Order of the Dead (57 page)

29

With all of her being, Senna tried to pull what she was seeing backward into
unreality, tried to summon some untapped power in her soul capable of such
things, and the world began to reel around her, and she thought maybe it really
could be undone, but then the world regained its composure, having forgotten
itself only momentarily, and Senna’s wish was denied.

Alan remained in the state in which
she’d found him.

Dead.

Eyes sunken.

Flesh sallow.

But in spite of the virus’s telltale
signs, some of the glow that had made him Alan was still lingering about his
body.

He was surrounded by the still
brothers and sisters of the Order, their corpses arranged in almost perfect
concentric circles, a pattern that seemed too precise to have been created by
chance. The smell of death was strong in the air.

Senna shrugged out of the Voltaire
II’s shoulder strap and the flamethrower clanged heavily to the floor, a
lifeless tool of the apocalypse.

She turned back to Alan, and her face
wilted into an expression of unfettered sorrow. She still couldn’t believe that
it was real.

How can this be? How can he be dead?
How can he be gone? This is
our
world.

The world had made them for each
other, and had shaped and reshaped the course of its events so the two of them
should meet and build a life together. She’d built something extraordinary in
New Crozet with him, and she knew that had they landed in a different
settlement, they would have built something equally remarkable there.

Senna took her lover by the shoulders
and dragged him out into the open air, then went back in for the Voltaire II and
carried that out to him. She realized, suddenly, jarringly, that she had
absolutely no idea what she was doing.

Then she looked up from the Voltaire
II and saw Alan, and it all came back like a sword being thrust into its
sheath, except she was in the sheath, and there wasn’t room around the quickly-approaching
blade to get out, and…and she was cut in two.

Trembling, she reached out a hand to
touch his blue and muddy lips.

They felt cold.

She noticed for the first time that he
was covered in blood. It was dry on the fringes, of which there were many, but
there was still some wetness to it, especially in the center of his stomach.

She put a hand to his chest. No
heartbeat. Stillness.

That strong, resilient pounding that
had always been there for as long as she’d known him, was gone.

But it had to be somewhere, didn’t it?

How did something like that just go
away?

How?

Her mind seemed to be flying away from
her, except the birds didn’t fly anymore, now did they?

It was like she was in some place that
was never supposed to exist and she’d dared it into reality by being too happy,
and now she was stuck there forever.

There was a doorway back, but it was
locked, and, worse yet, invisible from this side. This was the wrong side of
it, the wrong side of everything.

She’d been thrown out and locked out
of her only real home. Home was with this man, but he wasn’t alive anymore.

But he
has
to be!

Taking his hand as her mind kept on
circling, she felt the fingers, damp and cold, and tried to uncurl them. Resisting
at first, they opened. Then she grabbed the Voltaire II by the shoulder strap
and dragged it closer through the mud until it was beside him.

She knelt there and put his hand on the
grip.

“Why did I bring it?” she asked
herself. “What was it for if not for…this?”

She looked at his face, but it only
seemed more dead than it had moments before.

She looked from him to the Voltaire II
and back again.

Why was this happening, and why now?

Why did it have to be now?

She grabbed him by the shoulders and
shook.

This isn’t real.

This
can’t
be real.

“Wake up!” Senna screamed. “Wake up!”

He didn’t. And no matter how hard she
shook him or how many times she put his hand on the thing with which he’d
brought some order to this world, he’d never wake again, and he’d never hold
the Voltaire II again.

He’d never hold
her
again,
either.

And they’d never make love again or
watch the leaves turn as they had just this season, or see the otherworldly
pictures that the sun sometimes painted in the sky when it set, like an alien
paintbrush set to work on the canvas above them.

“Wake up! Wake up goddamn you!”

It was louder this time, but why was she
still trying?

She kept thinking: How can this be
real? It isn’t real. It isn’t. It can’t be.

Her man was alive. Her man would be
there to take care of her, and she would take care of him, and they’d do that
until one of them died of old age, because that was the deal.

That
was the goddamned plan. That was the
point of all of it.

That was the fucking deal!

Suddenly, she reached up and began
feeling around the air with her hands.

Some minutes ticked by while she
enacted the pantomime of a woman who was trying to open an invisible door to
some other world. She groped in the air looking for the frame, and there were a
few times when it looked like she’d found it, because she tried to grasp an unseen
handle and turn. She turned and turned and pulled and pulled, and nothing.

There was no door, no handle, and no
way to go back, but she must have wrenched something free, because his voice came
to her as if blown in by the breeze.

“It’s okay babe. It’s gonna be okay.”

And his smell was there, and the sound
of his pacing, and the glint of his glasses in the firelight, and the strength
of his arms when he held her, and the strange way he’d always looked at the
spot in their farm where the apple tree used to be, like he’d been looking in a
mirror.

“I promise,” he said. “It’ll be okay.
I love you. I love you forever.”

“Alan,” she whispered, stretching a
hand out toward the voice, which wasn’t where his body was, and that, that said
more than words ever could. “Alan, please.”

The footfalls grew more distant and
there was a sound like the sigh he sometimes made when he was falling asleep by
her side.

Or was it just the wind?

There were no more words, and no
matter how much she begged, they didn’t come again.

30

Her strength faltered, and she sank down into the mud, her face pressing into
the cold ground. She turned over, and when she did that, the earthly remains of
the man she loved entered her field of vision.

They’d cultivated the magic between
them and transformed their corner of New Crozet into a place of unearthly
happiness, and they’d touched the townspeople with their joy. Their love was
what others hoped for, and what gave others hope in the good inherent in women
and men and the bonds that they formed.

All of that would remain in Senna’s
memory, and in the memories of those who’d known them, and, above all else, in
Senna’s soul. Alan and the reality of her past with him could never be wiped
out, and Senna knew that she would feel the absence of that magic until the day
she died.

As that understanding migrated down
from her brain and filled the depths of her bones with its certainty, the tears
came, stinging her eyes with confirmation, and her sobs grew into howls, soul-rending
in their expression of anguish.

There were no words for some time,
just animal noises that needed no explanation. The Order’s shrine echoed with
her screams, and had there still been living birds in the world that were
perched near the campsite, they would have taken flight and left empty,
swinging branches and small blasts of autumn leaves floating down to the
ground.

They would have sought the farthest
refuge to which their wings could carry them, and some would fall dead in their
effort to escape, because the agony that Senna was voicing was something to
which no living thing should bear witness, for the memory of such despair could
never be erased, and would be relived over and over in life, and would not be
wiped out in death either, such were the scars that hearing this woman’s pain
would have left on your soul.

Senna’s throat closed up as she cried.
It was stifling, but the implied promise, of death, was oddly comforting.

She could join Alan.

She and…

No.

No.

She spit and breathed, choking on the
air but forcing herself to take it in her lungs as she looked at him, at what
was left of him, this beautiful man, the most amazing, strangest person she’d
ever met. He was a mystery, an onion she’d never gotten to the center of, not
even after nine years. And now he was…now he was gone.

“
I
can still tell you more,”
she pleaded. “I can still love you more.”

She thought desperately of something
to tell him about her that he didn’t know, as if that could somehow breathe
life into him again. She was scrambling in her mind for it, and she didn’t have
to go far. Her heart sank at the thought of what she was about to say, and the
tears she was crying began to slow, as if they were themselves unsure if they
should be there for this.

“I kept waiting for the right time to
tell you,” she explained, “but, you see, it was never the right time. At first,
I wasn’t sure, and then I was, and then I didn’t know how to tell you, and then
all of this happened…and now…”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks and
touched his stubbly face with her wet hand. “Damn it, Alan, I’m telling you
now.”

“I’m telling you now,” she said again,
and this time it was so distorted by her sobs that Alan, had he been alive,
would have been the only person able to understand, and only because he knew
her better than anyone else in the world.

She collected herself, sniffing and
rubbing at her eyes. “We’re having a…a baby. We’re going to—”

The soul-rattling sobs were on her
again, and Senna wasn’t able to restrain herself any longer.

The feelings that were now moving
through her were a torture from which she’d not recover. No one could. They
were calling forth unrepeatable memories and hopes that would now remain forever
unfulfilled. It felt like being crushed, the air squeezed out of her, her lungs
reduced to pinpoints that couldn’t be inflated again.

There was anger there, too,
compounding the grief. She was furious with him for leaving her alone, for
leaving her and their child alone. She was terrified of being a mother,
especially without him there to care for them.

If it was true, and the virus was gone
and Alan had played some kind of role in that, then perhaps that had been his
calling, his fate, as it were. Still, even if his genetic makeup had transmuted
the virus into something harmless and even if he’d saved what was left of the
miserable world, Senna wished she could have him back, even if it meant that
the virus had to take everyone else.

He wasn’t for the taking, he wasn’t
free to give himself up like that. He was supposed to be hers, he was supposed
to be her only respite from the distortion that they’d come to call life. He
had no right to leave her like this.

“Always being so fucking righteous,”
she cried. “Saving the rotten, disgusting, fucking world. What about me? What
the fuck about me? You were supposed to stay here with
me.
We were made
for each other, so you can’t leave. We were made to be together, and you can’t
undo that, it’s not…not allowed. I won’t allow it. I won’t fucking allow it. I
won’t.”

When it dawned on her that she was
pleading with her lover’s corpse, all her remaining strength left her and she
slumped down next to his body.

The cold, damp ground sank under her weight,
seeming to take her in. Her body was shaking with each breath.

“You’re my world, Alan, you’re my
world.”

She thought of how she’d never give herself
to him again and an unfillable void seemed to enter the camp and draw closer to
Senna, threatening to swallow her with its emptiness.

No one had ever touched her like he
had. No one had ever been so completely in control of her. No one had ever been
so kind.

Her tears became relentless in their
need to pour out of her. The sorrow felt boundless. The void or whatever the
hell it was drew nearer until its limits were touching her quivering skin and
lapping at her tear-streaked face.

She wanted to give herself to it then,
as she’d given herself so completely to Alan, to lose herself in nothingness
and be removed from this place of insufferable cruelty.

The emptiness reached for her more
fervently. It could smell her weakness, could see that she was flirting with
defeat, or perhaps only on the verge of encountering it, but drawing closer to
the last fall, regardless.

Then she gave in, and it was like
falling into a chasm filled only by dark. The void that was there engulfed her,
choking the last breath out of her will. The murk of sorrow filled her lungs
with blackness and she lost consciousness.

The world around her, made of wet
trees and ground and colorful leaves and old trucks containing dead cultists, and
a clearing sky, and the lifeless love of her life, looked on in silence. Not
even the insects dared make a sound.