Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  Then there would come another dramatic pause during which Tyrone would soak in all the stares. God how he loved life on the reclamation crew. People paid attention to him, and, not only that, but because there were so few people left in the world, he commanded the attention of a huge part of all the humans who were left, a large proportion. Because you know why? Because a former auto-tinting Kung Fu master could become a learned man and professor in a world gone completely fucked to shit. That’s why.

  “And how do we cultivate our garden?” Tyrone would say, keeping at it and not expecting any sort of reply besides their eyes opening wider and their mouths hanging lower, which they would always oblige him by doing. “By burning those fucking things to ash, to nourish the soil.” And then his eyebrows would go up pointedly and his eyes would open wide and he’d say, “Not by hiding in settlements.”

  Apparently, he knew a thing or two about Voltaire, or believed he did, and no one questioned him about it. Maybe he really did know the secrets of the portable Voltaire II flamethrower. Maybe the damned thing spoke to him. Who knows?

  It wasn’t a bad show, Alan had to admit. Given what the man had to work with, it was pretty impressive. Alan got to see Tyrone do his routine sixteen times before the zombies decided that he was such a good performer that they needed him all to themselves.

  On one fine summer day Tyrone got a bit too far ahead of spotting range, and the next time anyone from the crew saw him, he’d turned and was going after them. He’d been killed without fanfare, by a spotter named Beth Mills, who would later join Brother Mardu’s fine troupe of merry men and, with her addition, women, too. She had put a bullet in Tyrone’s face, which bullet had taken off the right side of said face, and then another bullet in his chest.

  Then Alan had used his Voltaire II to burn the body, and then it was Tyrone who was nourishing the soil, Candy-Day and Vol-damn-fucking-taire the Second be motherfucking-damned.

  Allie the Vol-damn-fucking-taire the Second missed Tyrone something terrible. Her metal heart ached for him, and the grand introductions that he gave.

  There was a man who treated her with respect, a true gentleman. She got herself under control. Alan was the only man for her, her true master, that was sure as her desire to consume flesh, zombie or otherwise, with the licks of her fiery tongue, but he could be so rough and inattentive, and, now, she was so hungry, enduring the scratch and scrape of pangs of appetite against her metallic insides.

  Why won’t he feed me? Why? Oh, to eat again, to burn and consume and take.

  Sure, she’d just fed the night before, but she was always hungry, and after the great feasts she’d had in Alan’s service, the perimeter fence drills were such a tease.

  She was so hungry.

  Soon, very soon, even though there were no scheduled trainings for the children, she’d be fed, and not by Alan’s hand.

  PART TWO

  Market

  “It’s an outbreak, an epidemic, even, but what

  they’re saying about it taking the whole world can’t be true.

  All the people, and the animals? There’s just no way.”

  Alan Rice, former Virginia Corporate Counsel for DropItOff Inc., drop shipper to infinity and beyond,

  whose profits since the outbreak were in the amount of exactly nil.

  1

  Brother Remigius was kneeling on the ground, praying, as he had been for most of the morning. The peaceful silence tugged at his nose hairs and he breathed it in, delighting in the absence of birdsong. He’d always found animals to be noisy, loathsome things, and it was a relief that most of them were destroyed or at the very least quieted by the virus.

  Holding the lungful of silent air he’d pulled, he looked up at the sky, which was brimming with clouds to the east. The sky there churned out a hotdog shape of mist, and for a moment he felt as though the clouds were reaching toward him, beckoning for him to join them in their seditious huddle.

  Perhaps he’d achieved a higher state of consciousness through this morning’s meditation. Maybe he’d actually communed with the merging wisps of precipitation above him.

  Have I called the rain, he wondered, or does it seek me out of its own accord?

  He grinned. Accord, now that’s a good word. Well done, Remigius. Well done.

  Brother Remigius was a short, stocky man of thirty-nine. He had no hair left on his head, but enough on the rest of his body to make up for that and more. He had a fat belly, and if it weren’t for the robe he would have resembled a pregnant man. The belly was hard, as the better part of the fat he stored was of the visceral nature, living around his internal organs. His nose and sinuses were always stopped up, and he found that his symptoms were always worse the deeper they traveled into the forest.

  Upon joining the Order, he’d taken after Mardu’s example and had made up a pious-sounding name for himself. Acrisius had done the same when he joined, falling in step behind Mardu and Remigius.

  He heard approaching footsteps, turned, and, pointing up at the sky, said, “A sign if there ever was one.”

  “Yes,” Sister Beth said. “That it is.”

  Sister Beth, who was slender and surprisingly elegant in the dark robe of the Order, regarded Brother Remigius with delicately-veiled contempt.

  A veteran of the reclamation crews, Beth had found her true calling with Brother Mardu’s flock. But things had changed much over the years, and Mardu’s plan for the Order no longer coincided with what she was now envisioning for it.

  Objectively, Brother Remigius thought that Sister Beth was beautiful, but on a personal level, he found her too intimidating, too strong of character, to be an attractive woman.

  “We’ll do it when you get back,” he said, “after you’ve done Saul in. After our inspired leader and Acrisius find their tombs in that town.”

  “Speak more softly, brother,” Sister Beth admonished, nervous about being overheard. Looking around, she sat down on the ground next to him.

  Just then, a brother appeared, coming out from one of the trucks, and she bit her tongue, not getting her chance to further chide Remigius for his loud mouth.

  It was Brother Sanders who’d come out, and he now began to dig around in the bushes for something. He was another oaf, if you asked Beth. He still hadn’t chosen a side, electing instead to act like a child who closed his eyes, covered his ears, and sang out loud, hiding from what was going on around him. Or maybe he was just too stupid to notice.

  Either way, Beth didn’t care whose side he was on. He was useless, and if he chose to side with Brother Mardu, she thought there was some satisfaction to be had in killing him.

  When Sanders stopped rummaging and went back into his truck carrying a wash bucket, Sister Beth started to rant, as if seeing him had added fuel to the fire of dry twigs burning under her.

  “Mardu’s weak,” she said, “wistful. He lives in a state of nostalgia, lost in emotional weakness, remembering the supposed good old days when he first got us all together. Whatever charm, whatever influence, he had then is gone. No one wants to join us anymore, we’re losing power. Everyone on the outside slights us. Everyone can see that we’re all weak. All of us. Because he’s lending us his weakness and we’re taking it. The novelty of worshipping and praying to the virus is gone. No one cares about that bullshit anymore. No one’s cared for years. Worst of all, what we do now is bad business. We waste good meat, the best meat, the most expensive commodity there is.”

  2

  Sister Beth had been around the block a time or two before, and after leaving her rec-crew she traveled with some minor flesh-dealers—nowhere near the caliber of the Fleshers—before joining the Order. Following her initiation, she’d learned quite quickly that Mardu was both crazy gaga and crazy like a fox.

  The latter was the kind of crazy you wanted running your business or gang or post-apocalyptic religion what-have-you, the former not so much. But that was assuming you were rational, and the zombie zeitgeist wasn’t big on lucid leadership
or levelheaded followership, or any sort of sensibility, really. And it was true that some of the craziest, wildest and most ruthless of the gangs had become the richest.

  Be that as it was, Mardu seemed to have lost his crazy like a fox whiskers. He still had the completely-fucking-out-of-his-gourd-crazy eyes, but his business sense, if he’d ever had one to begin with—and Beth was starting to have her doubts—had run away from the family farm with its tail on fire.

  “We should’ve done something a long time ago,” Remigius agreed.

  “It’s just a matter of survival at this point,” Sister Beth said. There’s no central leadership, no worthwhile message, and no food. All the others, outlaws or not, have settled down already. It doesn’t make sense to keep moving like this. If we nailed down a base we could at least grow some of our own food, send raiding parties out to get meat, but not all of us travel together all the time. It’s a complete waste.” And, she added through clenched teeth, her anger reddening her cheeks, “Almost as much of a waste as the offerings.”

  Brother Remigius nodded. He was thinking about the annoying squawks that birds had used to make, back when there were living birds. Perhaps it would have been better to hear that sound again and be irritated by something as mundane as that, rather than have the plotting Sister Beth at his ear. He wasn’t sure, but thinking about the birds made him think of chicken, and that made him think of white meat.

  His mouth began to water. He hated dark meat, and that was all that humans had. He didn’t care for human flesh at all, but it was a trader’s world, and human meat was sought after, and that meant that it could be traded for more palatable items, like fruits and vegetables and grains.

  “We barely have food to eat,” Sister Beth said, “not to mention next to none of the flesh that we deserve, and no good supplies. The little meat we do have is hardly shared.”

  Brother Remigius frowned.

  “I want flesh,” Sister Beth said. “Supple flesh. I need it. I’m sick of this precise butchery. And there are too many of us to enjoy what little meat they let us have.”

  Brother Remigius was struggling to find something to say. If she went on like this, he was afraid he might get sick. He did want to get rid of Mardu and get some proper leadership in place, but to get more bread, not that sickening, gamey stuff that came from people.

  “Mardu is a dinosaur,” Brother Remigius finally said. He looked around nervously, checking to see if anyone had heard him. Bolstered by the usual go-around of the world that he saw continuing without interruption, he went on. “If we don’t change, adapt, we won’t last another year. The problem is that everyone here has gotten complacent, but what worked in the first few years after the outbreak doesn’t work anymore. You’re right that no one cares about the virus now or what it means, they just want food to eat.”

  People want to die in peace, he wanted to add, but said nothing. It pained him to say these things about Brother Mardu. Remigius had been of the Order’s first disciples, but he didn’t love Brother Mardu or his ideals anymore.

  They’d grown much older in their years together. It had been twelve years, but felt to Remigius like forty. Mardu was too distrustful now. He was closed off in a way that he’d never been before, and hardly spoke to Remigius these days.

  Instead, their leader was always off by himself. Or plotting with Brother Acrisius and Brother Saul, the jealous whisper that was creeping into Brother Remigius’s mind added. But it wasn’t that, he knew, it was mostly that Brother Mardu was a solitary soul, if a man like that could have a soul, that is. He had his ways, and he didn’t share himself with others.

  I don’t think he loves anyone, Brother Remigius thought, not even himself. At least those abominations that he’d kept as pets are gone. Those things…and the way they roamed around the campsites and into and out of trucks, it was enough to make you lose your ability to sleep, for the rest of your life. They were like the deformities of the universe that Mardu had found, added his magic touch to, and put on parade.

  3

  “We have to do something while we’re strong,” Sister Beth said, breaking Brother Remigius out of his thought trance, for which he was thankful. The dead-but-not-quite-dead creatures that Mardu had made haunted him enough in the night, surface out of the shadows as they tended to do. It was really better not to obsess over them in the daylight. After all, he had the rest of his evenings and nights and too-early morning to be visited by visions of the cauterized and stitched-up zombies, child-proofed, as it were, by Mardu’s disturbingly steady hands.

  And if he catches us, Remigius thought, what he wouldn’t hesitate to do…

  “All of this is just a front for cannibalism,” Sister Beth said, on the verge of seething, which was usual for her, “and it always has been. But twelve years after the outbreak, why are we still beating the fucking bush? It’s beat to shit already, there’s nothing left of it, so why are we still going on with this virus garbage? And infecting the children? The children? That’s the best meat of all!”

  Brother Remigius shrugged. He’d heard this a thousand times before and was glad it would finally come to a head today.

  “I mean it’s one thing to infect an old person,” Sister Beth went on, “but the children? It’s fucking unthinkable. We’re not trying to find new vessels for the virus, we were never trying to do that. It used to be a trademark, a way to show how bad-ass we were. Now it’s a liability. No one in their right mind would show force like that anymore. People—their meat, is a precious resource. We show up to the off-grid markets with less and less meat. Every time we have less. Every time. There’s less to go around in general, and here we are destroying good, young meat.”

  She spoke even lower now and said, “Last I heard, there are hardly any slaves left. They’ve all been eaten. We may well be on the brink of starvation, and you know just as well as I do that there’s no way we can lie our way into a settlement. We’re stuck out here, outside, and the food’s running out.”

  “Yes,” Brother Remigius said. “That’ll change soon. We’ll manage it all better without him, and I think I’ve got enough people on our side now.”

  “This has been in the works for a long time, and he has had plenty of time to do something about it, but he hasn’t, so it’s our turn to take over and do it for him.”

  “As long as we get rid of Saul first,” Remigius said, “then we can do Mardu, and that we should be able to do on our own, and the rest should be cake, or close to it.”

  “I’ll take care of Saul today,” Sister Beth said, “and with any luck, the settlement people will get rid of Mardu and Acrisius for us, but I wouldn’t count on that too much, you know how soft the settlement type is. Saul and I are their escape plan, after all, and I’ll see that it fails.”

  “And we’ll be in the clear,” Brother Remigius said. “The Order will be ours.”

  He wanted to add, ‘And then what? A few more months? A little bit more food to go around?’ But he kept it to himself. Maybe Beth really would pull a rabbit out of her hat and surprise him, she certainly talked like she had a rabbit-endowed hat, or at least was expecting one to show up any day now.

  Sister Beth eyed Brother Remigius’s bald head, shiny with sweat. “Mine,” she mouthed, too quietly for him to hear. “Mine.”

  “Let them eat meat,” Sister Beth said in her normal volume, a wry expression on her face. “We’ll be swimming in it again. Plenty for everyone.”

  She began to imagine murdering Saul, which, thankfully, was on the agenda for the day. She’d waited long enough. She would drink his blood there, in the forest, while it was still warm, and she would taste of his flesh. The thought made her lick her lips.

  “I’ve gone too long without meat,” she said. “I’ll eat damn near anyone these days.”

  “I know, I know. It used to be better. I think he really had us hoping for the Equilibrium, but it never happened.”

  “Wait, you never believed in that religion shit, did you?”


  Brother Remigius shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s nice to have something to believe in now and again.”

  Sister Beth’s expression darkened.

  “But now,” Brother Remigius went on, without looking at Sister Beth’s face and completely oblivious to the bile rising in her belly, “all I care about is keeping the meat for us and having more for trade. We won’t survive like this, and what he’s doing may as well be taking the food out of our mouths.”

  Sister Beth relaxed, and her eyebrows flattened some, but her irises were still full of malicious promise. She stared into the forest through a narrow gap between the Order’s trucks, which were arranged in two circles, and there, where the netting was set up to keep the zombies out, she saw a black bear cub, which in some moments would be called away from the Order’s campground by the growing noise around the New Crozet market.

  It was pawing at the netting with a gnarled stub of arm that ended only a few inches from its shoulder, if that could be called pawing. Its jaws were opening and closing, and sometimes the netting got in its mouth, but that didn’t matter. The strands keeping it out were too strong for it to bite through.

  It was blind and pathetic and though its kind owned the world at present, they wouldn’t for long. Sister Beth was the rising star now, and she was going to put a word in about renegotiating the supposed pact the Order had with the zombies.