by James, Guy
Acrisius was running his tongue over his bottom lip as he waited, back and forth, back and forth. He only felt half of it, and that went for the tongue and the lip, but he was having a really good fucking time of watching the woman’s awareness of her situation grow.
He knew the woman was a royal cunt, and he was sure she’d be lashing out at them, and as much as he was looking forward to that, it didn’t disappoint him to see the dread rising in her eyes when she saw what he was holding. In his hands was a cat o’ nine tails, each of whose thongs he was stroking in turn.
The cat was twice the standard size, and had been made, slowly and painstakingly, by none other than Acrisius himself. It was designed to prolong the agony, and to keep Acrisius far away at all times from his victim’s limited movements. Brother Saul was empty-handed, but considering what he was working with that would be more than enough.
They’d left her clothes on, too. Had she been a man, that would’ve been different, but they wanted nothing to do with her private parts if they could help it. Saul could go either way if instructed, but he was devoted heart and soul to Brother Acrisius, who strongly preferred the company of men, and wouldn’t have been able to stomach watching Saul do anything sexual with Senna, even if it were done to hurt her.
That wasn’t to say there weren’t others who would’ve been more than happy to violate her, and who could do so to their heart’s delight without Acrisius giving a second thought to it, but Brother Mardu had made it very clear, crystal in fact, that they weren’t to touch her, besides the beating, of course, and no one else was to play with her either, at least not yet.
“Brother Mardu asked us to try and persuade you,” Brother Acrisius said while prancing the cat around in the air as if it were the head of a trotting pony, “to help you change your mind. We’re good at that sort of thing, and we like it, too. Probably, we’re good because we like it. You have to love something to be really good at it, don’t you, Brother Saul?”
Saul nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, Brother Acrisius. Yes.”
“And practice helps, too,” Acrisius added.
Saul nodded again. He was like a humongous Muppet right now, doing what his master bid him do, and his master had his hand elbow-deep in his ass. He need only twitch and Brother Saul would obey.
“Do you know what this is?” Brother Acrisius asked, raising the cat up and twirling it, spinning its dangling cords in a carousel of knots that changed direction with the flicks of his wrist.
She made no reply.
“Well? Come on, give it a go and guess.”
She still didn’t answer. There was no point in goading them, and that was all her words could do.
“It’s a pussy. A pussy o’ nine tails. Why nine, you ask? Because that’s how unraveled ropes work. Unraveled once into three, and then each strand unraveled again, making three by three. And that makes nine.”
The better to beat you with, my dear, Senna thought.
Acrisius went on pontificating for some moments longer, but he was wearing his own patience thin. He still had to take a child out of the campground, and he had to do it soon, come to think of it, his contact was probably waiting in the woods already. After this was over and the damned woman was a bloody and unconscious pulp, he’d go to the holding cell. His pouch was empty, and the meat—adult meat—he’d been forced to eat earlier had made him vomit bloody, half-chewed, spongy chunks.
He eyed Saul, nodded to his gigantic slave, and the woman’s punishment began.
31
As the knotted thongs of the cat cracked through the air, alternating with the open-handed blows of Saul, which were just as bad as the lashing, if not worse at times, Senna keyed in on a thought that usually kept a strict distance from her, but which now, combined with Mardu’s sermon, had taken on a new form.
Who was the real Order of the Dead? New Crozet? Or the brothers and sisters of Mardu’s Order? Who were the real worshippers of death? Wasn’t New Crozet just a refuge? A conservatory for humans, the last endangered species?
“It’s humanity that’s dead,” Senna murmured. “We’re all dead, like Rosemary said.” Her voice became a whisper. “Fucked. It’s all fucked.”
“What’s that?” someone said, the voice swinging from the ceiling on lengths of barbed wire. “Got something on your mind?”
She began to wonder if it was really so bad to eat people. Was it really any worse than eating a cow or a sheep or a chicken, back when that was possible? What about insects and bugs and earthworms? Wasn’t that the same thing as eating a child?
It helped that she was clothed, but that didn’t stop the cat from tearing bits of her skin out, setting them to crawl away and leave bloody trails after them. Saul’s hands were like iron battering rams, a good counterpoint to the cat’s claws.
The nice thing was that the longer they did it, the less it all seemed to matter. The pain didn’t weaken, but it did seem less important. Because she was the cannibal. She ate people.
That was the fucking point, wasn’t it? The citizens of New Crozet were the cannibals, eating the notion, the very idea, of a civilized humanity into extinction. They were living off of it, eating themselves.
Hell, they were worshipping something that was already dead. When they’d built New Crozet they’d put down the foundation for a mausoleum. Brother Mardu and his kind, they were the ones who were adapting. They were the true survivors, and they were right.
New Crozet was the Order of the Dead, and it always had been, and, for being a part of that, as well as for a laundry list of other fuck-ups in her life, she deserved to be beaten to death by these men.
And those were the thoughts that bubbled up to the surface of her mind with each of her body’s painful cries.
Above all of it, the highest floating bubble that wouldn’t pop but only grew larger, straining the limits of its filmy walls, was the thought that she was finally getting what had been coming to her. If you asked her, she deserved this.
It had been a long time coming, but here it was, the punishment that was due her, and if it was going to be proportionate to what she’d done, it was going to get a hell of a lot worse.
32
She’d failed to get them out, and they’d all died, and now it was happening again. They were second graders. No, they’d been second graders. Now they were…they were gone, and Senna was sure some of what was left of them was still moving around the world, the virus controlling their small, decaying bodies.
She’d been their teacher, and she was supposed to have kept them safe from harm.
Of course everyone had been someone else before the outbreak. Every single person who’d survived could, if they dug into the soil of their guilt, unearth lists of all the people they’d failed to save.
Then the revisionist history exercise would begin: I could’ve done this, and this, and this, and then these other things, and all those people would still be alive.
I should’ve been there.
I should’ve seen it coming.
I should’ve reacted more quickly.
Here’s how it would’ve gone differently if I had.
These are the people who would be in New Crozet with me now, or in a different settlement, if only I’d gotten my act together sooner, if only I’d been better.
And then you’d see their faces, and visions of the past would circle in your mind with accented pauses at the moments when you should’ve done something different, and projected from these moments were the ‘would’ve beens’ and ‘should’ve beens’ that didn’t follow, because you hadn’t done what you were supposed to when you had the chance. All the survivors did it to themselves in varying degrees, and Senna knew that, she’d even tried to help others past it, but she herself couldn’t get out from under it.
Alan made it easier. He made it a lot better, actually, because he could just sit and listen to her and accept both her present and her past.
He knew what she’d done, or, more precisely, what she’d failed
to do, and he still loved her in spite of it. He didn’t’ think there was anything she really could’ve done, but he listened, and he held her when the tears came, and he always told her it would be okay, even though it never could be.
Well Alan wasn’t there now, and she was alone with the punishment she thought she deserved, except that she wished—oh God how she wished for it—that others didn’t have to suffer, that it could be just her.
Why did more children have to die? Why did it have to happen again, and done by other men and not the virus?
They were children for God’s sake. Children.
She had no illusions about Jack being the last one, either. These people, these monsters of the Order, they were out of their minds with viciousness, and if they could sacrifice one child to the virus, they would do the same to others, and they would try to make her watch.
There had been twenty-two in all in Ms. Phillips’s class, nine boys and thirteen girls, and they’d been working on recognizing the different geometric shapes when the crazy people began showing up.
Her classroom had been on the ground floor, and the second closest to the parking lot.
If not for that, there wouldn’t have been a Senna for Alan to meet on the rec-crews, and he never would’ve run off to New Crozet, and his life would’ve ended on his old rec-crew when they were overrun by a pocket of zombies in Corolla, North Carolina, on a beach that they’d taken for secluded, where they secured a cluster of vacation homes in which to get some much needed R&R.
Apparently, zombies had taken a liking to the beachfront there and had gone dormant in coves and underwater in the shade of the disused rental properties. And then the virus did what evil was prone to do: it rose out of the sea and came in from the cold.
Alan would’ve been resting in a house that he’d taken all to his own—there were plenty to choose from and few takers in sight—sprawled on a hammock on the second story balcony, watching the waves do their lappity-lap at the sand and remembering the last time he’d done this, and with whom, when a well-barnacled group of them came out of the lappity-lap waves.
He would’ve seen them early, of course, trained and sensitized as he was to their movements, but he wouldn’t have seen the other groups that were coming in from the other waters of the Outer Banks.
The house was surrounded in a short time.
All of the houses were.
He would’ve run down the stairs with his pistol when he heard the first scream go off like a rocket into the night, and in the foyer he would’ve met them, and they were fast, and his knee was jammed from carrying the Voltaire II too much, and the hobbling run into fighting position didn’t get him where he needed to be.
He’d have taken four down before the rest got him, and then once his rec-crew buddies were done in too, he’d go in the water with the rest of them. And lie in wait for new prey, of which there would be some, but not a whole lot more, as the fish tank of humanity had scant swimmers left.
But, because Senna had survived as long as she did, Alan’s saltwater zombie days had never come to pass.
33
On the day of the outbreak, Senna had led her students, running, outside, and they’d made it no more than a few feet off the curb and into the parking lot when the children began to be picked off…by other students, sick, rabid ones.
The first barrage took four of her kids in one swoop.
The next wave, coming only seconds after the first, took down eight more.
That was twelve down in seconds, and now her own students were turning. And there were even more coming from inside the school, boiling out from the doors and through windows.
And it wasn’t just the students and the school, either, the sick people—children and adults alike—were coming from all directions on the street, from everywhere. Senna surveyed the neighborhood in desperation, but there was nowhere to run.
She pulled the ones who were left after her, but she couldn’t hold the hands of ten children at once, not while they were all under attack. Still, she was moving them as best and as quickly as she could into the lot, away from their rabid pursuers.
If it weren’t for a little luck, it would’ve all ended right there, just a few feet from her classroom, on a day of spring sun showers and rainbows. The lucky bit came in the form of a mini school bus that rolled up in front of her and stopped short, the brakes crying out for mercy and the tires squealing.
The door opened, and she piled the children through it, but not before three more had been dragged away by the biting and grabbing things that had been their friends and teachers only moments earlier. After the seven kids she’d managed to herd to the bus were inside and it was clear the others were beyond help, she jumped in herself, and the accordion door shut on reaching, rot-speckled hands as soon as she was in.
It had been her plan to commandeer a school bus, though she hadn’t taken the time to think about who’d have the keys to get into one and drive it away. Lucky in busses, unlucky in…
The tires screamed and took the bus on a careening path out of the lot and away from the school. She and the bus driver decided to take the kids to her house, at least for the time being. They didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed like some kind of rabies outbreak, except, of course, much worse.
There were still a good number of people alive, and the authorities were trying to keep some semblance of order. Yes, there are some seriously diseased people running amok outside and we don’t know how to control them or make them stop, so please stay home for a while.
Some answer.
Don’t go outside, and do not, under any circumstances, engage.
Thanks very much Mr. Radio Man.
She took the kids home, and the bus driver left to find his own family. His name was Tommy Naples. Senna still remembered that. Sometimes she wondered if he’d made it back to his family, and what became of them, which really meant, how had they died? At home or on the street? Fast or slow? Had the kids been taken first while their parents watched? Or was it the other way around, or all at once? Had the kids done it to Tommy? Had his wife done it to him? Thrown one last zombie fuck at him while she was at it, in front of the children, perhaps?
34
At the time, Senna had been living in a two-story townhouse in Arlington with three roommates. As soon as she was through the door she realized that she’d just brought her students—the seven of them who were left—into more danger. Tommy was already gone, a little bit too quickly perhaps, but he had his own wife and kids to worry about.
The table in the entryway that usually held Senna and her roommates’ keys and umbrellas and was a rest stop for mail and packages was turned askew, and all that had been on top of it was strewn about the floor.
The children were crying, huddling behind her in the corner by the door.
Suddenly, her cell phone rang, and one of the kids screamed, and then something was coming for them, fast and hard and clumsy, bumping things as it went, moaning, calling out in a voice not human and not in words.
From the floor Senna snatched a swan-shaped bookend that belonged on the entryway table, and stepped in front of her students. A moment later, her roommate, who had the rabies or whatever the fuck it was, was trying to rip out her throat with her teeth, and it was all she could do to keep the biting, saliva-spewing mouth away from her.
The bookend arced through the air, once, twice, three times, and the shape of her roommate’s skull was rearranged and the back part of her brain mashed up into a lumpy paste by the swan’s wings. Chalk one up to the bird-folk.
The voicemail chime of her phone went off, and then the ringing started again. And it would keep on keeping on in that manner until Senna had secured the house.
Parents were calling her, parents whose children were not accounted for, and most weren’t here in Senna’s townhouse, which now looked like a crime scene, nor at school…nor anywhere. They were gone, but Senna had managed to get a few kids away from whatever was happening.
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And they weren’t all crying anymore, either. Five of them were just trembling in the corner, huddled together and fresh out of tears, and the other two were just now spouting the last of their waterworks. That was something, right?
Senna locked all the doors and stayed there, with the children, fielding worried calls from parents until the adults showed up, one by one, to pick up their kids. She argued some and tried to get them to stay, but it made no difference, or she hadn’t been convincing enough, or something. They all left, or tried to.
Two were picked off right in front of the house, the parents’ defense delaying the inevitable for only a moment. The rest made it some of the way, but Senna found their cars later, on the road not very far down the street, broken into, bloody-seated, and empty.
No one had survived. She’d almost come to blows with one of the mothers, but stopped short. She wished to God she’d hit that woman, bloodied the fuck out of her if that’s what had to be done. Maybe then at least one of the kids would’ve made it.
Then again, maybe it was better that none had. Who the fuck knew?
What she did know, was that they died because she’d been too weak, too careless, too unprepared. And she’d never let something like that happen again.
No matter how much anyone tried to talk her out of it, no matter how much Alan consoled her, and he was the only one who could ever make her feel any better about it, it always boiled down to the same thing: she’d killed those twenty-two kids by first trying to lead them out, and then by letting the ones she’d managed to get back to the townhouse go home with their parents. She’d done them in as sure as if she’d injected the virus into them by her own hand, squeezing the plunger of a long-needled syringe containing Krokodil’s legacy.
The upshot was that she’d killed enough children, and this wasn’t going to go down like it had at her school. Ms. Phillips was gone. She’d died there too, after all.
