Order of the Dead

by James, Guy

  He closed his eyes and tried to push his guts back into his body. They resisted.

  Blood was rushing from him. He imagined that when it hit the ground, it would begin to do the circular dance of the top as well.

  Everything outside him seemed hell-fucking-bent on rotation now. Or was it the other way around? Was he the one who’d stopped spinning, and who was now standing still for the first time?

  He opened his eyes.

  “Fuck,” he mouthed, and a dribble of blood passed over his bottom lip and stopped halfway to his chin, putting a streak of red in his stubble. Rainwater mixed with it and washed it away. His body was drawing itself up to heave, but he stopped it, willing it to relax, to cooperate, if only for a few moments longer.

  This was the worst physical pain he’d experienced in his life, but, somehow, it was still a great distance beneath the height of anguish he’d felt upon losing Senna.

  He stumbled toward the truck that the not-quite unbreakable giant man had tried to keep him from.

  He’d seen wounds like his in the field before and knew that even if treated, given current treatment and rehabilitation options, recovery was unlikely. The pain was deep in there and ragged, and imagining the current state of his intestines made him wince. The countdown had begun.

  He was brought back by a recollection of the previous day’s torment when he’d cried, and framed within that memory, the current pain was trivial, no more than a maroon blot on a white sheet. The idea of death itself seemed inconsequential, a formality of an improbably long journey.

  This was it. This really was it.

  The end of the line. No more passengers beyond this point. The train is going back to the motherfucking station to be mothballed for good, so when you get off, mind the fucking gap.

  Okay, he thought. I get it. Okay. I accept, so long as I can have a few more minutes, just a little bit longer to…

  After having cheated death so many times before, this was fine. Though he didn’t have time to wonder about it, the surprising speed with which he accepted dying was probably a result of having been almost killed so many times and having been proven wrong over and over again.

  He’d made peace with death a long time ago. He’d never expected to live this long, to find so much happiness, if only for a while, and to have the chance to do so much good.

  Now there was just one more thing he had to do, one more thing to set right.

  The searing ache in his belly pulsed with each of his heartbeats, radiating barbs of pain to the tips of his toes and the roots of the hairs on his head. It was making it hard to think. The sheer hurt was remarkable, and that was appropriate given that it was marking his passage out of the world that he’d fought so valiantly to secure for coming generations, few though there may be to inherit it.

  But the pain should have been felt by those mourning his death and reminiscing on his great accomplishments, and not by him. But that wasn’t to be, and Alan was a man who, though he wasn’t capable of killing a dying friend in cold blood, would fight to save those he loved with the last of his fading being.

  His mind clouded over and it became more difficult to focus his eyes on anything at all. The urge to vomit was becoming harder to bear.

  Reality lurched around him, as if the fabric of the world was coming undone in a shimmer of white and black spots that were like flying amoeba that showed themselves and went invisible again, but not in time with each other, and in no particular order.

  Everything was becoming unhinged. He coughed and his mouth filled with the taste of pungent metal. His chin grew wet with something thicker than rain. He coughed again, then choked and spat. The saliva that flew from his mouth and clung to his lips was more parts blood than spittle.

  The world was fading. Had it ever been real in the first place?

  No, he thought, of course not. How could it have been?

  There were more and more of the amoeboid shapes, flickering and blocking out his vision. What were the fucking things?

  He was so thirsty that for a moment the thought of water made him forget about Senna and the children and the other townspeople he needed to help. He’d been stranded without water in the heat for days and survived, but he’d never known a thirst like this.

  It felt like the water had been flash-dried out of him, if such a thing were possible. He could feel the longing for moisture in his eyes and fingernails, like a dryness that was threatening to catch fire and make his body go up in a puff of smoke if he didn’t drink soon—no not soon, now, an hour ago, yesterday.

  A thin rivulet of blood dribbled over his lips and found a path down his chin.

  Dryness raked the inside of his throat.

  His hands relaxed over his wound and his body slumped lower to the ground. He felt as if he were being sucked into a sandy vortex of thirst. He would drink all the water in the world, he decided.

  This was it. This was what it felt like to be dying.

  The pain was still immense, but it was becoming a pendulum, swinging in and out, distancing itself and then coming back to throb in full force, then swinging away again, then back...

  The ropes that were Alan’s intestines raged outward, taking advantage of his relaxed pressure on the slippery hole in his belly. His hands became slick with blood and ruined cords that were—oh my God he knew exactly what they were—but he couldn’t find the strength to push them back into their place.

  Then the cold came, and he could barely feel anything at all. His senses numbed, motion became impossible, and his mind became a barren tundra. His insides were freezing, and the frozen shards were poking through his skin. The break. It had found a way to get him after all.

  17

  Almost unbeknownst even to himself, Alan began to move again, the fingers of his left hand pressing into his stomach, because that’s where they needed to be to keep those damned ropes in place.

  He was almost there.

  Almost.

  There.

  The truck—that was where they all were. That was where they—the people he’d come for—would be. That was where Senna would be. Where she had to be.

  And then he was forcing his way up into the truck, and he was in it. He was there. He’d made it in spite of the worms trying to wriggle their way through his fingers.

  When he was in the worship truck, the first thing he did was to look back out into the night. Through the glass he saw Senna.

  She was outside with the children. Was she really there, or was he looking through some porthole into his wishful imagination?

  It seemed real, because Senna was there and so were Sasha and Jenny, and no others, and that seemed sadly real. He remembered Jack, and realized the boy wouldn’t be here in this truck…and he stopped himself before his mind dove into that dark place where Rosemary probably was, with Jack, restless but not alive. Wasn’t that where she had to be, if she wasn’t out there with Senna now?

  Who else had been taken? Who else had been turned?

  The chill of it all gripped him by the shoulders, lifted him, and shook, as if he were being held up in front of a picture, his feet dangling inches from the floor, and whatever it was that was holding him there was trying to make him see.

  Look at the picture damn you! The pieces are all there. Look at the fucking picture!

  Okay, okay.

  He looked.

  There were people in the painting—actors. But they weren’t immobile as characters frozen to canvas should have been, no, not at all, they were moving, doing something like a stationary twist and inaudible shout that emphasized just how alive they were.

  There was Senna and the children. There was the altar.

  They were the only townspeople. They were all the townspeople.

  At the center of it was Senna. She was looking at him, speaking to him through her eyes, helping him to see.

  She would lead the children—no, not just the children, but all of New Crozet—back to safety. She was their spotter, the best of all time.


  Alan now saw that he was in the picture too, but he was behind them, his doppelganger positioned behind Senna and New Crozet and all of its people.

  Behind him was a muddy darkness of watercolors. He looked from his own rendering to Senna and back again, until his eyes settled on her. She nodded at him. Of course she understood.

  That Alan, the one in the back of the painting, whose face looked slightly pained but was otherwise unreadable, was the Order’s loose end. He was the seed of their unraveling. And then there was Saul to Alan’s right, a faint, transparent apparition behind the wheel of an equally translucent steamroller, and he was riding toward the painting at a painfully slow speed, and then he was there, on top of the image, his great tumbling rollers pressing Alan into the paint.

  Alan’s eyes snapped open to their widest as if he could breathe through them and they were gasping for air, and then traveled up the Order’s nave, following the red and green diamonds threaded into the carpet and careening back and forth to stay off the diamonds and regular splatters of blood, which, together, left scant room for error. Had the diamonds been pressed into the fabric by a steamroller as well? And, if so, was it Saul, too, who’d piloted it?

  And what about the blood? No, not the blood. That had been put there by Brother Mardu’s machinations.

  Seconds ticked away somewhere in a faraway place that was actually quite near, a spot Alan passed often, in a part of New Crozet.

  Four-and-a-half miles away, the wind puffed up its chest and blew. It tried again, huffing and puffing with all its might this time to try to blow down what little was left standing of the blown-down barn that was the dividing line between New Crozet proper and the New Crozet that was unofficially Senna and Alan’s homestead.

  I have you now, the wind thought, and it was right. The raggedy and half-rotten boards that had for years continued to poke up out of the ground like gravestones finally relented and spilled onto the weedy earth. There the rain began to push them deeper while the wind, its work done, flew off in search of other manmade guideposts to topple.

  Alan was at the Order’s altar, another grave marker, and now, it was his turn to be the wind.

  18

  Alan heard a voice whispering in his mind: “You’ve come to pray at the headstone. It waited for you all this time, for all those years that you stole, that she stole. That was all something you weren’t supposed to have, something you didn’t deserve, something no one deserved or should be allowed to have after the outbreak. You stole and you took but now you’re here where you belong. You can’t steal from the grave forever, all you can do is delay.”

  “Now kneel and pray.”

  “Pray.”

  “Fucking pray.”

  He heard the screams around him, but they cut off in an instant, all at the same time, and the only thing Alan could hear after that was the electric hum of the overhead fluorescents.

  The buzz was a punctuation, an order: the order of the Order of the Dead.

  So be it, he thought. So fucking be it.

  Hum, diddly-um, the fluorescents said. Hum on down, Alan! Hum on down to the Embodiment and see if you can guess the price. We think you can…you’re paying it now, after all, and you’re a halfway smart guy, so hum on the fuck down and spin the wheel and see where it lands.

  He coughed, spraying blood. It fell in an arc, spattering the Order’s holy prayer floor as he began to totter up the nave.

  I gotta come on down, he thought. Spin the…

  He was vomiting bile as he went, but he didn’t notice, so great was his focus at that moment. A small length of cord that was a disconnected part of small intestine found a way to slide out between Alan’s fingers. It leaked its contents over his hands and down his pants and white hot pain tore a line of fire through him. He staggered onward in spite of it.

  More fires inside him, as if they were set to light by the previous one, branching out, burning him alive.

  No, he thought. Fuck, not now. I still have to…

  He looked down—it was more his head drooping than a conscious move to look—and saw metal sticking out from the base of his sternum. It was the point of a dagger, covered in blood.

  The fluorescents seemed to beat down on him harder.

  Hum, diddly-um, they roared, spitting yellow bile on his head. Hum, fucking-diddly-the-fuck-um. Now get your lazy ass moving and hum on down!

  Collateral damage. That was all the stabbing was at this point. That was all anything was now.

  Behind him, a snarling Sister Beth withdrew the knife and readied it for another go. Alan stumbled forward.

  Wait, was it the lights or the Embodiment that was egging him on? Whose voice was that, and was there even a voice at all?

  There must have been something, because Alan heard it loud and clear, bright, too, like those damned harsh overhead glares. And that was when he realized they were all watching him, not just the lights and all the brothers and sisters of the Order who’d piled into the worship truck like it was a clown car, but the Embodiment too, and something else, something that was connecting all of it together, like a line moving from dot to dot to dot, but it was more than one line, it was a whole group of them appearing behind a brush. And it was high time for him to catch up with the hand guiding it.

  Sister Beth was one of the spectators, and Alan would have recognized her as Beth Mills if he had more of his faculties about him. But he didn’t do the former, because he hadn’t the latter. She’d served on the crews with him, and with Senna too.

  She was a cunning one, and if not for Alan’s darn meddling, she would’ve now been in the midst of her coup, taking the Order for her own to refashion it into the most profitable cannibalistic venture of the post-apocalypse. But here was Alan, trying to ruin everything.

  She did recognize him, and she remembered him all too well. Her snarl became more feral, more filled with malice. She hated him, had always hated him. He and Senna and the way they were together was exactly what she loathed most in the world.

  All they cared about was love.

  Love.

  There was no such thing, and the very notion and the way people worshipped it disgusted her. To Beth, the way Alan and Senna behaved was sheer and brazen vileness.

  All she wanted to do at that moment was tear his fucking lover-boy throat out. Someone had gotten ahead of her in line and done a number on his face, but that was okay. She had no problem finishing the job, as long as she had a hand in his death.

  Death to Romeo, you fucking better-than-thou fuck, she thought triumphantly.

  And now, she’d finally been given the chance to kill him and get away with it, and she’d do just that. He and Senna had always kept too close to each other for Beth to risk killing them on the rec-crew. They were mistrustful of others, and rightfully so. Beth had killed half a dozen cleaners and two spotters before going off on her own. The murders were chalked up to the zombies, which were convenient scapegoats.

  Now, finally, he would die by her hand.

  Wait, why was he still moving? She’d just plunged her knife into him to its hilt, and yet here he was, stumbling away from her, toward that thing that Brother Mardu worshipped, that rotten carcass to which she’d feigned tribute, the so-called Embodiment. She moved after Alan, readying herself for another stab, aiming this time for his neck.

  He was in front of the altar now. The zombie torso was towering over him, writhing erratically, its flesh hunger directed at Alan, the closest uninfected human.

  A brother—it didn’t matter who, just another spectator to Alan’s spectacle, but for the record, it was Brother Duncan from New Jersey, born-and-raised—inserted his body between Alan and the altar. Alan reached upward, grasped the brother’s head in both hands, and twisted. There was a crunch, like the sound made by the breaking of a thick magnolia branch, and the brother went limp. Alan staggered forward, stepping on Brother Duncan’s body.

  The Embodiment’s grey flesh pulsed, as if reaching down. It was sickenin
g, how alive the thing was in death, how much it managed to thrash and writhe without limbs, using only its torso and head.

  The brothers and sisters fell upon Alan. They were moving in a flurry of desperation, trying to protect their sacred relic.

  What was this bleeding madman trying to do? Balled fists pounded on his back, untrimmed nails scratched at his face and neck, hands tried to pull him away by his clothing.

  But they were too late, or, rather, from Alan’s perspective, they were precisely on time.

  He opened his mouth wide, thrust his face forward, and bit.

  One of the brothers, a Lawrence Anderson from Houston, Texas, had time to wonder what kind of lunatic, even a dying, post-apocalyptic one, could do a thing like that?

  The revulsion Alan felt was muted by the diminishing strength of his nervous system, but there was still enough there to bring tears to his eyes.

  He turned around, and there was Mardu, the Tacker who’d stolen from him. Alan seized him by the cloak and pulled him close with the last of his human strength.

  Mardu, like any good evangelist with a sprite sitting on his shoulder and singing into his ear—from the virus’s mouth straight to his brain—imparted a cuttingly shrill flavor to his most reverent voice and cried, “It’s you. The Equilibrium. It’s you! Equilibrium Day! Equilibrium Da—”

  Alan’s teeth tore into the flesh of Mardu’s neck, and it was good, because it was what the virus wanted for its most pious disciple, and for Alan, and for all of them.

  Mardu could actually feel the virus shifting around him. Everything was changing. The voice in his brain…it seemed to be wavering in and out now, like a fading and increasingly scratchy radio station that he was driving away from, or that was being driven away from him. He would have wanted to say his piece, one that he would have fashioned to be appropriately reverent given the occasion, but he didn’t have the time to think on that, because the time for thinking was over.

  Alan tasted blood and pulled back, letting the weight of his clumsy, fading body lend him momentum. He took with him a sizeable chunk of Mardu’s neck meat, liberating a severed vein to spurt blood to its heart’s content. Alan let go, and the piece of flesh dribbled over his bottom lip as if it were a large pool of saliva.