Order of the Dead (36 page)

21

Senna woke sucking in air, or rather, struggling to. Her mouth was stuffed with
gauze and taped shut, the tape wound around her head.

It was like trying to breathe through
layers of cheesecloth jammed in your mouth. Rolling over onto her side, she
screamed into the mouthful of stuffing. When she next tried to draw a breath,
loose tatters of gauze began to creep down her throat.

A brief moment of panic followed, until
she rediscovered her nostrils, which weren’t obstructed, and she took in a few
breaths, pulling in the smell of the dank place in which she was now trapped
deep into her lungs. Blood was pattering onto her forehead from her scalp and
running lethargic trails over her eyelids, pausing at her eyelashes as if to
think, and then, if the drops in question were adventurous, exploring her
eyeballs, and if they were more the shy sort, waiting for her to blink and
taking up their trail run again at her bottom eyelid and moving on to her
cheeks.

Formless wisps of brain activity were
struggling to find purchase in her suddenly transparent grey matter.

Why was it so hard to think? Why was she
so tired? Why was her chest so heavy and stiff?

Straining to move, she found that her
hands were tied behind her back. Her ankles were tied together. Cable ties.
Fucking cable ties.

The stiffness in her ribs was so
foreign that she couldn’t tell if it was really painful or just uncomfortable.
Everything was a shade of numb.

She understood that she was inside the
Tack Truck, that much was obvious, even though the memory of following someone—a
child—to it and then something happening to her outside of it, were so
indistinct that they seemed like events from a forgotten dream. Her brain was
flying high, or low under the radar, whichever, but when she could narrow her
focus she
could
think, if only in small doses. Trying to concentrate,
she looked around the room.

The large design of the truck was now
made clear in purpose. She was in a small room without windows. There was a door,
and only the bleakest beams of light were filtering in around its edges.

Focus, she tried to yell at her cloud
brain, focus!

The grey cloud of what was supposed to
be her grey matter only watched her from its lofty position, frowning
dismissively, jeering her in her plight.

Focus!

The cloud made a frowny face of mist
at her.

From somewhere nearby came the sound
of shallow breathing, then a groan. It was a child’s groan, or at least that
was how it sounded to Senna, but her eyes were too unfocused to tell for sure. Dominating
her field of vision was what you’d see if you looked through a windshield in
the pouring rain with your wipers off: flowing water with only bleak colors
behind it.

It was like there was something on her
eyes, an infuriating, blinding film, except that she
could
see that
fucking frowning cloud of her mind, but that wasn’t in the room with her, or
was it? Was it in the room? Was she in the clouds?

Concentrate!

After what seemed like hours—it was
only minutes—and just when she was close to choking on her frustration, the
cloud, fucking thing, finally listened.

Its body distilled until it was a
single glob of water hanging in the air. What air? The glob began to vaporize
again, to become essence, and Senna had to apply all of her will to keep the
thing from steaming into indistinct and useless vapor that could do nothing but
make stupid, childish faces at her. She kept the liquid floating in place,
pressed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, and reopened them.

The blinders were lifted, if only for
the moment, and she saw others there with her: Molly, Rad, Jack, Rosemary,
Sasha, and Jenny, all unconscious, their breathing faint, but rhythmic. The
children were in a heap of jumbled limbs and crisscrossed torsos, the adults side
by side. Senna was on the floor opposite them, like an afterthought. She was an
unwanted player in the Tackers’ game, a troublemaking intruder.

She heard footsteps approaching,
reverberating through the floor, so she stopped moving, closed her eyes, and
rested her head on the floor. The door was unlocked and opened.

Outside noises, from the market,
floated into the room. Senna could hear townspeople bartering. Someone was
arguing about the price of cauliflower, someone else was haggling over Nell’s
Poppers, and there was a sliver of conversation about a settlement in the
Midwest. Then the door was shut and locked again, and the outside world was cut
off, perhaps for good.

22

“I know you’re awake,” Acrisius said as he glared at her. “We didn’t have
enough of the good stuff left to put you to bed. No use in pretending, anyway.”

Senna remained motionless.

“Stubborn. I like that. Okay, let’s
try the hard way.”

He kicked her, planting the steel toe
of his boot squarely in the soft spot under her ribs.

“Open your eyes and look at me when I
talk to you, you fucking cunt.”

Senna’s breath was forced out of her
and she did open her eyes. Standing over her was one of the Tackers, the one
whose face was covered in boils, and half of it was frozen in a glare while the
other half sagged expressionlessly.

He was bald except for two patches of
yellowing hair that sprouted from the sides of his head above his ears, and his
appearance might have been comical had he not looked so evil. The sadism that
lived in his eyes was so stark it might as well have been tattooed on his
eyeballs.

She’d known men like that on the
rec-crews. They’d rarely lasted long because they got caught up in trying to
inflict pain on the zombies, which was an impossible task, and they forgot to
mind their own safety. They were a liability, a danger not only to themselves,
but to those who worked with them.

“That’s better,” he said. His voice
was flat but twitched up and down uncontrollably when the tentacles of his
paralyzed half brushed against it. The words were a bit of a challenge to work
out at first, but Senna’s hearing adjusted quickly.

“Now listen real closely to what I’m
about to say to you, because it just might save your life, for a while, anyway.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking if you play nicely you might live
long enough to get a chance at freeing those kids and taking them back home
safe and sound and so on and so forth. Well, let me make something perfectly
clear to you. You won’t, so you can struggle all you want, and you can plan all
you want, but nothing’s going to come of it. Not a single fucking thing in the
world.”

He shrugged. “That, is the rule. But,
as all rules, there’s one exception. If you keep on trucking in that bitch way
of yours sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, making noise and having your
friends out there get suspicious of anything too soon, the minute we think
we’re in any real danger, all of the little ones in here with you will die.
I’ll cut their throats one by one while you watch until you see the last of
them bleed out.

“If you behave, you can prolong all of
your lives a little while longer. And who knows how long? That, one never
knows. So whatever big move you’re planning, or planning to plan, don’t even
think about it. Unless, of course, you like to watch children die.” He spread
open the fingers of his good hand. “It’s your call.”

Then he kicked her again, in the head this
time and hard enough to jog her memory, literally, and how she’d gotten there flashed
back into her mind: she’d sold out her stand and was looking for Rosemary and
behind the stands next to the Tack Truck. She’d wanted to buy the girl
something to eat, if there was anything Rosemary still hadn’t tried.

There she must have gotten a bit too
close to seeing something she was not supposed to, because the last thing she
now remembered before losing consciousness was a mosquito alighting on the side
of her neck and stabbing, hard. The bloodsucker
du jour
had been a syringe
loaded with vitamin S, the great Sultan Sufentanil, which backwashed the
strongest sedative the Order had straight into her bloodstream. Mothballs of
dark had bloomed in her veins, smothering all the dry fluttering of
wakefulness.

And now that she was awake again, it
really felt like she’d been mothballed and in storage for weeks, maybe even
months. What had they given her?

The very act of being awake seemed
foreign. The light, of which there was barely any at all in the room, pricked
at her eyes as if she was using them for the first time in a long while.

She remembered something before the
Sultan bit her, just moments before: it was the sound of a muffled sneeze,
which she’d thought had come from behind the Tack Truck, and when she’d gone
back there…

That was where the replay ended. Maybe
more of the movie would fill itself in later. She’d just have to wait and see.

Well, she’d found Rosemary alright,
and not just her. Since Senna had been knocked out, more children had been snatched
up, and Molly and Rad, too.

“And here’s something to make sure you
behave a little while longer,” the Tacker added. The plunger of the syringe was
squeezed once, then the needle went into the small of Senna’s back, just barely
missing a bundle of nerves that, had it been hit, really would’ve taken her out
of the running for good, and the plunger leapt again.

“And, for good measure…” He kicked her
again, and the room begin to spin out of the one lane road and into the trees.

“Fucking meddling cunt,” he said, and
his mind went straight to the dope and how they needed more of it.

They had a little of the good stuff
left, but not enough to keep wasting on a snooping settlement whore like this.
The bit he’d held back he was saving for a celebration, when he and Saul could
be alone with a pound of salty flesh.

For further good measure, he kicked
Senna in the small of her back.

“That’s to give that shit a kick in
the ass…get you into dreamland faster. Nose around there all you want.”

Acrisius was remembering just how much
he hated women, and it was a good feeling, a
damned
good one. There was
plenty of hatred to go around these days, for all manner of things and the scum
that passed for people, but he had a special place in his dark heart for these
disgusting creatures. Revolting was what women were, and if it were up to him,
there wouldn’t be a single woman in the Order and the ones who were in it now
would be expelled.

They weren’t even fit to be
eaten
by men. But if the virus wanted them, so be it.

He turned his back and left, wiping
the sweat from his brow with the snarl of his paralyzed hand and trying to
twitch onto his face an expression that was welcoming and calm.

Senna tried to see the children
through the careening veil of her swelling right eye. They would be sold into
slavery, abused, and eventually eaten. That was the nature of the world outside
the perimeter.

New Crozet had always been a snow
globe in a field of meteors, and a rock had finally struck the fragile dome.
Now, all of the contents of the town, the ones that mattered, anyway, the ones
with the possibilities of futures, would be sucked into the vacuum outside. And
that was the last thought that she had time to think before the Sultan, that
supreme ruler of the post-apocalyptic opiate kingdom, pulled her under again,
back into storage, to limber her up for his sadistic games.

The distinct sound of Rosemary’s wheezing
was filling the truck. The child was wandering through drugged, lightless
fields where the air was rare and life was really fucking unfair.

Every so often a patch of dark would
light up, as if a glow were tearing through it, and she’d be able to get a
breath in all the way. But trapped where she was, in a boa constrictor’s
squeezing coils, the glimmers were few and far between.

23

The fireball that had lit up the ground of New Crozet before the place had a
name and continued to do so now that there was, was setting. The clouds were
wispy streaks across the sky, plumes of smoke emitted by the sun’s orange glow.
Alan stared upward, awestruck, his jaw slackened by the sight. He’d never seen anything
like this.

It was a sky ablaze. He had to find
Senna, to show her, or at least to make sure she’d seen it. He had to look at
it with her, while there was still time.

He pushed through the dense throng of townspeople
in the market, trying to remember where he had seen Senna last. The people didn’t
notice him, focused as they were on the wares set out in the traders’ stands.

As he made his way down the street, he
noticed how deeply absorbed everyone was in trade and in exchanging stories
with the traders. The line for the Tack Truck, the newcomer that was the
surprise star of this market, showed no signs of getting shorter.

He looked around, but didn’t see a
single other person, not a single soul, looking up at the sky. He would point
out the burning sky to them too, if they would allow themselves to be
distracted from feasting and storytelling, after he found Senna.

Swimming upstream through the crowd,
the wonder seeped out of him as if the townspeople he’d lived with for all
these years had sucked it from him as he passed. When he reached the other side
of the town center, the excitement had gone from his face. He’d been sure that
Senna would be somewhere in the center of the market, and he was sure he hadn’t
missed her just now. Where else could she be?

Alan stepped backward from the crowd, detaching
himself from it, and looked at the New Crozet market.

Senna wasn’t there.

He glanced up at the sky, as if to
reassure himself of what he’d seen there moments before, and when he lowered
his gaze, his eyes met those of one of the traders in the Tack Truck. They were
eyes that glinted darkly from a nest of scraggly folds where pustules grew like
mushrooms.

Alan’s expression wilted, the cadence
of his breathing faltered, and he almost lost his footing as it all registered
at the same time, in the space between two quickening heartbeats. He’d seen
looks like the one on the trader’s face before, on men like that, and Senna wasn’t
the only person suddenly gone from the crowd.

Children were missing, and there’d
been a telltale rhythm to the Tackers’ intermittent disappearances from the
truck’s storefront.

All the arrow tips dipped in poison
connected in Alan’s mind.

And…

The flavor.

That connected too.

There were only two people in New
Crozet who’d tasted human flesh, and he wasn’t one of them, but he did remember
how Allie had smelled when she burned, and he’d almost been able to taste the
oiliness of the smoke.

That was the flavor in the tack.

It was a trap sprung, realized too
late.

But wait, maybe there was still time.

The truck was still here, surrounded
by New Crozet, by survivors who wouldn’t abide by this. It would not leave.

It.

Would.

Not.

All of this flashed in Alan’s mind in
a split second, and then there was nothing, just—

Impulse.