Order of the Dead (33 page)

11

Trade spun and tore through the market like a whirlwind, or a whirling dervish,
perhaps. Had you been there you would’ve been lost in the hustle and bustle
exploding around you for a full three minutes before you’d have even begun to
get your bearings. But the people of New Crozet were used to this, as were
those visiting them today, the Tackers—the off-grid markets they attended were
similar, though the goods traded there were of a markedly different sort—the
regulars, and the several newcomer outfits alike.

It was always like this, and this was
not their first rodeo. The bulls were being ridden and the onlookers were
throwing their cheers and jeers and eating their rodeo treats. It was business
as usual.

In the town center, the townspeople
who made goods had put up their stands, displaying the best, and the rest, of
their wares. The traders had done the same, and now the townspeople and traders
were mingling in the center of the market, chatting and examining the goods on
display. There was yelling and jostling and muscling for news, all ears eager
to learn of anything at all, all mouths yearning to try…anything at all, on
that count as well.

“Nell, these Poppers are delicious!”
Ronnie Fiechter said, his fingernails attacking a patch of psoriasis on his
upper arm and making his entire body and, by extension, his voice, tremble
while he chewed up the roasted June bugs.

Nell’s Poppers were being popped by
the happy dozen and half dozen, and not just by Ronnie Fiechter, either. The
sizzled bugs were practically crawling, and apparently not fast enough, down
people’s throats.

Some Poppers, please. How many? Six of
one and half a dozen of the other, if you will. Right you are, and how will you
be paying today? With moldy carbohydrate supplements? Perfect!

The commodities that had been grown or
found were exchanged this way and that, like they were dance partners hell-bent
on trying all the different leads there were that day. A twirl here, a dip
there, a quick salsa step everywhere.

There was some silver and gold
changing hands too, but relatively little of it. It was a nice-to-have but it
only had the value people assigned to it, and with the passing years fewer and
fewer traders would accept it. It was better than some trinkets but worse than
others, such that its value had become entirely subjective.

Some would trade an old relic or an
appliance or board game for gold, because they thought the metal might make a
fine decorative piece. A few coins glued together and you had a coaster to put
hot mugs of coffee substitute on. It was something for the nostalgia-afflicted,
and little more than that. Others were more than happy to unload their shiny
pirate money.

The green stuff, however—cash, was
unmarketable. Nobody wanted it. You couldn’t eat it, it made a pathetic
scratchpad, and it was ugly as heck so it was worthless as a decorative piece,
too. Tom Preston, when he was younger had collected two-dollar bills, and after
the outbreak he’d found ten large of the same, which made twenty large, total.

Apparently someone else had been way
more into the two-piece notes than he’d been. He’d carried the fat stacks around
for some time, and then put them to sleep in his sock drawer for a year or two,
where they’d slumbered dreamlessly, until he’d put them to better use in his
fire on a particularly cold winter night.

Not close enough to popcorn, Alan
thought as he watched the June bugs move crunching into the people with whom he
shared a town, and into the visiting traders.

No Poppers for me, he thought. No
thank you. No thank you very much.

The sun was getting in his eyes so he
slipped a scuffed-up pair of Wayfarers onto his face. He was okay without his real
glasses in daylight, but as soon as dusk hit or if there was rain, he needed
them to keep the angles of things from being eroded. By morning, he’d forgotten
all the Krokodil dreams of the night prior, and that was nice, because who
needed that shit in their head on a market day? This was one of the four annual
markets, which made it one of the four happiest days of the year, and why let a
nightmare or two ruin that?

12

The market was having its usual effect, reinvigorating the town’s slow and
dwindling pulse. You could just about get lost in the newfound energy and
forget that the world was no longer normal, and never would be again.

The Klefekers’ peanut stand looked
like it had sprung up out of burlap sacks overflowing with peanuts, which in
turn looked like they had grown up out of a mattress of discarded peanut
shells. One side of the stand was covered with packages of shelled and
unshelled peanuts alike, all roasted in their own oil. On the other side of the
stand were three rows of peanut pies, the Klefekers’ prize hogs, so to speak.

Senna’s table was brimming with
zucchini, peppers, acorn squash, peach preserves, fig jelly, a treasure trove
mix of herbs, and the odds and ends of her fruit and vegetable selection
du
jour:
potatoes, grapes, onions, tomatoes, sweet corn, snap beans, and some
too small cukes. The peach preserves and the fig jelly were the most sought
after and most expensive items, followed by rosemary, oregano—of all things,
and then the potatoes and grapes.

Nell’s table was covered in exactly
what you’d expect: all manner of things that could creep and crawl, which were
at the moment, and thankfully so, lacking both said creeping and crawling
aspects on account of being dead and dried or fried up or all three, though not
necessarily in that order. Her famous Poppers, which could barely make it on
top of her stand fast enough before being snatched up and paid for by both the
visitors and the locals, had a history of being eaten by Native Americans,
who’d roasted the June bugs over coals and had eaten them like the popcorn
goodie that they were.

Keeping the Poppers company were jars
filled with ants that had been toasted with salt in cast-iron pans and bottled
up for safekeeping. Containers of crickets and grasshoppers were festooned
about the table like decorations, each bearing a slightly different variation
on the same theme, they were bugs and insects alright, but some were roasted,
others were fried in peanut oil or sunflower oil, others dried with apples,
berries, or onions and garlic.

The sky really was the limit when it
came to all the different flavor combinations that Nell could come up with, but
she mostly stuck with what worked, and that was the Poppers, of course, the
dried cricket powder, which was used as a protein supplement in soups and stews
and what-have-you, and her protein slurry, which, she claimed, had everything
the human body needed to survive and thrive. It was sweetened with cane sugar
and dried fruit, and as to what was in it besides that, well, just about every
unsavory crawly thing that can be dreamed up and then mashed to a squishy pulp.

If you convinced yourself that it was
medicine, and most people who bought it did just that, it was still a bit hard
to fathom swallowing. But, like Mary Poppins once said: ‘A spoonful of sugar…’

And the spoonful of sugar helped, and
medicine it really was, because it kept survivors going and put the red back in
the cheeks of many who’d seemed to be on their last legs on a diet of runny
grits and half-rotten vegetables before the farming operation in New Crozet had
really kicked off.

Chase Ham’s table had jars of rice,
packets of chewing tobacco, and two standalone, potted tobacco plants. Not so
much on the wacky tobacky, although the dirt weed did grow well in Virginia and
some of the townspeople—most notably the older folk like Amanda Fortelberry and
Henry Rushing—grew it and partook in it on occasion, and in Henry’s case, the
occasions were frequent.

Apparently the hippie lettuce really
did wonders for rheumatism and the general old person malaise. And when you’re
living in the human equivalent of a wildlife sanctuary and you’ve lived far too
long already,
improbably
too long, people ain’t exactly judging you for
cramming a cigweed in your piehole and giving it the ol’ toke.

Puff away, old-timer, the zombies sure
as shit ain’t enjoying the cheeba. From what the survivors of the outbreak
could tell, zombies weren’t big on the chronic, and too bad for them, because
there was more than enough of the stuff to go around now, and no drug policing
agency to speak of, and zombies did sort of have the rest of forever to chill...so,
it was their loss, really.

13

There were other New Crozet tables, but the standouts were Nell’s, Senna’s,
Chase’s, and the Klefekers’. Other tables were focused on corn, oats, cotton,
flax, sugar, and hemp. Sugar was next in line after the town’s top offerings,
followed by corn and oats.

Among the visiting traders a standout
was a group that had brought, of all things, Twinkies, which Alan and
Larry—they had this much in common—had made a beeline for and found that the
aged treats really were still edible, if the absence of sharp stomach pains
right after scarfing the sponge-cake, trans-fat bombs was any indication.

The Tackers were another popular
group, and, unlike the other traders’ vehicles, the Tack Truck was designed
like a food truck, so that the Tackers could do their business from inside it,
selling their tack through an open panel in the side of the truck. The novelty
of that and their green status in the market drew people’s interest, though the
idea of hardtack was hard-pressed to elicit more than a lukewarm response,
until this particular one was sampled, that is, and the delightfully special
nature of the biscuits they’d brought was revealed.

As usual at these things, food and
clothing ruled the day, with a touch of mild amusements thrown in here and
there. One group of traders had brought balloons, and another had found a stash
of one thousand piece or more jigsaw puzzles. One was of a log cabin birdhouse,
and Senna quickly secured that one for herself, trading a small jar of peaches
for it and four other puzzles.

The puzzles were missing a good number
of pieces, and the traders had been honest about that—and they’d better be
because they were regulars—but she thought the children might enjoy playing
with them nonetheless. The puzzles New Crozet still had were missing too many
pieces these days to be worthwhile.

Jack found and traded half an onion
for two balloons, one for Sasha and one for himself, and then set off to find
her in the rabble.

Another group of traders was trying to
unload a few Scotch-taped Christmas tree ornaments, and someone else had a
collection of cuff links, but no one in New Crozet had any interest in those.

Rosemary was going about the market
trying out the goods and honing her negotiating skills. Her mother trusted her
with more than a bit of what they grew, and Rosemary did splurge on occasion,
sometimes spending almost half her money in a single transaction—when it came
to the snails, for example—but when she did get aggressive with her spending,
it was always on food and always after a good measure of haggling, a tactic
she’d discovered a knack for.

She was sharp as a tack and relentless
when it came to bargaining, and she almost always got her way or came close.
The traders, she’d discovered, were very eager to unload as much as they could
before setting off for the next settlement or back home to their own.

After stuffing his face with one too
many Twinkies under Senna’s not-even-a-bit reproachful and definitely tender
eye—Senna loved watching him eat, and only wished he would do it more, as he
needed the energy—Alan began to make his way over to the Tack Truck. He’d been
helping Senna with her stand while shoveling food into his mouth, and now that
Betty Jane Oswalt had come back from one of her potty trips to resume her place
by Senna’s side, he could wander about some more. The Tackers were new, and he
wanted to have a word with them. He pushed his old Wayfarers, which were
beginning to slip off his face and let a tad too much light into his eyes, back
up his nose.

Senna watched him go until Betty Jane
tugged at her shirtsleeve, asking for some help to fill a trader’s order of
peach preserves. This guy, apparently, wanted near all of it. When Senna next
looked up, her man was gone.

14

“Come and get your tack
,
” the ugly Tacker cried.

“Come and get it. Premium hardtack
here. You’ve never tasted anything like it.”

His head was poking out of a serving
window in the side of the truck. The other Tacker was behind him, arranging
their inventory by the looks of it.

The shutter of the serving window kept
trying to grind its way shut on top of the ugly Tacker’s head, and it did so
now, causing him to push it back up again and curse not at all under his
breath.

The shutter clanged to the top of the
window and lingered there for a moment before it began to edge downward again.
It was persistent in its workings, you had to give it that.

He was hard-selling the stuff, but
there was no need for that. Or maybe he wasn’t hard-selling it at all, Alan
thought, but that was just his way. And anyway, it was hardtack, so what the
hell? He seemed to be having a good time pushing the stuff, which, if the
pockmarked biscuit could be made to replace his skin, would’ve made him a heck
of a lot better looking.

Alan was always wary of new traders,
and it was rare to get newcomers of any sort these days, but he was glad that
the Tackers had braved the forest to come here, and was looking forward to
talking to them later and learning about their trip, about how they’d come and
the lay of the land. Was it improving or was it exactly the same? Probably the
latter, he knew.

Still, the other traders, the regulars,
seemed optimistic, but they always did. It was part of their grift, or if you
were the generous type, their
sale,
and it took a hardened optimist—if
there was such a thing anymore—to be a trader and travel among the settlements
in the first place, that or a loon. Alan shrugged. It wasn’t like him to think
this
much about things.

He got in the back of the line for the
biscuits. He’d had hardtack a number of times—they’d eaten it plenty on the
crews, where it was referred to as z-biscuits, short for zombie-biscuits, and a
play, at least in some minds, on sea biscuit, which was what sailors had once
called the stuff.

Seeing it again made Alan feel a
slight tug of nostalgia. He wanted to remind himself of just how plain and hard
and barely edible the crackers were.

At least the Tackers said it was
fairly new, so the chances of it being infested were low, or at least lower.

Back in Civil War times, the soldiers
who were lucky enough to get some ten-to-twenty year tack—a very good vintage
indeed, especially when made so by food shortages—broke up the crackers and
dunked the bits into their coffee cups, forcing all the weevils to the surface
of the weak and usually ersatz coffee they were drinking, allowing the men to
scoop out said weevils and proceed to eat the softened tack and drink their now
carb-fortified coffee. Alan shook his head. Now we’d eat the weevils, he
thought, and call ourselves lucky.

Jack walked over to Alan.

“What’s tack?” Jack asked, and the
half-paralyzed Tacker, who’d called himself Albert, heard him.

“It’s a cracker,” Albert said,
practically spitting the words in his gruff manner and startling Jack. “It’s
flat and hard—very hard. Made of flour and salt, and water, but that gets
cooked out.” He reached down out of the truck and offered Jack a small sample,
which Jack took.

“Now, before you pop that in your
mouth, be warned, it’s real hard, and you need to soften it up with spit or
water.”

Jack nodded, placed the piece of
cracker gingerly in his mouth and began to suck at it. It was like a rock, but
had a faint flavor that was good, but which he couldn’t place. Whatever it was,
it didn’t taste like just flour and salt.

Albert was handing out samples to the
other townspeople, most of whom had eaten tack before.

“What’s your name, young man?” Albert
asked.

Jack told him.

Albert nodded. “A good name for a boy,
and tack goes by a good many good names, too. It used to be called a lot of
things, like sea bread and sea biscuit and ship biscuit and cabin bread by
sailors who ate it on ships as rations…but here I’ve more often heard it called
worm castle, sheet iron, and molar breaker.”

Z-biscuit was one of the epithets the
Tacker didn’t know. He offered Jack the most conspiratorial smile he could
manage with his half-iced face. “What do you think?”

“It tastes good,” Jack said. “And I
like worm castle. Why that?”

Albert grinned, showing his gum line
where the teeth were more green and black rot than tooth. “Because the worms
think it makes a good home. Protection from the elements.”

The townspeople were exchanging all
manner of goods with Albert and his assistant, Ronnie—who was the first living
black man Alan had seen since the rec-crews—while Albert continued to talk with
Jack. Alan was standing and listening, somewhat interested, and feeling a bit
protective of the boy. The traders who came were sometimes a bit too loose with
their tongues, and they could put ideas into children’s heads that didn’t
belong there. There were things that happened outside the fence that he didn’t
want Jack to know about.

“People in the north,” Albert said,
“back when there were more people up there, would eat tack with melted butter
and soup or dipped in moose stew. Too bad there’s no more butter or moose now,
at least not the kind you’d wanna eat. Wouldn’t wanna go squeezing any butter
out of some zombie cow’s teats, I’ll tell you that much.”

There it is, Alan thought. Exactly the
wrong track to be going down.

He frowned, and gave Albert a very
clear shake of the head that said, ‘no more’. Did the children really need to
hear that? Albert nodded, and shrugged apologetically.

“But let’s not worry about that now,
Jack,” he said. “Just make sure you mix the tack with water or spit and be
careful not to break your molars. If you have sugar or fruit you can mix it all
together in some water and have a pudding later.”

Jack moved the piece of worm castle to
one cheek and smiled a hamster smile. He’d already decided that worm castle was
what he’d call the stuff. That was the best name by far.

“Here you go,” Albert said, offering
Jack some more of the broken bits of tack he’d brought for sampling. “The small
bits don’t keep too well, so you might as well take ’em. Make sure to share
with your friends, and warn them not to break their molars either!”

Alan nodded. The Tacker had quickly
changed his tune, and that was good.

Jack thanked the man and ran off,
presumably to find his friends and show them his treasure.