Order of the Dead (5 page)

11

While something in Corks’s mind, some protective wall that had enabled him to
function in spite of what the virus had done, got yet closer to breaking for
good, Senna and Alan walked Rosemary back to her house and said their goodbyes.

The girl opened her front door, spilling
light from the house onto New Crozet’s carpet of semi-dark, then went in and
pulled the door shut behind her, leaving the spilt light stranded on the porch.
It could’ve fled to Senna and Alan for comfort, but instead resigned itself to
its fate and floated upward, finding a place for itself on the border of one of
the moon’s ashier cheese holes, where it would toil until daybreak.

Rosemary said a perfunctory hello to
her mother, Elizabeth Clark, who’d stayed up waiting for her daughter. In New
Crozet, parents or those serving in that role usually didn’t go with their
children when Senna and Alan took them to the fence for training. If there was
trouble, the parents would likely only get in the way.

Elizabeth had much on her mind and
much to do, responsible as she was for organizing the market, but she’d been
unable to focus on any of her tasks while Rosemary was away at the fence, so
she’d spent the evening worrying. It would have been easier for her to keep
distracted if Tom Preston, Rosemary’s father, had been home, but he was out on
a routine perimeter patrol, so there had been no one to fuss over while she
waited. Elizabeth tried to engage her daughter in conversation, interested to
know how the night had gone, but Rosemary made little attempt at a response.

Dazed and nauseated, and having fended
off her mother’s questions, she slunk up the stairs, went to her room, and
closed the door.

The Preston house was two stories and
spacious, and having her own room was a welcome extravagance for a girl like Rosemary,
who valued her privacy and spent much of her time alone. She had a place to
escape to, as well as some disused rooms on the second story, and the attic to
stow herself in when she really needed to vanish without a trace.

When she was by herself, she liked to
think about the world, and about solitude. She wanted to believe that there was
a reason for what had happened, and that there was some meaning in it. She
always
tried
to believe that.

The fact that the animals had been
taken away from people in particular struck a chord with her. She’d seen
pictures in the magazines and books in the library of people with cats and dogs
and horses and other animals, sometimes even lizards.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a
picture of a deer before, but it wouldn’t have surprised her if she had. The
pictures of animals she saw in books didn’t stick in her mind. They were
abstractions, unreal constructs whose images failed to bear them out into flesh
and blood concepts for Rosemary.

The creature that she’d killed tonight
likely bore only a basic, structural resemblance to its living predecessor. The
virus changed animals and people so much, made them so ugly, that they were
hardly recognizable for what they’d been before.

It was the breaking. It was all that
horrible breaking. Thankfully, she’d been too preoccupied with her fear and
focusing on shooting the thing to let her eyes really sink into the details and
see all the...

She’d been taught these things early
on, had been shown pictures of what people looked like when the virus had taken
them. She hadn’t spoken for a week after looking at the first set of pictures.
But, with time, she’d grown used to the images, which returned to her
throughout her waking life, and when she dreamed.

Seeing a zombie in real life, however,
had shaken her in a way she hadn’t been prepared for, and she’d barely even
seen it. Why was everything so much worse when it was off the page and moving?

Until tonight, Rosemary had wanted a
dog. She’d been in love with the fantasy of having one. According to the books,
dogs seemed to be the most fun of the animals to play with.

Cats seemed good, too, but Rosemary
had wanted a dog more. She’d known that she would never have one, and she thought
the closest she would get to that daydream would be an encounter with a zombie
dog, and she would have to kill it, and, if she didn’t, it would kill her.

Now, her recollection of that fantasy was
sickening. It seemed somehow disgusting that she’d ever entertained the idea in
the first place. There were no dogs, not anymore. It was wrong to keep thinking
about it, unhealthy.

The room was sparsely furnished. It
was lit by the light of a lamp that was too small to do much good, whose shade
had gone missing long ago and rotted away in an unknown somewhere. The wire
mesh on which the shade had once sat was tarnished and bent out of shape, and
had been that way for a long time.

It was more bent out of shape than it
had been when Rosemary got it, however, because she’d dropped it twice. She knew
that it had made her mother cross with her, because she could tell those
things, but her mother hadn’t yelled or punished her.

A coloring book was on the bedside
table at the base of the lamp. The outlines in the book were scenes from fairy
tales, most of which no one had read to her, and she hadn’t read herself. She
did know about the one with the sleeping princess, but that was the only one,
and she wasn’t sure if her version of the story was correct. All the pictures
had been colored in by the time Rosemary received the book. It had been a
present from Alan for her sixth birthday.

Rosemary sometimes wondered if there
was any unfilled picture left in any coloring book in the world, or if the
pictures remained unfilled only in the memories of some of the older people,
and, when they died, there would be no unfilled pictures left anywhere, in
people’s memories or otherwise.

She sometimes wished that she could
live in the world before the virus. It seemed so wonderful: the people, the
animals, no perimeter fence, buying food at stores.
Stores.
Can you
believe that?

She could hardly imagine a world so
perfect. She’d never seen the world that way, and it made her wonder if there
was a way to travel inside another person’s memory, so that she could live in
some older person’s recollections.

If only there were a way to make the
leaves fall upward and turn green again, and to repeat the cycle until she was
in a place where the progression of the seasons hadn’t known the apocalypse’s bitter
austerity. She would stay there in that place, indefinitely, if she could.

The concept of memory had begun to
fascinate her soon after she’d received the coloring book from Alan, but she wasn’t
aware of the connection. Did people and animals and events continue to live in
memories? Or were they gone forever? Had they ever existed at all if the
memories were the only evidence that remained? Were the memories embellished or
inadequate or was it different for each memory? If the pre-apocalyptic world
did live on in people’s minds, was there a way to restore what was remembered?

They were odd, precocious thoughts,
stirred in her by a world that made its children grow up far too quickly.

She spent a few minutes standing by
the bedside table and trying to imagine what it would be like to have this
night in her distant past. She was moving her perception of her life forward in
time, until what she’d done tonight was so far away that she could no longer
feel the gun’s weight in her hand, or its recoil, or hear the muffled shots or the
sounds made by the thing that had once been alive, or feel the sting of the
burning rot in her nostrils and taste its sour and acrid flavor in her mouth,
or its stabs deep in her seizing lungs.

She wanted to forget, and realized
that she probably never would. She sat down on the floor and leaned her right
side against the bedside table and her back against the bed. Her clothes
smelled like the burning corpse, and she could still taste the hot air that had
risen up to her from the fire. She knew that she should shower, but she didn’t
have the strength, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to, either.

Maybe if she drew the feelings in even
closer, if there was any nearer for them to get, this evening would more
quickly become a distant memory, grey and faded and odorless, like pulling back
a string on a bow and letting your arrow fly.

Familiar noises were filtering up
through the floor, the sounds of her mother tidying up. Elizabeth cleaned when
she was nervous, and that was a lot of the time, so the house was immaculate. On
a normal night, she would have been able to sleep with Tom out on patrol, but
worrying about both him and Rosemary had wound her up too much to go to bed.

Feeling slightly comforted by her
mother’s movements downstairs, Rosemary got up, pushed the curtain aside, and
looked out the window. Seeming to be keeping their distance from the moon,
there were patches of velvet in the sky where the stars’ glimmers couldn’t
reach.

She frowned as she squinted into the
darkness. The clouds looked stupidly happy—that was the only way she could
think of to describe it—they were fat, fluffy, and unhurried, as if they were
strolling leisurely across the sky, without a care in the world. Rosemary
pressed her lips into a thin line, and thought of Senna and Alan.

A cloud, the happiest looking of all, was
on a course to collide with one of the velvet spots in the night, the darkest
Rosemary could see. She stared at it for a moment, unable to imagine a blacker
dark, then looked away and closed the curtain.

What would happen when they met? Would
the cloud be sucked into the darkness, caught by an unseen vortex and absorbed,
spinning, into nothingness? She didn’t want to see it.

She took a deep breath, exhaled
slowly, bit her lip, took one more deep breath, and got in bed with her clothes
on. After pulling the comforter, which was a lesson in patchwork and tatter,
over her, she turned out the lamp.

Her asthma wasn’t too bad right now,
just a bit of trouble catching her breath, which was normal for her. It was a
lot better than it had been at the fence, and even that was nothing compared to
how it sometimes got in the spring when the air was thick with pollen.

Closing her eyes and pushing her face into
the worn pillow’s rough surface, she began to cry silently. What passed for a
pillow on her bed was a flattened relic, more like a drab towel. As she wept quietly
into it, the feelings and smells that had come home with her from the fence
gathered in around her, seeing how close they could get, knowing that she
didn’t understand what they were, and knowing that she knew that, too.

12

Rosemary dreamt her usual dream that night. She was sitting in the shade of an
old barn—channeling the past life of the blown-down barn on the way to Senna
and Alan’s house, perhaps—listening to a fenced-in herd of cows low.

They were lowing and chewing on grass
and swatting at flies with their tails and tromping about and lowing some more.

They were nice cows, pretty and
colorful, with wonderful brown and black and white spots, and quite happy in
their sun-drenched chewing and lowing, in spite of the tail-flicking that was
required. But maybe that didn’t faze cows. It probably didn’t, her dream-self
decided.

It wasn’t like she’d ever heard a cow
moo in real life, but this was how she imagined cows lived and breathed based
on what she’d heard from the adults. There were some movies lying around New
Crozet that she could’ve watched for a more realistic portrayal, but neither
her parents nor Senna and Alan had watched them with her yet. They were holding
off until she got older, so that the stark differences between pre-outbreak and
post-outbreak life would be easier for her to process.

She was just sitting there in her
dream, watching them and listening to their cow jibber-jabber. They were
hemming and hawing, she could tell, that much was obvious. Maybe this and maybe
that. She liked that kind of talk, the sort that went in circles around and
around and around the answer without touching it.

That way the cows could talk for much
longer than if they just spat the answer right out along with their happily
green cud. But what would be the point of that? Cud was only digested partway,
and therefore required further chewing, and the hem and haw tactic was
conducive to just that. There was plenty of time and nothing to rush for,
anyway.

The world was perfectly at ease with it,
and her and the cows in it.

A precise and swift breeze made its
way through the bovine enclosure, perking up the ears of one cow and disturbing
the hair of a cow tail that was just recoiling from a well-timed horsefly whip.
The horsefly was falling, dazed but still alive, and would resume its flight in
just a moment.

The breath of wind dipped under the
lowest rail of fence and rippled through the grass until it found its target: a
dandelion whose florets were aching to be set free. The wind inhaled and blew
to lend a refresher of strength to its fighter jets, and the feathery dandelion
parts were let loose to fly and parachute down somewhere, hopefully far, far
away, somewhere that, should they find luck in the wind, would become home.

A feathery parachute reached Rosemary,
landing softly on the back of her hand.

She was home here, in this dream
unreality with the cows. This was a place where animals lived and breathed and
had homes to go back to and when they did there was no virus to greet them at
their doorsteps.

If she’d been aware that she was
sitting in a dream, she’d have wished not to wake.

She heard a new sound then: the
singing of birds—there was often a smattering of feathered friends in her
dreams too, also imagined when it came to their proper sounds and movements—but
she hadn’t noticed them until that moment.

They’d been sitting in the branches of
the two tall oaks beside the barn the entire time, and the dream’s magic let
her know that. Now they took flight from their posts, and croaked and warbled
all the way home.