Order of the Dead (41 page)

13

The orgy of cannibalism was about to get into gear. Brother Mardu’s fingers
were already dripping blood and there were thick, red smears up to his elbow,
but his lips, for the moment, remained smudge-free. He raised a hand high in
the air, and a greedy murmur went up at the sight of what he was holding.

All of the Order was before him,
reaching, licking their lips, the anticipatory saliva building in their mouths
and needing to explode into the still-warm flesh. They’d all get a small dose of
the Sultan’s fix in the meat, but that was okay. Maybe, Mardu thought, the
serving of dope would help them all see clearly again.

Mardu made more words, reciting more
of the Order’s tenets and their battle plan for making it through the year,
most of which revolved around stealing people and food from the settlements, and
then the cheer that followed was the first true one of the night, because food
was coming.

The virus took hold of his mouth and spoke
for him, and then the Order was becoming his once more. They were shouting with
him, listening rapt and punctuating his sentences, the
virus’s
sentences. He was the amplifier, he was their
god.

While Mardu was having his moment of communion
with his own god—he the demi-god to the god, of course—even Sister Beth added
her cheer to those of the brothers and sisters. It sounded forced, and it was,
but its insincerity was chewed up and swallowed by the din. Even so, it wasn’t
entirely faked, because she was hungry, too.

Her extreme disappointment in herself
for not having killed Saul in the forest was for the moment tempered by her
need to eat. Looking back, she would see that she’d had a chance or two, though
she’d been hard-pressed to spot them in the moment.

In that way she was like Senna. They
both looked back, and often, at the choices they’d made in their lives, and, in
stark relief, saw all the things they should’ve done differently, like the
right things were carved into a shadow marble that subtitled the real events
that had taken place. It was a running critique of each of their shows, kept by
the most critical observer of each, themselves.

Mardu thrust his raised hand upward
and waved the narrow section of human liver in the air, flapping it as if it
were a misshapen, maroon pancake. Droplets of blood scattered from it, some
landing on the brothers and sisters who were in the first row.

It wasn’t so much an audience now as a
riled-up mob, ready to lynch and be lynched if only the virus so requested.
That was how Mardu felt, at least, but at the moment, the truth of it was that
the rest of them weren’t so much serving the virus, but their appetite. Right
now, that was a distinction without a difference, because the task at hand was
meal-taking, and the viral pixie was down with that.

Oh yeah, he thought, whisper away,
tell me your sweet-nothings. And he looked over at his shoulder and could actually
see
her, the too-skinny, winged woman, her skin green and scaly, her
bony legs crossed twice over just so. He’d never been much into skinny bitches,
but she was to die for. There was just something about her, and her voice…the
slight rasp in it was enough to light him up for days.

Looking back to his flock and grinning
broadly, he gestured with the sliver of organ again and they roared up once
more, but in a more controlled way. It was as if their collective hunger had
grown wings and flapped over their heads, where it was now circling, not yet
daring to approach the morsels of fresh kill that Brother Mardu was preparing.
Not yet. Not for you just yet. This is where he always made them wait to remind
them that he was at the top of the food chain, and the rest of them, they ate
at his pleasure, because that was how the virus wanted it.

The turkey of this Order’s
Thanksgiving was still alive, and in the room with them.

Drugged up to the gills, his skin
peeled back so that his insides could take in the not-so-fresh air of the
worship truck, Rad was strapped to a table beside Mardu. Weak but rhythmic, the
young man’s pulse was beating on, and it would keep on drumming, and he’d keep
on feeling, for much longer than was fair, except that fairness was a concept
that had died on the day after the outbreak, if not earlier.

The flesh was stripped from him in
portions that were sized to keep him alive and green for as long as possible.
It was the post-apocalyptic death of a thousand cuts, copied quite closely
aside from the fact that the pieces sliced from him were for the eating, for
their
eating. The men and women of the Order crowded closer, sensing that the signal
would be given at any moment.

The vulture that was their want was
rising higher and higher in a frenzied beating of wings until its head touched
the ceiling and it had to crook its neck while it waited for its master’s
permission.

Almost…

There…

Now!

The virus shot off a pistol in Mardu’s
head and he tossed the meat down to the gathered cannibals and the vulture
folded its wings and torpedoed down and forward, its jaws agape and straining
against their limits to open as wide as vulturely possible.

That’s right, Brother Mardu thought,
I’m the lion and you’re the pathetic fucking scavengers who eat after me. You
need
me. You
all
need me. I’m the king of this motherfucking pride, because
the virus willed it so.

14

Brother Acrisius was brimming with delight, bathing in the pool of his
patriarch’s success. The festivities of the Order were now in full swing, and
the mutinous looks were gone from the faces of the brothers and sisters, if
only for the moment, replaced by expressions of greedy mirth.

They were happy, so long as they got
something to eat, and probably for only so long as they were gobbling it down.
Still, there was plenty to go around. The take had been good.

Tearing into some calf meat, the
semi-paralytic was positively swelling with glee. He was looking up now and
again at the others, but mostly at Saul and Mardu. Saul looked happy as ever,
and that was no surprise, but Mardu seemed uneasy, in spite of this decisive
victory. He’d drugged and dragged in a fresh kill, put on a show of his power
by giving the boy to the virus, and yet he still looked unsure of himself, like
a shadow of himself in years past.

Perhaps he was losing his faith.

During his stint with the Order,
Brother Acrisius had himself moved back and forth as far as his own beliefs
were concerned, though Mardu’s sermon had never wavered. He’d taught them all that
the virus was the ultimate, most perfect program, and that it was the Order’s
role to spread it to new hosts, to new biological machines, and iron out any
hindrances to this progress. He’d promised that the virus would provide for
those who sought to know it and love it and help it spread. And it really had
taken care of them, for a time.

Mardu had explained that the virus was
the world’s reality, the virus knew better, was superior to mortal men, and had
proved that by the changes it made to the world, and they had to go with it to
survive. He’d told them that the virus spoke to him, in private of course,
because Mardu had the same affliction of secrecy shared by all great prophets.

And in a lot of ways, that made sense,
it was the post-apocalypse, after all, and sense wasn’t highest on the totem
pole of survival desirables, but sometimes, Acrisius thought there was more to
it, that, perhaps, the zombie plague was a punishment meted down by God
Himself.

He wasn’t alone in that, either. It
was pretty common for the survivors to look at it that way. Maybe it really was
a holy extermination, the world’s retribution for all of mankind’s sins or some
hippie shit like that.

The virus—according to Mardu—wasn’t a
lightning bolt flung down by God, neither penance nor extermination. It just
was—an ‘it is what it is’ item for the ages.

What did matter, whether the plague
had been wrought by the God of the Christians or the Jews or the Muslims or the
green god of Wall Street or the great hippie spirit of the universe, was that
it was
holy,
and, by extension, so was the Order’s mission.

The Order’s great and occasionally
fearless leader acknowledged, in his moments of self-reflection, that the Order
was in some ways a religion, and it was really all a matter of perspective,
wasn’t it? A lot of things could be like religions. Gangs, for example, were
just like them. And in the end, of course, it was all about power.

Back when Mardu had been padding his
soapbox with the cash proceeds from his Krok-peddling, it had never really been
the money angle that had driven him, because he’d understood, from the very
get-go, what cash really stood for. It was always power, had always been and
always would be.

Power.

That was the only thing that mattered.
Money wasn’t worth a squirt of piss after the outbreak, but when it had been worth
one or two said squirts, when it had meant anything at all, it had meant power.

For this, for this practical approach
to it all, Acrisius loved him. And that way of looking at the world and moving
through it had turned Acrisius on something fierce, but Brother Mardu wasn’t
for him, never had been, and still wasn’t. Acrisius found the leadership itself
erotic, but it was the act more than the one doing it.

In a sexual sense, Acrisius thought Mardu
was disgusting, and why, he wasn’t sure, because Mardu was as good looking as
they came. It certainly wasn’t a race thing for Acrisius, there was just
something very off-putting about their leader, in spite of the charisma he
sometimes exhibited. It seemed like if he was to touch you, you’d turn to
stone.

Shrugging the half-shrug that his
broken body would allow, Acrisius lapped up the blood from his fingers and went
in for seconds. More of the settlement man’s organs and muscle meat was being
brought out and set in front of him. He made delicious eye contact—one which
spoke of other things—with Saul, and then he and his slave dug into the
glistening flesh and partook.

15

The world was a sequence of zeroes and ones, hots and colds, stops and gos,
blacks and whites with no shades of grey in between.

Jack’s coopted body stumbled onward.
The light was green, so he went, and the campsite receded behind him as the
woods took him in.

A yellow buckeye drew nearer until he
was slumped against its trunk. The green light in his head had taken ill and
was now growing cold, turning from a one to a zero. The tree’s branches had
just enough leaves left on them to hide Jack from view.

Rain had drenched the boy’s body and
soaked into his pants pocket, where the crocodile snout still bit at him,
though now the flesh it was seeking to rip away and swallow was dead and
cooling.

After the ritual of giving was
complete, Brother Mardu had taken the restraints off Jack and given him a good
kick in the seat of the pants, launching him out of the Order’s camp before
sealing the netting again.

Jack had staggered away, and his
throttle had been dialed down steadily until he’d gotten here, to the yellow
buckeye that was dripping with rain. There’d been a noise—thunder, although the
zombie gunk between Jack’s ears didn’t register it as such but only read it as
potential prey—and he’d been drawn toward it, but now there were no more
prominent noises, just the rain’s unrelenting pound.

Other than the body, there was nothing
left in him of the New Crozet Jack. He didn’t know himself, wouldn’t recognize
anyone, not even Sasha, and there were no thoughts, just impulses. Move or
don’t move. Pursue or wait. Right now, he would wait.

Pursuit would come later, when the
signal was given. The prey always came, sooner or later. That was how the world
worked, and according to the virus that had taken him, that was the only way it
could.

16

In the distance, Alan spotted the splintered wood of beams peeking through a
strangling mass of creeping vines and turning foliage. It was the base of an
elevated safety platform. He began to hurry toward it, adjusting his course
slightly, and moving with as much stealth as he could muster while stumbling
over the dense undergrowth.

There were safety platforms like this
one throughout the forest and around the town that were designed to be
temporary refuges from active zombies. After climbing a ladder to a tall
platform, there the humans could wait out the zombies until they slipped back
into dormancy, which, depending on the circumstances, could take days or even
weeks. Most platforms had a roof and a stock of essential supplies, and some had
walls in addition to roofs, offering a good measure of protection from the
elements.

One of Senna and Alan’s jobs on their
trips outside the perimeter had been to restock the safety platforms. This had
become unnecessary four years earlier, as the platforms slipped into disuse and
the marauders who’d once looted them found other distractions—some of the
becoming-a-zombie sort, and some with larger gangs such as the Fleshers or the
Order, either as their new members or as their food, new meat in either case,
figurative in the former, and painfully literal in the latter.

The zombies were getting closer to
Alan, and soon they’d break. If he could reach the top of the platform before that
happened, the increased distance between him and them might put them off the
scent. If they broke before he reached the platform, or when he was on it, then
he’d be trapped for God only knows how long, assuming he could climb up before
they got him.

He was running out of options, and
even though he knew he didn’t have time to wait it out on top, he’d be no use
whatsoever to Senna or the others if he let the zombies catch him on the
ground. It was climb up or run for it, and he knew he’d only make more noise if
he ran, and then the virus would take him for sure.

When he got to the base of the
platform he slipped between its four beams, which were overgrown with scraggly
shrubs whose branches scraped at him as he moved past. He stepped square in the
middle, flattening a small patch of chanterelles, and looked up at the
underside of the tower.

Panting, he gripped the ladder and
began to pull himself upward as the sound of movement behind him grew louder.
He heaved himself off the ground, and a large splinter of wood fingered his
bandage, which ripped, then the two wooden fangs at the end of the splinter bit
him a good one and stuck. He went on, feeling the pain, but not caring.

A few more feet and the splinter would
fall off, taking with it a smear of Alan’s blood, but he had plenty of that
left over for the time being, bullets and fanged slivers notwithstanding.

He pulled harder, climbing several
rungs, then continued to ascend the ladder as he looked over his shoulder at
the ground beneath him. There, he saw exactly what he’d feared.

The two zombie squirrels that were
following him—had been almost
ambling
after him—were no longer semi-dormant.
Behind them, the pony that had only one hoof, and no eyes or tongue to speak
of, raised its rotten head upward and bounded up on its hind legs before dropping
back down on all fours.

In the moment when it had been nearest
to vertical, it had directed its vacant, eyeless stare upward, and it was the
glower of the virus that had found Alan, and it declared through its hoofed
messenger that it would have him, finally, stubborn man and all of his
miserable humanity be damned.