Order of the Dead (47 page)

33

On the day of the outbreak, Senna had led her students, running, outside, and
they’d made it no more than a few feet off the curb and into the parking lot
when the children began to be picked off…by other students, sick, rabid ones.

The first barrage took four of her
kids in one swoop.

The next wave, coming only seconds
after the first, took down eight more.

That was twelve down in seconds, and
now her own students were turning. And there were even more coming from inside
the school, boiling out from the doors and through windows.

And it wasn’t just the students and
the school, either, the sick people—children and adults alike—were coming from
all directions on the street, from everywhere. Senna surveyed the neighborhood
in desperation, but there was nowhere to run.

She pulled the ones who were left
after her, but she couldn’t hold the hands of ten children at once, not while
they were all under attack. Still, she was moving them as best and as quickly
as she could into the lot, away from their rabid pursuers.

If it weren’t for a little luck, it
would’ve all ended right there, just a few feet from her classroom, on a day of
spring sun showers and rainbows. The lucky bit came in the form of a mini
school bus that rolled up in front of her and stopped short, the brakes crying
out for mercy and the tires squealing.

The door opened, and she piled the
children through it, but not before three more had been dragged away by the
biting and grabbing things that had been their friends and teachers only
moments earlier. After the seven kids she’d managed to herd to the bus were inside
and it was clear the others were beyond help, she jumped in herself, and the
accordion door shut on reaching, rot-speckled hands as soon as she was in.

It had been her plan to commandeer a
school bus, though she hadn’t taken the time to think about who’d have the keys
to get into one and drive it away. Lucky in busses, unlucky in…

The tires screamed and took the bus on
a careening path out of the lot and away from the school. She and the bus
driver decided to take the kids to her house, at least for the time being. They
didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed like some kind of rabies
outbreak, except, of course, much worse.

There were still a good number of
people alive, and the authorities were trying to keep some semblance of order.
Yes, there are some seriously diseased people running amok outside and we don’t
know how to control them or make them stop, so please stay home for a while.

Some answer.

Don’t go outside, and do not, under
any circumstances, engage.

Thanks very much Mr. Radio Man.

She took the kids home, and the bus
driver left to find his own family. His name was Tommy Naples. Senna still
remembered that. Sometimes she wondered if he’d made it back to his family, and
what became of them, which really meant, how had they died? At home or on the
street? Fast or slow? Had the kids been taken first while their parents
watched? Or was it the other way around, or all at once? Had the kids done it
to Tommy? Had his wife done it to him? Thrown one last zombie fuck at him while
she was at it, in front of the children, perhaps?

34

At the time, Senna had been living in a two-story townhouse in Arlington with
three roommates. As soon as she was through the door she realized that she’d
just brought her students—the seven of them who were left—into more danger. Tommy
was already gone, a little bit too quickly perhaps, but he had his own wife and
kids to worry about.

The table in the entryway that usually
held Senna and her roommates’ keys and umbrellas and was a rest stop for mail
and packages was turned askew, and all that had been on top of it was strewn
about the floor.

The children were crying, huddling
behind her in the corner by the door.

Suddenly, her cell phone rang, and one
of the kids screamed, and then something was coming for them, fast and hard and
clumsy, bumping things as it went, moaning, calling out in a voice not human
and not in words.

From the floor Senna snatched a swan-shaped
bookend that belonged on the entryway table, and stepped in front of her
students. A moment later, her roommate, who had the rabies or whatever the fuck
it was, was trying to rip out her throat with her teeth, and it was all she
could do to keep the biting, saliva-spewing mouth away from her.

The bookend arced through the air,
once, twice, three times, and the shape of her roommate’s skull was rearranged
and the back part of her brain mashed up into a lumpy paste by the swan’s
wings. Chalk one up to the bird-folk.

The voicemail chime of her phone went
off, and then the ringing started again. And it would keep on keeping on in
that manner until Senna had secured the house.

Parents were calling her, parents
whose children were not accounted for, and most weren’t here in Senna’s
townhouse, which now looked like a crime scene, nor at school…nor anywhere.
They were gone, but Senna had managed to get a few kids away from whatever was
happening.

And they weren’t all crying anymore,
either. Five of them were just trembling in the corner, huddled together and
fresh out of tears, and the other two were just now spouting the last of their
waterworks. That was something, right?

Senna locked all the doors and stayed
there, with the children, fielding worried calls from parents until the adults showed
up, one by one, to pick up their kids. She argued some and tried to get them to
stay, but it made no difference, or she hadn’t been convincing enough, or
something. They all left, or tried to.

Two were picked off right in front of the
house, the parents’ defense delaying the inevitable for only a moment. The rest
made it some of the way, but Senna found their cars later, on the road not very
far down the street, broken into, bloody-seated, and empty.

No one had survived. She’d almost come
to blows with one of the mothers, but stopped short. She wished to God she’d
hit that woman, bloodied the fuck out of her if that’s what had to be done.
Maybe then at least
one
of the kids would’ve made it.

Then again, maybe it was better that
none had. Who the fuck knew?

What she did know, was that they died
because she’d been too weak, too careless, too unprepared. And she’d never let
something like that happen again.

No matter how much anyone tried to
talk her out of it, no matter how much Alan consoled her, and he was the only
one who could ever make her feel any better about it, it always boiled down to
the same thing: she’d killed those twenty-two kids by first trying to lead them
out, and then by letting the ones she’d managed to get back to the townhouse go
home with their parents. She’d done them in as sure as if she’d injected the
virus into them by her own hand, squeezing the plunger of a long-needled
syringe containing Krokodil’s legacy.

The upshot was that she’d killed
enough children, and this wasn’t going to go down like it had at her school.
Ms. Phillips was gone. She’d died there too, after all.

Senna wasn’t going to abide by this.
She would make different choices.

She’d see the inflection points, the
forks in the road, and she’d go down the correct paths this time. No more
children would die on her watch.

No more.

It was a brave thought, and considering
her current status, futile as well. But that wasn’t how she saw it.

The way she looked at it, she could
change her mind now, and when the forks came, when the time for action was upon
her, she’d spring to life and go sprinting into the proper road. It was just a
matter of seeing the choice at the right time, and knowing which path to take.

It’s a matter of will, she told
herself, trying to firm up her resolve. I’ll take this, because I earned it,
and then I’ll find a way to get the children out. What happened in Arlington won’t
happen again.

Not again.

Spots began to burn holes in her field
of vision.

No more.

Her mind was tottering, trying to shut
down, but the force of the blows kept her from losing consciousness.

Not again.

After some time, she did pass out, and
her mind tumbled into a darkness scattered with invisible boulders that she was
being flung into, one by one by one by one.

No more.

35

Brother Saul was feeling unhappy, which, for him, in normal person terms, meant
neutral. His exuberance with respect to every darned thing in the world had
suddenly dropped off. He suspected why this was, but he didn’t know for sure.

He thought it had to do with that
thing that sometimes happened to him, like the time when he knew with certainty
that the outbreak wasn’t a dream, and that the things coming at him were not
part of a nightmare dreamscape, but were real, and that his road-working days
were over, and that he was to go west, and to stay away from the large cities,
and to move quietly, and to strike the sick people in their heads if it came to
it.

When he’d stepped off the mill during
the outbreak twelve years before, he’d known it was real—though it felt very
much like a nightmare—because he’d had that exact dream already.

And Brother Saul
never
had the
same dream twice. Well,
had
never had the same dream twice, until now.

More often than not, the events of his
dreams did occur. He didn’t know that they did, except when he found himself in
it, like what had happened on zero day and other, smaller events of his
childhood, like a pants-ing at school, or a friend’s newly dead pet, or an
affair between a teacher and sixth grader, the sixth grader in that instance
being Saul himself.

He knew what the dreams were, and hey,
what can you do?

As he grew older, the subject of the
dreams became more serious, more grave, and he didn’t want confirmation,
because that was what he knew he’d get, so he didn’t read the news, and stayed
away from everything and everyone as much as he could. What he did know, was
that what he saw couldn’t be stopped—perhaps
shouldn’t
was more in line
with what he believed, but the truth was somewhere in between—and that no dream
ever repeated itself.

Until the one he’d just woken from.

Getting up from his cot, to which he’d
turned for some rest after their work with the female prisoner was over, he
caught sight of his wrench, which was in the corner of the room. It wasn’t the
one he’d used to defend himself on the day of the outbreak, but one he’d found
in an abandoned camp some years ago, after being taken in by Acrisius and the
Order.

It reminded him of what it had felt
like to crush the first few skulls. They were new zombies then, and he’d killed
more than his fair share of zombies, and men, and women, since. He’d never felt
much about it, good or bad, but it had become increasingly unremarkable over
time.

He picked it up, felt its weight in
his hand, which was what an average person felt on lifting a toothbrush, and
then dropped it back in its place in the corner of the room. There were two
other brothers who lived in this truck, Brother Samuels and Brother
Fitzpatrick, each of whom had their own rooms, but they weren’t there now. They
were in the worship truck, meeting about something or other, or perhaps deep in
prayer, devout as they were.

Saul was excused from most of the
formalities of the Order, had been from the start, and for that he was glad. It
wasn’t his cup of tea.

Considering the dream, he turned out
his lamp and went outside into the rain, wearing only a shirt and shorts,
wanting to be soaked. As the rain quickly and earnestly put its wet arm around
him, the discontent that was keeping his usual cheerfulness under its thumb
began to crawl, very slowly, away.

36

A short distance from where he’d encountered Jack, Alan arrived at an
encampment of trucks that was cordoned off from the woods by netting.

Examining it, he found that it was a
finer grade of net than what New Crozet used. The fibers were so sheer they left
marks, not quite cuts, on the pads of his fingers.

This was where the traders had gone,
he was sure, and he saw no need to waste time going around the camp to see if
there were fresh tire tracks leading into it. This had to be it, and this had
to be the reason the perimeter fence was so quiet on the night he and Senna had
taken Rosemary out for target practice, or rather, desensitization training.

He gritted his teeth and the rain that
was washing down his face began to run down the right angle of his clenched jaw
toward his neck, dripping off under his chin. He was soaked to the bone, and
he’d had a close call at the platform, but he’d made it. He was here now, and
Senna and Rosemary were inside—had to be. And maybe, just maybe, unlike Jack,
they were still alive.

Sasha was probably there too, perhaps
along with others, but it had been impossible to do a proper accounting of the
missing before leaving New Crozet, so he wasn’t sure. The town had been a mess,
and it was more important to seal it up again before figuring out precisely who’d
been taken.

What had happened to the men and women
of the town, Alan wondered, that he was here at the kidnappers’ camp, and he
was alone? Most of them hadn’t served on the rec-crews, that was true, but all
of them had survived the outbreak, and for a long time, and that meant that they
all had been out among the zombies and lived.

Someone could’ve gone to help. Anyone.
Someone could’ve at least volunteered, or put up a fuss about one other
able-bodied man going along with him.

When had New Crozet gotten like this,
that they wouldn’t pursue their
stolen children?
To Alan, that was
inexcusable.

Yes, the zombies were coming, and a
temporary barrier had to be put up, but there were enough people to handle
that. They had plenty of firepower, too.

When had cutting losses this large in
exchange for the mere hope of a few more years in New Crozet become the policy?
Their refusal to come, to try to get back those who’d been taken, that wasn’t
what Alan had been working to make for nine years in the town, and for three
years before that on the rec-crews.

This wasn’t the humanity he’d been
trying to help. He felt betrayed, and ashamed that he’d given so much of
himself to these people. What was the point if they let their children be
taken?

If that was how they went about it,
then life would end in New Crozet, and that would be the final word. Maybe
other settlements would fare better, but he doubted it. People were the same
everywhere, and there was something wrong with most people, something cowardly
that kept them from standing up for themselves when life was at stake.

Maybe that was normal, but for him,
life would be too painful to try to keep at if he didn’t do this. Dying
tonight, even in the next few moments, was better than spending his remaining
years carrying the weight of the world in guilt, piled on top of the grief of
losing all that mattered to him.

“How can you just do nothing?” he
whispered. “You have to fight. Because if you don’t, what the hell are you? You
have to…”

With his knife he cut through the
netting at its seams, and, just when he’d put the blade away again, something
in the periphery flickered—or seemed to, which was a common visual disturbance
experienced in the night specs. He turned and saw a yellow leaf on the ground,
underneath a cluster of mushrooms with striated, semi-transparent caps that were
sparkling feebly in the washed-out moonlight.

Then, suddenly, it wasn’t a leaf
anymore, but a Post-It Note. He could see what it said clearly: ‘You make me
so, so, so happy. I’m so grateful for you. I love you more than I ever thought
I could. You’re my heart.’

A chill brushed its cool finger down
his spine. What he was seeing was a love note that Senna had passed to him
years ago, which he still kept in a drawer in their bedroom. She’d left a great
many notes for him over the years, and still did, or…still
had,
and he’d
kept all of them, but none outside the perimeter, of course. Yet, here it was,
winking at him in the storm.

The flickering went on while he stared
and then, as if turned by the rainwater, the note became a leaf once more, a
darker yellow than the Post-It Note, with traces of orange running through it
like veins, parched and withering in spite of the water that was running all
over them.

What did the note mean? Was it a
marker on his path? Was it telling him he was on the right track, or was this
just grief getting the better of him?

His wound offered up a timid pulse
from under the bandage. Absentmindedly, he brushed his fingers over the
dressing. Then he dug his fingernails under the bandage and pressed into the raw
wound, hard.

The pain rallied, and it seemed to set
the storm’s snare drum on a mad, sprinting rhythm that couldn’t be kept up for
long. He went on pressing into the raw flesh until tears were standing ramrod
straight in his eyes and all he knew was that he was alive and the drums were
tearing up the world with the darkest solo there could be and he knew then,
without the faintest glimmer of doubt, that he’d been made for revenge.

He pressed onward, because the
vengeful master commanded it, and wriggled inside the encampment. Moments
later, a squirrel of the zombified variety used its broken limbs like oars to
drag itself in after him.

It made pathetic crawling noises
against the wet earth that you’d only have heard if you’d bent right down to it
because of the pounding rain’s noisy backdrop, but then the thing would’ve
bitten you square on the nose or cheek, depending on the relative prominence of
those two facial features on your particular face, and then you would’ve been
on the ground, turning while bullets of rain sprayed the body that had been
yours seconds earlier but was now a chess piece captured by the virus, except
in this game of chess, you could never get your piece back, no matter how many
pawns you managed to get behind enemy lines.

In this game of chess, where the
pieces were genetic code, the virus took no prisoners.