Order of the Dead (4 page)

8

Alan turned away from the flames, and, after closing the window in the fence,
caught up with Rosemary and Senna, who were already through the middle gate and
waiting for him to catch up. Senna still had her arm around Rosemary’s shoulders,
and the girl was trembling. When Alan was beside them, the middle gate closed and
the next one opened, allowing them all to slip into New Crozet proper, where
they belonged.

Rosemary was walking warily, taking
small, hesitant steps, as if she suspected the ground might give way under her
feet. There was a wheeze here and there, but her breathing was under control.

“What was that?” she asked, with only
a slight tremor in her voice. “What animal?”

“A deer,” Senna said.

“A deer,” Rosemary repeated
thoughtfully. She was trying to drown the strain of what she’d just done in
rational thought, understand and have everything explained so it wasn’t so frightening
anymore, and perhaps less ugly.

She’d been too scared to look very
closely at the zombie, or rather, to really see what was there, and that was for
the best, at least for now.

She asked, “Did you ever eat a deer, a
healthy one I mean, before the virus?” The children had heard of meat-eating
from the adults, and knew it was something from the past.

Senna nodded. “Yes.”

Rosemary considered this. “Did you eat
all of it, all the parts?”

Senna thought she understood the
question, because children born during or after the apocalypse, who’d never
eaten meat, didn’t have much of a concept of what parts of an animal were
eaten. “Only some of the meat,” Senna said, then shrugged, thought about telling
Rosemary that pretty much all animal parts had been eaten or put to some
commercial use, but said nothing.

“Was it good?” Rosemary asked.

Alan was walking behind them, curious
about what Senna was going to say because he thought she was a lot better with
children; he always seemed to say the wrong thing.

Raising his right shoulder as he
listened, he tried without success to work the crick out of his upper back.

The Voltaire II flamethrower he was
carrying was a light model as far as throwers went, but he felt the strain in between
his shoulder blades all the same, and the muscle pain always came with a sharp,
poking feeling at the base of his spine. Now, as always, it was the inside of
his right shoulder blade that was giving him the most trouble, reminding him of
the toll the Voltaire II had taken on his body in the three years he’d carried
it after the outbreak.

Ignore the ache was the name of the
game, and he played it a lot. He certainly didn’t feel young anymore, not in
any sense of the word.

Senna frowned and shook her head. “Not
at all. Bitter and tough. Not a bit of fat on it, barely worth the effort of
hunting and eating. I don’t miss it.”

Pursing her lips, she glanced back at
Alan, and he nodded, understanding that answering with a lie was the right
thing to do, and he knew he would’ve screwed that up. She had an empathy that he
couldn’t manage, and which he wasn’t sure he understood in the first place.

That’s the problem, Alan thought, I’m
too honest. But shouldn’t they know? Maybe not yet. Digestible bits, here and
there, one at a time. There had been more than enough to chew on tonight.

Alan remembered meat well, and dreamt
of it often. Apple smoked bacon shone through as the one he missed the most,
but he’d take anything these days: burnt and stringy chicken, an old egg, blue
mold-infested cheese, anything with some animal protein.

Some survivors lost their minds over it,
killing and eating the zombie animals and knowing full well that the tainted
meat would infect them with the virus. It hadn’t happened in New Crozet for
almost five years, but before then, one to two meat-eaters a year had been the
name of the game.

We’re due for another one, Alan thought
grimly.
Past
due.

The Voltaire II was radiating a good
deal of heat outward, still purring, baby, rolling waves of hot air out through
the slits in her heatproof chassis. This feeling of warmth was familiar to
Alan, who was holding the Voltaire II at a practiced distance from his body by her
insulated bits.

The heat had once been uncomfortable,
but not anymore. He’d burned thousands of zombie corpses, and the cooling
flamethrower recalled the feeling of walking away from the infernos, intact, more
or less unscathed—though far from untouched mentally—and, most importantly,
uninfected.

“What about when the others say they
miss meat?” Rosemary asked. “Were the other meats better?”

“No,” Senna said, wishing the adults would
stop bringing it up with the kids. What the hell was the point of that anyway?
“They just say that because they miss the option of eating it.”

Rosemary frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes, when something isn’t
around anymore, we miss the possibility of having it, even if we don’t like it that
much. Grass is greener sort of thing.”

Rosemary looked thoughtful. “Oh.” She
had the ability, usually reserved to children, to switch gears rapidly, and now
that she was focused on the meat eating question, the traumatic experience
she’d just gone through felt dulled. Being easily distracted could be a real
asset at times.

“Come on,” Senna said, putting an
encouraging hand on Rosemary’s shoulder, “let’s get you inside where it’s
warm.”

It was past ten, and a fresh autumn chill
had entered the air.

“Okay,” Rosemary said, looking somber,
but no longer distraught. She’d done what she was supposed to do, and it had
been horrible, but, with Senna and Alan’s help, she’d been able to will herself
through it. Rosemary hoped that she would never have to do it again, but if she
did, she would be more prepared for it than she’d been an hour earlier.

From his post in the sentry’s tower, Corks
had nervously watched the trio of townspeople pass through the middle gate, then
he’d closed the gate behind them and opened the last one in the sequence, and
after that he felt a brief upsurge of calm because Rosemary and Senna and Alan would
return to their homes unharmed.

There were holly bushes at either side
of the innermost gate, planted there by Amanda Fortelberry and Betty Jane
Oswalt, two of New Crozet’s founding stalwarts, with the aid of some of the
younger folk, of course. The bushes’ glossy, pointy leaves were drawing
luminescence from the moonlight, giving the bushes a faint aura of silver, and
when Rosemary, Senna, and Alan had passed through this last gate, Corks saw Rosemary
and Alan, who were walking to either side of Senna, pick up some of the holly
luster.

Corks rubbed his eyes, and now that Senna,
Alan, and Rosemary were well inside, he shut the inner gate and watched them
walk away until their forms began to merge with the shadows cast by New
Crozet’s dimly-glowing lights. Then he turned back to the town’s entrance and flipped
the heavy switch that controlled the spotlights.

The big lights blinked off their beams
with only a flicker or two of delay, seeming to say to the seasoned watchman: there’s
still a long shift ahead of you and we’re sorry about that, but we’re done so
goodnight. He nodded, used to it as he was, and watched the afterglow of the
spotlights hang in the air like a wicked half-grin until it was vacuumed up by
the advancing dark.

9

The deer’s burning corpse was casting a shallow, shifting light on the path
into the woods. As the fire receded, the darkening skeleton winked up at New
Crozet’s gate and elevated watchman, the bones sizzling and gasping almost
invitingly when untapped treasure troves of marrow or gristle, or likely both,
were licked up by the fire’s diminishing tongue.

The flames wanted more, were
asking
for more, but there was hardly anything left. The bones that were now being
crisped had formed the framework of a living animal once, with ample meat and
not an indecent amount of fat for burning, but that was more than a decade ago,
before the end of the world.

Corks watched the changing pattern of
light play in the clearing, his trained eyes searching the ground for other zombies,
but none appeared. He’d expected them to come a while ago, and now, as they kept
on not showing themselves, his agitation grew. Squinting at the fire, he knew
that Alan’s flare and the charging deer’s noise should have been more than
enough to attract others, and the fire’s crackling should have been enough,
too.

What did it mean? Where were the other
zombies? Market day was still two days away, so it was too early for the
traders’ caravans to be attracting the forest zombies.

Corks thought that Alan and Senna had
been surprised by the lack of zombies too, but he was too far up in the
watchtower to tell for sure. He’d been the night sentry on many nights when children
were brought to the outer gate for this exercise, and he couldn’t remember a
single time when Alan’s flare had brought only one zombie from the forest.

Definitely too early for the traders to
be getting close, Corks thought. Where are the animals? The
zombies,
he
corrected himself.

The more he thought about it, the more
it bothered him. Why hadn’t Alan and Senna made more of a fuss? He hadn’t seen
any discussion take place, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either,
because Alan and Senna had been focused on Rosemary.

It wasn’t that he wanted more to come,
of course. It was bad enough that Rosemary had to deal with any at all. At her
age, she should have been excited about Halloween coming up in just a few days,
putting up ghoulish decorations with her family and thinking about the costume
she’d wear and all the candy she’d get to eat.

Did she even know that it was October,
or what year it was? For that matter, did Senna and Alan know? Sometimes Corks
thought he was the only one who still tracked time on a calendar. And was that
a strange thing to do now, rather than just live by the sun and seasons?

Shaking his head, he wished that Rosemary
wouldn’t have to see any more than what she’d just seen, or to do any more than
what she’d just done. But it was necessary, and she would likely be required to
kill again in order to survive, in an uncontrolled environment much more
dangerous than the practice field to which she’d been brought tonight.
Childhood had to be cut short for her to survive, or at least to stand a better
chance.

It was something the children had to
experience, something they had to see with their own eyes and do with their own
hands. Their small fingers had to be the ones pulling the triggers, because
that was what it took to really understand the world beyond the fence, and that
it and the zombies living there were real, and always trying to get in. If his own
son had had such training, Corks knew, he might still have been alive.

His thoughts turned back to the scant
response to Alan’s flare, and he decided he might bring it up at the town hall
meeting the next day. He told himself that it was nothing, a meaningless
coincidence, but trying to dismiss it, unusual as it was, made him even more
uncomfortable.

Might as well get settled into unease
now, he thought. There was a long shift ahead of him to dwell on what he hadn’t
seen.

The thermos of chicory coffee caught
his eye and he picked it up. Unscrewing the top to let the earthy smell of the
fake coffee reach him, he began to pace.

10

Aside from the crackling of the zombie deer, the night was sounding only with
the rhythmic chirp and wing beats of insects. The watchtower’s dim light was
attracting moths, mosquitoes, and their many winged friends, some of whom were
unsettlingly large. But Corks was used to that, for the most part.

A moth flitted and fluttered around
the glow of the light as he watched. Would the insects be next? The virus had
already taken all the other animals, and if it jumped to insects, how could the
town be protected then?

Even if insects lost their ability to
fly following infection, as the birds had, they’d likely keep their ability to
climb. And even though their climbing would become clumsy, they’d probably make
it up the concrete and through the chain link after a few practice go’s, and
then that would be all she wrote.

The coffee’s smell was wafting up at
him, but it gave him no comfort.

That won’t happen, he told himself.
It’s been too long since the last mutation already, so there won’t be any more.
The insects can’t get it, because they’re too different. They can’t.

It was difficult to rely on that sort
of logic, because a great variety of animals had succumbed to infection. After
humans, the virus had jumped to other mammals, and then to birds, and then to
fish. Corks couldn’t be sure that insects and fish were more different than
mammals and birds. Maybe insects were just as different from mammals as fish
were.

Perhaps all that was worth knowing was
that the virus was smarter than the world and all of its creatures, and where
it had found ways of entering new species, it would do so once more.

Briefly, he felt gripped by a
panic-fueled urge to exterminate all the damned bugs and insects in the world.
His breathing became more rapid and uneven. This was when it always became hard
to control.

“I’m watching over the town, over New
Crozet, my town,” Corks said as calmly as he could between gasps for air. “I
have to keep it together. I can keep it together. I
do
keep it together.
Everything’s under control. Everything’s okay. It’ll be another uneventful
night, and New Crozet will go on another day. We’ll go on.”

Hardening his resolve, he stood up
straighter and reminded himself of the job he had to do, and that he was going
to do it extremely well. He wouldn’t allow himself anything less.

As the wings beat frantically around
him, he took a tepid sip from his thermos, and then another, before screwing it
up again and putting it back in its place under his chair. He often fell victim
to anxiety attacks when he was in the watchtower, but rarely this early in the
night. They usually began just before his shift ended, when his time at his
post was running out.

The anxiety came to him on most of his
shifts at that time, just before first light. The attacks were characterized by
an overwhelming feeling that the world was out of control, and that he couldn’t
control anything, not even the smallest of details around him, but that he had
to try. As the end of his shift drew nearer, this mania would metastasize
progressively, causing him to close his eyes for set intervals, reopen them briefly
and then close them again, the sight of the reality that surrounded him too
much to bear.

On this night, the anxiety took a
different turn. Rather than shutting his eyes for counts of five or ten or
fifteen as he was prone to do, he found himself staring at the dirt road toward
the forest, unblinking and unable to shift his attention away. He felt that the
image of the road was burning itself into his mind, carving its dust and gravel
into the soft matter of his brain to create an indelible impression there,
crisscrossing the folds.

Corks tried to look away but couldn’t
even turn his neck.

Beads of sweat formed at the fringes
of his receding hairline and ran down his brow, collecting over his eyebrows in
preparation for the next leap. Moments later he was hyperventilating, and a sheen
of sweat was draping his forehead, then sweat was soaking through his shirt at
the armpits and lower back. Although the pressure to wipe his face was great,
his arm seemed to be made of lead.

The unmistakable buzz of a mosquito
nestled in his ears, and then another, and another, until the movement of the
bloodsuckers’ wings was all he could hear. A swarm was surrounding him,
attracted by the delicious scent of his sweat, which was seeping out of him in profuse
fashion. There was bug spray in the tower with him, just a foot away, and he
should have reapplied it, except he couldn’t reach for it, or, for that matter,
move at all.

The winged party-crashers closed in
and landed and sunk anchors in his skin where the blood was closest to the
surface. These were the best tethering points, if you asked them.

They couldn’t get at his ankles, which
were covered with socks and pants, and there were some darned good spots there,
but they had easy access to his face and neck and wrists, with which they’d
have to make do. There was more than enough hitching space, so they docked to
him and slaked their thirst while their winged bodies were caressed by the
gentle stirring of the unseasonably chill night air.