Order of the Dead (24 page)

63

When Ginny stumbled on her greatest, and last story, she was snacking on
Annie’s organic ‘Friends’ bunny grahams, which came in a mixture of honey,
chocolate chip, and chocolate, and which she ordered online because you’d be
hard-pressed to find anything organic in the dear old town of
Balleston.

That was how she worked best: in the
dark, a mug of hot cocoa by her wireless—thank heaven for dongles—keyboard’s
side, and Milo the spotted tabby—who sometimes went by Miy-Miy when the mood so
struck his mistress—looking disdainfully down at her from his wall perch, which
Ginny had ordered online and installed herself, thank you very much for that
too.

It eats people.

That was the phrase that caught
Ginny’s eye.

It eats people.

It.

Eats.

People.

Grabby, she thought, but amateurish.
Still, she gave it a read. It was definitely a hatchet job, done by a hacker
who was low on the whole persuasive writing skill thing, but it was the
information in the article that Ginny cared about, not how it was written or by
whom.

Apparently, it really did eat people.
The
it
was Desomorphine, a cheap drug whose street name was Krokodil,
because…a quick flip through the images and a translation of the transliterated
word said it all, too much, in fact.

She clicked on an innocuous-looking
hyperlink. She knew better of course. No hyperlinks were innocent, and least of
all in the Deep Web chat rooms where she was now frolicking.

A clutched handful of bunny grahams
froze in midair on its way to her mouth. A few lucky bunnies tumbled out of her
hand and fell with all their chocolaty goodness to the floor.

She put the rest—the ones she was
still holding—back in the bag and wiped her palm clean of graham crumbs against
the leg of her sweatpants. She swallowed, a feat that was usually easier for
her to manage, and kept going.

The images filled her screen when she
was reciting the mantra: ‘Balls to Balleston, soon to go balls-up thanks to the
Haven,’ which she recited quite regularly, and choked on the ‘thanks.’

It came out as a, “tha-ha” and
transitioned not-at-all seamlessly into a coughing fit. When she was done
coughing, she went to the bathroom and launched a neat plume of masticated
bunnies into her toilet, where their bits could hop to their little chewed-up
hearts’ content. She flushed, swirling the bunny parts into sewer oblivion, and
went back to her post.

Even when the innermost reaches of her
gut were clenching with the force of an amateur arm wrestler’s fist, what she’d
seen remained pinned to that darn tack board in her mind, not one of her
run-of-the mill story tack boards either, but
that
one, the one that
once there was something pinned to it, wouldn’t be pushed out of the way or
even curtained. When pieces of mental scrap paper were stuck to it, it wouldn’t
go away until it was served, and all she could do was submit.

This story would consume her life and
she would pursue it with a passion she hadn’t tapped before, and that was
fitting, because this story was to be her last. It was always good to go out
with a bang, or, in this case, a global pandemic.

It was unfortunate she’d lost her meal
of bunny grahams, and her appetite with it. She usually ate them when she was
working on a story, it was part of her process, and the only difference was
whether she dipped the grahams in her cocoa or not. Sometimes she dipped and
sometimes she didn’t; it depended on the story she was writing.

In this case, she wouldn’t, but thanks
very much anyway. She hardly ate at all while working on this one, her appetite
becoming more and more difficult for her to locate. It just wasn’t where she
left it anymore, like a key ring that sprouted legs and moved about the house
at will. You know the kind.

Her curiosity needing to be quenched,
she reloaded her Tor browser—which she’d closed out of in disgust before
spewing up her snacks—and began to peel away the onion’s layers, until she
reached its core, which she found was more than a tad rotten. When you combined
all the sources on the Deep Web, you could usually begin to see some of the
truth, pieces of objective reality, as if the combination of the sources
created a chemical solvent that was finally strong enough to cut through all
the obfuscatory lies and false halves of half-truths.

The
It eats people
page was on
her screen again, and now that she had no troublesome anything in her stomach,
she could go on. The images only got worse, and the truth was cruder than the
tagline suggested.

It wasn’t a neat thing that just ate
people and went on its merry way, it chewed people up from deep in them, working
away at their veins and bones, keeping them alive in a protracted state of
suffering in which they were apparently helpless in their need to give
themselves up for further chomping.

Krokodil was the transliterated
Russian word for crocodile. Maybe, she thought, it’s called that because it
eats you like a crocodile. But then, no. She shook her head. A crocodile
wouldn’t leave damage that was so revolting. The injuries seemed cruel, and yet
they were self-inflicted. Was that poetic? Ginny wondered. Or ironic? Or just
another example of humanity’s self-destructive nature at work? It was a
tragically poetic irony, perhaps, or something.

But, as she discovered, that wasn’t
why it was called that. It was called crocodile because that’s what it made
your skin look like, scaly like that of a crocodile, while it rotted you from
the inside out.

Krokodil.

Chomp, chomp.

Charming, Ginny thought, as she
scanned through the photos of people with parts of themselves eaten away and
other parts in the process of being eaten some more.

Six-and-a-half hours later, her hot
cocoa had cooled, and some of the organic, fair trade, magical powder had
settled to the bottom of the mug.

“Oh my, Miy-Miy,” she said, looking at
Milo, “my oh my.”

The cat yawned, unimpressed. He wasn’t
named after the sorghum, but after the Nestle tonic food that was basically
evaporated chocolate and malt powder, which would become an epically prized—read,
killed-for—possession after the outbreak.

And what he was now perusing in his
cat memory banks was an image of Ginny eating the Milo powder straight from its
green container, spoonful by dry, heaping spoonful. No wonder she couldn’t find
a mate, thought the tabby. No wonder.

“Old news to you, is that right?”
Ginny shrugged. “What else is new? But, gosh darn it,
oh my.
”

She took a sip of tepid cocoa and
frowned. The dark mixture was the only way she was taking in any calories at
that point, and it offered few. She tried to immerse more nutrition in it, but couldn’t
drink it with more than a dollop of Horizon Organic Milk and a smattering of
organic brown sugar.

At this point in the night, the cocoa
needed some heating if it was to stand any chance of feeding the ill-fated
journalist. She blinked at the screen and tilted her head, setting it at an
angle that was almost jaunty, but it was just something she did to give her
eyes a rest.

Tilting her head from side to side,
she could alternate the strain on her eyes and work longer. It seemed to do the
trick, anyway.

“Probably knew the cocoa was cold,
too?”

Ginny wiped her lips with the back of
her hand, smearing some light cocoa trails past her lips and onto her left
cheek. She smiled up at Milo, beaming love straight at him, while he was still
thinking of his powdered tonic food namesake and the way it had smelled on his
mistress’s breath.

While his cat mind scratched aimlessly
about the filing cabinets in his brain, he continued to watch her, as she dove
into the murk where the crocodiles swam, and uncovered more than she bargained
for.

64

Krokodil was a mixture of Codeine tablets, paint thinner, red phosphorous scraped
from matches—for the Krok devotees of a more hipster-like persuasion—gasoline,
butane, household cleaners, iodine, hydrochloric acid—always a hit at
parties—and whatever other chemicals happened to be within arm’s reach. You
mixed all that shit together and then injected it into your yearning veins.

Basically, it was super cheap horse, a
heroin-type ride that wouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg, except that was
exactly what it did. Arm, leg, jaw bone, face, foot, spine. Yeah, you’d be paid
up for a while with that, but if you wanted to keep spinning on that
merry-go-round, you’d have to pony up more.

Born in Russia, where heroin ain’t so
easy to find, the green scaled drug’s tenth birthday had come and gone by the
time it caught Ginny’s attention, but chances were extremely good that had you
tried it when it first hit the streets, you wouldn’t have made it to Krok’s
second
birthday bash. And that was because you’d have been dead a good twice over by
then, and great foresight in starting on the whole decaying thing in advance,
hats off to you.

Krok was about three times more potent
than heroin, and three times cheaper, but the high only lasted a few hours, so
about half as long as horse, depending on your tolerance. You may or may not be
a mathematician, but that was like four-and-a-half times more bang for the
buck.

Now that’s one hell of a multi-day
binge. Fuck sleep. Who needs that shit?

So what if you become like those
zombies on TV because all you do when you’re not in the quickly-burning-off
high is chase the next one? So what if the rotting gums and infected bones of
your jaw and face and the open sores that are everywhere and the rotten and
pus-spewing nubs where your ears, nose and lips used to be, so what if that
gets you looked at askance in the street? What matters is you made your own
fucking choices. It’s your life, man. Now fuckin’ skin-pop that Krok.

Krokodil was really good at starting
up some scrambled, green eggs-looking gangrene, especially around the injection
site where it clumps, and those thrill-seeking clumps…they spread. Green and
scaly skin plus the smell of rotting flesh plus nerve and brain damage plus the
best high of your quickly-shortening life plus no more toenails to clip on
account of no more toes equals pure, unadulterated
awesome.

Ginny stared at another picture, the
Krokodil victim in this one missing half a foot, one whole arm, and a nice
portion of his lower face. Next to that, the expanding quicksand-like pools of
ulcers on his skin didn’t look half-bad.

“Lovely,” she said, cringing.

The news articles that she was able to
pull up—from reputable sources, no less—confirmed the chat room rants, at least
as far as the nature of the drug. Krokodil really did eat people from the
inside out.

It’s an injectable opioid—also
available in pill form, lucky you—that eats your flesh and turns your skin
black and green, and let’s not forget,
scaly,
and makes you a walking,
rotting brainless thing that will eventually end up on Google images making
someone who doesn’t use Krok and therefore is ignorant in only the way the Krokodil-uninitiated
can be, blow chunks all over themselves. Fucking cute little newbs.

Oh, and happily, the gravy gargling
fun isn’t limited to those who see Krok abuse pictures. You, as a Krok abuser,
get to do it too, so shoot it and gut dump and negative chug away. You’ll be
putting your best
food
forward in the tonsil toss, after all, assuming
of course that you’re still managing to eat on the Krok and that your tonsils
weren’t removed when you were a kid,
and
that the Krok hasn’t gnawed up
said tonsils yet—key word,
yet,
’cause it will. Oh yeah.

In exchange, you get a strong,
short-lived high, and on top of that, you don’t have to dress up as a zombie
for Halloween anymore. You can just go as, well, you, dolled up with gangrene,
necrosis, and tissue damage galore.

At first, Russia and Ukraine had been
the hotspots for getting high with the Krok, but apparently our scaly friend
had taken a liking to travel, and who could blame him? Who doesn’t want to see
more of the world?

Ginny’s digging revealed that the Krok
was making special cameo appearances in Illinois, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

Shit, it’s already here, she thought.

Not only that, but Krok had a way of
biting people with short drug histories. Fresh meat. Good for the Krok, its PR
people must have been the creamiest of creams.

After completing her introduction to
Krokodil, she read thread upon thread—each more spidery and disturbing than the
last—of posts by two hackers who went by the names Fyodor-D3PO and
Nikolay-Zaitsev, and that was when she got at the heart of what the Deep Web folks
were claiming. She digested all the data after cutting it up into bits small
enough for her to chew, and said figurative kind of eating was pretty much the
only kind she was doing in those days, because the more she read, the further
her appetite for food got from her.

It was like the idea of eating food
ever again had gotten into a sports car, hit the track, and made just the right
sequence of wild and reckless turns to break out of its loop, and was now
speeding off into the sunset, where it was going to drive right off the edge of
the world. And her thoughts were beginning to trail off, possibly looking to
find the sports car and try the whole early retirement thing too.

People, she thought. Will there be any
left? Is it really as bad as Fyodor-D3PO and Nikolay-Zaitsev claim? Of course,
as Ginny knew well, they could have been the same person, or hardly reliable
whether they were two people or one, so there was that to keep in mind.

If they were to be believed, Russia
and Ukraine were riddled with a Krokodilic gangrene. Hundreds of thousands of
users had become a million, and a million had become two, and then four, and
somewhere between four million three hundred thousand and four million four
hundred thousand, critical mass—or rather, in this case,
evolutionary
mass—had been reached.