Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  Formless wisps of brain activity were struggling to find purchase in her suddenly transparent grey matter.

  Why was it so hard to think? Why was she so tired? Why was her chest so heavy and stiff?

  Straining to move, she found that her hands were tied behind her back. Her ankles were tied together. Cable ties. Fucking cable ties.

  The stiffness in her ribs was so foreign that she couldn’t tell if it was really painful or just uncomfortable. Everything was a shade of numb.

  She understood that she was inside the Tack Truck, that much was obvious, even though the memory of following someone—a child—to it and then something happening to her outside of it, were so indistinct that they seemed like events from a forgotten dream. Her brain was flying high, or low under the radar, whichever, but when she could narrow her focus she could think, if only in small doses. Trying to concentrate, she looked around the room.

  The large design of the truck was now made clear in purpose. She was in a small room without windows. There was a door, and only the bleakest beams of light were filtering in around its edges.

  Focus, she tried to yell at her cloud brain, focus!

  The grey cloud of what was supposed to be her grey matter only watched her from its lofty position, frowning dismissively, jeering her in her plight.

  Focus!

  The cloud made a frowny face of mist at her.

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of shallow breathing, then a groan. It was a child’s groan, or at least that was how it sounded to Senna, but her eyes were too unfocused to tell for sure. Dominating her field of vision was what you’d see if you looked through a windshield in the pouring rain with your wipers off: flowing water with only bleak colors behind it.

  It was like there was something on her eyes, an infuriating, blinding film, except that she could see that fucking frowning cloud of her mind, but that wasn’t in the room with her, or was it? Was it in the room? Was she in the clouds?

  Concentrate!

  After what seemed like hours—it was only minutes—and just when she was close to choking on her frustration, the cloud, fucking thing, finally listened.

  Its body distilled until it was a single glob of water hanging in the air. What air? The glob began to vaporize again, to become essence, and Senna had to apply all of her will to keep the thing from steaming into indistinct and useless vapor that could do nothing but make stupid, childish faces at her. She kept the liquid floating in place, pressed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, and reopened them.

  The blinders were lifted, if only for the moment, and she saw others there with her: Molly, Rad, Jack, Rosemary, Sasha, and Jenny, all unconscious, their breathing faint, but rhythmic. The children were in a heap of jumbled limbs and crisscrossed torsos, the adults side by side. Senna was on the floor opposite them, like an afterthought. She was an unwanted player in the Tackers’ game, a troublemaking intruder.

  She heard footsteps approaching, reverberating through the floor, so she stopped moving, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the floor. The door was unlocked and opened.

  Outside noises, from the market, floated into the room. Senna could hear townspeople bartering. Someone was arguing about the price of cauliflower, someone else was haggling over Nell’s Poppers, and there was a sliver of conversation about a settlement in the Midwest. Then the door was shut and locked again, and the outside world was cut off, perhaps for good.

  22

  “I know you’re awake,” Acrisius said as he glared at her. “We didn’t have enough of the good stuff left to put you to bed. No use in pretending, anyway.”

  Senna remained motionless.

  “Stubborn. I like that. Okay, let’s try the hard way.”

  He kicked her, planting the steel toe of his boot squarely in the soft spot under her ribs.

  “Open your eyes and look at me when I talk to you, you fucking cunt.”

  Senna’s breath was forced out of her and she did open her eyes. Standing over her was one of the Tackers, the one whose face was covered in boils, and half of it was frozen in a glare while the other half sagged expressionlessly.

  He was bald except for two patches of yellowing hair that sprouted from the sides of his head above his ears, and his appearance might have been comical had he not looked so evil. The sadism that lived in his eyes was so stark it might as well have been tattooed on his eyeballs.

  She’d known men like that on the rec-crews. They’d rarely lasted long because they got caught up in trying to inflict pain on the zombies, which was an impossible task, and they forgot to mind their own safety. They were a liability, a danger not only to themselves, but to those who worked with them.

  “That’s better,” he said. His voice was flat but twitched up and down uncontrollably when the tentacles of his paralyzed half brushed against it. The words were a bit of a challenge to work out at first, but Senna’s hearing adjusted quickly.

  “Now listen real closely to what I’m about to say to you, because it just might save your life, for a while, anyway. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking if you play nicely you might live long enough to get a chance at freeing those kids and taking them back home safe and sound and so on and so forth. Well, let me make something perfectly clear to you. You won’t, so you can struggle all you want, and you can plan all you want, but nothing’s going to come of it. Not a single fucking thing in the world.”

  He shrugged. “That, is the rule. But, as all rules, there’s one exception. If you keep on trucking in that bitch way of yours sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, making noise and having your friends out there get suspicious of anything too soon, the minute we think we’re in any real danger, all of the little ones in here with you will die. I’ll cut their throats one by one while you watch until you see the last of them bleed out.

  “If you behave, you can prolong all of your lives a little while longer. And who knows how long? That, one never knows. So whatever big move you’re planning, or planning to plan, don’t even think about it. Unless, of course, you like to watch children die.” He spread open the fingers of his good hand. “It’s your call.”

  Then he kicked her again, in the head this time and hard enough to jog her memory, literally, and how she’d gotten there flashed back into her mind: she’d sold out her stand and was looking for Rosemary and behind the stands next to the Tack Truck. She’d wanted to buy the girl something to eat, if there was anything Rosemary still hadn’t tried.

  There she must have gotten a bit too close to seeing something she was not supposed to, because the last thing she now remembered before losing consciousness was a mosquito alighting on the side of her neck and stabbing, hard. The bloodsucker du jour had been a syringe loaded with vitamin S, the great Sultan Sufentanil, which backwashed the strongest sedative the Order had straight into her bloodstream. Mothballs of dark had bloomed in her veins, smothering all the dry fluttering of wakefulness.

  And now that she was awake again, it really felt like she’d been mothballed and in storage for weeks, maybe even months. What had they given her?

  The very act of being awake seemed foreign. The light, of which there was barely any at all in the room, pricked at her eyes as if she was using them for the first time in a long while.

  She remembered something before the Sultan bit her, just moments before: it was the sound of a muffled sneeze, which she’d thought had come from behind the Tack Truck, and when she’d gone back there…

  That was where the replay ended. Maybe more of the movie would fill itself in later. She’d just have to wait and see.

  Well, she’d found Rosemary alright, and not just her. Since Senna had been knocked out, more children had been snatched up, and Molly and Rad, too.

  “And here’s something to make sure you behave a little while longer,” the Tacker added. The plunger of the syringe was squeezed once, then the needle went into the small of Senna’s back, just barely missing a bundle of nerves that, had it been hit, really woul
d’ve taken her out of the running for good, and the plunger leapt again.

  “And, for good measure…” He kicked her again, and the room begin to spin out of the one lane road and into the trees.

  “Fucking meddling cunt,” he said, and his mind went straight to the dope and how they needed more of it.

  They had a little of the good stuff left, but not enough to keep wasting on a snooping settlement whore like this. The bit he’d held back he was saving for a celebration, when he and Saul could be alone with a pound of salty flesh.

  For further good measure, he kicked Senna in the small of her back.

  “That’s to give that shit a kick in the ass…get you into dreamland faster. Nose around there all you want.”

  Acrisius was remembering just how much he hated women, and it was a good feeling, a damned good one. There was plenty of hatred to go around these days, for all manner of things and the scum that passed for people, but he had a special place in his dark heart for these disgusting creatures. Revolting was what women were, and if it were up to him, there wouldn’t be a single woman in the Order and the ones who were in it now would be expelled.

  They weren’t even fit to be eaten by men. But if the virus wanted them, so be it.

  He turned his back and left, wiping the sweat from his brow with the snarl of his paralyzed hand and trying to twitch onto his face an expression that was welcoming and calm.

  Senna tried to see the children through the careening veil of her swelling right eye. They would be sold into slavery, abused, and eventually eaten. That was the nature of the world outside the perimeter.

  New Crozet had always been a snow globe in a field of meteors, and a rock had finally struck the fragile dome. Now, all of the contents of the town, the ones that mattered, anyway, the ones with the possibilities of futures, would be sucked into the vacuum outside. And that was the last thought that she had time to think before the Sultan, that supreme ruler of the post-apocalyptic opiate kingdom, pulled her under again, back into storage, to limber her up for his sadistic games.

  The distinct sound of Rosemary’s wheezing was filling the truck. The child was wandering through drugged, lightless fields where the air was rare and life was really fucking unfair.

  Every so often a patch of dark would light up, as if a glow were tearing through it, and she’d be able to get a breath in all the way. But trapped where she was, in a boa constrictor’s squeezing coils, the glimmers were few and far between.

  23

  The fireball that had lit up the ground of New Crozet before the place had a name and continued to do so now that there was, was setting. The clouds were wispy streaks across the sky, plumes of smoke emitted by the sun’s orange glow. Alan stared upward, awestruck, his jaw slackened by the sight. He’d never seen anything like this.

  It was a sky ablaze. He had to find Senna, to show her, or at least to make sure she’d seen it. He had to look at it with her, while there was still time.

  He pushed through the dense throng of townspeople in the market, trying to remember where he had seen Senna last. The people didn’t notice him, focused as they were on the wares set out in the traders’ stands.

  As he made his way down the street, he noticed how deeply absorbed everyone was in trade and in exchanging stories with the traders. The line for the Tack Truck, the newcomer that was the surprise star of this market, showed no signs of getting shorter.

  He looked around, but didn’t see a single other person, not a single soul, looking up at the sky. He would point out the burning sky to them too, if they would allow themselves to be distracted from feasting and storytelling, after he found Senna.

  Swimming upstream through the crowd, the wonder seeped out of him as if the townspeople he’d lived with for all these years had sucked it from him as he passed. When he reached the other side of the town center, the excitement had gone from his face. He’d been sure that Senna would be somewhere in the center of the market, and he was sure he hadn’t missed her just now. Where else could she be?

  Alan stepped backward from the crowd, detaching himself from it, and looked at the New Crozet market.

  Senna wasn’t there.

  He glanced up at the sky, as if to reassure himself of what he’d seen there moments before, and when he lowered his gaze, his eyes met those of one of the traders in the Tack Truck. They were eyes that glinted darkly from a nest of scraggly folds where pustules grew like mushrooms.

  Alan’s expression wilted, the cadence of his breathing faltered, and he almost lost his footing as it all registered at the same time, in the space between two quickening heartbeats. He’d seen looks like the one on the trader’s face before, on men like that, and Senna wasn’t the only person suddenly gone from the crowd.

  Children were missing, and there’d been a telltale rhythm to the Tackers’ intermittent disappearances from the truck’s storefront.

  All the arrow tips dipped in poison connected in Alan’s mind.

  And…

  The flavor.

  That connected too.

  There were only two people in New Crozet who’d tasted human flesh, and he wasn’t one of them, but he did remember how Allie had smelled when she burned, and he’d almost been able to taste the oiliness of the smoke.

  That was the flavor in the tack.

  It was a trap sprung, realized too late.

  But wait, maybe there was still time.

  The truck was still here, surrounded by New Crozet, by survivors who wouldn’t abide by this. It would not leave.

  It.

  Would.

  Not.

  All of this flashed in Alan’s mind in a split second, and then there was nothing, just—

  Impulse.

  24

  He threw himself into the throng and ran, barreling through the oblivious people who were stuffing their faces and spewing columns of words from their mouths.

  In seconds he closed three quarters of the distance to the truck, moving more swiftly, precisely, and with the most clarity of purpose he’d ever had in his life.

  Men and women were falling, had already fallen, to the ground in his wake. They were lying, toppled and stunned, liked planted seeds of silence that hatched and grew with the rapidity of weeds, poking into the din and putting it out like a licked finger to a waning candle flame. A painful quiet was spreading.

  Alan hit a dense spot in the crowd and heaved himself into it. There he was met with limbs and torsos that remained stubbornly in place.

  The chatter was almost completely gone now, and in the space of a few more seconds it would be entirely snuffed out. The townspeople were noticing, and some were reacting, moving toward Alan, pressing up behind him, moving, reflexively, to help in the unknown task.

  The Tackers were faster. It had come to a head, as they’d been expecting it too. They’d taken more than they’d hoped for, and it was time to close the fucking candy store for the day.

  The shutter on the side of the Tack Truck rattled shut before Alan could reach it. Locks were thrown, and the sides of the truck began to dance with the rhythm of the hurried movements within.

  Alan pushed onward, roughly shoving people aside until he reached the truck. There he pounded on the shutter.

  “Let them out,” he yelled. “Open!”

  He pounded on the truck hard enough to split his palms open and set them to bleeding. Bloody prints were being left on the truck with every blow.

  “Open!”

  Then the truck’s engine roared to life like a waking dragon. It had been disturbed in its slumber, and now it would lash out with mythic fury.

  “They have Senna!” he yelled over his shoulder to the crowd. “And the children! They’ve taken the children!” He repeated the cry again, and again, stoking the growing flames until the confused protests behind him had become an outpouring of burning, desperate anger.

  War had broken loose in New Crozet.

  Alan began to circle around the truck to get to the cab. There he wo
uld get in, and he would rip these fucking Tackers apart with his bare hands.

  If they were stronger, then he’d fight them until his dying breath was wrenched free of his lungs, and then the other townspeople would take up the fight and finish them off. They had damn well better.

  The town of New Crozet, he was determined, would prevail, and Senna and the children would be set free. The truck was locked inside the perimeter, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

  25

  The walls of the Tack Truck were shaking. Someone—one of the townspeople, probably the lanky, Wayfarer-bespectacled man with the crazed look in his eye who’d made a run at them, and now surely joined by plenty of his good ol’ Podunk townsfolk—was pounding on the truck from the outside. But that was okay, because, ugly as the truck was, it was impregnable, and near unbreakable at that.

  That was how Brother Mardu was looking at it, anyway, because he was now in one of his better moods, the depression having for the moment lifted. He’d begun to hear a faint squeak in his left ear, and he took that to mean the only thing it could: his mistress, the wonderful queen of Krok and all that still moved, fragrantly rotting, in the world, was returning.

  Brother Acrisius, on the other hand, thought that this was it, that they’d been figured out too early and would be taken out and literally ripped apart by the mob outside. He began to busy himself with the task of whipping himself into an internal panic, which was threatening to spill over the rim of his composure and take over his body if he didn’t keep it together.