Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  He turned to Jack, whose rosy cheeks were brighter in the cool morning air. “What do you want to know?” The sharp smell of onion wafted up at Alan and he felt a familiar tugging behind his eyes. He took half a step backward.

  Sasha smiled shyly up at him, and looked from him, to her half-brother, to Senna, and back around again.

  “What were the crews like?” Jack asked with a gleam of delight in his eyes.

  The boy had always been curious about life right after the outbreak, back when the survivors still thought the world could be reclaimed, back when that notion hadn’t been proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, to be wrong.

  21

  “The teams,” Alan said, nodding. He stifled a yawn. It wasn’t his favorite topic in the world, but it was good for the kids to know—no, not good, necessary.

  He glanced at Senna and half-smiled. “It’s times like these I could really use a cup of coffee.”

  She nodded. “Me too. Can I make you some substitute?”

  “No thanks.” If he never drank another chicory-based beverage again for the rest of his life, it would be too soon. The watered-down flavor without a caffeine jolt behind it made the drink worthless.

  “What about you?” Senna asked. “Sasha, Jack, would you like something hot to drink?”

  The children shook their heads. Apparently they weren’t big fans of the coffee substitute either.

  “Sorry Jack,” Alan said, “I’m just a bit sleepy this morning. The teams were put together to get rid of the virus, so that we could all move back into the open. That meant that people had to go out there—” he gestured in the direction of the gate, “—there weren’t as many settlements back then anyway, not ones secured like this—and take on the zombies.”

  Jack nodded excitedly. Sasha was watching him, taking cues and feeding off his eagerness.

  “The teams usually had four to six spotters and twenty to thirty cleaners,” Alan said. “Cleaners, like me, were basically the foot soldiers of the post-apocalyptic restoration work.”

  “What?” Jack said.

  “Sorry, we were the rank and file soldiers of the rec-crews, the reclamation crews. It was our job to attract, kill, and burn the zombies.”

  Jack’s eyes lit up happily and he grinned.

  “The spotters,” Alan said, “like Senna—”

  “Wait,” Jack said, interrupting, “tell me some more about the fires.”

  Alan looked at the boy.

  “Please,” Jack said.

  Nodding, Alan said, “Sure.”

  After a pause, he began again. “We worked together with the spotters to set traps for the zombies, luring a lot of them to one place. Once they were there, assuming we still had them dormant or semi-dormant, before they bro—reactivated, or woke up, all the way, we set off explosives that took out most of them, and then we’d go in to find the rest. After they were all gone, we burned them to get rid of the virus, using flamethrowers a lot bigger than mine.”

  Jack’s eyes glimmered. “Bigger than Allie, than Allie the Voltaire?”

  Looking frightened, Sasha sidled up closer to Jack.

  Alan nodded, his expression growing somber. His Voltaire II was named after a fallen member of the crews.

  Allie the thrower was a precision weapon, unlike the massive flamethrowers that were used to burn zombies en masse. Those flamethrowers had to be rolled in on treads, because they were too heavy to be carried.

  Allie the person had been a diminutive woman, shorter than Senna, and with a slighter bone structure. She’d been almost as good a spotter as Senna.

  Almost.

  And that day flashed into Alan’s mind as if he were watching the events unroll on a movie reel set at fast forward. There were holes and burnouts in the playback, as in all memory, but the major plot points were intact.

  Ten years had gone by, and now that it was playing again, Alan knew he’d have to let it have its way, unrolling itself in his head. If he could just cut off the last few inches of the reel, just the moment when they were all paying their respects, if he could just not see that piece of the replay, it would be a good day.

  Twenty-two months after the outbreak, Alan’s team had been doing a routine sweep of several acres of forest before it set the day’s trap, and Allie was spotting from a northeastern position. It was late fall, and the ground was covered with thick mats of leaves.

  She was leaving her spotting post and was about to signal the all-clear when the ground shifted beneath her feet and her legs sank into a mass of bony limbs. Hands began to claw at her, trying to get through her layered clothing and body armor, working to get their owners’ mouths closer to her flesh. Struggling to get out of the pit, she threw elbows, drew her knife, stabbed, and twisted away from them. She managed to free herself and get out of the hole—that’s how good she was at knowing and responding to their movements. She looked down and saw hands, gnarled by rot, reaching up out of the wet, overturned leaves.

  Somehow, by some miracle, they still hadn’t broken, but that was about to change.

  Suddenly Allie felt a dull ache in the back of her head. Her legs became unsteady. The trees around her seemed to spin, their half-naked branches keeping balance like oversized, knotty tops.

  The movement coming from the pit accelerated sharply, and heads emerged from the hole—three of them, a man, woman, and child. They’d been dormant in a crevice formed by a massive tree root and covered by fallen leaves, and now they were struggling to get up. The adults couldn’t do it—the repeated breaks had destroyed their bodies too much—so they began to crawl toward Allie, like lizards with broken limbs flailing against the ground.

  The child did get up, though, launched himself at her, and was on her before she could draw her gun, his mouth clamping down on her arm above the elbow, teeth coated with fatal saliva tearing into uninfected human flesh.

  Allie’s pistol, whose barrel had just cleared its holster, dropped.

  She pulled a knife from her belt and plunged the blade into the boy’s temple. The pressure of his bite slackened, though he’d already been letting go, his work done. Allie stepped backward, letting the boy fall and as he went down, his teeth tore a chunk of flesh free of her arm. She spat on his corpse, picked up her gun, and shot at the zombies rapidly crawling toward her like demons just loosed from their confinement in hell.

  As she fired her weapon, the branches of the trees flailed wildly at her, mocking. Her first two shots missed, the third hit one of the crawlers in the thigh.

  She aimed again, trying to steady the gun while running backward to keep some distance between her and the advancing zombies. Seconds later, a neat hole appeared in the forehead of each of her pursuers. Allie looked at her pistol in surprise; she hadn’t yet pulled the trigger again. That was when Senna and Alan appeared beside her. Senna was putting her rifle away.

  “I was already bitten,” Allie managed, “before he jumped on me. I can feel it, the disorientation, the headache.”

  Senna and Alan backed away, Senna signaling the other crew members to keep their distance.

  “They were over there,” Allie said, pointing to the pit, “hidden under the leaves.”

  Pain doubled her over and she vomited.

  Neither of them said it, but Alan and Senna could see it was the slow turn. Pure protracted pain, a drawn-out agony ending in undeath.

  “I know what’s happening to me,” Allie said, wiping spittle from her lips. Her insides felt like they were folding over on themselves. “I know what you have to do, what I would do in your place.” Her face was pale and gleaming with sweat. Then she locked eyes with Alan. “Name your thrower after me, and burn those fucking things up, every single last fucking one of them. For me.”

  Alan nodded, and a second later there was a muffled shot from Senna’s rifle, and Allie collapsed. She’d been a hero, and she’d died like so many of the others.

  Alan was the one who burned her while the crew stayed and paid their respects. Some said pr
ayers, but most said nothing. Afterward, the rec-crew was pinned in place while a wave of zombies passed them at their flank, and so they’d been forced to stay by Allie as the fire ate her away.

  The replay was almost over. There were just a few more details, ones he was trying to lop off at their roots. For the moment, the film kept rolling.

  He remembered how her hair had given up faint crackles, and the smell. He should’ve been used to it by then, and then there was that other thing that still lingered in his memory, the—

  He didn’t want to think about that now. Not right now, and not ever. He managed, thankfully and to his relief, to cut off the playback before it reached the end.

  22

  Alan looked at Jack. Was he a young version of himself? Would he have to kill and burn his friends to survive?

  It took Alan a moment to remember what they’d been talking about. Then it came back to him: his flamethrower, his Voltaire II, Allie.

  “Much larger than Allie,” he said, his voice a whisper. “But lacking her precision.” He sighed. “The ones that we used for the big fires, one man couldn’t handle a weapon like that by himself. Two or three of us had to hold it steady on its treads, and another would pull the trigger. Great sheets of flame would pour out of it, incinerating the carcasses, and banishing the virus to hell.”

  Senna looked quizzically at Alan, who was himself unsure why he’d added that flourish. He didn’t want to feed Jack’s imagination too much, or to romanticize something so terrible.

  Maybe I’m finally losing it, he thought. Maybe I lost it a long time ago.

  “Wow,” Jack said. “That’s so great.” He looked off into the distance, toward the town center, an odd smile on his face. Sasha smiled too. She looked happy again, the fear gone.

  Jack said, “You were going to say something about spotters.”

  “Right. When we were rounding up zombies into one place to blow them up, the spotters’ most important role was to warn us when the zombies we were grouping together were getting too close to breaking. If that was happening, the spotters would make the teams stop and go silent for a while, easing away, until the zombies calmed again. We’d all get into position slowly and carefully, and then we’d execute the trap.

  “After that, it was a matter of rolling out as quickly as we could, because the noise of the explosions and the burning itself would attract more zombies. That noise also let us be less quiet in our escape, giving us some cover, but we still had to be careful to avoid running into other zombies as we moved out.

  “In that sense, the spotters’ role never ended, and whenever we were moving, they’d help us pass nearby zombies unnoticed, by timing our movements and telling us when we needed to stop for a while. The way it worked, we weren’t rounding any up until we got to an area that already had a large number of them. We were focusing on spots with a lot of zombies, but of course that made it more dangerous, too.”

  He thought for a moment. “When it came to gathering zombies in the traps, it was like stirring water in a pot very fast without letting any of it pour out, and when it’s already full almost to the top. It was a very delicate process. The spotters also helped get rid of zombies, and helped the teams out of jams.”

  “Did you get in trouble a lot, with the zombies?”

  Alan nodded. “Yes. It was usually because of the large flamethrowers we had to move. Even after they were taken off wheels and put on treads, accidents happened, loud ones. Sometimes we had to abandon the things, carry off as many drums of fuel as we could by hand, and burn up the zombies manually. That was even more dangerous.”

  “What happened when things went wrong?” Jack asked.

  “We did what we were trained to do: we ran and tried to minimize loss of life.”

  Jack looked confused. “But you always got through the mission, right?”

  “Now Jack,” Senna said, stealing a glance at Sasha, who was beginning to look scared again, “we can talk more about that later. Do you remember the rules we taught you?”

  “The zombie rules?” Jack said.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you repeat them for me?”

  “All of them?”

  Senna nodded. “Yes, but you don’t have to think of it as a memory test. Think of it like this: what are the most important things you would tell someone about the virus, someone who’s never heard of it and has never seen a zombie before?”

  Jack grinned. “Like someone from another planet, an alien?”

  “Exactly,” Senna said. “And Sasha, you listen closely.”

  Sasha nodded obediently, the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

  Alan smiled, watching the exchange. Jack’s capacity for enthusiasm and Sasha’s bright-eyed cheerfulness were inspiring.

  “Okay,” Jack said. He furrowed his brow in concentration. Sasha watched his face change, and put a hand over her mouth to suppress a giggle.

  “First,” Jack said, “the virus kills someone and they die, but it keeps using their body because it needs something to infect others with. It makes them a zombie.”

  “Right,” Senna said.

  “Then,” the boy went on, “the zombie tries to bite other people and animals to make them into zombies too. But the zombies are stupid, so if we’re smart we can get away, except when they’re moving very fast, and sometimes then it’s too dangerous.”

  Sasha gasped.

  “It’s okay, Sasha,” Senna said, “we’re just going over the rules.” She turned back to Jack. It was important they get through this. “What do you mean about them being fast? Are they always fast?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, not always. First they can be slow and not really see you. But as you get closer and make more noise, they wake up, and they wake up more and more until they’re fast and chasing after you, and then you have to kill them right away, or…”

  “Right,” Senna said. “When they’re slow, they stay in a small area and don’t go too far. They’re not chasing anything yet, well…not really. But noise wakes them up, and gets them going faster and faster. When they speed up all the way…they break, and rampage. They move extremely fast after the break, and even the most experienced spotters and cleaners know to avoid a zombie that’s broken.”

  This last point was worth emphasizing, so she said it again. “Remember that, even the best spotters and cleaners will stay away from a zombie after it’s broken. They won’t try to fight it or go after it. It’s too dangerous. Run and get to a place where it can’t reach you.”

  Senna looked closely at Jack, and then at Sasha. “Now,” she said, “do you understand that no one should ever try to take on a zombie like that, one that’s broken and moving very fast?” She looked at them expectantly.

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Sasha repeated.

  “That’s really good, Jack,” Senna said. “What you should also tell your alien friend is that if he meets a zombie and it breaks, run to the nearest safety platform or indoor hiding place where you can lock yourself in. While you run, just run. Never stop and turn around to try to shoot a zombie after it breaks. Their movements are too erratic, and their speed and the changes in their speed can take you off guard.

  “Never engage. You have to keep moving and get high up or inside, somewhere that’s got locks or ladders and other obstacles they don’t deal with well. If you’re too far from a safety platform or a house but you’ve got woods, you have to get up in the trees and wait it out.”

  She wasn’t being entirely forthcoming. There had been many confrontations with broken zombies, both by choice and out of necessity, but the children didn’t need to know about that.

  23

  “How long do I have to wait?” Jack asked.

  Senna was silent for a moment, then said, “As long as it takes. They’ll go to sleep eventually and wander away. You may be able to get some clear shots in and kill them, but if you keep missing, save your bullets, and never give up your safe position
for a better shot. The way they move when they’re broken, they’re very hard to hit.”

  “That’s why you have to get them before that,” Jack said, “like you did.”

  “Yes, while being careful not to cause the break.”

  “That’s what you’re good at,” Jack said, “spotting the break before it happens, right?”

  “Something like that,” Senna said.

  “How do you do that? How do you know when they’re going to break?”

  She pursed her lips and considered how best to answer. It was hard to describe what she saw in the zombies’ movements, or what she sensed when they were around, and she knew that she never did a good job of explaining it to anyone.

  “Senna?” Jack said.

  She looked at him and realized that she’d been thinking it over for some time. Sasha was watching her and looked worried. In her hand the girl had a few layers of Jack’s onion, which she’d been peeling apart while they talked, finding layers in the layers and separating them out.

  “Well,” Senna said, “it’s like when you’re about to sneeze. Do you know that feeling you get, like your nose is all itchy on the inside?”

  Jack nodded. The expression on his face was growing more serious, and he appeared to be aware that he was receiving information that most people weren’t privy to, and that might one day save his life. Sasha, on the other hand, seemed to be absorbed entirely in the mysteries of the onion.

  “Okay, good. There’s a point when the itchiness is at its worst and you know you’re going to sneeze, or at least that it’ll be very hard not to. That’s what it’s like. The zombies begin to move differently when they’re about to break, but the changes are slight, and there’s a lot of them, and a lot of levels. Like, more and less itchy, I guess.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, “I think I get it.”

  “And how do you kill a zombie, Jack?” Senna said.

  “You have to get the brain.”

  “That’s right. A well-aimed shot, a hard strike with a blunt object, a stab, they’ll all do it.”