Order of the Dead (54 page)

19

What he saw was the soul of the world, encircled by a spiraling abyss that was
trying to close, to seal itself, and, Alan understood, all of life within it.

The abyss was made of links, a coiled
chain of voids stained with contagion, spinning with the speed of tireless,
insatiable evil, with the unflagging determination of the zombies.

Alan was moving into the chain.

He was to be the final link that
closed the loop. This would be the last of the mutating progression, the addition
of his missing puzzle piece the finishing stroke of some cold, viral wisdom. He
was fitted in place, and the abyss was at last made whole.

And the blight, by now mad with hunger,
fed.

Within moments, cracks formed at
either side of Alan’s body and were filled with blue fire and grew into
creeping fissures that tore through the links, breaking them and disconnecting
them from one another. The fraying links encountered friction, and the
revolutions of the coil lost speed. The entire abyss, formed piece by piece
over millennia, was unraveling.

The spinning of the coil slowed
further, and its structure began to change. Many of the broken links fell away
and disappeared, and the ones that were left mended and rearranged themselves into
a helix. It was Alan’s helix, his DNA, that unique something that Senna found
so irresistible, a three dimensional arrangement that represented the essence
of his being.

The helix softened, and Senna’s face
appeared, the constellations of freckles on her cheeks radiating what he could
interpret only as freedom. Alan looked at her, and there, in the whites of her
eyes flecked with grey, he saw the future, each spot representing a perfect
imperfection that would come to pass after his time, and some after hers as
well.

20

And suddenly she was everywhere.

Every moment they’d spent together was
playing out at the same time, backward and forward all superimposed on one
another.

Blooming on her face was the first
full smile he’d teased out in the middle of some woods in winter.

Backward she was walking and untying
the apron cords around her back, retreating from the dinner of pumpkin and corn
stew she would soon be making if time would only move forward again.

Forward she was walking out of the
kitchen and toward the bug bite couch where Alan was sitting with a chewed-up
Grisham framed in firelight, and then he was putting it down and taking her in
his arms.

And they were in their farm with a
four-year-old Rosemary squinting under the summer sun and watching the
butterflies flit about the apple tree.

And Alan was alone staring at the spot
where the apple tree had once been, and he was seeing the world for what it
really was, understanding his place in it, zooming out to see far more of the
big picture than any man should have been able to, and then he was moving
backward, back to the porch where he’d left Jack and Sasha with Senna. And the
feeling was leaving him as he moved back in time, just as it had left him after
he’d experienced it the other day.

And he was thirteen, thinking that
twenty was light-years away, and he couldn’t imagine growing up, or falling in
love, or wanting a family. And yet there was a lighted corner even then that
had represented all those things, and it was Senna’s glow that gave those
concepts life.

And then he was giving her the
cinnamon, only that event felt different, because it hadn’t happened yet.

Somehow, it was in the future, or had
been, no, still was, but he was going through it and seeing it happen all the
same.

And she was there through it all, made
for him as perfectly as he’d been for her.

Then she was gone, and only the helix was
left, solid once more. It pulsed once, and Alan knew that the thump was the
heartbeat of hope, and that the beats were slow and far apart in time, and the
next one was not for him to feel.

Then he was both within the helix and
without it, and stillness was his world.

21

The worship truck was alive with the workings of a struggle, its chassis
rocking appreciably. Distressed shouts, muted by the truck’s walls and then the
rain, reached Senna.

The timing couldn’t have been better.
Senna reacted, grabbed Sasha and Jenny by the arms, and began to lead them to
the edge of the campsite.

The children’s faces were wild with
terror and confusion. They looked thunderstruck by fear, but also lost. Senna’s
face was bruised and battered, and her lips were turned downward slightly, making
her look like an old tree’s hollow whose folds had begun to resemble a woman’s face
over time.

The hollow would withstand the storm,
if it pleased the lightning marksman, of course. Her lips were pressed tightly
together, and her hair, made wet and heavy by the rain, was clinging to the
sides of her face. She was plenty scared, but not in the way the children were.

She felt what she needed to feel at
that moment, the feeling that had meant the difference between life and death
numerous times when she’d been a spotter. It was a determination that went
beyond the far reaches of stubbornness.

It was a will to push onward through
anything, to get to the other side, and if there was no other side that could
be reached, to go on forever. She would do that now, and the children were
coming with her.

She had to pull them more roughly than
she wanted at times so that they would follow, frozen as their bodies were by
panic. They likely would have remained there in the Order’s encampment,
unmoving, if she didn’t force them out of it.

Mutiny, she thought, as she looked for
a weakness in the fine netting that made up the camp’s perimeter, even the
cannibals aren’t immune to it,
especially
the cannibals. The heavy
downpour made it difficult to see much, so she worked by feel.

Then, after what seemed like too long
a time, she found it, a flaw in the material, one of many that every enclosure had,
no matter how well-made. She kept her thumb pressed against it and ran the
point of Acrisius’s knife through at the juncture. She cut a small piece of
flesh from the pad of her thumb, but swallowed the pain as she pulled upward
with the knife and cut a swath in the netting that was big enough to crawl
through.

Then she turned to the children and
spoke firmly.

“I’m going to go through first, and
then I’m going to reach through for each of you and you’re going to come out to
me. Do you understand?”

Sasha and Jenny nodded.

Senna pushed the wet coils of hair
back from her face. “Are you ready?”

The children nodded again, appearing
more apprehensive than they had been a moment earlier.

Senna allowed herself one last glance
at the worship truck, the site of an apparent uprising, before forcing her way
through the slit in the netting. She hadn’t cut the hole wide enough, and had
to struggle to force the middle of her body through. The netting ripped further
as it expelled her from the campsite.

When she was fully outside the Order
of the Dead’s perimeter, an odd feeling passed through her, as if she were
leaving something behind besides the obvious, a piece of her that was never
supposed to be in the camp in the first place, a part of herself that belonged
elsewhere, in safety. An image of her farm flitted into her mind and she felt
swept up in a fog of confusion, except the fog was more sandstorm than fog, its
gritty particles stabbing at her like tiny daggers, turning her around and decoupling
the tracks on which her thoughts ran.

Two sets of small hands were reaching
toward her through a matrix of rainwater, and she remembered where and who she
was, and that there was only one thing that mattered right now. She pulled
Sasha out of the camp first, and then Jenny.

After they’d wriggled through, Senna
stood up and pulled them to their feet. It took her a moment to get her bearings,
and then she was moving stealthily under the rain-assaulted and meager leaf
canopies the trees offered, leading the children back to New Crozet.

Before they’d gone more than a quarter
mile, someone called out from the darkness.

“Who are you? Where’s Acrisius? Why’d
you bring two? I don’t have room for two, and that one isn’t the age we agreed
on. I don’t—”

Senna darted into the night and
plunged the knife, to which small sticky pieces of Brother Acrisius’s genitals
were still clinging in spite of the knife’s work on the netting, into the caller’s
throat. He had strength left for one gurgle and a widening of the eyes, then
fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and went about the business of
bleeding to death while Senna returned the knife to her belt, the bits of
Acrisius privates happily freed from it, having found their resting place of
choice in the Flesher’s neck.

She watched the life spurt out of him.
It went quickly, looking more like a fit of vomiting than an outpouring of
blood, and it left behind the pale form of a man. She’d sensed him there,
watching, before he spoke, and she’d known that a confrontation was inevitable.

There hadn’t been time to warn the
children, as that could have made the man nervous, and a nervous, likely
hostile human in zombie territory was the last thing she needed.

Senna motioned for Sasha and Jenny to
come closer—if the man had accomplices the children would be safer near her—and
searched the body. Judging by the contents of his backpack, he was a very rich
man, or the agent of very rich men, who dealt in human flesh.

When she was sure what the little
baggies were filled with, she let the currency fall from her hands. She looked
at Sasha, whose eyes appeared to be searching, inquisitive, then looked at
Jenny, who was peering into the darkness and shaking with fear and the cold
that came from being out in the damp too long.

There was a knotted rope above the cannibal,
dangling from a tree, his escape route if zombies arrived. He may have eaten
human children before, but he wouldn’t get his chance today, or ever again.

You’re safe now, Senna thought, from
the zombies, and from me.

Behind his post, she could just make
out a reinforced four-wheeler, its lights off.

She closed her eyes for a moment,
expanding her awareness.

Emptiness.

Nothing.

No one.

Death.

That was good.

The man had come alone.

Suddenly Senna found herself hoping
that she was right, which was odd, because there wasn’t right and wrong in
spotting, there was just the act of it. But something about her senses seemed
to be off.

All the more reason to get out of here
quickly, she thought. She took the children by the hands again and off they all
went. There was too much risk in trying to take the Flesher’s vehicle, because
for all she knew, there were more cannibals nearby. She and the children could
move more quietly on foot.

In some moments they would pass the
spot where Alan had stopped at the pignut hickory, where, under the gaze of the
dogwoods, he’d pushed the circling demons that were trying to consume him back
under the murk and willed himself forward. All for Senna.

The Order’s camp and the forest around
it were covered by a garment sewn of water and night, an undulating arras whose
moving points touched the escapees as they moved, as if the fabric were trying
to wring itself dry, but couldn’t summon the momentum it needed to turn all the
way over. As Senna guided the children through the territory of the zombies,
the Order’s encampment and its wan lights began to blur in the distance, washed
out by the swelling rain.

22

Dawn broke. Outside New Crozet, the sun’s rays were filtering in through the
forest canopy of yellows and reds and browns, refracted where the light met
with the rainwater that generously covered the turning foliage. At the end of
its journey, the early morning sunshine was finding a home in the damp,
blood-soaked ground, imparting the brown-red hue with a bright, fresh overtone.

Senna stepped out of the forest,
guiding the children behind her. The men working on the perimeter noticed them,
stopped working and stared. Senna searched among their faces for Alan’s, but
his wasn’t there. Next she searched for Tom’s face, but didn’t find his either.

You’ll see them in a moment, she
thought. Get inside first.

She gestured for Jenny and Sasha to
approach the layers of protective netting shielding the men working on the fence.
The girls went obediently, seeming to run from Senna as if relieved to get away
from her, and Corks began the process of lifting the protective barrier to
allow the children through.

Senna looked around her and back at
the tree line, assuring herself that no zombies were near.

All was quiet.

Then she looked back toward the town
and realized that something wasn’t right. Alan should have been here, with the
others. No matter how tired he may have been from working to secure the fence all
night, he would have been there now.

Senna knew his character, and she knew
that it wouldn’t have let him deviate in this way. At the very least, Tom
should have been there in Alan’s absence. One of them should have been there.

She knew what it meant, as much as her
mind tried to rebel against the thought. Half-staggering under the weight of
the mental upheaval, she approached the town.

They’re injured, she reassured
herself, injured, but alive. I’ll take care of him, I’ll make him better.

Making no effort to hide the plaintive
expression on her face, Senna searched Corks’s eyes for any hint of
confirmation, but he didn’t meet her gaze. He was working to let the children
inside now, but he hadn’t looked at her when he first saw her enter the
clearing, either.

Corks and two other men lifted the
netting just high enough for the children to crawl under. Senna pushed Sasha
and Jenny onward, and the men pulled them inside.

She was close to Corks now, but he
still didn’t look at her, and the other men at the perimeter didn’t either.

Were they ashamed that they hadn’t tried
to rescue them? That they hadn’t tried to save the town’s children?
Where
was Alan?

The children were safely inside now,
and the townspeople at the outer gate who weren’t working began to attend to
them.

“Corks,” Senna whispered, as she
crossed under the netting. “Where’s Alan? Where’s Tom?”

For a long moment, Corks didn’t say
anything. He turned to look at her, and, struggling to hold her gaze, said, “He…
Tom’s dead.”

“How?” Senna asked.

“A zombie got through the net. It was
dark and we were hurrying and it wasn’t set up right. It was before the thunder
started calling them away. They were all over us.”

Senna looked beyond Corks toward the
town center and saw a large, human-shaped pile of jackets.

“Is that him?” she said. “Is that
Tom?”

Stone-faced, Corks nodded.

She walked quickly to the corpse and
lifted the jacket covering Tom’s head. Seeing his bone structure unchanged
offered her a measure of relief. At least he’d ended it on his own terms,
before he’d turned into one of those things. She replaced the jacket and looked
around, searching for another human-shaped pile. She saw none, and her heart
skipped a beat at the hope that Alan was alright.

But the men and women at the fence
still weren’t looking at her. Their body language was all wrong with respect to
her, she could see that plain as she could sense when the zombies were about to
break.

It was like the sound the TV made on
mute that people could hear when they were young but when they grew older no
longer could. She’d never lost that ability, not to hear the high-pitched whine
of the muted TV, but to sense the changes in the air, the precise assemblages
of sound that signaled movements and moods, the shifting melodies that foretold
the break and more to those who could hear them.

Still, she had to ask.

“And Alan,” Senna said, her voice
unsteady, “what about Alan?”

Corks looked at her and drew a sharp
breath. “Senna... He…”

“Where is he?” she asked. There was a
tremor in her voice, and it caught in her throat and began to spread downward.
“Tell me where he is.”

“He… He went after you.”

Shaking now, she looked at Corks,
uncomprehending. “Alone?”

Corks nodded.

They were both soaked to the bone.
Corks was shivering, his eyes half-shut by fatigue and his face pale. His mosquito
bites looked less inflamed, covered as they were with a sheen of cold water.
His movements were slow and clumsy, and he looked to be seconds away from
keeling over.

“Went after me? What do you mean?” She’d
expected to hear that Alan was dead, had been preparing herself for that blow
from the moment she got back and saw that no one would look at her.

“Tom tried to stop him,” Corks said,
“but he wouldn’t listen. He’d been wounded—” Corks cringed, at once regretting
what he’d just said, “—but he went into the forest to find you.”

Her knees buckled. She caught herself
and moved away from Corks, toward the town center.

“Senna,” he called after her, but she didn’t
hear him. He made a move to follow her, then stopped.

Best to leave her alone, he thought,
and it’s not like I’d know what to say. What is there to say?

Still, was it right to leave her
alone? Was she going to be alright? He wasn’t sure.

He watched her limp away, wanting to
help her, but knowing that she wouldn’t let him. He considered finding a woman
to send after her, to offer her some sort of comfort, but the more he thought
about it, the more he realized it was all for shit. He turned back to the
perimeter, disgusted with everything that had happened here, disgusted with the
world, and with himself.

It’s my fault, he thought. I let them
in. In the end, this is all my fault. Again. I’ve given to the virus,
again.

He looked around at the other
townspeople at the fence, at the people with whom he’d shared this safe haven for
so many years.

I’ve let all of them down, he thought.
Finally, after all this time, I cracked, and the children are dead. Molly and
Rad, Alan, they’re all dead, too, and it’s my fault.

He looked into the eyes of the people
around him. They all seemed to be looking at him, their eyes placing blame on
his shoulders.

“I betrayed all of you,” he whispered.
The tears were gathering behind his eyes. His son was in his mind, the zombie
prison of his body a twitching and staggering mass of rot.

Corks reached under his raincoat and
took his pistol from its holster. He brought it up slowly. The hurt had to be
stopped. The shame had to be removed. It wouldn’t go away on its own, Corks
knew. If that were possible, it would have left by now.

There were days when he didn’t feel
it, but rather than increasing in frequency, days like that were becoming less
common. The torment had metastasized over the years, the fights between father
and son replayed, distorted, and amplified by time, guilt, and the imperfections
of memory.

All those times you were hard on Remy,
Corks thought, now you can never take back, you can never say you’re sorry. Maybe
you think you were trying to teach him something, but what the fuck was it? How
to be a man? How to live in the world? What fucking world? He’s a monster now,
rotting
aboveground,
and it’s your fault. You made him. You did this to
him. You gave him a life that the virus could take. You gave to the disease, you
enabled it,
you
made your son a fixture of hell’s stony corridor, in the
darkest reaches of malignancy, a servant of the devil.
You.

Does Remy still feel? Does he remember
you? Does he know what
you
did? How bitter is his hatred? How expansive is
his fear?

Facing this internal barrage, Corks
expected there would be no more respites from the pain, not after today, not
with the weight of the prior day’s failures pressing him down and down and
lower still. The load was just too much. He passed judgment on himself,
deciding that he hadn’t borne the trial well—the facts were dead-set against
him—and, as such, he’d bear it no longer.

The gun’s barrel parted his lips and
clicked against his front teeth. His belly relaxed for what seemed the first
time in years.

They—his friends—were rushing toward
him, trying to stop him, when he pulled the trigger and put into his world a
maroon inkblot that spread and darkened on fast forward. Then no rewind or
replay, just static.