her that this was the last time she would see Senna. She wanted
to say goodbye or that she loved her, or
something,
but she couldn’t
manage anything through her pall of tears and the seizing up of her chest and
those damned breathing devices in it.

Her face crumpled as she fought for
air and the feeling that she’d lost Senna for good grew stronger, as if it was
stealing her air for its own good. She couldn’t catch her breath, and now it
was running away from her and it was so fast and she tried to get it back in
but that only made it go farther and her body was sinking into the choking and
there just wasn’t enough air and the little there was wouldn’t connect in the
right place and the panic was coming and then it was there tugging at her with
its anxious tentacles, pulling her into the depths.

Panic. That was the worst thing you
could do when your body needed air that it couldn’t get right then. And panic was
exactly what Rosemary did.

The need became too great, but there
was still no way to get the air in. This, she realized, was what it felt like
to drown, fully aware as you sank, struggling, into a suffocating darkness.

But how long could it last? No more
than a minute, maybe two. It was agony, but a few moments could be traded for
peace. That thought offered her no comfort, and the nearing reality of her
death made her more scared than she’d ever been in her life.

The water was filling her lungs.

No air.

She wanted to stay strong for Senna,
but she didn’t know how to get the air back.

Maybe now was the giving up time.

The surface was far away, and the
water was cold, numbing. She kicked her legs to try to propel her body upward,
but it was no use.

Then the currents snapped taut and
pulled her lower. It was darker there, and things hurt less, and the absence of
breath didn’t seem quite as bad as it had moments before. She was seizing now,
and the dark water into which she was sinking had become blackness.

“Rosemary,” Senna yelled, “calm down.
I’m going to come back for you. Calm down! Breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The convulsing girl heard nothing.

Was it really going to be okay? Was it
ever going to be okay again? Senna’s mind did a loop de loop—just how much had
they drugged her, or had someone hit her?—and she began to think that maybe it
was
already
okay. How could a world that felt so soft and fuzzy be bad,
even if she was being dragged through it?

The vinyl floor tried to pull a layer
of skin from her face—and the slick spots were making a ripping sound at her skin
that was worse than nails on a chalkboard, probably because it was vinyl on
face—but it didn’t feel bad at all, none of it did, it was like being brushed
by a soft pillow.

Even the stiffness in her chest loosened
its grip. Maybe the man was taking her away to somewhere good, with more
pillows—maybe even pillows for sitting—and maybe they’d sit and sip chicory
coffee and talk and listen to the sounds of the insects in the forest and think
on them and eat...meat.

30

Acrisius’s room smelled of sweat and fecal matter, their odors set to mingling
by the urging of the acts that had been done there, over, and over, and over
again. The overhead fluorescents were out, in a state of mildew-infested disrepair,
and the only light in the room was coming from two Coleman lanterns set in neighboring
corners of the room.

Senna’s wrists were chained to one
wall. Brother Acrisius and Brother Saul were watching her. She was facing them
on her knees, and if she tried she could sit, stand, and move about somewhat
freely until the chains became taut, keeping her a safe distance from her
captors. Safe for them.

Acrisius could’ve tied her down to
something, or chained her by her ankles as well, but he’d found with time and
experience that he preferred a moving target. It was more satisfying when the
thing they were hurting could recoil, and run just a little, and try, if in
vain, to get away. Yes, it was a lot more fun that way.

Now they were waiting for her to sober
up just a tiny bit more, because what was the point if she was too doped up to
feel what they were doing?

Acrisius was running his tongue over
his bottom lip as he waited, back and forth, back and forth. He only felt half
of it, and that went for the tongue and the lip, but he was having a really
good fucking time of watching the woman’s awareness of her situation grow.

He knew the woman was a royal cunt,
and he was sure she’d be lashing out at them, and as much as he was looking
forward to that, it didn’t disappoint him to see the dread rising in her eyes
when she saw what he was holding. In his hands was a cat o’ nine tails, each of
whose thongs he was stroking in turn.

The cat was twice the standard size,
and had been made, slowly and painstakingly, by none other than Acrisius
himself. It was designed to prolong the agony, and to keep Acrisius far away at
all times from his victim’s limited movements. Brother Saul was empty-handed,
but considering what he was working with that would be more than enough.

They’d left her clothes on, too. Had
she been a man, that would’ve been different, but they wanted nothing to do
with her private parts if they could help it. Saul could go either way if
instructed, but he was devoted heart and soul to Brother Acrisius, who strongly
preferred the company of men, and wouldn’t have been able to stomach watching
Saul do anything sexual with Senna, even if it were done to hurt her.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t
others who would’ve been more than happy to violate her, and who could do so to
their heart’s delight without Acrisius giving a second thought to it, but
Brother Mardu had made it very clear, crystal in fact, that they weren’t to
touch her, besides the beating, of course, and no one else was to play with her
either, at least not yet.

“Brother Mardu asked us to try and persuade
you,” Brother Acrisius said while prancing the cat around in the air as if it were
the head of a trotting pony, “to help you change your mind. We’re good at that
sort of thing, and we like it, too. Probably, we’re good
because
we like
it. You have to love something to be really good at it, don’t you, Brother
Saul?”

Saul nodded enthusiastically. “Yes,
Brother Acrisius. Yes.”

“And practice helps, too,” Acrisius
added.

Saul nodded again. He was like a
humongous Muppet right now, doing what his master bid him do, and his master
had his hand elbow-deep in his ass. He need only twitch and Brother Saul would
obey.

“Do you know what this is?” Brother
Acrisius asked, raising the cat up and twirling it, spinning its dangling cords
in a carousel of knots that changed direction with the flicks of his wrist.

She made no reply.

“Well? Come on, give it a go and
guess.”

She still didn’t answer. There was no
point in goading them, and that was all her words could do.

“It’s a pussy. A pussy o’ nine tails.
Why nine, you ask? Because that’s how unraveled ropes work. Unraveled once into
three, and then each strand unraveled again, making three by three. And that
makes nine.”

The better to beat you with, my dear,
Senna thought.

Acrisius went on pontificating for
some moments longer, but he was wearing his own patience thin. He still had to take
a child out of the campground, and he had to do it soon, come to think of it, his
contact was probably waiting in the woods already. After this was over and the
damned woman was a bloody and unconscious pulp, he’d go to the holding cell.
His pouch was empty, and the meat—
adult
meat—he’d been forced to eat
earlier had made him vomit bloody, half-chewed, spongy chunks.

He eyed Saul, nodded to his gigantic
slave, and the woman’s punishment began.

31

As the knotted thongs of the cat cracked through the air, alternating with the
open-handed blows of Saul, which were just as bad as the lashing, if not worse
at times, Senna keyed in on a thought that usually kept a strict distance from
her, but which now, combined with Mardu’s sermon, had taken on a new form.

Who was the real Order of the Dead?
New Crozet? Or the brothers and sisters of Mardu’s Order? Who were the real
worshippers of death? Wasn’t New Crozet just a refuge? A conservatory for
humans, the last endangered species?

“It’s humanity that’s dead,” Senna
murmured. “We’re all dead, like Rosemary said.” Her voice became a whisper.
“Fucked. It’s all fucked.”

“What’s that?” someone said, the voice
swinging from the ceiling on lengths of barbed wire. “Got something on your
mind?”

She began to wonder if it was really
so bad to eat people. Was it really any worse than eating a cow or a sheep or a
chicken, back when that was possible? What about insects and bugs and
earthworms? Wasn’t that the same thing as eating a child?

It helped that she was clothed, but
that didn’t stop the cat from tearing bits of her skin out, setting them to
crawl away and leave bloody trails after them. Saul’s hands were like iron
battering rams, a good counterpoint to the cat’s claws.

The nice thing was that the longer
they did it, the less it all seemed to matter. The pain didn’t weaken, but it
did seem less important. Because she was the cannibal. She ate people.

That was the fucking point, wasn’t it?
The citizens of New Crozet were the cannibals, eating the notion, the very
idea, of a civilized humanity into extinction. They were living off of it,
eating
themselves.

Hell, they were worshipping something
that was already dead. When they’d built New Crozet they’d put down the
foundation for a mausoleum. Brother Mardu and his kind, they were the ones who
were adapting.
They
were the true survivors, and they were right.

New Crozet was the Order of the Dead,
and it always had been, and, for being a part of that, as well as for a laundry
list of other fuck-ups in her life, she deserved to be beaten to death by these
men.

And those were the thoughts that
bubbled up to the surface of her mind with each of her body’s painful cries.

Above all of it, the highest floating
bubble that wouldn’t pop but only grew larger, straining the limits of its
filmy walls, was the thought that she was finally getting what had been coming
to her. If you asked her, she deserved this.

It had been a long time coming, but
here it was, the punishment that was due her, and if it was going to be
proportionate to what she’d done, it was going to get a hell of a lot worse.

32

She’d failed to get them out, and they’d all died, and now it was happening
again. They were second graders. No, they’d
been
second graders. Now
they were…they were gone, and Senna was sure some of what was left of them was still
moving around the world, the virus controlling their small, decaying bodies.

She’d been their teacher, and she was
supposed to have kept them safe from harm.

Of course everyone had been someone
else before the outbreak. Every single person who’d survived could, if they dug
into the soil of their guilt, unearth lists of all the people they’d failed to
save.

Then the revisionist history exercise
would begin: I could’ve done this, and this, and this, and then these other
things, and all those people would still be alive.

I should’ve been there.

I should’ve seen it coming.

I should’ve reacted more quickly.

Here’s how it would’ve gone
differently if I had.

These are the people who would be in
New Crozet with me now, or in a different settlement, if only I’d gotten my act
together sooner, if only I’d been better.

And then you’d see their faces, and visions
of the past would circle in your mind with accented pauses at the moments when you
should’ve done something different, and projected from these moments were the ‘would’ve
beens’ and ‘should’ve beens’ that didn’t follow, because you hadn’t done what
you were supposed to when you had the chance. All the survivors did it to
themselves in varying degrees, and Senna knew that, she’d even tried to help
others past it, but she herself couldn’t get out from under it.

Alan made it easier. He made it a lot
better, actually, because he could just sit and listen to her and accept both
her present and her past.

He knew what she’d done, or, more
precisely, what she’d failed to do, and he still loved her in spite of it. He
didn’t’ think there was anything she really could’ve done, but he listened, and
he held her when the tears came, and he always told her it would be okay, even
though it never could be.

Well Alan wasn’t there now, and she
was alone with the punishment she thought she deserved, except that she
wished—oh God how she wished for it—that others didn’t have to suffer, that it
could be just her.

Why did more children have to die? Why
did it have to happen again, and done by other men and not the virus?

They were children for God’s sake.
Children.

She had no illusions about Jack being
the last one, either. These people, these
monsters
of the Order, they
were out of their minds with viciousness, and if they could sacrifice one child
to the virus, they would do the same to others, and they would try to make her
watch.

There had been twenty-two in all in
Ms. Phillips’s class, nine boys and thirteen girls, and they’d been working on
recognizing the different geometric shapes when the crazy people began showing
up.

Her classroom had been on the ground
floor, and the second closest to the parking lot.

If not for that, there wouldn’t have
been a Senna for Alan to meet on the rec-crews, and he never would’ve run off
to New Crozet, and his life would’ve ended on his old rec-crew when they were
overrun by a pocket of zombies in Corolla, North Carolina, on a beach that
they’d taken for secluded, where they secured a cluster of vacation homes in
which to get some much needed R&R.

A
pparently, zombies had taken a liking to
the beachfront there and had gone dormant in coves and underwater in the shade
of the disused rental properties. And then the virus did what evil was prone to
do: it rose out of the sea and came in from the cold.

Alan would’ve been resting in a house
that he’d taken all to his own—there were plenty to choose from and few takers
in sight—sprawled on a hammock on the second story balcony, watching the waves
do their lappity-lap at the sand and remembering the last time he’d done this,
and with whom, when a well-barnacled group of them came out of the lappity-lap
waves.

He would’ve seen them early, of
course, trained and sensitized as he was to their movements, but he wouldn’t have
seen the other groups that were coming in from the other waters of the Outer
Banks.

The house was surrounded in a short
time.

All of the houses were.

He would’ve run down the stairs with
his pistol when he heard the first scream go off like a rocket into the night,
and in the foyer he would’ve met them, and they were fast, and his knee was
jammed from carrying the Voltaire II too much, and the hobbling run into
fighting position didn’t get him where he needed to be.

He’d have taken four down before the
rest got him, and then once his rec-crew buddies were done in too, he’d go in
the water with the rest of them. And lie in wait for new prey, of which there
would be some, but not a whole lot more, as the fish tank of humanity had scant
swimmers left.

But, because Senna had survived as
long as she did, Alan’s saltwater zombie days had never come to pass.