Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  At least the Tackers said it was fairly new, so the chances of it being infested were low, or at least lower.

  Back in Civil War times, the soldiers who were lucky enough to get some ten-to-twenty year tack—a very good vintage indeed, especially when made so by food shortages—broke up the crackers and dunked the bits into their coffee cups, forcing all the weevils to the surface of the weak and usually ersatz coffee they were drinking, allowing the men to scoop out said weevils and proceed to eat the softened tack and drink their now carb-fortified coffee. Alan shook his head. Now we’d eat the weevils, he thought, and call ourselves lucky.

  Jack walked over to Alan.

  “What’s tack?” Jack asked, and the half-paralyzed Tacker, who’d called himself Albert, heard him.

  “It’s a cracker,” Albert said, practically spitting the words in his gruff manner and startling Jack. “It’s flat and hard—very hard. Made of flour and salt, and water, but that gets cooked out.” He reached down out of the truck and offered Jack a small sample, which Jack took.

  “Now, before you pop that in your mouth, be warned, it’s real hard, and you need to soften it up with spit or water.”

  Jack nodded, placed the piece of cracker gingerly in his mouth and began to suck at it. It was like a rock, but had a faint flavor that was good, but which he couldn’t place. Whatever it was, it didn’t taste like just flour and salt.

  Albert was handing out samples to the other townspeople, most of whom had eaten tack before.

  “What’s your name, young man?” Albert asked.

  Jack told him.

  Albert nodded. “A good name for a boy, and tack goes by a good many good names, too. It used to be called a lot of things, like sea bread and sea biscuit and ship biscuit and cabin bread by sailors who ate it on ships as rations…but here I’ve more often heard it called worm castle, sheet iron, and molar breaker.”

  Z-biscuit was one of the epithets the Tacker didn’t know. He offered Jack the most conspiratorial smile he could manage with his half-iced face. “What do you think?”

  “It tastes good,” Jack said. “And I like worm castle. Why that?”

  Albert grinned, showing his gum line where the teeth were more green and black rot than tooth. “Because the worms think it makes a good home. Protection from the elements.”

  The townspeople were exchanging all manner of goods with Albert and his assistant, Ronnie—who was the first living black man Alan had seen since the rec-crews—while Albert continued to talk with Jack. Alan was standing and listening, somewhat interested, and feeling a bit protective of the boy. The traders who came were sometimes a bit too loose with their tongues, and they could put ideas into children’s heads that didn’t belong there. There were things that happened outside the fence that he didn’t want Jack to know about.

  “People in the north,” Albert said, “back when there were more people up there, would eat tack with melted butter and soup or dipped in moose stew. Too bad there’s no more butter or moose now, at least not the kind you’d wanna eat. Wouldn’t wanna go squeezing any butter out of some zombie cow’s teats, I’ll tell you that much.”

  There it is, Alan thought. Exactly the wrong track to be going down.

  He frowned, and gave Albert a very clear shake of the head that said, ‘no more’. Did the children really need to hear that? Albert nodded, and shrugged apologetically.

  “But let’s not worry about that now, Jack,” he said. “Just make sure you mix the tack with water or spit and be careful not to break your molars. If you have sugar or fruit you can mix it all together in some water and have a pudding later.”

  Jack moved the piece of worm castle to one cheek and smiled a hamster smile. He’d already decided that worm castle was what he’d call the stuff. That was the best name by far.

  “Here you go,” Albert said, offering Jack some more of the broken bits of tack he’d brought for sampling. “The small bits don’t keep too well, so you might as well take ’em. Make sure to share with your friends, and warn them not to break their molars either!”

  Alan nodded. The Tacker had quickly changed his tune, and that was good.

  Jack thanked the man and ran off, presumably to find his friends and show them his treasure.

  15

  Alan wrote himself a mental note to show Jack how the tack really ought to be eaten: mixed with peanut butter and something sweet like honey, which they had painfully little of, or apple sauce or another fruit preserve, or, if there was nothing of the fruit or berry or honey variety to be had, with cane sugar. That was the best way to eat it, if you asked him.

  He got in line and traded an elderly box of oats and a potato for two packages of tack, which he meant to make into a snack for the children later.

  He thanked Albert for coming, and asked him how they’d come by New Crozet.

  Albert and Ronnie, who’d never gone by either of those names before as this was their first undercover job, and, it was going swimmingly if you asked them, acted out their rehearsed fable of how they’d heard there was a town out in the middle-of-nowhere Virginia, where the produce was fresh as could be and the people weren’t half-bad either, and they’d already been held up nearby when their truck broke down just outside Asheville, North Carolina, where the nearest settlement was, lovingly dubbed Asheville Extended.

  “So we were on our own sort of extended stay,” Albert had said, “east of Asheville Extended, and some of the good people there helped us stay whole and patched up our truck some, and they told us about you guys over here. So we figured, what the hell. They said you had darn good stuff, though you were a good stretch away.”

  Larry Knapp had listened with a bit of interest at first, but now he was just impatient. He wanted his turn with the tack, because he really knew how to make the stuff tasty: what you do is you take some of this here tack, get some sugar and beer or liquor if you’re lucky enough to have it, and mix it all up into a pudding.

  Teetotaler and water drinkers beware, you’re missing out. But Larry could live with that, because that meant more for him. What was good for the on-the-wagon gander was good for the off-the-wagon goose, or some such dusty adage. The trick was to not use water, but to soak the biscuits only in the good stuff. Any barfly worth his tequila salt knew that.

  The townspeople were trying the tack and loving it. The biscuit was evoking much more fanfare than usual for the worm castle that it was, and that was because it was different than the kind of worm castle the townspeople had eaten before, most of which had come under the Sailor Boy label, which had been made locally by a company called Interbake Foods, based out of Richmond.

  Until the outbreak, Interbake had made most, if not all, of the commercially available hardtack, the kind of stuff you could order online and, when that neat parcel showed up on your door, you could tear it open and break your molars to your heart’s deepest content. That was back when packages could be ordered and were delivered, of course.

  Most of Interbake’s sales had been to Alaskans, where tack had never really gone out of style, especially on light aircraft, which had been required to carry pilot bread. When the outbreak hit, there had been a run on Alaskan airstrips to salvage as many Sailor Boy Pilot Bread boxes as could be had. It did have a long shelf-life, but it would expire eventually, so why let it?

  On this very market day, there were still people living in Alaska, not many, subsisting on the remains of Interbake’s commercial runs. The pilot bread was past its technical ten year life, but if stored well and especially in cold conditions, the stuff could last for decades. And the few people left in Alaska were having a go at drawing out the crackery goodness.

  Sailor Boy Pilot Bread had a different taste than the biscuits the Tackers had brought to New Crozet. What the Tackers were selling was much tastier, and surprisingly so for tack. What made Albert and Ronnie’s tack so damn delicious was a subtle flavor, a hint of something that the people of New Crozet couldn’t quite remember, like beef tallow…but slig
htly different.

  16

  “This is really good,” Corks said to no one in particular, dragging out the ‘good’ and with an inflection of surprise in his voice. The tack really was, too, and you would’ve thought the same.

  It was one of those rare times when he had any appetite at all, so he was trying to take full advantage of the slight peckishness and stuff himself with as much of the tack as he could.

  The meat was falling off his bones a little too quickly these days, and he’d about had enough of the ‘you’re wasting away’ and ‘you’re all skin and bones’ comments, a good number of which came from Senna, who was all about trying to make everybody eat more.

  Tom had even half-threatened to take him off the night watch. And then what the hell would he do? It’s not like he could sleep much, and he had to do something that was useful to the town or he’d lose his mind, or what was left of it, anyway.

  Not quite smiling—he was actually liking the taste of this stuff—he took another bite of the cracker, working his teeth into it slowly so as not to break or chip any, and only after he’d soaked the bite with saliva to soften it up. The Tackers had some thinner crackers too, but he liked the thicker kind, the sort you had to work to get a mouthful of.

  Working on the cracker in the pleasant late morning sunlight, while he watched the excited New Crozet townspeople at market, he felt something close to happiness. It was good to have these things—the markets. Better than that, it was great. It changed everyone, made people light up again, sparking them with curiosity about the world and the things that were outside the fence—the good stuff that was out there, anyway.

  It was a world where glass jars were treasures and having some coarse flour in the pantry was a thing to be thankful for, and tack that was this superb, well that was downright glorious. He’d traded some of his cornmeal rations—the New Crozet watchmen and other folks who performed non-farming functions were paid with food or what passed for it these days—for the tack, and it was so good that he decided to trade some more.

  Standing in line and chatting with some of the townspeople and visitors was a good way to occupy his mind, too, and it would help him through until he was up for his next shift. Distractions were what he needed, and he knew that. Still, the older he got, and the longer he lived in the town, the harder it was becoming for him to fully engage his brain, and thereby keep it quiet. That was the real challenge: shutting the blathering thing up.

  Corks’s rec-crew had dissolved just over seventeen months before Alan and Senna left their crew, but he’d gone off in a far more damaged state than either of them had. He was more sensitive than they were, but perhaps that meant that he was normal, or just slightly more fragile than normal, or maybe it was just the loss of his son that made it all nearly unbearable.

  Whatever it was, he didn’t have the mental staying power of an Alan or a Senna, and he knew it.

  He’d spent years trying to get better at living in the post-apocalypse, and that happened just by virtue of being alive, really, and he wasn’t the only one whose mind was a motor-mouth when it came to reminding him of all the things that he’d done wrong, and of uttering the names of the people who’d been taken out of his life.

  Many survivors—most—heard these voices, but they all seemed better able to block that out. He knew he wasn’t the worst at it, that couldn’t be, or at least he thought that he knew that, but everyone else acted like they were much better adjusted than he was. Maybe that was all in his head too, just like the voices, but he didn’t think so.

  It had always been an effort for him to fit in with people in the old world, and whenever he stopped trying, he’d fall back out and into isolation, like he was an ill-fitting puzzle piece that could be jammed into place, but once you took your hand away, it would pop right the hell back out again. Fitting in didn’t matter so much these days, and he didn’t care about that anymore anyway, but maybe that was part of the problem he was having, in that his mind didn’t seem to take to the normal things that everyone else was able to lose themselves in.

  The trouble was finding a way to keep himself distracted. For a time he’d tried TV, but that hadn’t worked, and he didn’t watch it anymore.

  A few still turned the old boob tubes on now and again. There was no TV left, not the live stuff, or anything new, anyway. There were still some DVDs and VHS tapes here and there, and there were plenty of working TVs and DVD players and more than enough juice to run them—it didn’t take much—although when it came to tape decks, there were fewer and fewer working ones every year.

  The things seemed to be shriveling up in a second extinction, as if the meteoric rise of the DVD hadn’t been enough. He tried to force himself to read sometimes, but that too was a battle, because he couldn’t make his mind engage with unreality anymore.

  Whatever had enabled him to escape into entertainment and find relaxation and pleasure there, that portal or star gate of synapses in his brain, was gone, having folded in on itself years earlier. And without the distraction of movies and TV shows or anything else to still the thoughts, he did think, and darkness was often in his mind, a shade sewn from guilt that he rarely took off.

  You’d have thought that with enough power to watch movies and play music, the townspeople would’ve been more into the stuff, but they weren’t. They hardly used it as an escape at all.

  Once in a while someone would turn on a TV or play a song and all it seemed to do was reassure them that they didn’t need or want the stuff anymore, that it was a thing that they’d shrugged off when it stopped fitting right and the thing still didn’t fit, and wouldn’t again. It was just like something you kept in the closet for years before giving it to Goodwill, somewhat uncomfortable about the idea of giving it up, but also certain that you’d never get any more use out of it.

  And now it would just hang there, because there was nowhere to take the ill-fitting costume of dramas and comedies and action flicks. There was probably a zombie movie or two in the bunch. How about that?

  Corks thought on the dark suit that he always wore and how he might get rid of it. He did want to get it out of his life, or at least he thought he did. That darkness was always there, day and night.

  It was worse in the daytime, in fact, when the sun lit up what was left of the world and showed him the shadows of what was missing, just like the harsh light of day might show you all the lint and stains and loose seams on your black wool suit. At least in the dark of night, these failings were harder to spot. They were still there of course, but as long as the moon and stars didn’t shine too brightly, they were hidden, and he didn’t have to think about them quite so much.

  He caught a glimpse of Larry Knapp. Corks envied him. In fact, he envied him just as much as a man could envy another. How could he not? That man could drink and forget. And it must have been a damned good remedy, because he kept downing the potions as quickly as he could brew them.

  And on top of all of it he had two wonderful, healthy children. He didn’t even have to forget, because he could live in the now and be happy, but he chose to ignore the good he had and focus only on what he’d lost and how he’d been wronged and let that consume him.

  But wasn’t that how it always was, forget the good in hand and get drunk out of your mind to forget the bird or maybe even birds still in the bush? Corks had tried to follow Knapp’s example, but the drinking hadn’t done much to ease the hurt. In fact, it had only made it worse. Maybe the drunk’s remedy wasn’t for everyone.

  17

  Speaking of, Larry Knapp was sauntering this way and that, grinning like a fool. He was on a meandering course to nowhere in particular, and that was just how he liked it.

  He had a fistful of Nell’s Poppers and dried and fried grasshopper and cricket mix, two Twinkies, tack tucked away in his pockets, and a thermos of beer in his hands, and, given his condition, he was doing an admirable job of keeping most of what he had in his grasp most of the time. And when he did drop some of the poppers
or a cricket or two, he bent down and did a gymnastic dance of scooping them up again. He was surprisingly flexible at the moment, but all drunks were in that state.

  There’d been a crick in his neck when he woke up, but the drinking had helped that, a lot. The drinking, Knapp decided as he grinned to himself, helped a lot with a lot of things. On top of that little tidbit of awesome, one group of traders had brought Twinkies, imagine the luck!

  Were they still good to eat? Where had they found them, and just how many years expired were they? Who knew?

  What mattered was that the one in Larry Knapp’s mouth right now seemed to be made of heaven—a faintly stale heaven, like the clouds holding up the pearly gates had turned a tad sour and the harps inside the gates were a bit rusty and some even had a booger or two stuck to them, but Knapp didn’t mind that. He was still in heaven. “And tha’s what counts,” he said, slurring his words amiably. There were times when his drunkenness was almost cute, and his current condition was as close as it got.

  The cup he was holding tried to jump from his hand and do a little jig in the air. He tried to restrain it, and the result was that some of its prized contents sloshed out over the rim and soaked the front of his shirt. He felt the beer soak his belly.

  “I spilled beer on my ’elf,” he murmured, and chuckled to himself. He didn’t have an elf, but he realized that he might like one. That’d be fine: an elf for his own, to do with as he saw fit.

  The elf could brew while Knapp slept, and could sleep while Knapp brewed…and… He couldn’t think of much else at the moment, but he was sure there were a lot of useful things an elf could be put to work doing.

  “I’ll look into it in the morning,” he said, addressing himself. “If you want it ’un tight, do it your elf.” He laughed again, more heartily this time, and this pulled a satisfying belch up out of the depths of his stomach.