by James, Guy
She went from truck to truck until she found some blankets and a plastic tarp with handles. She spread the tarp open on the ground and went back into the Order’s butcher shop. There she wrapped the remains of Molly and Rad in separate blankets, and carried them out and placed them on the tarp, which she then dragged up the hill to where Alan was sitting, lifeless, under the oak tree.
Stealing a heart-rending glance at him, Senna turned and jogged down the hill, back into the campground. Her body was pulsing with pain, but she didn’t care anymore. It was nothing compared to what she was feeling in her heart, that unfillable hollowness. She went through the camp searching for the bodies of Rosemary and Jack, but found no trace of either.
Fuel was what she wanted now, so she went through the trucks one by one, gathering what she needed. Then she entered the worship truck, the coffin of the brothers and sisters and their relic, and doused them with gasoline.
The smell of the gasoline was satisfying, intoxicating even, especially when layered over the sight of it spilling on the faces of Mardu and his disciples, coating them with the promise of burning.
The corpse of the limbless zombie, still trapped in its encasement, lent Senna its unseeing stare as she placed fuel canisters under the shrine.
After dousing the inside of the truck, Senna went out to the spot where Brother Saul was. She couldn’t move his body much because he was too massive, so she turned him on his back and upended a gasoline canister over his face. The rolling fluid tugged at the flaps of his eyelids and lips, forcing his expression into a momentary, snarling half-glare.
“Fuck you,” Senna said, and spat on his body.
New Crozet could use the fuel, the trucks, and the other supplies that the Order had, but these were tainted things. The townspeople were owed a fresh start, and salvaging the things the Order had brought…the notion was repugnant.
Senna took particular care in dousing the books that contained Brother Mardu’s scripture. She would see to it that all evidence of him was erased.
That was how she could continue to hurt him, even after his death. He would be forgotten, expunged from history, rubbed out by her hand. His possessions and all the things that showed the impression of his will on the world, his fucking book, would be destroyed.
After she’d let free the contents of the last of the fuel containers, except for the canisters sitting under the dead limbless zombie that Brother Mardu and his followers had worshipped, she went up the hill and picked up the Voltaire II, then descended the hill partway and took position. There she aimed the Voltaire II at the still campground. It was a thing already dead, but in need of purging.
The forest seemed to quiet and become calm, as if holding its breath.
She pulled the first trigger, letting the stream of fuel fly, and then the second, igniting it. Dual trigger action, baby.
Flames touched down in the center of the campsite and the air lit up with burning.
Still spraying fire at the encampment, she walked purposefully backward, laboring up the hill. The heat rising from the thrower was pulling sweat from her body with a vengeance. If any part of her clothes hadn’t been soaked during her work of arranging the fuel, they now were. Hair was sticking in clumps to the sides of her face. Sweat ran into her eyes and she blinked it away. Had Alan been there he would’ve jumped her bones, and she knew that, and she tried to blink that thought away too.
When she was almost all the way to Alan and Molly and Rad, she released the double trigger and let the Voltaire II, which felt like it had tripled in weight, drop to the ground, offering the stinging muscles of her arms and back some relief.
Steam began to rise from the wet earth under the flamethrower’s barrel.
Senna went to the bodies lying in the shade of the great oak, then turned to look at the blaze and sat down next to Alan.
“This is for you, Alan,” she whispered, feeling the utterance of his name stab her heart. “Watch those fuckers burn.”
As she watched the campground burn with him, she saw the flames weren’t reaching all the gasoline she’d poured, probably because she’d failed to properly connect the fuel lines, but it was too late to go back in with the Voltaire II now.
Unsurprised by this flaw—fire setting was not her forte—she removed her sidearm from its holster, took a deep breath, aimed at the corner of the campsite where the fire needed to go to consume Saul’s corpse, and fired twice in rapid succession.
Her first bullet made a spark, and flames erupted and spread, igniting the untouched fuel. Seconds later, explosions followed, tearing what was left of the day apart, rocking the Order’s shrine, and setting the Embodiment alight.
Body parts were flung into the air by the blasts, but none left the campsite’s borders before falling to the ground. After the explosions, the fire settled to a steady state, eating the brothers and sisters of the Order, its burning mouth crawling over them like a swath of righteous maggots.
This was her revenge, inadequate and pathetic compared to what had been done to her and her people. Was it even her revenge? Alan was the one who’d killed them. Somehow.
And burning was too good a washing from this world for these monsters. They were worse than zombies; they deserved to be stuffed and put on display as a warning to others tempted toward such evil.
Too late. The fire was going, and burn from this world they would.
33
What was left of the Order time would sweep away with its waves of forest. Senna thought on this, and she pictured the digging roots and creeping foliage reclaiming the charred leavings of the brothers and sisters, taking them back into the earth from where they’d come, absorbing what nutrients they had to offer, and transmuting their evil into greenery that would nourish what animals remained.
The bugs would eat the leaves, and the humans, were there to be any alive at that point, would breathe the oxygen. The thought of breathing that air was odd—would there be evil in it, or would all of that have been converted by nature’s magic into something inert, clean food and air and nothing more?
But of course these couldn’t be all of the cannibals. There were bound to be more out there, hunting children, other children like Jenny and Sasha and Rosemary and Jack. Her children.
But, she thought, Brother Mardu hadn’t wanted the children for food, he’d wanted them for the virus, solely for the virus. Had he been right? Had this been the culmination of the Order’s plot? Had Mardu succeeded somehow?
No, that was impossible. That had to be impossible. But when she turned to look at Alan it seemed that it was not only possible, but true. She’d always sensed an indescribable something about this man, and that had been one of the things that had drawn her to him, and she could still feel it now, in the presence of his body.
He was unlike anyone else, but, the key to the virus? The man to prove the Order right?
That was something she couldn’t wrap her mind around, not now, and maybe not ever.
The Order had been a group of virus-worshipping cannibals. How could they have been right about anything at all?
She took a deep breath.
Some poorly-drawn feeling made her look in Alan’s pockets. There she found a small tin. Puzzled, she pried it open. Inside it was a folded piece of wax paper.
She began to unfold it and the wind blew, stirring some powder into the air and flinging it at her face, adding a clumsy orange-brown blush to her cheeks. In that instant, the last of the cinnamon’s aroma came out.
Dazed and with a mixture of soot and old cinnamon on her face, she got up from beside Alan’s body and went a short distance in the direction of New Crozet before returning to the hill. She went to the Voltaire II and dragged it from the spot where she’d dropped it, then set it next to her dead lover’s corpse. She put his left hand on its cooling hull, sank to her knees, and the tears took her again.
“Take me away,” she begged. “Take me away from all this. I can’t. I don’t want to anymore. Take… Make it stop, pl
ease, God make it stop. Everything’s gone, everyone. God, please, fucking please, make it stop.”
She pleaded for some time longer, and it didn’t stop, but it did get a little better. Feeling slightly numbed, she found a way to stand up.
Moving like a woman in a trance, she began to walk toward New Crozet again. She couldn’t carry the bodies back herself, so she’d have some townspeople come back with her to help move them, and to try to find what was left of Rosemary and Jack.
The wind breathed, stirring some of the wafting smoke after her. It stank of burning flesh, petroleum, and rubber.
The fire wasn’t closure. There would never be closure. What the Order had done was senseless, unforgivable, something only the human mind could envision.
Sodden leaves and small clumps of mud clung to her boots as she walked. The ground was covered in a multi-colored mat of leaves that reached toward her, as if trying to be noticed, to distract this woman from the tragedy that was her lot.
It had taken millennia for the Virginia woods to arrange themselves in the current pattern, dropping the leaves just right and timing their work with that of the rain and the insects, creating a startlingly beautiful forest floor that had taken ages of coordinated effort by many parties, and was by a longshot no accident.
Senna saw the leafy carpet, but it didn’t register. It would return to her in the future, in daydreams, but faintly, like the furtive caresses of a nervous apparition.
Right now, although it had been made just for her, all she could do was walk on it.
As she went, she rubbed at her sides, steeling herself against the new chill in the air. The world had grown cold, and, she felt, so it would remain.
34
The sun was close to setting by the time Senna made it back to New Crozet. On her way home, she’d reflected on what Brother Mardu had said about Equilibrium Day.
This was that day. This actually was Equilibrium Day and in some harsh twist of irony, if that was what it was, the Order of the Dead had been right.
There were townspeople waiting for her at the gate, and as she got closer, they called for others. Some of them were smiling, trying on an expression they hadn’t worn in years.
They nodded at her slightly, pursing their lips, offering support. She’d returned alone, and they all knew what that meant.
There was something else in their eyes, too—in all of their eyes—something that was new and different. Something she hadn’t seen in years, for so long in fact, that it took her a few moments to recognize what it was.
What was in the background of their faces now was a playing, uncertain hope, one that was pushing the boundaries, but timidly, not wanting to risk going too far. The fear seemed to be crawling down their faces and dripping off, no faster than molasses would, but that was progress too. And the way they were holding themselves was changing, becoming more expansive, as if their bodies were realizing that the cage had been lifted, and now, for the first time in many years, there was space to spread into.
Being the spotter she was, Senna could sense the change in the forest, and she’d just made her way through it without seeing any sign of zombies besides their corpses, and by now the townspeople were suspecting it too. Their faces spoke of it plainly: were the zombies gone, leaving nothing to pin New Crozet in place on its withered page in humanity’s scrapbook? Were they finally free?
They let her inside. They were still keeping the gate locked, even though it seemed that the virus really was gone from the world, and that was the right thing to do, for now. It was too early to risk exposing the town.
Jenny and Sasha stepped sheepishly out from behind the adults. They approached cautiously at first, then, finally, mercifully, put their hands on her, although they did it as if expecting an electric shock. When none came, their readiness to jump backward and run, which had been painted clearly on their faces, dissolved like the last traces of a watercolor, and went off to find the fleeing mist that was now settling into the ground.
They wrapped their arms around Senna, clinging to her tightly, and she put her arms around the children and hugged them back. All she could think was, thank you.
Sasha tugged at Senna’s sleeve. Senna bent down, and Sasha tried to wipe some of the soot from Senna’s face, leaving a trail where she rubbed. Sasha looked at the ash on her finger and saw bits of orange in it. She wondered about this for a moment, then forgot it and said, “You smell like fire.”
She’d see the sooty orange mixture again in dreams, and only there, and she would never know that it was cinnamon, because she would go through life without a full awareness of what cinnamon was, experiencing it only twice in books, so the spice would never be more than an abstract concept in her mind, weightless, odorless, and without color.
Senna nodded. “Like Alan,” she whispered.
She thought of how much Jack had loved Alan’s stories. And thinking of Jack made her think of Rosemary and how the two had played and cared for Sasha in their own way. Rosemary had spent so many evenings talking with Senna about the markets and the traders and traveling among the settlements.
They’d all been alive just a short time ago, just some hours earlier. And now they were gone. Gone.
She bit her bottom lip. The feelings she was now having were too powerful to contain. She saw Rosemary’s face from the previous night, and remembered what the girl had said in the cell, and she understood why Corks had wanted to die.
Sasha tightened her grip around Senna’s waist, then let up and Senna felt small fingers interlace with her own. For a moment she thought she could look down and see Rosemary—albeit a younger one who still held her hand from time to time—and she almost did see her, and those strikingly inquisitive eyes, and the way her lips would part just before she asked an insightful question.
The girl who wasn’t there was about to ask about clothes before the outbreak, and why there were so many different kinds, what all the brands meant, what it all meant, and how to make it better.
Alan was the one to go to for what it all meant. He was the one. He was the one. And Rosemary was the one to make it better, it was supposed to be her thinking up the new ways, her and Jack.
Senna’s throat was closing up and the tears were coating her face. Breathlessly, quietly, she cried, for all of them.
Elizabeth Clark emerged from the crowd. Her eyes were raw, and she looked like she’d aged ten years in a night. She walked toward Senna with her eyes trained on the ground, and, when she was close enough, put her arms around Senna’s shoulders.
More townspeople came and joined Senna and Elizabeth and the children.
Senna felt eyes on her, and she looked up. Larry Knapp and Chad Stucky were standing a short distance away, and Amanda Fortelberry and Betty Jane Oswalt were hobbling closer, each framed by skin that was more wizened.
The tears stopped, allowing her to take in what was happening. In the faces crowding around her was an understanding that seemed to be limitless, an acceptance that was unconditional, and the tears that now stood in her eyes were taller than any that had come before.
She knew it then.
It was they who were the true Order: New Crozet was the real Order of the Dead.
It was they who’d clung so stubbornly to the idea of reviving the human race, not just in the physical sense, but in the moral sense too. And in the end, somehow, both in spite of and because of the losses they’d sustained, their cause had won out.
Senna drew the children closer to her, and her mind turned to her unborn child, whom the townspeople would help her raise, just as they would help to raise Jenny and Sasha. They were all her family now. These people, this motley group of outbreak survivors, this was Senna’s family.
She closed her eyes, and when the tears tried to pour out of her again, she didn’t even try to hold back. As she cried harder than she ever had in her life, the New Crozet townspeople welcomed her into their arms, and when her legs tried to give out, it was they who kept her upright.
The town itself was embracing her, taking her in.
She knew she had to be strong for her family, but maybe that meant letting them see her pain; perhaps that was what true strength was.
Above her, the sky was ablaze once more, as it had been during the market, when Alan had gone to find the woman who was his greatest love, so he could point a finger at the sky, put an arm around her shoulders, and take in the sight with her.
Today’s display was burning even more brightly, encroaching on the outskirts of the day, which was cool after the rain. At the epicenter of the inferno in the heavens, an orange fury was billowing forth trails of grey smoke across Senna’s world, bearing the promise of a distant, though reachable, warmth.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed Order of the Dead. You helped Senna get to the finish line, which for her was painted along the New Crozet perimeter fence. She got to be reunited with her post-apocalyptic family there, and she wouldn’t have made it back without your rallying cry. For that, Senna and I both thank you.
I offer a sincere thank-you to my parents, my editors, Greg, Nika, Taly, Stephen, Dave, and my friends. Thank you for your encouragement, and for taking the time to give me feedback on Order of the Dead’s plot and writing style, and/or the lack thereof. Your support has been, and continues to be, invaluable. Thank you again.
Guy James
