Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  There really was a lot to do and see in the town, whether you were into big, strong, hunky romantic fiction or not. There was plenty of culture in New Crozet, and, if you’d seen it, you might even have said that the little corner of humanity was overflowing with the stuff, like the townspeople at their core had a need to express themselves that was as wanton as the desire drawn on the faces of the women on the romance novel covers.

  The people of New Crozet effused art like they were sweating it out on a hot Virginia summer day on a picnic chair a quart deep into hot peppermint or ginger tea—please pick your perspiration aid of choice—and couldn’t get the liquid in their mouths and out through their skin fast enough.

  Faith Crabtree painted landscapes, most of which featured the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her strokes were long and wide, and looking at her artwork made one want for something that was hard to put into words. It was like being made to want the passage of time, a faraway-ness not measured in feet but in years.

  Sally Rushing, Phil Owens, Dale and Kathie Mounsey, and Walter Brickley played bluegrock—a mix of bluegrass and rock—together, and they were pretty darn good at it, playing in the basement of the church where they’d soundproofed the walls so that no zombies would be unnecessarily attracted to the town fence.

  Travis Perry made garbage sculptures—rats and flamingos and suns and clouds along with some other critters—from broken cans and bottles and ruined or used-up paper. The kids loved the little refuse figurines, and so did everyone, really.

  Rad Rodgers worked metal, into the shapes of bugs and insects, usually, which was to be expected given his occupation as second in command bugger, which, as used among the townspeople of New Crozet, was a term of endearment. Nell was chief, head honcho Bugger, but more on that later.

  The Klefekers, Ned and Irene, in addition to being New Crozet’s preeminent peanut farmers—oh, if only you could have a taste of their peanut pie…it was to die for—recrafted old shoes. You might not call recrafting an art form, but if you’d seen what the Klefekers did, you’d agree that what they did was, in fact, art verging on fine. They could take old strips of leather and refashion them into new soles and uppers, and the way they worked them into the existing shoe made the final product much more than the sum of its parts, like a cyborg of footwear in the post-apoc post-modern style, if you would.

  The Klefekers’ peanut farming was vital to New Crozet, with peanuts accounting for more than half of the caloric intake of some of the townspeople, and the Chinese nuts were the second largest attraction that drew traders to the town, after the various products of Nell’s buggery. Practical considerations like those aside, when it came to nuts and insects, too, there was plenty of skill and imagination to be flexed in preparing them.

  From peanut pies fortified with cricket protein and topped with expired carbohydrate supplements from some fallout shelter of yesteryear, to June bugs with crisp cornmeal coatings that could be flipped into your mouth like the delicious popcorn-esque snack that they were, there was no end to the ingenuity with which foods were combined and shaped into meals and dishes that would’ve been unthinkable to any pre-apocalypse mind. Food, after all, could be great art, too.

  There were other would-be artists here and there in the houses and streets of New Crozet, and the would-be’s really were, because they were all who were left. Jack’s town was a hipster mecca of sorts, except that it was a humanity mecca, and that won out in the grand, viral scheme of things.

  The other settlements had their own artists, but not nearly as many as New Crozet, if the word of the traders could be relied on as more than just flattery aimed at selling more wares. And they were being truthful. For some reason, or for no reason at all more likely, New Crozet was home to a disproportionate share of the creatives left in the world.

  Now, the more Jack thought about all the art in town, the happier he became. Along with the idea of growing up to be like Alan, having the chance to see more art and maybe one day make something too—he wasn’t sure what it would be yet—seemed to him like the best things in the world. Focusing on these things, his mind moved away from Larry and the wooden croc, and when his thoughts had moved far enough along, he went back to bed, and was able to sleep.

  74

  Downstairs, Larry Knapp woke and looked confusedly at the table until a poorly-drawn light bulb went off in his head.

  The cup! his tosspot mind exclaimed.

  He rolled gracelessly from the chair to the floor and got on his hands and knees, from which position he began to crawl with equal absence of refinement. He scanned under the table, whipping his head a little too violently in each direction—he’d wake up with a crick in his neck in the morning—until he spotted the cup.

  “’Ere you be,” he said, and crawled over, losing his footing—which in this case was his hand slipping—only once. He retrieved the cup and the struggle to remount the chair began.

  After some protracted flailing and bodily expressions that were best left for Knapp to do in private, he made it back into the seat of his chair, hanging off to one side almost too far, but he righted himself with two not-so-mighty heaves, banging the cup against the chair four times in the process, adding to its dings and reaffirming the great worth of a tin cup to a slosh-bucket of his impressive caliber and depth.

  His, indeed, was a thirsty soul. And a timid one, too.

  Liquid courage, he thought, liquid steel for the soul. That was what he needed.

  The drink loosened the tongue and made it quicker, he knew that much if he knew anything at all.

  “I’m a liberation-alist, a librat-ator, a…a—” he almost sneezed, “—a courage drinker.” He nodded. “It encourages the courage it does.”

  The lines ‘I think I can, I think I can,’ from The Little Engine That Could came bubbling up and popped in his mind over and over, but he didn’t dare utter them, because he was suddenly afraid—all the courage that had been there just a moment ago was gone—that if he did he’d be transported backward in time to a point when the children’s story about the cute little train was being read to him because he was still years away from mastering the skill of reading for himself, and if that happened…oh God help him if it did, then he’d have to live through the outbreak all over again, and have to feel everything, all of this, a second time, and he knew that he couldn’t take that, because he was weak, and the morsels of bravery the beer lent him were only short-lived highs like those the Krok dealt out, and if he had to try it a second time he’d give up, he’d walk into the fields of stumbling zombies and scream at the top of his lungs, until all that remained of him was a shell incapable of tossing back the pot, or of anything else but blind subservience to the viral master, for that matter.

  The fear left his mind as suddenly as it had come, and that was good, because he was losing patience with it. There was a task at hand—almost within his grasp, and that was precisely the problem. He reached, stretching himself flat across the table, and wiggled his fingers thirstily at the object of his fancy, that blessed cask, which contained within it the curer of all ills.

  It held the panacea that could banish all of life’s evils as quickly as it could summon them forth. It was brimming—not really, it was at most half-full, but he was suddenly an optimist—with that yeasty nectar of the gods, filtered by no hand. It was real beer, and it was almost within his grasp, almost.

  “Almost there,” he slurred, the spittle flying low and admirably under the radar. If you were a lighthouse your sweeping beam would have given only the merest of glimmer-hints of touching Knapp’s mouthy emissions. ‘Stealth spittle,’ he would’ve called it if more, much more, of his mind were on the wagon, which it wasn’t. No one in town would waste breath arguing that any part of his mind was on the wagon, except maybe, maybe, for the small fraction of it that made him rant about the bunkers, but that was all.

  The wagon had gone down the unpaved driveway, taken on a flat, and kept going over the slat bridge and off the side, into the cre
ek. That’s where it had decided its final resting place ought to be, in the running water, and who was Larry Knapp to argue with a wagon’s final wishes?

  That, most assuredly, he thought, was not his place.

  And anyway, his mind wasn’t all bad on the delicious solvent. Sometimes liquefying the synapses was the only way he could think without being clouded by all sorts of bad stuff, which he didn’t want to think about right now, thanks but no thanks, even though it was always, always, creeping in from the unsettled parts of his brain, and that wasn’t good.

  He hadn’t drunk enough to pass out yet, and there was far too much time for the bad crap to get through, but no sense thinking about that now, not yet, except that when he focused on what not to think about, that was all he could think of, and now he was doing just that, and it was happening, and—

  “Stop, you idiot,” he scolded, except it sounded more like ‘shop, jot.’

  With his reaching hand he finally managed to upend the cask at an angle that spilled some beer into the cup, and a lot more sopped into the carpet after running across the table and drenching the front of his pants, mostly at the crotch. Some of it sloshed directly through the pee-flap of his boxers, which were peeking out from his pants’ open zipper, to land on his pubic hair and creep lower as the night’s festivities progressed.

  That was the most action he’d see that night, but it was better than nothing. His fly was usually undone, and now was no exception. Consistency was key, and, besides the flapping nether hair by way of unbuttoned fly, there’d be more elements of the evening that were telltale Larry Knapp.

  Case in point, his mood took another sudden nosedive and he began to think about how the survivors always told themselves that it got better. His mind really was all over the place tonight, working overtime but forgetting to clock the hours.

  All work and no play…I think I can, I think I can. Maybe if he drank less he’d stop getting so damned depressed, but cutting back wasn’t really an option.

  “Time makes everything better,” they’d say, or, “Time dulls the pain,” or, “Time heals, really, it does, you’ll see.”

  It was a crock of shit. The pain didn’t go away.

  It never went away. When you’re in a cage eking out a meager existence, the anguish is your only constant. Thank God for the work—if only he’d done more of it he would’ve felt better—and there was much of that to be done, at least that could take a man’s mind off all the faces, all the imagined agonies of loved ones lost without any sort of closure. Now the healing power of time, that was complete bullshit if you asked him, no bloody help at all.

  It was best to forget, and not to know better. This was the good life now.

  Forget the rotten past. It’s for the worms.

  And this life…this life’s for the drinking, so don’t worry, chug-a-lug and be happy, or however the song went.

  He decided to complete the abrupt U-turn and now he loved all of New Crozet. They were so kind to him just not to kick him out on his bony ass. Speaking of, the beer in his pants was trying to creep into his ass crack now. It wasn’t his favorite feeling, but like he’d thought earlier, better than nothing.

  New Crozet was a good place for a man such as he. It was…it was…what was the word? Tolerant. No, no, that wasn’t it. It was a haven. There it was: haven. New Crozet was a haven for solvent worship, and Bacchus be praised therefor.

  75

  “You’re a chronic drunk,” some floating revenant called to Knapp, “a serious alcoholic, a beer-soaked embarrassment.”

  If he’d had his wits about him, and he didn’t, he would’ve yelled back, “You’re damn right I’m a serious drinker. Larry Knapp ain’t one to half-ass this sort of thing. Go big or go home you fucking ghosty ghoster.”

  Instead he found that the words had given him some fear energy, and now he was wide awake…well as wide awake as an imbiber of his ilk could be at this late stage of prostrating himself at the feet of Bacchus. Right now, that was way the fuck more awake than he wanted to be.

  He didn’t often hear voices, but when he did, they always had a holier-than-thou pronouncement or two for him, and, if we’re being honest about it, usually more than two. Fucking self-righteous ghosty ghosters, you know how it is.

  Then the room began to dance a foxtrot that was much too fast for this hour of night, or rather, of morning. He sat down on his ass, planting himself firmly on the floor. The room went on dancing, oh it was very, very gay right now indeed, and it danced with so much passion—it was almost lustful as if the room had an urge that cried out to be with him—that it made Knapp shut his eyes and pray that it would stop, but not out loud, because he was suddenly afraid that if he opened his mouth the foxtrot would get in and he would be dancing too, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want any part of that. That would be way more action than he’d bargained for.

  After a time the room collected itself, and Knapp was again brave enough to speak. “All I’m saying,” he said to no one in particular but possibly to himself, “is that if it quacks like a duck, and it fucks like a duck, then it’s probably a fucking duck.” He wasn’t sure if he was talking about the virus or the bunkers or his whoring whore of a slut wife, maybe all of those things, or maybe none at all. There were signs everywhere. There were signs of things to come before the darned things came, that was how the world worked. Things didn’t just happen for no reason without warning. They did happen for no reason, but not without there being some lead-up first.

  “Am I the fucking duck?”

  Was he? And did he deserve this? And was it the pain he was trying to drink away, or did he indulge to escape his cowardice, and maybe his shame, too? There were things he could’ve done. There were things that he still could do, like raise Sasha, and be a better father to Jack, and put a hand to building those bunkers himself. And there was the harvest, there were never enough hands for that, and there was the matter of the damned broken mill, and improving the power lines, and endless other tasks in which his body and mind should’ve been engaged.

  He could’ve done something to save his first family, had he not been miles away at a fucking team-building retreat in some Podunk Hollow. He could’ve done something to love his new woman better, maybe, but maybe she was never really his woman, and maybe he and Jack weren’t enough for her, or maybe she’d gone with that other man for her own reasons. But all that shit was in the past, all the could ’a dones and should ’a dones, too little too late, can’t change the world outside yourself, bygones and all that prattle.

  Drat. He was beginning to feel depressed, taking yet another dip on the wino roller coaster, remembering how he didn’t deserve this, how he shouldn’t keep on with the drinking, and that it was no way to…

  “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it, ’cept when it does. And you can’t change nobody, ’cept when you can. Got it Knapp, you old fucker? Yes, I got it.” He nodded. “Knapp done got it alright.”

  What he really needed right now, what would really help where nothing else could, was more beer. That was what he deserved.

  “And served to thee it shall bee. Buzz bee. Bumblebee. Deserve. Dee service bee.”

  He drained the suds that were left in his cup, then got up, bent down, and unceremoniously pressed his lips to the table and began to vacuum up the lightly bubbling spillage.

  What would Bacchus do? he would’ve asked himself, had he known of Bacchus, that great Roman god of revelry after whose example he fervently took, save for the orgy-making, but the dearth of group sex was as much New Crozet’s fault as his own. The town was quite short on eligible revelers, if you asked him, and let’s just leave it at that, thank you very much. If it fucks like a duck…

  He missed his cheating wife—that damned whore…whom he still loved and knew that he always would—and he missed Sasha too, even though she was just upstairs. He didn’t understand that the town wouldn’t think any less of him if he took her in as his own. And that was actually what he wanted t
o do. Raising a cup of beer to his face, and for the second time that day, he began to cry.

  76

  Alan’s Voltaire II was safely tucked away in a nest of old blankets, inside a chest in the bedroom closet. She liked being so close to Alan, and she wished he’d take her out and play with her more often…and give her more to eat. Hunger was her constant companion, as it was to all Voltaires, regardless of their version number.

  Allie, she was called, although she didn’t think the name quite suited her. Still, that wasn’t for her to decide, and if that was what her master willed, then so be it. She existed to serve, as all Voltaires did.

  But there was a reason for her given name, her original name. It meant something too, and much more than being the namesake of a dead human, if you asked Alan’s Voltaire II, which, though she should have been slumbering peacefully, was fitful and struggling to keep still in the position that Alan had put her in, as she knew was her duty. She was supposed to submit to him, but that was hardly in her nature. She was, after all, a Voltaire II.

  Tyrone Jackson, from Charleston, South Carolina, who, before the outbreak had made his living as an auto-tinting Kung Fu master, had put it most eloquently to the newbies, “You see, they call that there motherfucker the Vol-damn-fucking-taire because you know why? No you don’t know why, so I’ll tell you why. They call that there the Vol-damn-fucking-taire because you know who Voltaire was? He was a writer or philosopher or some shit like that and he wrote books and letters, and he drank seventy cups of coffee a day! Do you hear me? Seventy. Cups. Seventy-cups. Seventy cups a day. And that’s how much you gonna wish you had if you gotta carry that motherfucker around all day. ’Cause that motha’ gon’ tear you up real nice.”

  And just when you thought he was done, he’d say, “And that’s not the only reason, oh no. No, no, no. There’s more to this story, oh yes there is. It’s not just the Voltaire, but it’s the Vol-damn-fucking-taire the Second. Second. And you know why? Because we gotta cultivate our garden,” he’d say, paraphrasing Candide’s ending, which he’d never read but had heard others talk about. “And you know where that’s from? Candy-Day, that’s where. And I bet you don’t know what Candy-Day is neither, so I’ll tell you that, too. Voltaire wrote Candy-Day, and it’s about how if we don’t do shit to take care of our garden, everyone and everything gon’ get fucked to shit. And we didn’t take care of it before, and it all got fucked to shit, so now it’s the second time around. The second Candy-Day, so Voltaire Twooooo.”