Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  54

  Now, in New Crozet, Alan was happy to do his part, no, more than happy, he was thrilled. He worked hard, harder than most, although he always thought he could work more, in the hope of…something.

  At first it had been the notion of setting up what was left of the survivors to one day retake what the virus had stolen. It had been a fleeting hope, and he found that his faith in the restoration of the world waned with each passing day, and with each passing market when fewer and fewer traders showed up, and with less diversity of produce every time.

  Yet, in spite of that, he still worked to feed and fortify the town, to educate its few children, and above all else, to defend it and his fellow townspeople from all manner of threats, whether from the zombies, the living, or otherwise. The town and its dwindling population and diminishing resources were all he had left.

  As far as he was concerned, the town was the last living body in the world, and they were all fighting to keep it hovering out of hellfire’s reach, like something being roasted on a spit that was too high, smoked and perhaps a bit charred by the lapping flames but not consumed by them. The hope he’d had of any of New Crozet’s number retaking the world was still there, buried somewhere not quite too deep yet, but working toward the survival of New Crozet was more than good enough, whether or not they’d ever be able to take back the world.

  To Alan, life mattered, and so long as he could make life better in New Crozet, even if no one would ever be able to leave the town and if the townspeople died out there, that full shelf life was worth toiling for.

  You could try to convince him, as his mood sometimes tried when it took dips in the pools of his memories, that it was all pointless, that he was stupid not to go outside and give himself to the virus, but he wouldn’t listen. He would say that he could never give up, and never would, and that so long as his body could work, that’s what he’d do.

  It wasn’t just the New Crozet Kool-Aid, either. He had Senna, remember? So he had reason to be optimistic. They were childless, but he wasn’t alone.

  And they weren’t really childless, either. The town had kids, and he found that, surprise, surprise, he liked them. He liked talking to them and getting a sense of how they looked at the world, and teaching them what he knew, which he considered to be little, but from a survival perspective, was much.

  If, God forbid, something happened to Senna, he’d still have them to watch over, and the town, and over the years that had all become his calling, and he felt honored to have that as his life’s work, even though the circumstances were what they were. Ya gotta make the most of it, right?

  55

  The fact was, the virus had spread so quickly that noting its progress in the people around you had been irrelevant. The rising waters of the infected sea had drowned the world in a matter of days. A flood of zombies and no ark. That was the outbreak. That was the reality of zero day.

  All that there had been left to do at that point was run and hide, assuming you were still capable of either. There was no fighting it, not then, and as it turned out, not later.

  After some semblance of stability had been found, the survivors began to work at understanding the virus and the zombies, how they ticked, and how they might be destroyed. You had to know your enemy if you were ever to overcome it, right? Love your enemy and all that junk.

  In the case of the virus and its zombies, that approach hadn’t worked at all.

  The crews’ efforts had resulted in great losses of life, and what had it all been for? The virus still had the run of the world outside the…refuges, and the chances of the human population’s rebound had been cut almost entirely out of the world by the crews’ self-imposed culling. Rather than trying to fight, what the rec-crews should’ve been doing was building more settlements, and keeping people in them. But hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

  New Crozet was a nice cage for the survivors to be squirreled away in waiting for death, one of the better ones as far as post-apocalyptic life went, that was for sure, and the company wasn’t too bad, either.

  Heck, as far as Alan was concerned, the people were some of the best he’d known in his life, but then he’d spent most of his time before the outbreak interacting with other lawyers, so, if you asked him, the bar had been set low. Too low for even the most limber to limbo under, in point of fact.

  As he stared at the screen, he found that his mind was again pushing up against the idea of a zombie, revolting against it. He’d spent years running from them, killing them, and now living in a settlement designed to keep them out, but the idea that one could exist still seemed to have a foot firmly within unreality.

  It wasn’t just a disease, but something that took your soul. If it could keep using your body after you died, it had to be more than a virus. How could something born of nature do that, unless it was the earth’s malice itself, or an evil engineered by man, or a toxic mixture of the two?

  No, he thought, not malice, but balance: the righting of wrongs and the putting back of order. As far-reaching as the annihilation of God’s creatures had been, it was hard not to look at the virus as a punishment sent down by a higher power, perhaps even by God. Whether or not it was didn’t matter. It might as well have been.

  56

  In the video, the woman’s vital functions had stopped. On the table, the oatmeal in Alan’s bowl was now cold.

  He closed out of the video, having to hit the touchpad several times before it reacted. What he’d just watched had depressed him thoroughly, as usual, and yet he kept doing this to himself for some reason, as if he expected to one day find something different in the videos, something with meaning to it. Maybe that something would explain what they’d all done wrong, what acts had earned this, what that poor woman had done to end up the way she had. He sighed.

  Just being alive at the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess, he thought. Just like everything else in life.

  In an apparent effort to cheer him up, his mind flipped like a pancake and revealed a perfectly crisped circle, which was made up of recollections of what it had been like to meet Senna for the first time.

  Alan’s rec-crew had merged with Senna’s three years after the outbreak. By then they were veterans of their respective crews, having outlived most of the original members.

  All the crews throughout the country had atrophied over time, consistently losing more members than they gained. When their crews combined to offset the loss of life that each crew had sustained, the resulting larger group was still smaller than the original size of either. They were coming together to have a better shot at completing their mission, but by that point most everyone had turned pessimistic.

  Zombie-ridding had proven not to be in the world’s cards, and that was that. Morale was at an all-time low.

  The spotters and cleaners were becoming careless, and the rate of attrition was growing. And who could blame them? Why not go off into the woods and die? Or into the skeleton of a human city…and die?

  There was some honor in that, going off and dying alone, even if it meant abandoning your crew. That was how the cleaners and spotters all felt by that point. There was no anger, no hatred directed at those who left. It was what it was, and those who left were often envied for their courage to go off on their own.

  With the mounting fatalities and desertions, spirits on the crews were plunging into the murky depths. There were some holdouts, of course, like Senna and Alan, who kept on chugging—Senna because she was stubborn as an ox and drank the reclamation Kool-Aid, and Alan because he thought there was nothing left worthwhile to live for.

  To him, it was better to die fighting with the last of the humans, or even to be the last of the fighting humans, than to go off and starve peacefully to death in an abandoned house where the memories of strangers would watch you shrivel up until you croaked. That this scenario was comforting to most, like a desert mirage, should tell you what the state of things was then.

  It wasn’t even remotely realistic. Mos
t who left the crews died within days, picked off by zombies or outlaws, or ending their own misery when they were denied entry to a settlement, or if they’d gone far enough to see what was left of the old cities, when they saw the remains of what had been called civilization.

  The combined crew was two weeks old before Senna and Alan first said hello to each other. When they did it was perfunctory and militaristic, even though neither of the two had had formal military training. People on the crews learned quickly that growing close with one another was to be avoided. It was easier to lose an acquaintance than a friend.

  But there was something in the air between Senna and Alan, that unquantifiable thing that they tried to ignore but couldn’t. They found themselves spending more and more time together, working side by side, and looking out for each other.

  They had few conversations in the first few months of their romance, opting for their bodies to do all the talking. The way they looked at each other was enough. When they were close, whether it was walking or hiding or sleeping side by side, and whether deep in the forest or in a city overrun by zombies, their eyes were alight with passion. They’d given each other a purpose once more, had rekindled a dormant lust for life, even the abbreviated and dangerous kind they were leading.

  57

  They began to sleep together, and then to talk, and before long they were trying to learn as much about each other as possible, in spite of the likely emotional consequences that came with getting too close to someone in the post-apocalypse.

  Senna had surprised herself with how much she liked Alan. She couldn’t help but be affectionate toward him when he was around.

  She’d never been like that before, but when he was there, she wanted to be touching him all the time, even if it was just holding his hand or lying on him. He made her feel happy and warm and serene and playful all at the same time, and she couldn’t get enough of him.

  Alan put on the next video, which offered a flickering scene of something like two dozen zombies in a room, engaged in semi-dormant wandering.

  He turned it off.

  He knew it by heart anyway, their aimless shambling this way and that in the six hundred square foot cell...until the induced break, and then they went absolutely fucking wild. But all in the same exact way.

  Their movements were all so similar and repetitive, like they were all part of the same organism, or copies of the same thing…no, they were all products of the same program. That was right.

  They were at the end of the viral assembly line. They came in different shapes and sizes, but they were all the same.

  Fractals, he thought. Fucking fractals.

  That’s how Senna described the zombies sometimes, although she didn’t talk about that much anymore. They were all one big fractal, or they were fractals, or something like that.

  Before the outbreak, in her other life, she’d been a teacher, and she’d done a class about fractals. The kids had loved it, especially the part about snowflakes. They’d been fascinated by snowflakes. That’s how Senna had told it to him a few times, at least.

  They were second graders.

  And there was that. He pushed it out of his mind.

  No need to relive Senna’s suffering, she’d done enough of that for several lifetimes. He suddenly felt very sad for her, and horrible for making her go to bed alone while he stared at these videos.

  This was the last time, he decided. No more. He closed the laptop, whose joints were now rickety and a third of whose buttons no longer worked, and took it to a closet off the foyer. There he stuffed it, along with its power cable, into a duffel, zipped up the bag, and put another bag on top of it. No more.

  Had it been six years earlier, he would’ve kept the laptop out after watching all the videos, to check the internet. He would’ve found on that day, as he had, after three years of successfully logging on after entering New Crozet, that there was nothing left to log on to.

  The green servers, running on solar power, were offline, or he could no longer connect to them. No one in town could anymore. The settlements had been using the web to police local trade, and to give each other updates on the state of the virus throughout the world, the worst of the updates being grim, in the case of new loss of life or evidence of another mutation, and the best updates had been no news at all.

  Apparently the green servers had needed some tender love and care after all. Or perhaps they’d been tampered with.

  Perhaps it didn’t matter. The standards for trader licensing was set, and enough information had been exchanged so that all the settlements knew where the rest were.

  The World Wide Web blew away, and the communication that went from there was carried by the traders. It was much of the same, and, fortunately, the ‘no news is good news’ phenomenon had ruled the day.

  People had gone on living, dying off slowly, and the virus hadn’t made any new inroads, except perhaps with respect to the outlaws, slavers, and cannibals who lived outside the settlements, and good riddance if that was the case. There hadn’t been much virtual chit-chat between the settlements, anyway. There was little left to say, and the word that came with the traders was plenty.

  Brother Mardu had had a hand in taking down the net, but no one in New Crozet would ever find out about that. Senna would come close, though she wouldn’t learn of it either.

  58

  The internet was nowhere near as important as the fence, and power, and the guns they’d stockpiled. Electricity was still trickling through the grid, for now, thanks in large part to the work that Senna and Alan had done on the rec-crews—part of their task was to keep the flow liquid—and the work they’d done after joining New Crozet to update and improve the lines both inside and outside the town.

  A lot of that had been severing the grid’s unneeded limbs and cauterizing the wounds. The simpler the grid, the less could go wrong.

  Of course the infrastructure was going to lapse, sooner or later. The reserves of coal would run out, the few wind turbines that were still spinning and hooked into live electrical collection would fall over, the hydroelectric dams would rupture in spectacular breaches seen by few if any humans, but perhaps attended by a great many zombies. Maybe the noise would draw the zombie equivalent of a cheer from them—perish the thought…

  Some settlements had their own power sources, scant though they were. Even New Crozet had some: a residential windmill and semi-functional rooftop solar panels on top of two houses, one owned by Chase Ham and the other by Betty Jane Oswalt.

  Chase Ham was half a measure too rotund to climb a ladder to maintain the panels on his roof, and Betty Jane was too old to see to the upkeep on hers, so Alan and Walter Brickley took turns washing down the panels and repairing the wires as needed. There was sometimes talk of expanding the town’s freestanding power facilities, which meant the construction of another windmill, because New Crozet didn’t have the equipment or know-how to build solar panels, but no one ever got around to it in an organized way except Walter Brickley.

  Walter was fifty-eight, a corn farmer and windmill tinkerer in New Crozet, and a landscape architect in his prior life. The town’s second windmill had been a pet project of his for some years, but no more progress could be made on it without trips outside the perimeter to salvage materials, and that was out of the question. The town’s general attitude about what would be done when the electricity stopped flowing was: we’ll make do...so long as we keep up with plumbing and drainage, but that was easier, because it could be managed from inside a settlement.

  It wasn’t too cold in the winters, or too hot in the summers, and electricity wasn’t used for much besides lighting at night and heating in the winters. If the citizens of New Crozet could live in a zombie-infested world, applying extra layers of blankets in the winter and going to bed at sunset would be trivial, like scuff marks on a shoe with no sole or laces, if you were somehow using it in that state, as a lampshade perhaps, the scuffs wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, they could give it some mor
e character.

  He went back to the kitchen, put his hands on the counter next to the stove, and let his body settle down into a lean. He thought of what he had here, what they’d built, and it was hard not to think about the future. It was always hard. What was next?

  The past was easier, there was no uncertainty there. Because it was done. After they’d met and gotten to know each other, but before they decided to run off together, life had suddenly become precious again, something they actually cared about, and they’d wanted to extend and preserve what was left of it. Remaining on the crews wasn’t the right recipe for that. He stood thinking about how they’d gotten away. He felt like he’d stolen her away for himself, but really they’d stolen each other.

  When they left, their crew was losing several people every week. People died on raids, or disappeared in the middle of the night without warning. Senna and Alan said a few carefully-chosen goodbyes, and then made their own disappearance. They had an idea of where they were going, but neither cared much where they went so long as they were together.

  From the moment he’d lain eyes on Senna, Alan had wanted to put her over his shoulder and carry her off into the forest, and when they left the crew, he got his wish.

  Senna wouldn’t tell Alan until they’d been in New Crozet for some months, but ever since she’d met him, there had been a voice whispering to her in her mind: “Go with him, go with him. He’s the one to run away with, the one to follow.”

  59

  They set their course for a small settlement in Virginia, which Alan had passed during his active time with his crew. It was one of the smallest settlements in the country, and Senna and Alan both wanted to go somewhere as small as possible, somewhere quiet.

  They wanted to build a life together. It didn’t matter where, even if they couldn’t gain entrance to any settlement and had to stay in the forest with the zombies. All that mattered was that they would live and die together, side by side, taking on all of the world and all that it threw at them.