Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  People, she thought. Will there be any left? Is it really as bad as Fyodor-D3PO and Nikolay-Zaitsev claim? Of course, as Ginny knew well, they could have been the same person, or hardly reliable whether they were two people or one, so there was that to keep in mind.

  If they were to be believed, Russia and Ukraine were riddled with a Krokodilic gangrene. Hundreds of thousands of users had become a million, and a million had become two, and then four, and somewhere between four million three hundred thousand and four million four hundred thousand, critical mass—or rather, in this case, evolutionary mass—had been reached.

  65

  Except that none of this was in the mainstream news, far from it. She searched and searched, and while individuals on the Deep Web confirmed it, and the ones who did were in full-fledged panic mode, often prefacing their posts with farewells, words of dire warning, life lessons learned too late, etcetera, like they thought they were done in, the public faces of these countries showed nothing. It could have been a hoax perpetrated on the Deep Web, Ginny knew, but there were too many people involved, and…there were videos.

  In them were hordes of drug addicts who seemed entirely out of their heads, even for drug addicts. They were becoming violent, and, irrational, and, much, much sicker.

  The people posting the videos and writing about it were all doing so while trying to escape their respective countries, but the hordes were making the streets a place too scary to venture out into.

  Some were waiting it out, hoping the military would get control of things. That was easier hoped for than done.

  The authorities tried to sweep the addicts under the rug, usually with plumes of high pressure water, but, increasingly, with bullets, and not just the rubber kind. All of that only enraged them, and soon they were fighting back, biting back.

  And they were getting worse, and it seemed that some of those they bit, whether soldiers or just regular people like you and me, were taken in by the Krokodil madness too. It was unprecedented, unbelievable, and the most frightening thing Ginny had ever seen.

  Would the Russian and Ukrainian governments keep so much under lock and key? Would the American government keep this much from their citizenry? If a plague of these proportions really was brewing, the U.S. government was surely aware. But then why the secrecy? And what, if anything, were they doing about it?

  Was the CDC aware? When would they issue guidance? When would the President address the nation with meaningless words of hope and prayer and resilience, and perhaps with a plan of dealing with this thing and keeping Americans uninfected?

  In search of more data, she kept on scouring the internet’s pimpled underbelly, and the more she scrubbed it with her research loofa, the more pustules broke, until her hands were caked with, well, you get the picture. At that point she could deny it to herself no longer.

  It was some kind of disease or madness—somehow connected to or springing up out of Krok addiction—and it was damned real, and that blasted tack board in her head had grown flashing lights for horns and a siren for a mouth. Dratted thing.

  Five other hackers in Eastern Europe—two in Russia, and one each in Germany, Romania, and India—were confirming an internet and phone blockage, and the voluntary shutoff of the Russian media. Worse still, there was word that the disease, or whatever the right term was for what the addicts now had, had spread beyond Russian borders and into Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Mongolia.

  That was bad, really, really bad, assuming there was any disease driving the hordes of drug addicts in the first place, of course, and Ginny had no hard proof of that, at least not yet. She was about to get more than she’d ever bargained for, because that’s how these things went.

  It had been easy to connect the dots, well, relatively so, and only because of how talented she was and the experience she’d picked up over years of scouring the net and its many-wrinkled under-layers.

  If the information she found there was to be believed, then there were smaller disturbances happening all over the world, relative to the huge ones in Russia and Ukraine, that is. They happened and died out, and happened and died out, the disease not spreading beyond the limits of a neighborhood or a town. But they were becoming longer, and spanning larger areas, and taking more lives.

  And still no one had any idea what exactly was happening, why the addicts were banding together and becoming violent, and in a way that seemed to be organized and yet not by word of mouth, but in some other manner, like the instructions were carried in the air. None of this was in the Surface Web news.

  It was all inside the unpeeled onion, and no one took it seriously there. Well, Ginny did, but she was only one reclusive reporter chick, and no balls—even though she was from Balleston—plus agoraphobia meant seriously no sway in the news world, and it would’ve been too little too late, anyway. You could report the fuck out of the outbreak and the viral armies charging the world, but that was all you could do before you were swept up in it yourself.

  So, she wondered, how long would it be until the hordes of addicts were here, and they began to multiply, in whatever way it was that they did, rabid and biting at everyone? The drug had already been confirmed in Illinois, after all, and that was some time ago.

  The working title of her story was: ‘Desomorphine Madness: A Global Pandemic of Russian Origin.’ It didn’t have quite the pop she wanted, and she doubted she’d get much readership of the Haven variety, but maybe that was okay.

  Not many of them could read, and not many of them who could, would. And they weren’t her target audience to begin with.

  She could always re-title it, anyway. An alternative she considered was: ‘’at ’ere Durned Melt ’ur Face off Disease is coming to a Campsite near You!’ But that wasn’t her style.

  She could still go the ‘It eats people’ route, but that wasn’t a whole lot better than the face melting version. There was probably some middle ground, but she could settle that later, after the body of the article was to her liking.

  How about ‘Gangrene, It’s what’s for Dinner?’ Probably not the best either.

  The mainstream media outlets she’d approached with her idea wanted no part of it. She’d been expecting to be met with rejection and was unsurprised when she was, so she set the article up to publish on her local, independent news site, which received in the last year on average, one hundred eighty-four visitors per day, which was pretty damn good if you asked her, notwithstanding the fact that a good number of those visitors landed on her page in search of porn that featured a ton of balls, preferably large ones, but said surfers, in their infinite excitement, had encountered difficulties keying in their fetish du jour.

  Balles-ton please, thank you very much. They—the testicle buffs—needed to know about the Krokodil connection too. Almost all the heavy ball connoisseurs clicked onto Ginny’s page from computers in Europe, which was inhabited by undeniably hornier and more perversion-prone people than the good ol’ U S of A, but she didn’t judge them too much for that.

  The truth was, in spite of what Ginny thought, they didn’t really need to know at all, even though Krokodil had been snapping its jaws in Europe for quite a while. No one really needed to know.

  It was too late for knowledge, for book-learning, which Ginny held in such high esteem, to matter more than one of Milo’s half-buried scats. But, for the record, when it came to the substance of the matter, she was right.

  The third draft—this one ready to send and afflicted with the multi-syllabic title, God forbid someone might have to pull out a dictionary or combine three sounds in their heads to form a word, or both—was ready and sitting on her screen when her house was broken into.

  Although should it really be called that? It was people who broke into houses. The virus just…spread.

  It happened after she clumsily knocked her mug of piping hot cocoa off the counter where it had been cooling. She was rereading a chat transcript and spun excitedly when she confirmed that she’d gotten the facts right or close enou
gh for there to be a viable story.

  Given liftoff by her forearm, the mug was smashed to bits against the wall, which cried cocoa tears all the way to the floor where the shards had landed. Unbroken, it had said, ‘I’m an INTERNET Journalist. What is YOUR Superpower?’

  She’d never much liked the joke, but it had been a present from her mother before she passed. Looking at the broken mug in its pool of cocoa sitting on top of the kitchen laminate, Ginny burst into tears.

  Even if she hadn’t cried, the noise of the mug’s explosion would have been enough.

  66

  There were zombies outside, and they were dialed-in. They were on fire, way past broken, and they would’ve heard a mouse peep and made after it like yellow on rice rocket, to borrow a phrase popular in the Haven.

  And, as luck had it, two of the Haven’s residents, who’d thought themselves extremely clever in tossing that phrase back and forth like a little racist Frisbee—no spoiler on the flying disc, unlike the rice rocket—were the ones to go tearing through her screen door.

  The skinnier of the two got to her first, bit, and then they were off in search of more noise made by uninfected humans. It didn’t register right away. It had happened in seconds, and so quickly after she’d begun crying over the spilled cocoa and broken gift mug with the cheesy joke on it that it might’ve all been a delusion, a phantom nothing, but then, no…it wasn’t nothing.

  This was it. This was Krokodil, only not Krokodil the drug, but the next stage, the thing that Fyodor-D3PO and Nikolay-Zaitsev had been describing, and what their governments had been working so hard to keep under wraps. She’d been bitten, and time was running out. Time was…

  The world’s colors were pumped out of it as if by a great bellows and she found herself in a bleak expanse within her house—everything was still there, and she was still standing in it, but it all now felt like it was sitting in a black and white desert. Dry, gritty, and hopeless.

  Faintly, she could feel her being unraveling as every molecule of her body was recruited into a new cause, brainwashed, and dressed up in the same uniform those two nice men had been wearing—you know, the two who were against rice rockets, and that was their right after all, to express their opinions and such. Her old self was looking for the rest of…itself, but there wasn’t much there anymore, and there was less with every passing second, like she was being deleted file by individual file.

  The front door was close—the back way by which the zombie Havenites had come and gone seemed much too far—and she made an attempt to dash through it, to get at that outside world she’d always taken the utmost care to avoid, if only to see, to see in living color—though dying color would’ve been more accurate at this point—what was happening.

  Willing her failing muscles into coordinated action, she managed to wrench the screen door open, throw the two locks, and trap the doorknob in a clumsy not-so-death grip. Her fingers had locked in the clasping position, leaving her two gnarled fists to work with. She squeezed the doorknob with the sides of her hands and tried to twist it.

  It wouldn’t go.

  Desperate, she kicked at the door and pain exploded in the big toe of her right foot. She kicked again, and her second toe broke as well. She gave the door one more kick, twisting the doorknob as hard as she could at the same time, and as pain ignited fresh fires in her foot, the door opened.

  She fell into the widening space and tossed her cookies, the bits of masticated and stomach-acid-sodden bunny friends hopping free. The sour fragrance was less than stomach-settling, and she barfed again. The negative chugging was in full force, but it would only last a moment now that the fever, which hadn’t been there moments before, was burning her out.

  Spots bloomed in her vision. And then it was time for her to sign off.

  You stay classy, Balleston, although fat chance of that now with the Krok hordes and the Havenites, I’m off to join said hordes, and, if I’m lucky, I can take out a Havenite or three. Stay classy, Balleston. Sta—

  Opening the door was the final program she’d been able to run before the Krokodil-inspired mutation coopted her biological machinery, and the point of it wasn’t to get herself out. Just before the virus burrowed deeper into her warm and brilliant brain and got its delete key tapping furiously away at the last of those wonderful files, she forced the door open so that Milo could get loose.

  When she reanimated as one of those things and crawled completely out of the house, the tabby had already escaped. Moments prior to her turn, he’d taken the brief opportunity to use his mistress’s zombifying body as a bridge over the threshold. He was a wise and wily old cat, and survived long enough to succumb to old age, rather than the virus.

  The article post remained on Ginny’s computer screen, the mouse pointer poised over the publish key, just left of center. It stayed there, undisturbed, until the power went out.

  67

  Rosemary was sitting up in bed, a throw pillow tucked behind the small of her back. She was too excited to sleep. The market was going to come in the morning, and that was all she could think about.

  What a wonderful day it’ll be, Rosemary thought. I’ll go around with Jack and Sasha and see what the traders are selling and maybe there’ll be some good food from other places.

  She thought about what she’d eaten at the last market—snails that had been absolutely delightful fried in peanut oil, oranges that were only half-rotten with plenty of edible parts, and pistachios that were admittedly stale but sprang right back to life when roasted or mixed into peanut butter supplemented with Nell’s protein slurry. Oh, and she’d almost forgotten the fallout shelter rations.

  The last market really had been wonderful, the best that she could remember, so tomorrow’s had a really high bar to live up to, and Rosemary, realistic as she was, knew that it was unlikely to come close. Still, she decided, it didn’t need to be better or even just as good, so long as there was something different to try or see, or a new story on the traders’ lips. That would be more than enough to tide her over until the next market day.

  The fallout rations that she’d enjoyed at the last market were gone, but she’d kept the tins and earlier that night had put them next to her on the bed. It hadn’t been much, just some survival biscuits and carbohydrate supplements, all of which had exceeded their shelf lives, but still tasted okay in the afterlife or purgatory of expired consumption or whatever period of existence the rations then found themselves in.

  The carbohydrate supplements looked a lot like throat lozenges, and they were only the tiniest bit moldy, and it was the green mold anyway, which was easy to pick off and not that horrible tasting if you got some in your mouth.

  She drummed her fingers on the empty tins, and the hollow sound made her think of what it must be like to live underground in bunkers. Probably dark, she concluded, and not a whole lot of fun. Like living in one of the tins.

  And who says the virus can’t get into a tin, or a bunker, for that matter? If the virus hadn’t stopped the birds from flying, then she’d be living underground now, but, fortunately, the virus couldn’t quite figure out how to make the flapping thing work. She’d heard of something the people in the bunkers got. Was it crickets’ disease? Something about not getting enough sun, and the crumbling tunnels and dust certainly wouldn’t have made her asthma any better.

  She wondered if the virus would ever go away. Probably not.

  If they did go underground, would she still have to live with her real mother and father? Probably.

  She didn’t mind them, but they hardly told her anything. Senna and Alan were different, they always had stories; they always asked her what she wanted to know, what she thought. Her parents definitely loved her, buy they seemed unplugged.

  Maybe that was because Tom was so busy looking after the town, and Elizabeth was so busy looking after Tom. They just didn’t seem as happy together as Senna and Alan, but for that matter, no one did. She also resented the idea her mother had put in her head about Jack
, like she and Jack were supposed to be together when they got older or something like that.

  She liked Jack, but not like that, at least she didn’t think she did, and she couldn’t for the life of her picture being with him the way Senna was with Alan. And Jack’s always eating those onions. And it wasn’t really the smell of the onions that bothered her, either, but the sense she got that Jack was perfectly content to do nothing more in life than eat onions.

  Maybe that was okay. Maybe that was even right. But it wasn’t for her.

  There was more in the world than that. More to life.

  There were worthwhile things to reach for, and being a cleaner like Alan had been wasn’t one of them. Jack wanted that, or thought he did, but that was a copout in itself. She wasn’t sure there were even cleaners anymore, or that there ever would be again. So, assuming Jack had the right stuff for it, it wasn’t something he could do anyway. That was safe. Too safe.

  Rosemary wasn’t sure where these feelings were coming from, but the more she thought about it, the more the idea of a life with Jack seemed wrong, dangerously wrong. Was it Jack at all?

  It doesn’t matter, she thought. One day at a time, like Senna told her. Easy does it.

  She began thinking about the market again, and her own goals in life. Right now, what she wanted more than anything was to learn more about the traders, so that she could one day join them and leave New Crozet. She wanted to see the other settlements and what they had to offer, and bring something back to her own town.

  There had to be stuff out there to learn and give to New Crozet. She closed her eyes and focused, feeling as if she might be on the cusp of realizing something important. Moving toward it, she tried to hold it pinioned in place, under the brilliant glow of her mind’s spotlight.

  In her mind she saw maps where dashed lines connected the settlements. They looked like ancient pirate maps where big X’s marked the spots where treasure was buried, even though she’d never seen a pirate map before because she’d never watched a pirate movie or read a pirate book.