Order of the Dead (40 page)

10

The choking filter of gauze was gone when Senna next woke. She took a deep
breath, and it was like inhaling a mouthful of sewer water.

It wasn’t just the air, though. The Sultan’s
empire she was in was dirty, poverty-stricken, and in serious disrepair, and not
only that, but it was filled with people who were sweaty and breathing ragged,
frightened breaths. And, she realized, she was in it too, and her own breathing
didn’t sound much different.

Who were they—these people?

She was trying to remember.

Who was she, at this rate?

The Sultan—she needed to speak with him
about the state of things. But where the hell was he?

She tried to roll over and get to her
feet, but couldn’t. Though she wasn’t bound any longer, her limbs seemed to
have been replaced with look-alikes made of JELL-O.

J-E-L-L-O, the San Francisco treat!

Except, no, that wasn’t right at all.
She tried again to get up, didn’t make it, but did manage to sit up, resting
her back against a wall.

“Well done,” roared the Sultan, the
great ruler of all things Sufentanil, five hundred times more powerful than
morphine. “A for effort.”

So he was there! But where?

She tried to turn and it was like
trying to move through toffee. Or was it taffy? No, that’s something else.

Senna ran her tongue over her lips,
which, forget ChapStick, dipstick, were cracked and emitting a slow ooze of clotting
red stuff. It was leaking out very slowly, and if she’d seen it she’d wonder if
her heart was still beating or if any blood was still moving in her body at all.

The Sultan and his buddies had dried
her out, hanging her upside down by the ankles in an endless expanse of desert.

And not just her, others.

The others, they were there too, in
the rotating kaleidoscope where she occupied a distorted scene behind one—and
only one—gem. If the gem fell out, or if people stopped looking at it just
so…she’d be gone. And everything was rotating, going round and around and round
and around…

They blinked their spinning eyes at
her.

Blink.

Rotate.

Blink.

Rotate.

Blink-blink and dry heave and repeat.

If only she could move, then…then…
Then what?

What was happening?

“Mum’s the word,” said the Sultan.
“And the bird is the word, too.”

Where was he? Fucking invisible prick.

He came into focus and she saw him. A
Tacker. The Tacker with the boils, except, he wasn’t a Tacker at all, was he?

No. No, he wasn’t.

There were bars between him and them.
Us and them.

That game again. Hunter and prey.

No, cannibal and c
aptured
prey.

Caught and to be fileted and made into
Senna Phillips filets. Phillips filets? Phillips fill-its? Either one.

Groaning, seemingly in pain, their
jailer left. After he was gone, Senna took in more of her surroundings.

Sasha and Jenny were in a corner, holding
each other, whimpering. Someone was screaming—Molly. Rosemary’s lungs were
wheezing in the background. Rad was trying to crawl over to Rosemary, and
making slow progress of it.

Jack was there too, and, of all of
them, he was the stillest, staring at two buckets that were in a corner of the
cell, his gaze unwavering.

The floor was a sandy clay vinyl tile,
like something that belonged in a bathroom. And perhaps that was appropriate.
It was easy to clean, but even so it came decorated with dark stains, that, by
the looks of them, liked very much to linger in places.

The prisoners were pricked and
re-pricked with drugs—the Order was almost out of dope but soon their stock
would be replenished—and the world for the captive townspeople became more haze
than world, floating in and out of itself, over, and over, and over again.

People would bob past the bars, like
seagulls in water, then they’d disappear, and then they’d come back, and then…

There was someone standing outside the
cell now, no longer bobbing back and forth, but planted in place. Someone…deformed.

“Looks like we’re fresh out of water,
hasn’t rained in ages,” Brother Acrisius said, the words spilling out clumsily
from his yawning maw. The mockery was lost on them, however, as they were too
far gone to understand the beating on the roof was a downpour.

Then, he added, staring at Rad and articulating
more carefully, “Stringy and salty is better.” The words didn’t quite fall out
of his face in ragged bits that time, but they didn’t flow smoothly either.
This put some frustration in him, which he took out by unsheathing his knife
and tapping it against the bars of the cell.

He grinned, seeing the desired effect
bloom like a fungus on the prisoners,
his
prisoners. That was what they
were now, especially when Brother Mardu wasn’t around. They were his. They were
all
his to torment.

A pain around his bladder made him
groan, and he stepped backward, almost losing his grip on the knife. He quickly
put the blade away, forgetting about how he’d wanted to bother his new meat. It
felt like something was pulling at his insides, and not at all in a good way.

Groaning, he went about the task of
moving the cattle. He was usually meaner, but right now he just wanted to be
done with the chores and get back to his room. He needed to lie down, and
probably vomit, as well. It was the worst time to be sick, in the middle of all
that needed to be done, but sickness was a malignant thing that would rear its
head on its own schedule, and not piss on you if you were on fire.

Molly and Rad were taken out of the
cell while Senna swam in and out of consciousness, feeling like she was wading
into and out of sand and coming out more dried up and gritty each time.

Like jerky. Maybe she was to be jerky.

That would be alright, she guessed. At
this rate…it all floated away again, or she away from it, no matter.

The children were being moved as well,
and when she next woke, it would be in a different place. The children would be
there too, and all of the Order.

The festivities were scheduled to commence
soon, and no one dared miss that. Not on Mardu’s watch.

11

The bullet wound was pulsing with the heartbeat of a madman, who in this case
happened to be Alan. It was a flesh wound, unimportant, and he would not allow
it to distract him from what now needed to be done.

Glimmers of red sky were filtering
through the growing storm and into the bedroom behind him while he rummaged,
setting glowing fingers to work on the sheets of the bed, like a spell being
cast. From the closet he took a pistol, three clips, night vision specs—he
couldn’t use his glasses and the night specs at the same time, but in the dark
of the storm, he’d be better off with the night goggles than his regular
lenses—a canteen of water, and a spare roll of bandages. That was all. His
knife was already on him, tucked into his belt, its usual living space.

This is the last time, he thought, the
last time you’ll use these things.

He went to the door, hesitated, then
backtracked and picked up the tin of cinnamon from the floor. It sat in his hand
for a long moment, then was moved into his pocket.

He wanted his Voltaire II…Allie. She
always had a way of calming him. He went to the bedroom again and this time the
absence of Senna that he felt there was like a leaden grip squeezing his neck.

Feeling like he was being strangled, he
dragged the Voltaire II’s box from the closet and lifted its lid. He knelt down
and threw the blankets aside, and seeing her gave him a weak push toward some semblance
of composure. He wanted her, but he couldn’t take her with him now.

This had to be a stealth job, a covert
rescue and not a rampage, and not just that, he had to be
fast,
without
anything to weigh him down. He stared for a while longer, then, without closing
the box that was Allie the Voltaire II’s home, got up and left.

On the way to the outer gate, the bit
of calm he’d found looking at the Voltaire II deserted him, but at least he was
thinking a little more clearly, though not by much.

The town seemed to be a destroyed
thing, but more than that, it felt tainted now, like something that had been
stupid of them all to build in the first place.

And he’d helped in that build-up. He’d
believed in it, drunk all the fucking survival Kool-Aid, and he’d fucked and
survived, and survived and fucked, for a while, anyway.

Now the punchbowl was empty, and maybe
there’d been something more than Kool-Aid in the neon drink, the seeds of their
own undoing, the flavor of complacency. The walls could’ve been built up more
so that the Tackers wouldn’t have been able to escape so easily, the children
could’ve been prohibited from going to market, markets could’ve been called off
altogether like Larry Knapp had kept prescribing in his drunken rants,
something.

When had they all stopped adapting?
When had they stopped expecting their
other
nightmares to come true?

What, just because they’d already
lived through a nightmare—and, depending on who you asked, continued to live in
one—meant that a worse one couldn’t come along?

When had they become so fucking blind?

He’d done it, too, of course, but even
if he didn’t feel like he’d been complicit in it, he’d have gone after the
kidnappers. And in that he was set apart from the other townspeople. He knew
exactly what he was heading toward, and he went anyway.

When he reached the fence, no one
stopped him or offered to help. They saw him pass through the temporary barrier
they were building, and they let him go without a word.

With New Crozet at his back, Alan
crossed the tree line and over a cluster of mushrooms that he saw and quickly
dismissed as uninteresting. He was a man on a mission, probably, from what he
could surmise, the last one he would undertake, and he wasn’t to be distracted
from that.

The mushrooms had wiry stems, some of
their caps were squashed, and the flattened tops had oozed something coral-colored
from their edges. He took some of that with him on his boots, and it was the
same glop the zombie that Rosemary had shot dead had taken on its hooves and
carried toward the town, the same ooze that another of New Crozet’s townspeople
would pass through and carry in pursuit of Alan after he went missing.

12

Jack was sitting in a chair that was nailed to the floor, screaming. Spittle
was flying from his mouth, and his shorts—the ones he’d been wearing at the
market—had prominent spots of saliva on them.

Large clumps of red hair were caked to
the sides of his head by panic sweat, and one smaller clump had formed above
his forehead. It was poking upward now, giving him a unicorn look that he and
Sasha would’ve laughed at under different circumstances. No one was laughing
now.

He was tied to the chair at the wrists,
ankles, and around his midsection with rope. He was struggling against the
binds, but his strength was waning. It was no use, he couldn’t get free without
help.

There was one final cry, a desperate,
unintelligible plea, but it fell on the deaf ears of the Order, which was
impatient…and hungry. With the last scream came a good amount more spit that
fell and formed wet spots on Jack’s pocket where the croc snout was currently
living, and probably making a dinner out of some lint. It was about that time of
day, when the animals fed.

Jack was plenty conscious, because he’d
only been given half the Sultan’s helping for a child of his size, so that he
would be awake and fully aware, for this. Brother Mardu had wanted him this way,
though the virus didn’t care one way or another if the child was fully
conscious or not. To Mardu, however, the child—and Mardu’s ruthless treatment
of him—was a stepping stone on his way back to his throne, and he would regain
his seat, mercy be damned he would.

The last to bear the Hodgins name that
he took from his mother, the boy called Jack stopped struggling. He’d spent the
little energy the Sultan had left him.

The room—it was a modified inside of a
truck—began to do a loop around him like it was a hula-hoop, and he didn’t like
that at all. He’d never even liked real hula-hoops, although he’d only met one
and it had been broken when he found it on the second floor of what passed for
the New Crozet library, and this was much worse.

And he was so, so thirsty. He’d eaten
too much tack and too many Poppers, and now he wanted to be thrown into a
river, or better yet, a lake, or, better still, an
ocean.
Not that he’d
seen any of those bodies of water in real life, but he’d heard tell of them.

And, truth be told, in his current
state, he’d happily settle for one of the two New Crozet wells. As sleepy as he
was, he’d probably drown as soon as he’d drunk his fill, but he didn’t think
he’d mind that either, as long as he could get the cool water in his belly
first.

Someone said, “This sacrifice brings
us closer to the Equilibrium, to Equilibrium Day.” It was a commanding
statement, like a proclamation by a great leader, but the voice wasn’t quite
right. There was a note of confidence that had been missed, and that had ruined
the melody.

There were more words about
Equilibrium Day, shouts about it even, but the atmosphere was tense rather than
excited. The edge would come out of the air, and only briefly even then, when
the meat was dealt out later.

Jack drew in a shallow breath of
clarity and he saw Senna. Rosemary and Jenny and Sasha and Molly and Rad were
there too, but they were being held in place by men and women in dark robes.

Senna, on the other hand, had just
gotten free of the unbelievably large man who’d been holding her, and she was
surging forward, the look on her face making Jack think she’d only just
realized she was there, like she’d popped her head through some clouds and saw
that on top of them was something so horrible it couldn’t be real, except, of
course, it was.

Jack saw the links of the chain expand
and then draw taut when Senna reached the limit of her leash. The giant’s grip
was unyielding, and Senna was jerked backward. She fell, and then Jack couldn’t
see her anymore. He’d begun to climb up the rope of dope again, up high where
the air was thin and made you grin. And it was a fine rope to climb indeed, the
best in the world at that moment, Jack was sure.

Brother Saul pulled on the leash and
Senna’s throat closed up and then he was hitting her on the side of the face,
once, twice, then maybe three times, and then she was falling into a limp
darkness that was silhouetted with darkly-robed figurines carved from matchsticks,
the wood split just so to form limbs and the heads with their phosphorus hair
draped in black hoods.

Mardu shot Saul a dark look like a
poison-tipped arrow from his eyes, and the giant felt the sting. He hadn’t used
even half his strength, but apparently Mardu had thought it too much. Saul
bowed his head in apologetic deference.

The townspeople were there, allowed to
watch this until it was done and then the bags would be put over their heads
and they’d be taken back to the holding cell…well, not all of them would be
taken back to the same place, because Jack’s sacrifice, that wonderful gift of
his life that he was so generously putting in the hands of the virus, deserved
to be marked by a feast.

None of them saw much, however,
distracted as they were by the Sultan’s various charms. The most lucid of the
New Crozet prisoners was Molly, and she had just time enough to scream before
being clobbered by Remigius, who elbowed her repeatedly in the face until her
strength gave out.

The eye of Jack’s mind was winking off
again.

There were more proclamations, and
Jack couldn’t tell in his ephemeral moments of lucidity who was their source,
whether it was the same man who’d spoken of equalizers or equaling or
equal-i-something earlier, or someone else.

“To the virus he goes, our sacrifice,
our rite!”

A cheer limped to its feet, seeming to
want to exit the room.

More calls to action, to arms, to
witness.

Another cheer, sturdier.

When Brother Mardu made the cut, Jack
felt almost nothing. He understood, through the use of some previously untapped
part of his mind, exactly what was happening to him. The master had been a long
time coming, and now he was here to take what belonged to him. What had
always
been his.

Said master was scaly, and had a great
mouth filled with row upon row of sharp, yellowing teeth that thirsted for warm
blood like you’d thirst for a cool drink of spring water if you were caught in
a boundless expanse of desert. Then the teeth were moving inside of Jack,
tearing at what made him human, and he was being taken.

The life ran out of the boy not by
blood but by breath, like a final sigh. His last wish, if he’d had the presence
of mind to make it, would’ve been that the air he was exhaling would be used as
fuel for the fire that would burn Mardu’s face off, assuming the world could
ever be so lucky, or so just.