Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  And that was why it was called the break.

  8

  When Sister Beth looked up at Saul, he was looking at her and beaming with merriment.

  He is retarded, she thought. No fucking doubt about it.

  He wasn’t, but his brain chemistry was tweaked just right so that he was an eternal optimist, regardless of what life presented to him. He’d been happy as a slave, and he was happy now, and he’d be just as happy if Brother Mardu and Brother Acrisius decreed that he was to be eaten by the Order. He’d smile until the muscles that allowed him to show joy on his face no longer worked, until they themselves were eaten.

  There’d be pain in it, he was sure, but he’d bear it gladly—no, more than gladly—to help his brothers and sisters go on. After all, with each passing day, they were getting closer and closer to their goal, to the Equilibrium, to Equilibrium Day.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  In the next two hours they would travel stealthily by foot through the forest. They were out in the open with the zombies often, Beth more often than Saul, as she was the better spotter. She’d been a parole officer in her prior life, and she’d had a knack for spotting misbehavior then, too, if the telltale signs of the break could be characterized as a form of misconduct.

  It wasn’t though. It was just the way the zombies expressed themselves before they did a certain other thing.

  It was all part of a routine, just like truancy or assault or battery or worse were part of a parolee’s program. Zombies were predictable machines just like criminals were, just like settlement dwellers were, just like ’tards like Saul were, just like Mardu was.

  She was convinced that she, on very much the other hand, was entirely unpredictable. She wrote the fucking program as she went and she coded it as she saw fit. No one knew what was coming, not even she did. It came to her as the days unfolded, showing her uncharted forks in the roads and lanes of her mind.

  The toll for the bridge she was trying to pass over now could only be paid in lives, and in particular ones at that. She had to fork over the lifeblood of Saul, Mardu, and Acrisius, who together represented the holdouts of the old way. A gangrenous curmudgeon of a limb that needed to be amputated for the good of the whole. The fact that she would enjoy it, too, didn’t make it any less right.

  She stood, avoiding his gaze, and followed him to the edge of the campground. They were to make it to the town after the market was already underway, after Mardu and Acrisius were well enough inside, and there was no point wasting time.

  The forest beyond the netting was quiet, the only sound besides the insects and burrowing worms that of the last bits of dew turning to vapor, which was a pop and sizzle too faint for most human ears to catch.

  Beth stole one look at the camp behind her, and then, boring her death glare into the back of Saul’s skull as he worked on making an opening for them to cross through, took pride in knowing that after she’d done her deed, he wasn’t to come back here, and neither were his masters. Her only regret about the future—because her imagination was fruitful enough to have such regrets—was that she wouldn’t be able to take their bodies back to put on display in gibbets.

  If she’d had more on her side, she would’ve liked to execute them all publicly, to make an example of them, but that wasn’t an option right now. She’d make do, however, as she always did. The bridge keeper’s toll had to be paid, and she wasn’t one to turn back from a new means of passage, no matter how great was the entry fee.

  As she left the campground following Saul, the sun’s growing heat wiped out the last of the dew that had settled in the woods.

  9

  Jack was walking around the town center looking for a place to bury the last of the crocodile parts, the wooden snout, now that he’d gone about the work of dismembering the toy and burying its other parts in separate, unmarked graves. The snout was in the right pocket of his pants, the top row of teeth biting at his leg. The bottom row was inset from the top, so it couldn’t get at him.

  Absentmindedly, his eyes focused on the ground, he wandered over to the outer gate. There he looked up at the watchtower where Rad Rodgers was in mid-throw, casting weighted netting down from the tower.

  While the heavy mesh was in the air, the two men in the waiting truck jumped out and dashed into position. When the netting landed in a bundle the two men grabbed it while it was still settling to the ground, before it had the chance to get the last bounces out of its system.

  They worked at a feverish pace to unravel it as they ran behind the back of the truck, pulling the netting apart to make a shroud around it. Then each of them came up the sides of the truck until they reached the outside of the New Crozet gate and attached the net to hooks on the town fence.

  No zombies had come while the men were doing their practiced market dance, and if any came now, they wouldn’t be able to get through the mesh. If nothing else, it would at least slow them down and allow the townspeople to pick them off with rifles while the traders got inside.

  The men had jumped back into the truck and were now pulling up to the gate.

  Corks sighed heavily. As far as he could tell, these would be the last traders for the day. There were no caravans in view behind it, and it was getting late in the morning. There weren’t likely to be anymore, and even this one had come on the later side, after he’d thought no more would.

  “This better be the last of them,” he mumbled under his breath.

  He was exhausted, and he was getting hungry, and on top of it all, his mood was beginning to dip. Hopefully these guys would have something good and be a quick let-in, and then he’d be able to leave his post every now and again, taking shifts between Connie Williams and Lester Mills, and get some market time—and most important, market food eating—in.

  In the town center, the market was ratcheting into gear. All the expected traders had already been let in, along with two newcomer outfits. The traders who were at the gate now were also new.

  All the fresh faces were good, because depending on what goods they’d brought, they could make the market better. The heavy turnout also meant that New Crozet was solidifying its place on the map.

  It wasn’t just a forgotten outpost now, but a real human settlement, and it mattered. The people Corks was protecting mattered. He was doing something that would’ve made his son proud, and in the end, that was the only thing that was important to him.

  “Don’t let them in,” a voice in his head admonished.

  Corks stiffened. Was he really going to lose it now, in the middle of the day? These episodes were supposed to be a nightly affair. He was used to that, at least.

  “Spare me the day,” he grumbled.

  “Don’t you dare let them in your town,” the voice went on. “They’re the devil’s children. The devil’s spawn. They’re going to ruin everything.”

  He put his hand on the butt of his gun and an electric shock seemed to travel up his fingers when he touched it, setting first his fingers and then his wrist to trembling.

  “They’ll take all you’ve got left. And that’s not very much, is it?”

  He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to clear his head.

  “Devil’s children. His.”

  A frown line appeared between his eyes. It deepened with each step he took toward the gate, toward the devil’s children. That damn voice wasn’t shutting up now, so he tried his best to ignore it.

  He walked closer.

  “Devil’s children. Devil’s children.”

  The men smiled at him.

  “Devil’s children.”

  A cricket chirruped.

  “Devil’s...”

  The voice in his head was growing quieter.

  “Children.”

  “How many are with you?” he asked.

  “It’s just the two of us.”

  “Devi—“

  “And what did you bring?”

  “Potatoes, sugar, shoes.”

&nbs
p; “How’d you hear about…here?”

  They pointed inside and mentioned two veteran trading outfits, which they claimed had shared New Crozet’s location with them. Supposedly, they were licensed and had been at it a long time, but had never ventured this far east. The story was plausible.

  “IDs?” New Crozet’s last line of defense said.

  They handed their IDs to Corks, who examined them, doing a painstaking comparison against the acceptable forms of ID that the settlements had agreed upon when trading had just begun.

  The IDs checked out, and the voice in his head was gone.

  “Okay,” he said. He gave the OK signal to Mills and Williams, and they opened the gates in sequence, first opening the outer gate, letting the traders in and closing it shut behind them, then opening the second gate to allow them into the next fenced-in compartment, shutting that gate, and then opening the last gate to let the potatoes, sugar, and shoes into New Crozet, and then shutting that one too.

  Maybe they’d have Nikes, Corks thought as they went by. The random thought pinged in his brain, wanting him to wonder where it had come from, but he didn’t care one way or another.

  Just as the traders passed into the town center, woodland zombies, having been attracted by the scraping of the gates—peanut oil could only do so much—threw themselves against the outer gate.

  Corks, from his place in the alley beside the gated compartments said, “Hello again, old friends.” Then he promptly launched a noisemaker up into the woods.

  The popper—not to be confused with one of Nell’s Poppers—went on its merry way, arcing over trees before reaching its zenith, giving a great bang, and then beginning its descent, rattling the whole the way like a pesky flame-free firework.

  The zombies at the fence turned abruptly and began to lope back toward the tree line and over it. Corks followed their progress and his eyes were met with something he didn’t expect to see—another truck.

  “Shit,” he said. “This had better be the very last.”

  Who was in this truck that the rotten deer, rabbits, foxhounds, mice, squirrels, and Labradors and Goldens—once much-loved pets—were now passing on their way into the woods? Corks didn’t recognize it.

  Uneasy, he looked behind him.

  Jack was standing at the last of the inner gates, watching him.

  There was something in the boy’s eyes.

  “What is it, Jack?”

  Jack only stared at Corks, saying nothing. He was trying to remember something, it was the crocodile snout that he’d meant to bury.

  It was outside of his mind now, displaced by what he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the curious and extremely dilapidated truck outside the fence. Who were these traders? What did they have? And how far had they come for the truck to look that bad?

  The wooden snout with its reptile mouth kept biting at his leg, but he still didn’t remember it, fascinated as he now was with the rolling relic that was slowly approaching. If there were channels of other-than-human communication in the world, a message was now racing on them, trying to reach this boy, to convey a rough sketch of the coming hours, not to warn him off or scare him, but just to be seen.

  Try as they might, they were failing to reach him, and only hit the snout and its teeth and stuck to it like jam. The message in the invisible bottle was simple. It came first as words, then as feelings, then as pictures, then as feelings again, then as a tingling sensation—which Jack almost did feel—and then as a final coloring book page, but a blank one without outlines.

  On the page, a teal crayon began to smear itself clumsily across. It drew a small boy with wavy, uncombed hair, teeth marks in his leg, and a fence, and his house, and he…he was on the wrong side. On the wrong side of the fence.

  And there was more, there were…

  It kept drawing, cutting itself down to small teal strips stuck to paper to show him, just to let him see, because that was what it did, what it was made to do if it had ever been made at all. There was a lot more that even the crude crayon piece could convey, but it didn’t matter, because it was outside of human comprehension. But, perhaps its existence in that outside place, was exactly why it did matter.

  Feeling a strange tug in the pit of his belly, Jack retreated from the fence, making his way to the center of New Crozet, where the unfolding market would welcome him with its county fair-like ambience. No pig races at this one, but some good post-apocalyptic delicacies and refried chunks of gossip to be had.

  10

  Brother Acrisius was looking curiously at the man’s face, which was covered with mosquito bites. Some of them were so inflamed that they were red, semi-bloody welts. That made Acrisius feel a certain kinship with the man, but only for that moment, as they each raised a hand to the rebellious skin of their faces and rubbed.

  New Crozet’s most senior watchman had been scratching at the itchiest of them all morning, raising the bumps up higher and higher and overturning barely-formed scabs. The sun was in his eyes now and he was squinting, and the crinkling of his skin made the itch worse.

  As he dragged his nails down one cheek he got some momentary relief, and then the itch returned, crawling back with its barbed legs. A spot of blood surfaced in the nails’ wake, like a forming nipple on a pink, mosquito bite breast.

  Groaning, he put his hand back on the butt of his sidearm—which he’d holstered again after letting the last group through—and glared through the window of the outer gate. He didn’t recognize the men or the truck, which was more broken to bits than vehicles that were still in working order usually were.

  The truck puttered along for a few yards and then stopped again, punctuating the halt with a few spits of exhaust that sounded more like an old man hocking phlegm than an automobile, even a tired and grumpy one such as this.

  Now Corks could see that the truck had the words ‘Tack Truck’ written in big block letters on one side. The thing looked old and dilapidated, like a turd on wheels that had suffered more rounds of flushing than even it deserved.

  But that was all a ruse, a façade. The outside was shit, and the muffler was more rust and holes than metal, but what was inside, that was a different story entirely. The truck was really a young man in old man’s garb, a dire wolf in a sheep grandfather’s clothing. And the apparent frailty was almost too good to be taken for true, almost.

  Jack looked at the truck, and the men sitting in its cab, and he turned around and bolted. Corks watched the boy sprint toward the town center, the dust his shoes turned up settling in his wake. The ground was dry and flaking apart, and even the weeds were drying up. They were due for some rain.

  Corks turned back to the gate and winced, almost drawing back. The traders were now pulled up to the window, and the one in the driver’s seat was disfigured. Corks was disturbed, but only briefly. It was just a man with a skin problem and some paralysis, not a zombie.

  The pustules on the man’s face parted to let some teeth poke through. It took a moment for Corks to register what it was: a smile.

  “Hello,” the man with the pustules said. The word was contorted by stroke-stiff muscles, but only slightly.

  Corks offered up a close-mouthed smile and nodded.

  Silence ping-ponged between them for a long moment, Corks standing firm with his paddle.

  “We’re Tackers,” the man with the skin disease said. “I’m Albert, and this is Ronnie.” He gestured to the man beside him in the passenger seat.

  He does look like an Albert, Corks thought, unsure of where that thought had come from.

  Albert’s face seemed to sour, but maybe that was just the pustules moving along with his face, as if his expression were rotten milk with curds floating to the surface.

  The man called Ronnie put a hand up, palm directed at Corks, waved slightly, smiled, and said, “Hi. We’ve come a long way to find you. Heard you’ve got some good trade here.”

  He had chiseled features and teeth that were too white and looked too pointy in places. To Corks, there w
as something unreal about him, not like he was a Claymation that was trying to pass for a person, but more like he’d been airbrushed. Ronnie flashed another overly bright, vampire’s smile and waited.

  Corks sighed. “Tackers, eh? So you’re bringing what, exactly, to market?”

  Ronnie’s smile grew broader, and Corks had an urge to turn away from the increasing dazzle playing off the shiners in Ronnie’s mouth, but he didn’t. “Hardtack, of course, the very best kind that’s left. We make it ourselves, live on the stuff.”

  “Uhuh,” Corks said. The blasted flying leech bites were driving him crazy. Why’d they have to go for the face? What the hell kind of mosquitos did that, anyway?

  “Is that all?” Corks said. “Tack?”

  Now was it just Corks or did the man in the driver’s seat stiffen a tad at that? Never mind, they were probably hungry and eager to trade their tack—no matter how good it actually was and Corks doubted it was any better than average, which wasn’t much good at all—for anything else in the world to eat.

  Ronnie nodded. “The best tack you’ve ever tried. We guarantee it.”

  “Sure, sure.” Corks was finding it easier to keep his gaze averted from Albert with the soup of boils covering his face, and look only at Ronnie. “IDs?”

  Now, hold on there, did the man in the driver’s seat stiffen at that, too? On top of being hungry, he was probably nervous about being out in the open with his window rolled down for this long.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Corks said. “I sent a noisemaker cracking into the woods just now, fire-less, of course, wouldn’t want to burn the place down and us in the middle of it. The zombies are going after it now. You’re safe here, for the time being.”

  “Yes,” Albert said, nodding and arranging the lumpy puree of his skin into an attempt at something pleasant, which only looked like he was bearing a small load of discomfort. Still, it was an improvement.