Order of the Dead (51 page)

9

Rad’s muttering brought Senna out of this darkness. He was feverish, and
judging by what was coming out of his mouth, he was hallucinating as well.

“’Oppers,” he kept saying. “’Oppers,
’oppers.”

And, once in a while, in between dry
heaves and ‘oppers,’ he’d say, “I’ll ’ake it. I’ll ’ake it.”

It could’ve been ‘I’ll take it,’ or
‘I’ll make it,’ or ‘I’ll rake it,’ or something else. He’d taken it, but he
wasn’t going to make it, and he wasn’t going to rake it either, if he meant
helping to rake in the produce of the insect traps with his mother, Nell. She’d
be doing all the raking from now on, assuming the perimeter could be sealed up
again before any zombies got in, which wasn’t exactly a sure thing.

Senna bent down over him and he stared
at her, his eyes wide and bloodshot. The pain in him wasn’t just alive, but
running wild like a red devil.

“Where’s Rosemary?” she asked as
softly as she could manage.

“’Oppers, ’oppers.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“’Oppers,” he said, and it was more a
hiccup than a word this time. He was straining to choke something out, and,
finally, he managed. “Sor-sor-ee. ’enna…orr-ee.”

A spurt of blood shot from the stump
of his thigh, billowing the hastily-tied shopping bag like a flag caught in a
sudden, stiff breeze. The flag descended in its surrender, the final blurt
having been made, brief and pointless.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

He stared at her, and now he had the
eyes of a man who didn’t know what he was looking at. Whatever he’d understood
just moments ago had gone, pushed out of him by pain. He didn’t know her
anymore, he didn’t know himself, he knew only suffering. His head sagged and he
looked down at the floor, his eyes locking onto it, not seeing the pitter-patter
of his own blood and warm saliva, which the reaching colony of black mold would
use to farther expand.

Staring at the floor, he was really looking
past it, into a chasm that was vast, inescapable, and full of bitter anguish. There
was an escape, a door that he kept trying to reach in his moments of clarity,
but the handle was just out of his grasp. It was close, so close, but the room
of agony expanded each time he got nearer, keeping him away from the threshold.

Senna straightened, Rad’s expressions having
reached out and pushed her away with their vivisected flesh. The image of his face
was one she would never forget,
could
never forget, even if she spent
the rest of her life trying. Of course that was assuming she got out of there,
and that was taking a lot on faith.

It wasn’t the face of a man who was in
hell, but the face of one who
yearned
to be in hell, because that was a
place of tender kindnesses compared to where he was now.

A moan rose up from somewhere deep in his
body and wafted up to Senna like a rheumatic mist, making her bones ache with
grief and fury and the want to hurt those who’d done this, to make them suffer,
to pull their bones through their skin while they lived, like the break did to
the zombies.

10

From the moment she’d entered the room, she’d had her eye on an object in the
corner. Now she strode to it and picked it up.

It was a large axe whose blade gave
her a wink that only a recently-sharpened axe could, though it was forced to
look on her through a sheen of dried blood. It hadn’t seen much use, relative
to the other axes that Senna had known, and she registered the distinct lack of
give between the shaft and head when she carried it back to Rad’s table.

She couldn’t help but think about how handsome
Rad had been only hours earlier, a sculpture of a man, really, before the Order
had made a feast out of him—literally,
out
of him. They’d carved out
pieces of his internal organs, taken strips of his muscles, his limbs, and just
precisely enough that he’d remain alive, for some time, at least.

Senna looked at him, seeing in the
fate the monsters of the Order had doled out upon him the vileness that lived
in men’s hearts.

Perhaps the virus truly was the savior,
as Mardu preached. But no, there was no redemption for the people of this world,
through death or otherwise. If this was what they did to one another, there couldn’t
be.

She turned to the girls, told them to
look away, and, once they had, turned back to Rad.

“Close your eyes, Rad,” she said,
trying to form what was left of her voice into a soothing whisper. Instead, she
had to settle for a murmur made shrill by sadness. “You deserved so much better
than this.”

She swung the axe easily, having
perfected the movement by years of chopping timber for her fires. The blade
whipped through the air in a practiced arc and fell on Rad’s neck, severing his
spine with a single thwunk.

The movements, the ghastly sounds he’d
been making, they all, mercifully, stopped. When she was sure the last
incoherent murmur had lifted from his mouth, Senna pulled the axe from his neck.
Blood spurted up at the rising blade.

Goodbye, Rad, she thought, and an
image of him materialized out of the shadows of her mind.

It was the day she’d first met him.
His sun-drenched face had been one of the few among the New Crozet townspeople
that was cautiously hopeful, just short of welcoming. He’d been a kid then, young
enough still to have hope.

She looked for something in the room to
use to cover his body. Between Molly and Rad’s tables were burlap sacks, stained
red and patchy with dirt and mold. There was also the sheet that was covering
Molly, and that was all. It didn’t really matter, did it, whether she covered
him or not? What mattered was getting out of there before she let more children
be added to the ranks of hell.

She turned and saw Jenny trying to
calm a sobbing Sasha. The younger girl couldn’t be comforted, and they both
looked like they were on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion and emotional
strain.

Senna let the axe fall from her grasp,
crossed the room, and scooped up the children’s hands in her own. She took a
deep breath and imagined that the stinking air filling her lungs was pushing
downward on the feelings that were trying to express themselves inside her.

This was war, and she knew that she
had to be coldly rational until Jenny and Sasha were safe. Still, she could
feel the bitterness and sorrow stirring in the pit of her belly, pushing her
closer to an unhinged state that would make surviving the night unlikely, and
rescuing anyone impossible. She had to stay away from that at all costs. She
had to keep all of this from getting to her, for now.

The children, she thought, I have to
save them.

She opened the truck’s door. Behind
her, the blood that had been spurting from Rad’s neck had reduced to a trickle.
Beneath the table on which he’d been butchered, a coppery-smelling pool of red was
spreading outward, covering more of the floor and giving the black mold yet
more moisture to play with.

11

The storm raged on, its bullets of rain putting dents in the mud and ripping parched
leaves from their branches.

A flash of lightning, long and ragged,
parted the sky, lighting up dark grey clouds that seemed to still be full to
their brims, no matter how quickly they forged their pellets of water and
blasted away at the Earth.

The wind blustered, as if asking for
more. It was.

Just as Senna was going into the truck
where she would let Rad free of his misery, Alan was facing a man who was a
full head taller than he, and one-and-a-half times as broad. Without an ounce
of fat on him, the giant appeared to be made entirely of muscle. He was
shirtless, and the muscle bellies Alan was looking at now seemed too full to
belong to those of a mortal man.

“I’m Brother Saul,” the man said, “of
the Order of the Dead. Who are you and why have you come here?”

Apparently, introductions were in order.

“My name,” Alan said calmly, his voice
deep but at a diminutive volume, almost meek, compared to Brother Saul’s, “is
Alan. I’m here to kill you, free the prisoners, and lead them back to town.” He
spoke with more confidence than he felt, which was saying little.

In fact, what he’d said had sounded
absurd to his own ears. But he’d said it all the same, and not only had he said
it, but he was really going to try to do it, too.

Saul, or rather,
Brother
Saul,
as he’d called himself, seemed to Alan a mountain that was not only
insurmountable, but one that was about to bury him within an avalanche of pain.
Even the rain seemed to spread outward away from Brother Saul, as if it feared
him. No—and this was an odd thought that struck Alan at that moment—not like it
feared Brother Saul, but like it respected him. He was like a giant out of some
fairy tale, except that he was real, and Alan was pretty sure that he wouldn’t
prove to be a friendly giant at all.

A sardonic smile spread across Saul’s
face, animating its angular components and giving him an unnervingly robotic
appearance. “Even if you do kill me,” Brother Saul said, “you’ll have the rest
of the Order to deal with. You won’t succeed. As for the prisoners you hope to
rescue, you’re too late. One adult has been completely consumed, and another
mostly so. I’m not sure about the children, but I believe they’ve all been…converted
by now. If not, they will be soon. That leaves one adult, the woman named…Sarah…no,
something else…Senna.” That was the right one, Senna. “The one who refused to
join us, so she was given to Brother Acrisius and me, for…punishment.” He
shrugged, the movement of his shoulders like the sighing of twin boulders. “I
don’t know what will happen to her.”

Saul’s words registered for only a
moment. The Order of the Dead? They existed? They’d attacked New Crozet? Jack
hadn’t been lost to the zombies by accident, but had been given to them on
purpose, by virus-worshipping cannibals?

It was insane, but it didn’t matter if
this really was the Order or a group breathing life into the legend. What
mattered was that they had Senna and the children, and he was going to get them
back.

“Where is she?” Alan demanded as he
drew his silencer-equipped pistol, his face taking on an expression of contempt
laced with dread.

“She is here…
somewhere.
But
that is not our concern right now. I will fight you and I will gladly die to
protect my brothers and sisters, for I exist to serve them.”

This was bad, Alan’s mind snapped at
him, very, very bad. Crazy or not, this Saul, this
Brother
Saul, seemed
more than willing to die right here right now in defense of whatever evil it
was they did here, and Alan wasn’t sure he’d be able to grant his wish. What
Brother Saul couldn’t know, and what he wasn’t prepared for, was Alan’s own
readiness to die if it meant saving, or even having a
chance
at saving,
the woman he loved.

Just when the space between them
seemed to have more water in it than air, Brother Saul snarled and lunged
toward Alan. His quickness surprised Alan, and had you been watching from
inside one of the Order’s trucks—and no one was—you would’ve found Brother
Saul’s ability to propel his mass with such speed off-putting.

It had been so fast and unexpected
that it had looked like he’d added a dimension to the movement that no one else
was capable of, like a two-dimensional figure inflating itself and jumping up
from the page that had held it trapped moments prior.

It was all Alan could do to raise his
gun when Brother Saul’s fist connected with his chin.

And that was like being struck by a
freight train.

Stars popped and crackled in his
vision. It was as if he’d caught the shiny things in the middle of a dance.
They were moving with such eagerness, and, more than that, confidence, that
they must have been doing this for a very long time.

Why hadn’t he seen them there before?
Did they always dance invisibly?

No, there was no sense in that. They
did their partying in their own world, and it was only in moments that were
concussive or full of sheer pain that people could catch a glimpse of that
other world where the tiny stars waltzed and spun and threw each other with a
grace that could only be described as…

12

Alan staggered a step and fell backward into the mud, but he didn’t lose his
grip on the gun. He’d been trained, and had trained himself, too well for that.

“Where did you get in?” Saul asked calmly.
“Where?”

Brother Saul’s face was inches from
Alan’s. The big man’s breath was coating Alan’s face, and Alan couldn’t help
but notice Saul’s perfectly straight, ivory white teeth. The man seemed as if
he’d been engineered, put together in a lab rather than born.

Saul threw a punch. His boulder of a
fist hurtled through the air, smashing the falling raindrops in its path.

It connected, shattering the right
side of Alan’s jaw. Two teeth were launched from his mouth like tiny
cannonballs.

As the teeth arced through the air,
glinting softly as they turned, something in Alan’s neck popped, something that
would’ve much preferred to have remained un-popped, and he was sent sprawling.
Saul jumped on top of him, and, sitting on his chest, grabbed him by the
shoulders, and began to shake.

“Where? Where?”

Blood was running from Alan’s mouth
and down his chin, the rain pitter-pattering through the trail of red as if it
were an intersection of roads. The pain was remarkable.

“Where?”

From Alan’s perspective, Saul didn’t
look angry or insane, just determined, like a man who was trying to complete a
task in the most logical and efficient manner.

In fact, Saul was already regretting
having hit the intruder so hard. Any harder and it might have been too much.
The man could’ve been knocked unconscious or killed and then it would be more
difficult to find out where he’d cut the netting to get in. The entire Order
was in danger now. Time was of the essence.

He got an idea, took Alan by the
shoulders, and flipped him over like a child might a ragdoll, then put the
raggedy face, half of which was now hanging slack where it had been collapsed
by Saul’s fist, into the mud. The eggshell fragments of Alan’s jaw cut at the
flesh holding them as he began to suffocate.

Mud seeped into Alan’s nostrils and
mouth, blocking off his airways. It pushed in deeper, looking to fill all the
crevices it could. The lungs and the tiny folds that were there, those were
what it wanted for most. For the mud, to fill those would be ecstasy.

His dislodged teeth were being drilled
into the ground by rain, and though he couldn’t see them and had only a vague
awareness that they were gone, it was as if he could still feel them outside of
himself, sinking into the earth.

This is it, Alan’s body said to him.
No more. You tried and good for you, but we won’t be going any further with
this ill-hatched plan of yours.

No.
No.
This is not it.

Alan kicked and bucked like a
mechanical bull with too many joints, but it was no use. Saul was too strong.

The mud traveled deeper. It was in
Alan’s throat now, pushing farther, still needing more.

No.

Alan reached behind him, and just when
he did, he was pulled up out of the mud.

“Where?” Brother Saul said, his calm
entirely gone, his teeth bared. “Where did you enter?”

Spitting up mud and sucking in air,
Alan said, “Up your ass.”

Saul shook his head. This wasn’t
progress.

He was about to plunge Alan’s head
into the mud again, was pushing the intruder’s neck downward, when he felt
something that he couldn’t quite compute at first. Whatever it was, it was
sharp, and it was
in
him, inside his body.

What? He tried to breathe and found
that it didn’t feel right, like there was something in the way.

Then he looked down and saw there was
a fist pressed up against his chest. It was Alan’s fist, and when it turned, as
it now did, Saul understood there was a blade in him.

Flecks of mud, launched from Alan’s
mouth a moment earlier, were standing at attention on Brother Saul’s perfect
chompers. Chomp, chomp. The chomping would be gritty.

Saul ran his tongue over his teeth and
felt the dirt there and tasted its earthy nature spiced by moss and turning
grass and bug leavings. It was good. His insides had been parted by a knife,
but the flavor of the ground was fine, a complexly-textured treat in which only
the living could indulge. He would miss things like that, he knew, if he was to
meet his end here, tonight. But it had all been borrowed time. Always borrowed
never owned, but much—so much—gained all the same.