Order of the Dead (48 page)

PART FOUR

Prophecy

“Senna, be my woman, my wife, my everything.

I want to spend the rest of my life
with you…I love you so, so much.”

Alan Rice, former rec-crew cleaner, citizen of New Crozet,

rehearsing his engagement speech,
which he could never get to sound quite right.

1

Rosemary’s eyes were wide with horror as Acrisius reached for her mouth. She screamed,
and the sound that came through the gag—a crude strip of towel that had been
stuffed into her mouth—was a muted nothing that sounded pathetic to her own
ears.

She strained to open her mouth wider
so that his fingers wouldn’t touch her, and only one did, brushing against the
inside of her lip as he pulled the rag out. She screamed again, and this time
the sound came through, shrill, loud, and full of terror.

“Now, now, Rosemary,” Brother Mardu
said. “Don’t you go playing that tune because there’s no one around to keep the
beat. Know what I mean? Why don’t you just go ahead and calm down?”

The semi-paralytic was holding a knife
in one hand and his other hand was balled up in a loose fist, palm facing up,
like he had something hidden there and was being careful not to drop it. His
face, as always, was a half-working mask of anger and hatred, a contorted
visage that seemed to always be trying to express some internal malignancy, and
with great success at that. Mardu was standing next to him.

She screamed again, struggling against
the ropes that were binding her to the chair. It was the same chair that Jack
had sat in earlier that day, the same chair he’d been in when they… Her mind
revolted at the thought of what was about to happen to her, of what they were
about to do to her, and she dry-heaved.

“You’re hurting yourself, Rosemary,”
Mardu said. “Please try to relax.”

A moment later Brother Mardu must have
experienced a mental misfire, because he suddenly wanted to stop all of this,
and to tell Rosemary it was going to be okay, and that she could be okay on her
own, that she could make something of herself without anyone’s help. She was so
young, and beautiful, and terrified, and for some reason that made him think of
potential, the limitless kind. The churning of second thoughts began to show on
his face.

“Are you…” he began. And that was all
he said before stopping himself.

Rosemary looked through the blur
screen of her tears at Mardu and saw something in his expression that didn’t
belong there. It was a disquiet she thought she recognized because she imagined
that was how she herself looked on the nights when she couldn’t sleep and spent
the early hours of the morning trying to squeeze from her mind an answer for
why this was to be her lot, why this was the life she had to live. He was obviously
upset, in spite of his words, and in an abrupt and unwelcome turn of emotion,
she felt sorry for him.

She looked down, feeling inexplicably
ashamed, and anger began to simmer inside her at the thought that this man, the
leader of the cannibals who’d killed Jack and who was going to kill her and
Senna and Rad and Molly and Jenny and Sasha and who knew who else, could make
her feel this way.

How on Earth could she feel bad for
him?

Acrisius’s expression was so different
from Brother Mardu’s that it looked like the two men belonged to different
species. There was nothing close to compassion in Acrisius’s face, only contempt
and…pleasure, the contempt directed at her, and the pleasure seemingly derived
from her condition.

She stared at the knife and the sallow
thing that Acrisius was holding clutched in the gloved, gnarled claw of his
fist—his bad side, or his paralyzed side rather, because he didn’t seem to have
any part that wasn’t bad, only different degrees of it. As he moved closer,
Rosemary’s eyes went wide.

Horror and comprehension sat down next
to each other in her brain and strapped themselves in. They were in it for the
long haul now.

2

In that moment she knew exactly what was about to happen to her, and all she
could think was: where had the virus come from? Where was the missing coloring
book that showed its origins? There were so many blank spaces that needed to be
filled in. Where was it from, and am I about to find out?

She’d asked the adults about it a lot,
but she’d never gotten a real good answer. Did they really not know? How could
something like the virus have come out of nowhere? There had to have been
signs, or clues about where it came from, or something. And there was something
else filtering into her thoughts now. It was that word she sometimes caught the
adults saying, though less and less over the years. Something like… Kro… Kro…
Something.

“Wait,” Rosemary said, the steadiness
of her voice surprising her, “I have a question. Just one last question,
please.”

Acrisius frowned, then grinned,
revealing a mouthful of teeth speckled with rot. The knife and what Rosemary
understood to be a sliver of zombie meat stopped their progress toward her.

“Well?” he said. “Get it out of your
system…while you can.”

Rosemary swallowed. “Where does the
virus come from?”

Acrisius raised his eyebrows and
looked pleased. “A wonderful question. A
smart
question. How old are
you?”

“Nine.”

Licking his lips, Acrisius said, “The
virus, little girl, is God.”

Rosemary didn’t follow this. God was
largely a foreign concept to her, devoid of religion as the post-apocalyptic
world she’d grown up in was. She’d heard of God, and had a vague idea of a
benevolent supreme being who lived in the sky and controlled everything, but
the notion seemed utterly preposterous to her.

There was almost no good in this
world, only suffering and death. If a compassionate and all-powerful being
truly did exist, he wouldn’t allow for that. Therefore, no God.
Quod erat
demonstrandum.

But what this man was saying made no
sense in that context at all. The virus was pure evil, and he was saying that
it was God?

“God?” she said. “But it kills, it
killed most of the world.”

“That is its will.”

Acrisius leaned closer.

“Wait,” Rosemary said, her voice
quavering. “If you keep doing this, there won’t be any people left.”

“If that’s what the virus wants,” Brother
Acrisius said, “so be it. We’re chasing Equilibrium Day, and we know we might
not live to see it. It might come when we’re all gone. It’s all up to the
virus, to God.”

Rosemary looked at Mardu, who seemed
happy to let his henchman answer all the questions. Mardu nodded, in apparent
agreement with the words that had been spoken.

Then Acrisius made his move. Using his
good hand, he roughly pulled up Rosemary’s shirtsleeve, exposing her upper arm.
He stared at her smooth skin, licking his lips again, then ran the tip of the
knife lightly from the inside of her elbow to the outer tip of her shoulder.
The blade lifted off a fine layer of cells, leaving a faint trail of red behind
it.

That didn’t help Rosemary’s breathing.
No, on the contrary, it made it get all messed up again. Her lungs began to
seize, and, at this rate, she’d be dead before they could do anything to her.
The way it felt right now, she didn’t think she’d be able to calm herself again
in time before her body closed up its own airways and asphyxiated. She’d come
to in the chair, after the last attack, which she’d truly thought would kill
her, but the beginning stages of that one hadn’t been like this.

After almost two minutes of full-body
convulsions, which the men who were holding her captive seemed to enjoy, or, if
not enjoy, wonder at, because they certainly didn’t offer to help, she was
proved wrong when her breaths began to connect again, and her body’s defective flow
meters and transport systems seemed to clear completely.

It was a rare feeling, and she wanted more
of it, to get to know it and live with it, but she had a sense that she wouldn’t
get the chance. Per the universe’s irony, she’d been scheduled to finally
outgrow her asthma today.

3

“Wait, wait,” Rosemary said, no longer able to quell the panic in her voice.
“What about you? You should be infecting yourself if you really think spreading
the virus is what God wants.”

“You really are a smart girl,” Brother
Acrisius said, “very smart. But if we infect ourselves, there’ll be no one left
to spread the virus. The humans outside the Order sure aren’t doing it. We
serve the virus, and we do so best by remaining uninfected. However, if it is
God’s will that I should be infected, I will readily submit.”

“Please,” she said, squeezing the
words between the tears, “will you tell me something, anything, about the rest
of the world, the things that you’ve seen? I want to know. Please. I need to
know.”

It was a senseless thing to ask for
now, but no more senseless than what the Order was doing to her. She began,
ever so faintly, to wail.

Brother Mardu, who suddenly felt like
he was Maris, or whoever the fuck he’d been before he was
Yooooo
Maurice
of
The Destroyaz,
stared at the girl. His mouth dropped open, and for
the first time since his own childhood, he felt the separation from his family,
and a longing for his parents, his real family, none of whom he’d known, but
all of whom were for certain long dead.

There was a flash, an instant when he
wanted to scoop Rosemary up and tell her that everything was going to be okay,
that he would take her away from this and she would grow up and find love and
be at peace in the world. He opened his mouth, but no words came.

He took half a step forward, then
stopped and turned his back on her. There came a gurgling from deep inside him,
followed by a feeling of breathlessness: Mardu’s palm touched down on the wick
of Maris’s candle, and Maris was gone. Finally gone. And now that the weakling
was out of the picture, it was time for Brother Mardu to get the rest of his power
back.

“I’ll do this myself,” he said, and
snatched the knife from Brother Acrisius, who Mardu now found even more
loathsome than usual, unfit to be a right-hand man. The too-weak walking
pustule nodded and stepped backward—no,
crawled
backward—retreating into
a corner.

Not a man at all, Mardu thought, but a
column of bile that needs to be thrown up. First things first. Give the child
to the virus, then clean up the ranks.

He pressed the flat part of the blade
against Rosemary’s skin and ran the knife up and down her arm. Red lines that
were slightly raised were cropping up on her skin and spotting with blood at
points.

More of the color left Rosemary’s
face. Was he actually
enjoying
this, or just trying to? She searched
Brother Mardu’s chiseled features for a sign of human emotion, but there was
nothing there.

She went into her head and began to
grasp at straws. At first she couldn’t think of anything, but then she grabbed
hold of a straw, an infected one as it were, and asked, “What about Krokodil?”

Mardu frowned, and the pressure of the
blade on Rosemary’s skin lessened. It lingered there, indecisive, as if it had
suddenly forgotten what it was supposed to do next. Mardu glanced up from
Rosemary at the standing pimple in the corner and saw Brother Acrisius’s eyes darken.
He wanted to put his thumbs in those eyes and force all the pus out the other
holes. Acrisius must have seen something in Brother Mardu’s glare, because he
raised his eyebrows fearfully, pushing a grey pustule on his forehead upward, and
looked away quickly.

I’m going to kill him, Mardu decided.
That was the way to get more of the mojo back—killing his number one dude, his
favorite, his confidante. That would overflow the Order’s fear bucket with all
the required bodily expulsions.

The idea of eating the half-paralytic
disgusted him, but killing him he could do. Brother Saul would have to get over
it, or he too would die. The killing mood had struck him, and taken him fully
into its fleshy folds.

Encouraged by the effect her words had
had on the men, Rosemary went on, barely able to control the shaking of her
voice. “Isn’t that where the virus comes from? Not from God, but from that
drug? It’s not God, it’s a disease, from Krokodil?”

Brother Mardu snarled. “Clever girl,”
he said, the disgust in his tone plain. But who or what was he disgusted with? Everything,
nothing, it didn’t matter. All he knew was that the viral sprite who was
supposed to live on his shoulder was gone, and all her wonderful urging too,
snapped shut into the folding chair she’d carried off when she left.

And now it was all left up to him. He
felt like he was on his own, and probably for good. Had his failure to persuade
Senna been the final straw? Perhaps, and no matter. He could do it on his own,
he told himself, and, virus damn it, he would.

4

It felt—to all of them at the same time—as if they were in a space capsule
hurtling toward something cataclysmic, some sort of collision, with an asteroid
perhaps, or a meteor, or the sun itself. They all looked at one another: Mardu
at Acrisius, Acrisius at Rosemary, Rosemary at Mardu, and back around again.

They could all feel that it was out of
control,
this,
all they were doing, everything was suddenly out of
reach. Their microcosm of the universe had undergone an abrupt expansion and
had gone past the point of no return.

They kept looking at one another in
the same sequence, as if they were stuck on repeat, until Brother Mardu broke
the spell, and, when he spoke, the room seemed to shrink all at once, like an
aluminum can being crumpled in a giant’s fist. Each of them felt it some, but
Rosemary most of all.

“You’ve heard the grownups talk about
it, right?” He shook his head and smiled ruefully. “I’ll answer your question,
briefly.
It is your
last
request.”

At the utterance of the word ‘last,’
Rosemary’s skin grew very, very cold.

“Everything moves in a sort of order,”
Brother Mardu began. “And a certain series of events had to happen before the
virus could make its move. It needed time to sow its seeds and to grow, to
change, until it was strong enough to attack and take everything. It was an
all-or-nothing strike, no prisoners, and no chance of a truce. So it waited
until it had everything it needed.”

He looked at Rosemary. She said
nothing.

Ginny Lloyd, the recluse and ill-fated
journalist, would have had a great time talking to Rosemary, and would have
found her own anxiety at epically low levels if she’d had a chance to be around
the girl. Rosemary could’ve charmed the pants off a rattlesnake—not that Ginny
was a serpent, just shy—but she couldn’t reach Brothers Mardu and Acrisius.
They were more than dangerous, they were wicked puppets suspended by foul
strings, the virus holding their manipulator, because what they’d preached for
all these years had become true over time: they did belong to the virus, and it
was their ultimate master.

Then the wooden rod holding them
moved, and they responded with delayed and clumsy movements that would have
made the most inept marionette’s cheeks redden with shame.